by Thomas Perry
“I know you wouldn’t want me to learn it on the street, Norman,” he said, and got up to follow.
ELIZABETH SAT ON THE EDGE of the bed watching the forensic team going about its work. It took an extraordinary act of patience even to watch them. They crawled around on all fours, sighting along the edge of each smooth surface for latent prints, then wrote in pads, took photographs, stretched tape measures from one point to another, and made more notes.
It was already clear that they weren’t going to find anything new in the room, she thought as she watched a sergeant crawl up to the coffee table and stare at the same spot for the third time. She said to Hart, “Let’s try something different.”
“Got anything in mind?”
“How about the other rooms on this floor? Do you have the list of who was in what room? Maybe we could start with the hotel register.”
“Mistretta’s got it and he’s checking them all out now. Not just this floor, either.”
“Well, it looks as if we’ve hit the point of diminishing returns in here.” The forensics people were packing their equipment in black metal boxes and preparing to leave.
“Whew!” said the sergeant. “This has been a long day.”
Elizabeth said, “Oh?” She was still a little resentful because they hadn’t seen the importance of the absence of prints on the window.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, “two murders this morning besides this one, three breaking and enterings, all within a mile or two of here.”
The resentment came back without warning. Ma’am and sir were what policemen called outsiders. Whatever sympathy she had been prepared to feel for a tired cop who’d been crawling around straining his eyes for invisible marks went out of her. But she just said, “Please have copies of those reports sent to us at the Bureau office, with the precinct log.”
“No possible connection, ma’am,” said the patient sergeant. “The other two had their skulls crushed. Nothing subtle about it. Just a gang fight in an alley. The B and E’s were all just the usual—an auto parts store, a housebreaking, and a stereo shop.”
She matched his patience. “I want them anyway. It’s important to learn everything that we can about what went on in this part of town last night.” At last she succumbed: “If nothing else, it may tell us where the squad cars were when a murderer was swinging like Tarzan from balcony to balcony on the outside of this building.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the sergeant. He picked up his fingerprint kit and stomped out the door.
Elizabeth became aware of Hart standing there watching her. She turned on him and said, “I know it wasn’t nice. But it happens to be true.”
Hart shrugged. “The local police can be very helpful if they want to.”
“So I’ll be extremely sweet to him when he gives me the logs and the investigation reports, and we’ll be fast friends forever. But the local police might not be the kind of help we’re going to need on this case. Has anybody—”
“Yes,” said Hart. “The CIA was as surprised about it as we were, and they’ve spent the day trying to match it to their standing list of possibilities, apparently without success. Mike told me they’ve probably cabled their field offices and are waiting for something that sounds plausible to come back. He also told me it doesn’t look as if anything will. McKinley Claremont was in the Senate for almost thirty years without doing anything very controversial in the area of foreign policy.”
“I suppose all we can do tonight is wait for the forensics people to work their way through the other rooms, then.”
“That and wait for our replacements to arrive,” said Hart. “As of an hour ago we’re no longer here just to establish a presence.”
“So they’ll send in the first team?” said Elizabeth. “We haven’t done so badly, considering we’ve hardly had time to begin.”
“No, we haven’t,” said Hart. “But just the same, I’m not going to do much unpacking.”
“Speaking of that, has anybody told you where we’re supposed to be staying?”
“They had our bags sent here a little while ago.” He reached into his pocket and fished out two room keys. “That way we’re easy to get hold of if they turn anything up.”
Elizabeth reached for the telephone and dialed a familiar number. An unfamiliar voice came on and said, “Justice.”
“This is Elizabeth Waring. I want to leave a message for Roger Padgett,” said Elizabeth.
“I’ll see that he gets it,” said the voice. “What’s the message?”
“I want his airline reports for last night and all day today wired to the Denver field office of the FBI. Everything within a five-hundred-mile radius of Denver. The information I requested previously I want telephoned to me at the Constellation Hotel.”
“That in Denver too?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, “I’ll give you a number.” She read the number on the telephone dial slowly. Then she held out her hand, and Hart placed one of the keys in it. “Room 256.”
“Got it,” said the voice. “Anything else?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “Thanks.”
Elizabeth sat on the bed feeling exhaustion beginning to flood into her mind, taking possession of whole sections of her brain at once like water rushing into a sinking ship. Too many things were going on at once, and she was beginning to lose the strength of will that kept them separate. Everything was beginning to get muddled together and hazy. She couldn’t remember anymore whether she was collecting information that was supposed to lead in some particular direction, or just collecting information. Pervading all of it was an impression, a sense that an awful lot of people seemed to be dying. There was something unreal about it.
