“Guess not,” I said. “Well, thanks for the ride. And for trying to answer my question. I know you would have if you could have.” I handed him the twenty and walked off the elevator. But then I stopped, because I didn’t hear the gate closing.
“Maid said one was missing,” he told my back.
I turned around.
“Is that a fact?”
“Mercedes. The redhead? One that found the body in the bathtub,” he whispered. He stepped out of the elevator now, stood next to me in the hallway. “Asked me what to do. Was afraid she’d get fired.”
“How’d she lose it?”
“Didn’t lose it,” he said. “Someone swiped it off her cart. Happens from time to time. A guest forgets to pick up the key at the front desk and doesn’t want the bother of going all the way back downstairs again, so he picks up the maid’s key. Wouldn’t be so bad if he were decent enough to put it back. I told her it happens, told her just like I told you, but don’t tell the manager, I said. He might not be so understanding. She said the door was propped open—you don’t prop it, it locks. Always leaves it open when she’s cleaning. Feels safer that way. Cart was right in front of the doorway. Someone would have had to move it to get in the room. Didn’t see anyone near the cart. Doesn’t know how it could have happened. I said, Don’t you worry. I’ll get you another one. Told Pop to go get hisself a coffee, I’d watch the front. She’s supporting a little girl and her mum. Can’t have her losing her job.”
We heard the buzzer ring inside the cage.
“Thanks, Jimmy.”
“Now, don’t go telling nobody what I told you, get Mercedes fired.”
“You can trust me,” I told him, heading for my room to go snooping around in other people’s business.
I got back downstairs in time to hear the end of Chip’s talk. Sam was sitting in the back now.
“There you are,” she said. “I looked around for you in the break, but I didn’t see you.”
“Headache,” I said. “I went upstairs for a while.”
She nodded. “Do you need an aspirin?”
“No, I’m better now. Any news?”
“Detective DeAndrea came by. He said they’re going to handle Martyn’s death as a homicide. I’m not sure what their thinking is. It’s possible they’re doing this because of the children. Martyn’s wife can’t collect on his insurance if his death goes on the books as a suicide.”
“They know about his children?”
“They asked about his family,” Sam said, “where they were, if he got along with them, if he’d had any phone calls in the last twenty-four hours, something that might have upset him, if he seemed depressed, all of that.”
“And you said?”
“That he was a devoted husband and father, that he didn’t seem in the least bit depressed. What did you find in the phone records?”
“I haven’t had the chance to look at them yet,” I lied.
She was looking up at the stage.
“He’s so good at this. Listen to him, Rachel.”
“And you will have to keep reminding your clients—once will not be enough to say it,” Chip was saying, “that when they allow an aggressive dog up on the bed or couch, the message the dog receives, loud and clear, is, We are equals. It’s far more appropriate for the aggressive dog to have to work for what he gets, to live in a no-free-lunch culture, because if he keeps getting the wrong message, the message that he rather than his owner is in charge, eventually his aggression will be impossible to contain.”
Betty was lying down, her pretty paws hanging off the front of the stage. Every once in a while she’d close her eyes. But you could tell she wasn’t asleep. Her breathing pattern never varied.
I closed my eyes too, listening to the sound of Chip’s voice but not his words. One of us was imitating behavior, too, the behavior of a professional colleague, blending in, acting like part of the group while carrying on some sinister project at the same time.
I knew how the passkey was stolen without Mercedes seeing anyone near the cart. The thief was short enough not to show when he or she was on the far side of the little wagon that held all the cleaning supplies, the free bubble bath, and the key that fit every lock in the hotel. It was a piece of cake for me to figure out how. Now all I needed to know was who: Who had sent the dog to steal the passkey, who had unlocked the door to the roof, whose aggression had become impossible to contain.
“He seems at ease in front of an audience. I don’t know why he doesn’t do this more often.”
“Well, after this experience,” I said, looking up at Chip on the stage, “nothing personal, Sam, but I wouldn’t count on him ever doing it again.”
“He may not be the only one,” she said. She was picking the red polish off her nails. Little chips of it, like flakes of dried blood, were all over her skirt.
24
GOOD BOY, I SAID
I waited for Chip at the back of the auditorium, watching him taking people’s hands as they spoke to him, looking at them as if each were the most important person on the face of the earth, and he had nothing more urgent to do than listen to their concerns.
When he finally got away, we left the empty auditorium and took the dogs across the street to the park.
“Something really strange is going on this week.”
“Tell me about it,” Chip said.
Dashiell had turned to look at me for direction. I nodded my head to the right, and he ran ahead off the path and into a copse of trees.
“I wish I could. That’s the problem, I have all these pieces of information that don’t fit together.”
“Wouldn’t that indicate that there are still pieces missing?”
