The Big Dirt Nap db-2 Page 3

  A news van arrived and Winters motioned for Hector to get me out of there; I was more than happy to leave. I followed his squat body and knocked knees, retracing our steps back to the loading-dock doors; then I remembered about the greenhouse.

  "Mr. Mishkin," I said, turning, "could I possibly have fifteen minutes of your time tomorrow?"

  Mishkin looked at me, then Winters, bewildered and almost nervous. "Sure," he said, "call my assistant, Rachel, to set up a time." He seemed to be waiting for an explanation. I let him stew for a few seconds.

  "It's about the corpse flower."

  Three

  Once we were away from the real cops, Hector slowed down and regained some of his swagger. He may have even shot his cuffs.

  "You get a lot of police activity here?" I asked, speeding up to walk alongside him so I didn't look like I was being ejected from the premises.

  He smirked as if it was no big deal.

  "We found another homeless guy by the Dumpster once. Got stupid drunk and curled up in a spot where one of the delivery trucks sat idling the next morning. Died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. Big Y comes for the food," he added, smiling. "Rachel, Mrs. Page, doesn't like it, but there's not much she can do about it—she can't stay in the kitchen all day."

  It must have finally dawned on Hector that he was escorting a not-bad-looking woman through the hotel lobby, so he took the opportunity to flirt. "No one else comes here for the food. Not spicy enough. If we had a better kitchen, maybe there wouldn't be so much food thrown out," he joked.

  He eyed me up and down. "You don't look like a gambler."

  "I'm not," I said. "Why do you ask?" I thought of Nick's dumb comment about the odds favoring the house.

  Hector told me that most of Titans's guests checked in and then left for the mega-casino twenty miles down the road. At one-third the cost for an overnight stay, Titans was a cheaper alternative for the nickel-slots crowd and the road warriors on limited travel-and-expense accounts who worked the Boston–Hartford–New York corridor.

  But they didn't spend much on food and beverages here, and that was where the real markup was.

  "Judging by the Maltese and her owner, you're pet lovers, too," I said.

  "Yeah, we're pet-friendly. Fran"—he remembered himself— "Mrs. Mishkin loved animals."

  So the Mishkins had somehow held on through the lean years with this motley clientele and, according to Hector, had recently, miraculously, been given the promise of an influx of cash from a Chinese investor named Wai Hi. But right now, the Mishkins were hanging on by their fingernails.

  As we made our way out of the labyrinth of service corridors, past the much-maligned kitchen and into the all-beige lobby, I envisioned a change in decor to foo dogs and red tasseled lanterns. I wondered aloud why a Chinese businessman would want to invest in a nearly bankrupt hotel in Connecticut.

  "Wai Hi made a lot of money in Malaysia. Solid-gold-faucet-kind of money—like that guy who had the six-thousand-dollar shower curtain," Hector said. "He's smart, that Bernie. He's got an in with the foreign press." Which meant that four or five times a year a busload of European journalists stayed at the hotel and went outlet shopping the next day. The idea was that they'd write about the experience when they got home to the Netherlands or Italy or wherever they came from.

  "Publicity," Hector said, tapping his temple. "Bernie's always thinking about the big picture. In two or three years, we could have bingo tables all over this room," he added, spreading his chubby arms and fingers out wide, in an unconscious imitation of his hero.

  Now, bingo, to me, conjures up very fond memories of Aunt Jo and little plastic disks and bottles of red ink with spongy tips. Warm and fuzzy, but not exactly the stuff that dreams are made of.

  "Is bingo such a hot ticket?" I asked stupidly.

  "Shows what you know. That's how they all get started," Hector said, as if I were an idiot or a five-year-old. "The big ones. Fox-woods, Mohegan Sun. All the Indians start with bingo."

  We walked through the hotel lobby, past the corpse flower, past the sparsely populated bar, and I flashed back to grade school, trying to remember if I'd ever heard of an Indian tribe called the Mishkins.

  Hector deposited me at the elevator and I assured him I could make it to the sixth floor under my own steam. Just then, Oksana, the bartender, ran over to us. She was shaking and jabbering in two languages.

