Heartbreak Hotel

Chapter 27

By nine A.M. the following day, we were back at the Aventura. The parking lot was even lonelier, what might’ve been one guest vehicle plus a limo driver sleeping openmouthed in his car.

Milo and I got out of the unmarked and he walked up to the driver.

Not Leon Creech. A young bearded Latino wearing a black polo shirt and matching jeans. iPad on the passenger seat. Angry Birds on the screen.

He snored.

Milo poked him awake gently. The guy roused, gave a wet cough, looked panicked.

Milo said, “Police, but no hassle. Just want to ask you why it’s so quiet.”

The driver rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, totally dead, it’s like they’re going out of business. Don’t know why the company sent me here. Actually, I do. They got a contract, get paid a flat fee. But we get shafted, no tips, it sucks.”

“Crap deal,” said Milo. “How long’s it been this way?”

“The guy they sent yesterday said it was the same.” He looked at the pad, like a kid wanting another bite of cookie.

“Thanks, good luck to you.”

“I’ll need it.”

As we approached the hotel, Alicia Bogomil stepped out from behind foliage, cigarette in hand.

Milo said, “Not much going on.”

“Not for three days, sir. No check-ins other than three snip tucks, all women.”

“Any idea why the slowdown?”

“Four days ago a bunch of Arabs marched through with DeGraw and they looked even more pissed off than usual and he looked even more stressed out than usual. Someone said they want the land for something else, the end is near. I asked DeGraw about it and he blew me off but I could tell something was bugging him.”

“When was that, Alicia?”

“Morning after the Arabs were gone, so three days ago,” she said. “Listen to this: They own the place but didn’t stay here. I heard some driver say he was taking them back to the Beverly Wilshire. There’s an endorsement for you.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“One thing you might want to know, sir. There’s demo notices on all The Numbers, went up yesterday. I was going to call you in case you still needed to preserve the crime scene. But then I had a look, saw everything was cleaned out, no tape, I figured you were already on top of the situation.”

Her shoulders tensed.

“You got it, Alicia, nothing to preserve.”

“Well, that’s good. I’m thinking more about getting back into the job.”

“Great,” said Milo. “Speaking of DeGraw, does he keep a room here for sleeping?”

“Sure, right behind his office. I thought that was his main crib. You’re saying he has another?”

“He always sleeps here?”

“Every time I’ve worked late, I’ve seen him go in there for the night. Are you asking about him because you think he was part of something?”

“Just following up, Alicia.”

“Oh, okay. Want me to page him for you?”

“Not necessary, Alicia. Have a nice day, Alicia.”

As we left her, Milo said, “Ignorance, bliss, why not?”

Kurt DeGraw’s office was on the ground floor, through the door behind the reception desk. One liver-coat on duty at the concrete counter, a young woman we hadn’t seen before. Young, acne-spotted, chopped-up blond hair streaked with pink and lavender.

A paper tag on her lapel said Kelli in black marker.

Milo flashed the badge and said, “We have an appointment with Mr. DeGraw.”

“Sorry, sirs, he’s not here, yet.”

“We’ll wait in his office.”

By the time she said, “Um, I guess,” we’d stepped behind the counter.

She trotted after us through an empty five-foot corridor. At the end was a door marked Manager. Milo turned the knob. No resistance. He dropped his hand, left the door closed.

Kelli said, “Um, maybe you shouldn’t go in? I can page him, uh-oh, I can’t, don’t know his number.” Perplexed.

Milo delivered one of his classic mixed messages: Looming huge while putting on his softest smile. The infrequently visiting uncle you kind of like but also fear.

Kelli opted for fear.

Milo said, “You can go.”

“Um, I’m not busy,” she said.

“We’re fine, Kelli.”

“I don’t want to mess up. I’m just a temp.”

“When’d you start?”

“Like three days ago.”

“Has it been quiet all that time?”

“It’s like nothing happens. It’s a hotel but nothing happens.”

“Even so, Kelli,” said Milo, “you’re the only one out there handling the front desk. Better get back to your station.”

“If you can just wait, I can find his number and page him.”

“Not necessary, Kelli. Like I said, we have an appointment.”

She said, “Um, okay.”

“We’re the police, Kelli. No one will hassle you for anything.”

“Really? Okay, cool.”

All traces of worry erased, she bounced away.

Kurt DeGraw’s office was as large as his Culver City bedroom, furnished with similar apathy. A door with no visible lock was centered on the far wall. Milo gloved up, opened it, peeked in, and shut it.

“His crash pad. First things first.”

He scanned the office. An iMac on the desk brought a smile to his face. A keyboard tap brought up a demand for a password. He tried variants of Kurt and DeGraw, got nowhere and began searching elsewhere.

Landline on the desk, but no cellphone, not in any desk drawer, the compartments of a matching credenza, or a black metal three-drawer file cabinet whose doors swung open easily.

I said, “He wasn’t one for security, same as his house. Maybe he did leave the back door unlocked.”

“Wish there was something iffy here,” said Milo. “I like it when they think they’ve got something to hide.” He looked at the laptop.

I said, “Maybe try something with Aventura in it for the password?”

His sixth try worked. KD Aventura.

“Voilà,” he said. Then, “Shit,” when he encountered blank screen after blank screen. “Wiped clean. Maybe he was ready to rabbit. So where’s the damn passport?”

He reopened file drawers, inspected contents, squatted at the lowest section, finally stood up rubbing the small of his back. “Plenty of work stuff but nothing juicy.”

I examined the documents. Payment records and insurance info on surgical patients, nothing on guests who hadn’t gotten their faces rearranged.

Milo said, “Maybe it all goes to Dubai or wherever.” His smile was crooked, mischievous. “Hell, maybe he got careless about security because he’s Swiss. All those centuries of neutrality you don’t figure someone’s gonna declare war.”

