Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  Daggett didn’t see it as a long shot. It made a hell of a lot of sense. He suggested a couple other things they could look for to ID the trash: gold and black cigarette butts, an empty bottle of Anbesol, a grocery bag, or a grocery store receipt that listed a potato. Macalister looked at him strangely. Daggett explained, “He blocked Ward’s exhaust pipe with a potato.”

  “Right.”

  “What about a car? You can’t get around this city without a car. The hotel must have some kind of parking arrangements for guests. They may be able to give us a license plate number for this guy’s car.”

  “That’s good. I’ll follow up on that. We got a license plate number, we might get a rental agency.”

  “We should also talk to the maid.”

  Macalister nodded. “Already spoke to the front desk about that. They’re going to send her up.”

  Macalister slipped a piece of plastic into a key slot and unlocked the door. “Electronic keys,” he said in disgust. “When’s this shit gonna end?”

  It was a tiny but attractive room with a rose-and-teal chintz bedspread, almond drapes, and too much furniture: a couch, a desk, the bed and the bureau. It didn’t leave much room for people. Macalister and Daggett both donned plastic gloves. The door thumped shut behind them. The claustrophobic space reinforced Daggett’s sense of urgency. Ward’s killer may have been inside this room. This was the bed he had slept in, the desk he had used. They were that close. No matter how small, it was a victory to be briefly savored.

  Daggett walked over to the window and looked down at the cars, trucks, and buses below. “We want as many of the details as we can put together,” he told Macalister, “what this guy ate, the quantity and especially the brand of cigarette he smoked, whether he showered or bathed—anything and everything that might shed some light on him.” Macalister nodded, accustomed to such requests. The two men searched the room, wandering it slowly, heads craned down. The lab boys would find something—they always did. Whether or not it would help the investigation remained to be seen.

  A knock came on the door and Macalister answered it. A shy Vietnamese woman introduced herself as Karen Xi. She was a tiny, flat-chested woman with callused hands, her hair held back by a white plastic clip with blue flowers. She had twisted teeth and flawless dark skin. Her frightened eyes seemed to occupy half her face.

  “You’re in no kind of trouble,” Macalister explained.

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, you may be able to be a tremendous help to us.”

  “Yes.” Looking at him out of the corner of her eye, skeptically.

  “You cleaned this room this morning.”

  “Yes. Check-out.”

  “You clean more thoroughly when it’s a check-out?”

  “Yes.”

  Daggett wondered, was it too much to ask that this woman remember this room in particular?

  “You clean a lot of rooms,” Macalister said, reading his mind.

  “Many rooms.”

  “You probably don’t pay much attention, one room to another. Is that right?”

  She nodded, shrugged her shoulders, and offered them both an innocent expression. She still seemed scared.

  “I wouldn’t pay much attention, I can tell you that,” Macalister encouraged.

  She smiled, but raised her hand to cover her mouth, not allowing those awful teeth to show.

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember anything in particular about this room?”

  “Yeah, sure I do.”

  “The guest?” Daggett blurted out, interrupting, drawing a look of annoyance from Macalister.

  “Did you see him?” Macalister asked. “Do you remember the guest?”

  “Not him. Don’t remember him. Remember room … clean room. Very neat and tidy. Easy to clean.”

  “Neat?” Daggett asked. This was just the kind of information he had hoped for—it shed some light on the man’s personality.

  “You notice when you clean rooms.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Macalister said. His eyes asked Daggett to stop, but Daggett couldn’t. “He smoked,” Daggett said.

  “Yes.”

  Now Macalister glared, but Daggett was unrelenting. “Do you, by any chance, remember what the cigarettes looked like? What color?” Daggett asked.

  “No. Don’t remember. He smoked. He left the window cracked open.”

  Daggett walked over to the window and studied the building and its fire escapes more closely. If pressed, could a person escape from that window? Yes, he thought it possible. Edge your way over there, drop down to the overhang. Possible. Leave the window cracked open to speed up your exit. “We’ll want the latent-print team to pay special attention here.

