“Try your key,” I told Paul as I stepped out of the way.
He did. Red light. A frown and six seconds of thought brought me to Plan B.
“The computer must have switched our keys off by mistake, or maybe we just got them wet or something. Why don’t you take your key down to the front desk and have them restrip it, and I’ll stay here and keep trying to make mine work?”
“You got it.”
Insanity, according to Einstein, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Embarrassment, according to Jakubek, would be having someone from Guest Services take the key I’d been futzing with and make it work the first time he tried it. I preferred insanity to embarrassment. I waited ten seconds, inserted my key-card into the slot, and slid it home again.
Green light!
I shoved the handle down and pushed the door open. I was about to charge into the dark room when something stopped me—namely, that the room was dark. I was sure I’d left the entryway light on when we took off earlier in the evening. Plus, I just wasn’t getting an empty vibe from this room. Feeling conspicuously moronic, I stood there on the threshold for five or ten seconds, trying to imagine some way to slip my right hand in far enough to flip the light switch while still keeping the rest of my body anchored in the hall.
The door suddenly jerked all the way open and a startling black-and-white blur slammed into me. I’d reflexively retreated a step or two down the hall, and so instead of bouncing me off the opposite wall the blur knocked me fanny-over-shoulders onto and then quickly off of the room service cart. I smeared my hair abundantly with mayonnaise, barbecue sauce, and green beans. I stumbled to my feet just in time for the assailant to smash a muscular forearm across my nose and lips. Now, that was just unnecessary. No way was I going to give him or her any argument about leaving, which was apparently what the assailant had in mind.
That’s when I heard a full-throated roar from Paul: “hooooo-rawwwww!” That probably wasn’t what Hemingway yelled when he was defending James Joyce from bar bullies in 1920s Paris, but it sounded good to me.
Charging down the hall like the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, Paul half tackled and half fell on my assailant, making up in ferocious enthusiasm what he lacked in pugilistic art. I only had a blurry view of what happened next. I saw both combatants scramble to their feet, and heard rather than saw something drop from one of the burglar’s pockets. Paul took two or three punishing punches to his ribcage and I could tell they got to him, but he didn’t give an inch. I had visions of Norman Mailer punching out Gore Vidal as Paul landed a jab of his own.
Then, the burglar backed up a couple of feet—and Paul took the bait. He launched into another bull rush, and the next thing I knew his feet were brushing the ceiling as the burglar flipped him over his (or her) shoulder and then let gravity take him ungently to the floor. In the quarter-second between the time Paul’s butt landed and the moment his feet hit the carpet, the burglar had taken off in the opposite direction, without bothering to retrieve the dropped article. With a start I realized that it was my pink, digital camera. Why would anyone want that?
While we wait for Paul to get up, I will share with you the entire description of the burglar that I would have been able to give the police if we’d bothered to report this business: He or she—I really didn’t have the first idea which—was wearing a black-and-white room service waiter’s uniform and the worst black wig I have ever seen in my life. I mean worse than Donald Trump’s. We’re talking neo-Stalinist crap.
Paul bounced up, with obvious designs on pursuing the burglar. I figured that if he did there were two things that could happen, and both were bad. I managed a grunt suggestive of hideous pain. After an instant of agonized indecision, Paul decided that I should get priority.
He took me tenderly by the shoulders and scrutinized the mess where my face used to be.
“Are you okay?”
“A little wobbly, but I’ll live.”
What did we do about all the other guests who rushed out into the hall to see what the commotion was about? This is New York! No one came out. We would have had our rumble and its aftermath in total privacy if it hadn’t been for a guy in workout gear coming back to his room. He got off the elevator just in time to see me wincing as Paul lovingly kissed my lumpy nose and swollen lip.
“Take it inside, kids,” he said.
“Not a bad idea,” I told Paul. “Let’s see what’s missing.”
Chapter Fourteen
Nothing was missing. Neither of the computers, not a page of Paul’s manuscript, none of the notes or other stuff from my backpack, no clothing or personal effects. Paul’s macho Nikon camera, which was probably worth three times more than my smart little Minolta, was still there. My iPod and Kindle lay right where I’d left them. And if the burglar had searched the room, she (or he) had been pretty neat about it. Despite the fight-or-flight juice racing through our veins, we went over the room for a good ten minutes in an unhurried, methodical way. We checked and double-checked. Nada.
A question was nagging at me. I finally asked it about five minutes after we’d finished.
“How did you happen to come back just in the nick of time?”
Paul was standing about six inches from me, but I yelled the question so that he could hear me over the roar of the shower. I was washing green beans and barbecue sauce from my hair and he was soaping and rinsing my back. He was being a real gentleman about it, getting the job done without feeling me up.
“Well,” he said, as he sent a delicious tingle down my back by squeezing a wash cloth full of hot water at the nape of my neck, “just as I got to the elevators, I realized something. Namely, that the desk clerk wasn’t going to give me the time of day when I asked to have a key restripped for a room registered in somebody else’s name.”
