The elevator to the penthouse floor was locked out to anyone not registered there. Justice’s instructions were to pick up the key card at the desk. A compact blonde in a blazer looked at his driver’s license and handed him an envelope with the hotel’s logo on it. We entered a car with the same design in relief on bronze plate. The logo was repeated on the walls of the car, which was big enough to carry forty people without jostling. I leaned against the railing just to feel the bulk of the .38 in its belt clip.
Six weeks later the brass in Vegas installed metal detectors at the front entrance; I can’t help feeling we were at least partially responsible for the decision.
He tried to slip the card in the slot next to 17 and came within about a foot of it on the first attempt; two on the second. He handed it to me without comment. I got it in without bending more than one corner on the first try.
We rose on a cushion of air. Except for a slight vibration I’d have thought we were standing still.
Justice was breathing as if he’d run around a country block. It reminded me I’d been holding my breath since we boarded. I let it out with a whoosh. The noise didn’t make him jump any higher than the ceiling.
I grinned at him. “Everybody dies, Counselor.”
“Have I said I don’t like you?”
“Hurts just as much every time.”
We ran out of conversation then. I leaned back against a brass rail and played with a pack of cigarettes. It kept my hands from shaking.
Up and up we went. I’d never traveled that far in an elevator without stopping to pick up more passengers.
At end of track we stepped out onto a red carpet runner deep enough to tickle our tonsils, with the MGM brand embroidered on it in gold every few feet. Bronze wall sconces lined the walls between doors, labeled the same. I figured I’d know the name of the place by the time we left.
If we left.
The door to 1700—at the end of the hall, meaning a corner suite—wasn’t anything special, if you’d grown up in the Winter Palace. It was paneled in coffered mahogany, with its number scrolled on it in gold script. A pearl button was set back inside a brushed-gold socket next to the frame.
“What a layout,” Justice said. “If just one of my clients slipped on a puddle of flop sweat in a gaming room, I might be able to stay up here for a month.”
He was reverting to type. I felt a little better then. “Hero going in.” I laid a finger against the button. The lawyer retreated a few steps and took up a position with his back to the wall and his hands folded at his waist. I pushed. A set of chimes played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I don’t make these things up.
“Mr. Justice?” A male voice from the other side, with a mild urban accent; but then Madam Sing was an equal-opportunity employer, recruiting her squad of hit men from both sexes and every ethnic quarter. She’d have chosen this one to lull us into a sense of safety. I reached under my coattail and loosened the revolver in its cradle.
Justice cleared his throat and said, “Yes.”
“Please come in.”
I twisted the knob, filled my lungs, and swung open the door.
No one greeted me. No one shot at me, either; but the day was still young and there were plenty of places to hide.
It was a suite reserved for the occasional VIP from Washington or the Vatican, but more frequently for high-rollers, to entice them to stay long enough for the house to get even.
You could have moved my house inside that space without scratching the trim. The walls were a restful eggshell, hung with good reproductions in oil of old masters in gilt frames. A wind-torn scene of the destruction of the Spanish Armada took up most of the wall opposite the door, realistic enough to make you hang over the rail. Table and floor lamps bathed the room in soft glow, studded chairs and sofas invited the visitor to sink into glove leather. A liquid plasma TV the size of a bank mural was bolted to a wall, probably using railroad spikes. There were sprays of flowers and complimentary baskets, bowls of chocolates wrapped in gold foil, premium liquors behind beveled glass cabinet doors; and that was just the sitting room. The bedroom would have a swan-shaped gondola upholstered in hummingbird down and sprinkled with buds from an extinct variety of rose. Instead of a wake-up call, a gimmick attached to the telephone spritzed you with Chanel No. 5.
All Las Vegas, and all fake. The people who design penny arcades put more convincing veneers on diamond rings in claw machines. But it was impressive enough for Detroit, where anyone who drinks Schnapps from a glass is automatically an earl.
For all its gaud it felt like a place that had been abandoned for years. I let my arm fall. I’d been holding it bent, the .38 level, so long it had gone numb. The circulation came back tingling, like an electric current.
