Security(7)

“No,” she says, “we won’t. I’m not leaving, I have tons of work to do.”

“Mon Dieu,” Henri says again, his legs akimbo on the reception sofa, his snowman’s torso struggling for the torque to right itself on the plush rug. “This is why chefs die of the heart failure! This is absurde! I come to you with problem, as you tell me to do, and I become victime of assault.”

“Hey.” Brian points at the knife on the floor. “Who assaulted who? Why’re you running around with Ginsu knives? Riddle me that, Pepe, okay?”

Henri, finally managing to sit up, says to Tessa, “Pepe? Who is Pepe?”

Tessa massages her closed eyes. She might be battling a grin. “What problem, Henri?”

“The dishwasher. She is broken!” He shakes a fist in the air. Fat and on the floor, he looks like a spoiled toddler. “I bring the knife to show you.”

“So it’s a dirty knife,” Brian says. “Great. Good, that’s great.”

Tessa picks the knife up, turns it. Her blood glistens on the edge. It’s beautiful. “You couldn’t have shown me a spoon.”

Henri farts thunderously as he stands. “You claim to me this is not a problem? Four days until the soirée and no dishwasher? This night is for the testing of the coulis. How do I make many coulis without dishwasher? I pile dishes until tomorrow, when man for repairs can come? This is what I do? This is what you ask of me? This is why the chefs die young. Mon Dieu, c’est tragique!”

During Henri’s tirade, Brian tried to take Tessa’s arm. She wouldn’t let him. So he gestured to a reception armchair with one shoulder high in aggravation and the other low like a supplicant’s. Tessa is now sitting down. Brian again examines her cut as if he might have missed something the first time.

The Killer has been wandering the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors. It’s methodical wandering. He’s traced each floor’s layout, a predictable square on either side of the elevator’s long hallway. Door after numbered door, slowly, taking his time, passing every guest room. He is now passing Room 1016.

Vivica, in the entryway of Room 1516, is making progress with the stain on the carpet.

“No hospital,” Tessa says to Brian. He throws his hands up and goes to the lobby’s modern fireplace (white marble, deep—children could have a tea party in it), where he hits his head against the mantel for show, only it hurts worse than he planned. He hides a wince from Tessa as she tells Henri, “I can call a repairman out tonight.”

“Repairman will not come! Repairman will say tomorrow, and I will waste a day in the dishes. They are not to use when dirty.” Henri reaches for the dirty Ginsu knife, which Tessa placed on an end table.

Brian points at him. “You touch that knife again, I’ll kick your ass.” The threat wouldn’t work on a man who knows threats. The effortful tone is all wrong.

But Henri whimpers, “Mon Dieu.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tessa says. She presses her bandage, and her fingers come away sopped red.

“How about this,” Brian says. “If I fix the dishwasher, will you go to the hospital?”

Tessa looks out the long windows at his motorcycle. “Not on that.”

“I said already we’d take your car.”

Henri stares at Brian like he might be Jesus. “He can fix her?”

Tessa gets up and goes to the main elevator. “Yeah,” she says, “he can fix anything.”

Tessa’s a difficult person to get to know. Conversations about family or childhood get brushed aside as unimportant, irrelevant, dumb. The past is over, she’ll say. Haven’t you read any self--help? You’re supposed to live in the present. She sidesteps and counters with questions of her own that focus conversation back on the questioner.

But there are files. Some of them are juvie files, but then there are bribes.

Tessa was found in a Dumpster when she was two days old.

Tessa’s holding the main elevator open. As he gets in, Henri is describing the dishwasher in detail to Brian, who looks at Tessa like he wishes she’d look at him. When the elevator . . .

Camera 4

. . . disappears with Brian and Henri and Tessa inside it, Franklin darts from the stairwell and scurries across the foyer like a tweed rat. He shuts himself in his office, placing the large pair of scissors in his desk.

Camera 12

. . . passes the second floor, Tessa sees Delores wiping her eyes en route to the housekeeping office. Tessa moves to make a note and says, “Damn it. My clipboard.” Brian hides a snicker in a fake sneeze.



The Dumpster was in Spokane. Tessa went into foster care. She had twelve homes in eight years, all in northern Washington State. When she was eight years old, she went to live with Troy and Lorraine Domini. Troy and Lorraine had two other foster sons, twin boys, Mitch and Brian, ten years old. Tessa lived at Troy and Lorraine’s until she turned eighteen, and then she went to UCLA. Yet she is not over being abandoned in a heap of trash, wrapped haphazardly in a white blanket patterned with blue and yellow ducklings, her hair light then, and wispy, her mouth a round, wailing hole in the police photographs—no one gets over that. Tessa needs to be liberated from those memories. She should confide them. And if she won’t confide them, there are files.

But information from files can be as irritating as it is illuminating. Files don’t mention, for instance, that even in an elevator with an annoyingly verbose chef describing every conceivable challenge involved in creating the perfect cherry coulis, Brian is jocular. His eyes laugh. Tessa bites her lower lip to keep from laughing with his eyes. Their bodies, even with a considerably wider body between them, possess a kind of visible static. Tessa’s hips seem overactive. They tick outward or rest on the elevator’s railing, in turns. The blood on her hand has pooled past the bandage. Brian picked up his jacket before getting in the elevator, mostly—it seems—so he’d have pockets to shove his hands into. His hands are so far in his jacket pockets that they make conspicuous forward bulges. He is fit, but not so fit as to seem vain.