  “Did you ever see a gun, a knife, anything like that?” Daggett asked her.

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Did he speak to you?” Macalister interrupted.

  “No. I never even saw him. He done something, this man?”

  The killer’s invisibility bothered Daggett. First at Duhning, now here.

  “Anything unusual? Anything at all?” Daggett blurted out in frustration, further annoying Macalister.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, drawing their attention with her sharp voice and suddenly bright, anxious eyes. “The tooth!” She beamed. “Not every day you find a tooth.”

  5

  * * *

  Anthony Kort cringed as he explored the gaping wound at the back of his gums with the rubber tip of the toothbrush. It was ugly back there. His jaw was so swollen on that side that he had taken to stuffing an enormous wad of tissue between his opposite cheek and gums in an attempt to balance the look of his face. If ever there was a chipmunk, he thought, it’s me. He didn’t mind it so much: he looked like a different person, and that had its advantages.

  He felt exhausted from the train ride; he had been unable to sleep, too preoccupied with the repercussions and subsequent preparations resulting from Roger Ward’s unintended murder. The last several days had been hectic; he didn’t like Los Angeles.

  He rechecked his watch for the date: August 27. Two weeks to the day since the explosion that killed Bernard. Hopefully, by late this afternoon the unfortunate loss would mean something. Bernard had made himself briefly immortal: he still lived in the form of the detonators he had left behind.

  Monique Cheysson arrived at the door of his Los Angeles hotel room precisely at nine-thirty. It had been nearly two years since he had last seen her but he recognized her face immediately, even when distorted by the door’s fish-eye security peephole.

  He opened the door for her.

  She entered in behind a waft of musky perfume and the rustle of fine fabric. She carried a black briefcase.

  Kort slipped the DO NOT DISTURB sign over the knob and closed the door firmly. The dead bolt insured privacy. She spun around dramatically to face him, the well-practiced turn of a fashion model at the end of the runway. Monique was always onstage.

  A curtain of fine black hair fell to just above her shoulders and then curled under stylishly. Low bangs shortened her forehead and framed a face that was all brown eyes, cheekbones, and red lips. She had perfected the demure expression of appearing half asleep—or ready for bed. Her self-confidence drew attention from across a room—it bordered on arrogance. She had square shoulders, high breasts, and a waist so tiny that he thought he might be able to reach around it with both hands.

  He had been fantasizing about her for weeks.

  “Any problems?” he asked her.

  “It is right there,” she said, pointing to the briefcase. She had less of an accent than he remembered. If she tried hard, she might even pass for American. Her voice rang with disappointment.

  “What’s wrong?” His fantasy collapsed. He had imagined her seducing him. He had imagined a reenactment of Frankfurt.

  He recalls that first time he saw her with crisp clarity. He remembers the cold, his breath white, his nose running. So cold that her face is hidden by the mask of fro
st on the windscreen. It’s a silver Mercedes—stolen, of course, with stolen plates. His passport is a forgery, and therefore his identity; everything about him is a forgery. The door sticks with the cold as he attempts to open it. She leans across the front seat and bangs it open for him. He sees her for the first time through the frost-glazed glass, the determination on her face, the rouge on her cheeks, a silk scarf, dark sunglasses. Typical of these operations, they haven’t met until this moment the door complains open. How Michael manages this is anybody’s guess. The training, the logistics. ... A dozen or so people, all orbiting around him regularly, but not so much as a shadow shared between them.

  “The fucking car wouldn’t start,” she says angrily, and he likes her right away.

  “The suitcase?” he asks.

