“Ray,” the uniformed cop said, “did you happen to read this guy his rights? Because he just admitted to a Class D felony.” Ray gave him another look, and he opened his mouth and closed it.
“It was a piece of jewelry,” I said, and glanced at Isis, who registered this information and nodded thoughtfully. “I subsequently found out that it had been the property of one of the hotel’s permanent residents, and that she didn’t live in the room I’d taken it from. Someone had evidently stolen it from her and put it in the room where I found it.”
“That’s interesting,” Hilliard Moffett said, “if a bit hard to follow. But what does it have to do with two murders and the disappearance of the Fairborn-Landau correspondence?”
“I’ll get to that.”
“Well, I wish you’d speed it up,” he said, a little testily. “And could someone open a window? Between the body heat and the fireplace, it’s getting awfully warm in here.”
I looked at Isis, and she turned to Marty, and he walked over to the window and opened it.
“What I did,” I said, “was put two and two together, which is to say I put 602 and 303 together. The room numbers,” I explained, when I saw some puzzled faces. “Landau was in 602, and someone entered her room and killed her, and made off with the letters from Fairborn. And 303 was the room where Karen Kassenmeier was living, and where I found the stolen jewelry. Of course I didn’t know the jewelry was stolen when I, uh, picked it up, and I didn’t know it was Kassenmeier’s room until I went back to it a second time.”
“You went back to it…”
“To find out whose room it was. I figured there had to be a connection between the theft and homicide on the sixth floor and the missing jewels that turned up three floors below. Anyway, I went there and found a suitcase in the closet with Karen Kassenmeier’s luggage tag on it. I might have found more, but I heard somebody at the door.”
“Kassenmeier?”
“That’s what I assumed,” I said. “I didn’t know her name yet, I hadn’t had time to read the luggage tag, but I assumed the person at the door was the room’s current occupant. It was the middle of the night, so it didn’t figure to be a friend paying a call.”
“It could have been another burglar,” Isis suggested. “Like you.”
“Not like me,” I said, “because this burglar had a key. What I did was hide.”
“In the closet?”
I looked at Alice, whose question it was, and who seemed surprised at having raised it. “Not the closet,” I said. “And a good thing, because I have a feeling they looked in the closet.”
“‘They’?”
I nodded at Isis. “There were two of them,” I said. “A man and a woman. I was in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain, and I didn’t get a look at either of them. I stayed where I was, and they used the bedroom and left.”
“They used the bedroom?” Erica said. “How?”
“Well, not to sleep.”
“They had sex in it,” Carolyn said. “Right, Bern?”
“They did,” I said, “and then they left.”
“Kassenmeier and some guy,” Ray Kirschmann said, and glanced at Carolyn. “Or maybe it wasn’t a guy.”
“It was,” I said.
“What did you do, hear his voice?”
I shook my head. “He left the toilet seat up,” I said.
“The pig,” Isis said.
“I never really heard his voice,” I went on, “except in an undertone, and I certainly didn’t recognize it. But I recognized her voice, and it wasn’t Kassenmeier’s.”
“How could you tell? You said you never met Kassenmeier.”
“I never did,” I said, “so if I recognized this voice-”
“Then you knew who the person was,” Marty said. “The woman.”
“Yes. She was the person who got me interested in Anthea Landau and her file folder full of letters. And now she turned up in a room where I’d found some stolen jewelry, and then she left and I checked the luggage tag and read the name Karen Kassenmeier. So my first thought was that this was her room, and that she and Kassenmeier were the same person, even if I had met her under another name. One of the names was an alias, and they were both the same person.”
“Maybe you were right,” Alice Cottrell said levelly. “How can you be sure they weren’t the same person?”
Because Karen Kassenmeier’s dead, I thought, and you’re sitting here trying to look innocent. But what I said was, “I saw Karen Kassenmeier at the morgue, and she wasn’t anyone I’d seen before. But even before then, I had the feeling the woman I overheard wasn’t the same person whose room it was.”
Ray said, “Why’s that, Bern?”
“The bed was made.” That put a puzzled look on every face in the room, so I explained. “The two visitors made love in Room 303, and then they left, and when I saw the bed it had been made up.”
The man from Sotheby’s, Victor Harkness, cleared his throat. “All that would seem to establish,” he said, “is that they’re neat.”
“I couldn’t see how they’d had time to make the bed,” I said, “and it was very professionally made, as if the chambermaid had done it. In fact it looked the same as it had looked before they got there, and there was a reason for it. They’d never unmade the bed in the first place.”
“You mean they…”
“Had sex on top of the bedspread,” Isis Gauthier finished for him, and made a face. “That’s even worse than leaving the toilet seat up.”
“I suppose they were in a hurry,” I said, “and they probably wanted to avoid leaving evidence of their visit to the room, evidence Karen Kassenmeier might notice when she returned to it. But they did leave some evidence, and it enabled me to determine who the man was.”
“DNA,” the uniformed cop said. “But how would you get samples for comparison, and when did you have time to run tests, and-”
“Not DNA,” I said, “and that wasn’t the kind of evidence that was left behind. Maybe they practiced safe sex.”
“I hope so,” Isis said. “Everybody ought to.”
“Who was the man?” Carolyn asked. “And what was the evidence that pointed to him?”
“It was a black mark.”
“On his record?” Victor Harkness suggested. “A blot on his copybook?”
“Don’t forget his escutcheon,” I said. “But this was a black mark on the bedspread. At the top, over the pillow. Right where his head would be.” While they thought about it, I added, “Remember what I said earlier, about hearing a key in the lock? That was one of the reasons I assumed it was the room’s occupant coming home. But it wasn’t, yet it was somebody with a key. Of the two people in that room, I knew the woman, and I couldn’t think of any reason she would have a key to another person’s hotel room. But maybe the man had access to a key. A key to Room 303, say, or a master key, a key that would open any room in the hotel.”
“A key to the door,” Carolyn said, “and a black mark on the bedspread.”
“A picture begins to emerge,” I said. “A picture of a hotel employee. Someone who could put Karen Kassenmeier in a room without officially registering her. Someone who would thus know what room she was in, and would be able to get in and out with no trouble. Someone whose hair is as black as the telltale mark on the bedspread, and not because that’s the way Mother Nature made it. Carl, you’ve been at the Paddington for years. Is there anyone you know of who fits that description?”