Alarm Call

by Jardine, Quintin

I shouldn’t have uttered the word ‘sleep’: as soon as I did, the day, and probably the rest of that week, started to catch up with me. I felt dog tired as I called Reception and asked the duty manageress to book us on to an LA flight in the morning and into the closest hotel she could find to Westwood Village.

  We both knew the Village; it’s one of the nicest parts of LA and one of the safest. I felt comfortable about taking Prim there. The woman called us back inside half an hour, which I had spent drinking Bud Light from the mini-bar in an attempt to dull a growing ache, not just in my ear but all over the side of my head. They had given me painkillers at the hospital; they were starting to wear off. She told us that we were on an American Airlines flight and that she’d reserved a room in the Century, on Wilshire Boulevard. I’d been so damn tired, or drugged, that I’d forgotten to ask for two . . . or maybe I was getting used to the way things had developed.

  Don Johnson’s place seemed a long time past, but I didn’t fancy going anywhere to eat, not even down to the hotel’s excellent restaurant. Instead we ordered a couple of room-service salads and a few more beers in an ice-bucket and spent the evening getting quietly plastered . . . at least I did, I can’t speak for Prim.

  I don’t remember who suggested the sleeping arrangements that night. I only know that I woke up slightly feverish in the middle of the night, from a very bad dream involving gunshots, to find that I was in her bed, without a pyjama in sight. For a few moments, I was worried, but I wasn’t so drunk that I’d have forgotten that. Still, after I’d relieved myself of the burden of all that beer, I crept back to my own room and flaked out on top of the duvet.

  She said nothing about it next day, other than a cheerier ‘Good morning’ than I had expected. She did ask about my ear, though; the pain wasn’t as bad, but it was still there, so I popped a couple of tablets to ease it.

  We had room-service breakfast at eight o’clock; they brought a couple of Saturday morning’s newspapers with our order. I wasn’t the lead story, but I had front-page treatment in both of them. I was glad to be getting out of San Francisco, for all sorts of reasons. As I chucked the last one away, I decided I’d better phone Susie again.

  I went to my room to make the call. She was still anxious about me: there had been some footage on the British TV news taken outside the police station and she’d seen the blood on my shirt and the patch on my ear. ‘I thought you said it was just a graze,’ she said.

  ‘It is, love, honest. They put in a few micro-stitches, that was all. I might have a designer ear for the rest of my life, but there’s no lasting damage otherwise. It’s all positive: it’ll make me look like a war hero and I’ll be able to bore dinner parties with the story for years to come.’

  ‘The guy who did it’s not going to get out or anything, is he?’

  ‘Not in the full vigour of his youth, that’s for sure.’

  ‘That’s comforting to know. Just you be sure you don’t get into any more trouble. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, my darling, I hear you.’

  ‘Ah, so I’m still your darling, am I?’

  ‘And always will be.’

  ‘That’s good to hear, since that carry-on in Minneapolis. The sooner this thing is over with and Prim’s far away from you, getting on with her life, the happier I’ll be.’

  ‘Hopefully that’ll be tomorrow.’ I told her about Los Angeles. ‘He’s got to show himself this afternoon. I feel the same way you do; I just want the deal done, whatever it is, and the kid returned.’

  ‘And Prim? How does she feel?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Will she give up her fortune for her son?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  I heard her sigh. ‘Yes, of course. Ignore me, love, I’m super-cynical about people and money, that’s all. It’s all right talking about sacrifice; actually making it’s the acid test. I wonder whether she’s hoping that, when the moment comes, you’ll be able to muscle the boy away from Wallinger.’

  ‘Hey, if I see a chance to do that, I’ll take it ... as long as it’s within the law.’

  ‘You keep that in mind,’ she warned me. ‘In this world you can be a hero today and a villain tomorrow.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Good.’ She paused. ‘By the way, I didn’t tell you. When I saw you on television, I was prouder of you than I’ve ever been before. I’ll bet your dad and Ellie are too.’

  ‘Oh, Christ, I never warned them!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I did.’

