He grinned. “I always did like to kill two birds with one stone.” He let the sentence hang there for a second and then went on. “I’m teasing. I’d never tell you what to read.”
“Or what to drink.” I went back to the book.
Reading a page of Henry James wasn’t the quickest thing in the world, but this time I barely made it through a paragraph before I heard his voice again. “You’re so far away. I feel like I have to shout just to talk to you.”
“If you weren’t talking to me you wouldn’t have that problem.”
He smiled. “But then I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“All that logic,” I observed. “Maybe you really are a lawyer.”
“Not just a lawyer. I happen to be a really good lawyer.”
“I’ll be sure to call you next time I get pulled over for speeding.”
He didn’t love that. Humor often seemed to fall before ego. “I’m a partner in a firm that handles things a touch more important than speeding tickets. Come sit over here,” he urged. “I promise you I’m more interesting than a book.”
“You’re setting a pretty high bar for yourself,” I warned as I got up and sat next to him. He looked triumphant as he ordered another Manhattan. “And whatever she’s drinking, another,” he told the bartender.
The drinks were set down even though my first glass of wine was still more or less full.
“Now,” Silas said, “I’m going to run to the little boys’ room, and then you’re going to tell me all about yourself.”
For some reason, I’d always disliked men who called the bathroom the little boys’ room. One day maybe I’d meet the exception to that rule, but it didn’t seem likely to happen tonight. The lawyer got off his stool and headed toward the restroom off the main lobby. I sat there, the two drinks in front of me. Silas’s Manhattan was a garnet color. A flat twist of orange peel curled on the rim. I looked over at the bartender. He was across the bar, busy taking glasses out of an under-the-counter dishwasher. I discreetly emptied a small capsule of white powder into the Manhattan. The powder immediately dissolved, leaving nothing more than a slight cloudiness in the drink. I glanced around again. No one looking anywhere near me. The whole thing had taken perhaps five seconds.
Silas was back. “Still here.” He grinned. “I wasn’t sure if you’d run away.”
“I’ve never much liked running away from people.”
The lawyer sat back down and raised his glass.
I watched the rim ascend.
The glass stopped just shy of his mouth. He was giving me a strange look.
He put the glass back down on the counter.
“Everything okay?” My tone was casual but I was running the last several minutes, and several nights, back and forth in my mind, wondering. Had he seen something or recognized me? What could have given it away?
He shifted the glass around on the bar, still watching me. “Your face,” he finally said.
“My face? What about it?”
His eyes were narrowed as if trying to place me. As if there was some kind of delayed-fuse recognition process occurring. Depending on what he said, I’d need to either bluff or leave the hotel. Quickly. And then figure out how to get what I wanted with the addition of a very suspicious lawyer who would be asking all kinds of questions on behalf of his clients. An outcome that would turn an extremely difficult problem into a hopeless one.
He pointed a finger toward my face. “Those bruises—what happened?”
I realized with relief he was just noticing the marks left by Victor in my brother’s apartment. They had faded a little and I had used makeup to cover the worst, but bruising was still visible. “Slipped and fell,” I said apologetically. “I guess maybe I’m just a bit of a klutz.”
The lawyer smiled affectionately. “Now you don’t have to worry. You have me here to catch you.” He raised his glass again and gulped half the drink. His brow furrowed. He looked like he’d sucked on a lemon. He called over to the bartender. “You way overdid the bitters, Brian. Remake this, will you?”
The bartender came over and removed the offending glass. He emptied it into the sink and made another Manhattan and placed it back in front of the lawyer. “Apologies. Hope that’s better, sir.”
Silas took a judgmental sip. “Considerably.” He turned his attention back to me. “Now, where were we?” He answered his own question. “Ah, yes. You were going to tell me all about yourself.”
Like some men, he had the habit of meaning the opposite of what he said. I hadn’t much felt like talking about myself, but I needn’t have worried. What the lawyer really meant was that he wanted to talk about himself. And he did. I learned all about the important cases he handled and the giant settlements he negotiated and the huge fees he commanded. I learned about his unfortunate treatment at the hands of his ungrateful wife, and his upcoming divorce, and how unfair it was that he had to give her so much of his hard-earned money. “She had me followed!” he exclaimed, like he was still upset by the whole thing. “Photographed, even! Can you imagine?”
“I guess I can picture it.”
The conversation shifted as he ordered another drink. I was still sipping my original glass of wine. He kept talking. I learned about his views on everything from why the Sundance parties were overrated to the mistakes we made on foreign policy. I learned about the beautiful, exclusive vacations he took and what great Warriors seats he had, thanks to having represented a friend of the owners in some long-gone case. “Play your cards right,” he added, “and maybe you can come to a game with me. Bet you’d like that.”
“I always try to play my cards right,” I said, my voice soft and now a little flirtatious.
He finished his drink and turned to me. He seemed a little drunk. His face was flushed. “You know, you’re very beautiful.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s a beautiful woman like you doing all alone at a bar?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
I looked directly into his eyes. “I’ve been watching you.”
He liked that. “Really? You were watching me?”
I nodded. “I’ve been watching you like you wouldn’t believe.”
