A Hell of a Dog (20 page)

I looked up in time to see Bucky trying to see my cards in the mirror on the wall behind me.

“Close to the vest, gentlemen,” I said as I got up and walked over to the bathroom. I came back with a bath sheet and draped it over the mirror. “My error. We should be sitting shivah. Haven't two of our colleagues just passed on?”

When I sat down again and looked around the table, Bucky no longer had a poker face. He was scowling as he studied his cards. What was he going to do next, the slime, send Angelo to steal chips from the rest of us? Just how far would he go, I wondered, to make himself feel he was winning?

It was going to be a long night, but that was precisely the point. I'd promised myself I'd do whatever I could to keep the game going until morning.

21

THIS IS SO SUDDEN, HE SAID

“We need more ice,” Boris said. “Wodka not cold enough.”

I looked out the open window and saw the first glimmers of pink in the sky.

“Ice, Rachel, ice.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, wanting everyone to be happy so they'd stay at my party, “I'll go down the hall to the ice machine.”

When I picked up the ice bucket, Dashiell got up and went to the door. I checked my pocket for the key. None of these guys looked sober enough by now to get up and unlock the door for me when I came back.

“Don't any of you touch my chips. I counted them.”

“Ice,” Boris said, clearly a man in need.

“Ice, ice, I'm going.”

I didn't bother with my shoes. The hall carpeting was thick and soft, and the maids vacuumed it every day. They were always there, cleaning the hallways, early in the morning when I was going out with Dashiell. Anyway, at that point, I wasn't sure where my shoes were.

When I got to the end of the corridor, there was a candy machine and an ice machine. But the ice machine wasn't working. Someone had taped a sign on it saying there was one on four. So I took the stairs, found the working ice machine, and scooped up a bucket full of ice so that Boris could chill the rest of the vodka properly. Next thing they'd be sending out to an all-night deli for more snack food.

I headed back to my room, swinging the ice bucket at my side as if I were Jill coming down the hill, and when I got to my door, Dashiell immediately welded his nose to the doorstop, hoping for a preview of Betty. I fished the key out of my pocket, blew the lint off it, and attempted to slip it into the lock. But it didn't seem to fit. I figure I must have had more to drink than I thought I did, because it wasn't until after my third try that I looked at the number on the door and saw that I was at 405. I heard a dog sniffing and sneezing near the saddle from the other side of the door, and though I clearly was not as sharp as I could have been, I knew it was a little dog, not a German shepherd.

I turned to go back to the stairs I'd come up, though I could just as well have used the stairs near the elevator. Just as I rounded the corner where the hallway dog-legged in another direction, I heard a door open behind me. But when I walked back to see who it was and to reassure whomever it was that it was only me, I found all the doors closed.

Downstairs, I headed back toward my room, padding quietly around the turn and then straight along the empty hall. My key still in my hand, I checked first to make sure it was the right room, then slipped it into my lock and opened the door.

Boris was out for the count. Stretched across the foot of my bed, snoring, he resembled a hibernating bear. Bucky had moved to the one upholstered chair, where he was asleep with Angelo curled on his lap. Chip had apparently stood up from where he'd been sitting on the window seat and was walking toward me. I heard the toilet flush, and Woody came out, barely looked at me, and lay down on the bed perpendicular to Boris, his head on one of the pillows, curled like spoons with Rhonda.

“Where's Martyn?” I whispered. “Are we playing cards or what?”

“It's nearly dawn, Rachel. Martyn's the only one here with any sense. He left shortly after you did. He said he was still jet-lagged and had to get some sleep. I'm going to do the same thing.”

I felt a flutter of panic over Martyn, but if everyone else was here asleep, he'd be perfectly safe. I looked at my bed. Then at the chair. Then I looked at Chip. What if that weren't so? What if by separating, the men weren't safe? Wasn't the whole point of this to keep them together?

I grabbed Chip's shirt. “You can't leave me here like this.” Joan Crawford, minus the shoulder pads.

