Smoke Rings
by J. Daniel Sawyer
AWP Mystery
A division of ArtisticWhispers Productions
Text Copyright © 2011 J. Daniel Sawyer
All Rights Reserved
Book Design by ArtisticWhispers
Digital painting “Cigar in the Smoke” © 2007 J. Daniel Sawyer
Distributed by Smashwords
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Dedication
For J&L
In memory of many excellent evenings
Smoke Rings
A Clarke Lantham Mystery
by J. Daniel Sawyer
8:00 PM
I didn't go to a New Year's Eve party this year. Last year, I'd wound up at one where an impromptu murder spree broke out, and I'm not keen to repeat the experience. Aside from having to work on my day off—it takes the cops a while to get to a remote mountain cabin on New Year's eve, no matter how much the wildlife complains about the rude, lumbering bald monkeys cluttering up their 'hood—I also wound up losing a girlfriend I was getting pretty fond of: Kristine Warner, who I'd intended to propose to after the party died down. I would have, too, if those two bodies hadn't shown up.
Kris was the kind of woman who liked her lines clear, and liked to pay her debts. Saving her life from a knife-wielding maniac put her in a position she couldn't stand: she felt like she owed me. That was pretty much the last I saw of her.
Well, the last I saw of her in a social context, at any rate. I kept finding ways to bump into her on business grounds. She was happy to help out when I needed a doctor's input for a client—she liked paying her debts—but nothing else changed between us.
In the year since, I hadn't had time to make many dates. And I wasn't keen to head out on the town stag, or in the company of my assistant and my current penance project.
This New Year's Eve, I was determined to spend the time polishing the insides of my socks. It was the only time I'd have to myself in my office for the foreseeable future, and I knew it. My life had been wrecked a week back by dregs from an old case washing up on my doorstep in the form of the just-past-teenaged Nya Thales, a girl with more than a little bit going for her and a mother who has a psychotic interest in putting me in debt to the tune of seven figures because she doesn't like the way I shot her husband in order to save her daughter's life. The result of that particular family drama gives off a funk that's going to be hanging around for a long time yet.
At least I've got Rachael on the line now. At three-quarters-past twenty, she's taken to Nya like a recalcitrant older sister, if older sisters are allowed to kiss younger sisters like that when they're drunk. Not something they allowed in the town where I grew up. I've decided not to investigate too much in that direction. Besides, days off, right?
My plan for the day—or night—off: take the time to enjoy the fact that, for a few brief, fleeting moments, I wouldn't be dodging random gouts of post-teenage estrogen. Rachael had taken Nya out to some shindig in the city, and I didn't expect either of them would be stopping back here before the end of hangover hour tomorrow morning. I had a book to read that had nothing to do with law enforcement, a new bottle of scotch I planned on draining slowly over the next eight hours, and—an annual tradition—a bundle of Churchill-sized Excaliburs. I don't normally smoke, but this one day a year, I take two in memory of a partner who taught me to blow smoke up the chief's ass and keep myself out of trouble. She was five-foot-two, fifty-eight years old, and talked like she'd just gotten out of the coyote's U-haul. She smoked like a chimney and blew rings that would hang in the air for three minutes if you didn't move, just spinning in the light.
Alexia Lopez. A hell of a brassy dame. She bought it when we were hunting the Broadway Slasher—took a corner too wide on Skyline when we were doing the take-down.
You can probably tell by now that I have a bit of a checkered relationship with the opposite sex. It's not of the “can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em” variety. I'd happily shoot one that needed shooting, but I've been lucky enough that everyone I've had to plug so far has come equipped with the same plumbing I've got, so I don't get to add “post-feminist homicidal ex-cop anxiety” to my list of mental disorders. I think if I can nail that one and “hypochondriac male artist” to the scorecard, I can send off for a free set of luggage.
The rain outside my office window was coming down hard. Hard enough that the Oakland city lights shining through the normally wavy Victorian glass looked like sequins in skin-paint from an energetic burlesque routine. I poured myself the first glass of the night—for me, eight o'clock is the official start of drinking hour on New Year's Eve—and I raised it to the city beyond the window. “Here's to surviving one more trip around the sun. If one of us has to go, better you than me.”
Don't get me wrong, I like living—or, as far as the city planning department knows, keeping an office—in Oakland, but it's a miserable town shot through with the kind of corruption you normally think they reserve for the movies. For the last five years I've been locked in a staring contest with it—one of these days, one of us will blink.
I sat there in the dark for a good piece, stocking feet on the window sill, lights out, back to the door. I'd left the light in the outer office on so I'd have a good view if anyone tried to bash the door down—I had a standing suspicion that one of these days another one of the characters from the Thales case was gonna bust through there with more lead pills than the RDA allows. If I was the kind of guy who actually slept at night, it might keep me up.
Wasn't going to happen tonight, I was pretty sure. Not in weather like this. I mean, would you want to be a hit man on New Year's Eve? And since I had a .45 and a .38 snub within arm's reach, I wasn't hurting for options.
Besides, it was my day off, and I had a bright year ahead of me. If you think it's a bit early to tell what kind of year I was going to have, you haven't been keeping up. I could spend the entire year investigating low-lifes trading kiddie porn like baseball cards and it wouldn't raise to half the level of weird, dark, and downright unpleasant I had to deal with last year. Actually, at this point, a handful of garden variety sickos would be a welcome relief.
