“Smith!” Crossbrace toasted him with his drink, turning from an offhand examination of the hotel’s register. “Joyous couplings. Thought I’d find you joyously coupling with some sylph!”
“Joyous couplings to you, too,” said Smith heartily, noting that Crossbrace was in uniform rather than Festival undress. “Who has time to joyously couple when you’re catering the orgy? You’ve got a drink? Have you dined? We’ve got a Sea Dragon Ballotine out on the terrace that’s going fast!”
“Business first,” said Crossbrace regretfully. “Little surprise inspection. But I expect you’re all up to code, eh, in a first-class establishment like this?”
“Come and see,” said Smith, bowing him forward. “What are you drinking? Silverbush? Let me just grab us a bottle as we go through the bar.”
The inspection was cursory, and went well. No molds were discovered anywhere they didn’t belong. No structural deficiencies were found, nor any violations of Salesh’s codes regarding fire or flood safety. Crossbrace contented himself with limiting the upstairs inspection to a walk down the length of the corridor. Then they went back down to the kitchen, by which time they’d half emptied the bottle of Silverbush and some of the guests on the restaurant terrace were beginning to writhe together in Festival-inflamed passion.
“And you’ve got to see the drains, of course,” Smith insisted, opening the door into the back area. Crossbrace followed him out readily, and looked on as Smith, with a flourish, flung the trap wide.
“Look at that!”
“Damn, you could eat out of there,” said Crossbrace in admiration. He took down the area lamp and shined it into the drain, as the distant sound of erotic enchantment drifted across the water. “Beautiful! And that’s an old pipe, too. City records says this place was built back in Regent Kashlar’s time.”
“S’right,” affirmed Smith, refilling Crossbrace’s glass and having a good gulp himself from the bottle. “But they built solid back then.”
Somewhere close at hand, hoarse panting rose to a scream of ecstasy.
“Didn’t they, though?” Crossbrace had another drink. “What’s your secret?”
“Ah.” Smith laid a finger beside his nose. “Scourbrass’s Foaming Wonder! See?” He waved a hand at the ten canisters neatly stacked against the wall.
“That’s great stuff,” said Crossbrace, and stepped close to read the warning.
Smith heard, ominous under all the giggling and groaning, the sound of someone running through the kitchen. The area door flew open, and Pinion stared out at him, looking panic-stricken.
“Boss! Somebody’s gone and died in—”
Crossbrace straightened up abruptly and turned around. Pinion saw him and winced. “In Room 2,” he finished miserably.
“Oh, dear,” Crossbrace said, sobering with alchemical swiftness. “I suppose in my capacity as City Warden I’d better have a look, hadn’t I?”
Smith ground his teeth. They went back upstairs.
“He’d ordered room service,” Pinion explained. “Never called to have the dishes taken away. I went up to see was he done yet, and nobody answered the knock. Opened the door finally and it was dark in here, except for the light coming in from the terrace and a little fire on the hearth. And there he sits.”
Smith opened the door cautiously and stepped inside, followed by Crossbrace and Pinion. “Mr. Coppercut?” he called hopefully.
But the figure silhouetted against the window was dreadfully motionless. Crossbrace swore quietly and, finding a lamp, lit it.
Sharplin Coppercut sat at the writing table, sagging backward in his chair. His collar had been wrenched open, and he stared at the ceiling with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth, rather as though he was about to announce that he’d just spotted a particularly fearsome spider up there.
On the table across the room were the dishes containing his half-eaten meal. The chair had been pushed back and fallen, the napkin dropped to the floor, and a small table midway between the dinner table and the desk lay on its side, with the smoking apparatus it had held scattered across the carpet.
“That’s the Sharplin Coppercut, isn’t it?” said Crossbrace.
“He’s the only one I know of,” groaned Smith, going to the body to feel for a pulse. He couldn’t find one.
“Saw his name in the register. Dear, dear, Smith, you’ve got a problem on your hands,” stated Crossbrace.
“Oh, gods, he’s stone dead. Crossbrace, you know it wasn’t our food!”
“Sat down to eat his dinner,” theorized Crossbrace, studying the dining table. “Had his appetizer; ate it all but a bit of parsley. Drank half a glass of wine. Working his way through a plate of fried eel—that’s your house specialty, isn’t it?—when he comes over queer and needs air, so he loosens his collar and gets up to go to the window. Bit clumsy by this time, so he bumps over the smoking table on his way. Makes it to the chair and collapses, but dies before he can get the window open. That’s the way it looks, wouldn’t you say?”
“But there was nothing wrong with the eels,” Smith protested. “I had some myself this aftern—” He spotted something on the table and stared at it a moment. Then his face lit up.
“Yes! Crossbrace, come look at this! It wasn’t food poisoning at all!”
Crossbrace came around to look over the corpse’s shoulder. There, scrawled on a tablet bearing the Hotel Grand-view imprimis, were the words AVENGE MY MURD.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, this puts a different light on it.”
“Somebody killed him,” said Smith. “And he took the trouble to let us know!” He felt like embracing Coppercut. An accidental death by food poisoning could wreck a restaurant’s reputation, but a high-profile revenge slaying in one could only be considered good publicity.
“So somebody killed him,” said Crossbrace thoughtfully. “Gods know he had a lot of enemies. Poison in his wine? Poisoned dart through the window? Could have been a mage hired to do the job with a sending, for that matter. Look at the coals in the fireplace, what’d he want with a fire on such a warm night? Suspicious. Maybe a smoke efrit suffocated him? Lucky break for you, Smith.”
“Isn’t it?” Smith beamed at the corpse.
“But it makes a lot more work for me.” Crossbrace sighed. “I’ll have to get the morgue crew up here, then I’ll have to investigate and question everybody, which will take all bloody night. Then I’ll have to file a report in triplicate, and there’s his avengers to notify, because he must have kept some on retainer … and here it is Festival time, and I had an alcove booked at the Black Veil Club for tonight.”
“That’s a shame,” said Smith warily, sensing what was coming.
“It cost me a fortune to get that alcove, too. My lady friend will be furious. I think I’m going to do you a favor, Smith,” Crossbrace decided.
“Such as?”
“It’s Festival. I’m going to pretend this unfortunate incident hasn’t yet happened to stain your restaurant’s good name, all right? We both know it wasn’t food poisoning, but rumors get out, don’t they? And the funniest things will influence those clerks in the Permit Office.” Crossbrace swirled his drink and looked Smith in the eye.
“But we do have a famous dead man here something’s got to be done about. So I’ll come back in two days’ time, when Festival’s done and everything’s business as usual. You’ll have a body for me and not only that, you’ll have found out who, where, when, how, and why, so all I have to do is arrest the murderer, if possible, and file the paperwork. I’ll have a Safety Certificate for you. Everybody wins. Right?”