Her guide began to move again, and Billie took a step forward to follow her host, then realized with horror that she was looking down at the skinny doorman, Con Zervos, his face but inches from her right hip. A chill went up her spine as if he’d reached up and touched her. His eyes were mercifully closed now, but somehow he was still looking at her as he had in his hotel room, strangled by his own necktie.
She gasped.
“Ms. Walker?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I ate the wrong thing for dinner. Seafood. It’s unsettled my tummy.”
“Would you like some tea?”
“I’m fine,” she assured him. She tried to smile again, but it wouldn’t form.
This was hardly the first dead body she’d seen—the war had taken care of that, as had multiple trips to the morgue—but it was the first she’d woken up with, the first violently taken civilian in peacetime that she’d walked in on unawares, and as such the death of Con Zervos had shaken her. Her guard had not been up when she’d walked into room 305. She hoped the grisly discovery would be an isolated incident. She blinked and brought her body back into line, doing her best to remain calm. Con Zervos was no longer a man but a hollow, human-shaped cast, as lifeless as a dressmaker’s dummy. The face was shrinking back, eyes falling deeper into the skull, the whole of his flesh abandoned utterly by the life-force that had filled it at The Dancers. The sight of it, of what had been him—so wiryand nervous and alive—made her heart thud beneath her blouse, despite the fact that she’d expected to find him here already, if Sam had done his job well. In fact, this was what she had hoped. Nothing could be done to breathe life back into him, but now that he had been collected, he would be cared for by Benny, and his family could be informed of his fate.
“Are you okay?” Benny asked suddenly. She must have paled.
“What’s his story?” Billie managed, running a hand over her hair.
“Sorry, it’s a bit gruesome, this one.”
“You know I can handle it.” She tried another smile, and this time her cheeks worked, and his confidence in her appeared to return. She hoped he hadn’t heard the story of her claiming to have found his body in room 305.
“You are one of a kind, Ms. Walker,” he told her admiringly, then turned and regarded the corpse. “This poor fellow was found out the back of the People’s Palace tonight. Strangled, he was. They do get some rough trade. The night watchman identified him. Some Greek immigrant who came out here for a new life, and this is what he got for his troubles.”
She swallowed. The night watchman. She wondered what he thought of all the confusion with the police on Saturday night, and now this.
“Isn’t that a temperance hotel?” she asked, trying to strike a normal conversational note.
“Fat lot of good it did this fellow,” Benny remarked.
“Indeed.”
Billie told herself to resist the urge to chat. It was easy to begin talking needlessly when you were nervous and keeping secrets, and then those secrets had a way of tangling you up. It wasn’t every dayyou woke with a corpse. If the police did find out, it would do her no favors. Had the force been less corrupt, she might have trusted them with her innocence, but her father had taught her better than that. Silence was best. Silence or brevity. Reg, the city coroner, would likely give young Con Zervos an autopsy the next day, if budgets allowed. How long would it take his family back in Greece to find out his fate? She walked on, fighting the impulse to look back at Zervos or ask further questions about him.
“Sorry your kid isn’t here,” Benny said, a welcome change of topic.
“I’m not sorry,” she said, and was sincere. “I still hope to find him alive.”
It’s too late. Too late...
“Of course,” Benny said. “I didn’t mean...”
“I’m reading one of those American detective novels where they go out and bury the body in the desert,” Billie said, changing the subject as they returned to the front desk. “The desert around Vegas is full of bodies, apparently.” She noted his interest. “I was wondering, where would someone do something like that around here? Hide a body, I mean.”
“Why, the Blue Mountains, of course.” His answer was immediate.
“Is that so?”
“If you don’t have time to drive all the way into the outback—and that’s risky, you know, the longer you have the body with you. I mean, you could be pulled over, your automobile could break down, all kinds of things could go wrong. So if you don’t go all the way to the outback, you go to the Blue Mountains. It happens all the time. Better than the country, where the locals and their dogs pick thingsup and know what’s about. No, you’d settle for the mountains and all those wild areas. It’s hard to tell a murder from an accident after a couple of weeks under a cliff,” he added matter-of-factly. “Or a suicide. The roads must be backed up with all the poor souls heading up there to take a walk off the Blue Mountains escarpments. It’s a damned shame.”
“I never thought of that,” she said. He had given her an idea.
“Otherwise it’s the harbor.”
She had thought of that. “Then they would end up here, wouldn’t they?”
“Eventually,” he said. “If they were found at all.”
When Billie arrived home she walked through her rooms with her Colt drawn and, once satisfied, double-checked the lock on her door and closed and locked her windows. She undressed, pulled the freshly washed sheets on her bed back, and sat on the edge. After a moment she rose again, walked to the kitchen, and pulled some old newspapers from the lower cupboard. She padded back to her bedroom and closed the door behind her. One by one she pulled the newspaper sheets out, crumpling them in her hands and scattering them in a large arc around her bedroom floor, like a circle of protection in some novel about the occult.
