37
The radiance of the sun just rising behind the horizon outside the east windows made entering the big conference room at dawn feel like walking into a dream. The light was beautiful, golden. In a few minutes it would shine through the broad, moist leaves of the jungle plants outside the glass with such intensity that the droplets left over from the three-thirty watering would evaporate in minutes. But the sky to the west was still that deep purple- blue of the desert night that made the colors of the Las Vegas lights glow brighter, like millions of flares burning at once.
Max Foley looked around the room and verified with mild satisfaction that he was the first to arrive. He supposed it wasn’t surprising. The complexity of Buckley’s mind seemed to Foley to have been built up like a muscle by a lifetime of worrying about eighty things at once. He had probably spent much of the night getting up over and over to see if any news had come in. Salateri had probably spent most of his night screaming into his telephone to find out why it hadn’t. All three partners had been living in their suites upstairs for two months, and it was starting to feel like a siege.
Foley walked to the private bathroom at the far end of the room and knocked, then opened the door with his key. He glanced at the key, as he often did, before he put it back in his pocket. There were only three copies of that key. He had seen them listed once on the roster for the hotel complex: Universal Grand Masters. They were the keys to the kingdom. They would open any lock that any other key in the hotel would open, and a few more besides. “We three kings of Orient-Tar,” as his kids used to say. That was—what? Two marriages back, before he had become rich enough to make giving away half his visible assets too steep a price for getting laid now and then. Foley stared in the mirror at his shave, combed his hair, and went back out into the conference room, then looked at his watch. It was after five o’clock, and he was getting impatient.
Foley walked to the end of the vast conference table and sat down in his chair. He glanced at the three identical piles of newspapers that had been left here for the partners and picked up the paper on the top of this morning’s pile. It was the
“Montana State Police confirmed that Calvin Seaver, the Nevada man held for questioning in the shooting, has been ruled out as a suspect and released.”
The muscles in Foley’s shoulders and elbows locked. He let the newspaper drop from his hands as he tried to reconcile what he had read with what he knew. Foley and his partners had sent Seaver out to find Hatcher and kill him. A man had been shot. Seaver had been caught a few miles away with the murder weapon in his motel room, powder residue on him, and false identity papers. Foley had always acknowledged that there was some remote possibility that Seaver might not be convicted of the murder—there could be warrant problems or something—but the notion that he would be released had never entered Foley’s mind.
Foley’s eyes fell on the pile of newspapers in front of Buckley’s seat. He leaned forward and lowered his head to be certain. Yes, if he looked at it from the side, he could see an indentation in the shape of a circle. Buckley had set his coffee cup on the newspaper. Buckley had been here and gone.
Foley studied Salateri’s pile of newspapers, but they seemed to be untouched. He swung his chair around, picked up the telephone, dialed Salateri’s suite, and let the phone ring fifteen times.
He walked out of the room to the partners’ private elevator and used his Universal Grand Master key to activate it, then rode it back up to the thirtieth floor. He rapped on Salateri’s door, then kept knocking until his knuckles were sore and the knocks grew fainter. He took out his key and unlocked the door.
Foley pushed the door open, stepped into the big living room, and surveyed the rest of the suite through doors left ajar. Drawers had been yanked out of the built-in dressers to be dumped into suitcases, then thrown on the floor. Salateri had not even bothered to close the floor safe and push the antique Persian rug over it after it was empty.
Foley went out, locked the door, and walked along the hallway and up the fire stairs to Buckley’s suite. He unlocked Buckley’s door and took in a sharp breath. The place looked untouched. Maybe Buckley was asleep in one of the bedrooms. Foley stepped in, closed the door behind him, and took two steps toward the master bedroom before he noticed the painting over the sideboard. The Matisse on the wall had been replaced by a reproduction of a Watteau. Foley spun around to look at the lighted glass display case on the wall behind him. The spot that Buckley had designed as a shrine for his Faberge egg was now occupied by a small black-and-orange urn that had curly- headed Greek wrestlers squaring off along the sides. To Foley it looked about as real as the ones in museums, but he knew better. It was a cheap fake, and Buckley was gone.
Foley stepped from room to room in the suite and savored Buckley’s premeditation. He had left nothing here that was likely to be of value, but a casual observer would not have noticed that anything was gone. Buckley must have spent several nights packing up treasures, slipping them out of the hotel, and replacing them with junk. No, Foley decided. This was all too elaborate. Buckley had probably been preparing for something like this for years, the way people in flood zones kept a bag packed.
Foley closed this door behind him too and locked it, then walked down two flights to his own suite. As he packed his suitcases he tried to estimate the dimensions of his problem.
Seaver had been hired because he was a cold-blooded, competent watchdog. Now he was a watchdog with rabies. He was already locked inside the house with the family, and he was certain to be getting the urge to bite somebody. He must have used his cop experience and credentials and connections to cut himself a spectacular deal. But a spectacular deal was something like a short sentence, or even a reduced charge, not a free ticket on a murder. What did Seaver have to offer that the cops wanted more than they wanted the man who had shot some hapless schmuck through a restaurant window? There was only one possibility. He must have given them a sniff of the project in upstate New York.
Foley tested the opposite point of view. Suppose Seaver had not turned informant? If Seaver had an alibi, the cops would have had to let him go. God knew, if anybody could set up a solid alibi and go kill somebody, it was Seaver. But the thought only gave Foley a sick feeling. Hiring a couple of killers to go after a nice, gentle kid like Pete Hatcher was one thing. Sending a team of thugs to stab a man like Calvin Seaver in jail and having them arrive after he was loose was another. Seaver was an old pro, and the ones looking for him were a pick-up team of second-stringers hastily assembled and sent into the game without a plan. Even if he didn’t know yet that his bosses had sent killers to silence him, by now he knew that they had cut him loose when he got arrested. He had been made into an enemy.
If Seaver now had an impulse to come here and get past the security to pay his respects to his bosses, it was hard to imagine a way to stop him. He had designed the whole system personally, supervised the installation of the hardware, hired the men and told them where to stand. Making Seaver into an enemy had been the wrong decision.
Foley stopped himself. He had to fight this new, neurotic tendency to construct ways to blame himself for everything. This problem was not Foley’s fault. It wasn’t. He and Buckley and Salateri had been absolutely right to assume that Pete Hatcher was a threat. After waiting three months for the threat to be removed, they had been right to send Seaver out to handle it. That was his job, and they paid him more than enough to be entitled to assume he would do it. When Seaver bungled it and got arrested, they had been right in acting immediately to disassociate themselves from him and act to cut their losses. The only way Seaver could have gotten out of that mess was to talk.
Now Foley had to assume that Seaver was sitting in some secret, safe location—didn’t they usually put people like him on some military base?—giving investigators from Washington everything. In a day or less, there would be the F.B.I., the Justice Department, and the police agencies of several states. They would make travel impossible and staying here unthinkable.
A couple of days after that, there would be raids at the offices of politicians in Albany, New York. A few powerful old men in New York City would start to notice that there were a lot more parked delivery vans, and city crews digging up the streets near their favorite haunts. Those old bastards wouldn’t wait around for some grand
