Margo says, “The police have assured me they will be finished with the … finished with your floor by this afternoon, sir.”
“I can’t go back up there,” he says. “Not for a while.”
“Of course. But we’ll be able to collect anything you might need and have it brought down here.”
“Joseph can do that,” he says. “I’ll give him a list. I want him to check things out.”
“In the meantime,” Margo says, “Anything else you might need …”
“Thank you, Ms. Traynor,” Leo says. “May I say that I’m grateful you handled this yourself. I don’t think I could have borne Lloyd Gruber’s ministrations just now.”
“He did ask me to convey —”
“Of course,” says Leo. “Tell him, tell him whatever you want to tell him.”
He crosses the room, stares out at the building across the street. Margo looks in my direction. I try to gesture that she’s done well, that things will settle down, that Leo’s okay. I’m not sure I manage to get that across. I’m even less certain it’s the truth.
“Thank you for stocking the bar,” he says.
“I wasn’t sure what —” Margo begins.
“You covered all the bases.”
She finally manages to complete a sentence. “May I offer my own sympathy for this terrible loss.”
Leo looks at her with what might have been an attempt at a brave smile but comes off as a grimace of pain.
“I appreciate it,” he says.
Margo gives me a glance that suggests general helplessness. I show her to the door.
“He’ll be okay,” I whisper.
“Everybody’s shaken up,” she says. “Downstairs. They’ll do anything. Even Lloyd.”
“Best thing is, keep the place running like nothing’s happened.”
Margo leaves.
Leo pours himself a drink. I wait for orders. It’s a long wait. Two minutes is a long time if you’re waiting for someone to speak, if you’re watching a man in pain pull himself together by an exercise of dogged will.
“Is there anything I can do for you, sir?”
I can see the tendons in his fingers and I worry that he’s going to crush his whisky glass, but his voice when he finally speaks is as cold as death. “Yes, there is, Joseph. You can find whoever did this … thing.”
“The police —”
“The police will do what policemen do,” he says. “If they catch the bastard they’ll charge him with second-degree murder which will probably get knocked down to manslaughter or aggravated assault and he’ll be a free man in seven years if the courts are feeling really tough that day.”
“I suppose that’s possible.”
“I’m seventy-four years old, Joseph. I may not have seven years to wait. Otherwise I could plan how I’d kill the sonofabitch as he walked out of prison.” He has a sip of Scotch and smiles at me. It isn’t a friendly smile. “You think I’m joking?”
I choose my words with care. “I think you’re understandably angry and that you want whoever did this to be punished.”
“I don’t want them punished. I want them dead.”
“One of them is.”
“Good,” he says. “It’s a start.”
Rachel gives me a sad smile when I come into the office. She looks likes she wants to give me a hug. I’m not in a huggy mood but I open my arms enough for her to get close, accept a quick squeeze.
“You okay, slugger?” she asks.
“Oh, sure,” I say.
She steps back and checks me out. “We had the same name you know,” she says. “Raquel, Rachel. It’s an ancient name.”
“You should hear it in Hebrew,” Gritch says. He’s sitting in his corner. “How’s the old bugger doing?” he asks.
“He’s okay I guess. His doctor came by, checked him over, gave him something to help him sleep tonight.”
“Hit him hard,” Rachel says.
“He kept saying how we should have gone straight up, that she was waiting for him to come home, that he shouldn’t have been downstairs listening to music.”
“Wouldn’t have made any difference,” Gritch says.
“Maybe not.”
“Seriously,” he says. “I was talking to one of the uniforms. The pretty one?”
“Chinese?”
“That’s the one. Melody Chan. Nice kid. Wants to be a detective.”
“What did she have to say?”
“Says it probably happened between midnight and one.”
“She tell you anything else?”
“Well, I had to chin for a while, bits and pieces, she’s pretty sharp, had her eyes open. She says there were at least two intruders, maybe three.”
“She knows this how?”
“She doesn’t know it, she thinks it. Maybe. Says she saw footprints from the terrace, dirt tracked in, and a different set with no dirt. Maybe. She was just spitballing. Cop talk.”
“Regular Chatty Cathy,” says Rachel. “You must’ve turned on the old Gritchfield charm.”
“Hey, she was stuck guarding an empty hallway. We were comparing notes. Technically, I was first on the scene.”
“What the hell were they after?”
“Beats me,” Gritch says. “If they were looking for something, they either found it in a hurry or quit looking. They didn’t go down the hall.”
“Maybe they were after her,” says Rachel. “Lot of talk this morning. The general opinion is she was more than his housekeeper.”
“She was,” I say.
“Ahh,” says Rachel.
“Do me a favour,” I ask them both, “check out where the brothers were. They both had invitations to the dinner, neither one showed up.”
“Not a lot of togetherness,” Rachel says. “We had twenty-seven at our last family gathering, and not everyone could make it.”
“They all get along?” Gritch asks.
“Heck no,” she says, “but they came. It’s family.”
Housekeeping is located on the third floor, east side, close to the service elevators — supplies, equipment, lockers and dressing rooms for the maids and cleaning staff, and Mrs. Dineen’s office, from which she rules every aspect of the Lord Douglas’s domestic management. It isn’t a part of the hotel I have need to visit often.
Two women in uniform are emerging from their cloister at the end of a corridor. The murmured conversation can only be about one subject.