Which is exactly what we did.
“Who was he?” asked Morris on the elevator to the fourth floor.
“He’s an enforcer for a drug dealer.”
“So this drug dealer then has the missing money?”
“Evidently, and he killed a man already to keep me from finding out about it.”
“Ahhh, now this is worse than your original telling.”
“But he shouldn’t know Veronica was here.”
“So how did he learn?” asked Morris as the elevator doors slid open at the fourth floor.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Careful now,” said Morris, and I followed him down the empty carpeted hallway. At Room 4016 he pointed at me. I shook my head. He knocked lightly on the door.
“Yes?” said the voice from inside.
“I’m sorry, miss,” said Morris, “but I need to be checking on the heat inside your room.”
“One minute,” she said and one minute later the door opened and a loosely draped Veronica, still wet from the shower, peered out. Before she could slam the door in my face I stuck one Florsheim wing tip in the opening. What they don’t tell you in vacuum cleaner salesman school is that sticking your foot in the door can hurt like hell, but pain or no pain it worked.
“You’ve been subpoenaed to appear in court today to testify,” I said when Morris and I were inside her room, the door locked and chained behind us.
“Who’s he?” she said, motioning with her head at Morris. She was wrapped in a light silk robe, her arms were crossed on her chest. Her hair fell flat and clean against her beautiful shoulders. I could barely stop myself from dropping to my knees before her, she was that beautiful.
“He’s a friend who is here to protect you,” I said.
“How comforting,” she said.
“Thank you, miss,” said Morris, ignoring her sarcasm.
“Who is he protecting me from, Victor? From you?”
“From Goodwin. His men are outside. He doesn’t want you to testify.”
“Fuck,” she said in a desperate voice. “Dammit, Victor. See what you’re doing to me.” She walked back into the room and sat on the far bed.
I followed her, like I seemed always to be following her, and stood beside the bed. Morris stayed by the door, listening to the outside, so we were talking in private. “He is probably going to kill you whether you testify or not,” I said quietly. “At least that is what it sounded like. How much do you owe him, Veronica?”
She shrugged her shoulders even as she hugged her chest and wouldn’t look at me. “Not too much,” she said unconvincingly.
“Is there ever too much for you?” I said.
She said nothing, her gaze still on the floor.
“Tell me something else, Veronica. How did Goodwin end up with the missing quarter of a million?”
“Is that who has it?”
“You didn’t know?”
She shook her head. “I was just holding it for Jimmy in the account.”
“The one with Chester’s name on it?”
“Right, but then he asked for it back, said he needed it all.”
“But first he wanted it in an account with Chester’s name on it. Setting Concannon up for the fall from the start, just in case.”
“I never knew what Jimmy did with the money,” she said.
“How would Goodwin have gotten it?”
“He must have stolen it somehow,” she said with a shrug.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I looked around her fancy hotel room: two king-size beds, color TV, easy chairs, and velour curtains, and began wondering. “You’ve been here a couple days now. Have you been buying any crap from Goodwin?”
“No, not from him, Jesus. One of the reasons I decided to leave was to get away from him and his damn dead animals.”
“So only Jimmy knows you’re here.”
“And you.”
“Yes, and me. But I wasn’t the guy who told Goodwin.”
She looked up at me questioningly. I shrugged. Her eyes opened wide and she shook her head. I nodded my head sadly. She screwed up her face in incomprehension, but then it started working, like the surface of an old computer, lights flashing, tapes winding, as the logic of it all unfolded for her, one syllogism after another, leading ultimately to a look of shock. Jimmy Moore had set her up, her face said, the bastard had put her in this hotel so that Goodwin could take care of both their troubles. Her head shook no, it couldn’t be. But she knew it could be, she knew it was. She turned from me quickly and began to cry. It was that moment, for the first time really, that I knew Veronica Ashland would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth on the witness stand.
I bent over to pick up some of her clothes off the floor and took them to the suitcase laying open on the top of the bureau.
“Nu?” said Morris from the door. “Is she coming?”
“No,” said Veronica weakly.
“She’s coming,” I said.
“If she is coming then she must come now,” said Morris. “Because I think that maybe our nice friend from outside might decide to force his way past Sheldon and come up here himself to find out what is happening.”
“Who exactly is outside?” she asked.
“Wayman,” I said. “And he’s the one who killed Chuckie.”
That ended all hesitation; in ninety seconds her bag was packed, she was in a pair of jeans, a shirt, her overcoat, and we were out of the room, running down the hallway, following Morris.
“Where are we going?” she asked me.
“Damned if I know,” I said.
As we ran, we heard an elevator opening. We ran away from the elevator, around a corner and another. By the time we turned the last corner and reached the stairs we could hear a door banging and Wayman’s thick and slippery voice yelling, “Open up, bitch. Open the fuck up.”
We rushed down the stairs, Morris leading as quickly as he could, which was quicker than I would have thought, down two flights. The sign said no reentry from stairwell, but Morris pulled open the door to the second floor, snapping tape off the lock as he went by, and we stumbled through the doorway after him, into the hallway, and a quick left to the room beside the stairwell, Room 2082, where Morris, without knocking, pushed open the door and rushed inside. We fell in after him, as if sucked in by a vacuum. The door closed quietly but quickly behind us.
The room was the same as Veronica’s, same size, same furnishings, same two huge beds, same color TV. The door to the bathroom was closed, the window curtains drawn. Morris locked and bolted the door behind us.
“Okay now, Miss Veronica,” said Morris. “You must give to me your fine coat.”
“My overcoat?” she said.
“Yes, of course. By now they have people watching the front and the back, there is no way out. So what we need is what is called in the profession the holtzene kochka. A wooden duck.”
“A decoy?”
“That’s it, yes. The holtzene kochka.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Why, you, of course, Victor,” he said. “And someone else to look like Miss Veronica, and for that we need the overcoat.”
“With all due respect, Morris, I don’t think you’ll pass.”
“Don’t be so much the cham, Victor. You think I would let myself be the holtzene kochka? You don’t live as long as I have lived in this business setting up yourself as the holtzene kochka. No, rule number two is that the detective is never the holtzene kochka. Maybe that should be rule number one and the coffee rule number two. The numbering, sometimes, it gets so confusing.”
“Then who?” I asked.
Just then the bathroom door opened and out she walked in jeans and a wig, a brown wig with soft shoulder-length hair, hair that was styled exactly to match Veronica’s. Beth. It was more than strange, my best friend styled to look like the lover of my dreams, a disorienting blend of comfort and kink. In a way, standing there, framed by the bathroom door, was my ideal woman, a fusion of all I could ever want or love. So I stared for a bit and then a bit longer, stared until Beth started to giggle, which broke the mood and let my fantasies slip away until I realized why she was there.