  "Is it true?" she asked, her accent growing thicker. She folded and refolded a thick wad of cocktail napkins.

  Hector nodded.

  She looked at me, in my revealing outfit, and must have gotten the wrong idea. She spat out a stream of what might have been Ukrainian and ended with the one word I could understand: "bitch."

  "Hey, I didn't do anything. They just found my business card on him." The girl started to whimper again and Hector put his arm around her. Celine Dion's heart was still going on in the background, accompanying Oksana's sobs.

  "I'm sorry for your loss," I said. "I know you were friends." I didn't know anything of the kind but she was obviously distressed and I thought that would make her feel better. Instead, her sobbing escalated into wailing and she glared at me, as if Nick's death was somehow my fault. Hector rescued me from the unspoken accusation.

  "C'mon, mamí," he said to her. "I'll get someone to drive you home."

  This is so not what I thought I'd be doing tonight. I thought I'd be hanging out with an old friend, maybe treating myself to a massage, writing my little story. Not to be.

  The first time I'd stood in that elevator, four hours earlier, Nick Vigoriti was handsome, sexy, and alive. The thought gave me the chills. Upstairs, I fumbled with the key again, but happily the green light flashed and I was able to unlock the door. As soon as I walked in, I noticed the smell. And it wasn't me. True, I'd just spent the last hour barfing near a Dumpster, in the same vicinity as a cigar-chomping troglodyte, a homeless guy, and a dead body that—to put it bluntly—was no longer sending out pheromones, but I wasn't what smelled. An unmistakable odor assailed my senses. Smoke. Not a fire—cigarette smoke.

  I called out, thinking it might be the maid, or Lucy, who occasionally lit up despite my threatening to stage an intervention if she continued. No answer. I backed out of the room, gently closed the door, and hurried to the house phone near the elevators to call security.

  Within minutes, Hector Ruiz reappeared.

  "What's the problem, ma'am?"

  I have a thing about being called "ma'am." I'm just not ready for it. Standing there in my hoodie and flip-flops, I didn't think I looked like a "ma'am," either.

  "Hector, after all we've been through together, I give you permission to call me Ms. Holliday."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Someone's been in my room."

  "Housekeeping has probably been there, unless you had a Do Not Disturb on your door."

  "I did, but it's not there anymore. Besides, would she be smoking?"

  "No, ma'am, Ms. Holliday. Of course not, but it's possible she had a cigarette on her break and the smoke lingered." Maybe he was right. I thought of the rancid cigar smoke clinging to Bernie Mishkin's hair and clothing. Hector spoke Spanish into his headset and I understood enough to know he was summoning the maid to the room.

  "She'll meet us there," he said.

  "I hadn't thought of that possibility; I don't want to get her in trouble."

  "She won't get in trouble. We'll just clear this up." Hector was all business now, and obviously enjoying his starring role in such an eventful night. It must get boring with nothing to do except strong-arm the occasional drunken suburban suit.

  We walked back to my room, arriving at the same time as the maid, who got there so fast she must have been behind one of the staff-only doors on the floor. She was a sleepy coffee-colored woman in a pale gray uniform with white collar and cuffs that reminded me of the little paper frills some people put on their Thanksgiving turkeys. She and Hector had an exchange in Spanish that was way too fast f
or me to follow. At the end, her eyes welled up with tears, and her neck, behind the ridiculous collar, flushed bright red.

  "Look," I said, "it's not that big a deal. It's just that it's a no-smoking room. I'm sensitive."

  "She says she was here to turn down the bed about an hour ago—that would have been when we were downstairs—but she doesn't smoke. Let's go in, shall we?"

  He opened the door with his passkey and the maid and I followed him into the room sniffing like hounds on the trail. Only I detected anything. Faint, but definitely there.

  "I know someone's been in here," I said.

  "Do you want to check to see if anything's missing?" Hector asked, unconvinced.

  The laptop was still on the coffee table, and my backpack was on the love seat. I checked my wallet; nothing appeared to be missing.

