Plus-One (Windrose Chronicles) Page 2

  Behind his thick spectacle-lenses Antryg’s eyes widened. Joanna said, “No. But we knew he wasn’t part of the martial arts group…”

  “Do you know him?” Antryg asked.

  Ms. Bannister looked aside. Asking herself how to answer that question.

  Then she took a deep breath, and with the air of a swimmer plunging into a pool she knows is freezing cold, said, “Since 1982 I’ve seen him maybe two dozen times. Always in crowds at banquets and buffets. He’ll come, he’ll eat, he won’t speak to anyone and when I try to get near him he just… disappears. He’ll slip away into the crowd and when I look for him he isn’t in the room. After the first three or four times – after I realized it was the same man – I’d ask people, and nobody ever remembers even seeing him. It’s why I… It’s why I’m troubling you about it this morning.” Her worried brown gaze traveled from Joanna’s eyes to Antryg’s.

  “You’re the only people I’ve ever seen at one of these events who seems to be able to see him.”

  Antryg tilted his head a little to one side. “What does he look like?”

  “You’ve seen him. He’s a little shorter than yourself. Overweight. He always wears that same gray suit and light-blue tie, black shoes…”

  “What does his face look like?”

  She was silent again, for longer, this time. Antryg watched her. For someone who was almost a non-stop talker, reflected Joanna, the man had a surprising gift for silence. For an unsurpriseable calm that wouldn’t react to any statement, no matter how absurd or horrific or emotional.

  Ms. Bannister finally said, “I don’t think he has one.”

  Antryg said, quietly, “No. He probably doesn’t.”

  All the professional poise was gone, though she was still a woman who’d know the right thing to say if you’d hit her with a brick. But suddenly there was something in her of a small girl speaking to her grandmother: “Is it a haunt?”

  “Not in the sense that you mean. It isn’t a ghost – that is, it isn’t the spirit of a dead person. It’s quite alive. It’s a haunt in that it’s attached itself to this place. It’s what’s called a Plus-One.”

  Joanna noticed he didn’t specify who called such things a Plus-One, nor, she observed, did Ms. Bannister ask.

  “Some people call them Burglars but that isn’t really fair, since the only thing they take is food, and they generally go to great lengths to stay out of everyone’s way. They cause people to see them as their viewers expect to see them – that is, as another human or whatever the dominant species of that world is—”

  “You mean it’s from outer space?” She didn’t look like she believed that, but Antryg went blithely on:

  “Sometimes they are. Mostly they’re from other universes – other dimensions, I think people say here. They’ll stay close to wherever they came through the Void, wherever they can find shelter and a steady supply of food, sometimes for decades… for centuries, depending on the species. They’re quite harmless,” he added earnestly. “Unless you back them into a corner, or cause them to feel threatened—”

  “And how was I causing it to feel threatened,” asked Joanna, “minding my own business walking across the parking-lot?”

  Ms. Bannister looked at her sharply. “The back parking-lot?”

  Joanna nodded. Knowing by the sound of her voice that this woman had seen or heard or felt something there, too.

  But their breakfast companion turned back to Antryg, and said, “About eighteen months ago it started killing.”

  Antryg said, “Ah.”

  Joanna said, “Shit.”

  In the momentary silence the tinny hoop-la of mechanical horns and buzzers playing the Marine Corps Hymn signaled that some blue-haired retiree in the casino next door had scored a jackpot. Like every Vegas hotel, the Della Robbia lacked anything resembling a window in any of its public areas, including the coffee-shop: the light here was brighter than the amber glow that suffused the lobby and ballrooms, but the combination of gold-foil and crimson wallpaper, of black leather and pseudo-Renaissance carving on the furniture, was the same, and somehow made the idea of a trans-dimensional abomination hiding out in its banquet-rooms more believable. It was as if, Joanna reflected, the whole hotel was a sort of stage-set, an enclaved universe attached to the real world only by its palatial front doors.

  She remembered the terrible sense of watching malice she’d felt, the scritching whisper on the asphalt that might or might not have been claws.

