Wellington grinned. “There’s the door . . . But you won’t, Marzten. You have too much to lose.”
The bastard was right.
“How much do you want?”
Wellington pursed his lips and thought it over, though I found it impossible to believe that he hadn’t already decided on his price.
No way I was going to pay, but I had to know.
“Before I set a hard number, I should inform you that I know where you live, how your wife is fixed, and all that. I’ve done a thorough background check, okay? So I’m completely confident you’ll come across for me. And—it’s a one-time payment,” he added, as if it were some kind of incentive.
I shook my head. “No.”
I didn’t know what I was even saying no to, whether I wasn’t going to pay, or whether I didn’t want to hear how much this cockroach wanted to bleed me for.
Wellington’s eyebrows arched. “No?”
He reached out, picked up the sheaf of dirty pictures, and shook it at me. “Marzten, you’d better think twice before—”
“I—I have to use the bathroom . . .”
I wasn’t ready to listen to dollar amounts after all. Instead of green, I was seeing red. I darted into the john, hit the switches, slammed the door shut, and locked it.
The low roar of the exhaust gave me the illusion that I had some privacy to think. I looked around for a window. But when a man needs a window to crawl out of, there isn’t one to be found.
Standing in front of the cosmetics cabinet mirror, I took a deep, shaky breath and tried to sort it all out. I could have used a fistful of the Xanaxes I sometimes took before flying, but I hadn’t thought to bring the vial with me.
I had to face reality: I thought I’d been clever, but the vermin in the next room had been even more clever. That is, if he was telling the truth. Maybe he and Gretchen had laid this all out long ago, at the very beginning. Maybe I’d never know the truth. All I knew for sure was that Wellington had me over a barrel, but good.
Okay, I figured. If Monica catches on to this mess, all will be lost. That was the main point here, the single thing I couldn’t lose sight of. Gretchen—her, I’d already lost. Maybe that’s what that little scene at the Embassy Suites had been about—this bloodsucking leech private investigator had been sicced on her again by her husband. She understood that our little fling was going to have to end, she’d been emotional, if not distraught over it, and she’d been trying to squeeze a grand finale out of me, but I didn’t know it at the time and she didn’t want to be the one to break the news about what I was going to be hit with. Who knows—maybe she was in love with me. Maybe I should have listened when she went on about that insane idea to get rid of our spouses—because maybe that was before Wellington was in the picture. Maybe, if I’d listened, I wouldn’t have lost her—if I even wanted the little tramp, that is. After all, if it hadn’t been for her, I wouldn’t be standing here.
Now, unless I paid this piece of shit off, there’d be nothing left to lose.
But if I gave Wellington what he wanted, what was the guarantee that he wouldn’t ask for more? And more? Sure, he said he wanted only one flat fee, but what if the son of a bitch tried to bleed me dry? He knew how nicely I was covered, didn’t he? What would stop him from wanting to go to the bottom of the Marzten bank accounts?
And what if he eventually goes and spills the beans to Monica anyway if he feels like he hasn’t gotten enough?
Then there were those photos. I could try and rip them away from the little rat, but no doubt he’d have copies on his computer, and there was also the matter of the camera he’d taken them with—they might still be stored on it.
Maybe . . . just maybe they’d never be found if—
I didn’t realize it, but I was gaping at my reflection in the mirror. And I didn’t recognize the creature staring back at me.
That scared the shit out of me, maybe even more than being blackmailed. I had the eerie sensation of being completely unmoored, like a rogue satellite drifting through outer space. My jaw was set a little off-kilter with the rest of my face. My lips were twisted into something between a frown and a sneer. My eyes were as wide as saucers. I could see the whites all around the irises.
I looked like a madman.
So what do I have left, really? What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I could go back out there and try to reason with Wellington, hope that he’d be sympathetic to a plea. Hell, I could throw myself at his feet and beg for mercy like a whimpering dog. But what would he do then, after I utterly debased myself? Agree to a smaller payment? Fat fucking chance. The last thing Wellington impressed me as was the compassionate type.
And that’s when it happened.
My gaze swept over the ivory tiles. Like a sleepwalker I reached for the crystal vase on the narrow shelf above the silver spigots. I yanked out the three yellow flowers, dropped them into the wastebasket, then drove the piece mouth-first into the washbasin. The glass shattered with a pop. When I turned it over, the rim of the vase looked like a set of the shark’s jaws you see for sale in resort trinket shops.
Wellington must have heard the strange noise. He rapped on the door.
“Hey, Marzten. Didn’t fall in, did you?”
I could hear him yucking away out there. I tore a hand towel off the rack and nestled the shard of the vase in it. Then I hid it behind my back.
With my left hand I unlocked the door and threw it open. Wellington was standing there, arms folded across his skinny chest, a condescending grin on his face.
I can honestly say that at that precise instant I didn’t know what I was about to do.
“So—made up your mind to talk turk—”
Before he had the chance to get the rest of his question out, I whipped my arm around and drove the jagged chunk of glass straight into his face.
“Mmm-uh-uh-MMMMMMM!”
That was all the reaction the puny hard-ass could muster.
