FEBRUARY 2003 #2
I expected questions, not least the whys that we were dodging. Why did she do this? Why was I helping?
(Because it was Harper. It was the only answer I could muster, even if it only demanded more questions of me. Because it was this girl everything pivoted around, and I couldn’t lose her.)
But she didn’t ask. She just nodded and said “okay.”
———
Walking into the room didn’t unravel her further. She was methodical, almost robotic, pulling out towels without comment and doing anything I said without complaint.
I flipped that sheet back and met Joel’s sightless eyes.
It took some maneuvering to get him in the garment bag.
“He’d hate this,” Harper said suddenly, as she heaved to get the zip closed around his shoulders. “He’d ask if we had an Umbro bag. McQueen’s not really his style.”
Oh thank god, the bitch was back.
Her comment startled me so that I nearly dropped the edges of the bag, which I was holding taut for her to zip. But I clutched it tight and said: “All things considered, I doubt it would be his first complaint.”
With a final tug, she had it zipped entirely.
We put the bag in his suitcase. It was one of those ludicrously large ones sportsmen use—like Joel might have had to carry his own footballs (maybe even his own goal from the size of the damn thing).
Even so, the zip would not close completely so we had to place Harper’s handbag on top to cover the bump of his head poking through.
The case was so heavy that the wheels threatened to crack as we pushed it to the edge of the room.
But with the body gone, the mess was all the more apparent.
The cleaning cupboard was locked so I went to the front desk and breathed a sigh of relief that it was manned by, well, a man. He looked tired with the late hour and appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties, which I took as a bonus.
“Good evening,” I said, racing up to the desk quickly and keeping my head down.
“Evening, miss—Oh, god. How … how can I help”
Ah, so he recognized me, delightful.
“I’m so sorry this is so embarrassing,” I babbled, really hamming up the distressed woman act. “But do you have any cleaning products I—”
“I can have a cleaner sent to your room if you—”
“No, no please. I just … I started my period, and it’s ruined the dress I was wearing, which I have to return to the designer and—”
“We offer full dry-cleaning services, you can just—”
“No! Please, please,” I let a tear fall. “I can’t have it cleaned, the designers have to do that, but I can’t bear to return it like it is, or give it to anyone else and I just … Please, if the press find out I’ll—”
Somehow, that was the part that did it—the idea of leverage at worst and holding some sort of shared secret at best.
“Don’t worry, here—there’s a cleaning cupboard next to the lift on every floor. Take the key and bring it back when you’re done.”
“Thank you! Oh, thank you.” My eyes dropped to his name tag. “David, you’ve saved my life.”
“Well, that’s a little much,” he said with a warm smile, which fell when he remembered the topic at hand. “Just … go handle your lady problem.”
———
“Why couldn’t you have smothered him?” I groaned, stretching to reach a spot on the ceiling from the pile of pillows I stood precariously upon. “There’d be less mess. We could pass it off as an accident. It would be so much easier.”
Down on the floor below, Harper’s ponytail sliced like a whip as she shot me a glare. “It was a crime of passion.”
“Of course it fucking was,” I hissed, reaching for the lampshade. “I didn’t think it was a crime of intellect.”
Even through the gloves my fingers burned, the chemical stain seeping beneath and the thick, drying blood sticky in a way I might never stop thinking about, a congealing texture unlike anything else I’d ever known.
It took just over an hour to have the tiny room spotless.
I got new linens before returning the cupboard key.
I’m not sure if David had questions about why it had taken me so long or if he’d expected lady problems like my own to take all night, but he nodded in thanks and slid the key into the drawer.
Back in the room, Harper was pacing—and even though I’d been doing that earlier, it concerned me.
“If you start muttering ‘out damned spot’ I’m calling the police.”
She turned, wringing her hands like she very much might feel a speck of blood there. “What do we do?” she asked, and I realized how much having a task, a thing to focus on, had reassured her. “I’ve done enough procedural dramas to know that bleach isn’t covering shit.”
“Enough to know the first suspect is always the spouse?”
Her hands fell to her sides, and she halted her pacing.
“At least do it in your own home next time,” I added, like that might help things.
“What do we do?” she repeated.