He seemed to like that even more. His eyes were all over me. “I have a beautiful suite upstairs,” he said. “Best suite in the whole place. Come up for a drink.”
“A drink,” I repeated. “I suppose I could handle that.”
His face lit up. He was happy. The night was going beyond well. “Perfect.” He called over to the bartender again. “I’ll take the check, Brian, and give me a bottle of champagne and an ice bucket, will you? Veuve, not Dom,” he added more quietly. For all his ostentatiousness, the lawyer didn’t seem opposed to cutting corners if he could get away with it.
While Silas signed the check, the bartender put a bottle of yellow-labeled champagne in a silver ice bucket. He loaded ice into the bucket and then folded a white napkin into a thin rectangle and draped it around the lip of the bucket. A nice touch. The lawyer seemed indifferent. He grabbed the bucket with one hand and my arm with the other. “Upstairs we go,” he said.
He was right. He did have a beautiful suite. No way to tell if it was the nicest in the hotel, but it was a nice one. A big corner suite on the top floor. A large dining area and a living room substantially bigger than my own. A balcony revealing the lights of the city. There was a bedroom off to the side. Through lace-curtained French doors, a king bed lurked. With no forewarning, Silas embraced me and tried to sloppily kiss me. One hand felt its way to my behind. I pushed him away. “I thought you were offering a drink.”
“Of course,” he said. He didn’t seem all that deterred. He shed his sports jacket and tie and busied himself with the champagne while I looked around. He had clearly been living in the hotel for a while. His presence was everywhere. There were clothes and bags strewn all over. I saw with interest that the desk was covered in papers. Next to the desk was a briefcase.
Maybe more papers in the bedroom. Many people worked from bed. Especially in a hotel. Maybe Silas liked to get started first thing in the morning, comfortably horizontal, with a room-service tray and fresh coffee within arm’s reach.
The lawyer was still occupied with the champagne bottle. He had unwrapped the gold foil and was twisting ineffectually at the cork.
“You look like that cork’s giving you some trouble.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m okay…” His words were slurred and tired. He fumbled at the cork and almost dropped the bottle.
“Let me help you.” I took the bottle from him. He didn’t protest. He looked at me dully, shirt half unbuttoned. Thankfully, he hadn’t gotten to his pants yet. His chest was covered by hair. I remembered it from my photographs. I twisted slightly, loosening the cork, and then got a thumb under the edge and applied pressure. I thought of his hand, squeezing my ass in the same possessive way that he had seized the ice bucket.
There was a loud pop. The cork shot out. It turned out that the bottle neck had been pointed Silas’s way. The cork bounced off his nose.
He rubbed his nose and looked confused. “Oww,” he stated. “That hurt.”
“Sorry. My fault. Maybe you should sit down,” I suggested.
“I’m fine,” he said, but let me lead him into the bedroom all the same.
He sat on the edge of the bed and watched me as I found a water glass. I poured champagne into the glass until it was full. I handed the glass to him. “Cheers. Drink up.”
The lawyer took the glass like a child and drank.
I watched him. He was sweating. His eyes were half-closed.
“More,” I suggested. “You’re almost there.”
“More,” he repeated as he drank. “More … more.”
“Good boy.” I patted him gently on the head. He had almost finished the glass when his hand loosened. The glass fell out of his hand and landed on his lap. Spilled champagne moistened his crotch. His eyes were fully closed. He slumped sideways onto the bed, breathing audibly. I picked up the glass and put it on the coffee table. Then I took a long, critical look at the lawyer. He had started snoring. I pulled his feet over onto the mattress so he wouldn’t roll off. Silas Johnson looked like every marching band in the Big Ten could have been in the room playing at full volume and he wouldn’t have even blinked. He’d wake up with a hellish hangover, but he’d be fine.
I went to work.
It took me under an hour to go through every single document in the suite, starting with the briefcase. The lawyer seemed to be simultaneously working on several cases. Some of the names were familiar from the search of his office, and some weren’t. But I couldn’t find anything about Care4. I was careful to put each paper back exactly in its original place. The last thing I wanted was Silas Johnson wondering if he’d had his room searched.
On the second pass through the room I pulled his pants off and checked his pockets. I went through his wallet, seeing platinum credit cards, a plastic room key, various insurance and membership cards, a driver’s license, two condoms, a thick fold of cash, and several folded pieces of paper with phone numbers that I assumed to be the fruits of his bar-and-champagne routine. I also found his car key. The Mercedes. It had been a silver late-model sedan, I remembered. An S550. I wasn’t thrilled about having to check the car. It would be parked in the hotel garage. I didn’t like parking garages. Cameras everywhere. It was one thing being in a hotel room. If anyone checked security footage, all it would show was me accompanying the more-than-willing occupant of the room and then later leaving alone. Hard to take issue with that. A parking garage was different. Tapes would show a woman unlocking and searching a car that wasn’t hers. Not to mention the problems that could occur if there were monitors being checked in real time by security. All kinds of potential trouble. But I didn’t really have a choice.
I took his room key from his pocket. No matter what I found, I would need to get back into the room to return the car key.
I was walking out when I saw the safe.