I pushed harder. To prevent blood spatter, I let the towel fall over Wellington’s face as I collapsed on top of him—that much I planned out. I must have had a good hundred, hundred and twenty-five pounds on him. He struggled against me like a drowning man, flailing, punching, and kicking, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t buck me off.
The little prick wasn’t so tough after all. When it sank in that the only way he could be stopped was to—
I raised the busted vase and slammed it again and again into his face, straight into his open eyes. Then I pressed my thumbs into the gully beneath his Adam’s apple with all my strength until I heard a crack and his arms and legs ceased thrashing.
“There, you motherfucking turd! There—how’s it feel now, huh? How’s it feel now?”
I couldn’t feel him breathing anymore. I stayed on top of him, raising my head a few inches, being careful not to let the blood seeping through the towel get on me. I could smell his cheap aftershave—Old Spice or Brut or some other such bilge. I stayed like that for a while, until I was 100 percent sure he wasn’t moving, and that he wouldn’t suddenly start again.
Then I sat up, on his stomach, and peered down at his still-as-stone face. I’d never seen a dead person, not even my father, so close up before.
I started thinking again. Terrible thoughts. Like about how I’d completely cracked up. Like how the walls were going to start talking to me if I didn’t watch out, and how I’d answer them if they did. Like how I’d probably lost it long ago, even before I placed the ad that lured Gretchen Trecker into my life. And how I hadn’t seen it coming, how I hadn’t seen it happen when it did. And how all insane people are the same that way—they don’t know that they’re crazy.
Then I thought that I was probably going to spend the rest of my life in prison if I couldn’t convince some judge that I was a whack-job, and how lucky I was that the state of New York had abol
ished the death penalty.
Lucky, sure. But would I survive in prison for the rest of my life?
No, I wasn’t going to prison. No fucking way. I’d smoke the tailpipe first. I’d blow my brains out if it came to that.
I reached out and felt for Wellington’s carotid artery, but if there was even a spark of life pulsing through the man, I couldn’t find it.
“Wellington? Wellington?”
Nothing. It was over. I rolled off him and slumped against the wall like an exhausted prizefighter on the ropes.
I stayed in that position for what seemed to be a long time, but it might have only been a minute or two. My sense of time—of anything real, anything solid—was off.
I had to expect that. I’d never killed anybody before.
16.
The Soho Grand was still quiet, as quiet as when I’d arrived, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened inside room 708.
I heard footsteps clomping down the hall. They seemed to slow down right outside the door.
Then—voices. They belonged to females, or so I thought. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“Jesus Christ,” I croaked. They better not be the goddamned cleaning service. But no—the cleaning service would most likely have been and gone since they usually performed their duties in the morning, around checkout time.
They were right outside 708 now. Whoever was talking stopped. There was a few seconds of dead silence, then a shriek of laughter, then more laughter, and then the feet clomped again until their echoes faded away.
This was too much, way too much. I was drenched in my own sweat, as if I’d jumped into a swimming pool with all my clothes on. My heart began clenching up spasmodically again, like it was going to detonate. If, that is, I didn’t suffocate first.
I tried to force some air into my lungs and told myself to hold on—just hold on. Because no matter what happened here, I wasn’t going down for killing Wellington. No way I was going to prison—I couldn’t take that, not at this stage of my life. I was too delicate, too accustomed to the good life to spend the rest of my days in a two-by-four-foot hellhole that was a pit stop for rats and roaches and trying to eat food that they wouldn’t even want to touch.
That was assuming somebody in there didn’t off me first for some reason. Or the state decided to plug in the electric chair again, or stick a needle in me.
I didn’t have much time. I tried to think of what had to be done. The quicker I got out of this room the better, obviously, before someone barged in and caught me keeping Wellington’s carcass company. One thing I had going for me—if Wellington had been straight with me—was that he was pulling this scam on his own, and so maybe no one other than him knew he was here meeting with me this afternoon.
Pulling a sleazy-assed blackmail scheme on some poor sap wasn’t something you normally wrote on your weekly agenda.
On second thought, there was one person who might know Wellington’s whereabouts: Gretchen. If the scumbag had been telling the truth about his whole slimy scheme. But she’d be ecstatic to have Wellington finally off her case, wouldn’t she?
I couldn’t get off the track and start thinking about any of that shit now. I had to move.
Fingerprints. That was the next thing I should worry about, right? Even though I had no criminal record and my prints hadn’t ever been taken except for when I worked in the comptroller’s office of a bank in Philadelphia twenty years ago . . .
I quickly tried to remember everything I’d touched since I’d been in room 708. I pushed myself off the floor, staggered into the bathroom, and pulled the other hand towel off the rack. Then I swabbed the sink counter, the door handles, the arms of the chair I’d sat in.
Now what? I couldn’t very well try and remove the corpse from the room, could I? The image of me dragging an inert Wellington down the hotel corridor might normally have broken me up, but at that moment I didn’t have a sense of humor. And if I did succeed in getting him out of there, what the hell would I do with him? I could run out to a store and buy an oversized piece of luggage to stuff him into, then transport him that way, but it would take up entirely too much time.