  ‘Thanks. Listen, love, I’d better go.’

  ‘Do that. Did you make those calls?’

  ‘What calls?’

  ‘The ones I told you about, remember?’

  ‘Oh, shit. With one thing and another . . . I’ll make them now.’

  I dug out my pocket PC ... techno-freak, I know ... where I keep my contact numbers, for convenience, and found the number of the Merchant’s Hotel. As I dialled it, I wondered whether the general manager would be on duty on a Saturday or whether he’d be taking his kids to the lakes, as all good Minnesotans do, but Benjamin E. King was conscientious: he was in his office.

  ‘Mr Blackstone,’ he said, as he answered my call. ‘I’m so glad you could get back to me. I see from the newspapers that you’ve been having an exciting time since you left us.’

  ‘One I could have done without,’ I confessed. ‘Why did you want to speak to me?’

  ‘I wanted to let you in on the results of my investigation into the incident which marred your stay with us. I’ve spoken to the clerk who dealt with your booking and now I know the whole story.’

  ‘I thought your assistant manager had done that.’

  ‘I’m afraid that gentleman was negligent,’ King admitted. ‘The story he fed you about your reservation being misunderstood was a fabrication, designed to get him off the hook. The person involved was off duty on Tuesday and only returned to work on Thursday. She tells it completely differently: it’s still not a pretty story from our point of view, but it’s better than an outright lie.’

  ‘Let’s hear it, then.’

  ‘Apparently, your booking was made correctly. You were allocated two of the last three rooms we had available at that point. However, on the morning of the day you were due to check in, the reservations office had a call from a gentleman who said he was your personal assistant. He said that your arrangements had changed, that you were now travelling with your wife and would only require one room. In accordance with our normal practice he was asked to confirm by fax or e-mail. He chose the latter, and a message was received. If the clerk had been super-efficient, it might have occurred to her that the original instruction was confirmed by electronic fax, on your personal letterhead, but she accepted the change at face value. By the time you checked in, your second room had been allocated, and the hotel was indeed full.’

  ‘What was the e-mail address on the message?’ I asked.

  ‘Hold on, I have it here.’ I waited, but I knew what he was going to say, even before he had started spelling the letters out. ‘It reads “p-w-a-l-l-i-n-g-e-r at trickledown dot com”. Does that mean anything to you, sir?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It surely does.’

  ‘Then I am afraid that you have been the victim of a practical joke, with our unwitting connivance.’

  ‘As a matter of interest, did the person who booked that other room ever turn up?’

  ‘Yes, sir, a Mr Jack Nicholson. He walked in off the street less than half an hour after your booking was changed. He took the room for three nights and paid in cash: unusual these days, I know, but it still happens.’

  ‘Which room was that?’

  ‘Twenty-oh-six; it’s across the landing from the room you and the lady occupied.’

  ‘Did he go out a lot, this Mr Nicholson?’

  ‘I have no idea, sir. This is a very large and busy hotel, you understand. But I can tell you that he took all his meals in his room.’

  ‘Did your checkin guy recall anythi
ng else about him? For example, did he have a laptop?’

  ‘He may well have done; most of our guests do these days. However, I have no way of knowing for sure.’

  I could take a good guess at it, though. I thanked Mr King and hung up, then went back out to the living room, thinking all the way. What he had told me put a new spin on things.

  Jack Nicholson, indeed! A name plucked from the flotsam of yet another shattered Hollywood dream? Or just a stupid bastard having a laugh at my expense? If it was, that was yet another mistake: I like to have all the funny lines.

  Prim came out of the bathroom as I closed my bedroom door behind me; she had a turban on her head and another towel wrapped around her. ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘You look worried.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Are you finished in there?’ She nodded.

  In the shower, even though I was concentrating on keeping the spray away from my wound, I thought some more. Wallinger had actually known when we were going to Minneapolis, and what hotel we would be in. The second part of that problem wasn’t insurmountable; I’m rich, so he’d assume that I’d be in one of the best hotels. Phoning round them and asking a few questions wouldn’t take long. One phone call to his cop brother, if I was wrong in my assessment of Lieutenant John the Second, would have been even quicker, and could have got him all the information he needed. But how the hell did he know when we were going?

