“Is Mistretta with you?”
“Yes, he’s right here.”
“Then let me talk to him.”
Elizabeth handed the phone to Joe, who listened intently for a few seconds and then said, “Yeah, it’s possible she’s right, but we’re still looking it over.”
He listened again, then said, “The police didn’t think so. No. Too obvious, I guess. The window latch was the first thing they went for after the corpse was moved. They said no indication of forced entry.”
He was silent for a moment. “Yeah, that too. Of course. We’ll keep you posted.”
Mistretta hung up and chuckled. “That’s something, isn’t it?” he said to Elizabeth. “We earn our pay on this one all right. Which do you want to work on first? Proving a man came in through the locked fourth-floor window because there are no fingerprints, or figuring out how he arrived at the idea of using curare on the old guy’s false teeth when he got here? I don’t suppose the MO file will help much on this one, unless it was a South American pygmy we’re looking for.” He shook his head and the false bravado began to fade.
Elizabeth wasn’t looking at him, though. She was standing before the window with both hands in front of her. “Pygmies don’t live in South America,” she muttered absently, staring at her reflection.
“I suppose we’d better get the forensics people back up here,” he said, picking up the telephone again.
Elizabeth didn’t turn, just said, “Yes. I’d like to be here when they come.” She’d never noticed that before, she thought. When you press your palms against a flat surface, the tips of your fingers are just exactly shoulder height. If you allowed for shoe soles, five foot ten? Six feet? They’d measure it, though. You could always count on them to measure.
Hart came into the room, bringing with him his notepad, still scribbling on it. He said, “I heard a phone ring. Was it the lab report?”
“That’s right,” said Elizabeth. “It was curare that was put into the glass where he soaked his dentures, believe it or not. Mixed with his Polident.”
“What’s the report on the rest of his stuff? Any curare or containers for it?” He seemed to Elizabeth to be hiding his surprise at the poison and it annoyed her a little. How could he not be surprised?
“No,” she said tonelessly.
“Then I’d say we have only a few things we can check on,” he said. “One is that somebody close enough to him to get into his luggage put poison on one of the Polident tablets and only one. Maybe his assistant or whoever packed his bags. Another is that somebody tampered with them between Washington and here.” He hesitated for a moment, but Elizabeth wasn’t going to help him, since he hadn’t had the decency to be surprised. Then he said, “But I’d say the least unlikely thing is that somebody came in through the window.”
“The forensics people are on their way up now to check the window out,” said Mistretta. “Elizabeth figured it out a little while ago.”
“Good thinking, Elizabeth,” he said, with apparent sincerity.
Elizabeth wasn’t ready to accept the compliment. Patronizing bastards, all of them. She was past that part of it anyway, thinking about the killer. He had to be athletic, or at least fit, to be able to go from any other room to this one. No matter how it was done he still had to get from one balcony to another in the cold and dark. That probably meant he wasn’t over forty. He was between five foot nine and six feet tall. And he was sneaky. God, he was sneaky.
There was something clean about the sun in Las Vegas. Even in February there was a searing, blinding white light that made you feel as if you were being sterilized, even cauterized, so there wasn’t a germ that could stick to you. Everything extraneous would be burned off your skin, desiccated and sucked dry, its empty husk blown clattering away in the hot wind out of the desert. Even the air itself felt like that—a breeze that carried with it tiny abrasive particles of ground-up quartz and topaz too small to see. You could feel them buffing and polishing away at you.
He rolled over on his stomach. Better be careful the first time out. Getting a sunburn on top of all those scrapes and bruises would be about the limit of what he could endure. He could already feel the sun gradually heating up his back and shoulders, breathing its energy into them so that moment by moment the temperature of his skin rose in infinitesimal gradients. In a few more minutes, he decided, he’d go back to his room and get cleaned up, then take a nice long nap before dinner. Your body heals faster while you sleep, he thought. There was no reason to think about anything at all until Friday night. Friday was payday.
The soft electronic female voices were alternating on the public address system: “Telephone for Mr. Harrison Rand. Harrison Rand, telephone. Telephone for Princess Karina. Princess Karina, telephone,” a steady murmur going out across the swimming pool from nowhere in particular, the volume just high enough to flicker across the corner of your consciousness. There was no more urgency to it than the constant whir and click of the slot machines in the casino. This, he thought, was the only place he knew of where clock time didn’t matter. You measured time against the size of your bankroll—unless you were lying on a chaise longue next to the swimming pool, he remembered. Then the sun would damned well remind you what time it was if you weren’t careful. Enough for today.
He sat up and put on the dark brown terrycloth robe and zoris he’d picked up in one of the hotel stores this afternoon. Then he changed his mind again. The vast empty surface of the swimming pool sparkled at him. There was time enough for one more dip in the water, he thought. There was no reason not to do exactly as he pleased, and swimming was good for you—the best thing in the world for damaged muscles, and it would be time to stop when you didn’t feel like it anymore.
The water was warm, almost hot, like a gigantic Roman bath. He swam lazily from one end to the other, testing the flex and fluidity of his muscles against the solidity and support of the water. It had always struck him as funny that they should have a heated pool that was twice the size of the ones they used in the Olympics, and that he should be alone in it every time. People who were serious about swimming didn’t drive through the desert to do it. He stopped at the shallow end and let himself go limp in the warm water, feeling the deliciousness of it, held there as though by a broad, gentle hand. He floated on his back, surveying the people sprawled on lawn chairs, absorbing the sunlight. Most of them had probably been up all night, he thought. Gambling, drinking, fucking, and now they were recharging their batteries by the energy of the sun. No, they weren’t swimmers, but it seemed to comfort them to be near all that water. Something to look at through your polarized sunglasses while you waited for night.
He swam back to the deep end, acutely aware of the workings of his muscles as he stroked. He was going to be all right. Everything felt exactly as he wanted it to. At least his body did. His head was going to take longer. It felt big and soft and sensitive today, a peeled pumpkin held in anxious balance on a neck too thin for it. Just so there weren’t any scars on his face. The pain he could live with.
He pulled himself up out of the pool and flopped down on his chaise longue. In a few seconds he could feel the water on his body disappearing into the parched desert air, leaving his skin feeling tight. He let the sun settle its gentle pressure on his face for a few moments before he put on his sunglasses. Then he closed his eyes and let himself slip into a state that felt as good as sleep but wasn’t quite a relinquishment of consciousness. “Telephone for Mr. Arthur Walters. Arthur Walters, telephone. Telephone for Mrs. Natalie Beamish, Natalie Beamish, telephone,” crooned the soft unanxious voices in monotonous alternation.
“You do all that to yourself or did you have help?” said a voice above him. His eyes flicked open for an instant like camera shutters behind the sunglasses, and brought back with them into the darkness an imprint of the familiar, hulking shape. Little Norman.
“You know how it is, Little Norman,” he answered. “You want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” He heard the scrape as Little Norman dragged a lawn chair across the pavement to his side. Little Norman. The first thing anybody said when he heard the name was that he never wanted to see Big Norman. Little Norman was six foot four without his hand-tooled Mexican cowboy boots, and must have weighed in at two-fifty without the two rolls of quarters he always had in his pockets. As if those fists needed the extra weight. And Little Norman was no longer young. He had to be at least fifty-five and semiretired, so that wasn’t it either.
“What brings you to Caesar’s Palace, Little Norman?” he said. “I thought you hung around at the Sands.”
