Jonathan Kellerman - Heartbreak Hotel

“Not necessary, Alicia. Have a nice day, Alicia.”

As we left her, Milo said, “Ignorance, bliss, why not?”

Kurt DeGraw’s office was on the ground floor, through the door behind the reception desk. One liver-coat on duty at the concrete counter, a young woman we hadn’t seen before. Young, acne-spotted, chopped-up blond hair streaked with pink and lavender.

A paper tag on her lapel said Kelli in black marker.

Milo flashed the badge and said, “We have an appointment with Mr. DeGraw.”

“Sorry, sirs, he’s not here, yet.”

“We’ll wait in his office.”

By the time she said, “Um, I guess,” we’d stepped behind the counter.

She trotted after us through an empty five-foot corridor. At the end was a door marked Manager. Milo turned the knob. No resistance. He dropped his hand, left the door closed.

Kelli said, “Um, maybe you shouldn’t go in? I can page him, uh-oh, I can’t, don’t know his number.” Perplexed.

Milo delivered one of his classic mixed messages: Looming huge while putting on his softest smile. The infrequently visiting uncle you kind of like but also fear.

Kelli opted for fear.

Milo said, “You can go.”

“Um, I’m not busy,” she said.

“We’re fine, Kelli.”

“I don’t want to mess up. I’m just a temp. ”

“When’d you start?”

“Like three days ago.”

“Has it been quiet all that time?”

“It’s like nothing happens. It’s a hotel but nothing happens.”

“Even so, Kelli,” said Milo, “you’re the only one out there handling the front desk. Better get back to your station.”

“If you can just wait, I can find his number and page him.”

“Not necessary, Kelli. Like I said, we have an appointment.”

She said, “Um, okay.”

“We’re the police, Kelli. No one will hassle you for anything.”

“Really? Okay, cool.”

All traces of worry erased, she bounced away.

Kurt DeGraw’s office was as large as his Culver City bedroom, furnished with similar apathy. A door with no visible lock was centered on the far wall. Milo gloved up, opened it, peeked in, and shut it.

“His crash pad. First things first.”

He scanned the office. An iMac on the desk brought a smile to his face. A keyboard tap brought up a demand for a password. He tried variants of Kurt and DeGraw, got nowhere and began searching elsewhere.

Landline on the desk, but no cellphone, not in any desk drawer, the compartments of a matching credenza, or a black metal three-drawer file cabinet whose doors swung open easily.

I said, “He wasn’t one for security, same as his house. Maybe he did leave the back door unlocked.”

“Wish there was something iffy here,” said Milo. “I like it when they think they’ve got something to hide.” He looked at the laptop.

I said, “Maybe try something with Aventura in it for the password?”

His sixth try worked. KD Aventura.

“Voilà,” he said. Then, “Shit,” when he encountered blank screen after blank screen. “Wiped clean. Maybe he was ready to rabbit. So where’s the damn passport?”

He reopened file drawers, inspected contents, squatted at the lowest section, finally stood up rubbing the small of his back. “Plenty of work stuff but nothing juicy.”

I examined the documents. Payment records and insurance info on surgical patients, nothing on guests who hadn’t gotten their faces rearranged.

Milo said, “Maybe it all goes to Dubai or wherever.” His smile was crooked, mischievous. “Hell, maybe he got careless about security because he’s Swiss. All those centuries of neutrality you don’t figure someone’s gonna declare war.”

Leaning against a wall, he phoned Assistant D.A. John Nguyen, caught him up, and asked for a warrant on DeGraw’s office, making it sound as if he hadn’t entered, yet.

After a lot of listening, he said, “There’s also a room behind the office where he sleeps and that’s clearly personal space, John, so let’s not exclude it—”

He frowned, listened some more, offered a couple of “reallys” and several “uh-huhs,” before clicking off.

I said, “John’s being lawyerly.”

“Per usual. The office is a no-go because it belongs to the hotel owners and contains business records not proven to be germane to my investigation. Ergo, I need to get the consent of someone able to grant it legally. Such contingencies are especially exigent because ‘we’re dealing with Mideast hotshots,’ no way we want that kind of trouble.”

I said, “Oops.”

He cracked up. Pointed to the rear door. “But that’s okay. Which is what I wanted in the first place.”

“Did John recommend the cooperative judge du jour ?”

“Better than that, he’s making the call himself, I can assume a yes and go right ahead.”

“Crafty, Lieutenant.”

“One does what one can. Let’s see if it makes a damn bit of difference.”

He had me glove up, too, and we entered the back room.

Kurt DeGraw’s in-house quarters were a splurge compared with his rental house. Fully equipped marble bathroom set up with high-end shaving gear, lots of hotel soap and shampoo, fluffy white hotel towels.

A good four hundred square feet of space suggesting what the so-called hospitality industry terms a “superior room.”

This bed was king-sized with a brass headboard and matching footboard, skinned in sky-blue, high-thread-count cotton and covered by a peach-colored down-packed duvet with a Pratesi label.

In the uppermost drawer of a walnut-replica, deco-replica nightstand was a small, bright-red leather book embossed with a white cross.

At first glance, a mini-Bible with souped-up binding. Five lines of white lettering said otherwise.

Schweizer Pass

Passeport Suisse

Passaporto svizzero

Passapor svizzer

Swiss passport

The most recent visa stamps were dated four years ago. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai.

One European trip, a year before, requiring no visa: sixty-day stay in the homeland, entry at Zurich.

“Family probably lives there,” said Milo. “I’ll tell Gottlieb, he can try to find them.”

I checked all the dates. “No other trip lasted more than six days. Got to be work travel.”

In the closet were two blue and two white dress shirts, a navy suit, a pair of liver-red-jacket-gray-slack combos. On a top shelf, two pricey silver Rimowa suitcases turned out to be empty. On the floor, polished wingtips, brown and black, and two pairs of Nike runners. A convex dresser, also mimicking the twenties, held precisely folded cashmere sweaters, Sunspel underwear from England, dark-hued cashmere socks rolled and sorted by color.

At the bottom of the dresser were two half drawers. Another “here go my knees” squat for Milo. “Where’s the WD-40 when you need it?”

In the left drawer, he found a vibrator, two tubes of Good Clean Love lubricant, and a stack of Technicolor Scandinavian porn magazines dated thirty years ago. Too-bright photography, tan skin, yellow hair. Straight sex, nothing beyond the basics.

Painfully wholesome Nordic faces in situations that didn’t call for goofy glee made me laugh.

Milo said, “What?”

“Back in high school this was forbidden fruit. Now it seems kind of quaint.”

“Ah, youth. At least yours was predictable.” He paged through. “Go for it, Bjorn and Brigitta, afterward we celebrate with herring for all.”

Last stop: the right-hand drawer. “Here we go !”

A second iMac sat next to a charging cord. He removed both, found an outlet, and plugged in. Dead.

“Damn.” Placing the computer on the bed next to the passport and the porn, he contemplated, put the magazines back in the drawer, glared at the Mac. “Bastard machine. Maybe our geeks can get something out of it.”