Authors: Kate Flora
"I'm sure he's long gone," I said, "but if you see someone who looks like the man in the elevator or the tall woman he was with, let me know."
"How do I do that? My mom says it's rude to point."
Before I could answer, a voice boomed in my ear. "Well, goodness me, Thea, don't you look nice? You're as pretty as a picture. Your mother is going to be so pleased to hear you're looking well. She worries about you." Alyce Edgerton, without being invited, pulled out a chair and sat down. "Haven't got much tan, though, have you. Harry won't be joining us. He's gone to bed. That man is such a party pooper." Her curious eyes lighted on Laura. "And who is this young lady?"
"This is my friend Laura Mitchell." Mentally I beamed messages to Laura not to say anything about what we were doing. I needn't have worried. Laura was an astute reader of grown-ups and Alyce absolutely reeked of busybody. "Laura, this is Mrs. Edgerton. She's a friend of my mother." Laura dutifully stuck out a small hand.
"Well," Alyce said, looking around. "I hope we can get some service. The last time I was in here I had to wait hours for my food. It isn't at all what I would have expected from such an expensive hotel. Not that anything has been as I expected. First that couple having the awful fight and then a murder! The woman who was killed was part of your group, wasn't she, Thea?" I nodded. "Did you know her?" I nodded again. "Terrible thing," she said. "I hear she was waiting for her secret lover and she let in the wrong man. There was something on the news about a serial killer who does this at resorts all over the country. I keep wondering if I should tell the police about that man I saw."
She started waving her arm vigorously. "Ooh. Over here. Ooh! Over here," she said. I watched the flab rock and mentally vowed to do more pushups.
I assumed she was calling for a waitress, but she was waving at a slim, dark man in a security guard's uniform. He came reluctantly toward our table, as if weighing the importance of shutting her up against the possibility of making a quick escape. When he was within moderate shouting distance, Alyce said, "This is my friend Naveen. He knows everything that goes on at the hotel." She patted the empty fourth chair.
I winked at Laura, who was very deftly converting a giggle into a yawn behind her hand. Tedious as Alyce was, she had a talent for collecting gossip, and Detective Mitchell and I were here to collect gossip. I gave Naveen my best smile. "Please join us," I said, "we don't want to interfere with your duties but we're awfully curious about what is going on."
Cautiously he lowered himself into the chair. I could see why Alyce had attached herself to him. In her youth, she had fancied herself a great beauty, or so my mother had told me. In Alyce's mirror, time stood still. Her blond hair was not colored and permed and teased and sprayed, it still cascaded in shiny waves to her prom queen shoulders. Her smile still lit up rooms. And Naveen was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, if you liked the dark graceful types with liquid eyes and sensitive mouths. He perched on his chair so tentatively he reminded me of a caged bunny.
"Tell them what you found in the men's room," Alyce said importantly.
"There's an ongoing police investigation," Naveen said. He had a soft, gentle voice. Across from me, Laura was falling in love. "I'm not supposed to talk about it."
"It's all right," Alyce said. "Thea's a detective. She's used to this stuff, aren't you?"
I thought Naveen would be more likely to tell his story to an ingenue in a shrimp-colored dress than to a tough female PI. I twisted a wayward curl around my finger and lowered my eyes. "Not really," I murmured. "But I am curious. What did you find in the, um, men's room?" Now I was saying "um." A bolt of lighting should strike me if I ever did it except for effect.
"Yes," Laura said eagerly, "what did you find? Was it a gun?"
Alyce couldn't wait for the reluctant Naveen. "It was a can of silver hair spray, like you might use to make yourself old, and some of that spirit gum that actors use to stick on false beards and things. And a pair of latex gloves. Whoever used the stuff didn't want to take a chance on leaving any fingerprints."
I looked at Naveen as though he'd divulged the information. "Really?" He nodded. "What about the gloves? Didn't I read somewhere that the police can sometimes get prints from gloves. Or right through them?"
Now he lowered
his
eyes and looked demure. "I wouldn't know about that."
Be proud of me. I didn't yell, "In a pig's eye," or any of a thousand other disbelieving epithets. I looked around for a waitress. "Do you have time for a drink with us?"
