The Good Thief's Guide to Vegas (8 page)

ELEVEN

Up on Floor 40, with Victoria dressed in jogging trousers, a sweater and training shoes, and with me gripping a wire coat hanger behind my back, we emerged from the service stairs and crept along the corridor towards Masters’ hotel suite.

I’d acquired the coat hanger from Victoria’s luggage. The hangers in the hotel closet were no good. They were wooden and fixed to the rail, and I needed something that could bend. I suppose I could have suggested using the under-wire from one of Victoria’s bras but I somehow doubted she’d be likely to dignify that particular request.

I would have felt a lot more comfortable if Victoria had been walking alongside me, but she’d taken to following from behind on tiptoes, as if she was in rehearsals for the role of Burglar #2 in a light-hearted play. By the time we reached the door of Suite H, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that she was wearing a black eye-mask.

‘Why don’t you go ahead and check around the corner,’ I said.

‘What do I do if I see someone coming?’

‘You could tell me. That’d be dandy.’

‘But how do I tell you without making it obvious that I’m warning you not to break in?’

‘Obvious doesn’t matter. The warning is the key part. Go ahead. See if the coast is clear.’

As Victoria tippytoed to the end of the corridor, I began to unwind the coat hanger and straighten it out as best I could without breaking it. Once I was satisfied with my handiwork, the wire formed a shape like a capital ‘L’, only with a hook at the top.

‘What’s that?’

‘Christ.’ I reached for my heart. Victoria was standing right next to me. ‘You almost gave me a stroke.’

‘Oops,’ she said. ‘But what have you done to my coat hanger?’

‘I’m going to use it to open this door.’

‘Why not use one of your picks?’

‘This is quicker.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do.’ I peered over Victoria’s shoulder. ‘I take it we’re clear.’

‘I couldn’t see anyone coming.’

‘Right-ho.’ I crouched down towards the base of the door and fed the hook of the coat hanger underneath.

‘Shouldn’t we knock first?’

‘Ssshh.’

‘I’m just saying, in your books you always have Faulks knock on a door before he breaks in.’

I took a breath. ‘We don’t want to knock if Masters is inside. And keep your voice down, will you?’

I focused my attention on the hook, feeding it under the door with all the care and precision of a medic performing keyhole surgery. Of course, that would be a really cracking analogy, if only the door had a keyhole in the first place. But, as I’ve already mentioned, the hotel employed a card entry system, which was why I’d resorted to such a makeshift approach.

Using a coat hanger was damn frustrating. The idea was to hook the door handle from the inside, then tug down on the wire, thus turning the handle and opening the door. Problem was, the procedure was fiddly at the best of times, and it was only made harder with two of my fingers out of commission. Oh, and I had to try not to make too much noise for fear of alerting anyone who happened to be inside the suite. Already, I was becoming annoyed, and that was making me reckless. The wire was scratching around far more than I would have liked.

‘You’re making a bit of a racket,’ Victoria told me.

I scowled up at her from where I was lying with my back on the floor.

‘Just trying to help,’ she said.

I gritted my teeth and did my best to visualise where the hook had ended up.

Victoria pressed her ear against the door, saying, ‘You’re close.’

‘Higher or lower?’

‘Higher, I think.’

‘There?’

‘No, lower.’

‘There?’

‘Lower still.’

Christ, this was beginning to sound all too familiar.

‘How about there?’

I heard a clink of metal and saw the door handle flicker. Holding my tongue between my teeth, I very steadily pulled down on the wire. The handle turned, and turned and . . . the door popped open just as the hook slipped free and scratched loudly down the reverse of the door.

I pushed the door inwards and rolled in out of the corridor. Victoria followed me and closed the door behind us.

‘Phew,’ she whispered.

‘Indeed.’

‘It’s dark in here.’

‘We’ll come to that.’

I set my trusty coat hanger down on the kitchen counter and reached inside my pocket, removing a pair of plastic gloves. I held the gloves out to Victoria and returned to my pocket for my doctored gloves.

‘Do I have to?’ she asked.

‘This is a crime scene, Vic.’

‘It’s a hotel room.’

‘Just put them on.’

