The hotel was a pink construction peeking out from behind rows of phoenix palms and another kind of palm with a narrow, tall trunk that I didn’t remember the name of. The hotel was set well in grounds that were both capacious and sun-kissed. I reached the start of its driveway around ten in the morning and I was looking for lunch around the time I pulled into the guest parking lot. A sign told me valet parking was available at two bucks a day. I decided to do Ada a favor and use the free option so I parked the car in the shade of a palm to hide the paintwork. The building in front of me was pink and had curves and arches and three turrets that looked like Venetian bell towers. There were three flags fluttering against the blue sky, one per turret, the Stars and Stripes in the middle, flanked by the banner of the California Republic on either side. The windows, of which there were more than a few, had white frames and verandas with possibilities.
The place looked like an expensive kind of wedding cake, one that looked good in pictures but probably not so much up close.
I stood by the car in the shade of the palm tree and straightened my tie and my hat, trying to look like the kind of private detective who might be called to such an establishment by an exiled dowager duchess who had lost the family jewels in the top penthouse suite.
I walked toward the hotel and then I turned under the shade of the next palm tree along and watched the parking lot, but the gold coupe that had been following me all the way from Franklin didn’t make an appearance. The tail—if he was a tail—wasn’t that bad. But as I stood there a couple of cars cruised past the end of the driveway and kept on going. One of them could have been gold.
I was met at the hotel entrance by a phalanx of doormen in top hats and tails. Each of them smiled tightly and the oldest number opened a large gold-and-glass door for me. I doffed my hat and he did the same. I saw a red line around his forehead and his thin hair was damp.
Hell of a day to be wearing a getup like that.
The hotel lobby switched the pink for a yellowish cream. It was a better color in my book, except for the fact that it seemed to stick to everything like glossy pancake batter. The floor was yellowish cream marble. The marble pillars were the same. There were two desks about a mile away from me on either side. Between me and them was an obstacle course of sofas and easy chairs and side tables. The sofas and chairs were a yellowish cream and had enough padding to lose a small child in. The tables, made of a dark wood with an admirable grain, were mostly covered with yellowish cream tablecloths to hide their shame.
There was a piano in a sort of conservatory annex on my far left. The piano at least was black but the complexion of the man playing it matched the floor.
“May I help you, sir?”
An employee in a uniform that was too tight and a hat that was small and round appeared to my right. He had his hands clasped in front of him like a groom waiting at the altar for his bride, and when I looked at him he jerked his head up like he wanted to get that cap off real bad but regulations didn’t allow him to touch it with his hands.
He smiled at me tightly so I returned the look. On the inside, anyway.
“I’ve got an appointment,” I said. This was not strictly true.
“Yes, sir?” he said. What he really meant was “Yeah, me and my mother, too.” He jerked his head back again. I was afraid he would give himself whiplash. “I’m sure reception can make a call to your party.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “Private appointment. Fourth floor.”
“Sir?”
“It’s okay, I’m expected. McLuckie, room four-oh-seven. He’s an army buddy.”
The bellhop—I think he was a bellhop, hat like that, uniform with enough scrambled egg falling off the shoulder for the wearer to hold high rank in the army of a small tropical dictatorship—nodded but didn’t offer any further argument, unless I was supposed to take some other meaning from the tight smile he turned on again.
I nodded at the elevators on the other side of the reception desks and he nodded back to me.
He didn’t try to stop me as I walked over to the elevators and pressed the button. Before I stepped into the car I gave him a little wave.
He didn’t wave back.
15
My destination was room 407 and the fourth floor seemed like a good bet. I cruised the corridor on carpet thick enough for a space capsule to make a splashdown on and spent some time appreciating the décor, which now featured some gilt in addition to the sickly cream. It looked like a lot of work and with good light from the big windows I had to admit it was pretty classy.
I glanced out said windows. I’d come around to the front of the hotel and I could see my car under my palm and all the other cars in the lot. Finally there was some life too, as a man and a woman with arms linked walked toward a convertible then unlinked arms as they went around opposite sides and got in. A moment later the engine turned over and they were chewing expensive white gravel all the way back to the street.
Then I turned back to the other cars in the lot, in particular my favorite gold coupe with the white roof, which had materialized in the sunshine opposite my car. Could have been a coincidence. It was a nice car. It was the kind of car that would be parked at a place like this, although I would have picked it to be one for valet, even at two bucks a day. The car was empty. I zoomed in to have a quick look. The angle I was at meant I couldn’t see the driver’s side too well but I got a clean look at the passenger side. There was a newspaper sitting on red leather, both baking in the sun. I read half a headline about a movie premiere then zoomed back out and continued sliding silently down the corridor.
Soon enough the corridor windows disappeared as I headed deeper into the hotel and the chandeliers took over the job of lighting. They were nice, too. Crystal. Not too big. Elegant. I decided that I liked the way this hotel did things and I wondered what one of these elegant crystal chandeliers would look like in the office.
Four-oh-seven was, by my count, just around the corner. I kept on traveling.
