Serious Moonlight(26)

“It’s like five miles across the water, or whatever, so no. But I can see Mount Rainier on clear days.”

“So cool. I’ve only been to Bainbridge Island once. My family wanted to see the Japanese memorial wall.”

I intended to tell him that I’d been to the opening ceremony for the wall but was interrupted when our server reappeared. She’d brought a carafe of coffee, a cup of hot tea, a plate of hash browns, and a shamefully large slice of pie. I kept my head down while she distributed everything and poured coffee for Daniel. When Shonda left, I extricated the limp bag of tea leaves from my cup and concentrated on inverting the ketchup over my hash browns, watching its snail-slow descent down the bottle’s neck.

“You have to smack it with the heel of your hand,” Daniel said.

I glanced at him over the ketchup bottle. “I’ll do it my way, thank you.”

He snorted, smiling, and after a moment drawled, “S-o-o-o. Did you talk to Mr. Kenneth in the security room?”

My heart sped. “I did.”

“And you saw the footage from the elevator.”

“Yep.”

“And? What do you think?”

I tilted the ketchup bottle and gave it one shake. “I’ll tell you when you tell me how you know this man is actually Raymond Darke.”

“It’s eating you up, isn’t it? I can tell.”

“You can’t tell.”

“I can. Good magicians need to be able to pick up on nonverbal clues to be able to guess how their mark will react, and I don’t mind saying that I’m pretty fucking good at it. You try to be all cool and collected, but I can read you like a book, Birdie Lindberg. Whenever we talk about mysteries, you get really alert and your eyes do this funny, squinty thing.”

“That’s my Nancy Drew face,” I said, feeling a little sheepish. “That’s what Aunt Mona calls it.”

He grinned and pointed at me over the table. “Aha! So I was right.”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me I’m right. I need to hear it from your lips,” he said, and it almost sounded flirty.

Or maybe I was just remembering how it was between us the day we met.

“First tell me how you know it’s Raymond Darke,” I insisted.

He chuckled and rubbed his hands together as if he was as eager to tell me as I was to hear it. “Okay, so the reason I know is because I drove him from the hotel to the Safe.” When I shook my head, he clarified. “Safeco Field. He had tickets to a Mariners game. It was after his first visit to the hotel. He was in a hurry to get to the stadium for some party in a private suite—you know, one of those club-level rooms that rich people and corporations rent out?”

I nodded and shook the ketchup bottle again, hoping I wasn’t making my Nancy Drew face.

“Anyway, normally most hotel guests like to chat with me in the van,” Daniel said, cutting the corner off his pie with the tines of his fork. “Those who don’t, they just want the music turned up while they scroll on their phones or whatever. But this guy didn’t want either. No music. No talking. And then he took a phone call, and that’s when I put it all together.”

Daniel’s eyelids fluttered when he put a forkful of pie in his mouth. “So good. Seriously, Birdie. You need to try this.”

I was sort of wishing I’d ordered a piece. “How did you put it all together?”

“The call was from his agent. They were talking about sales of a book. He was angry because his royalty check was wrong. He claimed his publisher owed him money, and apparently the agent was sick of his shit, because there was some yelling involved. This guy is a real prick, by the way. And anyway, long story short, the book titles he mentioned? I looked them up later. They were Raymond Darke books.”

I set the ketchup down on the table; it wasn’t coming out, and I didn’t want to do it the way he suggested, because he’d probably gloat about it until the end of time. “You mean to tell me that the Thomas Pynchon of legal thrillers, a man who has successfully guarded his identity from the press for twenty years, just slipped up and let a van driver know who he was?”

“You’d be shocked what I hear in that van. Shocked. I once heard some Amazon bigwig order two male prostitutes on his phone.”

“No way.”

“Yes way. And once a congressman berated his wife in front of me—said nasty, horrible shit you wouldn’t say to your worst enemy while she cried. I almost wondered if I should call the police. Like, if he treated her this way in public, what did he do to her at home? But see, that’s the thing. It’s not really in public, because I’m not a real human being to a lot of these people. I’m just the driver—a servant to do their bidding. They’ll never see me again, so why bother holding back?”

“Wow.”

“It’s the way of the world, Birdie.”

Indeed. I asked Daniel for the names of the books, and he rattled them off without thinking. I recognized one of them, and when I started to pull out my phone and look the other one up, he said, “It hasn’t come out yet. Click on the first link. I think it’s Entertainment Weekly. They revealed the cover a couple of months ago.”

He was right. I glanced from my phone to his face. “Are you sure he was Raymond Darke, and not just some manager or something?”