They were called the Speed Dragons. Jeramey first laid eyes on them
in the lobby of the Columbus Hotel, four smug guys in nearly
identical Affliction t-shirts dragging their gear across the polished
floor. They made a beeline for Chess, her boyfriend, who lounged with
Jeramey's guitars on a leatherette ottoman, and the band members
engaged him in conversation for several minutes before Chess finally
shook his head and pointed to Jeramey standing in line at the front
desk, like it was just then occurring to him that they were looking
for her. Jeramey felt a stab of irrational hatred for the Speed
Dragons as they gazed at her, blank. But she was forced to turn
away, her attention pulled into this new indignity.
"No, there's been a mistake. I'm supposed to be in the penthouse
suite, with the view of the river," she said, shaking her head
at the room keys in their little paper sleeve. The wedding planner
told her it had all been arranged. "It was all supposed to be
arranged."
The desk clerk nodded. "We've had the tiniest change of
plans," she said, then dropped her voice to an unapologetic
whisper. "We have some very high profile guests in the
hotel this weekend."
Jeramey considered. So no one recognized her here--fine, even though
she still looked as good as the girl in that white miniskirt on the
cover of Touch and Go. Or, at least, that girl's slightly
older sister. More or less. But that was beside the point. She could
feel her personal equity receding, like soil erosion of the spirit.
As it was, she'd already compromised by flying coach. There isn't
a first class on a Chautauqua Airlines regional commuter flight, the
wedding planner had told her, getting a little snippy. It's only
for two hours. Is it that big of a deal? But Jeramey was the one
who had to buy Chess three bloody marys on the plane just to make him
shut up about it. Nine dollars each, and she could smell the cheap
vodka from two seats away. It was getting to be a bit much to endure,
even for ten grand.
Now the Speed Dragons were heading her way. Jeramey didn't need to
meet them in order to distill this band down into their essence:
there would be a Brad among them, and a Wesley or a Corbin, a
weekday-afternoon radio DJ and an ad agency project manager. The
quiet-looking one in the fedora would be the only real musician of
the group but he would avoid any kind of direct attention, terrified
that someone would discover his terrible secret--bald at age
twenty-eight. The wedding planner had passed along their LP so that
Jeramey could learn the songs in preparation, but she hadn't.
"Listen," she said to the hotel clerk, wanting to be done
with it before the Speed Dragons knew all about her business. "Forget
it. The seventeenth is fine."
"It's a lovely room," the clerk said. "Great views of
the insurance building!"
***
After the wedding, Doug Beavers rode the sad little shuttle back to
the hotel and fumed. It was almost funny, how some smug assholes just
think they're the center of the universe, but others, even
though it hurts to admit it, actually are--they somehow know
everyone that you know, they've already been anywhere you could hope
to go, they even turn up at your cousin's stepdaughter's wedding and
charm the pantyhose off every woman there. Bennett Langdon was one
of those assholes. It transcended coincidence. It was just the way
things were. Beavers bet Langdon had a private driver to take him to
the reception. No way a guy with that much cash would ride on a
shuttle bus, with its stained grey-brown seats and sticky floor and
vague chemical blueberry deodorizer in the air which gave the
impression that someone had, recently, peed inside the vehicle.
At least Langdon had come to the wedding alone. "I bet he didn't
give get an and guest," his cousin murmured
sympathetically when they both discovered the horror, that Langdon
was some peripheral friend of the groom's family. It would have been
undeniably worse if he'd turned up at Beavers' cousin's
stepdaughter's wedding with Celia Beavers on his arm. This was not
out of the question--it had only been a year earlier that the whole
affair went down, his plain, good-hearted wife and the cap-toothed
charmer who taught the six-session self-actualization seminar that
Beavers himself had paid for Celia to attend. It was hardly a fair
fight; Langdon, silver-tongued devil of the self-help aisle, versus
Doug Beavers, Weeble-shaped middle manager. The affair was long over
by now, but the divorce was forever and Beavers was the type to hold
a grudge.
"I really wish you could just relax and have a good time,"
his cousin said when he stalked back to the table with a plate piled
high with bacon-wrapped water chestnuts.