I thought about that. “Okay, suppose we don’t rule out anything that happened,” I said. “What do we know? Three men have been killed, all after their ideas on dog training were expressed. Alan hadn’t delivered his talk yet, but with Alan, it was coming out of his pores. Everyone knew how he worked, and they all hated it. In addition, he insulted everyone he could, given the constraints of the short time he had in which to do so.”
“What about Rick and Martyn?”
“You know how dog people are—love my method, love me. If the opposite was true in Alan’s case, why not for Rick and Martyn? They surely had their detractors too.
He nodded. “And Boris. You think Sasha protected him, or he’d be dead, too? And that I’m next?”
“There’s one more element here that I discarded with Sam’s encouragement.”
“Ah, sex rears its ugly head.”
“Precisely. Each of the three victims spent the night before they were killed having sex.”
Chip looked puzzled, and then he began to laugh.
“And you think I might be next on the killer’s list?”
I nodded.
“Did I miss something, Kaminsky? Did you molest me in my sleep? I hate when that happens.”
“In your dreams, Pressman.”
“Then why do you think I’m in danger?”
He’d stopped walking and had turned to face me, the humor now gone from his eyes.
“Because we’re the only ones who know for sure what we did.”
“To the best of my recollection, we didn’t do anything.”
“Okay, then we’re the only ones who know for sure what we didn’t do.”
“And we can’t exactly advertise it, can we?”
I shook my head. “Who would believe us?”
“Not the cops,” he said. “I’m sure from the look I saw passing between DeAndrea and O’Shea.”
“What do you mean?”
“At first they only seemed interested in the fact that you were out of the room at the same time Martyn was.”
“But that was barely five minutes. Did you tell them that?”
“I did. And I told them that until Sam showed up to tell us about Martyn, you weren’t out of my sight. So then they wanted to know what we were doing for all those hours.�
��
“And you said?”
“That we were talking.”
“We were.”
“Exactly.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay, no big deal, right?”
“It didn’t stop there.”
“It didn’t?”
He shook his head. “They wanted to know what we were talking about.”
“That’s weird. When they questioned me, they mainly wanted to know what I did when I was out of the room and if I saw anyone else in the hallway. But they didn’t ask me what we were talking about.” I screwed up my face. “Did you tell them?”
“Of course. I told them we were discussing positive and negative reinforcement.”
“Good boy,” I said. “Did they buy it?”
“We’re here, aren’t we? Not in jail. But I doubt very strongly that they believe we were talking about dog training all night.”
“Then they don’t know dog people.”
“Apparently not. They asked me about phone calls, too—did Martyn receive any during the poker game? Did he leave the game to make or receive a phone call?”
“And you said?”
“That there were no calls for anyone during the game, and Martyn left because he was still jet-lagged. At least, that was the reason he gave. If it wasn’t the truth, well, how would I know that? They were making notes like crazy, as if I’d actually told them something important.”
“They were making a note to check the hotel’s phone records. They’d have all the incoming and outgoing calls. It’s SOP. I have a set right here,” I said, opening my jacket where the folded papers were sticking out of the inside breast pocket.
“Let’s have a look,” he said.
He whistled to the dogs to let them know we were stopping, and we sat on a big rock that could have been flatter and more comfortable but wasn’t. I pulled out the phone bills for each of our rooms and opened them up.
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “I call to say good night to the kids, not to speak to Ellen.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“Well, I just thought—”
“You think too much.” I put that page in the back and we looked at the calls from Martyn’s room. There were two calls to England.
“I guess he called to say good night to his kids, too,” Chip said. “Twenty-seven bucks for one call. Eleven ninety-five for the other. I hope that’s cool with Sam.”
“That’s not our concern,” I said. “It’s Sam’s. We’re looking for missing pieces, for something that might tie these deaths together.”
“Like if we found out that it was all the same woman, sleeping with each of them and then killing them afterward. Are the room-to-room calls listed as well as the outside calls?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“What’s that local call that Martyn made? Were you able to check that?”
“Read it to me,” I said, pulling my cell phone out of my pocket I punched in the number and waited for someone to pick up, smiling when they finally did. “Oh, sorry. Wrong number,” I said into the phone. “It’s the gift shop at the zoo,” I told Chip. “He bought some puppets for his kids there. But he didn’t buy them when he said he did. See, the call was made on Sunday, check-in day. He must have been calling to see if they were open. If he used his credit card or saved the receipt, I’d bet it was dated Sunday as well. Later, when I sat with him at breakfast and he showed me the puppets, he said he’d bought them for the children the afternoon before, which is the afternoon he spent with Cathy.”
“Sounds like a man who’s used to covering his tracks.”
“It does indeed.”
“Maybe the calls to England weren’t to his kids, Rachel. They’re young, aren’t they?”
“Young enough to still get a kick out of hand puppets.”
“Well, how long can you stay on the phone with a little kid? Maybe he’s got a girlfriend back in England, too.”
