“Hey, man, don’t be so negative,” Willie chided. “Too early for bad vibes.”
“Take a train,” I told Joe Billy. “The Musketeers will soldier on without you.”
“Mail me a little medal when you get your big ones, okay?”
“Negativity sucks, you know?” Willie said, continuing his soliloquy. “You gotta think positive as you travel the road of life. Tommy gets prosecuted, they’ll probably let him plead to desecration of a body or obstructin’ justice, something like that. Hell, he’ll only be in eight, ten years max.”
“Desecration of a body?”
“Yeah. You know, fuckin’ a corpse, something along those lines. Tommy will make out all right. Have faith.”
Easy enough for Willie to say, but mine was shaken an hour later, after we parked on a narrow east-west street just north of the Hilton. Willie was listening on the bugs, I was working the computer making a digital recording, and Joe Billy was munching a banana, three spies in the house of love, when Willie asked, “Who in hell are these people, anyway?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“You listen a while. You tell me what we’re listenin’ to.” He handed me the earphones.
A guy and a gal, talking about getting it on with another couple they knew from Tampa. The guy sounded lukewarm, the woman enthusiastic, trying to persuade him.
“What suite are they in?”
“Royston’s.”
“Naw.”
“Yep.”
“These aren’t the right people. That couldn’t be Royston. His wife is in Washington.”
“For Christ’s sake, I know that, Tommy. These are two goddamn swingers from California. They were talking about car dealerships in L.A. a minute ago. Who are they?”
I called Sarah Houston, woke her up, sounded like. “We’ve got a problem. Get on your computer and find out who the hotel put in these suites we bugged.”
“Please.”
“Get on your computer, please.”
“Okay.”
She called back twelve minutes later. “They’re registered as a Mr. and Mrs. Bronson Whitworth from Beverly Hills, California.”
Joe Billy and Willie were both wearing earphones now. “It’s the woman she’s got the hots for,” Joe Billy said gleefully. “This one’s a switch-hitter.”
“What suite did the hotel put Royston in?”
I slapped one phone on my left ear in time to hear the woman say, ‘Bronnie, you can watch. You know how much you enjoy that.”
He didn’t think the convention was the place.
“Royston’s party is in Penthouse Ten, Twelve, and Fourteen,” Sarah said.
“We bugged Fifteen, Seventeen, and Nineteen.” “A delegation from California got all three of those suites. Someone shuffled the parties around. There is a notation in Royston’s reservation about a good view. Royston must have demanded a view room.”
“What suite is Dorsey O’Shea in?”
In the silence that developed while she checked, I heard the woman in the suite cooing softly in my left ear.
“They’re gettin’ it on,” Willie announced gleefully. “She’s goin’ to screw him around to her way of thinkin’.”
“God almighty,” Joe Billy said with a smile on his face. “Wish we had put a little video camera in there.”
“What is going on?” Sarah asked. Apparently she could hear the comments of my colleagues.
“Gimme Dorsey’s room number, huh? I don’t want to run into her when I’m in the hotel trotting around.”
“You’re going in again?”
“Someone has to move the bugs. I planted everything we brought.”
“Twelve twenty-one,” she said crisply. Then she added with a trace of envy in her voice, “She paid several hundred extra for the room. It must be a small suite.”
“Next time around inherit some money, please,” I snarled, and snapped the cell phone shut. Damn women, anyway.
Years ago I learned that prior planning prevents piss-poor results. I call it my P5R rule. Sarah could check to ensure the master code I had put in my plastic door pass the other day was still in use. Or I could put in the new code. Getting into the rooms was not the problem.
However, getting in without arousing the suspicions of the people monitoring the hallway surveillance cameras was a problem. Unfortunately my suit, white shirt, and tie were in the motel room in New Jersey, and I didn’t want to drive two hours to retrieve them. Should have brought them along, just in case.
I left Willie and Joe Billy to be audio voyeurs and got out on the sidewalk to walk and think about the problem.
I didn’t have enough cash left to pay for a suit, and my Zack Winston credit card was bogus. I had high hopes that I would eventually be able to convince the powers that be that I had been merely defending myself and others since that Tuesday at the Greenbrier River safe house, but I didn’t want to try to explain credit card fraud. Some people get downright pissy about money.
If I used my own personal credit card, would it light up alarms in Dell Royston’s universe?
Maybe I should go back to Jersey and get the damned suit. We couldn’t move the van without losing the parking place, and I didn’t want to waste cash on a taxi.
What the heck, I had plenty of time. I couldn’t go into those rooms until the people were out of them. The dinner hour would be the most likely time.
Over on the East Side on Lexington I found a large men’s shop that opened at ten. Looking in the window, I thought I saw some sports coats on manikins that might fit. The problem is my shoulders and arms, which are so big that an off-the-rack coat that I can get around my shoulders doesn’t hang right around my small waist.
I strolled along soaking in the sights, sounds, and smells of New York, had a bagel and cup of coffee at a small breakfast place, then wandered back up Lexington to arrive at the men’s shop a few minutes after ten.
The owner was a former prizefighter, I surmised. Scars on his eyebrows, one permanently mashed ear, and huge shoulders and arms.
“You have a pair of trousers and a sports coat that might fit me without alteration?”
“You some kind of athlete, ain’t you?”
“Rock climbing.”
‘Yeah. I got the stuff to fit guys who work out, take care of themselves. Lot of pro athletes come here for their duds. Not the high dollar guys, but the guys who watch their wallets.”
“That sticker in the window says you take credit cards.” “MasterCard and Visa.”
He did have a sports coat that didn’t make me look like an ape, and the price was reasonable. I decided the risk of using my own credit card was small, so I surrendered my Visa card with TOMMY CARMELLINI embossed on the bottom. He ran it through the machine, I signed the invoice, and he bagged my purchases, which included a tapered shirt and subdued tie.
Walking crosstown, I called Sarah. “Where are you?”
“Eating breakfast,” she said.
I told her what I needed. “I don’t want the entire surveillance camera system to crash, just temporarily go on the fritz floor by floor as I move around. I’ll call you on your cell.”
“The motel doesn’t have a high-speed Internet connection. I dropped off the Net twice this morning and had to log back on and go back into the system. Takes about four minutes to get through.”
“I don’t have the money to pick up another night at the Hilton, Sarah, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I don’t have the bucks either. No, I was merely warning you that there may be problems.”
“Okay. Warning received.”
“You’re going into Dorsey’s room, aren’t you?”
