FBI. You're still under arrest for obstruction. Take this lunatic the hell out of here!”
A few minutes later, the narrow side street was quiet again, thank God.
Frankly, I was amazed - stunned - Mary Wagner, this supposedly careful and clever murderess, seemed not to have noticed.
Mary, Mary
Chapter 88
MARY WAGNER GOT A LOT MORE SLEEP that night than any of the rest of us.
James Truscott spent the night in jail, but I was sure he'd be out in the morning. His magazine had already put in a complaint. He hadn't missed much of anything, though.
There was nothing new to report when the relief team finally came at 4:00 A.M.
That gave me enough time to get to my hotel for a two- hour nap and a shower before I was back on the road again.
I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel just past 7:00. Mary Wagner's work shift started at 7:30.
This was definitely getting interesting now, and also weirder by the minute.
The luxury hotel, a pink stucco landmark in Hollywood, sat nearly obscured behind a wall of palms and banana trees on Sunset Boulevard. The inside echoed the outside, with its pink-everything lobby and ubiquitous banana-leaf wallpaper.
I found the security chief, Andre Perkins, in his office on the lower level. I had deliberately arranged for only one contact at the hotel.
Perkins was a former Bureau agent himself. He had two copies of Mary Wagner's file on his desk when I got there.
“She pretty much reads like a model employee,” he told me. “Shows up on time, keeps up with the work. As far as I can gather, she just seems to come in, do her thing, and leave. I can ask around some more. Should I?”
“Don't do it yet, thanks. What about her background? Anything for me there?”
He pulled out Wagner's original application and a couple of pages of notes.
“She's been here almost eight months. It looks like she was legitimately laid off from a Marriott downtown before that. But I made some calls on the earlier stuff, and it's all wrong numbers or disconnected. Her social security number's a fake, too. Not all that unusual for a maid or porter.”
“Is there anyone who can say for sure that she was actually on the premises during all of her shifts?” I asked.
Perkins shook his head. “Just the cleaning records.”
He looked over his papers again.
“She definitely keeps up with her quotas, which she wouldn't be able to do if she was ducking out a lot. And her comment cards are fine. She's doing a good job. Mary Wagner is an above-average employee here.”
Mary, Mary
Chapter 89
PERKINS LET ME USE HIS FAX machine to send copies of Mary Wagner's time sheets over to the Bureau for cross- referencing. Then he set me up with a maintenance uniform and a name tag that said “Bill.”
Bill stationed himself in the basement, within sight of the stocking area where housekeeping loaded up on paper products and cleaning materials. Just after 7:30, the new shift filtered in.
All of them were women, all in the same pink uniform. Mary was the tallest in the group.
Big-boned, that's what some people would call her. And she was white, one of the few on the housekeeping staff.
She certainly looked strong enough for the physical work Mary Smith had done - manipulating Marti LowensteinBell's body in the swimming pool, moving Brian Conver from the hotel room floor to the bed. Bill stood maybe twenty yards away from her, facing a fuse panel, his face partially hidden behind its door.
Wagner went about her work quietly and efficiently while the others chatted around her, most of them talking in Spanish. She stuck mostly to herself, just as Perkins had described. Hers was the first cart onto the freight elevatot I didn't follow her upstairs. The hotel corridors would offer no cover, and my priority was to interview her at home later, as myself. That meant a limited surveillance for Bill at the hotel.
My best opportunity came during the lunch hour, when the staff cafeteria was filled to