Yeah. Good year. I could get used to this having-the-office-to-myself thing again. Even after a little less than a week, Nya was a sweet kid, but with a suffocating presence.
Speaking of suffocating...
I took one of the cigars and cut it, then warmed the end over half a match before sucking the fire from the other half into the business end. After the first few puffs, I got a good sized smoke ring to settle slow against the cold glass in the window frame and churn in place for about twenty seconds before the convection currents eroded it away into afterthoughts. Alexia would've been proud.
“Got another one?” A voice from behind me. One I hadn't heard in a while—one I'd only heard a few times since last New Year's Eve.
I didn't turn around, just looked into the window glass. Once I re-focused, I could see Kristine Warner standing in my front doorway.
“In the bag on the file cabinet.” I didn't invite her to sit. The acknowledgement of her presence was enough.
She closed the front door behind her as silently as she'd opened it, then soft-footed through my front office and into my inner sanctum, stopping at the file cabinet for the bag from the tobacco shop. A minute later, there were two fresh smoke rings dancing against the window-skin.
“Nice one. I didn't know you could do that.”
“Same skill set,” she said, “different tool,” and she stuck the cigar into her mouth and sucked on it in a way that made me miss her all over again.
Nostalgia is a disease that hits widows, veterans, and old cops the way malaria hits naked sunbathers in the Congo. You'd think after what happened in Seattle last week I'd be pretty well vaccinated, but you'd be underestimating the size of my squishy underbelly. Good thing I didn't have to turn around to see the look on her face.
I took another drag—my third in as many minutes—and popped a series of small rings, like spitting wispy donuts that broke on the glass, scattering everything else away before clinging to the cold like fog.
“It's new year's eve,” I said, “Shouldn't you be out at a party or anesthetizing someone or something?”
“Mmm. No point. I'm on call tonight.” She had a job in the ICU at Children's Hospital. She preferred emergencies, worked like she was paying off karma—would've gotten in the way of our relationship when we were together, except that I work like I'm trying to keep from remembering something. We were a good match, once upon a time. “What are you drinking?”
“Macallan twelve.” I reached down next to my chair, hooked the neck between my fingers, swung it around over my head to land it on the table behind me. “You remember where the glasses are. Don't turn the lights on.”
She didn't reply, but I saw her reflection stand and make its way to the little kitchenette behind the chintzy Ikea rice paper screen at the north end of the office. There were some clinks while she tried to sort between coffee mugs and bar glass in the dark, then more footfalls across the brown-painted 1920s wood floor and up onto the throw rug. The scotch glugged in the glass. Usually one of my favorite sounds—right now it just sounded like someone stealing my solitude and handing me loneliness like they thought I didn't know the difference between the two.
I leaned forward to tap the first little bit of ash off the cigar. Excaliburs are finicky with their ash—prone to dropping it in big clumps without warning you. I once lost a perfectly serviceable tiger-print silk shirt that way.
“Pass that back here?”
I grumbled something about a perfectly serviceable trash can next to the desk, but I passed it back anyway. There was paper in the trash can, didn't really want to see the fire brigade tonight. I had all the fire I really wanted sitting on the end of six inches of thick-gauge portable coffee-and-vegetable tasting goodness.
Passing a full ash tray behind you when you're leaning back in an office chair with your socks on a window sill is a bit like trying to do the can-can in chain-mail, but I wasn't about to turn around and look at her. After a whole year, she could still make the fluid drain out of my throat and dance around in my stomach. To share a room with Kristine Warner is to live in that first weightless second at the top of a very high roller coaster for hours on end.
Time was, once, that I thought I'd eventually get to have a normal life. There'd be a girl—or, as I edged past thirty, a woman—who could deal with being married to a whack-job like me. There'd been a few along the way, but it wasn't until Kris that I really believed it wasn't a pipe dream. When she threw me over, she'd taken that last bit of hope I had that I'd get to have a normal life someday, put its teeth upon the curb, and stomped it until its skull cracked like an egg. Maybe she needed to find a way to forgive me for saving her life. I was never going to forgive her for breaking my heart.
You'd think that would stop me from wanting to turn around and tear her shirt off and start the new year with a bang, wouldn't you?
So would I, except I was in the room with her, living at the top of that roller coaster, and I could still remember the way her sweat cut through the smell of the cigar like perfume. In between drags I could taste her skin, the soft way her lips always seemed like they were made of of white chocolate, the way her nipples reminded me of raisins when they tightened from pink to dark brown, even now, a year after the last time I'd seen her in anything less decent that jeans and a sweatshirt. And I hated her for it.
Which is why I didn't turn around to look at her. I just talked to her reflection. “Drinking when you're on call?”
“Special occasion.”
“Your malpractice insurance is gonna love that when you drop a kid on its head.”
“Fuck you.” She set the tumbler on the desk, picked her cigar up from the ash tray, and proceeded to poke me with visual reminders of why her diction was so precise.
I squinted at her reflection. Trouble was, she had the kind of poker face that kept me interested for the two years we were together—which gives her an unmatched Lantham record—and she'd only gotten better in the year since. Studying her wasn't doing me any good. Still, I wasn't eager to end the silence. The only thing worse than her face was her voice.