  “Since Thanksgiving of 1986 there have been eleven unsolved deaths either in this hotel or in its grounds.” Ms. Bannister picked up the coffee-cup the waiter had brought her some minutes ago, tasted it and evidently found it cold. She put it down, her lips pursed tight. “The first one was… brutal, but it didn’t surprise me.”

  Then she was silent again, like one who seeks to explain an alien concept to strangers. “Hotels are… anonymous,” she said at last. “That’s why people come to stay in them.”

  “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Joanna quoted the old saw.

  No windows, no clocks, no accountability.

  An enclaved universe where you could do what you pleased, because it didn’t matter.

  “Pretty much.” Ms. Bannister’s voice was completely neutral. “The management of the Palermo Group – that’s our parent organization – has made it clear that it isn’t our business what our guests do here, and whatever we find in guest-rooms the following morning is to be cleared away without comment. This man – he was the head of a major talent agency in Los Angeles – would bring children here. Generally with their mothers. Or someone who claimed to be their mother.”

  “Ah.”

  And Joanna said again, “Shit.”

  “My boss then – the Entertainment Director – told me that all that would happen if I reported my suspicion would be that neither the child nor the mother nor anyone on the hotel staff would corroborate my story, the Las Vegas police would not investigate, and I’d lose my job.” She raised her eyes to them. “I’m not proud of my acquiescence. When you have two children yourself, you do what you have to do.”

  “That must have been a hard choice,” said Joanna, and the woman shook her head slightly.

  “The worst of it is knowing that even if it’s not him, it’s someone else, in some other Imperial Suite in some other hotel, all over town. And I’m also not proud of how… how pleased I was, when he was found, horribly mutilated, in the Sky Imperial Penthouse… which is on a security floor, by the way. The cameras in the halls showed nothing.”

  “No,” agreed Antryg absently. “No, they wouldn’t.”

  Ms. Bannister regarded him for a moment, her eyebrows drawn slightly together, as if taking in anew the gaudy archaic love-beads, the gray that streaked his mop of mouse-brown curls, the shattered crookedness of his long fingers where they cradled his coffee-cup. She asked quietly, “Who are you? I mean, what are you? Are you paranormal investigators?”

  Joanna said, “More or less,” and kicked Antryg under the table before he could explain about being the Archmage of the Council of Wizards. “It’s a long story.”

  “Who were the others?” asked Antryg. “The other victims. And when did it stop killing people who deserved it?”

  “This past December. How did you—?”

  “I don’t think you’d have come to us,” he said, “if it was just a case of the guilty coming by their desserts.”

  Surprisingly, she grinned, and shook her head again. “I like to think I would have.” Her smile faded. “For one thing, the Las Vegas police have been watching this place for months now and investigating every member of the staff, which isn’t fair – particularly to those who don’t have green cards. And the Palermo Group is conducting investigations of its own, which could be worse if they decide they know who’s doing this and can’t prove it.”

  Joanna said, “Oh, boy.”

  “One of their…” She searched for a term. “…business associates was the seco
nd victim. It happened shortly after he’d ordered Security to deal with a card-counter in the casino, a kid who should have known better than to try a stunt like that. Fortunately both the young man and his girlfriend were still in the hospital the night Mr. Pacinotti fell off the balcony of the Da Vinci Suite. Again, nothing on the security cameras in the hall. That was in May of ’87. The third and fourth victims – there were two of them – were Air Force captains from Nellis, who threw a bachelor-party here for one of their fellow officers. I don’t know what happened at the party, though I know they had a stripper in and I know that unlike a lot of girls, she didn’t come with a ‘boyfriend’ to watch her back. These men were the only two who stayed on another night after the party. One was found in the swimming-pool at four in the morning, the other – mutilated – was at the far edge of the parking-lot. I think the police investigated the girl but she was provably elsewhere.”

  “And possibly in no shape for shoving anyone in a swimming-pool,” said Joanna, a hot prickle of wrath sweeping over her.

