“Getting ready to do ‘Live at Five’ with KOMN. Due back at six.”
“Am I on the same floor he is?”
“With Trans/Oxana’s expense cap, you’re lucky to be in the same hotel.”
“Is Thompson with him?”
“Yep. He treats her like a good luck charm. Takes her wherever he can. She parks the kid in Trow’s room when she goes somewhere with him. And every place we’ve been, Trow has put the porn-blocker on the room TV.”
“Is Trowbridge on the top floor?”
“Yep.”
“Floor security detail?”
“No, it’s a key-access floor and we have all the rooms.” Wells looked mildly annoyed. “Why are you getting all Yellow Alert of a sudden? No one has spiked Trow’s latte grande since you bailed Tuesday morning. How did things suddenly get scary just because you showed up?”
“Thanks for the ride.” No sense spending forty seconds of my life teaching shady-guys-for-dummies to a civilian. “ETA is ten tomorrow, right?”
“Right. On to Denver.”
I dialed Proxy’s number as soon as I got to my room. Four-twenty-five in Omaha equals five-twenty-five in Hartford so Proxy figured to be at her desk. She was. It took me thirty seconds to give her the gist.
“If it’s Levitt double-teaming the tour that’s not a problem because our interests are congruent.” That’s Proxy-speak for ‘We’re on the same side.’ “Could be an Omaha cop just making sure the city doesn’t get embarrassed. But he could also be a free-lancer with an angle we don’t know.”
“Or he could be Korvette’s boy.”
“What would Korvette be up to?”
“A movie is supposedly just a line of soap to him. You told me the test-screening graded out to b-minus/c-plus. Maybe Korvette wants to sabotage Trowbridge, trigger the policy, and cut his losses.”
By the time Proxy was through thinking that over I’d finished unpacking. Of course, it doesn’t take long to take four changes of socks and underwear, one clean shirt, and a shaving kit out of a gym bag.
“Not buying it. New Paradigm has a hundred million in this movie. Korvette has plenty of cards he can play before making a high-risk move like that.”
“Well, Proxy, my degree is in civil engineering so I’ll go with you on the business strategy stuff. Question is, do we throw an extra eight-hundred bucks a day at this thing for the rest of the tour to get on-site security?”
“Can’t see it. Strike that. I’ll think about it. Getting me a little more dope on the bald guy might help me to sell something like that upstairs.”
“Understood.”
“Anything else? I’m late for pilates.”
“Nada. Sweat well.”
The room service menu beckoned, but it would have to wait. “A little more dope on the bald guy” came first, starting with whether he was still outside. Before I left to check on that, though, I punched 0 on the room phone and asked the operator to put me through to Trowbridge’s room. She did.
“Yo.” The voice providing this answer sounded male, edgy, and pot-deprived.
“Davidovich from Trans/Oxana. Listen, would you be a good bro and put the little girl on the phone? Tell her I’m the one her mom calls Tall Dude.”
He grunted something that didn’t sound too happy, but apparently being almost fired works motivational wonders. After about ten seconds Luci’s voice piped over the phone.
“Hello, sir.”
“Hello, Luci. How are things going?”
“Fine, sir.” Mix southern and Marine and you get lots of ‘sirs.’
“What are you doing right now?”
“Powdering Annabelle, sir. And working on the computer. And waiting for mommy. Do you know when mommy will get back, sir?”
“Six o’clock, I think. Do you know when six o’clock is, Luci?”
“Yes, sir. When there’s a six on the screen, with two zeroes after the dots.”
“Okay, Luci, can you do me a favor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In case I’m not there when your mom gets back, would you ask her to call me on my mobile phone if I give you the number?”
“Yes, sir. I’m ready.”
“Okay. Here it is.” I’d barely gotten the area code out when I heard a male voice over the line, muffled but clear enough to make out the words.
“Luci! What are you doing? Where did you get that?”
“From the bathroom, sir. I borrowed it.”
