Night Film(42)

He looked down at it and was about to shake his head when something about the coat visibly stopped him.

“You recognize it,” I said.

He looked puzzled. “No. It’s just, a member of housekeeping reported an incident. It was a while back. But I think it did have something to do with a person in a red coat. The reason I remember is the matter came up again this morning, when the same housekeeper refused to clean one of the floors. It caused a disruption because we’re at capacity.”

Hashim, looking up, noticed all three of us were leaning with great intensity over the desk.

He took a step back, alarmed.

“Why don’t you leave a number and my supervisor can speak with you?”

“We don’t have time for a supervisor,” said Hopper, jostling Nora as he moved closer to Hashim. “With a missing person, every minute counts. We need to talk to the housekeeper. I know it’d mean you bending a few rules, but …” He smiled. “We’d appreciate it.”

It’d been my suggestion back in the car to allege that Ashley was missing, not dead; the missing, I’d found, prompted a greater sense of haste and willingness to help. This strategy seemed to work. Or perhaps it was just Hopper’s looks cranked up and turned blazingly onto the man, because Hashim stared at Hopper, a few seconds too long. And I saw the brief yet brazen look of male desire flash on his face, unmistakable as an oil tanker blinking a light at another ship. The man picked up the phone and, tucking the receiver under his chin, swiftly dialed a number.

“Sarah. Hashim at the front desk. Guadalupe Sanchez. That episode she reported a few weeks back. Wasn’t there something about a red coat? Isn’t that what—oh.” He fell silent, listening. “Is she still on duty tonight?” He listened. “Twenty-nine. All right, thank you.”

He hung up.

“Come with me,” he said with a curt smile at Hopper.





24


We followed Hashim into an elevator, where he inserted a white keycard into the slot and pressed 29.

We rose in silence, though quite a few times Hashim glanced swiftly at Hopper, who was staring down at his Converse sneakers. I wasn’t sure what was going on in this silent communication, but it was working; the doors opened, and Hashim exited briskly, making his way down the cream-colored hallway.

A housekeeping cart was parked at the end. We made our way toward it, Nora hanging back to inspect the few black-and-white photographs hanging on the wall, pictures of Frank Sinatra and Queen Elizabeth.

Reaching the cart, Hashim knocked sharply on the door marked 29T, slightly ajar.

“Miss Sanchez?”

He pushed it open. We filed after him into a suite’s empty sitting room: blue couches, blue carpet, an extravagant mural painted on the walls, featuring Greek columns and a blue-skinned goddess.

Hashim stepped through a kitchen alcove, the three of us following.

It led into a bedroom where a petite silver-haired woman was in the process of making up the bed. She was Hispanic, wearing a sea-gray housekeeping dress. She didn’t react because she was listening to music—a mint-green iPod strapped to her arm.

She moved around the bed, tucking the sheet, and spotted us.

She cried out shrilly, clamping a hand over her mouth, eyes bulging.

You’d have thought we just filed in wearing hooded robes and wielding scythes.

Hashim spoke in Spanish, an apology for scaring her, and the woman—Guadalupe Sanchez, I gathered—removed the earbuds from her ears, and in a raspy voice muttered something back.

“How’s your Guatemalan Spanish?” Hashim asked brightly.

“Spotty,” I said.

Nora and Hopper both shook their heads.

“I’ll do my best to translate, then.” He turned officially back to her and fired off some immaculate Spanish.

She listened with keen interest. Occasionally her gaze left Hashim to study us. At one point—it must have been when he explained why we were there—she nodded almost reverentially and whispered, Sí, sí, sí. She then stepped around the bed toward us slowly, nervously, as if we were three bulls that might charge her.

Seeing the woman only a few feet away now, her face was round and girlish with the fat cheeks of a toddler, yet her caramel skin was so finely wrinkled, it looked like a brown paper bag once tightly wadded in a hand.

“Show her the picture,” Hashim said.

I removed it from my coat pocket.

She took a moment to carefully unfold her glasses, setting them on the end of her nose, before taking it. She said something in Spanish.

“She recognizes her,” Hashim said.

Nora, who’d been fumbling with Ashley’s coat in the Whole Foods bag, finally shook it loose, holding it up by the shoulders.

The woman took one look at it and froze, whispering.

“She thinks she’s seen it before,” Hashim said.

“She thinks?” I said. “She looks pretty convinced.”

He smiled uncomfortably, turning back to the woman and asking her a question. She responded, her voice serious and low, eyeing Ashley’s coat as if worried it might come alive. Hashim interrupted to ask a question, and she heatedly responded, taking a few steps away from the coat. She talked for several minutes, so dramatically at times I wondered if she were a popular telenovela actress on Venevisión. I tried to dig through the stream of Spanish to find a word I might recognize, and, abruptly, I did.