"Oh, I'm having a great time," Beavers said. Langdon was
currently holding court near the wedding cake with two of the
bridesmaids, who were giggling behind their wrist corsages. "I
just want to keep my eye on him. No surprises.”
"But Dougie, he probably doesn't even know you're here."
"Then it's even more important to know where he is,"
Beavers said. He set down the hors d'oeuvres plate and headed in the
direction of the bar.
"....penthouse," he heard Langdon say to the women. "It's
got an incredible view."
***
So it was not the worst performance of her career. No, that honor
would have to go to the gig in Berlin when her bass player puked on
one of the tube amps and shorted out the entire sound system. But it
was, quite frankly, a close call. The Speed Dragons played angsty
garage-rock versions of "The Electric Slide" and "Butterfly
Kisses" while Jeramey faked along. If not for the weed that
Chess had procured from a bellhop, she would have been in tears. As
it was, she wondered how many more times she'd be able to play
"Infinity" without her head exploding. "Sweet
forever sugar," she sang as the newly-wedded couple swirled
around the ballroom during their first dance, "infinity sky."
This was the whole reason she was here--the rich, dim, Midwestern
bride having always dreamed of dancing to the tune played live, by
Jeramey Jones herself, at her wedding. It was a wildly inappropriate
choice, nothing but a heroin-soaked ballad about, well, heroin, but
the masses, with their endless capability to misunderstand, had
turned it into a mainstream love song, rocketing Jeramey out of the
indie punk world and into the spotlight for a moment in time. The
moment had since passed--long since passed--but the song endured.
"I just can't even tell you," the bride gushed at her
afterwards. "Having you here, omigod! I want you to stay all
night!"
"Totally!" Jeramey said, accepting a clammy hug before
departing immediately.
She sought refuge in the lobby bar, where two bourbons filled in the
cracks left by the mediocre weed. She sat against the wall and half
watched a silent baseball game on a television mounted to the wall
and willed no one to speak to her, but she was only midway through
the second drink when a large, oniony presence appeared to her right.
"Don't I know you from somewhere?" the guy asked with a
blast of gimlet breath.
Jeramey looked at him. He was fat and fiftyish, sloppily buttoned
into an odd grey tux, the bow tie of which dangled from one shoulder
like it was trying to get away from him. He had hair the color of
nothing and pale grey eyes that seemed to have trouble focusing.
"You're not famous or something, are you?"
"No, I was just at that wedding," Jeramey said.
"Which side," her new friend said. "Bride or groom?"
"Bride."
"Yeah? Me too. My cousin's--"
"Can I just watch the ball game, please?"
At this, the guy laughed way too hard. "The ball game?"
"Yeah," Jeramey said. "I want to watch the ball game."
"You're interested."
"I am."
"Okay, Abner Doubleday, who's playing?"
"For the love of God," Jeramey muttered. She slid off the
bar stool and tossed a crumpled tip next to her half-empty glass.
"For such a baseball fan, you're a pretty poor sport," the
guy said. He spun around on his stool and grabbed her ass.
Jeramey bristled but walked away without looking back. "Ohio
fucking sucks," she announced as she exited the bar, to a few
mutters of agreement and one whooping cheer.
***
Chess was sitting on the bed with the bellhop when she walked into
the room. "Wow, are you her?" the bellhop said.
"Yup, this is Jeramey Jones, 1997's Best New Artist nominee,"
Chess said in a fake-announcer voice. He held a smoldering joint with
one hand and sifted through a pile of minibar snacks with the other.
"1998," Jeramey said, shooting him the finger. "If you
set the sprinklers off, I'll kill you."
"Don't worry," the bellhop said. He was a lanky kid with
reddish hair buzzed into a fade. "We got it covered." He
pointed up at the smoke detector, which was shrouded with a dripping
wet washcloth. He offered her the weed, but Jeramey shook her head.
"I'm exhausted," she said. "Can we wrap up this
party?"
"It's only nine-thirty," Chess said.
"Seriously?" She flopped onto the edge of the bed. The room
was beige and claustrophobic. It had an anonymous quality to it, like
a shared cubicle at the phone company. "I think time is messed
up in Ohio. It's stuck or something."