But the cigar was smoldering half-way down, and it's a two hour cigar. My hips were getting achy sticking in one position for too long—one of the side effects of aging that leads me to tell my sister's kid that he needs to find some really bitchin' way to die before he hits thirty—and if she didn't say something soon I was going to have to shoot her, just on principle. Or at least what passed for principles in my world.
The one thing I had on her, though, was patience. I do stakeouts for a living, she only has to wait for blood tests to come back. It's a close contest, but in waiting games, I always won. Drove her nuts.
I won this time, too.
“Good cigar.” She blew another smoke ring.
“Yup.”
“How've things been? You know, around here?” She waved an airy hand at my makeshift domicile. I was suddenly glad that Nya hadn't left her underwear to line dry over the radiator this evening.
“Things are fine. Business is good.” The English language is vague, and “good” is a very fluid term. My lawyer's wallet was doing good extremely well, and I was doing good enough to keep it from starving, barely. None of my longstanding bill collector relationships had progressed to the “baseball bat” stage. Of course, I was now carrying one assistant and one stray, so what constituted a healthy income had taken a turn toward “ouch” territory. What are you fishing for, Kris? Let's get it out of the way so I can enjoy my depressingly celibate New Year's Eve.
“Got any plans for the evening?”
“None that you're not currently wrecking.”
“What, you were going to sit here drinking and smoking till the sun came up?”
“I've got a chow mien and masturbation break scheduled for 3:30 AM, but other than that, yes. That was the general idea.”
She set her cigar down like a woman with something on her mind. “I've got a better idea.”
“I was already circumcised against my will by one of your kind. Forgive me if I don't come over all gushy and trusting.”
“Women?”
“Doctors.”
“Ah.”
Now, I'm the kind of guy who hears sentences like Lantham, your check just bounced pretty often. Sentences like Lantham, the toilet's just backed up and overflowed the plumbing, or Lantham, why is there a dead hooker in your bedroom? or Hand over the pictures or the girl gets it aren't unheard-of. So you'll understand what I mean when I say that I just about snarfed my scotch through my nose when she said what she said next:
“Actually, I came by to invite you to a New Year's Eve party.”
“Right.” And I've got a bright green tattoo of George W. Bush snorting cocaine with the Pope on my chest.
“I mean it.”
“Mmm.” I sucked on the cigar, took my time making a ring, letting the smoke cool down so it would hold together properly.
“And where, pray tell, is this mythical New Year's Eve party?”
“Santa Clara Convention Center.”
“At this hour? On New Year's Eve?”
“Can you think of a better time for a New Year's Eve party?”
“How about when neither of us has been drinking.” The convention center was at the Hyatt near the used-to-be-kinda-Great America amusement park—about forty miles south of my tragically over-occupied office. The CHP and the locals were all pretty humorless on nights like tonight.
She picked up the bottle and examined its level. “You've only had one. You're fine.”
“This is your considered medical opinion?” I put my tumbler aside—not quite finished yet—just in case I'd need to go driving.
“I don't have any other kinds.”
“That's not how I remember it.” I growled, and meant it. She was officially overstaying her welcome now. Ambivalence cocktails have a short shelf life before they turn completely sour, and the one she poured when she walked through the door was starting to smell like turpentine.
“Hey now...”
“Hey now yourself. What the hell are you really doing here?”
“Me?” It wasn't coy and innocent. More like she was collecting her thoughts and screwing up her courage. I added it to the list of things she'd screwed up. “I wanted to make up for last year.”
“Trust me, Kris. Nothing could make up for the last year.”
“Not the last year. Last year. One year ago tonight.”
“You weren't the one killing party guests.”
“Goddammit...just let it go, will you?”
“What, that you dumped me because I saved your life?”
“Fuck you.”
“That would be an improvement.”
“Look, I'm sorry...”
“You and the fucking Pope.”
“Are we going to have this fight again?”
“No, not again. Still. This fight is all we've got.” I was getting surly now. “You're the one who walked through that door and wrecked my evening. You can damn well walk back out again.”
“Fine.” She stood up and brushed her hair back like she was making sure she still had her dignity with her. “You just remember that you're the one who slammed the door on a fifty-thousand dollar payday.”
“Say what?” Socks are fickle creatures with minds of their own. Mine chose that moment to give up their grip on the window sill. I scrambled to keep from dropping my cigar, barely managed to keep hot coals from falling onto my shirt. It emerged uninjured. My poker face, however, was mortally wounded and limped away to cough up blood in the corner. I spun in my chair and stared at her in open incredulity. “Fifty thousand? What the hell...”
She was already at the door to my inner sanctum, the light of the outer office wreathing her in a yellow halo. She half-turned back to me, and I thought I saw the side of her mouth twitch, like it wanted to smile.
“So you are interested.”
“When you put that many zeros next to each other...”
“You say that now...”
“Cut it out. What are you talking about?”
She shrugged. “It was gonna be a surprise.” She shook her head a little bit, like she was trying to decide whether to spoil it. Something else, hard to identify, fluttered across her face. Regret? Disappointment? Hard to be sure, but it wasn't good.
Lantham, you asshole, she wanted you to come because you wanted her, not because you wanted the money. The icy realization clutched my stomach. I'd just blown my chance to patch things up, the chance I'd wished for all year. Now it was all business. And when it was done, whatever it was, she'd consider her debt paid, and I wouldn't see any more of her.
