Mystery Read Free Page B

the Fauborg’s final night.
    “Hotel swan song,” he said. “Hers, too. Oh, man … so maybe she was staying there and I’ll get a name from the register.”
    “Good luck but doubtful, no one was working the desk and the place looked cleaned out.”
    “Someone’ll have a record.” He scratched the side of his nose. Sweat stained the table where his paw had rested. “This is weird, Alex.”
    “All the cases we’ve worked, maybe it was due.”
    “Anything else you want to tell me?”
    “There was a guy out in front with a Secret Service thing going on—black suit, white shirt, black tie, two-way radio, what looked like a gun bulge. Robin and I assumed it was for her benefit because no one else in the bar looked like they needed protection.”
    “Why’d you figure she did?”
    “We didn’t, she was just the most likely candidate. It’s not that she projected vulnerability—maybe she did. She also looked like someone who should be famous but neither of us could place her. She kept checking her watch but when we left no one had showed up. And Mr. Black Suit was gone so maybe his gig had nothing to do with her.”
    He pulled out his pad. “What’d this guy look like?”
    I told him and he scrawled. “The waiter might know if anyone showed up. He was paying pretty close attention to her. Some temp named Neil. She vamped for him and he bought it pretty hard.”
    “When was closing time?”
    “I don’t know. You’re wondering if they were both there till the end and he tried to pick her up and something went bad?”
    “Her clothes and the watch say she was way out of his league but some guys don’t convince easily. Give me a detailed physical on this amateur.”

 
    ead people don’t answer questions. Sometimes the same goes for dead businesses.
    Milo’s attempts to get info from the former owners of the Fauborg Hotel proved fruitless. Marcel Jabotinsky’s heirs had relocated to Zurich and New York and London and Boulder, Colorado. The hotel had been unoccupied for two months with most of the fixtures sold at auction and the records dumped. No one knew a thing about the temporary staff who’d worked the bar’s final night.
    A niece in Colorado thought the evening had been coordinated by her cousin in Scarsdale. That woman denied any involvement but believed that an uncle in Switzerland had hired an event-planning outfit.
    “Waste of money far as I’m concerned, but Hermann’s senile and sentimental.”
    Hermann didn’t answer his phone. Cold calls to local event coordinators pulled up nothing.
    I said, “Neil said he got the gig through a temp agency.”
    Plenty of those on the Westside. Brite-Quick, the twelfth company Milo reached, admitted supplying two people to the Fauborg at the request of Madame Estelle Jabotinsky of Park Avenue.
    “She sounded pretty old,” said the owner. “If I’m remembering correctly, the deal was to honor the guy who built the place or something. But she didn’t want to spend anything and all she’d go for was two people.”
    “Could I have those two names, please?”
    “They in trouble?”
    “Not at all.”
    “Let me emphasize,” said the owner. “We background-check, they had to come up clean.”
    “That’s great. The names?”
    Sherree Desmond, 43, bartender, address in Mount Washington.
    Nelson Neil Mutter, 22, waiter, Gower Street, Hollywood.
    No criminal history for either. Sherree wasn’t fond of paying parking tickets. Nelson who preferred Neil had just applied for a temporary license, requesting reciprocity from DMV Nebraska.
    Nebraska said Mutter had been driving since the age of sixteen, maintained a clean record.
    “Careful driver,” said Milo. “Given the state of her face, that doesn’t mean much.”
    We drove to Mutter’s address on Gower. The building took up a third of the block, rising five off-white stories and shading its neighbors. Newish construction but already shabby, with rain streaks smirching the windowsills and