“Could be he said good night to the kids and then talked to his wife.”
“Twenty-seven bucks’ worth? Given his track record, I somehow doubt it. Unless that’s how he expiates his guilt?”
“Let’s find out right now. Let’s boot up Sam’s computer and see if that’s his home number.”
“Do you have access to her computer?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“I’m a detective, aren’t I?”
“You’re going to break into Sam’s room?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“By a stroke of good fortune, a friend of mine, well, this thief I happen to know, stole a passkey for me.”
“Was that the other room you were referring to earlier? You said not to return the key because there was at least one more room you had to get into.”
I nodded.
“Rachel, you’re working for Sam. Why do this behind her back? Why not just ask her for access?”
“She’s already lied to me once. At least, I’m pretty sure she has. I’d rather be able to check this out myself without Sam breathing down my neck. There’s a conflict of interests here. She needs to keep this thing going, because she’s spent a fortune on it. I need to find out all I can, no matter where it leads. Or to whom. It doesn’t matter who’s paying me. The truth is all that counts. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to stop this.”
I folded the phone records and put them back in that inside pocket. “Come on. If we go now, we still have time to do this while Sam’s at lunch.”
We put the dogs on leash and headed out of the park. Waiting for the light to change, we stood next to a boy with a white rat hanging halfway out of his shirt pocket, its nose vibrating a mile a minute—like there aren’t enough rats in the city already, you have to go out and buy one.
Once inside, we rang for Jimmy, then waited for the elevator with a woman who had blue hair and who exhaled in disgust when either of the dogs looked at her. Dashiell, who thought she was trying to play one of his favorite games, began to sneeze.
“Four,” she told Jimmy when the gate opened.
“Five, please,” I said.
“She’s not there,” he said. “She’s at lunch. All of them are.”
“I know. We have to pick up something from her room.”
He nodded and closed the gate.
We knocked first. You never know. Then I took the passkey out of my pocket and unlocked Sam’s door. She had a suite. We walked into what looked like a living room. The door to the bedroom was off to the left. Her laptop and printer were sitting on the large desk that was against the wall to our right.
I sat at the desk and turned on the computer, waiting for it to boot up before I could search for her seminar records. Chip walked over to the window to check the view from a higher floor, whistled softly, and then came back to the desk, pulling a chair from next to it around to the front so that he could see the screen too.
“Maybe the history of who Sam booked where will explain some of this,” I said, and we started calling up the seminar lists from the last two years.
“It looks as if, until this week, she never booked any of the men together,” Chip said.
“Still, they all knew each other. Or at least, they knew of each other.”
I pulled a small pad out of my pocket and began to make notes, dates and speakers, who was where when, and then I checked the list of names of attendees, just to see if something looked like a connection we hadn’t thought of.
“Look at this,” I said. “Audrey and Alan worked together late last year. After that, she attended two of his seminars.”
“Really? Audrey and Alan?”
“Maybe Audrey was the one who gave Alan his big send-off.”
“Which send-off do you mean?” he asked.
I looked away from the screen and into his eyes. “Maybe both, for all we know.”
I kept scrolling through her records.
“I wonder if Cathy and M
artyn ever met before.”
“It looks like Sam almost always booked Martyn alone. He’s probably a big enough draw.”
“I think you’re right. He does so much lecturing here, he’s probably got”—I stopped in mid-sentence—“he probably had a really strong following. Sam was talking about people who follow their heroes from talk to talk, from state to state.”
I scrolled down the lists of people in the audience for Martyn’s talks.
“Cathy’s name doesn’t show. Looks like she’d never attended any of his talks. But when he finally met her, it was lust at first sight.”
“How the hell did you—”
“I was sitting a row behind them. I couldn’t have missed it. I saw Cupid flying around over Cathy’s head, and then, whomp, the arrow hit her right in the chest.”
“I wonder who else he’s hit on?”
I began to scroll down the list again. “You said he sounded like a man who was used to covering his tracks, didn’t you? We have no reason to think that the dalliance with Cathy was a first for him. Look, the number he called in England isn’t his home number.”
“Big surprise.”
“It gets better. Check this out. Tina Darling worked with Martyn at the beginning of this last tour, three months ago.”
“Isn’t she the speaker who canceled out, the one I filled in for with today’s talk?”
I nodded. “After she was on the program with Martyn in Minneapolis, she went to seven out of ten of his next talks. That means hearing the same lecture seven times—eight actually, if you count the time they worked together.”
“Sounds like she was a really motivated student.”
“Sounds like something else to me.”
“So you think what? He dumped her after only seven seminars. And so she snuck into the hotel last night and—”
“I just thought it was interesting, that’s all. She probably didn’t show because they had a thing.”
“A dalliance?” He was grinning.
“Yes. Wouldn’t it be totally embarrassing to be on a program with someone who’d just dumped you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said.
A Hell of a Dog Page 18