I said earlier that I'm not the swiftest canary where women are concerned. In this case, I was playing for last place in a tortoise race—it wasn't until that moment that I realized that I still loved her.
You don't get very far in this business by “listening to your heart.” You get ahead—and stay alive—listening to your interpersonal radar and your wallet, and then occasionally throwing a glance over at your conscience to make sure it's not throwing up all over your best suit. You listen to your heart, you're liable to drive your wallet, your conscience, and your business all out onto the street to pace back and forth with cardboard signs saying “will work for anyone who's not a chump.”
Fifty thousand. That's a five with four zeros after it. Not counting the Beatles, anything with four or more zeros is officially worth my time, even on vacation. Even on New Year's Eve.
“Oh, it's a surprise. Third one tonight. You remember how I love surprises.” She'd once surprised me by yanking the string on a party popper behind my back when I didn't know she was there. I was having a bad day, had just got in from a shouting match with the local deputy, so my hackles were up. If I wasn't in the habit of carrying my weapon with the safety catch on, I'd probably have shot her.
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “Look, it's worth it, okay? Trust me. I'll tell you on the way.”
“Assuming we're not going to a 'who looks the most like Sam Spade' contest to compete for the prize,” I crossed my arms over my chest and stuck my legs, one at a time, up onto the corner of my desk, “I'm gonna need to know the score so I know what toys to bring.”
That faint smile again. Maybe with some relief? Hard to tell. But she turned back to face me, walking forward into rippling rainlight. She took a seat, leaned forward so I could smell her again. I had to take a French lit class in college once—believe me, Proust had a gift for understatement. Seemed like every memory connected to Kristine came flooding back at once.
But I didn't blink. I just listened to my wallet.
She propped her elbows on the desk. “Have you heard of Giles Noyce?”
I shrugged and shook my head. “Vaguely rings a bell.”
“One of the FBI's most wanted. A medical insurance guy. He was an accounts manager who ran a Ponzi scheme on some patients a few years ago, disappeared when he was indicted by a grand jury. Killed a teenager in a hit-and-run trying to get out of town.”
“Cool.” If you're from the Bay Area, this is one of those words that, depending on your inflection, can mean anything from “Oh my god that's the greatest thing ever” to “I can't believe you're wasting my time with this.” My response fell somewhere on the unenthused end of the spectrum.
“There's a fifty thousand dollar price on his head.”
“Standard FBI reward?”
“Yeah.”
“So, what about him?”
“Well, I can't be sure, but I think he's back in town. He's been in and out of the hospital in the last couple weeks, and I recognized him from his post-office pictures. Him or someone who looks a lot like him.”
“And he's going to be at this party?”
“The company he's working for is giving it. He invited a few of us—I think he was picking up on me.” Could blame him for that, but I wasn't going to say it out loud. “So I thought that if you could ID him, you could get the reward.”
Yup. She was after payback. Get me off her conscience.
Still, fifty K is nothing to sneeze at, and nabbing white collar criminals is a hobby I don't get to indulge near often enough.
“It's already after nine. New Year's Eve parties start to wind down around midnight...”
“Oh, don't worry about that. A couple of my girlfriends are already there, they say it's going to last till dawn.”
A setup like that is hard to turn down. I took another hit on the cigar, made a show of chewing the proposition over while I made a mental list of the toy box I'd need to pack.
She watched me like she was trying to read my mind. I used to love it when she looked at me that way.
After a couple minutes, I stubbed out the cigar. “Give me five minutes to pack. Do you know if he's got a room there? No, forget it, you wouldn't. Let's bet he does. Let's see...stand up for a second, will you?”
She did. I studied her. Stood up and walked around, looking at her from all angles. “First thing, we're gonna need to get you out of those clothes.”
9:45 PM
The roads were nice and loose—on any other night, I'd have taken 880 at north of eighty miles an hour. Not on New Year's Eve. Too many cops out looking for drunks. I drove like a constipated schoolmarm. Took us forty minutes to make the hotel.
The Santa Clara Convention Center is part of the Hyatt complex on Great America Parkway, a sprawling conference center tacked on to a hotel that claims four-star status, in one of the most desperately optimistic moves in the history of hospitality. Hard mattresses, doors that didn't hang right, thin walls, cheap carpet. They made their dime on the conference space, and the bar.
On the way down, I had some time to formulate a plan. First thing was gonna be to find out if our quarry had a room. He was going by the name of George Nathan—a good alias. Close enough to the old name that he could still sign his initials, different enough that it wouldn't raise immediate flags in anyone who wasn't a suspicious snoopy bastard like me.
Trouble is, hotels aren't all that happy about giving out names.
“Remember,” I told Kristine when we left the car in the parking garage, “I'm a photographer friend. Don't mention anything about the private detective thing.”
“Do I look stupid?”
“Honey, you look like you could start a war.” She did, too. Turns out that Nya is, in addition to her other hobbies, into cosplay. She had some 1920s flapper outfits, and was about the same size as Kristine, so I pilfered some of her things from my used-to-be-bedroom at the office and justified it by calling it “rent.”
Kristine looked like sex in a slip, drizzled with rhinestones. It'd be good for our cover.