  “No.” Ms. Bannister looked down into the depths of her cold coffee. “By the state of the suite’s furniture, I don’t think she would have been.” The young waiter came and re-filled all their cups.

  “I like to think I’d have gone to someone,” the Banquet Director went on after a time, “—if I’d known who I could go to – if for no other reason, because from the start I felt, even though the men who were killed had done terrible things… or I suspected they’d done terrible things… I was afraid…”

  She frowned, searching again for the right words. “It was vigilante justice,” she said at last. “I grew up in Mississippi. People taking the law into their own hands makes me… nervous. And even if you agree with their cause, you never know where that’s going to go next.”

  Antryg warmed his crooked fingers over the steam of his coffee-cup. The Council of Wizards, Joanna knew, had condemned him for precisely that reason: because he had used his considerable powers in a cause which he had considered just, unleashing havoc and death in all directions. But all he said was, “And where did it go next?”

  ***

  Ms. Bannister thought that question over on the way up the private elevator – set apart from the others and operated with a security key – to what Joanna privately thought of as the Conspicuous Consumption Suite. “I’m not sure whether that fifth death counts as a vigilante killing or the… the awful random thing that this has become,” she said, as the glass cylinder ascended past the twelve floors of the open atrium and into the blaze of the morning sky above. “I suppose that depends on how you feel about dogs.

  “The incidents that I think of as vigilante deaths – the first four killings – were all men who had stayed at least one night here in the hotel, immediately prior to their deaths. Mr. Kleb had also stayed here before, several times.”

  The elevator stopped. Joanna, who had resolutely turned her back on the glass walls and the endless vista of desert scrubland, new housing-developments, and, away to the north, the raw gray rampart of hotels and casinos that made up the Strip, stepped quickly back into what she thought of as terra firma, even though it was twenty stories above the parking-lots and pools. Antryg stared out, fascinated, his hands pressed against the thick plexiglass that even now was beginning to heat; then looked down at the glittering glass roof of that twelve-story atrium, far below.

  An airplane floated by, silent as a kite. Away to the south, Highway 15 disappeared in a landscape of gray and buff.

  “Mr. Kleb was part of an organization called the Great Basin War-Dogs Association,” Ms. Bannister went on as she led them down the hall. “They call themselves a breeder’s association, but they really come here to fight their dogs. Every Veteran’s Day weekend, half that parking-lot is cordoned off for their tents and motorhomes. The kennel-tents go all the way out into the desert. They bring in a generator and run air-conditioning for the dogs; some of the men go out into the desert with shotguns and semi-autos, and shoot up the ravines.”

  The regimented walls-and-doors décor on the lower floors, though still lush gold-foil-and-crimson, had been upgraded here; the corridor was broader and sported little conversation circles of elaborately carved furniture. Miniature groves of ficus and schefflera stood beneath domed skylights like enormous jewels. White marble fountains gurgled softly, eerie in the emptiness of the hallways. Around a corner of artfully manufactured architecture, a gilded door reminiscent of an Italian cathedral was graced by a small sign: Sky Imperial Suite.

  “I don’t know what these men do in their personal lives besides torment animals, but a couple of years ago, one of Kleb’s dogs lost the will to fight for some reason, and Kleb just took it out to the desert and left it. Is that justification for killing a man, the way rape would be, or what the Security staff did to that poor card-counter and his girlfriend?” She stepped back as she opened the door, to let them pass before her into the suite.

  “It sounds like a halfway point,” remarked Joanna. “Sort of a maybe-maybe-not. Jesus Christ,” she added, looking around her as her feet sank into the thick, white, pristine carpeting of the suite’s vestibule. “How much do you get a night for this place? You could bring a telescope up here and do night-sky astronomy.”

  “Three thousand dollars a night.” Ms. Bannister gave a crooked smile. “And astronomy is probably the last thing that’s on their minds when they come here.”

