Chapter 41

Docherty’s desk phone rang and he picked it up and started listening again. A friend in the 17th, presumably, with more details to share. I looked at Lee and said, “Now you’re going to have to reopen the file.”

She asked, “Why?”

“Because those guys were the local crew that Lila Hoth hired.”

She looked at me and said, “What are you? Telepathic?”

“I met with them twice.”

“You met some crew twice. Nothing says these are the same guys.”

“They gave me one of those phony business cards.”

“All those crews use phony business cards.”

“With the same kind of phone number?”

“Movies and TV are the only places to get those numbers.”

“They were ex–cops. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

“I care about cops, not ex–cops.”

“They said Lila Hoth’s name.”

“No, some crew said her name. Doesn’t mean these dead guys did.”

“You think this is a coincidence?”

“They could be anybody’s crew.”

“Like who else’s?”

“Anybody in the whole wide world. This is New York. New York is full of private guys. They roam in packs. They all look the same and they all do the same stuff.”

“They said John Sansom’s name, too.”

“No, some crew said his name.”

“In fact they were the first place I heard his name.”

“Then maybe they were his crew, not Lila’s. Would he have been worried enough to have his own people up here?”

“He had his chief of staff on the train. That’s who the fifth passenger was.”

“There you go, then.”

“You’re not going to do anything?”

“I’ll inform the 17th, for background.”

“You’re not going to reopen your file?”

“Not until I hear about a crime my side of Park Avenue.”

I said, “I’m going to the Four Seasons.”

It was late and I was pretty far west and I didn’t find a cab until I hit Sixth Avenue. After that it was a fast trip to the hotel. The lobby was quiet. I walked in like I had a right to be there and rode the elevator to Lila Hoth’s floor. Walked the silent corridor and paused outside her suite.

Her door was open an inch.

The tongue of the security deadbolt was out and the spring closer had trapped it against the jamb. I paused another second and knocked.

No response.

I pushed the door and felt the mechanism push back. I held it open forty-five degrees against my spread fingers and listened.

No sound inside.

I opened the door all the way and stepped in. Ahead of me the living room was dim. The lights were off but the drapes were open and there was enough of a glow from the city outside to show me that the room was empty. Empty, as in no people in it. Also empty as in checked-out-of and abandoned. No shopping bags in the corners, no personal items stowed either carefully or carelessly, no coats over chairs, no shoes on the floor. No signs of life at all.

The bedrooms were the same. The beds were still made, but they had suitcase-sized dents and rucks on them. The closets were empty. The bathrooms were strewn with used towels. The shower stalls were dry. I caught a faint trace of Lila Hoth’s perfume in the air, but that was all.

I walked through all three rooms one more time and then stepped back to the corridor. The door closed behind me. I heard the spring inside the hinge doing its work and I heard the deadbolt tongue settle against the jamb, metal on wood. I walked away to the elevator and hit the down button and the door slid back immediately. The car had waited for me. A nighttime protocol. No unnecessary elevator movement. No unnecessary noise. I rode back to the lobby and walked to the desk. There was a whole night staff on duty. Not as many people as during the day, but way too many for the fifty-dollar trick to have worked. The Four Seasons wasn’t that kind of a place. A guy looked up from a screen and asked how he could help me. I asked him when exactly the Hoths had checked out.

“The who, sir?” he asked back. He spoke in a quiet, measured, nighttime voice, like he was worried about waking the guests stacked high above him.

“Lila Hoth and Svetlana Hoth,” I said.

The guy got a look on his face like he didn’t know what I was talking about and refocused on his screen and hit a couple of keys on his keyboard. He scrolled up and down and hit a couple more keys and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t find a record of any guests under that name.”

I told him the suite number. He hit a couple more keys and his mouth turned down in puzzled surprise and he said, “That suite hasn’t been used at all this week. It’s very expensive and quite hard to rent.”

I double-checked the number in my head and I said, “I was in it last night. It was being used then. And I met the occupants again today, in the tea room. There’s a signature on a check.”

The guy tried again. He called up tea room checks that had been charged to guest accounts. He half-turned his screen so that I could see it too, in the sharing gesture that clerks use when they want to convince you of something. We had had tea for two plus a cup of coffee. There was no record of any such charge.

Then I heard small sounds behind me. The scuff of soles on carpet, the rattle of drawn breath, the sigh of fabric moving through the air. And the clink of metal. I turned around and found myself facing a perfect semicircle of seven men. Four of them were uniformed NYPD patrolmen. Three of them were the federal agents I had met before.

The cops had shotguns.

The feds had something else.