A Friend in the Glass (An Auden & O’Callaghan Mystery #3)

Chapter Seventeen

The Savoy-Hell’s Kitchen was a different beast in the early evening. The same white-brick veneer, the same chrome trim, the same lobby with the same muted carpet squares and the same knockoff Scandinavian furniture, sure. But entirely different in ways that mattered.

Outside, darkness was settling over the city, but the Savoy-Hell’s Kitchen’s lobby was ablaze with light and sound. Men and women—but predominantly women—thronged the lobby. They were spilling out of the bar, most of them with drinks in hand, and they were laughing and talking at a migraine-inducing volume. They were uniformly dressed in what someone, somewhere, would have called business casual: lots of wool and corduroy and silk, lots of pastel blouses and paisley pashminas, lots of cutesy button-ups. One woman, in a violently striped blazer, was apparently demonstrating the stretchability of her trousers by extending one leg along the back of a sofa to the admiring noises of spectators.

“What in God’s name is going on in this city?” Sam asked in an underbreath as he scowled a flabby-necked man in an ill-fitting polo out of his way.

Rufus shrugged. “Even I’m not sure sometimes.”

The front desk clerk had changed since their visit that morning. The white boy with the locs was gone, and in his place was an older Asian woman, her thick, graying hair in a braid. She was staring into the middle distance. Maybe, like Sam, she was thinking New York City was ripe for another period of glacial expansion.

As Sam crossed to the bank of elevators, he considered her for a moment. “Does she look amenable to bribes?”

“Not even remotely,” Rufus answered. He punched the Up button, and when the doors opened, he tugged Sam inside and hit 18. “It’s a shame we don’t have a gift basket,” he said thoughtfully. “People always open their door for those chocolate and pecan turtles.”

After that, they rode up in silence. The elevator stopped only once, on 11, where a nervous-looking woman laughed and apologized for hitting the wrong button. When it reached 18, the doors rattled open, and the smell of carpet cleaner and recirculated air rolled into the car.

Sam stepped out and checked the hall in both directions. At one end, a window looked out on the city at night. At the other, a painting—a vase full of flowers—hung on an otherwise blank hall. Sam counted six doors.

“Only six?” he asked.

“It must be one of the rich-people floors.” Rufus sniffed the air. “Yup. Smells like money. Executive suites, I bet.”

“Any guesses which one she went to?”

Rufus glanced in both directions as Sam had, then said, “If I had the money to stay here, I kind of feel like you’re obligated to ask for a room with a view.” He pointed toward the hall with the window.

“That leaves three.”

Sam moved down the hallway. He stopped at the door to the room closest to the elevator and listened. Either the construction and materials were high enough quality to keep him from hearing anything, or the room was currently unoccupied. He moved to the next door, which was located on the opposite side of the hallway. He listened again. This time, the murmur of a television filtered out into the hallway. It sounded like a news channel, the voices steady and even. Behind him, Sam heard the elevator doors rattle shut as the car was called to another floor. He sent up a mental prayer that the woman with the stretchable pants didn’t need to do a demonstration on the eighteenth floor.

The third door—1806—was on the same side of the hallway as the first. Sam listened. A man was talking. The voice had a low, snapping energy, but it didn’t sound familiar. He’d heard Del Jolly speak twice now: at the Conasauga panel, and then at the hotel. Both times, Del had spoken in the varnished, self-assured tones of someone who believed money could smooth out any misunderstanding, and this didn’t sound the same.

Sam retreated to the elevators. One of the cars was still going down. The other was stopped at the lobby. He took out his phone, did a web search for this hotel, and placed the call.

“Savoy-Hell’s Kitchen,” a woman answered. “This is Katrina, how may I help you?”

“Could you connect me with room 1806, please?”

“One moment, please.”

Muzak picked up, and then immediately cut off as the phone began to ring. One, two, three—

“Yes, what?” It was the same snapping irritation Sam had heard through the door.

“Hello, Del?”

“Who?”

“I’m sorry, I’m trying to reach Del Jolly.”

“Wrong number.”

The receiver clattered against the cradle, and the call disconnected.

At Rufus’s inquiring look, Sam shook his head. He considered the remaining rooms. Would Del Jolly want the room closest to the elevator? Or was he in the room with the television on? He flipped a coin in his head and pointed to the door closest to the elevator. “So, we knock?”

“I’m bold, but not that bold,” Rufus answered. “Call again and ask for 1802.”

