The Big Dirt Nap db-2 Page 4

  I picked up a newspaper and headed for the deepest corner of the dining room, away from the all-you-can-eat buffet. As late as the murder occurred it hadn't made that day's front page and probably wouldn't until the following morning.

  A busty waitress named Laurie came to take my order—coffee, fruit salad, and whole wheat toast.

  "You can get the buffet for two dollars more," she said mechanically, before the words had fully left my lips. I resisted the temptation.

  While I waited for breakfast I logged on to the computer and within minutes I was in Sumatra, Indonesia, the only place in the world where the corpse flower grows in the wild.

  Anyone in the United States can buy a titan arum bulb from a mail-order catalog. Still, it's appropriate that the bestselling plant in America is called the impatiens, nature's answer to the artificial flower. Most people don't have the patience to babysit spring bulbs planted in the fall, much less one that takes seven years or longer to bloom—if it ever does. Flowering is exceptionally rare for corpse flowers in cultivation, and it only happens when the plant is hand-pollinated—the botanical equivalent of in vitro fertilization.

  I scrolled through the listings of documented flowerings from the last ten years: the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Virginia Tech, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It was hard to imagine Bernie Mishkin's hotel joining that rarefied group, even temporarily.

  My order came fast and I slid the laptop over to the left-hand side of the table so I could pick at my food and continue reading; the waitress sneaked a peek as she refilled my coffee.

  "Is that what that thing in the lobby is gonna look like?" she asked, pointing to the screen with the coffeepot. I held my breath, visualizing scalding hot decaf soaking in between the keys of my new Dell.

  "If we're lucky," I said, nudging the computer a few inches farther away.

  "They've had someone out there measuring it every couple of hours for the last two weeks. Damn, that's like me weighing myself when I'm on a diet—every couple of hours, to see if not eating that cookie has made me any thinner." I could identify with that; it made me like her.

  "I'm not surprised about the frequent measurings," I said. "It can shoot up as much as five inches in a day. When the growth slows down, that's when you know it's ready to flower."

  "You ever seen one?" she asked, ignoring the couple who had just walked in. She waved her hand in a motion that told them to seat themselves.

  "Once. A few years ago in Brooklyn."

  "Brooklyn, Connecticut?"

  It's a fact that most people from Brooklyn, New York, think there's only one Brooklyn. When you can see chewing gum in France with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on the package, and T-shirts in Zanzibar with the Brooklyn Dodgers logo on them, it's a natural assumption, but it's not true. At least four states have Brooklyns and Connecticut was one of them.

  "New York."

  "Oh."

  I might as well have said Mars.

  "You know," she said, leaning in and getting close again with the coffeepot, "from this angle it looks a little like . . ."

  "Yup."

  She let out a whoop and moved off to the newcomers' table, a big grin on her face as if she finally got the joke.

  I tried to use my found time well. I'd ratcheted down quite a bit since my BlackBerry-24/7 days but still found it difficult to sit still for long stretches of time. And single-tasking made me feel like a shirker.

  I e-mailed Caroline Sturgis and rescheduled for early the next morning. Then I left Sumatra and went back to work on Caroline's garden design and crossed my fingers that she'd sign off on the plans. Now that Laurie and I had shared diet tips and a naughty joke, she kept me refueled with coffee as if I was a hotel regular. I asked her if she liked working there.

  "Oh, yeah, beats unemployment." Laurie had worked at Titans for eight years, since her youngest started school. Her husband had worked in a local factory that had closed so he now had a two-hour commute each way. "That's why I take the early shift. Otherwise I'd never see him."

  She liked Bernie more than Rachel but thought that was natural, "him being a man and easier to deal with."

  "I guess she's gotta come off that way," Laurie said. "She's one of those hard women. Hard to deal with, hard to like."

  Bernie was the opposite. A pushover.

  "Those Ukrainian girls walk all over him." A slim blonde in a rabbit-fur jacket caught her eye and sat at the counter. "I gotta go. That's a pal."

