Other People's Baggage (6 page)

MIDNIGHT ICE: TWELVE

  

Jack Jordan walked past the front desk while I remained in the hotel lobby. Kitty glanced up at him but didn't seem to recognize him. It was a piece of the puzzle now falling into place. Kitty belonged behind that desk as much as I might have. She was part of the problem, not part of my solution. Jack must have known that all along.

I caught my reflection in the glass of a poster hanging on the wall. Undercover was an understatement. I pulled the cowboy hat off, only to expose matted hair that lacked its usual fluffy volume. Instead of running my fingers through it like instinct told me to do, I set the hat back on my head and tipped it forward to shield my eyes.

I walked past the front desk to the elevators, stopping for a second by marble table in the hallway. I picked up the squat ugly lamp and pulled the brown rubber electrical cord from the outlet. I wound the cord around my left wrist and pressed the call button, silently urging the elevator to get me out of there before anybody noticed what I'd done.

The elevator seemed to take an unbelievably long time to finally arrive, though it couldn't have been more than a minute.

The doors slid open and I got inside and jabbed the door close button repeatedly. I did not want company on this ride.

Just as the doors were about to slide closed, a hand fed between them, triggering the sensors. NO! The doors slowly retracted and my worst fear came true.

Brad stood in front of me.

I fumbled with the buttons on the control panel with my free hand as though I were searching for the one that would open the doors, all the while staring down, refusing to make eye contact. I accidentally hit the alarm button, sending a caustic ring through the shaft of the elevator well. The elevator didn't move. Brad stared at the lamp in my hands.

“Is that from the hotel?” he asked.

I looked at the lamp and nodded, the cowboy hat shielding most of my face.

“Most people take a bathrobe.” He leaned into the elevator and pushed the alarm button, cancelling the siren. He looked at the squat ugly lamp again. “Southwest design…I guess some people like it.”

There were so many things I hadn't said to Brad at the top of that ski slope. I stared at the object, for fear if I looked at him I would say something I'd regret. Then Jack Jordan, my savior Jack Jordan, appeared like an angel in the hallway. He stepped into the elevator between me and Brad

“Take the next elevator, man,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“The lady and I want to be alone.”

“Sorry, man,” said Brad, backing away from us into the lobby. The doors shut, leaving him on the outside and me on the inside with Jack.

“Was that your guy?”

“Yes.”

He nodded once, then punched the 4 on the panel. “What's with the lamp?”

“What do you think is with the lamp?” I replied.

His face lit up as though it had been plugged into the now empty socket in the hallway.

  

I spent the last day of my vacation in the Carmel By-The-Sea Police Department surrounded by official looking men in black suits, white shirts, and skinny neckties. The only person in the room I recognized was Jack. He'd lied when he said he was head of security for the hotel. In reality, he was an FBI agent on the tail of a ring of jewel thieves.

The men and women behind the jewel smuggling had been working Carmel for months. It was a touristy town, a good place for outsiders to congregate, because everybody was an outsider, literally. They blended in by not blending in. The two men I encountered by the elevator the very first day were the men who anticipated going home with a fourteen carat diamond from the Barbary Coast.

I answered a lot of questions, and asked a few, too. I didn't get satisfactory answers. What I pieced together was the cops—the fake ones—had been planning a bait and switch all along. They knew the diamond was coming in to Carmel and the switch was happening at the hotel. Kitty worked for them, keeping lookout from the front desk. Her role allowed her access to the switchboard, to see what calls were going where. When Jack requested that no calls go through to my room, Kitty connected the dots. They didn't know how I figured into their overall plan, but my presence—and my reliance on the head of security—told them I was a part of it all. Once Kitty tipped them off, it wasn't difficult for them to keep tabs on me.

I asked if Louis and Grey Suit were the buyers, but they didn't tell me. I asked if the fake cops had been arrested and they didn't tell me that, either. I asked who had put the diamond in the lamp, when Jack had put the velvet pouch in my handbag, and if anybody knew how close they'd come to letting a team of decorators walk out of the building with a fourteen carat diamond. I'd worked out a plausible explanation but it was obvious nobody was going to validate my theory.

“Ms. Night, tell us why you refused to cooperate at first,” said Jack.