“Okay. You really shouldn’t have that. Why don’t you give that back to me?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. Just give it to me and I’ll put it back.”
I counted to five as seconds ticked off in silence. I was about to prompt Luci when she chimed back in.
“Could you say the numbers again, sir?”
“Sure I can, Luci.” I did. She repeated it.
“That’s right, Luci. Thanks a lot.”
“Okay, sir.”
I hung up and headed for the elevators. Time to check out the bald guy. Before I’d gotten two floors closer to the lobby, though, he dropped to number two on my list. I realized that I had to get to Trowbridge’s room in a great big hurry.
Chapter Twelve
I went down to the lobby. Within two minutes a guy wheeling a Stratus suitcase came by and punched the UP button. Door opened. I got on with him. He punched ten. As in not eleven. Shit. I banged the inside of the closing door and got off, muttering something about the wrong elevator.
Three minutes later, same routine. This guy was going to eight. I couldn’t bull my way off again without attracting attention, so I rode up with him, stalled until he was out of sight, and then went back down to the lobby.
Third time’s the charm. My free-pass to the top floor turned out to be a cheerful South Asian in a Saville Row suit. I followed him into the elevator. He put his key in the magic slot and punched 11. He asked which floor I wanted, I said same as yours, and the elevator started going up. That’s how airtight a key-access floor is. His attaché case, by the way, had Something-or-Other Nanotechnology stamped on it in gold. Which meant that he was not part of the New Paradigm traveling party. Which meant that New Paradigm had not block-booked the entire top floor like Wells said it had.
I’m no genius, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Trowbridge’s suite was the one with double doors at the end of the hall farthest from the elevators. The maid was just leaving, pushing a cart loaded with maid stuff. I thought she looked a little white for a hotel maid, but I chalked that up to East Coast stereotyping. I got to the doors maybe eight seconds after she started trudging away from them. My knock brought a grumpy “Who?” shouted from the inside.
“Davidovich, Trans/Oxana.”
The door didn’t open right away. I could make out indistinct voices going back and forth—apparently a lively little debate about letting me in. The door finally opened. I walked in to a welcoming committee consisting of Wells and the studio flunky, Jennifer Seawright. She was giving me that it-would-be-so-wonderful-if-you-weren’t-here look that chicks learn in second grade.
Luci sat at a table about twenty feet away—this was a big suite. Eyes riveted to the screen, she pecked at a computer with her left index finger while she clutched her doll in the right arm. Her feet didn’t quite reach the floor. She swung them rhythmically under the chair. A couple of other entourage types sprawled on a sectional, their eyes fixed on the suite’s biggest TV.
“Great to see you, too, guys.” I nodded at each of them. “Which way is the bathroom?”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Seawright demanded. “You—”
I brushed past her and started looking around the suite for the head. It wasn’t hard to find. I wondered whether Wells o
r Seawright or one of the other two would be the one to follow me. Turned out to be Wells.
There must have been fifteen damned bottles and cans of men’s toiletries on the counter around the sink and on the shelf above it. Even in a suite-sized bathroom it looked uncomfortably crowded. I probably could have picked out the one I needed, but I didn’t know how much time I had. When I played basketball in high school a clock ticked inside my head, sort of a sixth sense about when we were about to timeout on the five-second rule or run out of time to get the ball past half court. I felt it ticking now. I turned to Wells.
“Which one is the powder Luci was using on her doll?”
“Hell if I know, man. I just—”
I grabbed a fistful of his FUBU burnt orange shirt in my left hand and shoved his back against the wall. Didn’t quite slam it, but I definitely pushed him harder than I absolutely had to.
“Now listen, you sniveling little shit, we don’t have time to screw around. I need it and I need it right fucking now, bro.”
