“There goes the Lord of the Douchebags,” said Coldmoon as they watched the entourage pull out of the parking lot, light bar flashing.
“You should meet my friend Lieutenant D’Agosta of the NYPD,” said Pendergast mildly. “He, too, has a remarkable store of colorful expressions.”
“And here I’ve been holding back.” Coldmoon was still watching the receding vehicles. “You know, that guy really needs to be struck by lightning.”
“Patience, Agent Coldmoon.”
He swiveled toward Pendergast. “What does that mean?”
“Someone with his level of hubris and narcissism almost inevitably orchestrates their own downfall.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Coldmoon asked.
“Then I shall have to arrange for him to be caught en dasha belle.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a rather rude expression. Let me put it this way: you are named Armstrong because one of your ancestors supposedly killed General Custer. Right?”
“There’s no ‘supposedly’ about it.”
“As you wish. The point is: if Squire Drayton does not manage to disgrace himself, then I’ll personally make sure he meets his own Little Bighorn.”
He would not elaborate.
40
Wellstone sat, nursing a club soda and lime, at a window table in the bar of the newly opened Telfair Square Hotel. It was almost ten o’clock, and the bar was in the quiet period between the stampede of dinner-hour drinkers and the late-night revelers still to come. He, of course, was not staying here — his own suite was in the Marriott Riverfront — but this bar was a most convenient place to keep an eye on his target, directly across State Street.
The Ye Sleepe was a quirky hotel that cultivated a kind of seedy bohemian chic. It was clearly the latest of several generations of commercial lodging: the pentimento of a red-crowned Best Western logo could still be seen faintly, beneath the façade’s paint job, and the hotel’s external marquee looked suspiciously like the “Great Sign” of vintage Holiday Inns.
The waiter came up to his table. “Anything else, sir? Perhaps something with a little higher octane?”
“I’ll stick to club soda, thanks.” He’d put booze — especially red wine — off-limits for the time being.
He sat, gazing across the street while the waiter brought him a fresh drink. When he’d heard that Barclay Betts and his entourage were staying at the Ye Sleepe, his primary feeling had been one of disdain. Couldn’t the cheap bastard afford to put his people up on the waterfront? But sitting here across the street from the hotel, he could see method in Betts’s madness. The rooms — so the waiter had informed him — were old and very large, and the place catered to thirsty, horny young travelers on a budget. That meant Betts could afford a lot of room to spread out his entourage, and his donkey-like braying and yelling was not likely to elicit complaints from the management.
It had another advantage — for Wellstone, at least. Its on-site parking lot, currently being resurfaced, was barricaded off and unlighted. It took up the rest of the block on the building’s western flank, and it was naturally deserted. That side of the hotel was where Betts had booked a block of rooms, all on the first floor.
And Gerhard Moller’s room was the fifth window in from the street.
It had taken only a little research and surveillance for Wellstone to learn this. The layout was better than he’d hoped — in fact, it made what had initially seemed like a somewhat far-fetched scheme into something very workable. Very workable indeed.
He’d suffered nothing but setbacks in his progress to unmask Barclay Betts, most recently Daisy Fayette’s eviction from the graveyard shooting set. The feral cunning he sensed beneath the southern belle’s veneer had, ultimately, failed him. And now, thanks to his graveyard shenanigans, Betts was working with an even higher profile. Under normal circumstances, Wellstone would have returned to Boston and not bothered with this hack. But he could still practically feel the warm crème anglaise dribbling down his back as Betts laughed. And ironically, it was Daisy’s humiliation — which he’d heard about in querulous detail — that had given him an idea that might turn everything around.
As part of her breathless litany of injustices done by Betts & Co., Daisy described how Moller had taken photos with that special camera of his and then distributed them, via Bluetooth, to the crowd of reporters and rubberneckers. After leaving Daisy’s house with vague promises of retribution, Wellstone had immediately gone to the tourist ghetto along Bay Street, where most of the reporters were staying, and managed to get his hands on copies of Moller’s photos. There were three of them, with normal-enough subjects: a CSI worker, a tomb with a marble angel, another broken tombstone. But each one was also overlaid with a sinister apparition, indistinct but disturbing nonetheless — an outstretched bony hand; a huge, sinister face; and a wispy-haired skull and claw emerging from the earth.
Those were the words — overlaid, indistinct — that convinced Wellstone he knew what Moller was up to. It was obvious these were real photographs, taken in real time; after all, the “doctor” couldn’t have known in advance precisely what he’d be photographing in the cemetery. That meant there had to be some apparatus within the camera to create, in effect, a digital double exposure.
That had to be it. The camera Moller was so protective of contained a mechanism for manipulating the photos it took by overlaying on them the ghostly images. This, Wellstone speculated, could only be done if the camera already held a large set of supernatural images — previously created by Moller. All he’d have to do was take a “real” photo, then use whatever he’d retrofitted into the camera to add an appropriate overlay from his stock of sinister images, ready and waiting. Wellstone guessed he’d use the viewfinder to frame his double exposure in the most believable way — then, with the click of a button, he’d take a photo and some algorithm in the camera would blend the two layers into a final image — to be passed on to the credulous dupes.
But what exactly was the mechanism? Was there an SSD flash drive inside the camera, preloaded with fake ghostly images, ready to overlay? That was almost certainly the case. If Wellstone could snag that drive with its store of fake pictures, he could show Moller as the fraud he was — with Betts complicit in the whole scheme.
This meant getting his hands on the camera. And the way he planned to do that could technically be considered breaking and entering. But Wellstone brushed this aside. This could go under the heading of true investigative reporting — on the level of the Pentagon Papers or Deep Throat.
Just then, Wellstone saw movement at Ye Sleepe’s main entrance. A burly-looking man — the same Cro-Magnon bastard who had pushed him away from Betts in the restaurant — came out onto the street. He was followed by the scruffy-looking young man Wellstone knew was Betts’s researcher. These two were followed in quick succession by the attractive DP; Betts himself, the fartbiter — and then, Deo gratias, Moller. Wellstone noticed the charlatan was not carrying his case.
That meant he must have left it in his room. Exactly as Wellstone hoped.
A few more people joined the entourage; they milled around outside the lobby for a minute or two, then set off down State Street toward Barnard.
Now he rose, fresh club soda untouched; dropped a twenty on the table; and moved quickly out into the lobby and onto the street. As usual, he hadn’t anticipated the heat and humidity, which wrapped him like a soggy Hudson Bay blanket. There weren’t many streetlights here, especially on the far side where the parking lot was broken up and being repaved, and Wellstone could just make out Betts’s group as they turned onto Barnard and disappeared.