  By the time I packed up my computer to leave, they were breaking down the breakfast bar and setting up for lunch. Similar to a cruise ship, life at the Titans Hotel revolved around mealtimes. I felt guilty for not generating a bigger tab so I left Laurie a generous tip and headed for the lobby, looking for something else to occupy my time until my spa visit this afternoon.

  "Thanks, honey," Laurie yelled after me, pocketing the bill. "See ya tomorrow." Not likely.

  I made my way to the corpse flower, waiting for whoever it was that had the task of monitoring the plant. I didn't have long to wait.

  She bounced in, wearing a UConn baby T-shirt and a canvas cap I would have described as early Mao, but college kids probably called something else. About nineteen years old, she was a sturdy girl with pale freckles and light brown hair in a thick, no-nonsense ponytail, set high on the back of her head. Her rectangular-framed glasses gave her an edgier look than her unmade-up, corn-fed features did, and I guessed that was the intention. She said her name was Amanda.

  After I introduced myself as a fellow gardener, Amanda Bornhurst invited me into the greenhouse to watch her work. According to Amanda, when the Mishkins had agreed to buy the six-year-old corpse flower, they hadn't had the slightest idea it would need daily attention and the aforementioned hand-pollination, if it was ever to flower.

  "How did you get the job?" I asked.

  "Mr. Mishkin called the plant clinic at the arboretum. They turned him on to my school's extension university. My professor offered me the assignment for extra credit. I've never spoken to Mr. Mishkin personally, but I send him e-mails of my progress reports. He's very into it."

  Amanda's gear was in a canvas bag, with skinny pockets and loops for tools. She set it down on the small table next to the wrought-iron bench where I was sitting. She took out her records, notes, and tape measure and laid them out with the precision of a surgical nurse.

  "He's the only one, though. No one else seems to care much about it," she said, shaking her head and causing her ponytail to swish back and forth rhythmically. "Wait till it flowers, though. It's practically a miracle."

  She explained how she'd cut a thick wedge out of the bulb to collect the pollen and used a paintbrush attached to a wire hanger to deposit it on the stamens. Then she slid the chunk of plant material back into place. Now it was close to flowering.

  "Okay, drumroll." Amanda stood on a small ladder. In a practiced move she hooked one end of a metal builder's tape measure under one of the ladder's feet. "Ninety-seven and a half inches. That's only one and a half inches more than yesterday. We're getting close!" She was as excited as if this was her personal space launch or the countdown to midnight on New Year's Eve. I snapped her picture as she climbed down from her perch.

  "So what does that mean?" I asked, although I sort of knew.

  "As long as it keeps growing, it won't bloom. The aroma is really starting to kick in. It's intense from up here. Wanna smell?"

  I passed; it was pretty pungent from where I sat.

  She'd never seen one in the flesh, so to speak, but the Internet was filled with pictures. It would be impressive. "We've got a few more days," she said. "Then pow!" She may have had a few more days, I didn't.

  The girl entered her observations in a Huskies notebook and took pictures of her own. I checked my watch. Still hours until Bernie Mishkin returned. If this baby wasn't going to bloom today, I'd be on the road shortly after I saw him. But I did have a story to write.

  I
offered Amanda fifty bucks for copies of her digital pictures, gave her two of my cards and asked her to write her e-mail address on the back of one of them.

  "I'll send you the pictures, but I don't think I should take any money," she said, writing down her info. "That might not be right." I was charmed that she was grappling with an ethical issue, so few kids these days seemed to, but I came down to earth when she asked her next question.

  "Will I be in the newspaper?" she asked, brightening. I guess the news articles and surveys were true—more young people wanted to be famous than be rich, or successful, although all three would be nice.

  "The world-famous Springfield Bulletin."

  "Cool. Can I get tearsheets?" Tearsheets? Jeez, did she have a publicist?

  "Sure," I said. She told me her boyfriend also worked at the hotel and I promised I'd try to mention him in the article, too.

