Security(8)

It doesn’t seem fair that men preoccupied with being fit are naturally assumed to be vain.

The Killer is boarding the secret elevator on the twelfth floor. Vivica, on the fifteenth floor, is telling the stain in Spanish that it is no match for her, and she is right.

There is no thirteenth floor.

Tessa sees something from the glass elevator that makes her forehead furrow. Henri doesn’t notice, because he’s ranting to Brian about the unstable flavor of cherries. Brian notices Tessa noticing something and says, “What’s wrong?”

“I thought—the closet at the end of the hall—” She huffs and blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Forget it. I’m sleep deprived.”

“The profile, I tell you,” says Henri, “it has a volatility that the common mouth does not comprehend. To add cinnamon is to make them too sweet, liquor and it is overspicy. I try vinegar. I get desperate, monsieur—I try vinegar! And this f*cker Destin says he ruin me, says I am mad. Who made me mad, this I ask you!”

The glass elevator passes the fourteenth floor. At the south end of the hall on the fourteenth floor, in the secret elevator, the Killer presses his controller’s single button, and the cleaning closet’s shelves shift sideways. He looks through the slats in the cleaning closet door to make sure the glass elevator has passed. He must have seen Tessa glimpse him. He’s holding a knife much sharper than the one with which Henri accidentally sliced Tessa’s hand. It’s a knife the length of two of the sets of scissors Franklin used to disable the dishwasher. The Killer walks the fourteenth floor, methodically checking the door of each luxury room. They are all locked. Downstairs, . . .

Camera 5

. . . Franklin picks up the phone in his office. He looks at the receiver in bewilderment and joggles it a few times to confirm the landlines are not working. He laughs an unpleasant laugh that reminds the ear of a weasel. He takes a cell phone from his top desk drawer. Cell phones are against hotel protocol. Charles Destin himself made it clear he believes cell phones compromise employee productivity and, by extension, guest satisfaction. He dictated that all employee cell phones and other devices be deposited in the break room lockers on the second floor. Franklin presses his phone’s screen to blue it, taps, and puts the phone to his ear. “Tell the boss I messed with the dishwasher . . . Yeah, little things adding up to big things, like he said . . . And—uh—the phones. I got the landlines down, too.” Franklin is lying. The Killer disabled the landlines. “Yeah, later . . . No, I’ll wait till it’s dark . . . Right, nobody gets hurt—hey, we’ve got flashlights . . . Yeah.” It’s easy to infer that Franklin is on the phone with Cameron Donofrio, or, more likely, an associate of Cameron Donofrio. Donofrio Properties is the principal rival of Destin Management Group. Charles Destin has long suspected Cameron Donofrio was infiltrating and sabotaging his properties. To a sane mind, Destin’s paranoia seemed like so much rich-boy bullshit. The revelation of Franklin’s call makes one wonder about Destin’s reasons for building a hotel with the most sophisticated surveillance capacities ever attempted in the private sector. How much they had to do with catching the mole, Franklin, in a conversation like this one. “All right . . . Yeah, I’ll report later tonight.”

Camera 17

. . . Delores hears the intercom in the housekeeping office. The office is next door to the housekeeping storage area, where Delores is discarding a bulk bottle of expired shampoo. She crabs down a ladder and hurries toward the tinny voice. She wouldn’t hurry toward the voice if it weren’t Tessa’s. Delores hates men. Delores has a right to hate men, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for a man to whom she is supposed to listen. Delores’s office has the only security feed anywhere in the hotel besides the twentieth floor. It’s a tiny television that streams motion-activated activity from everywhere in Manderley. Delores is supposed to have this television on at all times. The television is on, but Delores has taped her to-do list over the screen, in order to stick it to the head of security, who told her she was very important, his number two, the last line of defense. Delores is the only person in the hotel—besides security—who knows about the secret elevator. If her to-do list weren’t taped over the screen, Delores would see the Killer boarding the secret elevator on the fourteenth floor. She would see her number two, Vivica, still warring with the bloodstain on the fifteenth floor. Delores hates men because her husband beat her for ten years. She tried to leave him four times, and he found her four times. The fourth time, she shot him. She didn’t kill him. This is all in her police file. Her lawyer got her off. She limps slightly because her husband broke her tibia with a baseball bat when she was twenty-two. She was pregnant at the time. She limps into the housekeeping office. “Hi, Tessa. Sorry for the wait. I’m here.”



Tessa kicks the glass elevator’s door frame, probably cursing its slowness, and speaks into the emergency phone, which can access the intercom system if one has the proper pass code. “Del, how’re you doing?”

Delores says she’s fine.

“I saw you crying, hon. I’m on the elevator,” Tessa says. The ele-vator sings its soft note for the nineteenth floor. Its doors slide open. Tessa signals Henri and Brian to go ahead. Henri rushes for a quartet of sous--chefs; they’re sitting at a table playing Go Fish. “Don’t let Charles get to you,” Tessa tells Delores. “You know how he can be.” Brian leans against the elevator doors to keep them open. Tessa signals again that he should go ahead. Brian shakes his head and smiles—at her, then at his feet.