“Josef, madame.”
“Pleased to meet you, Josef,” said Emma, reaching up and shaking his hand in a move she had been practicing mentally for years but never had an occasion to use. “I'm Emma Passant. I'll be staying at the hotel for a few days.”
“A pleasure to have you with us, Madame Passant,” said Josef, smoothly transferring the ten-dollar bill Emma had just placed in his hand into his breast pocket without even glancing at the denomination.
“Did you know my friend, Monsieur Caraignac?”
Josef frowned.
“It's all right,” said Emma in a quiet voice. “Mr. Anthony knows that I was a friend of Mr. Caraignac. He has already been kind enough to answer some of my questions.”
It was only the truth, after all. She had told him Henri-Pierre was her friend, and he had answered
some
of her questions.
“The hotel has tried to keep it quiet, but it is very sad,” said Josef, nodding. “Monsieur Caraignac took almost all of his meals with us.”
“Did anyone ever join him?”
“No.”
“No one?” asked Emma knowingly. “Not even a young lady or two?”
“No, Monsieur invariably ate alone. The police interviewed us all yesterday. There was not much to say. What does a guest tell a waiter? Or a maître d'? All I could say is that he was a very nice man who liked the fish.”
Emma suddenly wondered whether ten dollars had been enough to give Josef. How much had Henri-Pierre slipped into the man's hand every day to be considered “very nice”? How could she really hope to reconstruct Henri-Pierre's movements in this strange, unfamiliar world? There was a lot more to having money than having money.
“I think I'll try the fish today, too,” Emma said quietly. “Would you please tell my waiter to bring me something that Mr. Caraignac would have liked?”
“Oui, madame. You shall have the poached salmon with a touch of dill, a salade of endive and garden greens, and a glass of Pouilly Fume. It will be quite wonderful.”
What it was, however, was quite bland. It was also quite thirtyeight dollars, not including tax and tip. The lukewarm coffee was an additional six bucks.
Â
“Did you know Mr. Caraignac?” asked Emma, parking five dollars in the hand of the porter who had just delivered her and her luggage to the room on the eighteenth floor where the handsome Frenchman had been murdered.
“Please?” said the porter with a big smile, putting the money into his pocket as Emma looked around the room with trepidation. He was a small man with a pasty complexion and thinning red hair.
“The gentleman who was staying in this room for the past two weeks.”
“I no usual work this floor. Everybody got rotate.”
“I see,” said Emma with a sigh. “Do you think there's somebody downstairs who might remember him? Mr. Caraignac?”
“Capitán of the bells, he know everythin'.”
“Captain of the bells? The bell captain?”
“Capitán of the bells.” The porter nodded. “I help you more?”
“No, that will be fine,” said Emma, wondering how much she would have to give the bell captain to get him to talk. At the rate she was going she'd be lucky to stretch her executor's fee and savings a month, let alone the year Charlemagne had said it would probably take to probate the estate. Being an heiress was turning out to be an expensive business, and Emma still couldn't believe that Pépé really had a million dollars to leave. Until she knew where the money had come from, Emma had to assume she'd have to pay everything backâan unsettling thought, to say the least. And the meter was still ticking.
The porter exited with a big smile after putting one of her suitcases on the rack at the foot of the king-sized bed, leaving Emma alone for the first time since she had entered the hotel. The L-shaped room was eerily silent. It was suddenly hard to think about unpacking. It was hard even to remember to breathe.
Emma tried to shake off the feeling of dread, turning her attention to the accommodations.
She had stayed in larger roomsâthe one in Phoenix had been twice this sizeâbut never one so finished-looking. The thick pile carpeting, the handsome furniture, the delicately striped wallpaperâall seemed more like what you would expect to find in some banker's Presidio Heights mansion than in a hotel. Everything smelled freshly polished and new. The only thing Emma might have changed were the window draperies, which seemed too dark for the rest of the decoration.
The hotel had certainly done a good job getting the room back into action. It was hard to believe that someone had been murdered
here barely two days before. Emma took a deep breath. This is what she had wanted, to see the room where Henri-Pierre had spent his last days. Here she was. Now what?
Suddenly all the bravura Emma had manufactured for Mr. Anthony disappeared, and the enormity of what had happened here crashed down on her. A man had died in this room. A kind man who had helped her on the ferry, who had laughed with her and made her laugh. Emma desperately wanted him back. And she wanted her grandfather.
No, Emma told herself, forcing herself into a state of calm, just as she always had to do before she went out on stage. She had come here for a reason. There was nothing to be afraid of. It was just an empty room, and a nice one at that. At these prices it should be. And unless she wanted to give Mr. Anthony the pleasure of takingâEmma winced as she did the mental calculation âmore than two thousand dollars of her money for nothing, she was going to be here for a while. Five days. She had better make the best of it.
There was a color television at the foot of the bed, a remote on the bedside table. Emma walked over and turned on the set. One of the premium cable movie stations flickered on after a moment. Who had last watched television here? Most likely it had been Henri-Pierre. Perhaps he had stayed up for a film one evening. It was lonely being by yourself in a hotel room. Emma knew that from personal experience.
Emma flipped off the television and closed her eyes. The memory she had been fighting poured into her mind.
She could almost actually see him. The impeccably tailored taupe sport coat. Black pants with a perfect crease and tasseled oxblood loafers with soles no thicker than a dime. His hair may have been windblown on the ferry, but it was expensively cut. His sideburns had been straight. Henri-Pierre obviously had been a fastidious man, and a fashion-conscious one.