I'd put on my one good suit—navy with pinstripes—and tossed the Fedora on top. The guns went in the usual spots, and the camera and snoop gear went in the attaché case under one arm. The computer and bugs went in the laptop bag under the other, and an umbrella topped off the ensemble. I'd packed my rubber-soled shoes in the car—I might need to come back for them if I had to do any serious stalking.
First order of business, though, was figuring out where this guy was, and getting a room close by.
We scampered through the rain to the covered walk, then around to the front entrance, arm in arm. I shook off my umbrella in the airlock-style entry, then wrapped it up and draped it over the arm that Kristine wasn't occupying. We traipsed into the gargantuan lobby, hooked a right to the bar. I took a seat in one of the conversation pits that had a good vantage.
She sat across from me and leaned in like we were lovers talking lover talk.
“Okay, first order of business, I need you to go get his room number.”
“How?”
“Pick up on him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Can't you just bribe a bellhop?”
The refrain of people whose closest contact with the business comes from watching Poirot. I shook my head. “That attracts attention—kind of attention we don't want, and it probably wouldn't work anyway. These places get a rep if they go around giving out guest information.” I also needed some time to read up on this guy and this was the only good hotspot in this hotel, but explaining the whole business would take too long. In the time we'd been dating, she'd only had a tangential interest in my work, so I couldn't just say “remember the time when...”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
“When you've got that, come back, then we'll get a room nearby and go from there.”
“If you say so...”
She leaned forward and kissed me—I'd told her to keep up appearances, she was playing along—then got up and left.
As soon as she was around the corner, I broke out the laptop and got on the network.
The FBI maintains a “most wanted” website. I found our guy in pretty short order. They had a few pictures of him, enough that I should be able to recognize him. I saved a couple good ones, then transferred them to my phone in case I needed a refresher at the comedy club. I took some notes on his appearance and personal tastes in case they came in handy.
I ordered a lime seltzer so I'd look like a valid member of society, and set about the waiting game. Kristine wafted in about fifteen minutes later, sat down next to me and laid her head on my shoulder.
She said “Room 1233” in a voice that would melt a glacier. “He's scheduled to do a stand-up routine at ten thirty in the ballroom, then he's having an after-party in his room at oneish.”
“I take it you're invited.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you mention me?”
“In passing.”
“Excellent.” There were a few ways I could play this. I started packing up the laptop. “Let's go get a room.”
A spare fifty and a little flirting with the desk clerk. She was perky and had tinsel in her hair and was young enough to be my daughter, if I'd started having sex when I was fourteen, which I didn't. Turns out the hotel wasn't full up, and room 1234 was available. Right across the hall. Technically it was part of a suite, but we just got one side of it.
It was everything I'd grown to expect from the place. Adequate design, boring colors, god-awful water, spotty WiFi, but clean and nice-smelling all the same. And new furniture and carpets since I'd been here last time.
That was fine. It had what I needed.
Kris stood around by the bathroom while I tore the room apart and put it back together. Set up the computer, set up the portable hotspot, pull the bugs out of the kit and test them. Good battery strength, everything transmitting. Time to get to work.
“Hey,” I nodded at her, “You brought your cell, right?”
She pulled it out of her little clutch purse and waggled it at me.
“Okay. Get ready to text me. Doesn't matter what. Make it say 'hi' or something, but don't send it. Go to the next bend in the hall and hang out like you're checking your messages. If anyone comes our way, or if you hear anyone coming the other way, text me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Trade secrets. I'll fill you in later.”
She pursed her lips, weighing whether or not it was worth pushing the point, then she shrugged and made for the door.
As soon as she was out, I dove into the camera bag and pulled my electronic stethoscope—a battery-powered contact mic with a single earphone—and my door-opener. It's a length of thin-gauge metal tubing, folded over itself until it's pocket sized. I shook it out, it self-assembled into a long staff with hooks and levers at either end. I stuffed the bugs into my pocket, then did a final check. There was always a chance I might be able to do this the easy way, might as well take the fingerprint kit.
Time was, way back before the Americans with Disabilities Act, you had to have some kind of skill to pick a hotel lock. It used to be a challenge—or at least, I assume it was based on my experiences picking locks in regular doorknobs—but with the fancy shmancy lever-style doorknobs that publicly-accessible buildings are forced to use now, you don't even need a lock picking kit. A well-bent coat-hanger will do.
My toy was an improvement on the coat hanger—actual levers on the ends to let me deploy it correctly, and a T-junction on the operator's end so you could slide the thing in flat under the door and do your dirty work faster and cleaner than you can with a coat hanger.
Not that I'd want anyone pulling the same stunt on me—trust me, you don't either. Don't believe me? Look up the Connie Francis case from the 1970s. In such situations, remember your Douglas Adams:
“A towel is the most massively useful thing any interstellar hitchhiker can carry.”
That goes double for PIs and hotel guests. I rolled up a towel and stuffed it between the door handle and the door itself on the inside of my door. I was now officially safe from opportunistic college kids on the prowl to pilfer pizza money and laptops. Not foolproof, but it keeps gadgets like mine from working fast, which is the only way they work. If you can't get through a door in less than twenty seconds, you're not getting through.
I opened the door, deployed the slide hasp to keep it from closing all the way, and stole across the hallway. Mentally, I started the clock.
Two steps, stethoscope. No noise inside, though I could hear the service elevator around the bend in the hall. Whispering gallery acoustics. If Noyce was sharing a room with a friend, said friend wasn't in there. Still, I knocked, just in case. I hate breaking into occupied rooms—screaming gives me a headache.
