by Blake Crouch
“Upstairs in the master bath, right off our bedroom.”
“As you’re stepping out of the shower, is the toilet close?”
“Yeah, a few feet away.”
“You’re going to find her on the floor beside the toilet, neck broken like she’d slipped getting out of the shower. It happens all the time.”
“Okay.” Chase exhaled. “Okay, that’ll work. I like that. Then I just call the police?”
“Call Nine-one-one. Say you don’t know if she’s dead, but that she isn’t moving.”
“The police won’t suspect I did this?”
“They may initially.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Then don’t have your wife killed. It’s not a neat, easy transaction, and you shouldn’t do business with anyone who tells you it is. The husband will always be suspected at first, but please understand I am very good at what I do. There will be an autopsy, but assuming you hold it together, it’ll be ruled an accident. Now what does your wife do for a living?”
“Not really anything now. She used to be a registered nurse. Why?”
“Just a little piece of information that helps me to prepare.”
“That manila folder in the briefcase contains a recent photograph of Daphne. Address. House key. Floor plan. Everything you asked for. And I’ll make sure the third window to the right of the front door is unlocked.”
“I’ll need your help distracting her while I’m getting inside. I want you to call her at precisely 10:15 a.m. Tell her you can’t find your wallet. You got a bedside table?”
“I do.”
“You say you think you might have left it there, and would she please go check. That’ll get her upstairs, give me time to get in.”
“I should write this all down.”
“No. Don’t write anything down.” The black-suited man rose to his feet. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to grab some shut eye.”
They came toward her, and Letty realized that Chase was the tanned and moneyed specimen she’d seen in the lobby.
“Once you walk out the door, Chase, there’s no going back. You need to understand that.”
She watched them shake hands and then Arnold opened the door and saw Chase out and came back in and closed and locked the door.
He went past the closet and sat down on the end of the bed. Pulled off his shoes and his black socks, and as he sat there rubbing his feet, it occurred to her that he still wore his jacket, that he would want to hang it in the closet. Arnold stood and took off his jacket and started toward the closet.
The vibration of his phone stopped him. He flipped it open. Sighed.
“Yeah…no, it’s fine.” He unbuttoned his white Oxford shirt.
Letty’s hands trembled.
“The floral pattern, Jim.” He lay his jacket across the dresser and turned his back to the closet. “Remember we talked about this?” His pants fell to his ankles, followed by his boxer shorts. He stepped out of them, climbed onto the bed, and lay on his back, his feet hanging off the end. “No, Jim. With the daffodils.”
Already forty-five minutes late for work, Letty peered through the slats, saw Arnold’s chest rising and falling, the man otherwise motionless and perfectly silent. She’d been standing in the same spot for almost ninety minutes, and though she’d abandoned her heels, the closet didn’t afford room, with the doors closed, for her to sit down or bend her knees to a sufficient degree of relief. Her legs had been cramping for the last half hour, hamstrings quivering.
She lifted her duffle bag, and as she pushed against the closet door, a rivulet of sweat ran down into the corner of her right eye. Blinking through the saltwater sting, she felt the door give, folding in upon itself with a subtle creak.
She stepped out into the room, glanced at the bed. Arnold hadn’t moved.
At the door, she flipped back the inner lock, turned the handle as slowly as she could manage. The click of the retracting deadbolt sounded deafening. She eased the door back and stepped across the threshold.
She sat in the lobby, now noisy and crowded with the onset of cocktail hour. In her chair by the fireplace, she stared into the flames that roasted twelve-foot logs, the BlackBerry in her right hand, finger poised to press talk.
She couldn’t make the call. She’d rehearsed it three times, but it didn’t feel right. Hell, she didn’t even know Daphne’s last name or where the woman lived. Her story would require a leap of faith on the part of the investigating lawman, and when it came to credibility, she held a pair of twos. She couldn’t use her real name, and meeting face-to-face with a detective could never happen. Letty had been convicted three times. Six years of cumulative incarceration. Her fourth felony offense, she’d be labeled an habitual criminal offender and entitled to commiserate sentencing guidelines at four times the max. She’d die in a federal prison.
So seriously, all things considered, what did she care if some rich bitch got her ticket punched? If Letty hadn’t hit room 5212 when she did, she’d already be at the diner, flirting for the big tips and still glowing from the afternoon’s score. She tossed the BlackBerry back into her duffle. She should just leave. Pretend she’d never heard that conversation. She stole from people, innocent strangers, every chance she got. It never kept her up nights. Never put this torque in her gut. She’d get out of there, call in sick to work, buy two bottles of merlot, and head back to her miserable apartment. Maybe read a few chapters of that book she’d found at the thrift store—Self-Defeating Behaviors: Free Yourself from the Habits, Compulsions, Feelings, and Attitudes That Hold You Back. Pass out on the sofa again.
And you’ll wake up tomorrow morning with a headache, a sour stomach, a rotten taste in your mouth, and you’ll look at yourself in that cracked mirror and hate what you see even more.
