that room, to strum it softly and go over the melodies I used to love.
How many people know what a lute is, or what it sounds like? Maybe they've seen lutes in Renaissance paintings, and don't even know such things exist just now. I didn't care. I liked to play it so much in the Amistad Suite, I didn't care if the room service waiters heard or saw me. I liked that very much, the way I liked playing the black piano in the suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I don't think I ever played a note in my own apartment. Don't know why. I'd stare at the lute and think of Christmas angels with lutes on richly colored Christmas cards. I'd think of angels hanging from the branches of Christmas trees.
Angel of God, my guardian dear ...
One time, Hell, maybe just two months back at the Mission Inn, I'd made a melody to that old prayer, very Renaissance, very haunting. Only I was the only one who was haunted.
So now I had to think of a disguise to fool people who had actually seen me many more times than once, and The Boss said this had to be done now. After all, the girl might get him to marry her tomorrow. The Mission did have that brand of charm.
Chapter Three - Mortal Sin and Mortal Mystery
IKEPT A GARAGE IN LOSANGELES, SIMILAR TO THEone I kept in New York: four panel trucks, one advertising a plumbing company, another a florist, one painted white with a red light on top of it so that it looked like a special ambulance, and one that was simply a beat-up handyman's set of wheels, with rusted junk in the back. These vehicles were as transparent to the public as Wonder Woman's famous invisible plane. A beat-up sedan attracted more attention. And I always drove just a little too fast, with my window rolled down and my bare arm showing, and nobody saw me at all. Sometimes I smoked, just enough to reek of it.
I used the florist truck this time. No doubt it was the very best thing, and especially with a hotel in which tourists and guests mingle freely, and wander freely, in and out and at random and nobody ever asks you where you're headed, or whether or not you've got a room key.
What works in all hotels and hospitals is a resolute attitude, a steady momentum. It would certainly work at the Mission Inn.
No one sees a dark shaggy-headed man with a florist logo stitched to his green shirt pocket, with a soiled canvas bag over one shoulder, carrying only a modest bouquet of lilies in a foil-wrapped earthen pot, and no one cares that he goes in with a quick nod to the doormen, if they even bother to look up. Add to the wig a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that completely distorted the habitual expression on my face. The bite plate between my teeth would give me the perfect lisp.
The garden gloves I wore hid the plastic gloves that were more important. The canvas sack over my shoulder smelled like peat moss. I held the pot of lilies as if it might break. I walked with a weak left knee and a regular swing to my head, something somebody might remember when they didn't remember anything else. I put out a cigarette in a flowerbed on the main path. Someone might make note of that.
I had two syringes for the job, but only one was needed. There was a small gun strapped to my ankle under my trouser, though I dreaded the thought of having to use it, and for what it was worth, I had, in the lapel of my starched company shirt, a long thin blade of plastic, stiff and sharp enough to cut a man's throat, or both his eyes.
The plastic was the weapon I could use most easily when I encountered difficulty, but I never had. I dreaded the blood. I also dreaded the cruelty of it. I detested cruelty in any form whatsoever. I liked things to be perfect. In the files, they call me the Perfectionist, the Invisible Man, and the Thief in the Night.
I counted entirely on the syringe to do this job, obviously, because the heart attack was the desired effect.
It was an over-the-counter syringe of the kind used by diabetics, with a micro needle that some men couldn't even feel. And the poison had a huge fast-acting