Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  "You realise you're killing me," the woman said.

  "All part of the service," I replied, in my fruitiest English accent, and her boyfriend stood up. He was tall and had the wholesome, corn-fed look that virile non-smoker Americans like to affect. He'd doubtless been a line-backer or running front or some such thing in college, and looked capable of making me unhappy.

  So much for not antagonising the natives.

  Luckily, at that moment half the staff in the hotel arrived at my table. The waitress turned up with my beer, and Alicia also materialised with a bellhop in tow. I turned to deal with them, half-aware of the young couple as they huffily gathered their stuff together and headed for the interior of the bar, where no one was smoking, juggling knives or in any other way imperilling other people's health and safety.

  Alicia was polite and friendly, which just made me feel even more of a fuckwit. The bellhop with her was the very one who had delivered my package to room 805, early that afternoon. He remembered it clearly, including the small change spread over my table, and the large stack of pulp detective novels I was currently trawling through in a search for plots I could steal.

  A little spark of anger went off in my head, like a bubble of foul gas in a stream, and then I just sighed. I thanked the bellboy, who about-turned and walked off. Alicia lingered a moment longer, apologising for the problems I was having, and then went away, hopefully to a better evening than the one I was having.

  Maybe the package really was in my room, and I'd been too weirded-out to look for it properly. Maybe not, and someone had stolen it, in which case I could deal with that in the morning, if at all. The software hadn't been very expensive. Probably I should just order it again and chalk it and the whole day down to experience.

  I lit another cigarette, tried to blow the first mouthful of smoke toward the room where the young couple were sitting glowering at me, and settled down to drinking heavily.

  * * * * *

  Jon showed up at ten, by which time I was six Budweisers down and feeling significantly more mellow. I still ached, but the chair was comfortable and the young Americans had disappeared, presumably to have a colonic irrigation. I was coming to realise that tomorrow would be another day, one on which I wouldn't have been rousted by over-zealous police and could reorder the software which was beginning to assume Holy Grail status in my mind. Or else I could cab over to an Apple Centre, and buy it there, which might be simpler. Or just download it, for Christ's sake.

  Jon's tirade stopped in the middle of his first sentence, when he saw the bruises on my face. I gave him an abridged account of events. He talked forgivable bollocks about suing the police, filled me in on the meetings I'd missed, and reminded me what we had lined up for tomorrow. When he showed signs of wanting me to go through my day in more detail, I finished my beer, made my excuses and left.

  In the elevator I discovered that all the beer I'd drunk had had an effect I somehow hadn't envisaged. It had made me quite drunk. I stood with my head against the cool side of the elevator, listening to soft pings and distant thrumming. At one point the elevator stopped at a floor and I straightened up unsteadily, but no one got on. The doors closed again, and we continued up towards the sky.

  I found my room comparatively easily. It felt warmer than I was expecting, and I peered at the air conditioning control to find it had been switched off. I didn't understand this. I keep the A/C up very high. I like it that way. Sometimes the housemaid turned it off or down when she came in to turn the sheets, but tonight I'd successfully repelled her before I went downstairs.

  I flicked the switch back up, and turned to face the room, which was dark, lit only by the bedside and table lamps. It was then that I saw a cardboard box sitting on the table by the window. The box was brown, covered in stickers, and had the unmistakable air of being full of software. From somewhere in the bowels of the hotel's delivery system, my package had been burped up.

  Instantly forgetting the air-conditioning conundrum, I stumbled across the room towards it.

  The top of the box was already open.

  Inside was a mass of those polystyrene things which are used to pad packages and fuck up the environment. I stared at it, feeling more violated than at any time since, well, since that morning. Probably it was just someone who had received the package in error – maybe the other Mr. Williams, who at that stage I'd forgotten had never actually existed – and opened it accidentally. Either way, someone had opened my fucking package.

  I took a handful of packing material out of the box, and then another. During the second handful I felt something. A box, much smaller than I would have expected software to be packaged in. I picked the larger box up and tipped the contents onto the bed.

  Ten packets of Marlboro Lights fell out.

  Nothing else.

  I sat down on the bed. It felt as if the whole day had condensed down to this point. I should have felt angry, perplexed. But I didn't.

  This wasn't an accident.

  The fact that whoever had done this had got my brand of cigarettes right proved it, and it simply didn't feel like a joke. It felt macabre.

  Who could have done it? Not Jon. It was entirely out of character. If not him, then who? Alicia downstairs knew about my never-ending quest, as did the bellhop she'd brought to my table in the bar. Maybe the bellhop had seen an empty pack of cigarettes in the trash – but why would this seem like a good thing to do?

  It wasn't a joke. It was antagonistic. More than that. It felt like a threat.

  The couple in the bar had looked daggers at me for an hour before flouncing out, but suspecting them of this was running straight into the realms of abject paranoia.

  Apart from that, I couldn't think of anyone except...

  The Lieutenant. The man who'd searched through my pockets and found two packs of Marlboro Light. Who'd asked me about my smoking. Who'd thought he'd had good reason to accuse me of crimes which were evidently heinous.