Sam repeated his trick, if that’s what you could call it, with the front desk. This time, the call rang until it bounced back to the front desk. Sam disconnected as Katrina started speaking again.

“Nobody’s home,” he said. “Or, at least, nobody’s answering.”

“More to my liking.” Rufus tugged the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the doorknob of 1806 and held it up. “I can try to break in, if you’re ready for that.”

Sam nodded.

Rufus approached 1802 from an angle, careful to stay out of view of the peephole, in case someone was home and had simply been feeling uncommunicative. The door to the suite wasn’t entirely flush with the frame—a small bit of space allowing for the deadbolt to be visible. Sticking the heavy-duty plastic hanger against the lock, Rufus gently wiggled it back and forth until the deadbolt clicked, which caused the keycard reader to flash green. He grabbed the knob and pushed the door open while looking toward Sam.

“That actually worked?” Sam murmured, catching the door on his shoulder as he stepped past Rufus. He stopped. The white hiss of the HVAC system met him; nothing else. Elbowing the door open the rest of the way, Sam took in the room.

Unlike a standard hotel room, the door opened onto a large living space with a seating area, a large television, and a wet bar. A single lamp gave enough light to see that the Savoy’s Nordic design continued here with blond wood and chrome and glass. On the far side of the room, a wall of windows gave a view of the city that Del had undoubtedly paid a pretty penny for, the darkness shattered by the blaze of neon and sodium. A hall stretched off to the left, shadowy where the light from the lamp didn’t reach.

Giving the door another nudge for Rufus to follow, Sam headed into the room. He drew the Beretta from his waistband and held it low against his thigh. The rush of circulating air seemed enormously loud, somehow, swallowing up everything else. His reflection moved with him in the glass.

The training came back, the way it always did. He found the light switch and cleared the hallway. Then an empty bedroom and a bathroom that looked like it hadn’t been touched. Then a larger bedroom, a suitcase open on a stand. The door to the walk-in closet was open, and—

And instead of suits and dress shirts, uniforms hung in the closet. Army uniforms.

This wasn’t Del Jolly’s room.

A whiff of something foul met him as he approached the door to the attached bathroom, and a part of him already knew, even before he turned on the lights.

He was right about the blood on the tile, the streaks and swirls running down toward the shower drain. Right, too, about the smell you never forgot: a body violated, and shit, and piss.

But, then again, sometimes he was wrong.

Because it wasn’t Del Jolly who had been shot twice in the chest and died in a luxury hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. It was Colonel Leslie Bridges.

His face looked smaller in death, and the rictus made his little rat teeth even more prominent. He was still wearing the wool overcoat and the navy suit. A black driving glove—a little affectation, Sam guessed—had fallen out of his pocket and lay on the shower floor.

“Rufus,” Sam called.

“Sam,” Rufus answered back, his voice growing steadier in volume, like he was walking toward the en suite. “There’re two glasses made up in the other room and liquor missing from the bar. Someone had a friend over for—holy shit what the fuck !” Rufus stood in the bathroom doorway, hands firmly in his jacket pockets, eyes wide with shock.

“Have you touched anything?” Sam asked.

“No,” Rufus said with a vicious headshake. He pointed through his jean jacket, the gesture sort of looking like a kid trying to convince someone they had a gun in their pocket. “What’d you do?”

Sam shook his head. Then, returning the Beretta to the small of his back, he said in a low voice, “What the fuck?”

“Isn’t that the colonel?”

“That’s him.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Rufus said on a shaky exhale. He tugged his hands free and was already pulling on his cheap winter gloves. He motioned Sam away from the body while stepping into the bathroom himself. “I could be naked in bed, eating leftover Chinese takeout off your perfectly sculpted butt cheeks, but instead I’m rummaging through the pants of a guy who’s shit himself.”

“Try not to—”

“Touch anything, yeah, yeah.” Rufus crouched beside Bridges, his face twisted up in response to the smell. He carefully patted the dead man’s trouser pockets before peeling back one side of his overcoat. Rufus studied the bloody chest wound for only a second before draping the coat back into place. He patted the outer pockets, and when something crinkled, reached inside. Retrieving a few folded and slightly crumpled sheets of paper, he shifted his weight onto one foot, reached out, and offered them to Sam.

Sam took them, angling them to catch the light. The formatting at the top was a blur at first, and then he processed it as the header of an email. He scanned the text and stopped and held out the page for Rufus’s inspection, his thumb under the word STONEFISH.