‘I don’t know, Charlie. It makes me feel odd.’

‘And breaking in didn’t?’

‘
You
broke in.’

‘Oh, I see. Like that, is it?’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘Put the damn gloves on.’

Victoria held off for a moment longer, then sighed and slipped her fingers inside the sheer plastic. I followed suit. It took me a little more time than I might have liked, but once I was done, I flexed my healthy fingers before my eyes.

‘Looks like Masters has been here already,’ I said.

‘Really? How can you tell?’

I pointed towards the wall behind the door. ‘When I was here earlier, there was a key card in the plastic slot and the lights were on.’

‘Oh.’

‘No key card now.’

‘So I gathered. Do you have a torch?’

‘I have a penlight. But I can do a lot better than that.’

Stepping through the kitchen, I stumbled down the steps that led into the sunken lounge. I was halfway towards the large picture windows and the sodium glare beyond when I sensed that Victoria hadn’t followed me.

‘What are you waiting for?’ I hissed.

‘I’d rather stay here for now, if that’s okay.’

I grumbled to myself and marched on into the bedroom. The thick curtains hadn’t been drawn but it was dim inside all the same, and the bathroom door was in darkness. In the movie soundtrack in my head, an ominous note sounded, as though warning me not to approach the door. Unlike the teen starlets of most horror movies, I didn’t need the reminder. I was a long way from ecstatic to be in the vicinity of the bathroom again, and I’d be happy to leave it behind just as soon as I could.

With that thought at the very front of my mind, I threw back the closet doors and crouched down to the room safe. I withdrew my penlight from my jacket and, in the startling glare of the beam, I punched in the code I’d been so proud of – 50-50 – and the word
OPEN
scrolled across the electronic screen. Masters’ wallet was just where I’d left it, and so was his key card. I stuffed his wallet inside my pocket and hurried back through the suite to slip the card into the receptacle on the wall, bathing the place in light.

‘Wow, impressive,’ Victoria said.

‘Thanks.’

‘I was talking about the suite.’ She shoved past me and approached the black leather couch, running her gloved hands over its surface. ‘This place is huge.’

‘I’ve seen bigger.’

‘What, in this hotel?’

I slapped my forehead with my palm. ‘Just how many rooms do you think I’ve broken into?’

Victoria moved across to the window and took in the distant mountain view. She shivered.

‘Do you really think Josh has been back here?’ she asked.

‘Seems that way. If he came up here the moment he vanished, he would have had a head start. And if he was planning to go on the run, he might have wanted to grab some of his stuff. More importantly, he didn’t know I’d taken the chips from the safe. It’s a lot of money to leave behind.’

She turned and scanned the room. ‘Have you noticed anything missing? It’s so tidy in here. Unless it was very different earlier on, it doesn’t look like he had too many personal effects.’

‘It doesn’t look any different.’

She gave me a dubious look. ‘There’s not much to search.’

‘Still worth checking.’

‘And how do you suggest we go about it?’

‘There’s no particular technique, Vic. Just be orderly. We don’t want the place to look like it’s been ransacked.’

‘Gotcha. But how do I know what’s important?’

‘You’ll just know.’

She kicked at her heel and clenched her hands. ‘Can I search in here?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’m just a bit uncomfortable about being near the bathroom.’

‘I’ll handle it.’

‘And you don’t think anyone will turn up?’

‘Hope not.’

‘What do we do if somebody does?’

I tried not to sound too irritable as I said, ‘I wouldn’t recommend going out through the window. We are forty floors up.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Me too. It’d be one hell of a drop.’

‘Charlie.’

‘Just focus on the search,’ I told her. ‘If you start worrying about anything else, you’ll freak yourself out.’

‘I’m already freaked out. I’m no good at this sort of thing.’

‘It’s your first time, Vic. Cut yourself some slack. I was a complete wreck on my first break-in.’

‘I’m hardly planning on making a career out of it.’

‘Funny. I used to say the same thing myself.’