"Tell me about it," the bellhop said. He unscrewed the cap
on a tiny bottle of Bailey's and chugged it.
Jeramey
lay down on the edge of the bed and selected a whiskey bottle from
the pile, drinking it without sitting up. Then she rolled off the bed
and went to the window. "Great views of the insurance building!"
she muttered. The building in question was a concrete void with a
blinking radio antenna on the top. "Hey," she said finally.
"You don't have keys to the penthouse suite, do you?"
***
"This has to be the worst idea ever," the bellhop whispered
as they padded single-file off the eighteenth-floor elevator. "But
I'm just high enough to go along with it."
"I
just want to see the view," Jeramey whispered back. She steadied
herself on the wall with one palm. The night was getting silvery,
like she was viewing herself through a window streaked with liquid
diamonds.
"Do
you think the mini bar has better shit up here?" Chess asked.
"What,
like tiny bottles of Cristal?"
"That
would be awesome," the bellhop said. "Okay, this is
it."
They
stood in front of the door. It looked pretty ordinary. The bellhop
rapped sharply on it with a knuckle and called out, "Room
service!"
No
response.
"Room
service," the bellhop said again, knocking louder this time.
Nothing.
He
turned to Jeramey and gave her an impish smile. She decided that
she'd sleep with him, if it came up.
"Let's
do it," she said.
The
bellhop inserted a plastic key card into the slot and pushed the door
open slowly. Jeramey practically heard angels singing. The room was
at least twice the size of hers, decorated in plush navy blue instead
of beige, with a whole separate living room area and kitchenette.
Chess made a beeline for the mini bar. "Shit, there's macadamia
nuts in this one," he said.
Jeramey
headed for the window but froze just after she crossed into the
bedroom. The room was not, as it turned out, empty.
"Fuck,"
Jeramey said.
A
dark, lumpy shape was snoring quietly from the bed.
"Fuck,
fuck."
"Oh,
man, we need to get out of here," the bellhop said from behind
her.
But
the window, with its view of the river, was right there, just a few
feet away. Jeramey darted
towards it and parted the curtains, but it
was too dark to see anything other than the ghost of her own
reflection.
"Okay,"
Jeramey whispered. "We can go."
As
she crept back past the snoring lump, it stirred and emitted an
oniony belch. "Wait a minute," she said, turning back. She
squinted in the thick darkness at the man's face. "No fucking
way," she said. Of all the high profile guests in the
hotel, this asshole from the bar was the one who took her room?
"Come
on, let's go," the bellhop whined.
Jeramey
held up a hand. She wished she had a Sharpie--the man's dumb, doughy
face was just begging for a freehanded mustache. He twitched and
rolled to the side, his jacket flopping open. Jeramey saw the bulky
square of a wallet peeking out of the pocket.
Even
better.
***
Doug Beavers had a problem. More accurately, he had several problems,
but with varying degrees of urgency.
One:
his head felt like a malfunctioning tilt-a-whirl
Two:
his mouth tasted like onions
Three:
his pants were spattered with Bennett Langdon's blood
Things
had gone bad pretty fast. He'd sat in the bar for a long time,
drinking overpriced gimlets and working up a stormy rage over Langdon
and the bridesmaids. Somewhere in there he decided that it was his
moral obligation to intervene--those nubile, satin-sheathed maidens
needed protection! Langdon was a predator. But when Beavers got up to
the top floor of the hotel, Langdon had opened the door with a
quizzical smile and it was clear he was still alone. It was also
clear that he had no idea who Beavers was, which somehow made it all
worse.
"I,
uh," Beavers stammered, losing his nerve within two seconds, "I
went to one of your seminars. Last year."
Langdon
had just loved the sound of that and invited Beavers in for a drink.
Which
was more or less the last thing Doug Beavers needed.
But
halfway into that drink, Langdon disappeared into the bedroom and
reported that he had to get ready to meet up with a young lady he'd
met at the wedding. "Women at weddings are just so game,"
he called. "Are you getting lucky tonight, my man?"
That
was enough for Beavers. A tingling in his chest traveled down his
arm and into his fist.