He looked at me as if I were talking some foreign language he hadn't gotten around to learning. I thought I better try again.

“I thought maybe I could sleep in your room,” I whispered, even though I probably wouldn't have been able to wake the others had I begun demolishing the room with a jackhammer. “It's a little crowded in here.”

I watched him trying to figure out what it was I really wanted. Finally, he thought he had.

“Okay, Rachel, sure. Betty and I will stay here, and you can—”

“No. I wouldn't ask you to do that. It's bad enough we spent all these hours breathing smoke. Neither of us should—”

“You weren't merely breathing it, Kaminsky. As I recall, you were smoking.”

“Don't get technical.” It was a favorite line of my mother's when she'd been backed into a corner of her own making.

“So what is it you want, Rachel?”

Smooth, I thought. It's a good thing this guy was back with his Mrs., because God knows how he'd function as a single man. Maybe, unlike the rest of this motley crew, he was out of practice. One way or another, I had to get through to him, because if I couldn't protect them all, he was the one I couldn't afford to lose. It didn't matter that I was saving him for another woman, as long as I was saving him. I decided to do whatever it would take to not let Chip out of my sight. And then I knew exactly what it was I had to do. But I couldn't do it where we were.

“Come on,” I said. I took his hand and pulled him with me toward the door. Out in the hall, the dogs began to run back and forth, Dash chasing Betty, then Betty chasing Dashiell. I held out my hand for Chip's key.

Inside his room, I put my hands on his shoulders. “Sit down.” I backed him up to the bed and pushed him onto it.

“This is so sudden,” he said. He pulled me onto him and was reaching for my face. Even before I became a detective, I knew where a move like that was going.

I shoved his hand away. “I need you to listen to me, very carefully. You can't do that with me lying on top of you. And I won't be able to speak if you're kissing me. I have to speak to you right now. And you have to listen.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you're beautiful when you're angry?” he said. “Come on.” He rolled me off him, and we both sat up.

The dogs were nowhere in sight. Apparently they had gone into the bathroom to see if there was any food left in Betty's dish. A moment later Dashiell emerged from the bathroom backward. As soon as he was back in the bedroom, the growling stopped, and I could hear Betty's tags hitting rhythmically against the feed pan.

Chip got up and walked over to the nightstand to turn on the light. I noticed that there wasn't a picture of Ellen and the children there. Nor was there one on the dresser.

“Don't,” I said.

I heard Betty's tags hit the tile floor. I couldn't see Dashiell, but I could hear him snoring.

“You want to talk in the dark?”

“It might be easier.”

“Anything to please you,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. Or was he just hoarse from hanging out in a smoke-filled room for most of the night? My throat was sore, too, and I couldn't stand the smell of the stale cigar smoke coming from my hair and clothes.

“May I use your shower?” I asked.

“That's the urgent thing you had to say?”

“No—I had too much to drink, and I can't stand the smell of smoke on myself. I'd like to take a shower and wake myself up, and then I have something important to say to you. Okay?”

Chip nodded. Without saying a word, he walked over to his dresser, opened the second drawer, took out a clean shirt, and handed it to me. “You might feel fresher in this. I'm going to stretch out my back and close my eyes until you're finished, then I'll do the same. Afterward, we can do whatever you like.”

I didn't like the look in his eyes.

Well, I did. But I had something completely different in mind.

“Talk,” I told him.

“Talk,” he repeated, trying to keep a poker face.

Everything was aching. I decided on a bath instead of a shower. The radio was in the other room, where it belonged. I could hear it playing.

I emptied the complimentary bubble bath into the tub. I didn't think Chip would mind. Sliding into the hot water, I thought about what I wanted to say to him and how I'd put it. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in chilly water, the bubbles all gone, my mouth tasting like a sewer, complete with alligators.

I washed my hair, rinsed off, brushed my teeth with Chip's toothbrush, and got dressed.