“Mr. Jordan, with all due respect, nothing I've been told over the past four days made any kind of sense to me. I couldn't trust anybody.”

“So what changed?”

“It wasn't one thing, it was a bunch of things. Those men kept showing up and asking about me. And then you kept showing up and telling me they weren't asking about me, which I wanted to believe, but couldn't. And then the phone calls started, and you told the receptionist to hold calls to my room, but when I called her back, she claimed she hadn't seen you since you returned from your vacation. You have to admit, from my perspective, things were very confusing.”

“When did it click?”

“When I was at the diner, looking out the window at the hotel. I saw the van for the decorators and I realized why Brad was here. As soon as I realized you were telling the truth about him not being a guest at the hotel, I thought about everything else you'd told me. And once I determined everything you told me could be strung together as the truth, I realized everything else I'd been told had been a lie. From everybody. So I knew I could trust you and nobody else. Not the cops. Not the operator. Not the men from the elevator.”

“That's a big mental leap to make.”

“It was more than that. Once I started looking around, I saw things that didn't make sense. One of the cops had long hair. I don't think police officers are allowed to wear their hair long. Their uniforms were wrong. I'd overheard Kitty talking to one of them, and realized she hadn't addressed him like she would a police officer, so she must have been involved.”

“Not much gets past you, does it?” he said. I detected a complimentary tone but I couldn't be sure.

“What do you mean?”

“Most people don't see that much of the world when they're on vacation.”

“It's a compulsion. It's what I do.”

“How's that?”

“I'm a decorator. I look at a room and I see what fits and what doesn't. I take away the problem and I'm left with the beginning of a solution.”

“Is that how you figured out about the lamp?”

“I've hated that lamp since I first arrived. I saw it while waiting for the elevator after checking in. It's so out of place with the rest of the hotel. It didn't work, either. And once I realized the thing in the black pouch was a light bulb, I knew where to find the diamond. The lamp by the elevator was the perfect spot. Who looks at a lamp in a hotel? Nobody.”

“You did.”

“I already told you what I do.” I stared at him for a couple of seconds, wondering if he expected me to continue or if he would keep pointing out that my brain didn't work like other people's brains.

“It didn't make sense the decorators would leave the lamp. Especially Brad. He hates southwest design. This would have been the first thing he replaced. Someone must have told him to leave it.”

Jack checked some notes he'd made on a white lined tablet. Creases on his forehead deepened as he flipped back a couple of sheets, holding a black and gold ballpoint pen in one hand, touching different places on the paper as he scanned the contents. Four sheets back he tapped the paper a couple of times, looked at me, then looked back at the paper.

“You know this Brad guy pretty well, don't you?”

“I thought I did. Why?”

“I can't share anything from his statement with you.”

“Meaning what? Did he say something about me? Did he recognize me?” I asked, leaning forward.

Jack didn't speak. Instead, his silence fell onto my questions. The longer they hung in the air, the more I regretted asking them.

“Never mind. I don't want to know—”I started.

Jack reached out and placed his hand on top of mine. “He said coming to this hotel was the second biggest mistake he'd made in his life.”

I looked down at my hands, resting in my lap. “Did you look inside the lamp? Did you find it?”

“We did.”

“And?”

“I can't tell you any more than that.”

I understood.

I finished up with the men in the room and signed a piece of paper agreeing not to talk about what had happened during my vacation. When I was finished, I followed a uniformed officer out front where an attractive man with a light brown ponytail stood by the street. He wore a long sleeved navy and white striped shirt and faded blue jeans that were stained with dirt at the knees. Next to him was a small, green, energy-efficient car.

“Are you Madison Night?”

“I am.”

“I'm Merritt. Jack asked me to give you a ride back to the hotel.”

I looked behind me to the police station where Jack Jordan stood framed out by the white brick archway that surrounded the front door. The keystone over his head looked like a crown. He smiled, nodded, and waved.

“Can you wait here for a second?” I asked Merritt. I walked back to the police station. Jack met me half way.

“Ms. Night, you're a heck of a woman. Forget about Turlington. I bet you'll find someone way better for you.”

