“They’re fine,” he said.
“Good. Phil, how quiet are you going to keep this?”
“Arthur Forbes is an important citizen,” he said, looking back toward the ballroom. “I think the chief will be happy to keep this investigation confidential. At least for a while.”
It wasn’t Forbes I was worried about and Phil knew it. It was Fred Astaire. The guy from the medical examiner’s office came out, following two guys lugging a stretcher. A gray blanket covered the body of Luna Martin. A corner of her silk dress fluttered as they carried her past Phil and me. The fabric brushed against my hand. And she was gone.
The medical examiner was a twig named O’Neil whose hair was never combed and whose glasses were never clean. He paused next to us, nodded at me, and said, “In front of him?”
Phil shrugged, hands out of his pockets now, searching for something to do with them.
“Suit yourself,” O’Neil said. “Lady’s throat was cut, nice thin, even stroke. She was also strangled, but there are no bruises. Not sure which killed her. I’ll know more about the weapon and the cause of death sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. I’ve got bodies piling up. Riot, gangs, something in Little Mexico. I’ll get to the little lady as fast as I can.”
“Thanks,” said Phil.
O’Neil was shaking his head and looking down the corridor in the direction Luna’s body had been carried. “Seidman says it looks like she walked all the way into the middle of the ballroom after she had been attacked,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
“She couldn’t have come far,” said O’Neil. “A miracle that she could walk at all. That was a dead woman walking. I’d say she was murdered right out here, in front of the door to the ballroom probably. That was some determined woman.”
“Amen,” I said.
O’Neil strode down the corridor. When the M.E. was gone, Phil walked back to the door of the ballroom and looked down at the carpet. There were a couple of dark spots that might have been blood. There was no knife, nothing that looked like a murder weapon. On the chance that the killer had hidden the weapon, Phil looked behind the mirrors and paintings down the hall and went into the men’s room.
“You want me to help?” I asked, standing behind him.
“You’re a witness,” he said. “Don’t touch. Don’t help.”
Phil didn’t need my assistance. When he was done, he went to the sinks against the wall, turned on the cold water full blast, and when the basin was half full he plunged his face into it and held it there for about five seconds. When he came up for air, he shook his head like a wet dog and dried his face with one of the towels piled in the corner. I’d watched this before. He had never explained the rite. I had tried it myself but it didn’t seem to work the same magic for me. Phil looked refreshed.
“Time to see Mr. Forbes and his friends,” he said.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“You go home. I see Mr. Forbes. We’re getting along just fine so far. Let’s not test it right now.”
“Phil, I. .”
“Go now, Tobias.”
I went, but not out of the hotel. I hid behind some plants in the lobby. Phil went to the desk, where Seidman joined him. They talked to a clerk and headed for the elevator. When the elevator doors had firmly closed, I ran for the phone in the corridor near the ballroom and called the number Fred Astaire had given me. A man answered and I identified myself and asked for Astaire, telling him I thought it was important. Astaire came on about ten seconds later.
“Peters?”
“Luna Martin’s dead.”
He listened quietly while I told him what had happened, let him know that the police would be talking to him, and informed him that it probably wouldn’t make the papers.
“I should have given her the damned lessons,” Astaire said.
“I’d say the odds are very good that Luna Martin’s death had nothing to do with you, me, or her dancing lessons.”
“But Arthur Forbes doesn’t think so.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Then I’ll have a talk with Arthur Forbes,” said Astaire. “I don’t want you or your friends getting hurt because you work for me.”
“I don’t think it’ll do any good and it might be dangerous. Why don’t I try to see him? Talk to him.”
“A very good idea,” came a deep accented voice behind me.
I turned and found myself looking up into the face of Kudlap Singh.
Chapter Five: Let’s Dance
The big Indian didn’t say another word. He walked slightly in front of me, certain that I wouldn’t run and I wouldn’t try to make my own impression on his behind. The man had confidence, good posture, and a poor choice in bosses.
He led me down the corridor to a door that brought us into the hotel kitchen. Two male cooks in white and a bell-boy sat in one corner at a white metal table, talking and smoking. They looked up, saw Kudlap Singh, and went back to their conversation.
The smell of fried eggs, bacon, grilled sausage, and bananas accompanied us past the reasonably clean wooden cutting and serving tables and the metal sinks. We went through another door and into a small service area where an elevator stood open, waiting for us. Singh stepped aside so I could get on and then he followed, facing forward, and pressed a button. We jerked upward.
“Read any good books lately?” I asked.
“They Were Expendable,” he answered, without turning.
He was not only bigger than I was, he was funnier. I shut up and we went up. A jerk-stop on eight and the Indian stepped out and waited for me. I followed him down a carpeted hotel corridor to room 813. Singh knocked and waited for Forbes’s “Come in.”
We entered, Singh behind me. It was a normal hotel sitting room with a closed door to the left, which I assumed was the bedroom. The dark, flower-patterned sofa had its back to the sunny floor-to-ceiling draped window and there were two matching chairs facing the sofa. There was an old, highly polished wooden table and two chairs in a corner. On top of the polished table sat a cake-box sized chrome metal box with a cord running out of it. On one wall hung a painting of a guy in one of those white colonial wigs.
“Admiring the painting?” Forbes said from where he sat, knees crossed and arms spread over the back of the sofa.
With the sun at his back, Forbes was a black cutout, which was probably what he wanted.
“Yes,” I said, standing about six feet in front of him. “Washington.”
“Thomas Jefferson,” he corrected. “Jefferson and Washington didn’t look anything alike, for chrissake. Painting of Jefferson in every guest room. I’d change the name of the hotel to the Thomas Jefferson if there wasn’t already a Jefferson in Los Angeles. So I renamed it for his home, Monticello. You know he planned every brick in Monticello?”
“No,” I said, preferring the history lesson to what he might have planned after it.
“Do you know it took him thirty-five years to build Monticello?”
“No,” I said again.
“Do you know he started the University of Virginia? Not only did he found it, he designed the buildings.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said, looking at Kudlap Singh, who showed no sign of whether or not he knew the accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson.
“In my home I’ve got furniture from Monticello, books,” Forbes went on. “I tell you, I was born too late. In my heart I know I should have been around for the Revolution.”
“Maybe you could buy the Jefferson Hotel,” I suggested.
“Too high profile,” he said. “I like to do things without drawing attention to myself. You want a drink?”
“Pepsi,” I said.
“Fridge over behind the table. Help yourself. Kudlap Singh doesn’t serve. He gets paid for only one thing. To keep me alive and well and in a good safe mood.”
I went to the fridge, crouched, got a Pepsi out from a rack of wine and pop bottles. I stood up, looking for an opener. Kudlap Singh took the bottle from my hand and flipped the cap off with a thumb that looked like calloused leather.