Reactivated, he was on his feet in a second,
aimed like a surface to air missile towards his enemy. He threw the
punch before he even realized he was in the bedroom, and what a punch
it was: a glorious right hook that connected with Langdon's jaw just
as he turned away from the bathroom mirror, looking alarmed. Airborne
for a second, Langdon tumbled backwards into the shower, sputtering
blood. Beavers moved in for the coup de grace with a primal yell: a
kick to the chin. It sounded awful, an unnatural wrenching of bone
and skin. Langdon went instantly slack-eyed and still.
Wigging out, Beavers backed out of the bathroom and sat on the bed.
But there was blood on the mirror, on the sink, and it turned his
stomach. Did that really happen? He peered back into the
bathroom--yes, it had. He pulled the door closed. Now he did
need that drink. He went for the liquor bottle with both hands.
A few hours later, he'd came to on the bed, a sharp line of sunlight
from the windows across his torso. He sat up halfway and rubbed his
face. A plastic room key was stuck to his cheekbone in a slick of
gummy dried drool. At first it felt like a dream, until he realized
that dreams, no matter how vivid, don't actually bleed on you. A
glance at the clock revealed that it was ten in the morning. He had
to piss, but there was no way he was opening that bathroom door. He
looked through the peephole into the hallway and saw a housekeeping
cart three doors down. "Motherfucker," he said
.
He
flung open the closet and flipped through the items hanging there,
settling on a pair of flat-front khakis. He dropped his own bloody
pants and pulled Langdon's on--or tried to, a plan that might have
worked eighty pounds ago, but not now. Beavers clutched his
infuriatingly large belly and kicked the pants back into the closet.
The
housekeeping cart was now two doors away.
He
had no choice but to pull on the fluffy terrycloth bathrobe hanging
on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. It smelled like hotel and
Langdon's obnoxious Old Spice, but it did, at least, fit.
Beavers
grabbed his room key off the bed and darted out into the hallway, his
bloody pants tucked under his arm like a football.
But
down on the tenth floor, he inserted the room key into the slot and
was met with a blinking red light. He inserted the key again and
again, not understanding. The key on the bed must have been
Langdon's, he realized--his own key was in his wallet, which was--
Which
was--
Which
had formerly been in his jacket pocket, but was no more. The wallet,
he concluded, had to be back in Langdon's room. Beavers banged his
head on his own locked room door, cursing the day he ever filled out
the little RSVP card for his cousin's stepdaughter's wedding in the
first place. He tried shouldering the door open, the way you see hero
spies do it in the movies. He tried jamming Langdon's key in and out
of the lock in the hopes of confusing the electronic gatekeeper into
submission. Eventually he just headed back to the elevator and hit
the UP arrow, but when the doors slid open, two uniformed cops
blinked out at him.
"I,
uh," he mumbled. There was no way he could go back up to the
room now. "Sorry, I was going down."
***
Jeramey woke up devastatingly hungover. The inside of her mouth
tasted like campfire and Cheetos. She was fully clothed, her head
resting on the bellhop's stomach. Chess was spread-eagled on the
floor, the bedspread tangled around him. She had a vague memory of
buying round after round of drinks for everyone in the lobby bar,
using Abner Doubleday's American Express. This explained the
hangover, but not the Cheetos. She closed her eyes again.
When
she woke the second time, it was afternoon. She moved to the floor
and smoked half a joint with Chess while the bellhop took a shower.
"What the hell should we do here all day?" she said. "Our
flight isn't until five."
Chess
waggled the joint at her. "Isn't this entertainment enough?"
Jeramey
took a drag. Back in the Touch and Go days, the morning after
a gig had held a wild, raw
magic, her fingers sore, her voice hoarse.
Champagne for breakfast. Although she knew it was impossible, she
couldn't remember ever being hungover on that tour. "Yeah, I
guess," she said.
The
bathroom door slammed open then. "You guys," the bellboy
said.
Jeramey
turned. He was brandishing his cell phone.
"There's
a dead guy upstairs."
Jeramey
didn't understand at first. "What?"
"In
the penthouse! There's cops everywhere."
"What?"
