The Fat Innkeeper (26 page)

A strange idea came to Am. He considered explaining, but it was too late. Besides, the idea was far-fetched.

“Let’s leave them,” he said. “The drink’s too rich for my blood anyway.”

They waited for the valet to bring Marisa’s car to the front of the Hotel. Am always thought the Hotel was particularly beguiling
at night. Beyond the entryway, soft lights illuminated the gardens, the coastal clouds adding a fairy-tale mist. The Hotel
always dressed up for the evening, her antique lines accentuated by the shadows. She was an ageless storybook setting, a place
where once-upon-a-times began. The gentle ocean breeze circulated pleasant promises, the scents of jasmine, gardenia, and
roses making wonderful chemistry with the brine. Swaying palm trees lined the road, gently dancing to some airy tune and the
rhythm of the sounding ocean.

“I enjoyed myself tonight,” Marisa said, “even though I’m leaving with more questions than when I arrived.”

They had dissected the motive for someone’s wanting to murder Dr. Kingsbury. There were reasons aplenty, revenge heading the
list. Besides Skylar and Brother Howard, there were countless others that the doctor had exposed. Fear could have also contributed
to his murder. Brother Howard, in particular, must have been feeling vulnerable. He had already been driven out of one business
by Kingsbury, and just as he was starting another, the doctor had turned up. Adding gasoline to the fire was a game that Kingsbury
evidently relished. He had confronted both Skylar and Brother Howard in front of crowds, had acted as if he were ready to
duel with them again. Were there others the doctor had challenged?

“I enjoyed myself, too,” said Am.

“We shouldn’t have, though, should we?” she asked. “I mean, here we are looking into the death of a man.”

“You needn’t feel guilty,” said Am. “And you don’t have to take my word, you can take Kingsbury’s: ‘Be positive.’”

She smiled, raised her face up to his. “Yes, that’s right, isn’t it?”

Her smile, and upturned face, remained looking at him for a long moment. Was that an invitation, or was she just being friendly?
Should he kiss her? Hadn’t they just agreed there was nothing to be guilty about?

A screech of tires interrupted the moment. The headlights of Marisa’s red Mazda Miata spotlighted Am’s uncertainty. The car
came to a sudden halt, and the valet jumped out and opened the door. They walked over to the car. Am had already validated
her parking, but there was the matter of a tip. The valet gratefully accepted her money, but still stood sentry, waiting to
close the door behind her.

“I’ll tuck her in,” said Am.

“Yes, sir,” said the valet, and took off at a run. There were others waiting for their cars.

They both laughed a little, and then laughed a little more, neither knowing what to say, or how to end their evening. “I’ll
call you,” she said. “The autopsy results are supposed to be announced sometime tomorrow, which means I’m going to be busy
writing a story.”

“And I’ll be following up on a few leads,” said Am. He almost told her about his idea again, but held off.

“Thanks for everything,” she said, extending her hand.

He started to shake it, then brought her hand up to his lips and kissed it instead. Marisa got into her car without saying
anything, barely acknowledged him with a wave as she closed the door and drove off. Am couldn’t help but wonder if he had
misread the situation, if he had put his personal interpretation on professional friendliness.

Her car had to do a loop to get out. He was still standing at the curb when she passed by. Her return message to him wasn’t
in Morse code, and wasn’t hard to interpret. The headlights of the Miata opened and closed, gave as blatant a wink as was
automotively possible. And then the roadster sped off.

Am wasn’t sure how long it took him to notice he was being summoned, but the voice on the walkie-talkie sounded absolutely
peevish by the time he responded.

“This is Am,” he said.

Flanders had the graveyard dispatch. He had started him on his workday, sending him off to see Takei over sixteen hours ago.
Am wondered if his day would ever end.

“About time,” said Flanders. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

His last words were hopeful. The Hotel grapevine, which circulated any personal information faster than light, was obviously
in good working order.

“What do you have?” asked Am.