She cursed loud enough to attract the attention of an older man who’d dolled himself up for the evening, his eyes glaring at her over the top of the Asheville Citizen-Times. She slashed him with a sardonic smile and got up, enraged at herself over this swell of weakness. She took two steps. Everything changed. The anger melted. Exhilaration flooding in to take its place. In the emotion and fear of the moment, it had completely escaped her.
Room 5212 contained the manila folder with Daphne’s photograph and address, but also a briefcase holding $25,000 in cash. Steal the money. Steal the folder. Save a life.
Even as she scrounged her purse for the master keycard, she knew she wouldn’t find it. In those first ten seconds of entry into Arnold’s room, she’d set it on the dresser, where she imagined, it still sat. She could feel the heat spreading through her face. The barkeep and the bellhop, her only contacts at the hotel, were already off-shift. There’d be no replacement keycard.
She started through the lobby, wanting to run, punch through a sheetrock wall, do something to expend the mounting rage.
She’d stopped to calm herself, leaning against one of the timber columns, her head swimming, when thirty feet away, a bell rang, two brass doors spread apart, and the man named Arnold strode off the elevator, looking casual in blue jeans, cowboy boots, and a sports jacket. She followed his progress, watching him thread his way through the crowd, finally arriving at the entrance to the Sunset Terrace. He spoke with the hostess at the podium, and without even thinking about it, Letty found herself moving toward him, wishing she’d honed her pickpocket skills during one of her stints in prison. She’d known a woman at Fluvanna who had it down so cold she’d once lifted fifty wallets during a single day in Disney World. Arnold’s back pockets were hidden under his navy jacket, no bulge visible, but people with sense didn’t keep their wallet there. Inner pocket of his jacket more likely, and she knew enough to know it took scary talent to snatch it from that location. You had to practically collide with the mark, your hands moving at light speed and with utter precision. She didn’t have the chops.
Arnold stepped away from the hostess podium, and she watched him walk across the lobby into the Great Hall Bar, where he slid o
nto a barstool and waited to be served.
Letty cut in front of a striking couple and elbowed her way to the bar. The stool to Arnold’s left sat unoccupied and she climbed onto it, let the duffle bag drop to her feet. She recognized the scent of his cologne, but she didn’t look at him. Watched the barkeep instead, his back to her, mixing what appeared to be a Long Island Iced Tea, pouring shots from four different liquor bottles at once into a pint glass filled with ice.
Arnold drank from a long-necked bottle of Coors Light, picking at the label between sips. Something about his hands fascinated Letty, and she kept staring at them out of the corner of her eye.
When after two minutes the barkeep hadn’t come over to take her drink order, she let slip an audible sigh, though in reality she sympathized. The lounge was crowded and she could tell the guy was doing the best he could.
She glanced over at Arnold, back at the bar, thinking he hadn’t noticed her predicament. Like everyone else, exclusively engaged in his own world.
So it startled her when he spoke.
“Bartender.”
And though the word hadn’t been shouted, something in its tone implied a command that ought not be ignored. Clearly the barkeep picked up on it, too, because he was standing in front of Arnold almost instantaneously, like he’d been summoned.
“Get you another Coors?”
“Why don’t you ask the lady what she wants?”
“Sorry, I didn’t know she was with you.”
“She’s not. Still deserves a drink before the icecaps melt, don’t you think?”
The barkeep emanated a distinct don’t-fuck-with-me vibe that gave Letty the feeling he’d probably killed a number in medium security. A hardness in the eyes she recognized. But those eyes deferred to the customer seated to her right, flashing toward her with a kind of disbelief, like they’d grazed something harder than themselves and come away scratched.
“What would you like?”
“Grey Goose martini, little dirty, with a free range olive.”
“You got it.”
Now or never. She turned toward Arnold who’d already turned toward her, anticipating the attention, the tips of her ears on fire again, and got her first good look at him. Forty years old, she would have guessed. Smoothshaven. Black hair, conservatively cropped. His collar just failing to hide the end of a tat, what might have been an erotic finger strangling his neck. Green eyes that exuded not so much hardness as an altogether otherworldly quality. She didn’t know if it was Arnold’s confidence or arrogance, but under different circumstances (and perhaps even these) she might have felt a strong attraction to the man.
“You’re a lifesaver,” she said.
He broke a slight smile. “Do what I can.”
She fell back on her break-in-case-of-emergency smile, the one that had disarmed a cop or two, that she’d used to talk her way out of a hotel room in Vegas.
“I’m Letty.”
“Arnie.”
She shook his hand.
“So’s Letty short for—”
“Letisha. I know, it’s awful.”
“No, I like it. Nothing you hear every day.”
The barkeep placed a martini in front of Letty, slid a fresh beer to Arnold.
“I got these,” Letty said, going for her purse.
“Get out of here.” Arnold reaching into his jacket.
“Actually,” the barkeep said, “these are on me. Sorry about the wait, guys.”
Letty raised her martini by the stem, clinked her glass against the neck of Arnie’s bottle.
“Cheers.”
“New friends.”
They drank.
“So where you from?” Arnie asked.
“Recently moved here.”
“Nice town.”
“S’okay.”
She could already feel the conversation beginning to strain, climbing toward a stall.