"Naveen is extremely busy," Alyce interrupted. "Last night, at that luau you had, he literally had to break up a fight between two women! First they started throwing food, and then these other two women, a great fat black woman and this other Amazon, jumped into the fight and sat on the first two, and poor Naveen had to break it up. You know what he told me?"
Naveen looked like he wished he could crawl under the table and disappear. "I really should be going," he said. He stood up and patted the radio on his nice, slim hip. "I'm supposed to be working."
"Oh, just let me finished this story," Alyce said, oblivious, as usual, to what was going on around her. "He says that once the two women were away from the party, one of them started crying, and then said, 'at least she's dead.' and they walked away, arm in arm, like lifelong friends. Have you ever heard anything so bizarre? Imagine four women fighting. Why, in my day..." Naveen took a step backward.
"Nor in my day," I agreed. "Not that I spend much time with fat black women and Amazons." I held out my hand to Naveen. "It was nice to meet you. I'm sorry my conference has given you such a hard time." He took it with a gesture that was half handshake and half bow. Very appealing. He repeated the gesture with Alyce, who simpered, and with Laura, completing the winning of her heart. Then he went away, leaving two ladies staring after him and one wondering how to get rid of Alyce so that Laura and I could talk.
"I ought to tell the police about that man I saw," Alyce repeated, when Naveen was finally out of sight. "I thought he looked too young to be so gray and Naveen's story explains it."
"Where did you see this man?"
"He came out of the elevator on sixteen and then went immediately to the stairwell. It was right when that couple was having their fight."
"What did he look like?" I asked.
Alyce shrugged. "A middle-aged man with gray hair and a mustache. It was the way he moved that didn't match his hair. It seemed youthful."
"Height?" I asked. "Was he tall or short? Thin or heavyset?"
She shrugged again. "I didn't notice."
"Was he wearing glasses?" Laura asked.
Alyce considered, then nodded. "I think so." Then she shook her head. "No, I don't think so." She'd make a great witness.
"And was he about as tall as that man?" Laura pointed to a man who had just come in who was about Andre's height, or six feet one.
"No. Yes. I'm not sure. He wasn't a shrimp but he didn't strike me as particularly tall. You know, I don't think we're ever going to get a waitress. Things are better in the other bar." She stood up and gathered her things. "I'll tell your mother I saw you," she said. She swept out of the room.
Laura giggled. "You really don't like her, do you?"
"Does it show that much?"
She shook her head vigorously, her red hair bobbing. "Only to my keen professional eye."
"When I was your age, she was always telling tales to my mother and getting me in trouble. Would you like someone like that?"
"No. She doesn't know you don't like her, either. She thinks you two are friends." Her grin was enormous. "And you're the Amazon, right?"
I nodded. "So, where were we? I was about to tell you how to let me know without pointingâ"
"âif I spot the man or the woman I saw that night," she finished.
"Here we go, ladies." Our waitress put a plate in front of me with enough food to have fed the Russian Army for a week or Andre Lemieux for a day. She set down Laura's food and smiled. "Sorry about the delay. I was waiting for that woman to leave."
"Thanks," I said. "But how did you know?"
"I'm not clairvoyant," she said, smiling. "I was thinking of myself. I've waited on her before. It's like rubbing sandpaper over a sunburn. I hope you didn't mind too much."
"We're very grateful, aren't we, Laura?" Laura nodded. Her mouth was too full for speech. "We were also waiting for her to leave." Halfway through my burger I suddenly became very sleepy, like a predatory animal after it has eaten all it can of its kill. Of course, a normal, sensible person would have taken to her bed hours ago but I'm not a normal, sensible person. Or I am, but I'm also impulsive, headstrong, and determined, qualities my mother has been hoping I'll outgrow for thirty years. Worse yet, I become more impulsive, headstrong, and determined when I've been threatened with bodily harm. Sheer edgy energy had brought me down here. Now it seemed to be ebbing away. Soon I'd have to give up detecting in favor of sleep.
I yawned. "I'm going to have to go to bed soon," I said. "And we haven't made much progress."
"True," Laura said. "But we did learn one thing. I guess that's something. Isn't that the way detectives work anyway? Gathering information bit by bit?" She looked at her empty plate. "I win."