Jeramey repeated, then it hit her. "Wait, no, that guy was
passed out, not dead. What the fuck happened?"
"My
friend says there's homicide detectives and everything," the
bellhop said. "They're talking to everyone who tries to leave
the hotel."
Jeramey
dropped her head to her hands. It was certainly going to be hard to
explain how she happened to be in possession of that American Express
card last night. "Fucking Ohio," she said.
***
Still clutching his bloody pants football, Beavers lurked around the
second floor mezzanine and watched from behind a pillar as a
coroner's stretcher arrived and then departed with Langdon inside a
rubber sack. When the lobby seemed to reach a momentary lull, he
descended the stairs and tried to cross the polished floor with
confidence. He imagined he was Bennett Langdon--look at me, I'm an
asshole millionaire, I'm walking around a hotel in a bathrobe but
it's okay because I fucked your wife. The effect of this was more
unnerving than empowering. By the time he made it to the front desk,
Beavers was shaking.
"Um,
excuse me," he said timidly.
The
clerk turned to him, wiping her eyes. She was clutching a balled-up
tissue. She did not appear to notice his robe. "Sir?"
"I,
uh," Beavers said, "I seem to have misplaced my room key.
Can I get a new one? It's Douglas Beavers, room ten-sixteen."
The
clerk nodded. "I just need to see your ID, Mr. Beavers."
She wiped her nose. "We've had an incident in the hotel this
morning, so we've been asked to be extra cautious."
"Cautious,"
Beavers repeated. "Well," he added, improvising, "as
it turns out, my ID is in my room.
Which I cannot access."
The
clerk considered this. Beavers smoothed the lapel of his bathrobe
meaningfully.
"Of
course, sir," the clerk said finally. She gave him a small
smile. "You probably want to get out of that bathrobe," she
added.
"Oh,
yes," Beavers said.
Safely
inside his own room, Beavers took a shower and contemplated his next
move. The wallet must have been stuck between the cushions of the
leatherette sofa or under the bed or somewhere else out of sight,
since he hadn't seen it when he had been up there. And reason had it
that the police hadn't seen it yet either, since their first stop
after finding it would have no doubt been his room. He developed a
new set of plans.
Plan
A: Wait until the police were gone, and go back into Langdon's room
for the wallet. They had to leave eventually, he figured, and it had
been a couple hours already. He couldn't get very far without the
wallet, given that he had an hour-long drive to get home to
Springfield and his car was hovering on E.
Plan
B: Live forever in room ten-sixteen.
He
figured that he had a few dozen hotel nights' worth of available
credit on the American Express he used to book the room. Well, maybe
not quite that many, he realized as he ordered two twenty-dollar
cheeseburgers and a beer from room service. He needed sustenance if
he was going to stay sharp for his mission.
***
At
some point during the day, it became imperative to Jeramey that they
return the wallet. Though getting high in the middle of a crisis had
never had any other effect on her, she started to get panicky and
decided it was the fault of the wallet and not the weed.
"Look,"
she explained to Chess and the bellhop. They'd already missed their
flight due to being too freaked out leave the hotel. There were cops
talking to everyone in the lobby. "I used his card to buy I
don't even know how much liquor last night. I need to get rid of it.
What if they come here and do a search?"
"I
think it was something like eighteen hundred dollars," the
bellhop said, unhelpfully. Jeramey regretted that she ever considered
sleeping with him.
Chess,
suffering from sympathy paranoia, nodded along. "But we can't
just dump it somewhere," he said. "Because as soon as they
find it, they'll start trying to trace who dumped it, which makes the
whole thing worse. Maybe we could destroy it."
"Like
how?"
Chess
flicked the lighter.
Jeramey
pointed at the smoke detector. "I don't think the washcloth
trick will work if we set a wallet on fire."
"Maybe
we could cut it apart," the bellhop suggested, "and flush
it down the toilet."
After
sending the bellhop out into the hotel for a pair of scissors, the
three of them stood around the low-flow toilet as Jeramey cut an
experimental corner off Doug Beavers' driver's license and let it
fall into the bowl. She pressed the flusher and held her breath.
But
the low water pressure wasn't even enough to make the plastic
triangle flutter.