“I have a confession to make,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I shouldn’t. You’ll think I’m awful.”
“I already think you’re awful. Go for it.” He bumped his shoulder against hers as he said it, and she loved the contact.
“I’m here for a blind date.”
“What’d you do? Ditch the guy?”
“No, I’m chickening out. I don’t want to go through with it.”
“You were supposed to meet him in the lobby?”
“This bar. I got scared. Saw you sitting here. I’m a bad person, I know.”
Arnold laughed and slugged back the dregs of his first beer. “How do you know I’m not the guy?”
“Oh God, are you?”
He raised his eyebrows as if dragging out the suspense.
Finally said, “No, but this poor sap’s probably walking around trying to find you. He know what you look like?”
“General description.”
“So you want to hide out with me. Is that it?”
She dusted off her cute, pouty face. “If it’s not too much trouble. I can’t promise to be witty and engaging but I will get the next round.” She sipped her drink, staring him down over the lip of the martini glass, the salt of the olive juice and the vodka burn flaring on the sides of her tongue.
“Do you one better,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Well, if we’re really going to sell the thing, totally throw this guy off your trail, you should probably have dinner with me.”
They told each other lies over a beautiful meal, Letty becoming a high-school English teacher and aspiring novelist. She would rise at four every morning and write for three hours before driving into work, the book already five hundred pages, single-spaced, about a man who bears a strong likeness to a movie star and uses that resemblance to storm the Broadway scene and ultimately Hollywood, to comic and tragic ends.
Arnold worked for a philanthropist based out of Tampa, Florida. Had come to Asheville to investigate and interview the CEO of a research and development think tank that had applied for funding.
“What exactly are they involved in?” Letty asked after the waiter had set down her steak and topped off her wineglass, and she’d sliced into the meat, savoring both the perfection of her medium-rare porterhouse and the impromptu train of bullshit Arnold rattled off about bioinformatics and cancer applications.
They killed two bottles of a great Bordeaux, split a chocolate lava cake, and wrapped things up with a pair of cognacs, sharing a couch by a fireplace in the lobby, Letty adding up the three martinis, her share of the wine (more than a bottle), and now this Rémy Martin which was going down way too easy. Part of her sounding the alarm—you’re letting it get away from you. The rest wondering how fast the Hispanic bellhop pulling a cart of luggage toward the elevators could score her some tweak and would Arnold be down for it if he did?
In the dull brass doors, she watched her and Arnold’s warped reflection. He kissed the back of her neck, those fascinating hands around her waist which she was too drunk to bother sucking in.
They stumbled out onto the fifth floor, and by the time she realized her mistake, there was nothing to be done, having instinctively turned down the north wing toward room 5212, as if she’d been up here before.
“I have another confession to make,” Letty said while Arnold rummaged through the minibar.
“What’s that?”
“I’m not a redhead.”
He glanced over the top of the open door as Letty tugged off her wig.
“You look upset,” she said.
He stood up, kicked the door closed with the tip of his boot, set the bottles of beer on the dresser beside the keycard Letty had left behind four hours ago.
Sauntered toward her in slow, measured steps, stopping less than an inch away, his belt buckle grazing her sternum.
“Are you upset?” she slurred.
He ran his fingers through her short, brown hair to the base of her neck. She thought she felt his hands tightening around her throat, her caroti
d artery pulsing against the pressure. Looked up. Green eyes. Suspicion. Lust. She swayed in her heels. He ran his hands down her waist, over the curve of her hips, moved his right hand into the small of her back and pulled her against him.
Music bled through from the next room, something mid-tempo and synthesized from the 80’s—Air Supply or worse.
They kept dancing after the music had stopped, a mutual drunken stagger, Arnold working them back toward the wall, where his hand fumbled for the light dimmer.
She woke in the middle of the night with a violent thirst, and even lying on a pillow it felt like someone had caved her skull in while she slept, the red digits of the alarm clock continually descending into place, like the endless motion of a barbershop pole. The bulk of a man snored beside her, his rank breath warming the back of her neck. She lay naked with a cover twisted between her legs. Couldn’t recall passing out. The events after returning to this room lay in shards of memory—slamming shots of Absolut out of tiny bottles. A fast, hard fuck that didn’t approach the hype. She wondered if she’d said anything to undermine the evening’s lies, and just the threat of it, considering the man whose bed she shared, broke a cold sweat across her forehead. She shut her eyes. Heard her father’s voice—all cigarette growl and whiskey-tongued—that whispered to her on nights like these, lying in the beds of strange men and the darkness spinning, or a lonely cell, cursing her back to sleep. Words that, deep in her heart, she knew were true.
Threads of light stole in around the blinds.
9:12 a.m.
A line of painful brilliance underscored the bathroom door, the shower rushing on the other side. She sat up in bed and threw back the covers and brought her palms to her temples, pressing against the vibrant ache.
Out of bed, onto her feet, listing and nauseated. Stepped into her knit cashmere dress and pulled the straps over her shoulders. Last time she’d seen that leather briefcase full of money, it was sitting on the floor beside the loveseat, but it had since been moved. She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the couch, then under the bed.
