We'll Always Have Parrots(37)

“Check it over,” he said, waving to the connecting door. “Let me know if you see anything we’ve missed.”

More useful to let me search our old room, I thought, but presumably that was against the rules.

While I was checking the luggage, as ordered, I heard voices in the other room: Detective Foley and his partner. Okay, I’m nosey. I stopped rummaging through the suitcases, kept very still, and strained to hear.

“—but I’m still in charge of this investigation,” Foley was saying, “and that’s not the way I think it should be handled.”

The partner, whose voice was less penetrating, said something I couldn’t decipher.

“Then he’s an ass,” Foley said.

I could hear the partner’s chuckle, but not what he said next.

“No, not at all,” Foley said. “If we make an arrest and the suspect still has it, it’ll be a nice little bit of circumstantial evidence. But odds are it’s history already. Or will be, pretty damned quick, if word gets out that we’re looking for it.”

Looking for what? Foley had the sort of nice, booming voice that’s every eavesdropper’s delight, but his attention to detail left much to be desired.

The partner rumbled again. Voice and diction lessons for that one, I fumed.

“You can tell him that I’m very suspicious of watches that stop at the time of death, convenient deathbed confessions, killers’ names scrawled in blood on the walls, and especially critical bits of evidence found clutched in the victim’s hand,” Foley said.

Ah. The comic book scrap.

“Anyway, we’re out of here,” Foley said. “I want to get an early start here tomorrow.”

I could hear him as he walked down the hall, complaining about how long it would take him to get home, and how much longer to get back here on Saturday morning. When he was safely out of earshot, I stuck my head in the other room.

“If there’s anything you missed, I’m too tired to notice,” I said. “Any chance you could call down for a bellhop to help me move the stuff?”

He not only called the desk for me, but when they told him it would take a while—maybe the bellhops were still in parrot awareness training—he offered to have the luggage moved. I left one of our new room key cards with him and went off with the other to find Michael.

Back in the ballroom, the concert was still in full swing. Up on stage, Walker was doing his best Mick Jagger impression, strutting and leaping about with manic energy. Several dozen women clung to the edge of the stage; including, I noticed with a sigh, one slender figure in a bridal gown whose trailing hem was getting a little ragged.

Maggie was still dancing with the energy of a teenager in the center of the dance floor. The Amazon security guard recognized me and passed me into the backstage area, which drew hisses and venomous stares from the women clustered near the stage.

Thank goodness, the police had finally released Michael.

“There you are,” he said, spotting me.

“Sorry,” I said. “I only just finished bullying the front desk into handing over the keys to the promised new room.”

“Great. Let’s go. Not that way,” he said, as I headed for the way I’d come in. “We’d never make it though the crowd. We can go the back way.”

“Will the back way lead us past the front desk?” I asked, yawning. “It just dawned on me that I have no idea where the new room is.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got it covered,” Michael said. “Just tell me the room number.”

Since when had Michael become good at finding his way around this maze? But I didn’t have the energy to protest, so I just handed him the card key folder so he could see the room number.

Michael’s back way led through a narrow, shabby corridor into the kitchen, where Michael and the few employees on graveyard shift greeted each other like old friends. Another utilitarian hall led to a room where two middle-aged maids stood in front of a pair of washing machines, arguing in machine-gun Spanish. Michael asked directions in his slower but capable Spanish and one of the maids ended up escorting us to our new room, fuming the whole way at how estupidos the front desk staff were for assigning us a room that was so pequeño y asqueroso. I didn’t know what pequeño y asqueroso meant, but I suspected it referred to the room’s minuscule size, its shabby furnishings, and perhaps the faint smell of cooked cabbage that seemed to cling to the walls. But I didn’t want to ask.

“It doesn’t have a balcony, and it’s not a crime scene, and odds are we won’t be awake long enough to care,” Michael said, as if he’d read my mind.