  He could have done this. Or maybe not him, but someone else from the department. Maybe Mr. Tan Suit.

  It wasn't over, after all. They were still after me.

  I stalked across to the minibar, wrenched it open, and grabbed another beer. By the time I'd wrestled the cap off and taken the first mouthful, I knew what I was going to do. In a strange way, I felt glad it wasn't over. I'd been snatched out of my life that morning, thrown into some second, parallel reality. Then, through no skill or goodness of my own, I'd been belched out again, thrown clear of the machine. I'd received no sense of closure, still felt a victim of forces which I didn't understand and couldn't control.

  If it wasn't over, fine. But I wasn't going to just sit there and let it happen to me.

  I grabbed the phone. The hotel operator put me through to the L.A.P.D. general switchboard, and five minutes of careful enunciation got me through to somewhere specific, where a phone rang and rang. Eventually someone picked it up and grunted.

  I asked for Lieutenant Considine, and heard the sound of the handset being dropped on a desk. A couple of minutes later someone picked it up again.

  "Considine," a voice said, sounding tired.

  "It's Nick Williams," I said, my heart thumping. "I've just had a package delivered to my hotel room. It should have had software in it, but instead it's got ten packets of Marlboro Light. Does this mean anything to you? Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?"

  There was a long pause. When Considine spoke again he sounded different. "Where are you?"

  "In my room," I said. "At Ma Maison."

  "Stay there," he said, and the line went dead.

  It was as I was putting the phone down that I thought I heard the quiet sound of my hotel room door, shutting, as someone left.

  * * * * *

  "No of course we didn't send it," Considine snapped
, after looking through the box, and a telephone conversation with the hotel's security manager. "Like everyone else, you've seen far too many movies."

  "So who did it?"

  "I don't know."

  "Bullshit," I said. Bear in mind I'd drunk my own volume in Budweiser by then, and had a weird day. "You didn't come racing over here just because someone solved my cigarette needs for the next week."

  "I can't tell you any more."

  "Your guys made me look an idiot, like a criminal, in front of the guests and staff of this hotel. Not to mention making my face look like this. Added to which, someone broke into my hotel room. This is a warning."

  Considine didn't deny that, which worried me.

  "So?" I said, insistently.

  He looked at me. "The third reason you got an extra chance today," he said, "Is that you smoke."

  "I don't..." I said, but he talked over me.

  "Understand that I'm telling you this because you got a hard time this morning, and because I'm concerned about this box, and what it means. What I'm going to tell you is confidential. The third murder happened last night. A waitress called Janie Peltz was stabbed in her apartment – not so far from this hotel – at around 10.00 pm. Her room-mate came home at midnight to find Janie's body on the kitchen floor, naked and messed up. The face and torso were covered in burn marks, made with the lighted tip of a cigarette. These weren't little burns. They were deep enough to stick the tip of your little finger in."

  I looked at the end of my cigarette, suddenly less keen on smoking it. Considine noticed.

  "Right," he said. "But there's more. The torso was ripped open in two places, either side of the sternum. The killer had broken through the ribcage with an unknown implement, revealing the lungs. Into each he had stuffed a pack of Merits, the cigarettes smoked by Ms. Peltz."

  "Christ," I said, stubbing my cigarette out in the ashtray. It was horrific, but it was also absurd. I got a sudden glimpse of what it must be to be the kind of person who would do such a thing. Psychotic, yet with a kernel of triviality and ludicrousness and retarded literalism at the core, undermining the majesty of madness and turning it into a dark and stupid circus.

  The writer in me was callous enough to wish I had a pen and paper, to note that down.

  "As the room-mate was staring at this, she heard a noise and the murderer emerged from the bathroom. It was dark, but she got a good look because he came right up to her, stared in her eyes, and guess what?"

  "I don't know."

  "He asked her if she smoked. She said no. He punched her in the face, hard enough to knock her out, and left."

  "And the M.O. was the same in the other two murders?" I asked.

  He raised an eyebrow. "'M.O.'?"

  I indicated the stack of crime novels on my other table.

  "Yeah," he said. "It was. Except nobody saw him on those occasions."

  "Even for LA, that seems excessive."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Considine said, looking at me closely. I hoped I hadn't made a blunder.

  "Well, I mean, I come from England. We know smoking's bad for you, but we're more relaxed about it. We banned it indoors, but otherwise, you want to kill yourself, go ahead. Just don't blow it directly up my nose. In this town people are militant. It's like I'm assaulting someone if I have a smoke in the same zip code as them. I feel like a pariah the whole time."

  "We're a dying breed," Considine said.

  One part of my mind was working over what he had told me. The other was sitting a little way off, watching, marvelling at what was happening. I wasn't another cop. I was a scriptwriter, and an unknown, un-produced and probably useless one at that. Yet here I was, in an LA hotel room, shooting the breeze with homicide brass. I got another flash of the feeling I'd had in the station. Someone's scripting this.

  "What do I do?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Nobody saw anyone enter or leave your room. They'll be long gone now. How much longer are you in town?"

  "Two days," I said.

  "Watch your back, is my advice. If you see anything you don't like," he added, handing me a card, "Call me."