Around the corner might have been 407 but the first thing I came to was a cleaning cart. It looked just as greasy and dirty as in any other hotel. There was a steel bucket and a mop and I counted four colored cloths hanging on a rail. Up top there were plastic squeeze bottles sitting in a tray.
Even though I was a machine, Professor Thornton had thought of everything, which meant my nose was pretty sharp. The whole ensemble in the corridor in front of me smelled like a swimming pool and the lady in the blue smock who came out of the open door of room 404 just next to the cart smelled like a can of furniture polish. It wasn’t an unpleasant aroma.
She had black hair under a net and bags under her eyes, and her arms had a slackness in the upper portion that spoke of a certain age. As she backed out of the room she saw me and gave a little bow then turned her eyes to the floor.
“Sir,” she said, then she waited. I was clearly supposed to be doing something. I watched her for a moment. He lips twitched like she wanted a cigarette, and she twisted an orange cloth in one hand like a rosary.
When I didn’t move she looked up and then her eyes went wide. Whether it was because I hadn’t taken my hat off indoors or because underneath that hat was a face made of bronzed steel I wasn’t sure. I put a bet on the latter. The orange cloth between her hands got so tight I thought it would make a pretty good garrote should she ever consider another line of work.
I lifted my hat to see if that helped and it did, because it made the cleaner smile. It was still a nervous smile but I was starting to get somewhere.
“Do you clean all the rooms on this floor?” I asked. It wasn’t much of an introduction but I decided to skip formalities and get to business.
“Ah … yes, sir, I do,” said the cleaner in a clear deep voice with a heavy accent. “Myself and Maria, sir, we clean four and three. I’m sorry, sir, but … do you need me to get you something?”
Her eyes narrowed. Her suspicions about robotkind had returned. I should have kept walking
.
We were one step away from her placing a call to the front desk, saying there was a strange robot wandering around upstairs, so I reached inside my coat and pulled out my wallet. I opened it and showed it to her and held my hand there a while so she could get a good look. Her eyes crawled over the badge, reading every letter and every number.
Then her eyes moved up to my optics.
“You’re a private detective?” she asked, like a guy made of metal couldn’t hold down a good job.
“I am,” I said in a low voice. I turned my shoulder and looked back down the empty passageway and then I bent down like I was letting her in on a secret. She seemed to get the drift, checking over her own shoulder before taking a step closer and ducking in for a conference.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said.
The cleaner checked over her shoulder again. We were alone, swathed in cream woodwork with gilt edging and slowly sinking by the fathom into the carpet.
I pointed ahead with my shoulder. “Room four-oh-seven. You know who’s in there?”
The cleaner stood tall and she bit her lip and looked back over her shoulder for the third time. She was considering something, but she wasn’t sure of it.
I decided to get the jump on what she was thinking. I reached into my other pocket and pulled out my other wallet, the one I liked to keep paper money in. I opened it nice and wide and the cleaner got a good look at the contents. I picked out a one-dollar bill with two steel fingers.
“Room four-oh-seven,” I said again.
“Four-oh-seven?” said the cleaner, still looking in my wallet. Her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth and she lifted herself up onto her toes like a kid trying to see what secrets were at the bottom of the candy barrel. I lifted the dollar bill and folded it in one movement. I thought that was pretty smooth but she wasn’t watching. Instead she pointed into my wallet. “Is that a two-dollar bill?”
My wallet was filled with ones and fives and tens. There might even have been a twenty or two at the back. But at the front, revealed by the buck I’d already pulled out, was a two-dollar bill. I hadn’t noticed I was carrying it. Nobody liked the damn things, even though they were perfectly legal. I’d once heard of a guy who collected them and when he collected enough he stuck them all together and put them in a frame worth more than the money on display inside of it.
Maybe that guy was Thornton.
The cleaner’s eyes were wide and glittering like a fortune-teller leaning over her crystal ball. So why not? I moved the wallet closer to her and she plucked the two-dollar bill with a finger and thumb, bringing it out slowly and carefully like the sides of my wallet were electrified.
Two bucks. I could have got the car valeted for that.
“Four-oh-seven?” I asked again, my eyes on hers and her eyes on her prize. She stretched the two-dollar bill and turned it this way and that to make sure it was real.
“Four-oh-seven is the honeymoon suite,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“But,” she said, and then she dropped her hands and her eyes went narrow again and she dropped her volume to a whisper. Somehow that made her accent thicker and when she spoke I feared for the well-being of her tongue.
“But,” she said, “I do not know what is going on in there.” She checked over her shoulder, but there was nothing but thick carpet waving in the breeze like wheat in a field. “The room, it has been ocupado for, oh, I don’t know. A long, long time. Maybe three months.”
“Three months?”
“Sí, sí.”
I frowned, or at least it felt like I did. “That’s some honeymoon.”
The cleaner shrugged. I guess she had heard of stranger things in this town.
“So have you seen the happy couple?”
“Sí, but sir, I would not say they are happy.”
“Oh?”
“No. They sound angry most of the time. But when they see us they stop talking.”
I noted the information and I pumped for some more.
“Can you describe them?”
“Oh, well. She is small. Black hair. She wears too much makeup. Around the eyes.” The cleaner mimed two rings around the eyes and I got the drift.