Nobody inside stirred. I took the chance that nobody would be sleeping this time on a New Year's Eve. Time to work.
Shake the tool out, drop down, slide it under, twist, reverse grip, lever it up so the long end was against the inside of my quarry's door, change the handle's position in the T-joint, push down.
The door popped open.
From door threshold to threshold, fifteen seconds, including eavesdropping time. Not bad, Lantham.
I propped the door open behind me, just a hair's breadth, so I could exit without popping the latch—not exactly quiet mechanisms, and I was beginning to think the acoustics in this place had been designed by some yahoo who thought battleships were quiet, comfortable places. I almost didn't need Kris playing lookout. Almost.
Burglary works on a two-minute rule. If you're in and out in two minutes or less, it's very hard to get caught. If you're stealing things, that's an easy rule to follow—jewelry, wallets, electronics, and things you can resell aren't hard to find. When you're snooping for something, you usually need more time. Things worth snooping for are not usually of the “I'm keeping it on the coffee table” variety.
Except I wasn't going to take more time. I planted one bug in the central bathroom under the counter, and three others—one on an end table in the conversation pit in the central room, another in the first bedroom under the back lip of the night stand, and a fiber-optic camera that I married to the coax cable for the plasma screen at the foot of the bed in the second bedroom.
Forty seconds in.
Now, anything in here he might have reliably touched that wouldn't have other prints on it? Laptops and cellphones are best for this. Luggage is good if you have fancier latent print lifters than I did—you need chemical vapors and other such tricks to pull latents off skin and fabrics. I just had a basic dusting kit with me, and even if I'd had the fancy tools I didn't have time to wait for them to work. Best would be a drinking glass, but the ones the hotel supplied were still wrapped. The room looked pretty much untouched all around, and for a guy who was ostensibly having a party in here in a couple hours, he wasn't very prepared—no booze, no snacks, no stacks of board games or finger paints or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey posters.
One minute ten.
He hadn't brought a laptop either—or if he had, he was keeping it on him. The only two likely surfaces I could find were his deodorant and his toothpaste tube.
I did a quick dust puff on each in the bathroom sink, and found a few partials and a lot of smears. Not enough to make me happy. I'd need another plan.
Two minutes.
My phone buzzed on my hip.
Company's coming.
I rinsed the sink, wiped the tube and stick down so there wouldn't be any graphite dust hanging around. I slipped out of the suite the way I came, closed the door as quietly as I could manage, took one long bound across the hallway and shouldered my own door open just as a knot of loud conversation rounded the corner.
I eased my door shut, retreated into the room, returned Kris's text.
All clear. Come on back.
Now, to check the bugs. I settled down in what passed for an easy chair and brought up the monitoring software. Enough hard drive space for a whole night of both audio and video. I popped the headphones on and turned on auto-gain so the levels would stay good as the noise went up and down.
According to the FBI dossier, this guy was a clean-cut type, no known tattoos or other distinguishing marks. But if I could get a good shot of his face, I might be able to pull a facial recognition match.
He came in through one of the other doors. I followed him with my mics to the bedroom with the camera, where his luggage had been. I had a gorgeous view of the bed that would give me a face shot of someone sitting and looking at the TV. Unfortunately, at the moment, he wasn't sitting down. On my video feed I got a lot of milling about. A man in evening clothes, a woman in a cocktail dress. A bellhop unloading party supplies. Lots of chit-chat. I didn't hear Kristine came back in the room, but caught the motion. She headed straight into the bathroom, did some bathroomy things, came back out and circled around me about the time the bellhop left.
Just in time to see the video feed get interesting—not exactly a strip tease or hardcore, but near enough to get my eyebrows climbing toward my hairline. Dude certainly didn't waste time.
Kristine's reaction, though, was a lot more interesting. She was one of those women who, because she was a doctor, was very practically minded about sex and most other things. Or maybe I've got that backwards—maybe she was a doctor because she was practically minded. God knows I've known my share of quack nuts who managed to con some credentials out of a medical school. But despite the matter-of-fact attitude and being easier on the eyes than Visine, she found other people's sex lives to be about as interesting as their socks (and, for the record, she was not, in any way, interested in socks).
But Kris was at her sexiest when she wasn't trying to play the sex card, like now. Leaning over me, watching the screen as the camera feed showed the couple across the hall trying to untangle the party clothes enough to slide into a sixty-nine, she was drag racing to “hot and getting there on her own,” without really meaning to. I know. I could hear her breathing change, could smell her scent sharpening, could feel her hand on the seat behind me go hot as she leaned forward to watch over my shoulder.
I kept my eyes on the screen, not that it helped. They were officially at the stage where the laundry needs to be done. The she was wriggling like she was wired up to a car battery, and the he was shivering like he'd been dunked in the arctic ocean and left to freeze on an iceberg. Me? I was hard as organic chemistry, and not because of what was going on in the next room.
Fingers. Kris's fingers. In the sweat on my neck.
“Kris? You okay?” Break the tension, Lantham. Good idea.
“Me?” Her voice crackled like a teenage boy. “Fine. I just never thought I'd see Chleo from that angle.”
“Chleo?”
“I said he invited a couple of my girlfriends from work...”
