She hoped.
After a long lunch, Lola took a short cab ride across town, back to the Whitworth Arms. A uniformed doorman opened the cab’s door for her. Lola gave the driver a backhanded wave rather than accept change for the twenty-dollar bill she gave him, thanked the doorman, and entered the lobby.
It was as sumptuous as she remembered it. Acres of red-grained marble, rich brown leather furniture, and two elevators. A chandelier straight out of Phantom of the Opera graced a vaulted ceiling.
The doorman had followed her in and gone behind a marble counter. Lola stopped gawking and walked over to him.
“I’m here to meet Charles Langley in 303,” she said.
The name, which had been on the business card Lola had taken from the coffee shop bulletin board, seemed familiar to the doorman. “Third floor.” He motioned toward the elevators.
Lola thanked him and could feel him watching her as she walked toward the elevators. She gave a little hip switch but didn’t glance back, thinking, Soon you’ll be working for me, pal. As long as the condo board okays Roland and me as unit owners. Lola didn’t have the slightest doubt about their approval. She thought about the latest sales figures on the Effin’ Right! Line. This was one of those times when it was okay to be rich. Plenty of designers would love trading places with her.
The elevator made not a sound and seemed to take about three seconds to rise three floors. The door slid open silently.
Her footfalls in her high-heeled shoes were as hushed as the rest of the building. Was she dreaming? Floating?
The doorman must have called up to Langley, because the real estate agent was standing waiting for her with the door to 303 open. He was a small man in a well-tailored gray suit. His hair was long and combed down in back, puffed up in spikes on top. Despite his diminutive stature, the hairdo didn’t make him look feminine.
He beamed. “Lola!” Like an old friend greeting her after a long absence.
She smiled back at him. “Were you afraid I wasn’t coming?”
“I never for a second doubted it. Such a bargain this is!”
She felt somewhat ashamed because she didn’t actually know if the condo was a bargain. It must be cheap, if its address was scribbled on a business card pinned to a coffee shop bulletin board, with no price, no photograph. And it was being sold by an independent broker.
But it was precisely, give or take a few blocks, where Lola wanted to live, so she took down the card and called the number.
The sales agent, a man named Charles Langley, picked up after five rings. Lola had heard that they did that, letting the dream dangle enticingly. Still, she felt great relief when he identified himself. She still had her choices. It created the illusion of being in charge.
Langley had the knack of speaking in a way that made interruption almost impossible. He knew she would love the condo, and she would understand the factors that made it such a bargain. The couple who owned it were locked in a nasty divorce and wanted to return to England, where they’d lived previously. The husband could retain his employment in London only if he could report there by a certain date. Time was growing short, and any buyer had to accept that and use it as an advantage. Right now, the owners wanted to get rid of the place, furniture and all, and had priced it so they could stop thinking about it and walk away without looking back on it or anything else American.
“But they will take American dollars,” Lola said.
“Or anything that converts.” Langley smiled again, a kind of devilish, inclusive grin. “If you want to look around again, that’s okay. I have some paperwork for you to sign—nothing final, but it will lock up this place for you.”
Lola pretended to think hard. “We could still back out of the deal?”
“Sure. But you won’t want to.” He glanced around. “Heck, you could probably sell this place for a big profit even if you didn’t want to live in it. Or lease it.” He shrugged. “You can’t lose.”
“I could probably figure a way,” Lola said. “But I’ll sign. I just want to see the expression on my husband’s face.”
“Me, too,” Langley said, and laughed.
He reached down and got a large brown leather briefcase from where she hadn’t seen it alongside a chair. He opened the briefcase and paused. “Oh, before you do sign, there’s something you should see in the main bedroom.”
He strode toward the hall and she fell in behind him. As they passed the open door to the kitchen, she noticed something silver and black on the countertop. It looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place it. Some kind of gadget.
Then they were past it.
When they reached the bedroom door, Langley stepped aside so she could enter first.
“If you’ll concentrate and look up near that light fixture . . .” he said, pointing.
60
Eddie Amos, the doorman at the Whitworth Arms, was conflicted. He’d accepted five hundred dollars to let this friend of the real estate agent, Langley, into the unoccupied condo so he could make a deal. If the friend did land a temporary tenant and make a deal, Eddie had another payment, of a thousand dollars, coming. He knew that if he revealed that arrangement he would lose his job, not to mention the thousand-dollar cut. After all, he wasn’t in real estate, he was a doorman.
What got to Eddie the most was that Lola Bend turned out to be a hotshot designer, on the verge of becoming very, very rich.
Now she was very dead.
And now there was the package. It was small, wrapped in brown paper, with Eddie’s name printed on it in black felt-tip ink. He’d come in from hailing a cab for one of the tenants and found the small, square package on the marble desk where the building’s log was kept, with a record of every visitor coming and going at the Whitworth.
So far, Eddie hadn’t opened the package, knowing that if he did so before talking to the police, he’d be a coconspirator in a murder. If they didn’t already think of him that way.
But then there was the key to the condo. How reliable was Eddie’s story that the condo’s real owners were in England? The police would wonder soon how the killer got into the condo unit without a key. Or with a key. How many people knew that Eddie had a master key that fit all the units?
That was something else Eddie needed to think on. Sooner or later the police were going to find out about the master key anyway, so would his best move be to hand the key to them and explain what it was? Eddie knew they’d find the key anyway, so why not play it like a card first?
He slid the package down into the shadows of the marble pedestal where the black leather logbook lay. Unless someone for some reason reached way in there and felt around, the package would be safe. It also took the pressure off Eddie. He could think more clearly and calmly about his position. He could always tell the police he’d known nothing about the package, if they happened to find it. Or, if he decided to come clean, he could tell them about Langley and then pretend that he’d just found the package.
Almost certainly, Langley had left the package.
Eddie wasn’t sure about all the details yet, but he knew what he had to do.
When finally the police were finished talking to him they would cut him loose.
Loose but not free.
61
The corpse of Lola Bend yielded information but no surprises. She lay on the bed, where apparently she had been dragged after being left to bleed out in the bathtub. The tub itself, and the bathroom, were fairly clean, considering. The killer had dissected the victim, mostly drained of blood, on the bed. She had the now familiar puppetlike look, her torso, head, and limbs laid out in their anatomically correct positions.
“It almost looks like there was a medical seminar here,” Nift the ME said. He broke into song, providing his own lyrics: “Oh, this bone’s connected to that bone . . .”