I left her to gawp at that one, and duped myself into returning to the bedroom. The bathroom door was still closed and the closet doors and the safe were still open, just as I’d left them. Victoria was right – other than his neatly arranged clothes, Masters really didn’t have many possessions. It made me wonder if he had a more permanent home elsewhere in the city, and whether his suite was simply a base between shows. It was certainly something to bear in mind.

I began with the closet, searching to the back of every drawer and beneath every T-shirt, sock and pair of underpants. I felt inside the pockets of the trousers and leather jackets hanging from the rail, but all I found was stale air. It was the same with the bedside cabinet nearest to me. The alarm clock, the spiral notepad and pen, the covered water glass and the paperback book hadn’t moved in the slightest, and when I opened the drawer of the cabinet all I found was a red Gideon Bible. The only thing inside the Bible was the Scriptures.

I crawled across the bed and pulled open the drawer of the other bedside cabinet. The first thing I found was a small wooden box containing a man’s antique wristwatch. The watch had a brown leather strap, gold-plated casing and a white analogue face. The glass was worn and scratched, so that it was almost opaque in places, and the gold casing was discoloured with age. The hands weren’t moving. I wound the tiny mechanism and watched the second hand twitch into life. On balance, I doubted that it was worth the kind of money that could get the Fisher Twins off our backs, but it was certainly not to be sniffed at. I checked over my shoulder to be sure that Victoria wasn’t watching, and then I slipped the watch on to my right wrist. It felt a good deal heavier than the cheap digital watch I wore on my left arm, though I believed I could get used to the sensation.

The drawer was also filled with scores of loose business cards. There were cards from television executives, agents and promotion scouts; entertainment lawyers, corporate attorneys and tax advisers; limo drivers, call girls and casino hosts. But if any of the cards were significant, I had no way of telling.

Beneath the cards I found a small velvet bag filled with sponge balls of the kind that magicians can make appear as if from nowhere. I also found a tube of Superglue, pinched in the middle, and a hobby craft set containing several very fine paintbrushes and a whole spectrum of miniature acrylic paint pots.

I got off the bed and hunted beneath the bed box. Nothing doing. I was just about to get up off my knees and check how Victoria was getting on when I heard the mattress springs compress and found that she’d sat down next to the cabinet with the Bible inside it.

‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘Not so far. You?’

She showed me her gloved hand and began to count off her findings on her fingers and thumb.

‘One hotel stationery set and pen – nothing out of the ordinary. One hotel guest information folder – no markings. One answer machine – no messages. One fax machine and printer – nada. Two decks of Fifty-Fifty casino cards – all cards present and correct. One deck of MGM Grand Casino cards – ditto.’

‘You counted all of the playing cards?’

‘I was being thorough.’

‘No kidding. Go on.’

She drew an audible breath. ‘The kitchen cupboards and drawers contain the usual crockery and cutlery. The fridge is stocked just like the mini-bar in our rooms and everything matches the contents card, except that he has six bottles of Mountain Dew and all of the bottle caps are missing.’

‘Aha,’ I said, and tossed the hobby craft set onto the bedcovers. ‘I think it’s safe to assume that Ricks was right and Josh really did make that dummy chip-holder.’

Victoria reached for the craft set. She opened the cardboard flap at one end and eased out the plastic tray containing the paints and brushes.

‘There are a couple of pots missing,’ she told me.

‘Purple and lilac, by any chance?’

‘There’s no purple or lilac here.’ She put the craft set back together again and resealed the box. ‘Did you find anything else?’

‘Nothing of use.’

‘Terrific.’

Victoria transferred her attention to the bedside cabinet and picked up the paperback book beside the water glass. Now that I gave the book my attention, I could see that it was a biography of Harry Houdini. The jacket featured a bold image of a young Houdini wearing a hospital straitjacket, suspended upside down from a high crane, with the upturned faces of a huge crowd focused upon him. His name blazed out from above his feet in a stylised yellow font, like an old vaudeville show poster. Victoria turned the book in her hands and read the flap copy.

‘There is another room we could check,’ she said, trying to act casual.

I glanced towards the bathroom door and a shudder ran through me.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘It didn’t sound to me as though you spent very long in there.’

‘I guess I was a little distracted by the corpse doing breaststroke in the Jacuzzi tub.’