  “In the trunk.” He offers an expression that questions the intelligence of that and she interrupts him before he speaks. “Where a suitcase belongs. Especially that suitcase. You think I was going to keep it on the backseat?” Yes, he likes her. Despite her obvious good looks, he is not physically attracted to her. It has been two years since his wife took her own life, and in that time not once has he felt anything like lust for another woman. Only despair. He feeds on the despair, like a tick feeds on the blood of a stray dog. It motivates him. It forces him toward purpose. It is this despair that has turned a grieving widower into a killer. He doesn’t know this killer—he doesn’t stop to know him—but he doesn’t know the other man either, the man of a wife and a child and a workaday life he left behind. He doesn’t want to know. He has purpose. That is enough. It will suffice.

  “I’m Monique,” she says.

  He finds himself staring at her.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “You’re French,” he observes.

  She ignores this. “I do not know why I should feel so nervous, but I do. It is not so very hard what we are going to do, is it?”

  “The bag will match?”

  “Of course it will, but I warn you that hotel is impossible. I have never seen so many people.”

  “And the schedule?”

  “Yes. I double-checked.”

  “Then it’s done. There’s nothing to be nervous about.”

  “My insides say differently.” The car stalls at a light. The engine grinds and slows behind the efforts of a drained battery. He knows exactly how that battery feels.

  “Wait,” he tells her. He switches off the radio, which she had turned down but not off. He turns off the fan. Like closing off compartments. “Okay. Try again.” Someone honks at them.

  “Fuck off,” she says, glaring into the rearview mirror.

  “Pay no attention to that.”

  At last the engine flutters to life. “This fucking car!” she says. “This fucking cold. I hate Frankfurt. I hate this place.”

  “Pull in behind that bus,” he instructs.

  “Oh, my God, we are here! And look, the bus is early. Oh, my God.” She glances at him with an expression of horror, as if this were her fault.

  “No it’s not,” he tells her, finding his watch beneath his glove. “It’s right on time. Pull over here.”

  As she drives around the block, he carries the suitcase into the lobby, jammed with a hundred pieces of luggage. You can barely move for the luggage. An older couple, clearly late, sets their bags among the others and goes to join the tour for the final free breakfast. One thing you can count on with the Americans, he thinks, is that they will never turn down a free breakfast.

  He carries the suitcase across the lobby. Monique has done her job well. There, in the sea of hundreds of bags, are ten, maybe fifteen, identical black Samsonites. Just like the one he’s carrying. He cuts his way into the throng and sets his bag next to one of its twins. With his back to the registration desk, which is frantic with check-outs, he slips the personal identification tag off the one bag and on to his. It takes him less than ten seconds. There, it is done. All of these bags will be loaded by the bus driver, his substitute among them. At the airport, at check-in, the bags will be matched with passengers. By switching tags, he has insured this bag of his will be claimed. There will be one extra Samsonite that will not be claimed. Because of rules, it will not be loaded onto the plane. On large tours, such mistakes occur regularly. Nothing will be made of it. The bag will be returned to the hotel or destroyed by airport Security. His replacement will be boarded onto the plane in its place, Bernard’s bomb inside.

  He pulls the scarf up around his face and flexes his gloved hands, a person preparing for the bitter cold. Only his eyes show above the scarf, like an outlaw in a western.

  The Mercedes is waiting. She is bent over the hood, stretched out, scraping the windscreen clear of ice. He feels a twinge of lust stir his loin. So foreign an experience is this that he only faintly recognizes it for what it is. He gets in the car. She climbs behind the wheel.

  They drive for three hours to a Bavarian-style chalet hotel where they are to stay for three days. She talks for the entire trip. But he likes it, welcomes it as a blind man welcomes back his sight. It’s the most time he has spent with any one person in over a year. As she is parking the car she says, “There has been a slight change of plans. We are to stay together.”

  “What?”

  “Michael insisted.”

  “Impossible. We’ll take two rooms.”

  “It is two rooms. It is a suite. We are registered as a married couple. Do you find the idea so offensive?”

  “It’s not that at all.”

  “What then?”

  “Two rooms.”