  He could have been watching Prim all along; he could have tracked her to Scotland, then followed the two of us everywhere we went. It was pretty clear he’d been following our trail across North America, keeping one guess and one step ahead of us. But there was one catch in that theory. If he was cash-flashing Jack Nicholson, as I was certain he was, and he had been snooping on us in the UK, how had he got to Minneapolis ahead of us? No way could he have done that, as we’d been booked on the first available flight.

  So that left two possibilities: either he had an accomplice in Britain who’d trailed us all the way up to the KLM desk at Glasgow, worked out the rest from there . . . there are only a couple of ways to get to MSP from Scotland and via Holland is one of them . . . then phoned him, or . . . and this was the one I feared most . . . he had a spy in my camp.

  But who knew where I was going and why? Susie did; sure, and it was likely to be her, not. Audrey did, and so did Conrad; they were fairly new in our employ, but they’d been well vetted and neither of them had any obvious link to an obscure American actor. Mark Kravitz knew, but he was my man even more than Connie was. Suppose he could have been bought, who’d have known to buy him? Mark operated in the shadows.

  ‘Miles would have known.’ I said it aloud, and was rewarded with pain as I forgot myself and let the shower jet hit my stitched-together ear. And why the hell, I asked myself, would mega-rich Miles Grayson get involved in a conspiracy to extort from his sister-in-law the sort of money that he would regard as small change? Did he and Dawn hate her that much? Rubbish, I told myself.

  ‘But still,’ I mused. ‘Wallinger: actor; LA connection.’

  Roscoe Brown. Roscoe knew my travel plans. Roscoe was an actors’ agent and had been for some years. Did Roscoe know Paul Wallinger?

  I turned off the jet, grabbed a towel and began drying off, as quickly as I could. As soon as I’d got myself down to merely damp, I wrapped myself in the hotel’s towelling robe to finish the job, went out to the living room and set up the laptop again. I didn’t bother with the e-mail this time. I went straight on to Roscoe Brown’s website and did what he’d challenged me to do a week or so before: I pulled down his client list.

  It was extensive, built up through his years in the business. We were all there, from Adams to Zederbaum, like he’d said, but I was only interested in one letter. I clicked on the Ws and there he was, right at the top of the list . . . Paul Patrick Walls.

  Prim had come into the room, behind my back. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Just possibly, honey,’ I told her, ‘I’m pulling someone’s world down on his fucking head . . . and maybe if some contracts aren’t signed yet, on my own too!’

  Chapter 23

  I was seriously pissed off with flying. Whatever happened in Westwood Village, I knew that my next port of call had to be Las Vegas, which was within a drivable distance, so I went online to Hertz, gave them my gold member number and booked a Jaguar S-type, with satellite navigation, for collection at Los Angeles airport.

  That was a positive move after a week of uncertainty, and so I felt a little better as we checked out of the Campton Place. A local television station had found out where I was, and there was a crew outside as we got into our car. They got some footage of Prim, but the reporter wasn’t clued up enough to ask who she was, so I wasn’t worried about it turning into a story. They were only going through the motions anyway: already I was old news.

  I fretted about Roscoe all the way to the terminal and on to the flight. Security there was worse than it had been anywhere else, even for those of us travelling at the front of the plane, so that didn’t help. Add all that to my still aching head . . . fuck me, I’d been shot less than twenty-four hours earlier . . . and calling me irritable would have been a major understatement. Prim read this and knew me well enough to keep quiet. When a guy recognised me in the departure lounge and approached me, I froze him with a stare; he actually apologised to me, when all he’d wanted to do was shake my hand and thank me for the day before.

