by Greg Herren
I tiptoed to the bedroom and glanced inside. Shelia, sprawled across the bed, snored with abandon. She’d earned her rest. In addition to being able to account for my whereabouts last night, she’d been the dessert I’d wanted, but hadn’t had time for until now. I shut the door and returned to the offensive pizza she’d insisted she needed to sustain her for a night of passion.
She’d only eaten a couple of slices. The rest was mine. I may not eat the stuff, but I wouldn’t let it go to waste. I donned a pair of latex gloves and carefully broke the cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone into tiny little pieces. I used scissors for the SIM card and slid all of the remnants under the now congealed cheese of Shelia’s late-night binge. This particular evidence would soon be tangled with the detritus of my hundred neighbors, buried in the bottom of a commercial Dumpster. Shelia’s hunger had managed to come in handy in more ways than one.
I left her a note, explaining I had to go to work very early to prepare for a case. Not entirely untrue. I wondered what Detective Handsome would think if she came by and found Shelia naked and sated, alone in my apartment. The mental image brought a smile to my face. I needed the levity. Today would be trying.
Briefcase in hand, I walked the few blocks to my downtown office. At seven a.m., the city was just starting to wake. The nature of my work meant I’d had to become a creature of both late nights and early mornings. Each case demanded a different schedule, and flexibility was the key to success.
Neither Jeffrey nor Dora was in. Just as I’d planned.
I opened my briefcase and studied the contents. I’d never indulged my desire to exhibit these trophies. Many attorneys keep souvenirs of their cases prominently displayed on conference room walls or lining the shelves of their office. I’d resisted the temptation, instead keeping these special objects locked away in a box at the bank, but I took a moment now to relive the special memories associated with each piece.
The filigree pearl earrings were beautiful and I’d taken them the moment I laid eyes on them. The old woman had struggled hard to keep her jewelry and I’d gotten pretty bloody in the quest. I’d learned from that incident to wait until the end to claim my prizes from the others. I perused the rest of my bounty: the dainty gold butterfly necklace, the chunky garnet class ring, and the cloisonné ladybug pin—definitely the least valuable, but the one I revered the most since it would be my last.
The clock on my desk read 7:30 a.m. Time to finish up and settle in for the wait. I wrapped up my treasures and found the perfect place to tuck them away. Dora burst through the door at eight sharp, transferred the phone lines from the answering service, and brewed a pot of the weak decaf blend that Jeffrey adored. By then I was ready. I wondered how long it would take for the action to begin.
“Your detective came by yesterday afternoon.”
I glanced up from my desk, feigning annoyance at Jeffrey’s interruption. I wasn’t actually doing any work. The waiting had me on edge, but for once his intrusion was welcome. “Is that so?”
“It is. She had a lot of questions about our caseload. She was under the mistaken impression you were in charge of the office. I made it clear that I’m the senior litigator at this firm.”
I couldn’t have scripted their interaction better. I played along. “Of course, Jeffrey, you are the backbone of this practice. I wouldn’t be anything without you. I owe all my success to you. I don’t thank you enough for all that you do for me.”
He backed away, uncertain how to handle my uncharacteristic kindness. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dora twist slightly in her chair. Ever Jeffrey’s champion, she raised an eyebrow at my rare praise and nodded her approval. Normally, this entire exchange, Jeffrey’s self-aggrandizement, Dora’s tacit defense of him, would have made me ill. But the exchange played perfectly into my plans. I had only to wait.
He left for lunch. He always did. Whisky and a steak at the Club. A daily indulgence I’d begrudgingly allowed him to expense for years. He hadn’t been gone more than twenty minutes when my long wait ended. Detective Ward accompanied the team, but I knew she didn’t have any authority here. She didn’t need it—she’d brought a bevy of local police officers ready to find what she was looking for.
“Ms. Lassiter, we have a warrant to search these premises.” The burly lead officer braced himself for resistance. Lawyers weren’t big on cooperating. I pretended to read the document, and then shattered his expectations. “Looks like everything is in order. I’m certain you won’t find what you’re looking for,” I lied. “Take your time, gentlemen.” I stared at Kylie Ward, “And lady.”
