48

Wayne was bouncing up and down on the soles of his old Reeboks. He wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of coming back to the Monopoly since he’d had to give up his security badge. A hard case in a rent-a-cop suit could go to grab hold of him, and then who knew?

The doors opened on 15. Wayne looked both ways. Nobody in the hallway. Good. He headed down toward 1505.

KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. That was one of the mottos he learned from You Know Who, Mr. Big Deal Tru Franken.

Here it was, Wayne’s Plan to win the friendship and influence of Michelangelo Amato. He had his palm-sized top-of-the-line Jap digital camcorder with hi-fi stereo 10x power zoom with macro and a flying erase head in the canvas bag thrown over his shoulder. He’d tell Miss New Jersey, Michelangelo’s favorite girl, that what they had to do was make a tape of her walking down a runway in her gown with a crown. They could fake the runway on the Boardwalk down toward Ventnor.

In his bag he had a crown with only a few rhinestones missing he’d picked up at a pawn shop. He’d dazzle New Jersey’s chaperone with his phony NBC badge and explain that the tape was for a promo for Japanese TV. It’d be beamed by satellite. It was your international beauty coverage. The Japanese were crazy for blondes; it could change New Jersey’s life.

Did that sound good? Wayne liked it. Besides, these girls were all tits and no brains, so she’d believe anything. All you had to do was wind ’em up and point ’em in a direction and they’d smile and pose and walk and wave and smile.

Then, once he had the tape, he’d take it over to Michelangelo at his club. He’d paid Dean another hundred to find out where The Man hung. He’d show him the tape, explain about how he could plant the picture in the judges’ brains. The Final Judges. Then Michelangelo would take him on.

Miss New Jersey would win. Wayne would be Michelangelo’s right-hand man. And that would be that. Actually, Wayne could help Michelangelo in lots of ways. He’d realized, after talking with Dean, he knew a lot about The Man’s business.

He’d thought, last night, about whether he really wanted that, after he came back in from the Pines, and he’d decided, why not go for it? If it didn’t work out, well, the Pines were still there. But one more shot at the bright lights and the big time. Why not?

Wayne was rehearsing his speech in his head.

“Hi, I’m Wayne Ward from NBC, and I’m here this morning to—”

Christ! What was that?

Up ahead, the fire door had opened, nobody was supposed to be using that. And this tall, tall as him, skinny redheaded woman was creeping down the hall in her flats, not looking behind her. Not seeing Wayne.

She had a tape recorder in her hand! She was from some radio station probably, about to horn in on Wayne’s show. He didn’t have time for this. He had a lot to do today.

Or maybe the old broad had been hired by one of those other state delegations to poison Miss New Jersey!

Now, there was a possibility. Whatever she was up to, no good, that was for sure, she was creeping along, creeping, creeping, then stopping with her ear to the door.

See? If she were legit, would she being doing that? She reared back, about to do God knows what, when Wayne pounced.

*

The phone was ringing up in 1801.

“No,” Harry murmured. “Unnmmh-unh.”

“Harry.”

“No!” He smothered her mouth with his.

But she slid away from him and felt for the receiver. “I can’t let it ring. It could be—”

“Christ!” Harry rolled over and joined Harpo staring up at the ceiling. “It better be Him and not that damned Hoke!”

It was Win Kelly, Captain Win Kelly from the Atlantic County Major Crime Squad in Northfield, inland on the mainland from Atlantic City, he said, as if maybe she wanted a geography lesson. Which she didn’t. Not right now.

“I hate to disturb you like this,” Kelly said, letting her know he could hear another agenda in her voice, “but our mutual friend Charlie from Atlanta let me know you were in town—”

He did, did he? He had told her to stay away from the local cops. “Charlie said you’d been sort of nosing around a fellow you thought was missing?”

“Kurt Roberts. Well, he’s not. If that’s what this is about, you should talk—”

“I told him we didn’t know anything about any missing pageant judge, but we do have a couple of other situations here in your hotel, and I just wondered, seeing as how you’d been asking questions—” Kelly sounded like Chuck Yeager. But then, so did Charlie. It was probably something they taught ace detectives when they took those special seminars with the FBI at Quantico.

“So what’s up?” Sam was motioning to Harry for her pen and notebook.

“Well, first of all there’s this fellow Douglas Franken who’s been reported missing by his uncle—Tru Franken. You know who he is?”

“The discount mogul who owns this hotel.”

“Right. He seems pretty upset that nobody can find his nephew Dougie.”

“Don’t know either one of them.”

“Well, the thing is, we found somebody else who’d been missing, though nobody had reported her, a little receptionist to Franken named Crystal. Seems to have been a special friend of Dougie’s.”

“Nope.”

“We found her in Kurt Roberts’s room, right next to yours, about an hour ago.”

“Really?” Sam sat up and stared at the wall between the two suites as if she ought to be able to see right through it. “In Roberts’s room? I didn’t hear a thing.”

A testament to the soundproofing in the Monopoly, or, what with the bubble bath, the rose…

“A maid found her this morning. Head of housekeeping called security, who called us. They should have found her last night, when they were doing turndown, but since nobody’d been in Roberts’s room for a few days, I guess they were letting it slide—”

“Is she dead?”

“Crystal? Nah. She’s a real good nose breather, though. She’d been tied naked to the bed with her panties in her mouth. She was pretty hungry, probably’ll have a head cold, and was mad as hell. Said a fellow employee, actually former fellow employee, Franken just let him go, named Wayne Ward, tied her up. Said he was going to send her up some company, though nobody ever showed. We wondered if this same Ward might have something to do with Dougie’s being scarce, and it’s interesting Crystal was in Roberts’s room. You know anything about this, by any chance?”

Wayne. Wayne Ward. She put her hand over the receiver. “Harry? What was the name of that guy who popped you in the lip?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Detective Win Kelly, Major Crime Squad.”

“Oh.”

“Babe, is there any chance he knew Kurt Roberts?”

“Well, it was Roberts’s room he was coming out of when I ran into him that morning.”

“We’ll meet you downstairs in the coffee shop in about half an hour,” Sam said into the phone.