"The eating contest? Yes, you do. If Andre were here, we'd both lose. The guy eats like a horse."
"That's speciesist."
"That's truth." The bar was filling up. When our waitress checked back to see if we needed anything, I asked for the check. It would have been nice to linger and gather gossip, but one gathers very little gossip while asleep. As we were heading for the door, Jeff Pullman came in with Billy Berryman, talking earnestly. Jeff looked 100 percent better than he had in the morning. Pulled together, neat, relaxed. He passed me without speaking, but Billy caught my arm.
"Thea! I thought you were still in the hospital... after that terrible experience... and here you are looking like a million dollars. How on earth do you do it?"
"Gene pool, Billy. I come from a bunch of really tough folks. How was the dinner?" What I wanted to ask was where he'd found out how Martina died, but this was neither the time nor the place.
"I'll wait for you outside," Laura said. She looked so agitated I assumed she was rushing to the bathroom.
"Dr. Van Norden was dynamite," Billy said. "The woman would have made a great general. You made a super choice, inviting her. And Joly got through the intro without a hitch. I heard you had to rewrite it?"
"Yeah, a slight accident when my laptop got smashed into a million pieces."
"That's terrible. I couldn't live without mine. What's with you and Jeff, anyway? He saw you and it was like he was seeing a ghost."
"You didn't hear?" He shook his head. "Well, I'm not on his list of favorite people these days. We had a little run-in this morning."
"Run-in? You mean argument? That's too bad. I was hoping I could get the two of you together for a press conference tomorrow... you know, get some good looks and good minds out there in front of the cameras...."
"I don't think so, Billy. By run-in, I mean he knocked me down and attempted to carve me up with a piece of broken crockery. Something about avenging Martina's honor or some such thing. At least he said it had to do with our... plot... I think that's what he called it, to oust Martina from her hereditary position."
Billy shook his head. "That's bad. Very bad. Look, I'm sure it was just the shock of everything. I'll talk to him. He can't possibly think the board had anything to do with this, or you, in particular."
"He seems to think exactly that. He expressed his personal disgust that I had come instead of Suzanne. I think he saw it as a deliberate choice to send the warrior instead of the peacemaker, though he didn't say that. Don't waste your time trying to bring the two of us together, okay? I'm pretty easygoing but when people do what Jeff did, it takes me a while to get over it. The distance between Boston and Washington, D.C. is the minimum amount of space I want between me and Jeff at the moment. Truth is, I didn't want to come here in the first place. I wouldn't be here if Suzanne hadn't gotten sick, and I can't wait to leave."
He looked so unhappy that I patted him on the shoulder. "Relax, Billy. I'm not going to do anything that will hurt your public relations campaign. However I feel about Jeff Pullman personally, the board will continue to present a united front. Good night."
"Look, Thea, maybe we should talk about thisâ"
"It's been a long, hard day, Billy. I'm going to bed." I displayed my arm, with the bandages where the IV had been and where they'd taken blood. "I just got out of the hospital."
"By the way," he said, making a face, "no thanks for sending the cops after me. I lost some valuable hours convincing them that I'm not a bad guyâ"
"I didn't send any cops after you, Billy," I interrupted. I didn't use my Pollyanna voice, either. "First Lewis Broder, before he left, and now you."
He looked puzzled. "Lewis Broder didn't leave."
But I didn't want to waste any breath on Broder, nor did I want to get sidetracked from the point, which was that I did not set the police on people. "And I'm tired of hearing complaints about me and the police. Other than doing my minimal civic duty by answering their questions, I don't like them any more than the rest of you, my relationship with Andre Lemieux notwithstanding. So, to return to our earlier subject, you can do what you want to make things nice-nice, so long as you don't ask me to get near Jeff Pullman, understood?"
I left him staring after me, wondering how he could possibly put a positive public relations spin on a knock-down encounter between a board member and the husband of the deceased. On the other hand, if he hadn't heard about it already, it couldn't be making big waves on the gossip circuit. Billy was a magnet for gossip. Everyone wanted to tell him what was going on.
Laura was waiting in the hall, dancing impatiently from foot to foot. "That was him," she said. "That was the man. I'm sure of it."