Wells got that queasy look you see on guys who haven’t been in a fight since they were nine when you put a little muscle on them. He managed to nod. I let go of his shirt. He staggered over to the counter, picked up a short, plastic cylinder marked Hotel de Coronado Talcum Powder in cursive on a retro label, and handed it to me. I sprinkled a little on my palm. Looked a lot more like snow than powder to me. A dab on my tongue confirmed it. Nose candy. Cocaine. Not even crystal meth or something halfway original.
Suddenly I figured out my clock. The maid. It wasn’t just that she was white, or that after 4:30 is pretty late for maid service. Might have been a little ex-military in her bearing, or maybe just the way she carried herself, like she wasn’t making any minimum wage and hoping for tips from generous Anglos to make ends meet. My MP instincts told me that, if cops in a place like Omaha were thinking about executing a high-profile search warrant, they might send someone in under cover first for a little scouting report, just to make sure they wouldn’t drill a dry hole and end up with egg on their face. Someone disguised as, say, a maid.
I slammed out of the bathroom. Wells was saying something about, “Look man, I didn’t,” but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention.
Into the kitchenette. Turn the water on full blast in the sink. Steak knife from the drawer. Start hacking and slicing through the plastic maybe a quarter of the way from the top. Nick myself on the left thumb. Damnation, you call this piece of shit a knife? It couldn’t cut hot butter! There, got it. Big, gaping gash almost all the way through the bottle. Pour everything in the bottle down the drain. Seems like it takes forever. Part of the stuff clumps in the sink and I have to push it toward the drain so the cascading water can take it the rest of the way.
Finally the damn thing was empty. I rinsed it out.
“Hey!” one of the entourage sofa spuds yelled. “Could you cut the water, please? Trow’s about on!”
I walked away from the sink, leaving the water going full blast. Not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot.
I headed for Seawright. The eyes she showed me when I got within six feet stopped me cold. She was scared of me. Flat out terrified. She hadn’t seen me rough Wells up, so that wasn’t it. Some chick-instinct was telling her, before I’d raised a finger, that I was major bad news. Dial it back, buddy. Just turn it down a couple of clicks.
I stopped and took a deep breath. Don’t think about that ticking clock. Just like a jump shot when you’re one point down with four seconds left. All the time in the world. Square up. Get the wrist right. Eyes on the basket. Bend the knees. All the time in the world.
“Excuse me. Jennifer, right?”
“People call me Jenny.” Her voice was a little shaky, but at least she’d answered with words instead of a primal scream.
“Okay, Jenny, there’s something I need you to do. Take Luci back to her mom’s room and help her give her doll a nice bath.”
“What?”
“Just in the sink. You know. Little sponge bath.”
She took a couple of steps toward me—good sign—and stared at me like I’d just started babbling about the president’s birth certificate.
“Why?”
“Well, Jenny,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper so that she had to lean forward to hear me, “between you and me, we’re about to have company—and right now that doll has the most expensive plastic ass east of Cher.”
I showed her the hacked up plastic bottle. Then I put the pieces in my left trouser pocket. She got it. After a quick nod she walked over to Luci, squatted, and started cooing at her in a soothing voice that would have charmed a pit bull.
I tensed again as I approached the suite door, thinking that I’d open it to a squad of Omaha’s finest. A look through the peephole showed me nothing but an empty corridor. Hmm. I opened the door. Empty corridor all right. Was my internal clock going paranoid on me? Flipping the manual lock-bar out so that the door couldn’t close all the way, I walked out into the corridor. Strolled all the way to the other side of the elevators, trying to spot the surveillance cameras. Had to be some, but I couldn’t find them. Concerning. My plan was to drop the remains of the bottle onto a room service tray set out in the corridor for pick-up. That wouldn’t accomplish much if a hotel camera recorded me doing it.
Down the intersecting corridor on the other side of the elevators, to my left, I spotted a sign saying SODA ICE. That at least provided halfway decent cover for my walk. I stepped into the room, noisy with the hum of the ice machine. There, just inside the door, stood an answered prayer: a bright green plastic bin saying, “WE RECYCLE! Thank you for helping the Hotel Devo’s Green Initiative Project!” God bless your good green soul, Hotel Devo. Fishing the plastic bottle out, I dropped it in the bin.