The mental picture changed to one of Henri-Pierre lying gray and lifeless in a drawer in the morgue. Emma opened her eyes. The horrible image disappeared.
Shaken, she walked slowly around the room, opening drawers, studying the framed prints above the bed, trying to get some sense of what it must have been like for him. Henri-Pierre had stayed here for two weeks, the manager had said. At four hundred twenty-five dollars a night, he was clearly well-off, but Emma had already known that.
Had he been comfortable here? Had he known he was in danger? Or had death taken him by surprise? Nothing about the room seemed to tell her anything. For all its elegance it was as anonymous as any other hotel room.
Emma walked into the bathroom. There was a double marble sink with little bottles of expensive shampoo and conditioner in a basket along with small packets of soapâall wrapped in green paper with the hotel's logo. In a rack at the back of the tub were four thick white towels. There was a faint sweet odor in the air. The maid's perfume? Disinfectant?
Emma stared at the marble counter. This is where he would have put his toilet articles and his razor. Was he the type who lined everything up neatly in perfect order? Those well-groomed ones often were.
If she had come here that day for the mattress lesson, would he have gotten annoyed at the mess she usually made of the bathroom? Would he have expected her to fold up her clothes and use only one towel at a time and squeeze her toothpaste neatly from one end of the tube instead of from in the middle? Maybe it was better that she would never know.
Emma walked back into the room, closing the bathroom door behind her. The room had been combed by police and thoroughly cleaned by the hotel. What trace could be left of a murdered man?
The only place Emma hadn't yet checked was the closet opposite
the entryway. She did so now. It was large and roomy. On a top shelf were extra pillows and blankets. Henri-Pierre must have brought a lot of clothes with him if he had stayed for two weeks, Emma thought idly. Such a man would probably have wanted to wear a different suit every day.
It was then that she noticed the floor.
She knelt down to be sure, but it was obvious even from a distance. The carpet in the closet did not exactly match the carpeting in the room. The color was slightly off. The pile was fractionally less deep. And outside the closet, the carpet had a different smell.
“Why, it's new,” she said aloud. The carpet in the room had not merely been cleaned recently, it had been entirely replaced.
Emma looked around the room again and saw something else. The wallpaper of the outer wall, the wall that held the window looking out over the city, was slightly brighter than the wallpaper on the other walls.
She walked over and scrutinized the corner seam where the papers came together. There was no mistake. The wall with the window had recently been repapered. Why?
Emma fought down a sudden wave of nausea. The explanation was obvious. The wall had been repapered for the same reason that the carpet had been replaced: they had both been stained irreparably. With blood.
“He must have been standing by the window when it happened,” said Emma, trying to reconstruct the scene in her mind.
The mirrored dresser took up the rest of the outer wall. If Henri-Pierre had been on the bed, blood couldn't possibly have splattered as far as the wall. It wouldn't have been necessary to repaper. Nor could he have been sitting anywhere else in the room for the same reason. Both the leather armchair and the backless seat by the little writing desk were too far away from the repapered wall.
“That's why the draperies seem out of place for the room,” Emma whispered, shuddering. “They've been replaced, too.”
Emma walked over and stood at the spot by the window where it must have happened and looked out. The view wasn't much. The street. A few buildings. Poteet had said Henri-Pierre had died between eight o'clock and nine, so it would have been dark outside. There would have been nothing to see.
Emma looked into the room. Directly in front of her, ten feet away, was the armchair. There was a floor lamp next to itâa place for reading.
“He wasn't standing by the window for the view,” she said out loud. “So why was he here? To talk with someone seated in that armchair, maybe? If the murderer was sitting there, they must have been having a conversation. Henri-Pierre must have known him. The murderer in the chair, Henri-Pierre standing by the window.”
Emma walked over to the armchair and acted out the picture in her mind.
“The seated man stands up and pulls out a gun. Henri-Pierre would have had nowhere to go. He would have been backed up against the wall. And then the killer would have come closer and closer and brought the gun right up to Henri-Pierre's head and ⦔
Emma stopped.
“I'm just guessing,” she said.
There was nothing that really proved the murderer was sitting in the armchair, she knew.
“He might just as easily have barged into the room, gun drawn, and forced Henri-Pierre over to the window. But why force your victim to a window? A window is exposed. People look into windows and this one was in plain view to the street below. Why would a killer risk his act being seen?”
The problem was that people's actions didn't have to make sense. How could you figure out why someone did something when the person who did it probably didn't know himself?
That's why the police never solve crimes like this, thought Emma, walking over to the bed.
Maybe Poteet was right. Maybe this was just another random killing, just a crazed idiot with a gun who had killed Henri-Pierre. The same idiot who had killed her grandfather. The same gun.
Emma sank onto the bed, her mind filled with confusion and sorrow and memories of two murdered men. Her poor dear Pépé. A handsome stranger. The retired carpenter. The glitzy New York antique dealer. Where had their lives intersected? What had joined them in death?
Emma's lack of sleep was catching up with her. She had been up half the night last night, thinking about Henri-Pierre. Now she was lying on the very bed where he had slept the last two weeks of his life, and she could barely keep her eyes open.
“What's the connection?” she asked herself again. “There's got to be a connection.”
Emma let out a deep, plaintive sigh. Had it been just an expensive mistake to come here? Was she just one of those fools Pépé had always made fun of, throwing her money down a bottomless hole?