I don’t know why she kept looking to me for answers. But clinging to her need was keeping me calm, and it was clearly helping her to see me as a beacon of logic so that’s the dynamic we fell into.
“We give them no reason to suspect the crime happened here,” I said. “Go through Joel’s clothes and find something that I can wear to pretend to be him. A cap, a hoodie—something.”
“You’re not that good an actress.”
“Do as I bloody tell you,” I snarled, and she shut her mouth, even as that cocky smirk remained.
If she was smiling, though, at least some semblance of normality remained.
“I have a call to make,” I said. I wanted to take her hand again, wanted to reassure her, but that was difficult when she was being so damn Harper-ish about being vulnerable. “We don’t have to commit the perfect murder. We just have to tell the perfect story.”
———
“Hey, Caleb,” I greeted, and evidently I wasn’t feeling quite as calm as I was acting because my voice was honeyed, a heavy-handed saccharinity I’d never deign to flirt with. (It was Harper—old, CADS Harper with her fluttering lashes and tinkling laugh.)
“Heywoooood!”
It was difficult to remember, after scrubbing blood from a worn hotel carpet, that I’d won a BAFTA earlier that night. But Caleb could clearly think of nothing else. Good, he deserved his joy.
Perhaps I deserved this in turn.
“So, I’m not promising anything,” I said. “But, well, I’m a bit bored with this quiet reflective night of mine.”
“Of course you are because that sounds dull as shit. Come out! Join us!”
“I’m going to think about it. Have a few drinks here, see how I feel. I don’t know. Maybe. It would be so lovely to spend the night with you at any rate.”
Whichever way he took that was not on me.
“Come on, Heywood. Don’t we always have such fun together?”
Ah, he was taking it that way then. I admit it wasn’t an unpleasant thought, which boded well.
“Where are you?” I asked. “So I can consider my options.”
“Charlatans.”
God. Of course he was—haunt of the rich and famous. Seedy. Impossible to get into unless you were of course, us. It was a garish place and exactly where I should have expected Caleb to end up. He was probably surrounded by page three models and members of the royal family right now.
“Ohhh, that does sound fun! I guess I’ll maybe see you there.”
———
There was another call to make before I went back to Harper, and thankfully the time difference stateside meant Ruchi was still up to take my call.
“Nadine! Congratulations on the win.”
“Thank you. So look, I’m about to go do something reckless and hedonistic.”
“And I get a heads-up this time rather than reading all about it in the morning paper?”
“See, I’m learning how this publicist thing works.”
“Courteous of you. So which strings do you need me to pull?”
I took a breath. “Any chance you can get the hotel to wipe their CCTV for the next hour or so? I’m trying to be discreet, I really am, and I think I can pull this off.”
“Is this something I need to talk you out of doing altogether?”
“No, I’m just having fun!”
I racked my brain for something that might work and added. “And I don’t need a record of all of them coming to the hotel.”
If there was one thing Ruchi would never do it was tell me who I could and couldn’t sleep with. But she had to assume a threesome or, god forbid, a full-on orgy would cement us back in party-girl Nadine space when we were trying to move back to respectful actor.
A shame I’d do even worse than that press-wise by the end of the evening.
Ruchi sighed. “I’ll find out who to bribe.”
“Thank you!”
“Yeah, yeah. Have a good night. And for god’s sake, use protection.”
———
I went back to my room to grab my dress before returning to 311 to put on a dead man’s clothes, pausing only to slide that eternally present necklace into a pocket. If I had ever needed luck, it was now.
“How many outfit changes does your plan entail?” Harper asked, taking the dress between her thumb and forefinger and rubbing the beads between them.
“A good story needs a good costume designer, you know that.”
“Navy always flattered you,” she said, letting the fabric fall back to the now-clean bed.
It was not really a suitable response, but then, the image that filled my mind was hardly suitable either: Harper in that beaded dress, the gentle curve of it across her chest, her hair, I imagined, would be swept to one side in a thick coiling curl or the sort of elaborate braid that took hours.
I pictured her walking, the way the lights would glint off the edges of her, and that turquoise necklace, polished and shining in the groove where her collarbones met.
I wanted to see it, wanted to pour her into my clothes, would have let her slip on my very skin just to see how it fit.
But I couldn’t say that, so instead I said: “Let’s go bury your husband.”
———