In the last two hours I’d been bloodied, slimed, pelted with crushed beer cans, preached at, and mistaken for a bag of garbage.
“Do you go through this often?” I asked, once the cars had taken off and we climbed out of our bags.
“Almost every day. The lawn-and-leaf-bag trick saved my life once.” Maybe twice, I thought, folding the bag and giving it back to him. I couldn’t be entirely sure about whose voices I’d heard but they hadn’t sounded happy and wouldn’t have appreciated being interrupted.
“Any idea what kind of cars they were?”
“Too far to tell. But one was a smallish SUV, not a regular sedan.”
That wasn’t much help. Even Lucy’s rental car was a smallish SUV. We walked the rest of the way to the hotel, passing the spot where the cars had been stopped. I looked around for a due.
“What are you looking for?” Sam asked. I didn’t know myself; It was as if I expected whoever it was to have left a calling card. But there were no convenient cigarette butts, candy wrappers, or vodka bottles, just some dusty tire tracks and a jumble of footprints.
“Just curious,” I said. “You see anything?”
“Not much,” Sam said. “I can tell you that one of them was a big man, size fourteen or fifteen shoes and probably pretty damn heavy.” I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. “I worked in a shoe factory, remember?”
Our plan was this: I’d enter the hotel through the main lobby, trying to keep a low profile until I got to my room. Sam would sneak in through the loading dock and take the freight elevator up to my room, where, hopefully, Lucy would be waiting for us. Then we’d try to reach Betty Smallwood for legal advice.
“You’re not going to take off on me, are you? Look at me,” I said, holding on to his arm. “I’ve gone through a lot to find you. Claude and Billy need you.” He shook his head and I believed him.
We split up at the beginning of the long driveway into Titans. I kept close to the parked cars and in seconds, Sam had disappeared behind a hedge of green-and-white euonymus-clearly he’d done this before.
The valet parking attendant was asleep so I didn’t have any trouble getting by him and through the revolving doors unnoticed. Unfortunately, Taylor, the friendly but perpetually confused desk clerk, was still on duty.
“Ms. Cavanaugh, gosh, are you all right?” I motioned for him to keep his voice down, but he was a teenage boy and that made my suggestion ludicrous. “Can I call a doctor for you?”
That got me more unwanted attention. One gentleman initially got up, ostensibly to offer his services, then demurred when he saw how bad I looked-visions of a malpractice suit, no doubt. I went to the front desk to shut up the well-meaning clerk.
“I’m fine.” Now that he’d blown my hopes of sneaking into the hotel unnoticed, I decided to ask him for a favor. “Taylor, do you have a locker here?” He nodded. “What’s in it?”
“A T-shirt, a sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers. Old stuff, nothing nice,” he said, still confused.
“Good.” I looked through my handbag and pulled out my wallet. “I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you send someone to my room with your clothes in five minutes.”
“I could call Amanda. She’s coming back later, so she could bring you something to wear.”
“I need men’s clothing.”
“Oh, sure, I get it,” he said knowingly. “We have a few other customers who like to do that, too. There’s one guy, you should see him, wig and everything.”
“A hundred dollars and you’ll eventually get them back,” I said, handing him the cash.