  The maid shrugged and said something to Hector in Spanish, then went over to the bed to straighten the dust ruffle.

  "She says, Perhaps it was su esposo, your husband," Hector translated. I had the feeling he might have left out a few choice words, like crazy gringa.

  "Well, then we'd have a small problem since I don't have a husband."

  "The maid says she saw the two of you going into the room earlier."

  What was she talking about? Usually it's the semihysterical woman who claims to have been with someone that no one else has seen—not the other way around.

  "Young, dark, macho," Hector prompted. "Perhaps a friend?"

  "That guy? That was the dead guy, Nick what's-his-name." Not the smartest thing to say to a man who'd just heard me vehemently deny knowing Nick Vigoriti.

  "My key wasn't working. He helped me get into my room. That's all. He didn't come in." Tired of explaining, tired of being interrogated, I said, "You're right. Everything's fine." I sniffed the air and smiled. "There's no cigarette smoke here. All in my head. I'm sure it's just the strain of the evening's events." I couldn't wait for them to leave so I could triple-lock the door, rinse the taste of vomit from my mouth, and plunder the minibar. Now I did want an alcoholic drink. And carbs. Who could blame me for indulging in a little stress eating after a night like this?

  The maid was still muttering, mostly to herself. She brushed by us to get to her cart outside and then returned to the bed. She smoothed out the turned-down corner of the duvet and placed a chocolate on each of the pillows.

  They left with assurances and apologies—hers sincere, his, I wasn't sure about. As I closed the door, the maid continued her monologue.

  "Pero nunca olvido las dulces," she said, shaking her head.

  Four

  I took a shower, brushed my teeth, then raided the minibar. Pretty much the dictionary definition of doing things ass-backward, but I didn't care. The minibar was almost as empty as my fridge at home. Some high-fat salty snacks sat in a wicker tray on the counter, and inside the minifridge, screw-top wine, beer, and a door full of little nips. I took out a Sam Adams and searched for an opener. None. Probably pinched by the last guest. I rummaged in the black hole of my backpack, spilling my wallet, phone, and the sediment from my bag onto the coffee table, hunting for my Leatherman, but I couldn't find it. Too tired to keep looking, I held the lip of the bottle on the edge of the small refrigerator and slammed the heel of my fist down on the bottle. The top popped off just like it did when I was eighteen. It was nice to know I still had the touch.

  I collapsed on the love seat, put my feet on the cheap coffee table, and swigged hard. I found the remote and switched on the television again, wondering if Nick's death had already made the local news. I clicked the channel-up button until I found a station running the story. There was Mishkin tearfully bloviating to a bubbleheaded reporter, so I cranked up the volume. Then the voiceover continued. "Persons of interest are being questioned in this deadly encounter that has all the earmarks of a drug deal gone terribly wrong," and then the video cut to me being led through the lobby by Hector! I leaped to my feet, yelling at the screen, "Person of interest? I know what that means."

  I didn't know which bothered me more, that some incompetent reporter had wrongly referred to me as a "person of interest" or that I thought I looked dumpy in my low-slung yoga pants. I considered calling Winters to complain but knew she'd only lay the blame on the press, so I didn't waste my breath. This "person of interest" would be out of town tomorrow and it couldn't come fast enough for me.

  I grabbed a pack of Oreos from the minibar and tore the package open with my teeth. That's right, take it out on your own hips.

  I tossed the package aside and flopped back down on the love seat, shoveling my belongings back into my backpack.

  That's when I noticed that underneath its leather cover my phone's message light was flashing. Not voice mail; another text message from Lucy. Two men. What the hell did that mean? Two men are better than one? Two men are better than one girlfriend? Was she coming or not?

  I stared at the message and read it again. Something about it was off. For one thing, Lucy generally signed with the letter L or Loo-scious, if she had the time. It wasn't like her to blow me off completely without more of an explanation—unless a job or a man was involved. And with Lucy, each was a distinct possibility.

  Lucy and I had met in high school, back in Brooklyn, when we unwittingly shared a boyfriend. Lars was a beautiful Danish exchange student with cornsilk hair and Mick Jagger lips. She had him Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and I had him Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Presumably he rested on Sunday, but we were never sure—there were a dozen sniffling girls at his going-away party. You could either get angry or laugh it off. We laughed it off and got close.

