“The guilt,” she said, nodding sympathetically, eyes narrowing.
I said nothing. I just kissed her, briefly, and let her walk me out to my car.
And I drove away from there, from that house, from the family picture that included the round, pasty face, several facial moles and all, of the man who had come into my house and killed my wife, and my wife’s brother, and who had in turn been killed by me.
14
Around ten the next morning, Sunday, I went down to the lobby of the hotel and had a word with the man at the desk.
“I’m working for the Freed campaign,” I told him.
He nodded, smiled noncommittally. He was in his mid- twenties and blandly handsome; crisply dressed in a navy blazer and red and blue striped tie, he would be a manager here someday. The two women back behind the counter, doing the real work, wouldn’t have a chance.
“With the press conference tomorrow,” I said, “we have to be careful.”
“Certainly,” he said, the smile gone, very serious now, as if what I’d said was something he well knew, when actually it had never occurred to him.
“Our sources have informed us,” I said, “that one of the major parties has hired a political dirty trickster to disrupt the press conference.”
I was careful not to say which party. That way, if he were a Democrat he could assume Republican, and vice versa.
Whatever, he nodded, narrowed his eyes, leaned forward, pretended to be concerned.
“The agent provocateur in question,” I said, “makes G. Gordon Liddy look like Mother Teresa.”
He smiled at that, but a serious smile.
“We would like your help in keeping an eye out for him,” I said. “We’d like no one but yourself-and your night relief-to be aware of this request.”
“Do you have a photograph?”
“No. But I can give you a detailed physical description, and I know several of the names he frequently travels under.”
“That’s helpful.”
“He’s a slender man a few years shy of fifty. Six-one, pockmarked. Cleft chin. Eyes have kind of an oriental cast. Dark hair, widow’s peak, pale complexion.” I could tell, from his blank expression, he wasn’t visualizing anything yet, despite that laundry list of facial features. I tried again: “You know the guy in Star Trek?”
“William Shatner?”
“No, the other one-but without the pointed ears.”
He smiled, nodded.
“He looks something like that guy,” I said. “He sometimes uses the name Stone. He sometimes uses the name Brackett. Sometimes Pond. Sometimes Green.”
That was all the names I knew.
“Let me check the registry,” he said, and he began flipping the little cards, looking up each name. “Nothing,” he said.
“What about the description? Did it ring a bell?”
“Well, yes it did.”
I leaned against the counter. “What room number?”
“No, I just meant I knew which guy on Star Trek you meant.”
Maybe he wouldn’t be a manager someday.
“How long are you on?”
“Till five.”
“Two other shifts, then, after you?”
“Yes.”
“When does the graveyard shift start?”
“One A.M.”
“Good.” I handed him two twenties, folded once, lengthwise. “I’ll talk to the two night men personally. You just keep this to yourself.”
“That isn’t necessary, sir,” he said, meaning the money, which he was trying not to look at.
“Sure it is.” I let go of the bills and they made a little tent on the counter. “Now, I’m going to have to look things over for security purposes. Where is the press conference going to be held?”
He pointed across the lobby to some stairs going down. “The Bix Beiderbecke Room,” he said. “At nine o’clock Tuesday morning.”
“Thanks. By the way, my status with the Freed campaign is known only by the top-level people. So don’t go throwing my name around.”
“Uh, what is your name, sir?”
“Ryan. Jack.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling, as if the name had just momentarily slipped his mind.
I gave him a smile and a little forefinger salute and left him and the money behind.
The Blackhawk was an older, recently refurbished hotel; the lobby’s black and white marble floor gave it an art deco feel, though the extensive mahogany woodwork and whorehouse-red-trimmed-gold ceiling harked back to frontier days. The lobby wasn’t small, but a low ceiling and comfortable furnishings made it seem intimate, as did the way the thick pillars separated it off into areas. A row of shops and offices-one of them the rear end of the Freed campaign headquarters-was just around the corner from the check-in desk.
I went down marble stairs, following a sign that said ARCADE, and found an arcade in the earlier, pre-Pac Man sense: a row of shops and businesses, about a half a block long, beneath the hotel lobby. The walls were light plaster and decorated with amateurish murals depicting New Orleans street scenes, in honor of Davenport’s legendary Dixieland jazzman, Bix Beiderbecke, who died young. Frightened by the mural, possibly, with its grotesque Mardi Gras figures and frozen Basin Street musicians.
The shops were closed today, although from the looks of things, several stalls were shuttered no matter what day it was. Among those currently in business were a barber shop, a beauty shop, a shoeshine stand and an architect’s office. A ghost town on Sunday; I was alone down here, despite the crowd brunching it upstairs at the hotel’s Sundance Restaurant.
The arcade walkway was really just a hall-perhaps eight feet wide-with a fairly low ceiling made lower by chandelier-style light fixtures. At the end of the hallway were carpeted steps moving up into a newer, beige-brick section of the hotel.
But just prior to that was the entry to the Bix Beiderbecke Room, a short hallway with a short flight of steps that led down to an open area outside the room itself: a medium-size meeting hall with a door at right and another down at its other end, at left. I peeked in the door at right.
A podium was set up facing a room full of chairs, arranged in rows with a central aisle. Seating for probably a hundred or so. Standing in that doorway, I was within twenty feet of the podium.
I looked at my watch, waited for the second hand to point straight up. Then quickly ran from the doorway, down the short hall out to the arcade and up the carpeted steps. Checked the second hand.
Ten seconds.
I looked up from my watch and saw that I was indeed in the new part of the hotel, a high-ceilinged add-on that connected the Blackhawk with its parking. I was a few steps away from a door to the street, where there was plenty of parking at the curb on both sides of the wide one-way; and a few steps away from the parking garage itself, where if I had a car parked on the bottom floor nearby I was within seconds of wheeling out of here. A few more steps to my right, down a gentle Oriental-carpeted ramp-like walkway, were hotel elevators.
Back up the ramp, still in the beige-brick modern addendum, which was overseen by a huge, old-fashioned wall clock, I was facing the glass wall of the indoor swimming pool/sauna area. A few families were in there
