Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(29)

He also noted an additional odor: the crushed-walnut scent unique to the toxin prestrycurarine. He paused. It would seem the hotel was troubled with rat infestations. It would also seem they used a backward exterminator, because that particular rodenticide had been deemed ineffective years ago; rats, lacking the physical capacity to vomit, were by nature highly suspicious of unfamiliar odors. No matter; rats in a basement were not his concern.

The entire space exuded a feeling of desuetude and abandonment. He could see bare lightbulbs hanging from cords, stretching out into the distance, leaving gloom on either side. Even from his position at the foot of the steps, he noticed that the basement was formed out of a layering of building cycles, the stone floor rising or falling to match the periods of additional excavation. In the darker corners, away from the lights, rooms were faintly visible: pantries, a disused kitchen, what looked like a scullery. One section far to the rear was roped off with yellow tape and an official-looking sign that read STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND.

The antiquarian in him would have enjoyed exploring this underground fastness further, but he was here for a specific purpose: to investigate the room hard by the basement stairs that had been Ellerby’s special office.

The room was marked by a scuffed wooden door with a pane of frosted glass set into it. Pendergast tried it, found it locked. He took out his set of lock-picking tools and, with a quick movement of his nimble fingers, the door opened noiselessly.

The room was small and boxy. One of the fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling had a malfunctioning baffle. Three computer monitors arrayed along one wall were dark, but he could see the computers connected to them were still running, albeit asleep. They were placed upon a long table, a printer at one end. A shorter table was pushed against the opposite wall, its stacks of paper, arranged into folders of various colors. This was where the late Patrick Ellerby had moonlighted as a stock trader.

As he closed the door and walked into the room, Pendergast reminded himself that moonlighting was misleading: from what the staff had said, Ellerby would drift down here at random times of the day or night. Which was odd, because most traders worked by the clock.

Pendergast had already examined Ellerby’s rooms, located on the third floor of the hotel. There had been nothing unusual, incriminating, or particularly interesting; the books, magazines, clothing, and electronics were typical of the life of a middle-aged bachelor. Based on what Constance had told him, Pendergast had hoped to uncover something that might shed light on the nature of Ellerby’s relationship with the hotel’s ancient and reclusive proprietress—who had refused to speak to anyone, including the police—but he had found nothing.

As he scanned the desk, two items caught his eye. One was a set of purchase papers for an F-250 truck, loaded, that had cost just over $70,000, and the other was the receipt for a self-winding Vacheron Constantin watch from a Miami boutique, with a price tag of $30,000.

While Pendergast did not much care for Ellerby’s choice of vehicle, he certainly approved of his taste in timepieces.

Both purchases had been made within the last month. Pendergast briefly conjured up the image of somebody wearing that peerless example of haute horlogerie…while driving a pickup. It was ridiculous—but then, his mother had always told him people in Savannah had their own peculiar ways. He had witnessed a few of those ways himself, firsthand, the night before. He riffled through the colored folders, then placed them back on the worktable.

Constance had taken a peculiar interest in the proprietress, Miss Frost, and had gathered a store of gossip about her. Two days before Ellerby’s death, she had come down here, seeming not at all a frail old recluse…not to mention later that evening when they’d had a ferocious argument in her rooms. Odd indeed.

He turned toward the computers. Pendergast surveyed the long table for a moment, and then he pulled a penlight out of his jacket pocket, knelt, and examined the closest CPU, feeling its flank with the backs of his knuckles. The whining noise of the fan and the heavy accumulation of dust in its rear grill indicated these machines were turned off rarely, if at all.

He rose and walked past each computer in turn, wriggling their mice to wake them up. A password field popped up on one of the screens—not surprising, given the financial transactions it presumably controlled. The password provided access to all three machines.

These computers would be dealt with by the FBI’s digital forensics lab. He glanced at them for a few seconds before his attention turned to a thick, well-scuffed ledger book covered in green cloth, sitting on the desk before the three monitors. He picked it up and began paging through it. It appeared to be a list of transactions, all handwritten in a fanatically neat hand, with each entry containing a date, a cash amount, and a variety of abbreviations and symbols. It went back several years, and had obviously been meticulously kept. With any luck, it would prove to be Ellerby’s magnum opus: the logbook that chronicled all his doings in the market. It seemed odd he didn’t have a safe to put all these papers in, but then again, no one had any interest in his doings until after he was murdered. But it did strike Pendergast as significant that there was no air of secrecy, illicit trading, or deception here. Even the lock on the door was of the most ordinary nature.

Pendergast flipped through the ledger until he reached the final entries. The most recent had been made eight days before.

Eight days. Two days before Ellerby died.

Pendergast ran through the dozen-odd pages leading up to these final entries. A cursory scan indicated that the hotel manager had been actively trading every day of the week, including weekends. There appeared to be no missed days, gaps, or lacunae of any sort…until the trades abruptly ended. He looked at the final entries once again, but there was nothing about them that indicated anything was amiss. The lines of text simply stopped—and forty-eight hours later, Ellerby was dead.