desk. He began to walk the room in a spiral pattern, scanning the floor.
“What are you doing?”
He saw that Stillman was staring at him. “I saw you doing this in Ellen’s apartment.”
“There’s not enough room in here. You’ll screw yourself into the floor. Just look.” He returned to the bathroom.
Walker went to his knees and looked under the bed, opened all the drawers he could find, then returned to the telephone. He read all of the possibilities on the card for numbers to dial, but “redial” was not one of them. There must be some way of knowing what calls had been made; certainly the hotel knew.
He was turning toward Stillman to ask when his eye caught a glint from the darkness behind the nightstand. He bent closer. “Max. I found something.”
“Don’t touch it.” Stillman appeared at his side, then knelt down and looked. He raised his head and stared along the top of the nightstand. “Hmmm.” He took a pen from his pocket, carefully reached behind the nightstand, snagged the object, and pulled it out to the open floor. It was a gold woman’s watch. “Is it hers?”
“I don’t know,” said Walker. “She had one sort of like that—an oval center with a round face in it, about that size, I think.”
Stillman prodded the watch to turn it over. “Take a look on the back of the case.”
Walker could see engraving. “E.S.S. 10/2/95.” He felt his heart begin to thump, but it was as though it was pumping energy out of him. “That doesn’t mean it’s hers, or that she left it here.”
Stillman hooked the band with his pen and dropped the watch behind the nightstand again. “It sure ain’t Madeline Bourgosian’s.” Then he went to the coffee table, where there were two magazines the hotel had left. One said,
“Why did you put it back? It’s our evidence.”
Stillman didn’t look up. “If the cops find it, it’s evidence. If we break in and find it, I’d say it’s demoted to something less . . . a clue, maybe.”
Stillman moved to the chest of drawers Walker had already opened. “What we want now is another one.”
“What is it this time?”
“Something that tells us where she went from here.”
“What’s the likelihood of that?”
Stillman scowled as he stared around the room, then seemed to notice the second telephone on the desk. “Oh, I’d say the odds are nearing ten to one for.” He opened a desk drawer and took out the telephone directory. He turned to the yellow pages and began leafing through them.
Walker stared over his shoulder in disbelief. “You’re not even through the A’s. Are you going to look at every page?”
“Nope.” He stopped. “There it is. Airlines. Lo and behold. She’s circled American Airlines, and written her flight reservation right on the page. No doubt she copied it over afterward. Flight 302, from New York to Zurich. Thursday the twelfth. That’s tonight. Easy, isn’t it?”
He used his pen to write it down on a business card, then closed the book and put it back. He stood up again and walked to the connecting door to the next room that people opened to turn the rooms into a suite. Then he walked across the floor to the door connecting with the room on the opposite side. “This one,” he said.
“What?” said Walker.
“Don’t you remember? We’ve been operating on the theory that she’s traveling with two men. Maybe she got involved in this because she fell in love. That’s what love is—cajoling a woman into actively participating in something she wouldn’t have thought of doing by herself, right?”
“Ever the romantic,” Walker muttered.
“Well?” Stillman said. “I’ve heard of women falling in love with two men at once, but I never heard of one who actually ran off with both of them. Even if she did, they would take two rooms. They’re not traveling on a budget, you know. Even if their favorite means of expressing this affection were the time-honored Mongolian cluster fuck—”
“Is this necessary?” Walker interrupted.
“Sorry. I let it slip my mind that she was once the object of your infatuation. Even if she were insatiable and they had to go at it in shifts, person number three would need a bed to sleep on and regain his strength while the party of the first part and the party of the second part partied. He was in this room over here.”
Walker’s frustration and annoyance were growing. “How do you know it wasn’t the room on this side?”
“That one hasn’t been opened since the last time the woodwork was painted. There’s a little bit of white enamel between the door and the jamb. It’s not exactly painted shut, but the bellman might need to use one of these.” He produced his pocketknife and opened a blade. He turned a little wing knob to open the door, then put his ear to the door behind it and listened. “Nobody’s home.”
“I thought we knew that already.”
“Not necessarily,” said Stillman. “See, whoever was in that room will have checked out when he left, to keep the world from seeing the connection. I’m hoping the hotel hasn’t rented the room again.” He used the knife to remove the screw holding the latch on the other side of the door, then poked the latch forward through the screwhole, and opened the door.
Walker could see the bed had been professionally made, and everything was in place. He said, “I guess we’re out of luck. They already cleaned it.” He turned to go, but Stillman held him.
“Look around anyway,” he said. “Each chance you get only comes once.” He went to work on the room, searching everywhere, then replacing things exactly. When he reached for the two magazines, Walker was fascinated. How could they be anything but identical to the ones in the first room?
“Now here’s something the maid missed,” Stillman said. “Page ninety-two is ripped out. Bring me hers.”
Walker went back to the first room and returned with
He held up the page behind the missing one. It was a map with a larger scale that showed only downtown Chicago. He set the page on top of Ellen’s map and held a spot with his finger. “There’s a line,” he said. “It would take you right out here onto this road west of Waukegan.”
He put the magazine back on top of the other one, and handed Ellen’s to Walker. “Let’s get out of here. You leave through this room, and I’ll leave through hers so we can latch both sides of these connecting doors. I’ll meet you in the car.”
Walker waited until Stillman had screwed the latch back in and closed the door. Walker latched his side, went to the door, and listened. He heard no sound, so he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him. The elevator opened and a middle-aged couple stepped out. He turned away from them and walked ahead in the same direction they were going. He made a turn, then another, and another, until he reached a dead end where the hallway stopped. He took the emergency stairway down to the next floor and found his way to the elevator.
He arrived at the basement level and stepped out to find Stillman sitting in the car. When he was inside, Stillman started the engine and drove toward the exit. “Look for a phone,” he said.
As soon as they were out on the street, Walker saw a pay telephone beside a restaurant. “There.” Stillman pulled to the curb, got out, and made a call. After a few minutes, he came back and drove off.
“I just called American Airlines,” he said. “I checked on her flight from New York to Zurich to see if it fit what she wrote down.”
“Does it?”
“Of course it does,” said Stillman. “While I had them on the line, I thought I’d ask whether there was a direct flight to Zurich from here tonight. There is. One a day, in fact. And there are still seats available. Odd, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” said Walker.
“The only reason I can think of to fly to Zurich is if you want to get to Zurich,” Stillman said. “Am I getting through to you?”
“Yeah. We lost them,” said Walker. “Can you call somebody in Zurich to meet their plane or something?”
“I would if I were a cop,” said Stillman. “If I were a cop, I’d do a lot of things like that, because I could afford