  I’d forgotten, and so had Prim, that it would be significantly hotter in LA than it had been in San Francisco, or anywhere else we had stopped that week. We were both in denims, so the transfer to the Hertz pick-up point was a steamy ordeal. As soon as we were in the S-type I switched the air-conditioning on at full blast; and we sat on the tarmac for a few minutes, our shirts unbuttoned, enjoying the refrigerated breeze.

  When we were comfortable I programmed our destination into the navigation system and set off, taking every turn it told me to take without question. I felt a strange wave of relief just to be driving again: five days of Charles, Carmen, and assorted taxi-drivers is a lot for anyone, even someone with a less frayed temper than mine was by then.

  The city of Los Angeles is an enormous place, but we were lucky in that Westwood Village is relatively close to LAX. The system instructed me to take Century Boulevard, then switch to the Four-Oh-Five freeway, and finally to join Wilshire Boulevard. We arrived at our hotel in under twenty minutes.

  The Century was not the poshest hotel we’d been in that week, but it was okay, less than a mile from the meeting place Wallinger had specified, and it had an underground park where I could dump the Jag. It’s the oldest building around on that part of Wilshire, but it has a Spanish feel to it that makes up for its age. They gave us what they called a suite, on the first floor with a balcony that overlooked a central courtyard that would have been shaded if the sun hadn’t been directly overhead. It was cramped, but it had two enormous beds and a bathroom. When I saw how small it was I asked Prim if she wanted her own room, but she shook her head. ‘If you were going to take shameless advantage of me,’ she said, ‘you’d have done it last night when you crawled drunk into my bed. But you didn’t so I reckon we’re both safe.’

  I was okay with that, not because I wasn’t worried about Susie any more but because I had the irrational hope growing within me that somehow the whole business would be sorted that day, I could send Prim on her way, and make my own to Vegas.

  I took a long, cool shower in the cramped bathroom, to freshen up and to get my circulation going properly, then dug out my lightest shirt and a pair of Lacoste shorts that I’d packed with Vegas in mind. In those, and a pair of Panama Jack sandals, no socks, I felt dressed for the city. I looked at my suitcase and saw yet another reason for getting to my base camp in the Bellagio: more than half of its contents were destined for the hotel laundry.

  By the time Prim had got herself ready . . . her case was smaller than mine; I hated to think what it was like inside ... it
was after two o’clock, but I wasn’t worried about the time. I was worried about her, though: she was starting to get twitchy again, impatient, irritable and anxious to get going. We had plenty of time, but I kept her happy; I still had all the headache I needed.

  I handed my laptop in to Reception for safe keeping and, while I was there, asked the day manager if he knew where Damon and Pythias was. He didn’t, but his young assistant did: she told me that it was a café in either Kinross Avenue or Broxton Avenue . . . she wasn’t sure which, but they were adjoining and less than a mile away.

  We could have taken the Jag, but that might have caused us a parking problem at the other end so I decided that it was best to walk. Prim was in shorts too, a pair she’d bought at the airport in Minneapolis: her legs had the nice light tan that I remembered, but then so had the rest of her.

  We walked down Wilshire as the girl had directed us, then crossed it, turning right into Westwood Boulevard. Kinross Avenue was only a hundred yards along, to the left: we walked along it, but saw no Damons and no Pythiases either, so we carried on until we found Broxton.

  The whole area was familiar, and all of a sudden, I knew exactly where I was. When Prim and I had done our brief and ill-fated LA living bit, we’d stayed with Miles and Dawn in Beverly Hills for two or three weeks, until we found a place of our own to rent. The home town of the stars is very close to Westwood Village. It, in turn, is very close to UCLA, and so it has a nice student feel about it. We’d liked it and so we’d hung out there from time to time. I looked up the tree-lined avenue and there it was, on the other side of the street, the place we were looking for, a café with an indoor area and open-air seating under a veranda on the edge of the sidewalk. We’d actually had a drink there a couple of times, although I’d never noticed what the place was called.

  ‘Why the hell did he pick this?’ I asked.

  ‘I think I know,’ said Prim. ‘Paul used to ask me about you and me, and what we’d done when we were in California together, before it all went bad.’

  ‘It was bad from the start.’