I sank into one of the chairs in the reception area. I wasn’t required to stay, but I needed to at least act interested in this affront to my privacy. Besides, even though I knew how this would end, there was no substitute for the live event.
As the gloved officers began rummaging through Jeffrey’s desk, I saw Dora make a move. Detective Ward held her back, but she spewed her protest. “That’s Mr. Jeffrey’s desk. I don’t know what in the world you’re looking for, but Mr. Jeffrey’s the most honorable man I know.” She pointed at me and I struggled not to react. “If it wasn’t for Mr. Jeffrey, Michelle wouldn’t be the successful lawyer she is today. He’s sacrificed everything for her.”
Beautiful. I wiped away a nonexistent tear. As if on cue, Jeffrey burst into the room. “Michelle, what in the world are all those police cars doing out front?” He followed my gaze across the room into his office and scurried over to confront the culprits. “What are you doing in my office?”
The burly one turned, his hands full, and jerked his chin at Ward. “It’s him. You wanna do the honors?” She reached around her waist and within seconds she had Jeffrey locked into a pair of handcuffs. “You have the right to remain silent, but I guess you know that, right, Counselor?” She rattled off the rest and then handed him to a pair of uniformed officers who escorted the sputtering Jeffrey out the door. Dora shot me a look of disgust before she followed along behind.
Time for me to play my part. “Detective, would you like to explain what’s going on?”
She took her time staring me down, but my indignant expression was firmly fixed in place. Finally, she spoke. “How about you explain what your law partner has been up to?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Did you ask him to kill those women, or was it his idea to help his best friend’s daughter win a few high-profile murder cases?”
I assumed an expression of shock and sank back into the chair. While she tapped her foot, I ran through my mental checklist. The 911 call reporting the location of the dead girl had been made from the pre-paid cell phone, but they’d be able to triangulate the location of the call to this block. I’d made sure Jeffrey was working when I’d slipped away from naked Shelia, ostensibly to retrieve the pizza from the downstairs doorman. She slept so soundly in-between bouts of sex, she didn’t notice I’d been gone longer than necessary. Long enough to slink a few blocks through the dark, stand outside the office, and make the call. When I’d returned and woken her, panting, Shelia assumed I was as hungry for her as she was for the pizza.
And the souvenirs, locked away in Jeffrey’s desk. I’d hated to part with them. They represented my greatest successes, symbols of my willingness to do anything to win a case, but they were also the key to my freedom, and if you love something you’re supposed to set it free. Or something to that effect.
But I had to admit, the thing that sealed the deal was the damn book I’d carelessly left at the scene. At least I’d worn gloves, so the only fingerprints on the tome were Jeffrey’s. Funny, after all these years, my only mistake positioned me perfectly for success. Well, almost. An image of my current client, Donald Gosling, flashed through my mind.
My skills weren’t enough to save us both. With Jeffrey the copycat exposed, Donald would go down for the murders he’d committed. I couldn’t manage to summon much pity for the poor boy. And Jeffrey? Losing a case was a small price to
pay for shedding that albatross. I could already see the headlines: LAWYER WILLING TO RISK ALL FOR DEAD PARTNER’S DAUGHTER. Or the more succinct Meddling Mentor Is Copycat Killer. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t be around to read the stories.
Detective Ward was still waiting for an answer. I gave her all the honesty I had. “I didn’t have any idea what Jeffrey was up to. I’m as appalled as anyone to think he would commit murder so we could win a case.”
She didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter. She’d never prove I’d been involved. I excused myself to “reflect on this tragedy” and slipped out of the office.
I had kept one item from the safe deposit box. Time to gather the bundle of cash I’d squirreled away over the years and find a new place to live. Maybe I’d even start a new practice somewhere. Maybe Shelia would want to come along. We could talk about it on the road, maybe even stop somewhere nice for dinner. I longed for a blood-red hunk of steak. I doubted I’d ever get over the craving.