“And?”
“She's my nurse.”
“Ah.”
Breath through the hairs at the base of my skull. If I turned my head I'd swallow her alive. I may be a few rounds short of a clip where subtext is concerned, but Kris was firmly into the realm of text, and what I was reading scared my good sense halfway out the door.
When birds fly south for the winter, the planet does really dumb things, like snowing and freezing and being generally unpleasant to those of us that have to endure it. When your blood flies south for the winter, you're liable to do equally stupid things, like taking your eye off the ball, blowing a good job, and sleeping with old girlfriends. My blood wasn't just flying south for the winter, it was fleeing an ice age.
When the southern hemisphere warms up, the snakes all get hungry. But right when I was about to give up and feed it, an alarm buzzed in my ear. A cell phone from the other room. I looked up at the clock at the screen's top right.
10:15. Time marches on. And saves schmucks like me from tripping over their own dicks.
I swallowed my dry tongue and said “That's it. Let's go.”
Her fingers were halfway over the spot where I'd wear a yarmulke if I was Jewish. Ever stood in a heavy wind and get the kind of chills that pulls your heels up through your ass and into your brain? Ever promised God you'd do anything if only he wouldn't let it stop?
Yeah. Like that.
She didn't move her hand. “What?”
“Pictures,” evidently, some part of my brain was doing its proper job. I was still breathing, more or less. “I need to get down to his stand-up gig. Get pictures. You know, identification.”
“Oh.” She seemed to notice where her fingers were. Pulled them back. “Yeah. Right.” She was swallowing as hard as I was. Maybe harder. I just didn't want to fall into bed—in my experience, soft beds are more prone to shattering hearts, and I'd used up this decade's quota of crazy glue to stick mine back together. She was trying to pay off a debt so she didn't feel like a weakling and a fool. I'd take my position over hers any day.
Kristine smoothed her skirt down while I watched our marks put themselves back together. No good shots of their faces, so I actually did need those photos downstairs. A good thing. I don't think I'd have been able to stick to a lie with Kris standing there smelling like need.
I didn't look at her, except in reflections. I just broke open the camera kit and fit the high speed 70/200 to the body.
10:30 PM
Walking across the lobby from the elevators to the bar on the way to the conference center was my first mistake: I should have gotten off at the mezzanine level and gone through the flyover to the conference center.
Doing it that way takes longer, except when you get accosted by a hotel employee that knows you.
“Clarke? Clarke Lantham? Oh my god! What are you doing here?” I turned around to see Vonda Laplace, clipboard in one hand, a date in the other. She was waving and jogging and dragging her dude-of-the-evening across the long space from the base of the escalators.
With that kind of a public call out, you can't pretend to be someone else. Not that I'd normally want to with Vonda—she was a con girlfriend, the sort you spend long nights at the bar with during conventions that aren't really floating your boat. She'd liked the hotel so much she got a job here—tonight, though, she wasn't in uniform. The date on her arm was a willowy tall man with a boy's face and a goofy grin. Good thing. My attentions tonight were already saturated.
Wishing Vonda will go away is like wishing away the rain. Better to embrace it and find an effective umbrella. So I embraced the rain.
“What are you doing here? Are you on a case?”
Great, there goes my cover. And now Kris'll want to know why I don't talk shop. Thanks a bundle, V. “Eh, you know, New Year, new challenges.” I strained a smile.
“You are! Oh my god. What is it? No, don't answer, I know you can't. This is Herb.”
“Herb.” I shook his hand and smiled—not because I was pleased to meet him, but because Vonda loved cooking, and now she was dating a guy named after an ingredient.
“Clarke.”
“This is Kristine Warner. Kristine, Vonda Laplace, old friend.”
They made their introductions, and Kristine shot me a look as if to say God save the world from your euphemisms.
We made the obligatory small talk—turned out Vonda's date worked for the same company as the putative Mr. Nathan. The clipboard was because she was managing the company scavenger hunt, so they were busy and thankfully not interested in comedy. If Kristine hadn't been along, I'd have taken the chance to grill Vonda about George Nathan without letting on that he was the object of my curiosity, but good doctor was getting territorial and I didn't really care to deal with social awkwardness tonight.
Pop quiz: What do you do if you're on the run for defrauding your insurance customers, hiding under an assumed name, and trying like hell to avoid FBI attention?
Answer: If your name is Giles Noyce, you get yourself a fresh identity, a quickie hair transplant, duck off the radar for a couple years while the heat dies down, come back as a mail-order CPA with a sideline in stand-up comedy, and get a young-and-hungry tech startup to take you on. Two years later, headline their New Year's Eve party with material that'd embarrass a kindergartner with a brand new book full of knock-knock jokes.
At least, I wasn't laughing. Maybe it was because the only way I could keep my mind on my work was by fiddling with my lens. I'd hoped to be able to snag something with his prints on it here, but the man held on to his party glass like he was in the habit of making sure his fingers didn't give him away. Or maybe he was just really thirsty.
Nice long lens, lighting good enough that I didn't have to push the exposure compensation. Kristine was on my arm. Felt like old times. Good times. Between shots I muttered to her “How did you find this guy, anyway?”
