David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

I climbed the stairs to my room, already full of sleepy satisfaction. I passed Lajwati Lal, Sameen’s wife. She wheeled her cleaning cart along the balcony, her face impassive, hard, and lined. But she smiled at me when I passed by, giving her a little wave.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Lal,” I said, thinking myself enlightened because I cast a friendly greeting at an immigrant busy toiling over a stranger’s bed.

She nodded agreeably in my direction. “I hope you’re staying out of trouble.”

My stomach flipped. What could she know? “Trouble,” I said, my voice a rasp.

“My husband told me about those very wicked boys,” she said with a sympathetic smile.

I let out my breath. “He was great to help me.”

“Oh, yes. He fancies himself a real hero with his cricket bat,” she said. “But I think he only wanted an excuse to teach those fellows a lesson.”

I asked her to thank him again for me. Once inside my room, I turned up the air conditioner and sat on the edge of the newly made bed. The stillness, the dark of the room with its reddish orange curtains drawn- all of it felt too luxurious for words. I would at last sleep.

After splashing water on my face and rubbing off the last of the blood, I was happy to see I didn’t look like someone who had been beaten up. A little red but nothing more. I lumbered over to the bed and lay down, fully dressed, arms stretched, ready to fall asleep. Then I sat upright. How could I afford to sleep when I was a potential murder suspect? If I were arrested, tried, and convicted and had to spend the rest of my life in jail, I’d spew curses at myself forever for having squandered this time. Time I could have used for… For what, exactly?

For trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I supposed. Melford seemed absorbed by the mystery of the third dead body, but that bothered me less than it did him. I was more troubled by the Gambler’s involvement in all of this. Of course, I knew about the Gambler’s involvement and Melford did not. Best not to think about Melford too much, since for all I knew he was sitting in the back of Jim Doe’s police car with a bloody nose and his hands cuffed tight behind his back.

I, however, was at the motel, and the Gambler was not. It occurred to me that being here at the motel presented a golden opportunity.

I stood up and headed out of my room, very slowly. Down the hall I saw Lajwati’s cleaning cart and no sign of Lajwati herself. I walked slowly along the balcony, trying to look anything but furtive and probably failing miserably. When I got to the cart, I saw that luck was on my side- or perhaps fate was simply setting me up for an even greater tumble. There, hanging on a hook on the side of the cart, were the extra pass keys, the ones Ronny Neil and Scott had stolen in order to wreak havoc. I could take one and Lajwati would never notice- or, at the very least, never suspect me.

I heard the sound of running water coming from the open room, and when I peered in, there was no sign of Lajwati herself- except for one small, white-sneakered foot protruding from the bathroom. She was in there, scrubbing with the water running. With a casual swipe, I took one of the keys and kept on walking.

I went around to the side of the motel to the Gambler’s room. There was no one around and no sign of lights on in the room. To be safe, I knocked and then ducked around the corner to watch. But the door didn’t open. I went back, looked both ways, and stuck the key in the door.

It worked. I’d been half hoping it wouldn’t. If the key had failed me, I could tell myself I’d done my level best but the black bag operation simply wasn’t in the cards. Now I had no choice but to go forward. I sucked in my breath and pushed open the door.

And that was it. I’d broken into the room of a dangerous criminal. I couldn’t imagine having done this twenty-four hours earlier, but twenty-four hours earlier I’d been a different person, living a different life.

I looked around the Gambler’s room. Lajwati had already cleaned here, too, which was good since it meant I didn’t have to worry about her barging in. It also meant that I didn’t have to be paranoid about putting everything back exactly as I found it. Things would have been moved anyhow, giving me the freedom to look around as I pleased.

But what was I looking for? Some clue to who the Gambler really was, why he would be involved in covering up a triple homicide.

His burgundy garment bag was entirely unpacked, but I went through it anyway. Nothing. He had a few shirts and pants hung up and a pile of dirty laundry shoved in the bottom of the closet. I poked at it with my shoe, in case his dirty underwear was meant to disguise something of consequence, but a little shifting around revealed nothing. I went through the drawers, carefully lifting the undershirts, T-shirts, briefs, and socks, but found nothing of interest there, either. Nothing under the newspaper on the nightstand. A whole lot of nothing.

In the bathroom, I discovered the Gambler used cheap disposable Bic razors, off-brand shaving cream, and Crest. But I discovered little else except that he took three prescription medicines, none of which I’d ever heard of.

This was turning out to be a big bust. But then I saw it, hiding in plain sight. Hell, it was so obvious that it was a miracle I saw it at all. Right in the middle of the glass table toward the back of the room, next to the clean ice bucket with fresh plastic liner. His date book.

It would have everything in there. It was one of those date books that was about as broad as a paperback novel and almost as long. It had a little clasp and pockets on the inside and outside jackets. The pages were disposable, to be replaced each year, and there were too many of them shoved into a small ring, which made it hard to turn them. As I flipped through, I began to see that this wasn’t the gold mine I’d been hoping for, it was a barely legible scribble mine. Each spread of two pages represented one week, and there was an entry for at least one day each week, generally more. The problem was that the entries didn’t mean anything to me. “Bill. 3:00. Pancake.” Somehow this tidbit didn’t exactly clarify things.

Then I noticed that one name appeared over and over again: BB. “Expect BB call PM.” “Get instructions BB.” “BB 9AM Denny’s.” This was surely something, I thought. I checked the back of the date book, which had an alphabetized section for addresses. It was pretty well maxed out, so I concentrated on the Bs but found nothing that looked right. Then I checked the front and back pockets, overflowing with business cards. Anything, I thought, with the initials B.B. But nothing. Salesmen, lawyers, real estate agents, doctors, appointment cards. It was all crap. I was putting them back, trying to remember the right order, when one card grabbed my attention. It read, “William Gunn, livestock wholesaler.”

Bobby had mentioned Gunn as the owner of Educational Advantage Media. So what was with the livestock? There was nothing else in the book to suggest that the Grambler had anything to do with livestock. Jim Doe, however, did. Then there was the name. William Gunn. B. B. Gunn, I thought. An inevitable nickname- as inevitable as the Gambler’s. I ran over to the desk, took out a motel pad and pen, and copied the information. I put everything back carefully, then did a quick run-through to make sure all was as I’d found it.

Nothing to do now but make a clean getaway and I’d be home free. I parted the curtains slightly and looked out as best I could. The angle left a lot of room for blind spots, but I felt moderately comfortable that I could escape unseen, so I opened the door and stepped into the light and heat.

As it turned out, there had been a pretty serious blind spot. Standing fifteen feet down the balcony, hands in his pockets, was Bobby.