I looked up and saw Ash.
It was midafternoon, and I was in a phone booth. The booth was in the lobby of the Holiday Inn who’d sent “Raymond Drake” a room confirmation. The Holiday Inn was on the out- skirts of Davenport, Iowa, which is part of the Quad Cities, a half-million-plus metropolitan area straddling the Mississippi River; last time I was here I’d been on the Illinois side, at a Howard Johnson’s in Rock Island, meeting the Broker.
I was calling Ash’s room to see if he was in or not. And if not, planned to go find a maid to bribe, so I could get in the room and poke around. While I was sitting there letting it ring, he walked right by me.
He didn’t see me. He was walking toward the coffee shop, glancing at a newspaper, and he didn’t see me.
I slid out of the wandered over to the check-in desk, and leafed absently through free-take-one brochures detailing fun things to do in the Cities. Ash was hanging his overcoat on a rack just inside the coffee shop. The doors were spread open and I could see him clearly. He took a stool at the counter, ordered from the menu, returned to reading his paper.
Something was different about him. What was it? He was wearing a more expensive-looking suit than he used to, and that fur-trimmed brown leather overcoat alone must’ve cost an arm and a leg, or at least an arm. But that wasn’t it, nor was it the slight gut he’d put on that on anybody but a slender type like him would be nothing.
It was the hair.
His curly red hair. He’d had it straightened. And styled, covering up his little bald spot. Ash had come up in the world, it seemed, and it had gone to his head. Straight to his head.
Having the overcoat with him meant one of two things: either he was on his way out, and stopping off at the coffee shop for something before he left; or he was just getting back from somewhere, and stopping off at the coffee shop for something before going back to his room.
Either way, his room would be empty for a while.
So I went into the coffee shop myself, head lowered, scratching my forehead, keeping my face obscured. I went straight to the coatrack. It was not a busy time of day, and the nearby register was, for the moment, unattended. Ash was drinking coffee, reading the paper; his back was to me.
I pretended to be looking above the coats, where hats were stowed, as if I’d lost something, keeping a low but aboveboard profile as my left hand dug into the right-hand pocket of Ash’s expensive overcoat, from which I took his room key, gave up my search for the imaginary item I’d lost among the hats, and left.
I did glance back, well out into the lobby, but Ash hadn’t noticed me, and neither had any of the coffee shop help, apparently.
I’m not going to waste time describing what Ash’s room looked like. If you’ve never seen a room in a Holiday Inn, you’re either from another planet or lucky. I looked in the closet, found four suits hanging, all of the same well-tailored, costly nature as the one I’d seen him wearing. Also a raincoat, several pair of shoes, several empty suitcases. His shaving gear was in the john. I poked through the bureau drawers, found nothing. Nothing that told me anything special, that is: shirts, shoes, ties, underwear, box of ammo. The ammo was no great surprise. After all, I didn’t figure he was here on vacation.
But then, I didn’t figure he was here to kill anybody, either. He had sent others to do that, in my case; and he was now supposedly in the process of moving into the bloodless end of the killing business, into the role of assigning jobs, not carrying them out. Still, Ash was in the habit of carrying a gun, and why should he be expected to change? The Broker never carried one, but Ash wasn’t the Broker; Ash had come up through the ranks. So the box of ammo was nothing special, probably. I covered it back up with some of his jockey shorts and closed the drawer.
I shook the room down pretty good, considering I didn’t want to leave a mess. Went through the pockets of any piece of clothing that had pockets, got nowhere. Found a note pad by the phone, the top sheet of which had some doodles on, but nothing decipherable. I did find another sheet, crumpled up in the wastebasket by the desk; I unwadded it and for my trouble got “apt 6.” In the John I dug through his shaving bag and found deodorant spray, toothpaste, toothbrush, shave cream, aftershave, an electric razor, and a bunch of other stuff that normally would’ve been unpacked by now. He’d been here overnight, and he wasn’t packing to leave, so why was all this stuff stuffed in the shaving bag? Ash was not exactly compulsively neat, you know.
Under the false bottom I found two spare. 45 barrels, a spare silencer, a can of 3-in-1 oil, cleaning tools, and rag.
A box of ammo was one thing; this was something else again.
When I got back to the coffee shop, Ash was just finishing a plate of something. I dropped his key back in his overcoat pocket, and went out in the lobby. I was looking at the free brochures again, when Ash came out and headed for his room.
I’d had a good two minutes to spare.