“Call came in at twenty-three hundred and…” There was a pause while Flanders tried to figure out military time. He soon gave
up. “At ten minutes before midnight.” Am had to endure the rattling of papers over the walkie-talkie. Flanders was the least
officious of all the dispatchers, just one of the reasons he worked graveyard. There are some people who are made for the
vampire shift, who know they don’t fit in with people who circulate during the light of day. Flanders was one of those.

“We got us a code…” Some more shuffling of papers. “…a code green in the Crown Jewel Suite.”

Code green, thought Am. Green was, he remembered, a suspected break-in of a guest room. When Chief Horton had made up the
color codes, his logic had been that burglars usually took “the green.”

“If I were you, Am,” said Flanders, “I’d go up armed.”

Alarmed, Am asked, “Armed?”

“Lady’s none too pleased,” Flanders said.

He should lecture Flanders about dispatch protocol, order him to switch to the alternate channel and pointedly, graphically,
even, describe how many goddamn hours he’d been at the Hotel and how he didn’t need any of his crap. But Am was too tired
to expend that kind of energy, and this wasn’t something he could delegate. You don’t send an underling to Lady Death.

“Okay,” he said.

“Ten-four,” said Flanders. The words sounded like “tent floor.” Flanders was chewing on something, probably another jelly
doughnut.

Lady Death was surprised to see him. It was usually the other way around. She was waiting outside her room, and looked as
if she were afraid to go inside. Am reintroduced himself, and announced his position at the Hotel. Angela said she had figured
Am for some other Hotel capacity, something he was pleased to hear, but the rest of what she had to say wasn’t so pleasant.

“I arrived back at the Hotel just minutes ago,” she said. “And found,… well… you’ll see.”

He entered the room and she followed, quite clearly wanting him to lead the way. “In the next room,” she said. “On the bed.”

Am walked into the room and saw that someone had come in after turndown and left more than good-night mints on the pillows.
The bedspread had been pulled back, the white sheets apparently a better backdrop for the bloodlike lettering that had been
left: R.I.P. Beneath the large red letters were torn-out pictures of Angela Holliday and the word
DEAD
.

“I assume they found my books,” she said, “and ripped out my picture, and that particular word, from the book covers.”

For once, “dead” didn’t seem to be Lady Death’s favorite word. It only took Am moments to confirm her suspicion. Several dozen
of her books lay strewn on the floor, their covers torn apart.

“Did you notice anything else of yours missing or disturbed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hang around after seeing that message. I ran from the room and found a house phone. I doubt whether
my call to the front desk made much sense.”

“You did the right thing,” said Am.

He turned on some more lights, then stopped at the bar and picked up a comfortable cudgel, a bottle of wine, before starting
his exploration. Am methodically made his way through the suite. With each step he became more and more convinced that the
suite had been designed for paranoia. There were too many places for a potential assailant to be hiding. His search took in
bathrooms, walk-in closets, cabinets, sofas, beds, armoires, and hidden corners. In the suite’s second bathroom Am discovered
the “blood” on the sheets—two empty bottles of red fingernail polish. The bottles had been tossed at the mirror above the
sink, causing the glass to crack in several places. Someone had seven years of bad luck coming.

Angela entered the bathroom behind Am, gasped as she saw the damage. Through the cracked reflection he watched as she raised
her hand up to her mouth. Her pale features were now preternaturally so. In another circumstance, with another person, Am
might have thought she had seen the dead.

“The fingernail polish yours?” he asked.

She moved closer, examined the labels without touching them. “They’re my brand,” she said. Angela searched through her cosmetics
bag, and confirmed they had been taken from there. As far as she could determine, nothing else was missing.

He continued examining the suite. There were no more surprises, nothing else out of the ordinary. Am was thorough, even went
so far as to open the Steinway baby grand piano, but found only a little dust. He made a mental note for housekeeping.

His inside search concluded, Am turned the balcony lights on and went outside. No one was lurking behind the planters, or
hiding under the patio furniture. There was only the ocean, calling from seven floors below. He looked for signs of forced
entry, but didn’t see any. Then he checked the two entry doors to the suite, which didn’t appear to have been tampered with
either.