The radio was still on, and Chip was lying on his side, his head on the pillow, both dogs up on the bed, mine pressed up against his back. They were all sleeping.

Apparently Betty had changed her tune again. She'd not only allowed Dashiell up on the bed but her head was lying across Chip's legs so that her muzzle was against Dashiell's ear, whispering sweet nothings as he slept blissfully.

I looked at the clock radio. It was morning—six-twenty-two, to be exact. We'd been asleep for nearly two hours.

I woke Chip and walked over to the window seat, moved the drape back, and sat against the wall on one side. I listened to the water running, then heard the faucet squeak again as Chip turned the water off. A few minutes later, wearing a navy blue T-shirt and khaki pants now, his feet bare, he came over and sat on the other side, facing me.

“I'm not here for the reason you think I am,” I said.

With Chip sitting so close, his green eyes looking into mine, I understood what all those people had been doing here every night, leaving the loneliness of their own room and going to someone else's, where under a veil of alcohol and excitement and in the suspension of reality of being away from home, they would fall into the arms of a stranger, and for a moment there was that silent promise that what would follow would be perfect and different and for a few hours would make the world go very, very quiet and seem very far away.

“I'm here because Sam hired me to prevent the very thing that's been happening since we got here.”

“And what would that be?”

“Murder.”

“Rachel,” he said, taking hold of my arms and pulling me against his chest, “it's all right. You're just tired,” he said as if I were one of his children. “There've been a couple of terrible accidents, but no one—”

I pushed myself away. “No, you're wrong. They weren't accidents. Someone's winnowing away the competition. You've heard all the fighting, all the—”

“Rachel, are you telling me you think Bucky King or Martyn Eliot is a murderer? And anyway, what on earth do you mean Sam hired you to—”

“I'm not a dog trainer anymore. Since my divorce. I just couldn't go back to it. I don't know why. Well, you know what they say. One door closes. Another door opens. I'm a private investigator now. Sam hired me to work undercover because she was afraid—”

“A what?”

“A private investigator. This is real, Chip. It's not a joke.”

“Okay. If it's real, show me your license.”

He was trying to keep it serious, but his eyes were dancing with what he saw as the humor of the situation, same old, same old. Didn't we live to goof on each other? Hadn't we always done that? Or maybe he thought it was different this time, that I was too drunk to know fantasy from reality, that because of the alcohol I was telling a whopper of a story.

“I—”

“Come on. If you're a private investigator, show me your license.”

I just sat there.

“You know what a license is, don't you? One of those little laminated things with your picture on it you keep in your wallet and whip out on occasions such as this.”

“I never got one.”

“I see.” The way he was grinning, you'd think he'd just won the lottery.

“No, you don't see. I work without a license. I didn't want to do all the paperwork, but that doesn't mean—”

“Then your business card. Surely, you have a business card, Rachel. Show me.” He held his hand out.

I took a card out of my wallet and handed it to him.

“Rachel Alexander, research assistance?”

“It's just that … I mean, you don't want to put on a business card … I work mainly on referrals, and the thing is, people need answers, you see, and I do the research necessary to help them find out what it is they need to know. Understand?”

“And tonight?” He reached out and took my hand. “It's okay,” he whispered. “It's okay.”

He'd figured it out. Or so he thought. I had changed my mind about the meaningless roll in the hay and didn't know how to say it.

I took my hand back.

“I don't know who is doing this. I don't know when it's going to happen next. I suggested the poker game because it seems evident that men are the targets here. And when I couldn't keep it going any longer—” I turned toward the window, but the sun hurt my eyes. I looked back at Chip. “When you got up to leave, I thought that if anything happened to you, I'd never forgive myself.”

“Rachel—”

I held up my hand like a Supreme. “Let me finish,” I said.

“That's very sweet, really, that you're a PI and you're going to protect me.” He couldn't hold it in any longer. He was laughing out loud now. “Maybe vodka's not your drink,” he said. “Anyway, you've forgotten about Betty.”