Leaning against a wall, he phoned Assistant D.A. John Nguyen, caught him up, and asked for a warrant on DeGraw’s office, making it sound as if he hadn’t entered, yet.

After a lot of listening, he said, “There’s also a room behind the office where he sleeps and that’s clearly personal space, John, so let’s not exclude it—”

He frowned, listened some more, offered a couple of “reallys” and several “uh-huhs,” before clicking off.

I said, “John’s being lawyerly.”

“Per usual. The office is a no-go because it belongs to the hotel owners and contains business records not proven to be germane to my investigation. Ergo, I need to get the consent of someone able to grant it legally. Such contingencies are especially exigent because ‘we’re dealing with Mideast hotshots,’ no way we want that kind of trouble.”

I said, “Oops.”

He cracked up. Pointed to the rear door. “But that’s okay. Which is what I wanted in the first place.”

“Did John recommend the cooperative judge du jour?”

“Better than that, he’s making the call himself, I can assume a yes and go right ahead.”

“Crafty, Lieutenant.”

“One does what one can. Let’s see if it makes a damn bit of difference.”

He had me glove up, too, and we entered the back room.

Kurt DeGraw’s in-house quarters were a splurge compared with his rental house. Fully equipped marble bathroom set up with high-end shaving gear, lots of hotel soap and shampoo, fluffy white hotel towels.

A good four hundred square feet of space suggesting what the so-called hospitality industry terms a “superior room.”

This bed was king-sized with a brass headboard and matching footboard, skinned in sky-blue, high-thread-count cotton and covered by a peach-colored down-packed duvet with a Pratesi label.

In the uppermost drawer of a walnut-replica, deco-replica nightstand was a small, bright-red leather book embossed with a white cross.

At first glance, a mini-Bible with souped-up binding. Five lines of white lettering said otherwise.

The most recent visa stamps were dated four years ago. Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai.

One European trip, a year before, requiring no visa: sixty-day stay in the homeland, entry at Zurich.

“Family probably lives there,” said Milo. “I’ll tell Gottlieb, he can try to find them.”

I checked all the dates. “No other trip lasted more than six days. Got to be work travel.”

In the closet were two blue and two white dress shirts, a navy suit, a pair of liver-red-jacket-gray-slack combos. On a top shelf, two pricey silver Rimowa suitcases turned out to be empty. On the floor, polished wingtips, brown and black, and two pairs of Nike runners. A convex dresser, also mimicking the twenties, held precisely folded cashmere sweaters, Sunspel underwear from England, dark-hued cashmere socks rolled and sorted by color.

At the bottom of the dresser were two half drawers. Another “here go my knees” squat for Milo. “Where’s the WD-40 when you need it?”

In the left drawer, he found a vibrator, two tubes of Good Clean Love lubricant, and a stack of Technicolor Scandinavian porn magazines dated thirty years ago. Too-bright photography, tan skin, yellow hair. Straight sex, nothing beyond the basics.

Painfully wholesome Nordic faces in situations that didn’t call for goofy glee made me laugh.

Milo said, “What?”

“Back in high school this was forbidden fruit. Now it seems kind of quaint.”

“Ah, youth. At least yours was predictable.” He paged through. “Go for it, Bjorn and Brigitta, afterward we celebrate with herring for all.”

Last stop: the right-hand drawer. “Here we go!”

A second iMac sat next to a charging cord. He removed both, found an outlet, and plugged in. Dead.

“Damn.” Placing the computer on the bed next to the passport and the porn, he contemplated, put the magazines back in the drawer, glared at the Mac. “Bastard machine. Maybe our geeks can get something out of it.”

My first thought was, not likely. The lack of charge suggested it hadn’t been important to DeGraw. Or even in working condition.

No cellphone on the premises said the premises didn’t matter much to DeGraw, anything of interest had been stashed at his off-site pad and taken by his killers.

Bad choice. He’d made a lot of them.

I kept all that to myself, and thought about the rumors of the hotel’s closure. The staff had picked up on it recently but DeGraw had likely known for a while.

I said so to Milo.

He said, “Guy’s job is ending so he’s got an additional motive to press for his share of the take.”

“That could also explain why he let them in. The meeting was expected. He thought they’d be paying him off.”

I pointed to the passport. “Everything he’d need for a smooth exit is here.”

Milo said, “Score the dough, come back here, pack your good duds, and split for Yodel-land. Yeah, makes sense. But their agreeing so readily wouldn’t make him suspicious?”

“Big money breeds optimism,” I said. “Think of the lottery.”

He paced a bit, rechecked drawers and the closet, shook his head. “Idiot’s banking on serious moolah and instead he gets burked. Nice verb, that. Has that hard-edged feel... okay if that’s what happened, why no sign of a struggle when they jumped him? Like Robaire said, there were no downers in DeGraw’s system, the normal reflex would be to fight for his life.”

“Maybe there was some kind of struggle and they smoothed it over. Not a brawl, just some mussed bedcovers. Two able-bodied men using the element of surprise could’ve overpowered him quickly. Especially if he was being distracted. As in a vamp by Ms. Cutie. The porn says he was pedestrian and hetero. She’d be an excellent lure. Maybe she came in alone to deliver the payment, DeGraw didn’t expect the others.”

“Waters and Bakstrom dangle her as bait, then crash the party.”

“Money and hot sex? It would’ve lowered his guard way below rationality. He was probably thinking he’d died and gone to heaven. Unfortunately, he was only half correct.”

He paced some more. Tucked the computer under his arm, lifted the passport, wedged it between two fingers, and headed for the door.

As we passed through DeGraw’s office, he said, “She’s the appetizer, big money’s the entrée, you’re right, he’d open the door. Wide.”