“Was the door locked when you returned?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And are all your own keys accounted for?”

“I was only given one,” she said, “and I still have it.”

Takei had promised him they’d be getting electronic locks by next spring. There had been relatively few problems with the
automatic dead bolts currently in use at the Hotel, but there was the constant concern of outstanding keys. Security was good
about rekeying rooms with unaccounted-for keys, and keeping an accurate key inventory, but they weren’t perfect. Human error
couldn’t be ignored either, with guests often not shutting their doors completely, and housekeepers forgetting to lock all
the windows and sliding glass doors. Since the Crown Jewel Suite had two entry doors, it was only too possible that one could
have inadvertently been left open. Thieves were opportunists. But Am reminded himself that this wasn’t a case of a thief calling,
but a terrorist.

“Have you received any other threats?” Am asked.

“One,” she said in a small voice. “Just yesterday. I was doing a radio show. After we finished I was told I had a call. I
identified myself, and this voice said, ‘Speaker for the dead? Dead will be your first language very soon.’ And then he hung
up.”

“He?”

“Yes. The voice was muffled but it was male.”

“Do you have any enemies?”

“None that I know of.”

Am called the Rover on his walkie-talkie, told him to come to the Crown Jewel Suite to rekey the room, then turned back to
Lady Death. “Would you prefer sleeping in another room tonight?” he asked. “I can assure you total anonymity. No one will
know where you are.”

She ran a hand through her platinum-blond hair, sighed, then shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard for me to
think clearly.”

“Why don’t we sit down?” Am suggested.

The suite offered too many choices of where to sit. Angela hesitated, and then steered him over to the bar area. “Can I get
you anything to drink?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

“It was such a long day,” she said. “All I wanted to do was get some sleep. Now I’m afraid to sleep.”

She walked behind the bar, found a glass, and started looking through the bottles.

“How’d your signing go?”

“I have writer’s cramp.”

“Isn’t that good?”

She nodded. “But if it’s going to be like this for the next three months, I think I’ll be referring to my publishing contract
as a pact with the devil.”

Lady Death poured from a familiar bottle. Am took a closer look. “Goldschlager,” he said.

“Yes. Funny, first time I tried this was a few days ago. I had never even heard of it. But I enjoyed it so much I had room
service bring me up a bottle.”

In a courtroom, lawyers don’t like to ask questions of witnesses when they’re not already sure of the answer. “How’d you happen
to try it?” Am asked, knowing that Dr. Kingsbury had been seen drinking with a younger blond woman.

“Tom Kingsbury,” she said sadly. Angela looked at the drink as if she should be questioning its heritage, sighed, then took
another sip. “I was… unprepared for his death,” she said. “He was so vital.”

Anyone else would have said they were upset to hear about his death, but that sentiment wouldn’t have gone with the philosophy
Lady Death preached.

“How did you happen to know him?”

“I met him for the first—and last—time the night I arrived. I had filled out one of his questionnaires and he wanted to speak
to me, but with our schedules it was tough finding a time good for both of us. We arranged to meet the night before the conference
began. I had a late flight in, but he said that was okay, because he was a night owl.”

“What kind of questions did he ask you?”

Lady Death didn’t appear comfortable with the inquiry. “Why do you want to know?”

“Tomorrow,” said Am, “we suspect the coroner will be announcing that Dr. Kingsbury did not die a natural death.

” She didn’t immediately react. When she did, it wasn’t as Am would have expected. “I should have known,” she said.

“Why?”

“He wasn’t a man on his last legs. Far from it. I got the distinct feeling he was less interested in my out-of-body experiences
than in my body itself.”

Lady Death shifted slightly on the barstool. She had on a black jumpsuit that closely followed the lines of her trim figure.
If the doctor’s academic interest had waned, Am could certainly understand why.

“What made you think that?”

“Looks, comments. You don’t need to be a mind reader to see the obvious. He asked me the appropriate medical questions, but
I think he would have much preferred playing doctor to being interviewer.”