The Flight Attendant(61)

“These are probably worthless since the wounds are five days old and I’m using a camera phone, but what the hell?” the lawyer said. “By the time I find a photographer on a Friday afternoon in August, the cuts will be completely healed.”

“There is one good thing about Alex not having any defense wounds,” Cassie said.

“Go on.”

“Maybe it means that he didn’t feel any pain. I’ve been hoping he just never woke up.”

“That’s sweet. But not helpful.”

“I know.”

“Remind me,” Ani asked. “What time did you pass out?”

“It was a blackout. It seems like I was still up and about. Functioning, sort of. I wish I had just passed out.”

“Okay. What is the very last thing you remember?”

Cassie put her face in her hands and thought. Her fingers were moist from the perspiration on her glass. Finally she looked up and answered, “Here’s the chronology. Miranda is there and I’m dressed and we’re drinking. We’re in the suite’s living room. She says she’s going to leave, and I’m going to leave with her.”

“But you didn’t leave with her, right?” Ani interrupted. “You were there when Alex broke the vodka bottle.”

“That’s correct. He convinced me to stay, which wasn’t that hard. We drank some more and we had sex again, this time in the bedroom. But then I got dressed.”

“You’re positive?”

“No. But almost positive. I’m pretty sure. I really did plan to return to the airline’s hotel. That was my intention, anyway. Miranda had left and now I was going to leave, too.”

“Do you know what time Miranda said good night? Perhaps they could find her on the security camera.”

“Eleven? Eleven thirty? Midnight?”

“That helps. So you would have left when?”

Cassie shrugged. “Twelve thirty? One? An hour later, I guess.”

“Okay.”

“But they didn’t see me at that time—or, at least, they didn’t publish any photos from the lobby security cameras of me leaving in the middle of the night. That would suggest I didn’t leave until the morning.”

“Or, at least, that you didn’t get as far as the lobby.”

“Yes,” she said, and an idea, fuzzy and inchoate, began to form. She tried to gather it in, to mold it: to imagine where else she might have gone. She focused on the corridor. She saw so many hotel corridors, but few as elegant as the one at the Royal Phoenician. There were the long, endless hallways, which was typical, but the Oriental carpets had been beautiful and the elevator doors—when you got there—were black and gold; there had been the sconces along the walls, at once Aladdin-like and futuristic, as if the genie had instead been a Martian, and there had been the exquisite guest-room doors with their Moorish cross-hatching bordering the panels. There were the divans with the ornate blue and gold upholstery by the elevators and by the windows and in the nooks at the corners. She had stood beside one when she first exited onto Alex’s floor with the key he had given her at dinner, enjoying the view out the window on the way to his room. No, it had been beyond his room. She had walked to the end of the corridor to see the city from there.

“Sometimes I make a wrong turn when I leave a hotel room—even when I’m sober,” Cassie said. “I am just in so many hotels. We all make that mistake. Pilots, flight attendants. The elevator was to the left and around the corner in Berlin, for instance, but then it’s to the right and straight ahead in Istanbul. It happens all the time.”

“And?”

“I don’t know. This might sound pathetic, but I have a vague memory of panicking in the hallway after leaving his room.”

“Because someone was after you?” Ani asked, clearly a little stunned.

“No. Because I was lost. It was the middle of the night and I couldn’t find the elevator and I couldn’t find his room. I couldn’t even remember his room number. I mean, now five-eleven is branded into my brain. But it wasn’t then. Think of all the room numbers I see every month of my life. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do. I think…”

“You think what?”

“I think I collapsed on a divan in one of the corners of the corridor. I think it was by a window that overlooked the city.”

“This was after Miranda left.”

“Yes. This was after she left. And so there I was alone in the corridor. But I was so drunk—so very, very drunk. Maybe I got lost and gave up. Maybe I just sat down on the thing and tried to figure out what the hell to do. And maybe there I passed out. In other words, I never made it to the lobby. I got lost in the hallway and crashed on the couch for, I don’t know, half an hour. An hour. Maybe less, maybe more. But I woke up before anyone from hotel security or room service happened down the hallway.”

“And then you found your way back to his room?”

“That’s right. I had a key. Maybe the catnap helped me to focus. Or sobered me up just enough that his room number came back to me.”

“You wouldn’t have to have been gone all that long. I’m guessing even ten minutes would have been enough for someone else to enter his room and kill him.”

“Oh, it’s very possible I was gone at least ten minutes. Those hotel couches and divans looked really, really comfortable.”