You knew they were dying because somebody told you so over the telephone, and by the time you got there, there wasn’t even a body. At most there was a chalk outline like the one on the floor at her feet. The discreet efficient functionaries had already cleaned everything up, so there wasn’t the palpable and substantial residue of an act of violence, just a question; the murder itself just an intellectual postulate and you were supposed to deduce its causes and corollaries starting with an infinite range of things that could have preceded it in time. All you had to work with was your ability to see the relationships, to pick the single thread of logic that might lead to the one who’d done it, and then follow it slowly forward, trying hard to take each step faster to bring yourself closer and closer to the present moment, where the murderer would be waiting for you. And all the time, the act itself was moving backward, further and further into the past. Everything you chose to look at put the act farther from your reach—trace the poison? check the airline records for suspicious travelers? check the police reports? the other rooms in the hotel? the Senator’s personal life? the CIA’s foreign agents? the world?
She was aware that Hart was saying something to her that had just battered against the tired receptors in her brain without their being fast enough to decipher it. “Huh?” she said.
“I said I think we ought to go to bed.”
“So do I,” she said, and sensed in herself a tiny warm tremor of joy. Then she realized that part of her mind had heard him differently, and had rushed upward to meet him without being held back or delayed by the restraints. She caught it in time to keep it from blurting out, “Oh, you mean each of us, not both of us.” She smiled to herself as she stood up and walked out the door. All the barriers seemed to be going at once; things were tearing through them without warning, things she hadn’t suspected were there. This one would take some thought. Not that it meant anything, but it was interesting, like a dream.
THEY WENT OUT TO THE parking lot and got into Little Norman’s white Mark IV, then drove to the Marina Hotel.
At the bar, which was set back and above the casino, Little Norman said, “Grab a table where I can see the action; I’ll be back in a second.”
He said, “Where are you going?”
“Just a quick phone call, kid. I’m looking afte
r your interests.”
He waited as Norman plowed through the knots of gamblers to a bank of telephones near a men’s room. When Norman got there, he dialed and then turned back to face him, smiling as he talked.
The waitress leaned across him with Little Norman’s drink, actually placing a breast on his shoulder for an instant. Everything here was different, he thought. It was calculated to put things that secretly delighted just out of reach, always as though it had been a fortuitous chance. They probably had a class that taught them to do that, as the last girl in the line of the dinner show at the Lido had her G-string snap, always in the last few bars of the performance.
Little Norman said, “To your health, kid,” and took a drink.
He responded, “And yours,” and drank too, but only enough to wet his mouth and let the ice click against his teeth. There wasn’t much point in overdoing it, and he would overdo it if he had to drink one for one with Little Norman. Besides, he had been on the road for over a month, and he never drank on the road. You had to keep your head clear on the road.
On the other side of the casino the crowd around one of the crap tables was two deep and growing. The man who was rolling was wearing a sport coat, but had stuffed his tie in a pocket and opened his shirt at the neck. He rolled again and a little cry went up from the table that was just loud enough to reach the bar. More people strolled over attempting looks of detachment, but joined the crowd and riveted their eyes to the table. From where he sat in the bar it was hard to tell whether they were betting or watching. The quick, mechanical movements of the croupier didn’t reveal anything to him. From this distance they all just looked hungry.
“You a gambler?”
“I may try my luck a little later,” he said. “Why?”
“Some people in that line of work are, some aren’t. Henckel once lost twenty thousand in one night. Personally I didn’t like it much until after I quit. Couldn’t see the point in it. When you’re old you need some kind of excitement that doesn’t involve your body.”
Another cry reached them from the crap table across the casino, not a cheer, exactly, but a wordless, spontaneous howl from all the throats gathered around the table, as though it were the collective sound of their blood pressures going up in unison.
“You’re no more retired than I am, Norman,” he said. “Just got a steady job now.”
“It ain’t so, kid,” said Little Norman, his eyes suddenly open wide and his smile gone. “I’m sixty-one years old. But once I was good. One of the best. Quiet and reliable. Maybe the best button man in the Midwest.” Then his eyes narrowed and the opaque smile returned. “Not as good as you, though. I was real surprised to see your face like that. I never expected to see you looking like that. Not ever.”
“It happens,” he replied.
“I didn’t say it couldn’t happen,” said Little Norman. “What I said was I didn’t think I’d see it. That’s a loser’s face.”
Across the casino the man rolled again; this time he rolled into a silence, a deep-drawn inbreathing like a wall of anticipation. From the bar it was hard to tell whether he made his point, but the silence seemed to draw spectators even faster, like particles rushing to fill a void. When the stickman leaned across the table, bestowing and gathering in single economical movements, the man was still visible, standing with his back to the bar. But then the crowd shifted a little and he disappeared behind it.
“Maybe so,” he said. “Hard to tell about winning until you count the money.”
“That’s a fact,” said Little Norman. He gulped down the last finger of Scotch in his glass and stood up. “Be seeing you, kid. It’s always a pleasure.”
“Thanks for the drink, Norman.”
“Any time,” he said as he stepped down to the casino floor. For a long time it was possible to watch his head and shoulders moving along above the crowd, but then he was gone.
11He finished his drink and left the hotel. There wasn’t any particular reason to leave. He wasn’t hiding from anyone and didn’t have anywhere else as a destination. It was just the normal thing to do, as automatic as the urge to blink his eyes, as automatic as going outside and then waiting beside the door to see if the next one out paused for a second to see which way he’d gone. He was on vacation for two more days. That was no time to let himself slide into a position where he’d feel uncomfortable.