  Amanda stashed the ladder behind the bench, ushered me out of the greenhouse, and locked the door with a heavy chain and a bicycle lock.

  "It's nothing personal," she said, "just security." I laughed to myself and decided not to tell her that while the hotel was securing a glorified houseplant, a guy had been killed there the night before.

  "No probs."

  Amanda bounded out of the lobby, to field hockey practice or some other overbooked suburban kid activity, checking off another item on her busy schedule.

  It was still thirty minutes until spa time. I moseyed around the lobby, trying to eat some clock when I saw Oksana setting up the bar and chatting with a guy who punctuated his speech with frequent wheezing. The previous night she'd all but accused me of being involved in Nick's death so I slipped outside to the pool area, staying under her radar by using that ability to make myself invisible that I'd cultivated in high school. I knew high school was good for something.

  Six

  If the Titans spa had ever been an ongoing concern, it must have been back in the days when women in turbans stood in exercise machines and tried to jiggle the fat away. A glass door on the second floor was labeled Gaia's Palace—at least someone knew their Greek mythology. The room held little more than a bare reception desk, some candles, and a small bamboo plant in a shallow dish of wet pebbles—dollar-store nods to an Asian sensibility, but they were trying.

  While I waited for someone to greet me, I poked around, eventually sneaking a peek at the spa's appointment book. I was curious to see if there were any other clients that afternoon, or if I was the only one who'd been coerced into using the spa. Just as I opened the book, the door to the treatment room swung open, and I slammed the book shut.

  No waiflike creatures in black here. No long-necked model wannabes moonlighting from their jobs as haughty hostesses in trendy restaurants. Just Sveta. Quite possibly moonlighting from her other job as a professional wrestler. She led me into the treatment room that she had already prepared and I followed her in with all the enthusiasm of someone about to be strip-searched at the airport.

  "Salon receptionist is off today," she mumbled in a heavy Russian accent. "We have big group coming soon, so she will be here long hours." I thought Sveta was lying, but gave her credit for being a good employee attempting to keep up appearances for the guests. "Today we have salt scrub."

  Apparently I didn't have a choice. I was here. The salt was here. And so was Sveta. She ordered me to strip down and held up a sheet to shield her eyes while I did. A plastic shower cap and a paper thong were on the table behind me and I put them on as she instructed. New Age harp music played in the background. Relaxing was difficult. Finally I hopped on the table and lay facedown while she covered my butt and legs with a cool cotton sheet.

  Wearing scratchy white gloves, she began exfoliating my back, starting at my shoulders and moving her hands in short downward strokes.

  "First we do this. Slough off dry skin from winter. Should have humidifier. Heating and air-conditioning is bad for skin."

  She finished my back and repositioned the sheet to expose a different part of my anatomy. I was just about to drift off.

  "You are writing about flower?" she asked.

  Was it in the company newsletter? I told her I was.

  "Is good for hotel?"

  I told her hordes of people would visit Titans because of the article. They'd come from all over.

  "That's what they say about the foreign writers, but it never happens. And they're lousy tippers."

  I could tell that annoyed Sveta because she was scraping at my flesh a little harder than before. That last stroke was almost a smack.

  "Terrible thing happened last night," she said, after a few minutes. Was this supposed to be relaxing? Sveta's xenophobia and the police blotter? I grumbled a noncommittal assent. "Bad for hotel," she said.

  And not so great for Nick, either.

  "He was pretty man, but not to be trusted," she said.

  Any thoughts I'd had of a relaxing or therapeutic spa treatment were gone. Now that I was practically naked and under the woman's catcher's-mitt hands, what did she want from me? Could I run out of here in a shower cap and paper underwear if I had to?

  I turned my head to the other side to give myself time to think.

  "You're right," I said, stalling for time.

  She attacked my legs and arms with renewed vigor, brushing so hard that not only would my skin be smooth after this treatment, I might even weigh less. She was really getting into her work now, holding up my left arm by the wrist and sanding me down with a spa glove. Out of the corner of my eye I could see little flakes of winter skin sloughing off.