  A good three-quarters of the suite – the enormous master bedroom, the sitting area, and the black-and-gold tiled hot tub – were roofed over with glass. I bet two thousand of that three thousand a night goes for air conditioning. The view was stunning, the town itself like a virulent cancer within the gray-brown waste of the desert, the cocoa-colored rim of the Spring Mountains, of the canyons to the north, the blue jewel of Lake Meade to the east. By night it must have been jawdropping. The kitchen was larger than some apartments Joanna had lived in. A projection-screen TV filled the wall opposite the foot of the gold-curtained bed; another one occupied significant real estate in the sitting area. Oil paintings “in the Renaissance style” bedecked the walls.

  Three gilded slot machines – their sides sculpted in foliage and putti – occupied an architectural niche. Antryg promptly put a quarter in each and just as promptly lost his 75¢.

  “You thought something else was going to happen?” inquired Joanna.

  “The soul of man perishes without hope,” Antryg explained.

  Joanna rolled her eyes.

  “Where was he found?”

  “In the sitting area,” said Ms. Bannister. “He was in his pajamas. The police report said he was probably killed around three in the morning. His bed had been slept in, they said – I didn’t come up here until the next day, and by that time they’d already stripped out the carpet and some of the furniture.” She stayed by the door, watching as Antryg moved around the walls, his crooked fingers spread wide as he passed his hands an inch or so from the lurid wallpaper. In a quieter voice she went on, “They said it almost looked like a shark attack. That was the first story,” she added. “The Palermo Group must have paid off the coroner’s department, and I know they have their own clean-up agency…”

  Antryg moved across the floor on his knees, stopping now and then to run his hands along just above the rug; then he sat back, produced a loop of string from his pocket, and made a cat’s cradle, carefully observing the center of the web as he changed its pattern with the movement of his fingers.

  “What did they tell the newspapers?” asked Joanna.

  “Heart-attack. That’s what was on the death-certificate.” She added, as Antryg uncoiled his tall height and ambled into the bedroom, “Do you need to check in the hall? Though they played the camera tapes a hundred times, and can’t find any way they could have been tampered with.”

  “Are these suites soundproofed?” Joanna looked around her, wondering if the “mothers” of those would-be child actors watched TV here in the sitting area while the children
were with Mr. Big-Shot Agent in the bedroom. Or did he send them out into the hall with a magazine?

  “Absolutely. You could shoot off a cannon in here and the people in the Sky Celestial Suite wouldn’t hear a thing.”

  Antryg appeared in the bedroom door, a frown between his brows. “A fighting-dog lost its will to fight?”

  Delia Bannister nodded. “That’s what Mr. Kleb said. Troy Durango – the sous-chef at the Palazzo Borgia—” She named the penthouse restaurant that shared the hotel’s top floor with the two luxe suites, “—found the dog when he was hiking in the desert; the poor thing had been torn almost to pieces by coyotes. He brought it back and got it to a vet, and I phoned Mr. Kleb. That’s when Kleb told me he’d turned the dog loose himself. The damn dog got religion, is what he said. He won’t fight, so he’s no damn use to me.”

  Antryg leaned one shoulder on the door-jamb, arms folded and head cocked a little to the side. “Was this the November before last?” he asked. “Just before the first murder?”

  She looked startled at the question, but said, “Yes. Then Kleb was found dead in his room, from what looked like a fall against the corner of a dresser, the next time he stayed here at the hotel.”

  Antryg was silent for a few minutes, thinking about that. Then he asked, “Can we see the dog?”

  ***

  Troy Durango – sous-chef for the Palazzo Borgia – lived in a shabby single-wide on unincorporated – and “unimproved” – property out in the desert, about ten minutes’ drive from the Della Robbia. Ms. Bannister phoned ahead, so Durango was waiting by the gate in the low chain-link fence that surrounded his dusty acre of bull-thorns, aloe, tomato-plants and scrubby grass when Joanna turned her blue Mustang off Walker Road. He held out his hand as they got out of the car, a sandy, quiet man whose arms were a scratch-pad of crude tattoos: “Ms. Sheraton; Mr. Windrose. Ms. Bannister said you-all wanted to have a look at Ravage. Can I get you a Coke?”