  “Listen, my passport has the same name as yours. So we share the same suite. So what?”

  “Three days. We’re here for three days with nothing to do!”

  “He is right about you.”

  “Right about what?”

  “He said you are wound up as tight as a spring. He said you could use the rest.”

  “What does he know?”

  “Plenty. And you are wrong. About the three days, I mean. About nothing to do.”

  “Am I?”

  “It is three nights. Only two days. And do not worry about being bored. I can be very entertaining.”

  “This is Michael’s doing,” he says, smelling a conspiracy.

  “Of course it is. It is all Michael’s doing. No? Relax, you are in good hands.” She smiles. “Wonderful hands.”

  He follows her like an obedient pet to the registration desk, signs them in, and accepts the key.

  “Only the one bag?” asks the cherub-faced girl behind the counter. She has blond braids and enormous breasts. Red lipstick on her teeth.

  Monique answers before Kort can get out a word. “Yes, only the one. We won’t be needing a lot of clothes,” she says, winking as she adds, “It is our anniversary.” She hooks her arm into his and leads him toward the lift. He feels a flood of heat in his cheeks. Embarrassment is as foreign to him as the earlier stirring in his loins. This is new ground. He’s uncomfortable.

  They are only in the room a matter of minutes when a bottle of champagne is delivered.

  “We didn’t order this,” he tells the delivery boy. Always suspicious.

  “Compliments of the manager, sir,” the boy says, pushing his way past and setting the champagne down. He makes a fuss, buying time for the tip. Kort obliges him and the boy leaves.

  Monique whirls in from the bedroom and picks up the small note card alongside the glasses. “How thoughtful,” she says.

  She hands him the card. She already has the foil off and the cage open. She’s twisting the cork. It explodes from the bottle with a bang and his hand instinctively goes for his gun.

  He’s standing there with his hand inside his coat—she’s shaking her head at him—and he thinks, maybe she’s right, maybe I am wound up a little tight.

  “Read the card,” she says, pouring two glasses of the wine.

  He does. Happy anniversary, it reads. Enjoy your stay with us. />
  She walks over to the television and turns it on to CNN. They watch for a minute. Nothing yet.

  Kort checks his watch.

  “Relax,” she says, handing him a glass. “We have nothing but time.”

  She lifts her glass to his, and there’s that smile again. And he knows what she has in mind. And he knows he will enjoy it.

  He was thinking that nothing repeats itself; nothing is ever the same. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, it causes them.

  She placed her hands on her hips defiantly. “Any problems?” she repeated. “We have nothing but problems! It is over,” she said. “Do you not see that? Do you not feel it? They have arrested him. Placed him in jail! My God, the sense of relief when I heard that.”

  His face burned. “Relief? How can you say such a thing? Michael is in jail. He’ll go to prison—probably for the rest of his life. And you … you act as if it’s a holiday.”

  “It is a holiday. We’re free! He used us. Me, for the better part of three years; you, for how long? Five years? How many has it been for you? Or has it been too many? Maybe that is the problem.”

  “And Der Grund—The Cause—what of the cause?” He saw a flicker of guilt cross her eyes, and in that instant knew she could be won over. “You’ve become like all the rest of them—you give up before accomplishing anything.” He was shouting. He crossed the room and turned up the volume on CNN. He ran CNN every waking hour.

  “He has brainwashed you. Have you somehow forgotten that he blackmailed us? How can you forgive him that? I cannot. Will not. He is paying for it now. He deserves it. Why should I throw away these last two years? Give me one good reason.”

  He thought for a moment and replied in terms he knew she would accept. “Because he will see us hunted down if this operation doesn’t come off.” He gave this time to sink in. “Even from jail.” He watched as understanding registered on her face. He said, “The only way to break free of this—if that’s what you want—is to see this operation through. No more Der Grund, no more operations. It’s that simple. You can buy your freedom, Monique. We can both buy our freedom. Think it through.”