Serious Moonlight(20)

“Tell me what you know first.”

“Nope.” He shook his head, a smile behind his eyes. “Agree to solve the crime with me. Then I’ll tell you.”

“What makes you think a crime was committed?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Yes, I very much would! A thousand brain cells were coming to life in my head, flicking on like a string of Christmas lights, eager and curious.

But all he said was, “I’ll let you sleep on it. I’m off tomorrow, but we work together the next shift. You can tell me then. Better yet, let me see your phone.”

“Um, I don’t think so,” I huffed.

“Fine. Give me your hand.”

“Hey—”

“May I?” He used his teeth to remove the cap of a marker and tugged my fingers toward him, scrawling a string of digits onto my palm while he bit down on the marker cap. “There. Now you can text me.”

“If this doesn’t wash off, I’m going to strangle you. Is this permanent?”

“Nothing’s permanent, Birdie. Ask Mr. Kenneth to show you security footage from the elevators last Tuesday from 7:00 to 7:05 p.m. Look for a white guy with dark glasses and a baseball cap. He carries a shopping bag.” Daniel dramatically replaced the marker cap, hammering it down with the heel of his palm, and headed toward the hotel entrance. “Text me. Any day, anytime. Or don’t. It’s up to you. Maybe you just like to watch detectives solve crimes on TV. Maybe you aren’t interested in solving one yourself.”

“That’s not going to work.”

“No?” he called back.

Probably not.

I shuffled to the registration desk and stood there for several moments, staring at the marker on my palm and watching the front doors at the hotel entrance to make sure he wasn’t coming back. Then, when the lobby was empty, I stealthily slipped back into the employee wing and made my way to the security room.

It was at the end of the back hallway, past the break room and managerial offices. After checking to ensure that no one was following me, I peered through the open security door and spotted Mr. Kenneth lounging in his chair, feet kicked up.

“Hey, hey,” he said jovially, waving me inside. “What can I do for you?”

“I was wondering if you could pull up some footage for me?”

“With pleasure.” He pushed a ham sandwich to one side of his workspace. “Date, time, camera location.”

I relayed Daniel’s suggestion.

“Elevators . . . Give me a second here. System is slow. Ah, here we are,” he said. “This is time elapsed, so let me know when you want me to pause it or slow down. Seen something suspicious?”

“A guest complained that her shopping bag was stolen by another guest,” I said, proud of myself for thinking on my feet. And Mr. Kenneth’s unsurprised, slow nod made me think that this kind of thing happened often enough. I bent down to watch the footage rolling on the computer. It was a split screen that showed the interiors of both elevators. One went up and down twice, ferrying guests from the upper levels. The other was empty and still. I looked at each face, but none matched the description Daniel had given me. Until— “There!” I said.

“Him?” Mr. Kenneth paused the screen and blew it up. “That your man?”

“That’s him, all right.” Sunglasses. Blue baseball cap. Middle-aged and white. A little portly, reddish nose and cheeks. And he was carrying a striped shopping bag.

I stared at the screen for several seconds, trying to match up the silhouette in the photo on Raymond Darke’s book jackets, wondering if this truly was the famous author.

“I’ve seen him before,” Mr. Kenneth said, squinting at the screen. “You know, I think Aoki asked me to look up some footage of him.”

Uh-oh.

“Might be the same guest?” I said.

“You think this man here stole the bag?”

“Actually, no,” I said, trying to invent an excuse on the spot. “The guest who was complaining said it was, uh, a Macy’s bag. That’s not it.”

“Nope. Macy’s doesn’t have stripes. And this one here looks plastic. Like it’s from a bookstore, or something.”

“Ah. False alarm,” I told him.

But inside my head, all the gears began turning.

Looked like we had an honest-to-God mystery on our hands.

So what was I going to do about it?





“I promise I will not go looking for trouble.”

—Amelia Peabody, Lion in the Valley (1986)





8




* * *



I hoped to see Daniel in the break room after my shift ended, but he wasn’t there. After wasting as much time as I could without people in the break room starting to question why I was hanging around, I headed back to the lobby and made small talk with the incoming desk clerk about tasks that needed to be done. Daniel was still nowhere to be seen, and the clerk asked me to take some spare uniforms to housekeeping that had been stashed under the registration desk, so I went downstairs to the laundry room. They were still in the middle of shift change, so I sat at the end of a big folding table and waited for someone to log in what I’d brought. I waited so long, I dozed off.