“What about you, Mr. Jordan? I seem to remember you had somebody who wouldn't appreciate you spending the night in my hotel room.”

“Yeah, I do.” He put his hand on my upper arm and gently turned me to face the ponytailed man. “That's him.”

And suddenly, the last of the mystery surrounding my vacation in Carmel was solved.

MIDNIGHT ICE: THIRTEEN

  

When it came to Ms. Elliott Lisbon's suitcase, I was at a loss. Most of her belongings had been dirtied or destroyed. Everything, in fact, with the exception of the Dodgers t-shirt. I'd asked the hotel to launder the t-shirt for me. I wasn't sure how to explain the rest of the clothes, and, finally, I figured out a way to not explain them at all.

 

Dear Elliott,

 

I am not in the habit of opening stranger's luggage or using their personal belongings as my own, so it's with more than a little embarrassment I admit to having done just that. I can't explain why I did so, only that I had to, and I'm well aware of how thin that sounds. I'd tell you about the FBI and the investigation, but they told me I can't, so I'll say the only thing I can. I'm sorry. I wish I could return your items in the condition they were in when I first opened your suitcase, but that's no longer an option. Since almost everything you had packed still had tags on it, I'm hoping it can be replaced. I'm also hoping this will cover it.

 

Sincerely,

Madison Night

 

I clipped ten one hundred dollar bills to the side of the paper and tri-folded it, then unfolded it and included another thousand dollars. I had no idea how much Eliot's items had cost her and since I lived in vintage sixties ensembles and dresses scored at flea markets and estate sales, I wasn't the go-to person for quoting the price of a new western ensemble. There had been a reward for my help in the capture of the jewel smugglers, and even though I wouldn't see the money right away, by now I trusted Jack Jordan enough to know it would arrive. Two thousand dollars would probably replace the contents of my entire closet if I didn't count my collection of hats, but somehow, when I considered the violation of Elliott Lisbon's personal belongings, two thousand dollars didn't seem like so much.

I printed the stranger's name in neat architectural drawing-like letters across the front of a crisp ivory envelope I'd bought at the local stationery store. I gently folded the t-shirt and set it in the middle of the suitcase. Before putting the letter into the suitcase I added a postscript:

 

PS: It might be fun to meet face to face sometime, but in the interest of full disclosure, you should know I'm a Phillies fan.

 

I sealed the envelope and set it on top of the t-shirt, then closed the suitcase.

PART 2:

SWITCH BACK

An Elliott Lisbon Mystery Novella

(prequel to
Board Stiff
)

  

by

Kendel Lynn

SWITCH BACK: ONE

  

The wheels of our flight touched down in Waco, Texas at half-past eleven on a very late hot August night. I would've been so much happier had those wheels touched down at Dallas/Fort Worth since that's where we were heading, but after circling most of north Texas for over two hours to avoid a batch of wicked storms, I was happy enough to just get on the ground.

It took another thirty minutes for an airport employee to push the stairs out to the jet and another twenty to herd us into the small terminal. My traveling companion, Mrs. Zibby Archibald, who at eighty-six still looked ducky in her best pink suit and matching hat, sat next to me on the worn pleather bench while we pondered our options.

“Well, that wasn't so bad, dear,” Zibby said. She pulled a tissue from her oversized pocketbook, then snapped it shut on her sleeve. “Though I'd think a flight from South Carolina would be shorter.”

I patted her leg and tried to eavesdrop on the group of pilots in the corner. The place was jammed with cranky, crumpled passengers, none of whom planned on visiting Waco in the middle of the night. Including the pilots of no less than seven jets who'd been diverted over the course of the last six hours to an airport without the personnel to handle any of it. They'd closed at nine that evening and had no plans to bring the crew back until morning.

“Air traffic control isn't even responding to my calls anymore,” one pilot said to another.

“Yeah, same with the base office and the union. I radioed a friend diverted to Abilene. Says DFW's shut down until dawn, no matter what they told us earlier. Book the first hotel you can get because they're going to be scarce.”

Two little boys in the seats across from ours fought over a sticky handheld video game. Their mother snifled and sneezed out a half-hearted warning, which they ignored.