“So you turned around and came back, with the idea of sending me downstairs.”
“Right. I reached the corridor just in time to see you auditioning for Cirque du Soleil.”
“Damn.” I felt like slapping myself. “I should have thought of that key deal.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. You were right about the big thing, which is that someone wanted us out of the room.”
“But I outsmarted myself on the timing. If the idea of the fax-scam was to get us out of the room, there’s no way the burglar should still have been there when we got back.”
“I can’t figure out how the whole fax-scam was supposed to work in the first place,” Paul said. “Calder & Bull could theoretically have gotten a fax to you here because it had contact information for you in Pittsburgh and it would have been automatically forwarded. But Calder & Bull apparently didn’t send the fax. How did the burglar know you’d be at the Hilton New York tonight?”
“My blog.” I shook my head at missing the obvious—again. “When I do the blog I’m living my life in public. I was so pumped about being in New York that I didn’t even think about it. Anyone who knows I’m Streetdreamer could have known that I’d be in New York this weekend, staying at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan.”
“That could be dozens of people.”
“Over a hundred, if my computer isn’t lying to me.”
I turned off the shower and we stepped onto a terrycloth bathmat. Paul handed a big, fluffy towel to me.
“Do we call security?” He took a towel for himself.
“I can’t see it. Especially with nothing missing. Worst case, they don’t believe us. Best case we get some undocumented alien fired for renting out a uniform and a pass-key.”
That was the end of our conversation for a while because Paul, being male, had already finished drying himself and was headed out of the bathroom. I toweled off vigorously and did some thinking while I was at it. I was playing with some pretty tough customers—like Vera Sommers, the “insurance recovery co
nsultant” who’d been doing a gumshoe number at the Bradshaw place. Along with Learned, she was shaping up as a pretty good guess for who was behind tonight’s little adventure.
I decided not to report to Mendoza until Sunday. I had one more thing I wanted to do in the room, but that figured to take about five minutes and the night would still be young. After the Damp Squib fiasco I was still hungry for a New York Saturday night. While I blew my hair dry, I came up with an idea: walk down Broadway until the Sunday Times came out, and then read it while we noshed on midnight pizza. I decided to try to sell it to Paul.
My inspired notion evaporated as soon as I stepped out of the bathroom. Paul was standing there barefoot, in jeans and a tee-shirt. He was sporting a goofy grin and holding out a bulky package that had been gift-wrapped either by a male or by a woman without opposable thumbs. Giving him a quizzical look followed by an expectant grin, I took the gift and set it on the bed to unwrap it.
Pajamas. Powder blue. Soft flannel. The bottoms had feet. A little big for me, but only a diva would quibble.
In my imagination I heard a disapproving cluck from Stacy Tarrant, my BFF from clerkship days. Stacy’s a very together lady, but after bad experiences with guys she lapses into oral italics and tends to use words like praxis a lot.
“A gift from a male is his projection of his image of you onto you,” the Stacy in my head lectured me. “That’s the reality of the praxis at work here. He’s infantilizing you, trying to turn you into Hillary Duff or something.”
Right. I spent more weekends alone than I should have in high school and college because males were afraid I’d castrate them with my tongue. What Paul was projecting onto me was his image that I’m way too cute to be sleeping in sweatshirts and gym shorts.
I’ll take it. I burst out laughing and jumped him for a hug.
All at once I knew what the rest of my New York Saturday night was going to be. I was going to climb into my new jammies and curl up to read the latest chapters in Paul’s manuscript while he sat at his keyboard until after one a.m. doing his obsessed artist thing. Why? Because I could tell that that was what Paul really wanted, and he was my guy.
But I still had that one thing to do. After I put the new jammies on and did a little runway stroll so that Paul could admire them on me, I handed one of the room keys to him.
“Step outside the door,” I told him. “I’ll throw the deadbolt from inside. After I do, try the key in the door.”
“Why?”
“To see if we get a red light instead of a green light.”
“We will.”
We did. The experiment took about thirty seconds, and it worked out the way I’d expected. If someone uses the key-card while the deadbolt is engaged, the key-card doesn’t unlock anything—not even the main lock.
“So that’s why you kept getting the red light,” Paul said. “While the burglar is in here, she wants some privacy, so she throws the deadbolt.”
“It’s ‘she’ now?”
“We’ll alternate, like in a law review article. I’ll do ‘she’ and you do ‘he.’”
“Works for me. And you’re right. I got a red light until I sent you downstairs in a voice loud enough for the burglar to hear. When the burglar figured there was only one person left to worry about, he undid the bolt. Green light, open door, Cindy on her butt.”
“So,” Paul said, “we’ve figured out everything except who the burglar actually was.”
“And why he went to all that trouble for a camera.”
“And why she was still here long after she had to assume we’d be back.”
