I pictured Doug Beeman on his knees, his face up against the TV, how he'd sat back on his heels and swayed and how I hadn't known he'd been weeping until I heard the sobs choke out of him. The school photo on Elisabeta's table, the missing-teeth grin. Those heaps of banana peels. The despair, thick as a scent in that cramped living room. The duffel of cash that I prayed would lift that despair as the DVD had lifted Beeman's, that might just buy a wink of light at the end of the tunnel.
1:06 A.M.1:07 A.M.
I wasn't going to that hotel room.
Snippets of text floated in the darkness. SOMEONE YOU KNOW. A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. What was I going to do? Lie here miserably unasleep until I was awakened by a ringing phone? Or would the death notice come later? A day, a week, three months. Could I live like that, waiting, knowing I could have prevented whatever was coming?
1:17 A.M.1:18 A.M.
The only way to beat them is not to play.
I wasn't going to that hotel room.
1:23 A.M.
I kissed Ari on the sleep-warm neck. Regarded her sleeping face. Lips fat and luscious, popped open just slightly, giving off the faintest whistle.
Whispered, 'I'm sorry.'
Slid from bed, guilty, miserable, and racked with fear.
It wasn't that I had to go.
It was that I couldn't not.
Having parked at the curb up Sepulveda beyond eyeshot of the valets, having retrieved the key card from my glove box and snugged it in my back pocket, having pocketed my Sanyo and the prepaid cell phone to cover any recording or calling contingency, having waited for a break in traffic and threaded through the rear parking lot in my jeans and black T-shirt, I stood at the base of Hotel Angeleno, key in hand, confronting the service door from the photo.
Crinkling in my pocket was the note I'd jotted hastily under the dome light of my car: I received an anonymous message telling me to come to Room 1407, and that it was a matter of life and death. I don't know who's in the room. I don't know where this will lead. If something bad happens, please contact Detective Sally Richards of the West L.A. station.
Past the concrete freeway wall to my left, invisible cars swooped by, rushing smooth and soporific, an endless wave. The cylindrical building loomed overhead, a cool green glow uplighting the penthouse soffit.
A car approached from the curving drive, a valet closing my brief time window, but before the headlights swept into view, I zippered the key into the lock and twisted. A satisfying clunk. I slipped inside, breathed the heated air, and tried to shake the tingling from my fingertips.
Immediately I heard a squeak of a wheel, but before I could move, a worker turned the corner, pushing a room-service cart. In the frozen instant before our eyes met, I put a hand up on the door nearest me and noted with great relief that it led to the stairwell. Hoping he wouldn't catch a glimpse of my face, I swiveled quickly and stepped through.
'Excuse me, sir--?' The closing door severed his voice.
I huffed my way up, the tapping of my Nikes coming back at me off the hard walls. The fourteenth floor was blissfully quiet. Ariana would've liked the L.A.-hip deco--sleek, slate, stone, earth. Dark wood trimmings, amber glows from wall sconces, silent carpet underfoot. A clock showed 1:58. Passing the elevator, I felt a jolt of panic as a woman dressed for the gym stepped from her room, but, busy on her cell phone, she didn't bother with eye contact.
The key card ready at my side like a stiletto, I counted down the room numbers. Reaching 1407, I jammed it home. The little sensor gave me a green light, and I turned the hefty handle and shoved the door open a few inches.
Darkness.
A few inches more. A bottleneck hall by the front bathroom, only a sliver of bedroom visible from the doorway. The curtains had been thrown back, floor-to-ceiling glass doors letting out onto a cramped balcony.
'Hello?' My voice, strained and thick, was completely foreign to me.
Barely cutting the black of the room, the glow of the distant city lay in faded puddles on the floor. The hum of freeway traffic blended with the rush of blood in my ears as I inched forward. The door shut itself firmly behind me, cutting what little light the hall had afforded.
Somehow I sensed an emptiness in the room. Was I supposed to wait for someone here? Would it be another phone call leading to another wild-goose chase?
A faded smell--sweet, spicy, a trace of ash. My body tense, I stepped even with the threshold to the main room. The comforter had been dimpled where someone had sat on it. And lying next to the indentation, a slender object, about four feet long.
Scanning the room, I took an exploratory half step forward and picked up the object by the rubber grip. The metal head swung up on the graphite shaft, glinting in the city lights. A golf driver. My golf driver. The one I'd hurled after the intruder as he'd hopped our rear fence. The etching on the face of the head was dark with something, probably dirt; I had left it out there in the leaves, after all. But the stuff didn't act like dirt.
It was sliding slowly down the titanium face.
I dropped the driver abruptly on the bed. That smell in the air resolved, the faintest whiff of smoke. Clove cigarettes.
YOU NEED TO SEE HIM.
My chest heaving, I took another half step to my side to steady myself, and my foot struck something with a bit of give.
It was attached to a dark mass sprawled to my left beside the bed. I sucked in a breath, amplified to a screech inside my head, and blinked down through the darkness at the body splayed grotesquely on its back, the death curl of the white hands, the dent at the forehead, the black tendrils of blood worming into the hair, the ear, pooling in the eye socket. The famous brow. Those perfect white teeth. And my nemesis, that well-defined jaw.
TONIGHT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING.
Horror knotted at the back of my throat, blocking off air, making my gorge lurch. I knew even before I heard the pounding footsteps coming up the hall. Stepping away from the bed to the middle of the room, facing that glorious smog-diffused cityscape, I tugged the woefully inadequate insurance note from my pocket and put my arms up over my head a split second before the door smashed in and the powerful beams of police flashlights hit me.
Chapter 33
I didn't kill him. I didn't kill him. It sounded like my voice, saying it over and over, but I wasn't sure whether it was in my head or coming out of my mouth until one of the cops said, 'Yeah, we got that part.'
Patrolmen, huddled in twos and threes, alternately fielded phone calls and mumbled into their radios. They peered at me not with animosity but with a sort of bemused wonder, awed by the scope of what they'd stumbled into. I heard them from the end of a tunnel, their words strained through the humming in my ears. I'd gone into shock, I think, but I'd thought that when you were in shock you weren't supposed to be so fucking terrified.
I'd been frisked roughly and moved to a room up the hall, a match of 1407. They'd seized my note asking them to contact Sally Richards, though I didn't know whether they had tried to reach her. Hotel Angeleno fell within her and Valentine's jurisdiction, so that gave me my only glimmer of hope.
I sat on the corner of the bed. Looking down, I realized I wasn't wearing handcuffs, though I had a vague memory of being cuffed at some point earlier when they'd wiped my hands with a forensic swab. It seemed they weren't sure what to do with me yet.
One of the female cops asked, 'Want us to call your wife?'
'No. Yes. No.' I pictured Ari waking up, finding me gone. It would take her about two seconds to put together that I'd gone to the hotel, though I'd promised her I wouldn't. 'Yes. Tell her I'm okay. Not injured or dead, I mean.' That drew some odd looks. 'They led me here. They put a bug on me. Give me a pen. Here. Here. I'll show you.'