“I'd been down at the post office picking up some wine that Charlie sent me from New Zealand. One of the posters on the wall was...okay, I know it's a cliché, but he had this Bundy-hot thing going on. Really sharp eyes, you know?” I was looking at 'em through the lens. Sharp, yeah. Deep blue too. Not exactly what I'd call cute, but definitely demanded attention. “So, anyway, when I get back to the hospital, guess who's there in the exam room?”
“It's a children's hospital.”
“There was a male, about eight years old with CP and crippling stomach pain, I guess this was about three weeks ago? Mr. Nathan signed as his guardian, the boy called him 'George' though, so no, I don't know how they're related. Came in three or four times for tests, they saw me each time—one of our normal ER docs was out for the holidays so I was picking up for him, like you do. But Nathan? Clarke this man is smooth enough to melt your panties off.”
“Doesn't look that cute.”
“Trust me, love, you're missing out being straight.”
“I could say the same thing about you.” The guy was as animated as a charismatic preacher—chasing him around the stage on a long lens to get a clear enough picture was like trying to catch a mosquito with a toothpick. “So why now?”
“It was either this or go up to my mom's place, and it's fogged in tonight.”
“Hmph.” Boom. There we go. Perfect face shot. And now that I had it, I realized I'd missed the most obvious place for fingerprints: the door knob. Well, I'd heard which door he used. I could run the facial recognition routine on him while he was finishing up down here, lift his fingerprints from the inside of his doorknob, and be gone before everyone made it back upstairs for the party. I'd send the prints to the FBI, they'd run them, I'd sit tight and make sure he didn't go anywhere while the men in black got down here from the office in San Francisco. “I gotta head back up to the room and...” The sentence died on my lips when I pointed my eyes back her direction. A light sheen was standing out on her collar bone in the reflected stage light. Her face in three-quarter silhouette, just the slightest gleam off her eyes, making them look wetter than a whale. “Don't move a muscle.”
Naturally, she turned to look at me. “What?”
“Stop, Look back at the stage. Now, don't move until I tell you.” The short end of this lens was a 70, and it was always a little soft. I'd want to step in just a bit. I walked back as far as I could without climbing up on one of the cocktail tables, turned the camera for a portrait and pressed the viewfinder to my right eye. This kind of light, I'd want to be wide open with just a touch of a push on the ISO...
I twiddled the knobs, found my sweet spot, and fired. Nice.
“Good,” I said, just loud enough that she could hear me over the comic, “now, stop holding your breath.”
She let her breath go, and the tension eased out of her body. Her outline danced in a thousand subtle ways on the far side of my lens. I rapid-fired and caught them all. One of these, or more, was going on my wall when I got them sorted and picked the winners. She looked like a living sculpture, like an Egyptian Aphrodite in the Amazon—marble-coated muscle that got caught out in the rain. The straw-colored stage light coaxed her skin to bronze.
I lifted my eye from the camera and caught her smiling. I'd been aware of the smile through the lens, but nothing through a lens looks real while you're working with a model. That's why you see news footage from riot zones, where the cameramen are walking through unspeakable violence like they don't think they're really there: they don't. You put that camera between yourself in the world, and unless you're looking for something particular, the world disappears. It's all just images through a lens.
But when I saw her smile, she was real again. Maybe more real than I'd ever seen her. Laughing at the criminal with the jokes, the sparkle in her eye, the drink in her hands...you know how people say “she looked like a million bucks?” Well, Kris looked better than that. Kris looked like the Golden Gate at sunset. Like a sequoia that had survived worse forest fires than you could ever build. She looked like the ocean sounds after you've spent so many months in Kansas you started thinking nobody kept that much water in one place.
Applause interrupted the moment. The comic was leaving the stage. I dropped the camera to my side and returned to hers. The mark made a beeline for us as someone else took the stage and started in with an old-style Yiddish stand-up routine.
“Doctor Warner!”
“Mr. Nathan,” she said.
“Enjoy the show?”
She smiled. “It's great.”
“And this must be your...date?”
“Friend, actually.” I stepped in before she could say anything that would get inconvenient later. “She invited me along for the show. Clarke Lantham.”
“George Nathan. Call me George. What's your line?”
I held up the camera. “Pathological shooter. I get by.”
“Tough business. You any good?”
“I like to think so.”
“Self-taught?”
I shook my head. “More or less. Had a friend who showed me the ropes when I was starting out, but he retired a while ago.”
“Mentors! Can't do better than a good mentor in a new field. You been at it long?”
“Eh, on and off for the last six years.”
“On and off?” He looked me up and down. “What did you do in between? Bouncer? Security guard?”
I look like a cop. People who are used to dealing with cops can see it in the way I walk. Makes me shit for undercover work among habitual felons. I pushed my chips all in. “I was a cop a while ago, Captain didn't like me. I did insurance investigations—you know, background checks, fraud, that kind of thing? But this baby,” I patted my camera, “This is the one I can depend on.”
“Good for you. I like a man who knows what he loves. You got your tax certificate on file with the state, right?”
“My what?” California lets people involved in movie production take a slide on sales tax when it comes to supplies. Something to do with Hollywood and lobbyists, but that's the part of the state we try to pretend doesn't exist. But he didn't need to know that I new that. I could see the independent-on-the-make wheels turning over in his accountant's brain.
“Oh, wow. You, my friend, are missing out. Look,” he reached into his pocket, grimaced, then patted himself down. “Damn, I was gonna give you my card, but I left 'em up in my room.”