Back to Trowbridge’s suite. Luci and Seawright and, most important, Luci’s doll weren’t there anymore. Good. The only thing I couldn’t figure out was where the cops were. If the “maid” was a scout she had to have spotted the coke. She’d had plenty of time to get word to whoever was waiting with the warrant.
“Whoa, man, Trow is killing!” This came from half the guys on the couch.
I walked all the way to the back of the suite. Pushed a heavy, glass sliding door to my right and walked out onto the balcony. Worked my way around a metal table painted with green enamel. Across the street I saw a white Ford Crown Victoria. Eight to one that was an unmarked cop car. What are they waiting for?
“Go, Trow, go! Go, Trow, go!” erupted from inside the suite.
It hit me: that’s what they were waiting for. Trowbridge. They wanted to make the bust after he got back, turn it into a media stunt that might come in handy at budget time.
I turned my back to the street. Clenched both fists. Looked up at the overhanging eave. It was high, but it looked like I could just about reach it. I lifted both arms, casual as you please, with a clenched fist at the end of each. Don’t ham it up. My hands reached just over the lip of the gutter. I rested them there for just a second, opening both fists. Then I brought my arms down, glanced furtively over my shoulder, and went back into the suite.
The raps on the door came in less than four minutes. “Open up! Police!”
Wells got to the door first. I was in no hurry, and the two guys on the couch were busy not soiling their pants. A bullet-headed man in a tan sport coat led the way into the room. He looked like he was about five years from retirement. While he was flashing a piece of paper at Wells, the cop who’d posed as a maid streaked in behind him. She ran full tilt for the balcony, where people sitting in the unmarked car had to have seen me reaching for the gutter. As she reached me, though, she paused long enough to stick a finger in my face.
“You stay right there! Don’t move an inch!”
I nodded, folding my arms across my chest. She probably didn’t see the nod. She was already back on course
for the balcony at flank speed. The second she got there she pulled the table closer to the doors and then scrambled up on top of it so fearlessly that I was afraid she might fall and break her muscular neck. She was pretty agile for a farmer’s-daughter type, though, and before I knew it her head was out of sight as she presumably scanned the roof and the inside of the gutter, searching diligently for the contraband she thought I’d stashed there.
I swiveled my head to see what her colleague was up to. I caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the bathroom. I figured I had maybe six minutes between me and two cops in a bad mood.
More like three, as it turned out. The female cop came back in almost immediately and went to join her buddy in the head. That shortened things up. She knew what she’d found the coke in, and it didn’t take her long to figure out that it wasn’t there anymore. They came out together and converged on me.
“All right,” bullet head said. “Are you going to tell us where it is, or do we have to tear the place apart?”
“Do you have a warrant saying what ‘it’ is, detective?”
“You bet your ass I’ve got a warrant.” He showed it to me. It said something about up to three grams of cocaine, followed by what I assume is the chemical name for the stuff.
“Detective, I don’t think there’s anything like that in this suite.”
“Well what happened to it, then?”
Red faced and squinty eyed, he yelled the question at me. He’d had pizza with green peppers and onions for lunch. I felt a belly drop. Icy little gut-chill. Fifty-fifty I was about to catch a cop-punch—and there’s nothing you can do with those but take them.
“Detective, I’m trying to be helpful. All I can honestly tell you is that, no matter what you do, you’re not going to find any cocaine in this suite because there isn’t any here to find. The bald guy who gave you the tip was kidding you.”
He started to snap a crack back at me. Then he paused for a second.
“Whaddya know about any bald guy?”
“I know he’s about five-ten to five-eleven, weighs in at one-seventy or so, dark eyes, olive complexion. That’s about it. But I plan to know a lot more before sundown tomorrow. Can I show you some ID?”
Jail Coach Page 6