"Fucking
conservation," she muttered.
She
cut off a larger chunk and dropped that into the toilet too, but no
dice. Finally she reached into the water and retrieved the driver's
license pieces, shoving all of them back into the little plastic
compartment.
"The
police have to leave eventually, right?"
Chess
nodded. "They do."
"No,"
the bellhop said. "No. That's an even worse idea than going in
there in the first place."
Jeramey
shrugged. There was no other way. The weed made her feel certain of
this. "We're going to have to put it back in the room,"
she said.
Beavers
conducted some light recon. First, he waited until evening fell, then
crept down to the lobby to look for cops. Everything appeared normal
again, though.
Phase
one, check.
Then
Beavers sat down on a leatherette ottoman and faced away from the
desk as he dialed the hotel's main phone number from his cell.
"Good
evening, Columbus Hotel, how can I help you?"
"Yes,
uh, I'm in room, um, sixteen-ten," he said quietly, "and
I've been burgled."
"You've
been what?"
"Burgled."
"Sir?"
"I
think I might have seen someone going into that poor man's room last
night," he tried next. "Can you send the police down to
talk to me? Ten--I mean, sixteen-ten."
There
was a muffled pause. Beavers resisted the urge to look over his
shoulder at the desk to see what was happening. "Sir, if you
have information about the incident in the hotel, you should contact
the police immediately. They're no longer in the hotel, but I can
give you the investigator's phone number if you have a pen?"
"I'll
call back when I can find a pen," Beavers said.
Phase
two, check.
He
rode the elevator up to the eighteenth floor, alone this time. Once
the doors slid open, he cautiously stepped out and looked around. The
hallway was deserted, and the only indicator that anything unusual
had happened was a neon green seal over the frame of Langdon's door.
These premises have been sealed by the Columbus Police Department.
All persons are forbidden to enter unless authorized by the police or
a public administrator. Beavers let out a short sigh and slit the
seal with his Swiss army knife.
The
room had a garbagey smell, but there was no time to contemplate it.
He searched the sofa first--no wallet. Then he looked under the
bed--no wallet there either. He went back to the door and retraced
his steps: doorway, kitchenette, sofa, bedroom, bathroom. He
retreated quickly from the bathroom after seeing all that blood
again. Langdon's head, Beavers could practically swear, contained
more blood than a normal head, Jesus Christ. He closed the bathroom
door again and looked out at the room. He couldn't remember being in
any of the other areas, but then again, he had quite a few
unaccounted-for hours. He crossed to the window and drew open the
curtains, and it was then that he heard the unmistakable click of a
key being inserted into the door.
***
Jeramey
screamed. "Oh my god, I thought you were dead."
Beavers
screamed too. He got a little worried. Was he dead?
The
bellhop screamed and ran out of the room.
Jeramey
threw the wallet at the guy. "I don't know what is going on
here, but I don't want anything to do with it."
"Where
did you get this?" Beavers said.
"So
no one died?" Jeramey said. She looked over her shoulder for
explanation but the bellhop was gone.
"Well,
I wouldn't say that, exactly," Beavers said.
They
both spun around as the door opened again.
"There
he is! The ghost!" the bellhop said.
Two
cops followed him into the room. "Okay," one of them said.
"Which one of you would like to explain?"
Beavers
folded immediately. "It was an accident," he blubbered. "He
fucked my wife and I just, I don't know, I went crazy for a second.
And I thought I left my wallet in here, so I came back in to get it,
but it turns out she had it, and I don't even know--"
"Who
are you?" the cop said to Jeramey.
"Hey,"
the other cop said. "You're Jeramey Jones, right? Touch and
Go?" He strummed a few notes on an air guitar. "That
album defined my twenties."
"Wait,
what?" Beavers said.
"Yeah,
that's me," Jeramey said. She cocked her head at him and smiled.
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of the river
beyond the window.
That
view, just, wow.
Kristen Lepionka is the Shamus and Goldie Award-winning author of the Roxane Weary mystery series. Her debut, THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK, was also nominated for Anthony and Macavity Awards. Kristen grew up inside a public library and now lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her partner and two cats.