I spotted something I should have noticed before, a feature I didn’t think came with the down payment on an overnight stay: A micro-tape player, doubtlessly noise-activated, on a table under the bright copper shotgun-barrel door chimes.
That accounted for the voice that had invited me in. I was alone in the suite, a place where my gun was useless.
I dove for the door; not quite in time to escape the incendiaries that turned the world into a ball of flame.
* * *
The back of my coat was burning. I followed through on the dive, propelled by the force of the explosion, belly-flopped to the hallway floor, and rolled, laying a black streak across the MGM logo for yards. I staggered to my feet, slapped out the last shred of flame, and leaned my shoulder against the wall. Down the hall, smoke poured out of 1700, around the door hanging by one hinge. I hadn’t hit it that hard, although I’d tried; the blast had done the rest. Ahead of me the elevator door was closed. Philip Justice was on his way down, his mission completed.
I took the stairs, as we’re instructed to do in case of fire. Here was where the glamour peeled off; the treads were plain brown rubber, the railing painted flat black, the lights ordinary fluorescents shedding watery illumination down the well.
I didn’t hurry. I couldn’t outrace the elevator, and just then the railing was my closest friend. I pulled myself along it until my ankles turned from Jell-O back to tendon and bone. Somebody was gasping; the sound echoed off the walls, painted a non-threatening taupe. The somebody was me, and he was still smoldering, filling the place with the stench of burning rags. I stripped out of the coat, let it fall, and stamped on the ashes until they lost their glow. I left it there and moved on.
The tan sole of a polished black shoe showed on the edge of the third landing as I came around the corner. A few more steps and there was a black lisle sock and a narrow patch of white skin showing between the top and a rucked-up cuff belonging to a pair of gray trousers. When you see a foot in that position it’s almost never good news. I stopped descending, gripped the railing with both hands, and stood there waiting for my breathing and heart rate to slow down. When it was clear they wouldn’t, I began moving again.
He lay on his back, as neatly as if he’d been caught beneath the arms and lowered gently to the floor, with one arm lying across his chest and the other angled slightly out from his body. His gray suitcoat was spread open, exposing yellow shirt. Light reflected off the button where it had come to rest on the landing after the thread broke. His hair, normally sleek as a seal’s, was rumpled above the left temple, his head turned slightly to the right and one eye open. In death he was winking at me.
I accepted the challenge. I went down on one knee, not touching him. I’d made a New Year’s resolution to quit stripping corpses or going through their pockets. If whatever had killed him didn’t show itself in a cursory examination, someone else would have to handle that end.
Someone else got a break. Leaning close, I peered at what looked at first like a freckle just below and a little behind his left ear. Something had broken the skin, just a prick, slightly puckered and red around the edge. He might have been stung by a bee. He might have stuck himself with a shirt pin. He might have been bitten by a vampire with one fang. That was the likeliest of the three. You rarely hit the jugular purely by chance.
It hadn’t been any of those, any more than a certain Bulgarian dissident had stumbled all by himself into the point of a toxic umbrella at the height of the Cold War.
They wouldn’t have used that old gag; not on a high-profile lawyer who trailed death threats like Marley’s chains. One glimpse at a bumbershoot and he’d have been a moving target, jeopardizing the operation. It would be more simple even than that: a Detroit-style mugging with a fatal ending.
I grasped the railing and pulled myself to my feet. I pantomimed the action, first taking Justice’s part, then his killer’s. That’s what you do when you’re a crack detective, play charades with the crime scene. He hadn’t taken the elevator. Either he’d suspected it would be turned off in response to the explosion or someone else had rung for it below and he hadn’t the iron will required to wait while it made its way back up. Encountering someone else in the stairwell, he’d have moved aside to let him pass. That was when he was grabbed, spun around, restrained with an arm across his throat—his shirt collar was rumpled, the knot of his gray necktie loose—and the needle or something similar injected in the artery. It would be a fast-acting poison, especially when introduced directly into the circulation. Ricin was trendy, the first choice of terrorists and would-be presidential assassins, but too slow. Unless someone had been monkeying around with it in a lab.
And who might that be?