disreputable, but then so did my girl. She was wearing skintight jeans and a bright green sweater a size too small for her with no bra under it. And she’d done something moderately sluttish to her hair, and she was wearing dark lipstick and several pounds of eye shadow. She looked remarkably tawdry.
The clerk looked her over while I registered us as Mr. and Mrs. Ben G. Roper of Kansas City, which might have made more sense had my luggage been monogrammed. I gave him back the registration card along with a pair of ten-dollar bills, and while he was finding my change Ellie slid an envelope onto the counter. The clerk gave me $6.44 or thereabouts, then spotted the envelope with Brill’s name printed on it and blinked. “Where’d this come from?” he wondered.
I shrugged and Ellie said she thought it was there all along. The clerk didn’t seem terribly interested in this or much of anything else. He stuck it in a pigeonhole numbered 305.
Our own key was numbered 507. I grabbed my bag—there was no bellhop at the Cumberland—and Ellie walked with me to the elevator, her behind swaying professionally to and fro. The old man in the elevator cage chewed his cigar and took us up to the fifth floor without a word, then left us to let ourselves into our room.
It wasn’t much of a room. The bed, which took up most of it, looked as though it had had hard use. Ellie sat lightly on the edge of it, removed make-up, did something to her hair to make it as it had been originally.
“A lot of trouble for nothing,” she said.
“You enjoyed the masquerade.”
“I suppose so. I still look like a tramp in this sweater.”
“You certainly look like a mammal, I’ll say that much.”
She glowered at me. I checked my wig and cap in the bathroom mirror. They hadn’t made much of an impression on Mrs. Hesch, who never even noticed that my hair had changed color.
“Let’s go,” I said, then did a Groucho Marx thing with my eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to make a couple of dollars, girlie.”
“Here? Ugh.”
“A bed is a bed is a bed.”
“This one’s no bed of roses. Do people actually have sex in rooms like this?”
“That’s all they do. You don’t think anyone would sleep here, do you?”
She wrinkled her nose and we left, taking our suitcase with us. A call from Childs had established that Wesley Brill was out, and a knock on his door established that he hadn’t come back yet. I could have picked his lock in a couple of seconds but it turned out that I didn’t have to, because I stuck our room key in on a hunch and oddly enough it worked. Quite often the rooms on a particular line will respond to the same key—305 and 405 and 505, for instance—but now and then in older hotels the locks loosen up with age and a surprising number of keys turn out to be interchangeable.
Brill’s room was nicer than the ones they used for the hot sheets trade. It still wasn’t much but at least there was a piece of carpet covering some of the floor and the furniture was only on its penultimate legs. I put my suitcase on a chair, rummaged idly through Brill’s closet and dresser, then took my suitcase off the chair, put it on the floor, and sat on the chair myself. There was another chair with arms, and Ellie had already taken it.
“Well,” she said, “here we are.”
“Here we are indeed.”
“I wonder when he’s coming back.”
“Sooner or later.”
“Good thinking. I don’t suppose you thought to bring along a deck of cards?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Well, I never thought of playing cards as proper equipment for a burglar.”
“You always worked alone.”
“Uh-huh. You’d think he’d have a deck of cards here. You’d think anyone who spent a lot of time in this room would play a lot of solitaire.”
“And cheat.”
“Most likely. I’d pace the floor if there was room. I find myself remembering bad stand-up comics. ‘The room was so small…’ ”
“How small was it, Johnny?”
“The room was so small you had to go out in the hall to close the door.”
“That small, eh?”
“The room was so small the mice were hunchbacked. I have to admit I’ve never understood that line. Why would mice be hunchbacked in a small room?”
“I think you’ve got an overly literal mind.”
“I probably do.”
She smiled. “You’re nice, though. Just the same, literal mind