Room Nine
Felice Picano
The hotel was prepossessing enough in that red-brick overstuffed Victorian manner. If, that is, one discounted its somewhat confined appearance sandwiched between a round-cornered, recently erected, multistory strip of shopfronts and an enormous concrete slab car park undergoing what seemed to be perpetual reconstruction.
He’d entered that latter labyrinth to leave off the hire car, secured inexpensively if incorrectly at the vast, impersonal Midlands airport where he’d alit from a cramped aisle seat in an economy aircraft after an eleven-hour-and-forty-minute flight.
The period since then had been distinguished by his attempts to follow printed-out Internet directions so irregular that a logician would conclude the country’s road plan to be at best provisional: Street names, when actually posted, had a curious habit of altering without warning, from one corner to another. Numbering, naturally enough, observed the same Lewis Carroll process, retrogressing from, say, 398 to 12 with stunning amorality.
Still one more confounding element was the suddenness, extent, depth, and finally the interminability of a low-lying mist that set in and hovered between the rental vehicle’s bonnet and the streetlighting’s upper metal. That a cloudless, starry, black night rose all above those lights provided the further impression that he somehow was motoring through a particularly uninspired museum diorama, perhaps one titled “Mediocre British Manufacturing City of Certain Age and Decreptitude.”
Nevertheless, once he was within the warmth and relative newness of the hotel’s most external lobby, his three oversized pieces of luggage almost completely in hand by then, he paused.
The typical foyer gave almost immediately on the right to an atypically attenuated gallery of a bar, with uneven tiled floor and an unpolished timberland of painted-black spindly tables and chairs of the cheapest assortment. Opposing them was the by no means contemporary, utterly undistinguished, long-uncleaned, dark wood stand-up bar, its uppermost regions plastered about with blazing company adverts, all of it redolent of beer, whiskey, and wine.
The second he peered in, a fusillade of lascivious, mixed-gender laughter erupted from out of an unseen section of the public room, so he quickly withdrew, only to focus abruptly upon a figure seated nearby in a straight-back rattan chair, a figure so ubiquitous and unmoving that at first he’d deemed it part of the background.
An elderly fellow, Mid-Eastern, Parsi perhaps, given the ethnic-appearing hat shaped somewhat like a bottle cap, dust speckled of course, wrinkled by antiquity and immutable usage. Beneath what might be a very old and dingy gray lambswool coat, the stick-like teak-colored personage seemed to sport tiny mementoes of his unspecified homeland in the shabby edges of a once-bronze-toned, silver-thread-embroidered vest and an achromatic shirt and collar of exotic fabric, all indubitably hoary and begrimed. His narrow head was so sculptured and noble in that UNESCO poster mode, his face so grim and unmoving and unquestionably toothless, and the old thing was muttering something in such a low consistent voice, that he could not possibly be understood unless one moved directly beside what was certain to be his noxious exhalation.
So he turned instead to the hotel desk, such as it was, a timid affair, squashed into one end of the aforementioned bar and separated from it by only the merest of particle boards. An effulgent violet cloth notebook, like that an eight-year-old girl would use as a photo scrapbook, lay ajar as the hotel register.
He knew this, as it was immediately thrust toward him by an amber-skinned, all but kohl-eyed youth, effeminately pretty in a graphic novel way, wearing a matching if more metallic, purple blouson, who never once ceased speaking quietly—he presumed amorously—into a mobile phone held against one ear as the clerk juggled a melange of items.
In the light of the hung-high competing monitor screens above—one an unchanging perspective of the front steps, the other a television tuned to a silent talking heads information show—the young hotel-keep’s skin and especially his improbably tinted (hennaed?) hair cast off glints of apple green, lilac, and mauve.
After a sufficient amount of time evading the letter thrust, rethrust, and repositioned for greatest effect upon the registration desk, the young houri on the mobile phone excused himself from his all-important caller to ask if he wanted to check in.
“The university booked for me,” he responded. “It’s paid for in advance.”
Despite these facts, he still must show his passport as well as a “valid credit card,” which he found slightly galling and undoubtedly an abuse. Funds were tight enough as it was: He didn’t need to have to constantly monitor some bank company trying to clear off frivolous charges being made from this desk.