  We were in and out of each other's lives during college, then reconnected a few years back at a television programming market in the south of France. Not bad for two Brooklyn girls. We were about the same size and had the same long dark hair, but hers was more likely to be sporting hand-painted caramel highlights and a four-hundred-dollar haircut and mine was more likely to be stuffed up under a Knicks hat, especially now that I'd made the move to the hinterlands and couldn't afford a chichi stylist, even if one had existed in Springfield.

  I texted her back, saying I'd call in the morning. If I hadn't committed to writing the article for the Bulletin, I would have been packed and on the road back to my nice little house, where there were no dead bodies, or at least none recently. I'd give the corpse flower overnight to show some more signs of life, but after my chat with Mishkin I was out of there. Maybe I'd give Hector a nice tip and ask him to send me a picture.

  Revived by the beer and annoyed by Lucy's e-mail, I brushed away the crap on the coffee table and turned on my computer to work on the story. I did an online search for anything I could find on the titan arum and the Titans Hotel. I sent them to my desktop at home, where I'd print them out in a day or two when I sat down to finish the piece. Then, just because I had the time and a second Sam Adams, I did a search on Indian casinos.

  Hector was right, it had all started with bingo. In 1972, the state of Connecticut enacted something called Las Vegas Nights, a limited measure to help churches and nonprofits raise funds. Good people at the Knights of Columbus or Elks clubs, raising money for team uniforms, the way I imagined it. That was the intention. At the time no one could have guessed how dramatically that statute would change Connecticut's future.

  Fifteen years later, when the United States Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments couldn't regulate bingo parlors on Indian reservations, those two events combined to open the door for the mega-casinos that have since appeared, Oz-like, on the Connecticut landscape—not always with the blessing of the neighboring towns, and not always benefiting the people the ruling was passed to help.

  And now, even though the Las Vegas Nights statute has been repealed, any group of people claiming Native American heritage can seek federal recognition and announce plans to open a casino. Some residents were against them, but plenty of others were more than happy to bankroll the legal fees for their
claims in the hopes that the tribe would eventually be recognized and they'd share in the multibillion-dollar-a-year business Connecticut casinos have become.

  I sent the casino info to my home computer along with the rest, got up to stretch, and walked to the minibar for another beer. I leaned across the bed to pluck a foil-wrapped chocolate from the pillow on the far side. One of las dulces, the sweets. What had the maid said? Something about forgetting the sweets? But nunca, what did that mean? I'd have to ask Anna when I got home.

  Before I knew it I was out cold.

  Some time later the phone rang. It was Rachel Page, Bernie Mishkin's assistant. He'd been called away to a meeting in Hartford but could see me at 6:00 P.M. when he returned. I peeked at the digital clock on the nighttable, 7:13 A.M. Why the hell was she calling so early?

  Rachel sounded surprised when I answered, but offered me a late checkout and a free spa day if I wanted to stick around to wait for Mishkin. She sold me on the idea of a body treatment—after my Dumpster experience, it sounded like a good idea, although nothing less than sandblasting would make me feel clean again.

  "Sveta is wonderful. You'll feel like a snake shedding your old skin," she said.

  I mumbled yes and hung up. Why not? Wasn't that one of the reasons why I came . . . a little R & R?

  I rolled out of bed and instinctively reached for my phone. One new text message: Not coming. Lucy

  Five

  I left a message on Lucy's cell. It was still too early to call her office, and it would be hours until my appointment with Bernie Mishkin or my spa treatment with the scary-sounding Sveta, so, laptop and camera in hand, I once again set out to explore the hotel.

  The Titans dining room had the look of a hospital cafeteria, a little less antiseptic, but not much. It was nearly empty. Based on what Hector had told me, I figured most of Titans's guests decamped for the casino as soon as they woke up to get in a full day of hot slots and video poker—but for all I knew everyone else had heard about Nick and I was one of the few foolhardy guests still registered.