I inched closer to Zibby and lathered on my nineteenth layer of hand-sani in the last four hours. Even though being in the airport made my skin itch, I reminded myself it was one level better on the germ-scale than being on that airplane.

A lone security guard walked past me to the pack of pilots near the gate. He raised his hands and spoke to the crowd. “Ladies and gentleman, due to the weather, flights won't resume until first thing tomorrow morning. Please keep your boarding pass to re-board your flight. The airport will be closing in twenty minutes. After you leave the secure area, you may not return until we reopen at five a.m. Thank you.”

He said all this with the practiced air of a flight attendant instructing passengers to fasten their seatbelt by placing the metal flap into the buckle via posted placard. Clearly this wasn't the first group of flights to land at Waco's gate in the middle of a storm.

After telling the crowd everything it did not want to hear (no, there are no nearby hotels; no, you may not sleep inside the terminal; no, there are no restaurants open this time of night; no, the luggage will not be retrieved as there is no way retrieve it; no, I do not have a manager you can speak with), he calmly walked through the angry throng toward the security gate.

“So glad the rain stopped,” Zibby said. “It would be terrible to get my new hat wet after all this. I bought it just for the Honeysuckle Festival.”

“Agreed,” I replied, but I was much more worried about Zibby than I was her honeysuckle hat. She couldn't sleep on the hard dirty sidewalk in the dark, surrounded by strangers and whatever else slinked through the night. How could they just dump us without our bags, then shoo us into the night like unwanted refugees?

My brain tried working out different departure scenarios as I gathered up my one belonging, a small quilted handbag, and helped Zibby to her feet. We limped our way to the exit with only minimal pushing and shoving. By now most of the crowd was too tired and hungry to put up much of a fight.

Once we hit the fresh air outside, I eyeballed the last two spots on a metal bench at the far end of the sidewalk. I was about to make a dash for them when a woman with big brown hair and a big bouncy bosom approached us.

“Miss Zibby,” she hollered, then wrapped her in an exuberant hug.

“Why, Rita Whitaker,” Zibby replied. “What a pleasant wheel of fortune running into you. Our flight was diverted and that pilot plunked us right where you are.”

“It's why I'm here, sugar,” Rita said. “Gonna take you both into town. I couldn't leave y'all stranded way out here.”

I was so relieved, I wanted to hug her myself. “I'm with Zibby, definitely our good fortune to see you. And you must be from Little Oak?”

“You bet. Lived there my whole life. Own the inn where you're staying, assuming you're Miss Elliott Lisbon with the Ballantyne Foundation. I was almost to DFW to pick y'all up when the storms ripped through the sky like a hurricane in July, so I kept driving. Figured it was either going to be Waco or Abilene, and I'm tickled as a turnip it wasn't Houston.”

She tucked her arm in Zibby's and looked around our feet. “Y'all have any bags?”

“Oh yes,” Zibby said. “I brought three suitcases for clothes and one for shoes, but they won't let them off the plane. Guess we'll just have to follow the wind.”

“We really appreciate the ride,” I said as we walked through the small lot to a very large pickup truck. “I wasn't sure what we'd do for the night. Any idea what they'll do with our luggage?”

“Sure, happens all the time. They'll fly it over in the morning. I'm driving down to DFW first thing to pick up more guests. I'll grab it then.”

We clamored into the enormous cab, after I gave Zibby's behind a nice big shove, and pulled out onto the dark highway, about a hundred fifty miles from our destination.

“Oh Rita, I'm so excited to be back,” Zibby said. She belted herself in with her pocketbook on her lap. Inside the seatbelt. “I've missed my dear Bea. How's her spirit?”

“Not the same since Austin passed,” Rita said. “But she's doing her best. She's so looking forward to your visit. We all are, ready to show off the town.”

“Elli, wait until you see Little Oak. So beautiful. And vibrant! It's the envy of all Dallas.”

“Only take about three hours to get us there,” Rita said. “Might want to take a doze if you can.”

She didn't have to tell me twice. I tilted my head against the passenger window as the black asphalt sped by. I closed my eyes and hoped my travel theory held solid. Sometimes when a trip starts out terrible, you get the bad out of the way and the rest is all rainbows and cupcakes.

Turns out for this trip, there would be no rainbow after the storm. Just more storm.