We took a table in the rear, ordered martinis from the waiter, and sat back to watch the ceremonies for a while.
“They always leave the important awards till last anyway,” Donna said, lovely in the lamplight. On our way up here she’d plucked an orchid from a vendor’s display and set it jauntily behind her left ear. I wondered if she knew how good she looked to me.
For the next ten minutes a screen that appeared magically from the top of the stage was filled with examples of commercials. Not one of them starred me or anybody I knew, even though they were all local. So much for vanity.
Even without me, many of them managed to be very good — by turns funny, warm, instructive. Unfortunately, their makers detracted from the commercials somewhat — accepting the awards with a great deal of arrogance or smugness or artsy posturing.
Several acceptance speeches later I was worn down. Much as I like acting, close proximity to show-biz types dispirits me. They make me want to hang around plumbers or farmers or guys who fix flat tires. There were too many in-group jokes and far too much credit given and taken. They were honoring people who made TV commercials, for God’s sake, not brain surgeons or missionaries.
“You look mad,” Donna said.
“This is getting depressing. All these berserk fucking egos.”
“You are mad.”
“Yeah.”
Then I saw Carla Travers.
Even in a chiffon evening gown she still looked like a lady who could wheel a semi around an icy corner. Still looked like the lady who’d brained me with a gun in her apartment. She walked a tad unsteadily and there was something sad about her beefy shoulders and the mannish gait to her walk. I thought of her abortion story, how the jukebox had played while the baby was being ripped out, and I thought of her odd, possessive attitude toward Stephen Elliot. I needed to talk to her again.
Then something else interesting happened.
Not a minute after Carla left the ballroom so did David and Lucy Baxter. If only one of them had gone, I wouldn’t have thought much of it. But two of them made things suspicious, particularly so soon after Carla.
God wanted to make sure I got the point — because a minute after the Baxters passed through the doors, Phil Davies got up from somewhere near the front of the room and left, too, looking different from the night he’d begged me to leave his house before his invalid wife got suspicious.
“Gee,” Donna said.
“No kidding.”
“Now if I were a detective, Dwyer, would I follow them?”
“Right away.”
“Let’s go.”
The night crew was vacuuming and dusting and polishing when we reached the staircase.
We looked left, right, up, down.
Not a sign of any of them.
“You take the ladies’ room,” I said.
The men’s room was empty. So was a small lounge where a piano player played badly at “Skylark.” I tried the swimming pool area. Nothing.
Ten minutes later I found Donna outside the ballroom again.
“So much for my first assignment as a detective,” she said. “Zip.”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“I’m glad you do.”
In the elevator she said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“I thought we were working together.”
“We are.”
“Then how about giving me a clue about what the heck we’re doing, Dwyer?”
“You sound kind of drunk.”
“I am, but so what?”
“I thought we’d check out the register.”
“Why?”
“Well, at bashes like these, guests sometimes rent rooms or suites for private parties.”
“Hey, good idea.”
She really was drunk.
The night clerk was another IBM graduate. He didn’t look susceptible to my private-eye routine so I pretended we were looking for a private party. “Actually,” I smiled, “it could be listed under several names. If I could see the register—”
Donna, who was weaving slightly by now, whispered a bit loudly, “Gosh, could you hurry? I really need to find a bathroom.”
The night clerk, having heard, looked unhappy. But her remark seemed to convince him that we really were just harmless partygoers. He showed us the register. Tonight Room 708 belonged to Phil Davies. We thanked him and left.
Donna had found a bathroom and redone her makeup and she was walking straighter by the time the elevator let us off on the seventh floor.
“This is fun,” she said, “being a detective. I may write the story in the first person.”
“Kind of like a private-eye adventure?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Right,” I said doubtfully.
I paused in the corridor, leaned my head into 708, and listened.
Nothing special. Conversation. Ice cubes dropping into glasses. Water running in a sink someplace.
“You ready?”
“You nervous?” she asked.
“Sort of.”
“So am I. Only more than sort of.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“I sure hope so.”
I knocked.
Phil Davies must have been standing next to the door. He opened it instantly. He stood there in his country-western style tuxedo, a deep brown bourbon drink in his hand and a frown on his beefy face.
“I don’t seem to remember inviting you,” he said.
Donna squeezed my hand tight enough to grind my knuckles together. She wasn’t kidding about being nervous.
“You did.” I kept my eyes level on him. “Right after your friends at the motel died.”
He nodded angrily to Donna. “Who the hell’s she?”
“Donna Harris. Ad World,” she said. Actually, she sounded pretty good saying it.
“You’re a reporter?”
She looked at me as if for confirmation. “Yes, she is,” I said, since she couldn’t seem to speak for herself, “and a damn good one.”
This time she squeezed my hand in gratitude.
Lucy Baxter appeared behind Davies, radiant in a green silk dress that flattered her full breasts.
“Oh, more people? Aren’t you inviting them in, Phil?”
“I don’t think so,” Davies said. He smiled nastily at me. “Riffraff.”
“What he means by that,” I said to Lucy Baxter, “is that I’ve never spent a night in the Palms motel.”
She looked confused by that, shrugged lovely shoulders, and said, “Oh, don’t be a poop, Phil. Let them come in. This party needs a little cheering up.” She was drunker than Donna. There seemed to be a lot of that in the air.
She slid a long, graceful arm around his waist and angled him away from the door so that we could come in.
Donna glanced at me skeptically, but I escorted her inside.
And there they stood — David Baxter, Carla Travers, Lucy Baxter, and Phil Davies.
Staring at us.
“Bourbon is fine for me,” I said.
David and Lucy Baxter exchanged a murky look, and then Lucy said, “What about your friend?”
“Club soda,” Donna said, trying very hard to act sober.
The door leading from the room to the veranda was, surprisingly, open. Who would want to stand outside on a night that was below freezing? Then I decided it must be the heat here. The room was hot. And the moods of the people weren’t much different.
“Lovely dress,” Lucy Baxter said to Donna. I kept remembering how Lucy had looked in the photograph with Phil Davies — her beautiful, young nakedness contrasting with his middle-aged paunch.
A Nat “King” Cole album started playing on the stereo. “Phil hates rock ‘n’ roll.” David Baxter laughed.