It had all happened so fast, damn it.
What other choices did I have? Well, I could haul Wellington onto the balcony, hope nobody would see me, and push him over the railing, try to make it look like a case of suicide. The body would tumble seven stories down to the pavement, and if investigators couldn’t figure out that Wellington was dead before he hit the ground, maybe I’d get away with the whole thing scot-free.
Not bad. But there were problems with the scenario. First of all, whoever examined Wellington’s remains would see how I’d gouged his face and crushed his windpipe and pretty easily determine that in truth he’d been murdered. In the second place, it was possible that I wouldn’t be able to beat it out of the building before someone from the hotel figured out that Wellington had fallen from the terrace of 708 and intercepted me before I had the chance to flee . . .
If I let it, the back-and-forth argument in my head could go on forever. The upshot was that if I left Wellington right here, maybe I could buy more time. With a little luck, it might even be up to eighteen, twenty-four hours before anybody discovered him. With more luck, maybe even longer. And I wouldn’t have to take the chance of having someone see me heave a body off the balcony.
Then it came to me that there was something I could do to buy even a little more time.
I ran into the bathroom, pulled one of the folded towels from the storage rack, and went and wrapped Wellington’s head in it to prevent seepage of more blood into the carpet. Next, I hoisted him by the legs and shimmied him away from the wall. When I began to pull him toward the closet, which was close by the double bed, I heard a thunk. I looked down. A lumpy bulk had formed under Wellington’s armpit.
What the hell . . . ? I dropped the legs and pulled back the flap of Wellington’s suit. A small, black, compact semiautomatic pistol lay on the shiny inside liner of his jacket. It must have slipped out of his breast pocket.
So—the little jerk had been packing. I should have known. If I didn’t go along with his sales pitch, he was going to start waving the damned thing in my face and making wiseguy threats, the filthy weasel.
I chewed it over. Should I take the damned thing? What for? No. Leave it. Don’t touch it—fingerprints. The gun would make Wellington look like a guy who was out for trouble rather than a harmless tourist.
My brain undulated with a feverish welter of ideas and possibilities. I didn’t know if I was making a lick of sense to myself. But discovering the gun made me think of something else, something I should have thought of already.
I lifted and pushed Wellington’s legs toward the wall and felt for his wallet. There it was, in the right rear pocket of his trousers. I pulled out my handkerchief, and with it wedged between my thumb and forefinger drew out the slab of black leather.
It wasn’t a wallet, exactly, but slimmer, what you’d call a billfold. I flipped it open and saw the words Louis Vuitton. Evidently Wellington was a stylish fellow before he met his death.
I parted the inside lips. There were a few dirty green bills inside.
Take them. Makes it look like a robbery—right? Even better, take the entire billfold, and dump it someplace far from the hotel. It’ll buy even more time. They might not even know who this guy was without an ID, at least for a while.
I tossed the billfold on the bed. I’d look inside again later, then decide what to do with it.
No, wait. It doesn’t make sense. Wellington had to have signed in downstairs . . . They’d have his name down there, wouldn’t they? Well, maybe he hadn’t used his real name—what then? Nevertheless, if I got rid of the billfold, it would look like a robbery and throw investigators off the scent anyway.
I was arguing with myself again. It was astonishing, the ra
nge of possibilities that a crime scene raised. I realized that I was completely out of my element. It didn’t matter—I had to make decisions anyway, even if they were the wrong ones.
Hoisting the corpse’s feet, I’d begun to drag it again when I heard another noise—the telephone. My heart stopped. I dropped my load again and stood bolt upright.
The goddamned thing rang four, five, six times. Was it going to ring forever? Should I pick it up? Who the hell could it be?
Despite my confusion and panic I knew that it meant something. Had someone heard a scuffle in 708 and notified the front desk? Was it Gretchen? Is someone on his way up here?
I pulled my sleeve across my sopping forehead. I had to get the hell out of here before something happened.
Just as suddenly as it started ringing, the phone died. I waited a few seconds and then went back to pulling on Wellington’s legs. I’d just about maneuvered him to the closet when it began chirping again. If I’d been watching the scene in a movie, I’d be laughing my ass off.
Maybe it would be better to answer the fucking thing—pretend I was Wellington, give whoever was calling the impression that the private investigator was alive. Still alive.
I lowered his limbs to the floor again and walked around the bed to the nightstand. With a shaking hand I reached for the receiver. Then I lifted it and waited to hear what would happen.
Whoever was at the other end wasn’t talking, either. After ten seconds I hung up.
This was sheer madness. Whether or not I knew it, I’d gone over an edge. I had to get out of room 708 before my head exploded.
I slid the closet door open. There was definitely enough room in there to stash a body. I collapsed the luggage rack and set it against the back wall. Then I picked up the dead man’s legs again and dropped them into the narrow space.
It was a bitch trying to get all of him in there. Finally I was able to winch Wellington’s upper body into the narrow space and bend him into the closet in a seated position, with his head scrunched between his legs. Then I darted back into the bathroom, grabbed the rest of the bath towels off the rack, and spread them open beneath his battered skull to absorb whatever dripped out of it.
No Strings Page 8