  "He let Oksana believe he cared, but he was a fake." I hoped she didn't have too much invested in Oksana's being jilted, or I'd have no skin left.

  "Lovely girl," I said, mumbling into a towel and hoping to diffuse some of her agitation.

  "She is, but she's a child. And he was a liar. Nick bought her a few dinners. That was it. She wants to be rescued. You must rescue yourself."

  After delivering that insight into her personal philosophy, Sveta finished with my B side and I turned over. Why was she telling me this? Was this her own message or one she was delivering for someone else?

  "Still," I said, trying to lighten things up, "if all the liars in the world were killed, there wouldn't be many of us left."

  Her message delivered, she laughed, deflated my "A" side, then drizzled a gritty almond-scented oil on my skin and worked her hands in small rhythmic circles to distribute the scrub.

  When the scrub was finished, Sveta pointed me toward the Swedish shower, where I was pelted by three columns of icy water. I covered my face and let myself be spun around until Sveta took pity on me and turned the water off. She enveloped me in a wall of terry cloth and I shook the water from my eyes.

  "When I worked at The Baths," she said, "we would have done platza next, but no oak leaves here."

  I'd heard of platza—a friend of mine swore by it. But I hadn't yet warmed up to the idea of paying a stranger to beat me with branches. "Do you mean The Baths in New York City?" I asked.

  She nodded. "I lived in Brighton Beach and took D train to the Village. Too expensive," she said, leading me back to the treatment room. "I come back here, more friends."

  She patted the table, now covered with a mylar sheet and a thick padded fabric. I hopped on and she proceeded to anoint me one last time. This was the part that always made me feel like a baked potato. She folded the fabric over me and crimped the edges of the mylar so that I was encased in silver foil from my neck to my toes. All that was missing was a sprig of parsley and a dab of butter.

  "Twenty minutes. You want washcloth for forehead?"

  I passed on the washcloth, but asked her to turn off the cheesy harp music.

  "Is no problem."

  She killed the music and the lights. Just as she was leaving the room, I saw the lights of the reception area and the silhouette of her next client, a tall man who drew a deep breath and wheezed before addressing Sveta in Russian.

  I'd be
smooth as a baby's bottom for my meeting with Bernie, but I wouldn't be relaxed until I was vertical, dressed, and out of there.

  Seven

  Rachel Page looked like a lot of women I'd known in New York—curly chocolate-brown hair, long, like a Portuguese water dog's, overinflated lips, and the semi-Asian look that came from one too many procedures. After cooling my heels for twenty minutes in his waiting room, I was finally admitted into Bernie Mishkin's office. Rachel led me to the inner sanctum, pointed me toward a tufted, faux leather wing chair, and quietly left, backing out of the room and closing the door behind her.

  One wall was filled with sepia and black-and-white pictures of the hotel during its construction. And autographed head shots of celebrities who'd stayed there in the forties and fifties. I walked around the room, seeing who I recognized.

  Mishkin breezed in through a second door to the right of his enormous desk. "Celeste Holm was my favorite. A beautiful woman. And nice. Always treated the staff well. That's how you can tell who's got class."

  I sat down and he automatically offered me a drink. I declined, citing my long drive home after our meeting; he poured himself a tall tumbler of something brown.

  "Rachel takes good care of me," he said, pointing the bottle toward the outer office. "My sister."

  That explained it; I'd had him pegged for the curvy, Hooters-type assistant who couldn't use the computer, couldn't write a letter, but could sharpen his pencil pretty good.

  "She's been looking after me for the last few months, since Fran died. All my life really, ever since we were kids in Brooklyn."

  "Brooklyn, Connecticut?" I asked.

  "There's only one Brooklyn." To Mishkin, there was.

  It had been a long time since anyone had asked me where I went to high school, and even though he had twenty-five years on me, we spent a few minutes going over old Brooklyn landmarks.