“Room thirteen. You enter past the bar,” he was instructed, with a fluid wave in the general direction of where the laughter had squirted out at him before.
The key dropped in front of him, he all signed in, he still waited, as the unending barely audible mobile phone chatter went on. The heaviness of his bags had been obvious enough when he entered to require assistance. He waited until he had to actually interrupt the interminable conversation yet again: “Someone to help me up. The bags are so…”
Prettily unmotivated, the lad oozed from behind the desk and went directly for the smallest and lightest bag, which our friend, seeing his intent, quickly took up himself, forcing the youth to irritatedly lift another, heavier piece of the remaining two.
The lad pranced ahead through the bar, hips closely encased in boisterously bleached denims, swaying provocatively through the nearby doorway. Leading the way, he ignored the table of revelers—two middle-aged salesman with whiskey-wrinkled countenances, and an oddly unlined tart, once pretty and young, still dressed and coiffed in the style of Julie Christie in her high days of the Seventies.
He was guided through the quite long bar, where he was certain the trio were staring at him, ready to comment the second he was out of sight, through a doorway and up two sets of steps, down a stair. There a key attached to a plastic ring was flung into his hand, his third bag was released with a thud onto the wooden floor, and the young Middle Easterner was gone as entirely as though he’d never been there.
A struggle with the key ensued, while he remarked to himself how unseemly warm it was in the hallway. At the same time as the door finally opened to a small and dingy room, he turned to the nearby central heating grill and splayed his hand to test the temperature. Nonexistent, he discovered. Cool. Wherever the heat was coming from, and it was now almost chokingly warm in the narrow hallway, it wasn’t from that grate.
A step into the room confirmed two unpleasant facts: The room was even more stifling than the corridor, and one reason might have been that whatever windows it possessed—two of them, single-paned, head high above the narrow single bed—opened not onto the street, but onto yet another hallway.
When he stepped out of the room a minute later to see exactly where they did open onto, he was surprised to walk directly into a wall. No ingress in that direction. And none in the
other direction either, as that gave way to a stairway with tiny windowpanes.
He stood only a few seconds reflecting. He’d been hired for an indeterminate amount of time by the university. He hadn’t expected grand accommodations. But this ghastly room, small, dingy, and worse, with no possible ventilation, was an abhorrence. He couldn’t stay in it a single night, never mind weeks, possibly months, of nights.
Unwilling to drag his luggage back down again, he left them in the room, locked it, and went back down the stairs and past the bar—and the Dickensian-looking trio—to the front desk, where unsurpisingly the exotic youth was primping into a small mirror folded out onto the desk while still nattering into his mobile.
“That room won’t do at all. It’s hot in there. Too hot. And that room has no windows onto the street for ventilation. I’m certain you weren’t told to put me into such poor accommodations.”
The kohl-encircled eyes rose briefly from their adoring perusal of themselves, and the young hotel-keep turned to the back wall of the registration area where he himself could see dozens of hooks patterned onto a board of tiny squares—with only one single pink-plastic-ringed key hanging. The clerk lifted the key delicately—or was it distastefully?—off its hook and swung it mesmerically before his eyes. “Room nine is the only other room available.”
He grasped at the key. “I’ll take a look.”
“You enter past the bar,” the clerk said, indifferently returned to poring over the fold-up mirror in search of any overlooked fatal flaw.
Past the trio of loungers and bar again, up the two landings, past room thirteen, around another corner where a closed door stood two feet off the ground, locked, and completely unexplained, and from there on to another, one step down dropped, corridor and to a single door reading “9.”
Even though the hallway had been stifling, the room itself was cool. Its single tiny mullioned window looked out onto an air shaft between the hotel and a blank concrete wall of the large car park where he’d earlier left the hired Vauxhall. The room was ridiculously tiny. Smaller than the not-very-large bathroom in his flat at home. There was barely room for a single cot of a bed, at the feet of which the window began, with one tiny space barely adequate to place his largest bag. Opposite that loomed a built-in closet, with it seemed enough shelves and hanger space to hold his meager wardrobe. Between that and the corridor door, nearly hidden, lurked a minuscule desk and chair.