It was in the closet. A standard hotel safe, black-painted steel bolted into the wall, hidden behind a row of dark suits. A basic model with a keypad and small digital display. A small white square of paper was glued onto the front of the safe, offering simplistic directions for setting a code and unlocking it.
Hotel safes were designed with two considerations: security and convenience. The goal was to offer a basic level of protection while ensuring that the unlocking process wasn’t so complicated that a stream of annoyed guests would flood the front desk with forgotten combinations. Hotel safes weren’t even comparable to the really good home models. Just enough to satisfy a standard hotel insurance policy. This one was pretty average. Four digits, according to the instructions. Crucially, there was no cut-off feature. The safe wouldn’t shut down after a certain number of incorrect guesses the way an iPhone would. Four digits was a lot easier for a guest to remember than six or eight digits. Four digits was also a lot easier to guess. Exponentially fewer combinations.
But even four digits meant ten thousand possible combinations.
That was a lot. Far too many to try one by one.
I spent the first few minutes running through all the basic combinations that people used when they were rushed or complacent. A handful of combinations covered a big chunk of the PINs and passcodes people chose. I began with the most obvious numbers. 0000 and 0101 and 1010 and 1111 and 9999 and 1234 and 4321.
None worked.
Next was more common stuff. 2222, 3333, all the way to 8888. I went through sequential, easy-to-remember combinations: 2345, 3456, 4567, 5678, 6789, 7890. Then back down: 0987, 9876. Trying any sequence that was easier to remember than a random group of four numbers.
Each time, just a blinking red light marking failure. If Silas Johnson had gone with a random combination, I was missing it.
The next stage was more personal. I pulled his driver’s license from his wallet and tried his birthday, backward and forward. 6/2/1956 translated to 6256 or 6591. Nothing. His street address was 1004 and I tried that, backward and forward and mixed up. I tried digits off his credit card numbers and his medical record number from his health insurance and even combinations based on the phone numbers in his wallet. I didn’t know his wedding date but that didn’t matter. Soon-to-be divorced philanderers who had been kicked out of their apartments weren’t thinking about their wedding day.
Nothing worked. I checked the time. Over two hours had passed.
I had to go.
The safe was probably empty, I told myself. Silas Johnson was a slob. His stuff was all over the room. He didn’t seem like the type to take elaborate security precautions. If he had anything, it must be in the car.
The room door closed behind me. I headed down the hallway.
At the elevator bank I pushed the Down button and waited, picturing the car I was looking for. This hotel probably had a new Mercedes in every other parking spot. Silas’s car had been silver, four doors. I remembered the curved, taut lines of the roof and distinctive five-spoke rims. There had been a vanity plate. I thought back, trying to remember it. Vanity plates were easy to recall. Too easy. I didn’t understand why people paid to have them. I would have paid not to. LAW something. Numbers after the letters. LAW1981.
1981. According to his driver’s license, Silas Johnson had been born in 1956. Assuming he graduated college at twenty-two, in 1978, and gone straight on to law school, he would have graduated and sat for the bar in 1981. Silas Johnson was many things, but he didn’t seem like the type to fail the bar. In which case, by any measure—whether graduating law school, taking, or passing the bar—Silas Johnson had become a lawyer in 1981.
1981.
Four digits.
The elevator door opened.
I didn’t move.
I turned around and headed back the way I’d come, hearing the elevator door close behind me. Back in the suite, I checked on Silas. He was sprawled on the bed, snoring w
ith tremendous volume, mouth open. I went back to the safe and punched in the four digits.
1981.
This time the light flashed green.
I opened the safe. The first thing I saw was a stack of hundred-dollar bills. To pay the call girls, no doubt. Under the money was a white stack of eight-by-eleven papers. Papers that would fit perfectly into an olive-green document folder. The top paper bore two words.
IN RETENTIS.
I’d only read through the first couple of pages when I stopped and carried the pages to the kitchen counter. I turned up the overhead lights as bright as they’d go, took my camera, and started photographing close-up shots of the documents. There were over a hundred pages. So I took over a hundred pictures. Along the way, I started to understand why even a sloppy, drunken lawyer was so careful with security and concealment. Why the papers weren’t sitting around his office or briefcase with everything else. I started to understand why Karen Li had been so frightened, and why she had gone through such elaborate pains to hide the photographs I had found.
I started to understand more about those photographs.
By the time I finished, I knew a lot more about Care4, and In Retentis, and what was going to happen on November 1. People will die. That’s what Karen Li had said. She had been right. People would die.
But I had been completely wrong about who.
I had barely two days.
* * *
It was past two in the morning when I finished. I was even more careful to put everything back as I’d found it now. Because I knew more. I closed and locked the safe, resetting the code to the same four digits, 1981. Silas Johnson was still snoring in his king bed. I looked at him. The last few days hadn’t endeared him to me, but I hadn’t considered him much more than a mild form of dirtbag. My opinion had changed. With what I now knew, I would have liked to do all kinds of things to the man snoring in front of me.
I couldn’t touch him, though. Silas Johnson needed to wake up without suspicion. Which meant that he’d avoid what he deserved. Things weren’t always fair.
Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel Page 26