Mary, Mary

Chapter 88

MARY WAGNER GOT A LOT MORE SLEEP that night than any of the rest of us.

James Truscott spent the night in jail, but I was sure he'd be out in the morning. His magazine had already put in a complaint. He hadn't missed much of anything, though.

There was nothing new to report when the relief team finally came at 4:00 A.M.

That gave me enough time to get to my hotel for a two- hour nap and a shower before I was back on the road again.

I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel just past 7:00. Mary Wagner's work shift started at 7:30.

This was definitely getting interesting now, and also weirder by the minute.

The luxury hotel, a pink stucco landmark in Hollywood, sat nearly obscured behind a wall of palms and banana trees on Sunset Boulevard. The inside echoed the outside, with its pink-everything lobby and ubiquitous banana-leaf wallpaper.

I found the security chief, Andre Perkins, in his office on the lower level. I had deliberately arranged for only one contact at the hotel.

Perkins was a former Bureau agent himself. He had two copies of Mary Wagner's file on his desk when I got there.

“She pretty much reads like a model employee,” he told me. “Shows up on time, keeps up with the work. As far as I can gather, she just seems to come in, do her thing, and leave. I can ask around some more. Should I?”

“Don't do it yet, thanks. What about her background? Anything for me there?”

He pulled out Wagner's original application and a couple of pages of notes.

“She's been here almost eight months. It looks like she was legitimately laid off from a Marriott downtown before that. But I made some calls on the earlier stuff, and it's all wrong numbers or disconnected. Her social security number's a fake, too. Not all that unusual for a maid or porter.”

“Is there anyone who can say for sure that she was actually on the premises during all of her shifts?” I asked.

Perkins shook his head. “Just the cleaning records.”

He looked over his papers again.

“She definitely keeps up with her quotas, which she wouldn't be able to do if she was ducking out a lot. And her comment cards are fine. She's doing a good job. Mary Wagner is an above-average employee here.”