Eva McLuckie. One down.
“And the man?”
“Oh, oh.”
“Tall? Short? Fat? Thin? Black? White?”
“Oh, I…”
“Beard? Mustache?”
“Beard! The man, he has a beard. A big beard. Very orange.”
And there it was. Charles David.
The fact that Eva McLuckie and Charles David were apparently a couple was a surprise. I managed to hide it from the cleaner, which was pretty easy given I had no muscles in my face with which to change my expression.
“Have you seen them today?” I asked.
“Oh, oh, no, sir. Not for days. The woman, maybe … oh, Friday?”
“And the man?”
The cleaner shook her head. “Not for a long time. A week. Longer, I think. I can ask Maria?” Then her eyes did something that suggested she wanted some more of the money in my wallet.
“No, that’s fine,” I said. I nodded down the corridor. “Four-oh-seven?”
“Sí, sí.”
“Can you let me in?”
“Sí, sí.”
She led the way, her keys in one hand and the two-dollar bill in the other.
16
The inside of the honeymoon suite at the Ritz-Beverly Hotel was just as creamy as the rest of the place and the gilt that had started in the corridor came with me into the room. The main door led into a lounge not larger than a baseball field littered with gilt furniture. On my right was a hallway that ended in a big gilt archway with a big gilt set of double doors. The doors were closed. The whole place was spotless but when I turned to compliment the cleaner on her work she’d already gone and I stood there listening to her cleaning trolley swoosh down the hallway on the thick carpet. I was alone in the room with all that gold. It made me think of the athletic bag still sitting next to my desk back at the office.
The lounge was a dead end so I headed for the double doors. If a couple of newlyweds had been living here for three months then there would be plenty of evidence and my guess was that most of it would be beyond those doors in the master suite. There would be a closet full of clothes, drawers full of socks, a bathroom full of potions.
The fact that Charles David hadn’t been seen for a week or more made sense. He’d fled. Maybe he knew his wife was after an early separation of a rather permanent kind. The fact that, according to the cleaner anyway, Eva herself hadn’t been seen for a few days suggested to me that she’d bolted, too. She must have got wind of the price on her own head. Maybe that was why she hadn’t called Ada yet.
Which didn’t leave much for me to do in the honeymoon suite, but it was still worth a look. Maybe one of them had left clues about where they had gone. And there was always a chance they would be back, maybe if they’d left something important behind.
I got to the doors. A clock was ticking on the other side. It didn’t sound like it was keeping particularly good time, like it needed winding or a new spring or both. I listened some more. Then I pushed the doors open once I was sure the room beyond was unoccupied.
The room I found myself in was wide enough to park four cars side by side on account of the fact it was empty, devoid not just of residents but of everything. The place had been stripped, leaving nothing but wallpaper and the thick cream carpet covered in a maze of indentations echoing where all the clutter that should have stood in the room had once been.
I’d heard—or maybe Thornton had heard—that fancy hotels could customize the furniture in your room at your request, but taking it all out seemed a step too far. If someone were here for three months they would have to sleep on something and the carpet was thick but not that thick.
The bedroom had three doors leading off of it, which seemed excessive.
The first door led to anot
her bedroom that was smaller in the same way the White House was smaller than the Capitol. This room had also been cleared out, but where the bed should have been were instead two camp stretchers. They weren’t wide enough for me to lie in but they looked comfortable enough for a person of regular dimensions. They were a deep green and the metal parts were painted a flat ocean gray. They were foldable. They were the kind of bed the army might use but not the kind of bed you expect to find in the honeymoon suite of one of your fancier Hollywood hotels.
The clock’s ticking was louder in this room. I looked around but couldn’t see any clock.
The second door led to a connected bathroom. I was shocked to discover it was done out in cream marble and gilt and what wasn’t marble and gilt was mirrored. I looked at myself from four angles then checked the bath. It was dry. The basin too. Dry and clean. Immaculate. There were no hairs, nothing. If I hadn’t known better I would have said the bathroom hadn’t been used in about, oh, three months. I opened the cabinets and spent a couple of minutes counting folded towels and little bottles of hotel-branded shampoo.
Opening the third door that led from the master bedroom was like Christmas, given what I found on the other side.
This room had been emptied of the standard furniture, just like the others. In the middle of the room was a chair made of metal on a big metal revolving base. The chair consisted of three different parts to support the legs, body, and head, and had two long armrests. All of these parts were on an articulated frame, allowing the reclining patient to be lowered and raised, tipped and tilted. It was the kind of dentist’s chair you could fly to Venus on.
Hanging above the chair was a big metal arm with several ball-and-socket joints allowing free movement in three dimensions. The arm was attached to the same base as the chair, and the part that hung over the chair ended in a four-pronged claw with sprung fingers, and a mirrored disk with a pointed cone in the center. This disk was on its own miniature arm, which sprang up from the wrist of the four-pronged claw and allowed the disk to be positioned independently in front of whatever it was that the claw was supposed to hold. The disk was no bigger than a bread plate and the pointed cone in the middle of it stuck out about two inches.
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