The Flight Attendant(4)
You were doing this insanely provocative, pretend karaoke—without music, Cassie, without music! There was no karaoke machine!—while standing on a stool in the corner.
Oh, God, you had an epic face plant just outside the ladies’ room. How did you not break your nose?
You were taking off your clothes and trying to get the bartender to do naked yoga with you.
It was only dumb luck that she had no DUIs, no crimes and misdemeanors in her history, and thus was still allowed to fly. She thought once more of her father. As she dried herself—quickly, roughly—she recalled the men and the mistakes in her own past, and she counted once more all the different countries in which she had slept with strangers and woken up sick in unfamiliar beds. Even now, probably no one in the crew was thinking anything about the fact that she was not with them at their own hotel. Most of them barely knew her, but most of them knew women and men just like her. Her behavior might have been extreme, but it was not uncommon.
If she hadn’t slashed the throat of the man who had tenderly washed her hair in the shower, she guessed she should be deeply grateful that whoever did hadn’t bothered to kill her. And that, in turn, suggested either a respect for human life or a distaste for collateral damage that was rather at odds with the ferocity with which he (or she or they) had murdered last night’s drunken dalliance. It also might mean that she was being set up. Someone—perhaps even that woman who had come to their room for a drink—wanted her to be blamed for this crime. Two thoughts crossed her mind, and she was unsure whether to categorize them as paranoid or uncharacteristically clearheaded: the first was that she hadn’t killed Sokolov, but her fingerprints were nevertheless all over the neck of the broken bottle. The second was the notion that it wasn’t the arak that had put her out so thoroughly: she’d been drugged. They’d been drugged. Maybe it was the vodka in that very bottle that Miranda had brought. The woman claimed she’d brought it because she wasn’t sure if the minibars at the Royal Phoenician had liquor; in Dubai, some hotel minibars did, some didn’t. Perhaps there was no more to the gift than that; perhaps there was.
She took a little comfort in the fact that no one she knew had any idea that she was here in room 511 at the Royal Phoenician. Sure, Megan and Shane had seen her flirting with Alex in 2C, but she’d never told the two flight attendants that she was going to see him. She and Alex had been discreet when they’d discussed where and when they would meet. She hadn’t given him her cell because he hadn’t asked for it—which meant that she wouldn’t be in his phone.
There was only Miranda.
But Miranda knew a lot. Miranda knew that she was a flight attendant. Miranda knew her name—at least her first name. Miranda would, Cassie assumed, be the one to call the hotel when Alex missed whatever meeting he was supposed to be in and didn’t answer his cell.
In the end, she told herself that she did problematic things when she drank, but slashing people’s throats wasn’t among them. At least she didn’t think it was. But she also wasn’t going to take the bait and call the front desk. She was going to get as far away from Dubai and the Arabian Peninsula as she could, and she would deal with Miranda’s allegations—and, yes, her own guilt—when she was back in the United States.
And so she put the soap and washcloth she had used in the shower into her shoulder bag. She would take the towel, too, though she imagined that her DNA was all over the bedsheets. Nevertheless, after she was dressed she ran a second washcloth over everything she could recall handling in the bedroom, the bathroom, and the living room, hoping to expunge her prints. She wiped down the glasses, the minibar, and the bottles—all those empty bottles. The remote to the entertainment system. Then, because much of the night before was a blur with yawning black holes in between, she ran the washcloth over everything she was even likely to have touched. The hotel room’s doorknobs and closet handles, its hangers, the footboard to the bed. That beautiful headboard, too.
When she was done, she picked up all the pieces of the bottle she could find. She gazed for a moment at the jagged edge of the bottle’s shoulder. Could this thing have really cut open Alex Sokolov’s neck with the thoroughness of an autopsy scalpel? She had no idea. Then she took it, too, rolling it up in the towel.
She pulled aside the drapes and blinked at the sun and the flat blue water a few blocks distant. Though their room was only on the fifth floor, the lobby was as tall and cavernous as a casino, and they had had an unobstructed view of the azure sea.
She told herself that when she was safely back in the United States—assuming she made it back there—she would talk to a lawyer. One step at a time. The important thing right now was to get back to her own hotel, make up a man from the night before if anyone asked, and be in the lobby at eleven fifteen. She had a feeling that she wasn’t going to breathe easy until the plane lifted off the runway. No, she knew in her heart that she wasn’t going to relax even then. At least not completely. Of all the horrible things she had done when she was drunk, nothing topped leaving behind a body that had bled out in the bed beside her.
And, much to her dismay, she was doing this sober.
* * *
? ?
She left the “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling by its elegant gold braid around the hotel room doorknob to keep Alex’s body undiscovered for as long as possible, and stood for a moment trying to remember where the hell the elevator was. The hotel was massive, with corridors that seemed to snake in all directions. Finally she started off, walking quickly down empty hallways, and eventually she found the elevator bank. The lift seemed to take forever to arrive, but she reassured herself that time was just passing slowly because she was nervous. No, not nervous: she was terrified. She calmed herself by thinking how she could still tell someone at the front desk what had happened and tell them—insist—that she had done nothing wrong. After all, at this point, she had done nothing irrevocable: she was simply getting into the elevator (which was empty, too, a good omen). But then she was crossing the magnificent lobby with its palm trees and oriental carpets and opulent Moorish canopies (and, yes, security cameras), her face hidden behind her sunglasses and the scarf that she’d bought before leaving the Dubai airport yesterday, and then she was passing the row of stores inside the hotel. The shop for Christian Louboutin shoes. The one that sold nothing but Hermès scarves. A rather elegant arts and trinkets boutique. She remembered now, the images a fog, that she had ventured into all three of them. It was after dinner, on her way to the elevator. When she was waiting for Alex to return from his meeting. In one of the stores she had seen a leopard-print scarf—luminous, black and yellow swirls of spots, gold beading along the borders—that she had longed for but knew she couldn’t afford.