  He stood up and picked up the cardboard box and the cigarettes strewn over the bed. He noticed my own ample stock of cigarettes, leaning over against the wall in their duty free carton.

  "Maybe you should consider cutting down," he said.

  "Never," I said. "That would be giving in."

  * * * * *

  Ten minutes after he'd gone, I left my room, peered both ways down the corridor, and headed to the lift. I'd spent the intervening time standing by the window, looking at the lights which stretched into the hills, looking up at the Hollywood sign. I couldn't seem to settle. I felt like... I didn't know what. Like someone was out to get me, and who I was didn't matter any more.

  I certainly hadn't felt like going to bed. Considine's conversation with hotel security had been perfunctory: for all I knew, the guy could still be in the building, and I didn't fancy lying in bed and waiting for the sound of someone trying the door.

  I decided to go and see if the bar was still in operation. It was after midnight, and I didn't know how things operated in American hotels, but I felt I needed to be doing something. On the one hand I felt as if I'd been up for three days, but I also felt very awake. Albeit drunk.

  The elevator doors opened onto a lobby which was cool and a little darker than usual. Reception was still open, and there was twenty four hour room service, I knew, so most likely there was always something going on down here. But otherwise it looked like things were shut for the night. I turned left and walked into the lounge. No one was sitting at any of the tables, and the waitresses' cubby hole up against the wall was deserted. I decided to make sure, and walked through the archway to the bar. Now that I was down here, I didn't want to go back upstairs. Even a cup of coffee would do.

  The bar was dead, however, glasses neatly stacked along the side. The tall and morose barman was nowhere to be seen. I turned forlornly and walked out onto the terrace, pointlessly, reconciling myself to coffee in my room. Then I noticed the chair where I'd been sitting earlier in the evening, and something caught my eye.

  A book, lying on the table. And a pack of cigarettes.

  I walked over, puzzled. The table sat in its own little area of lamplight, and looked inviting, but it seemed odd someone should remain there when they couldn't get any refreshment. Then I caught sight of the title of the book and the brand of the cigarettes.

  The book was House-Hunting Blues, a half-decent detective novel by a guy called Egerton Royle. It was one of the books I had in the stack in my room.

  The cigarettes were Marlboro Lights.

  For a moment I confusedly assumed I must have left them when I left the bar earlier, and felt embarrassed. Then I remembered carrying my book and cigarettes up in the elevator, and that I was reading a different book.

  At that moment I was startled by a door opening. It was the door to the kitchens, and the waitress I'd seen earlier came sailing out of it.

  "Hello, Mr. Williams," she said cheerfully, her voice soft in the gloom of the lounge. "Still here?"

  "Yes," I said, confused. "Well, I'm back, anyway."

  She hovered, obviously waiting to see if I wanted anything. "I know the bar's closed," I said, on autopilot, "But can I get another Budweiser down here?"

  "But you just paid your tab," she said, feigning comic irritation. It was nicely done. Half the waitresses in Ma Maison are actresses or singers. The rest are probably directors.

  "That was hours ago," I said.

  She pouted, as if I was making a joke.

  "Okay," she said. "Sit down and I'll be right out." She turned, but then stopped and looked back at me. "Are you okay, Sir?"

 
; "Yes," I said distantly, "I'm fine."

  She went, and I dismissed her from my mind. I wasn't okay. I'd noticed the cellophane was still on the bottom half of the pack of Marlboro on the table. Not every smoker leaves it there. But I do.

  More disturbingly, there was a coffee stain on the cover of the book, and I moved closer to look at it. It was in the right place – or the wrong place. It was exactly where a friend of mine had drunkenly placed a coffee mug, around the time I'd first read House Hunting Blues, about a year ago. I'd been annoyed – I like to keep my books in pristine condition – and remembered the position exactly.

  I sat in the chair where I'd sat earlier, facing the table. The cigarettes were where I always put them, in easy reach. The book was laid as if I had just popped away to the gents, or set it down to use my phone.

  "Here you are," the waitress said, placing a frosted glass of Budweiser in front of me.

  I settled the tab and she marched off, on the way to deliver some food to somebody. Somebody who was sitting happily in their room in this nice hotel.

  I couldn't have been sitting here in the last hour, of course. I'd been up in my room with Considine. But slowly I began to read other things into the way the waitress had greeted me. Still here, she'd said, as if I hadn't left an hour or two earlier. Maybe she had thought I'd been joking about paying my tab hours ago. Maybe she thought I'd just done it only moments before.

  Maybe someone had. Someone who had been sitting in this chair, reading my book, smoking my brand of cigarettes.

  And when I'd sat down here at the beginning of the evening, she'd greeted me by name – though I didn't remember her. Maybe I had never seen her before, as I'd believed. Maybe she'd seen... someone else. Someone with the same name, and who signed the tab with the same room number. Someone who looked a lot like me, but wasn't?

  There was no ashtray on the table, which was weird. All the others had one. I suppose the waitress could have cleared it away, but some of the others I could see still had butts in them. It was almost as if whoever had been sitting in the chair had deliberately moved an ashtray away, despite having cigarettes with him.