“Maybe I should double-check that.” I strode over to the wastebasket under the desk where I’d chucked the fax. “Maybe I just remembered the time wrong.”
The fax wasn’t there. I was certain that I hadn’t thrown it away in the bathroom, but I checked the wastebasket there anyway. Nothing. I checked every other place I could think of where I might have thrown it or left it, and I didn’t find it.
“Well,” I said, “now we know what the burglar came for.”
“The fax?”
“The fax. Taking my camera was just a blind.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes sense if having the fax might help identify the person who sent it.”
“Even assuming that it could, the burglar couldn’t cover her tracks by taking the hard copy. The Hilton has a record of receiving it. Any information we could get from the hard copy we could get from the Hilton itself. Or the police could, at least.”
“Right,” I said. “We could. But the burglar couldn’t.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I think two different people were interested in getting into this room tonight.” I rattled the syllables out in staccato rhythm, like bullet points, as the theory took shape in my mind. “Why do I think that? Because there were two efforts to get us out of the room.”
“The fax and the free tickets to Saloon Singer.”
“Right. And the tickets to Saloon Singer would have kept us out until well after ten thirty if your ‘short notice’ crack hadn’t triggered my brainstorm during intermission.”
“Which means that the second burglar was working for Learned,” Paul said.
“And that Learned wanted the fax.”
“But why?”
“Because he noticed the fax and realized that it had to be phony. He assumed that whoever sent it is competing with him and is after something from me.”
“Which means the room got broken into twice tonight.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no—but we have to assume that it was.”
“Including by a first burglar who didn’t take anything—not even a fax.”
“Right.”
“Hmm,” Paul said. “So, what do we do about all this?”
“Nothing tonight.”
“What do you want to do for the rest of the night, then? It’s way too early to go to bed.”
“Do you know what I’d really like to do?” I asked.
“What?”
“I’d like to sit down with your manuscript while you work on the next chapter.”
He looked at me with wonder lighting his eyes.
“You are amazing,” he said.
“I get that a lot.”
Chapter Fifteen
His Paulness rolled over in bed and looked up groggily at me when I came back into the room around 9:25 Sunday morning. I found space on the desk for the tree-killer Sunday edition of the New York Times, a white sack holding a bagel and two croissants, and the Sunday bulletin from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Then I slid over to the in-room coffeemaker to try to figure out how to brew some of the packaged stuff that was included in the price of our room.
“Have you been up long?”
“Since the crack of 7:15.”
“7:15?” He yelped the time, as if that were some unthinkable predawn hour. “Why?”
“So I could make eight o’clock mass at St. Pat’s and pick up a little something to tide us over until we can go out somewhere for a real breakfast—because I am not going to pay the Hilton five dollars and fifty cents for the privilege of having someone charge me sixteen dollars for cold scrambled eggs.”
“You went to Mass?”
“Mm hmm.” I got the coffeemaker working. “Am I hearing an undertone of disapproval in your sexy baritone?”
“More like puzzlement. I mean isn’t what we did last night like, a serious no-no in the eyes of the Church?”
“No. Working on postmodern novels is okay. I looked it up.”
“No head games before I’ve had coffee,” Paul groused. “You know what I meant.”
“Oh, that: sharing sexual passion outside the bonds of holy matrimony. Yes, that is defin
itely against the rules.”
“So couldn’t you, like, burn in Hell forever for what we did?”
“No. Hell is for sins like blasphemy and eating meat on Good Friday. For fornication you spend eternity in Philadelphia.”
He blinked. It took him close to a second to get it. One of the fun things about unbelievers is that they’ll believe anything about Catholicism—anything. Then he jumped naked out of bed, hustled over to the table, and started scribbling in his notebook.
“Are you really going to work that little crack into your novel?”
“You bet. Just like your shot about Hillary Clinton flunking a bar exam.”
“I read that last night. I noticed you gave the straight line to his girlfriend and let Widget have the snapper.”
“That’s why we call it fiction.”
I didn’t bother explaining why I went to Mass on Sunday with a Saturday’s worth of sins on my unshriven soul. Probably eight hundred million adults on Planet Earth went to Mass that day, and all of them were sinners. To me, sharing love with my fiancé isn’t in the same league as promiscuous, recreational sex—something that did come up once or twice in my occasional confessions back in the day. If I thought that was the worst sin I’d have to confess at my final judgment, I’d already have my harp and wings picked out.
“Okay.” He turned around from the table. “What’s on today’s agenda?”
“Take your shower, get dressed, and enjoy your coffee and pastry while I e-mail Mendoza a report. Then we’ll find someplace on this magnificent island where we can read the Times without getting frostbite.”
The report took longer than I thought it would. By the time I hit SEND Paul was not only dressed, fed, and caffeinated but halfway through his weekly quota of disparaging snorts about the overrated hacks who somehow manage to get their fiction reviewed by the Times every Sunday. Just after 10:30, though, we were ready to go.
But Remember Their Names Page 12