He walked across the parking lot to the street, and joined the anonymous hundreds moving along the Strip from casino to casino. Just before they got to the MGM Grand Hotel he parted from his companions and took a shortcut through a closed gas station, then stopped in the shadows behind it. Nobody came after him, so he went on. If there was a watcher, he at least had sense enough to keep his distance and not be annoying.
He went in the front entrance of the Grand Hotel and moved quickly to the other end of the gigantic casino, where the blackjack games were proceeding in an atmosphere of spurious calm. At one table a man piled his remaining chips on the square in front of him and waited, one foot already on the floor to push his chair away from the table. The dealer’s deft fingers peeled cards out of the shoe and made them re-materialize in front of the players, and the man found himself sitting behind a ten and a four. He didn’t seem surprised or disappointed by it, just watched while the second ten appeared and the dealer’s hand snatched away the chips. Then his foot pushed off and he relinquished his chair.
The dealer’s face didn’t seem to notice that the man was gone, or that he’d ever been there. Only his marvelous hands took note of the fact that there were no chips on one of the betting spaces, and passed by without leaving any cards. The face didn’t acknowledge it when another man sat down in the seat to wait for the next deal. One of the hands snatched the five crisp twenties and tamped them into the cash slot, while the other left a stack of chips where the money had been. If the dealer’s eyes had passed across the new face with its terrible bruise and the cut just above the hairline, they didn’t linger there. The eyes were only there to direct the hands, and there was plenty for the hands to do.
When he sat down at the table he checked his watch. It was eleven thirty. It didn’t make much difference to him where he spent the next few hours, but it was important not to lose track of things. He set out a single five-dollar chip and watched the hands of the dealer deposit his cards on the table. They were a queen and a ten, so he stood pat and waited while the dealer’s king and five drew another king and busted. The hands fluttered over the green felt surface of the table, rearranging chips and cards, rewarding and punishing with the same even, imperturbable movements, but in any case obliterating the decisions that had just been made along with the combinations of numbers and symbols that had prompted them. Each time there was a new set of decisions, and then the hands performed their mechanical reckoning and dealt again. He kept a rough tally of how well he was doing, and it was no worse than he’d expected. The dealer had started on a losing streak, and busted about half of the first twenty hands. After that the normal order of probabilities had reasserted itself and the house’s regular five-percent advantage had resumed. When he glanced at his watch again it was one thirty. Two hours was enough. He gathered his red chips and headed for the cashier’s cage. When he went out the front door he had six twenties and a ten in his shirt pocket. It was mildly pleasing to him. He was no gambler and the minimum bets he had stuck to had just kept him there passing the time. But he figured it was better than losing.
Outside, the last big crowds of the evening were spilling out into the parking lots from the late shows. Caesar’s Palace was practically across the street, so he joined a group walking in that direction and began looking for the watcher, who would have been alerted when he left the blackjack table. Hadn’t he seen that older man in the gray suit who joined the crowd at the corner? Earlier, at the Sands. Only before there had been a woman in a white dress with him. People always went in pairs to the shows. He looked for her, but the man was alone, looking a lot like a middle-age
d businessman from someplace else who’d left the tired little woman in the hotel room and gone out for some action on his own. If he wasn’t, she’d turn up again in time.
He kept the man’s location in mind without looking at him again. Then a portion of the crowd streamed into Caesar’s and another portion split off into the parking lot to search for their cars. Once inside the casino he moved off along the edge of the forest of slot machines. There she was, a nice silver-haired lady from Missouri with that hypnotized look they all got, intently pumping dimes from a paper cup into a slot machine as though the wheels and gears couldn’t spin fast enough to digest the coins. Only this time she was wearing a blue dress. The man in the gray suit walked past her and over to the elevators without either of them making a sign.
That was just fine. As watchers went they were tolerable. They didn’t hang around close enough to be annoying, and now that he’d spotted them he could relax. He went to the second row of elevators and pushed the button for his floor.
The hallway was empty, so he made his way to his room and checked the space between the door and the jamb. The little ball of blue fuzz was still stuck there, an inch or two above the bright red carpet. Good. No surprises. They must be satisfied for the moment.
He swung the door open and for an instant struggled to remember if he’d left the bathroom light on. As the door swung wider he caught a glimpse of the television screen, which was casting a bright variegated display of moving colors into the dimness. He stepped aside and waited. Then a woman’s voice said, “Come in, baby. You’ve got the right place.”
He stepped across the doorway and caught sight of the whole room at once. She was kneeling in the middle of the bed and she seemed to be wearing nothing. He poked the door all the way open and moved warily inside. There didn’t seem to be anyone else. He ignored her for the moment and searched the room for hiding places. There was nobody in the bathroom or under the bed. He checked behind the curtains, then out on the balcony, but there was nobody. He retreated to the doorway and looked at her. “What are you doing here?” he said.