He chuckled and rubbed his hands together as if he was as eager to tell me as I was to hear it. “Okay, so the reason I know is because I drove him from the hotel to the Safe.” When I shook my head, he clarified. “Safeco Field. He had tickets to a Mariners game. It was after his first visit to the hotel. He was in a hurry to get to the stadium for some party in a private suite—you know, one of those club-level rooms that rich people and corporations rent out?”
I nodded and shook the ketchup bottle again, hoping I wasn’t making my Nancy Drew face.
“Anyway, normally most hotel guests like to chat with me in the van,” Daniel said, cutting the corner off his pie with the tines of his fork. “Those who don’t, they just want the music turned up while they scroll on their phones or whatever. But this guy didn’t want either. No music. No talking. And then he took a phone call, and that’s when I put it all together.”
Daniel’s eyelids fluttered when he put a forkful of pie in his mouth. “So good. Seriously, Birdie. You need to try this.”
I was sort of wishing I’d ordered a piece. “How did you put it all together?”
“The call was from his agent. They were talking about sales of a book. He was angry because his royalty check was wrong. He claimed his publisher owed him money, and apparently the agent was sick of his shit, because there was some yelling involved. This guy is a real prick, by the way. And anyway, long story short, the book titles he mentioned? I looked them up later. They were Raymond Darke books.”
I set the ketchup down on the table; it wasn’t coming out, and I didn’t want to do it the way he suggested, because he’d probably gloat about it until the end of time. “You mean to tell me that the Thomas Pynchon of legal thrillers, a man who has successfully guarded his identity from the press for twenty years, just slipped up and let a van driver know who he was?”
“You’d be shocked what I hear in that van. Shocked. I once heard some Amazon bigwig order two male prostitutes on his phone.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. And once a congressman berated his wife in front of me—said nasty, horrible shit you wouldn’t say to your worst enemy while she cried. I almost wondered if I should call the police. Like, if he treated her this way in public, what did he do to her at home? But see, that’s the thing. It’s notreallyin public, because I’m not a real human being to a lot of these people. I’m just the driver—a servant to do their bidding. They’ll never see me again, so why bother holding back?”
“Wow.”
“It’s the way of the world, Birdie.”
Indeed. I asked Daniel for the names of the books, and he rattled them off without thinking. I recognized one of them, and when I started to pull out my phone and look the other one up, he said, “It hasn’t come out yet. Click on the first link. I think it’sEntertainment Weekly. They revealed the cover a couple of months ago.”
He was right. I glanced from my phone to his face. “Are you sure he was Raymond Darke, and not just some manager or something?”
“It was Darke,” he said. “I would bet my life on it.”
We sat in silence for several moments while I considered what he’d told me. “Is Darke Russian? I couldn’t tell from the security footage, but the name in the registry was Ivanov.”
“Nope. Not Russian—I mean, not that I could tell. He just looks like... I don’t know. A random middle-aged American white dude. Maybe he has Russian ancestry. Who knows. But I’m thinking Ivanov is another fake name. Not his writing pseudonym, but maybe an identity he uses.”
I mentioned the address on file being the Cascadia’s sister hotel in San Francisco.
“I noticed that too. That’s the first thing I looked up, because I thought, whoa. Maybe I can track down his house, see how he lives. But no. I feel like he’s trying to cover his tracks.”
“But why not a local address? Why use one from another hotel—thathotel? The average person couldn’t know that the hotel in San Francisco is owned by the same people. Something’s not right about that.”
“Something’s not right about the whole thing. What does he do up there? Does he meet someone? I asked housekeeping, but they said the room is spotless after he leaves. Is he dealing drugs? Running arms for a Russian mobster?”
“Maybe it’s research for his next novel,” I said.
Daniel considered this. “I don’t think so. Whatever he’d been doing upstairs in the hotel room seemed to have made him upset. He told his agent that he needed his royalties ASAP because he’d just forked out an enormous sum of money, and he was being swindled, and then the agent seemed to ask about it, but he said, ‘Never mind. It’s personal.’?”
Okay, that didn’t sound like research.
I told Daniel about the opera theme running through Darke’s books. “His fictional detective, Paul Parker—”
“Stupidest name ever.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s what I said.”
He held his fist over the table, and after a short hesitation, I bumped it with my own. He seemedfartoo happy about this, and my cheeks were warmingwaytoo fast, so I quickly got back to my point before he pointed out that I was blushing.
“Anyway,” I said, “Paul Parker loves opera in the books. He has a massive collection of opera records. I breezed through a couple of his older books yesterday—they were on my grandfather’s bookshelves. And the details about opera are way too emotional. The way he describes music? It’s more than just a random character detail. It’s obvious Darke knows what he’s talking about.”
“He knows opera.” Daniel paused. “Wait. You mean he likes opera himself? Like, personally? Not just the character.”
