It was that small act of consideration that finally made me reconsider what was happening to me. He wasn’t hurting me. He was hiding me.
Then I realized how quiet the building was.
If, by some miracle, Lisa had found help quickly and the police had arrived, there would have been lights and sound. They would have treated this as a hostage situation-it wouldn’t be quiet, like this.
Maybe it was just Lisa and the security guard. Maybe the security guard was trying to be John Wayne. Maybe he was silently looking for me while the police tried to find the place. After all, the Angelus probably hadn’t been operating as a hotel for over a decade…
But Lisa knew right where it was. Lisa, who wouldn’t have been out of high school when it closed. When I had spoken to her on the phone, I had asked, “Do you know where the Angelus Hotel is?” and she had answered “Yes.” Without hesitation.
But the implications of that made me argue against myself. Maybe she had seen the hotel mentioned in one of the papers in the attic. Or overheard Andre talk about it. Maybe Roberta told her that Lucas died in this hotel, and Lisa came by to see it. That didn’t seem likely. I tried to think of other explanations. I was sure there had to be one.
Sure, until I heard the stairwell door close at the end of the hallway. Whoever was coming onto this floor made no attempt to hide his or her presence.
She might have known where the hotel was by some other means, but Lisa wouldn’t have known which room he had died in, what floor it was on. Not unless she had been here on the night he died.
Had he been alive when she saw him?
I remembered what Two Toes, my “guardian angel,” had said when he last appeared before me, in the alley near my car. He spoke of Lucas being turned away from the shelter, coming to the hotel. He had said that Lucas had a guardian angel of his own:
Lucas had been alive.
Alive on a cold wet night visited by an angel carrying a thermos full of coffee. The thermos in the room was not Lucas’s thermos. Did Lisa have one? Maybe it was Jerry’s, filled with hot coffee from his kitchen, with the pills taken from the spare supply of heart medication from his cabinet-heart medication Jerry kept on hand to save his father’s life. This had been a different kind of emergency.
If Lucas had made it into the shelter, would she have gone in like a Good Samaritan? The director’s young friend Lisa, sharing coffee and visiting with an old friend? Or did she delay him in some way, make certain that he was too late to find a bed there?
Heart medication. It wouldn’t be such a difficult way to kill someone. In the coffee, it would have been tasteless. Heart medications are powerful drugs. What will save one person could kill another; enough of it will kill anyone. What had she said to him? The same thing she said to me? My father hid some papers in an attic? He’s never loved me, I want to help you?
I pictured Lucas beguiled by her. Compassionate, trusting her. Drinking the coffee until he had enough in his system to do the damage. In that moment of dizziness before he fell against the radiator, did he know? Clutching his ring against his chest, did he know his trust had been betrayed again?
I shuddered. Two Toes leaned his cheek against the top of my head, moved the arm around my waist to pat my back. Childlike.
Childlike. The thought that Andre’s daughter might be just as manipulative and ruthless as her father was one I didn’t like to face. The apple never falls too far from the tree, Jerry Selman had quoted to me. I had been looking at the wrong apple.
Lisa. Why?
Was she so angry with Andre ignoring her that she’d try to frame him for murder? Was that why she had come to me? To make me a party to the accusations? Get the newspaper reporter to say it, so that she didn’t have to? No wonder she was upset when I defended him in any way.
And now she had Ben’s calendar pages, Ivy’s faxes, the copy of Jeff McCutchen’s suicide note. How ironic that she didn’t need to frame Andre-he had probably already committed a murder.
The footsteps in the hallway were cautious, but steadily approaching. Two Toes seemed to notice that I wasn’t trying to struggle. He relaxed his grip. I wanted to communicate my trust to him somehow, but didn’t dare to even whisper. I couldn’t see his face, he couldn’t see the change in mine. He eased away slightly. I reached for his hand, gently squeezed it. He squeezed mine back, just as gently. He stood back a little more, dropped his arms, no longer covering my mouth or holding me to him.
A moment later, any remaining doubts I may have held on to, the slim, denying hope that said no one that I had cared for so much could have killed Lucas, vanished when I heard a sharp bang against the door to the hallway. It quickly banged again as it hit against a wall, sounding as if it had been kicked open.
“I’ve got a gun,” Lisa’s voice said from a slight distance. “Bring Irene out now.”
Two Toes reached for my face, found my mouth, and patted his fingers on my lips. I nodded as he held them there lightly. He then turned around slightly, his back to me.
I wondered if she really had a gun. We had heard her footsteps overhead, in the bar. Her knapsack. Had she gone back to retrieve a weapon?
“Do you hear me? I said to bring her out now!”
The air inside the closet seemed to be gone.
When we didn’t emerge, she called out, “I have magic, Mr. Jones. I’ll trade you my magic for Irene.”
Mr. Jones. She had learned Two Toes’ name, but not his street name. From Roberta, perhaps? Two Toes had been to the shelter. Was she hunting him, too?
Two Toes wasn’t quite as gullible as she hoped, it seems. He didn’t move.
“Irene?” Her voice was less cocky now. “Irene, try to make some sound. It’s the only way I can save you.”
Listening to her lie brought a bitter taste to my mouth.
I heard her walk cautiously into the room, her shoes making the same sound I had heard upstairs, as if she had something sticky on the soles of her running shoes.
The light of the flashlight played near the closet door. The footsteps were hesitant, unsure.
Suddenly there was a piercing noise-I barely registered what it was before gunfire rang out. The echo of the shot had hardly faded before I realized what the first noise was: my beeper, going off in the old iron, claw-foot bathtub.
The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the small room.
The beeper stopped.
“Now,” she said shakily, “you know I wasn’t lying about the gun.”
The beeper went off again.
“Shut that thing off!” she shouted.
It continued.
She fired again; I heard the sound of something shattering, probably the bathroom mirror. The gun seemed to be fired near us. She had to be standing to one side of the bathroom door, firing through it, into the bathroom.
The beeper stopped for a moment, started up again.
“Come out of that bathroom, or I’m coming in!” she shouted, her voice not far from the closet.
The beeper stopped.
It occurred to me that with the flashlight in one hand and the gun in the other, she didn’t have a hand free. Her steps moved nearer the bathroom door.
“Do it!” she shouted. “Do it now!”
As if obeying her order, Two Toes burst out of the closet like a berserker, screaming as he launched himself into the room. I followed, staying low.
Lisa had turned at the sound, the flashlight beam spinning our way. The surprise kept her from taking aim, but she fired the gun as Two Toes leapt at her.
He grunted as he tackled her to the floor, grabbing her right wrist, tearing the gun from her hand and sending
