“Yesterday. He was standing outside the hotel all afternoon.”
“Did you speak with him?”
“No.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to him?”
Eccles raised a hand to his head, but stopped just before running it through his hair. “I don’t know. I don’t recall. We never actually spoke. It was more me yelling at him to get the hell away from my actors. Not what you’d call real dialogue.”
“And you have no idea who would want to slit his throat?”
“I told you. Everyone. All of them. Probably hundreds of people I don’t even know. He was a prick. A vampire. A waste of space.”
“Did he ever take pictures of you?”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Were any of them compromising?”
“You mean with my pants down? No. He never got that close.”
Bax made a point of writing in his notebook, but it was mostly a list of what he needed to pick up at the store on his way home.
Across from him, Eccles tapped his leg with his fingers, his unease and impatience telegraphed from his very pores. “Are we done?” he asked again.
Bax wrote down cereal and cream, then checked the list to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. When he was satisfied he looked into Peter Eccles’s dark, furious eyes. “For now.”
Eccles shot up and marched out of the office, slamming the door behind him.
Bax thought about smiling, but it wasn’t worth it. Eccles was a jerk. They were all jerks. He doubted he’d get anything useful from even one of the players. He’d have to do some serious digging. Talk to Geiger’s paparazzi buddies. He’d put the wheels in motion to get a background check on all these movie people and on Gerry and Sheila Geiger. Grunwald was going to have his hands full.
And then he’d talk to Mia Traverse. He still wasn’t sure about his approach yet, but one thing was in her favor. She was young, eager. It was a pretty safe bet she was already digging around the hotel, trying to find out all she could about Geiger and the movie crew. Bax wanted to know it all. Every detail. But he didn’t want to come right out and ask her to be his informant. He knew her first priority was the hotel and her job, which didn’t negate the fact that she was plugged into the world of Hush. No, this was going to be about finesse, not force.
He went back to his original notes. It bothered him that the camera hadn’t been found. It bothered him that Geiger was a sleaze, that everyone despised him, that most of the people staying in the hotel were suspects. At the moment the only people he could unequivocally eliminate as suspects were Piper Devon and Mia Traverse. Devon been at a very public function last night, her alibi confirmed by photographs in the New York Post. Traverse had been with her girlfriends in and around the hotel.
He wondered what she might have seen. Who. She may well know the killer’s identity without even realizing it.
That was one interview he wasn’t dreading in the least.
“SLIT. FROM EAR TO EAR. It was beyond horrible.” Mia looked around the cafeteria, sure everyone was staring at her, wondering. Not if she’d killed Geiger, but if she knew something more than she’d told the police.
The truth was, she didn’t. Not yet. But she didn’t do a thing to dissuade people from the idea that she did. Know stuff. Any stuff.
Her lunch companion, Theresa, the head of housekeeping, had been a buddy for a long while and they often ate together, so that wasn’t going to raise any eyebrows. What most of the staff didn’t think about was Theresa’s unbelievable information-gathering resources.
The maids.
It was the same in all hotels in Mia’s experience. Guests, especially the upper echelon, didn’t see the maids. They didn’t speak to them, they didn’t interact with them. Therefore, maids were not real. They were robots that cleaned and vacuumed. Mia had always felt badly that so few patrons tipped the maids, considering the crap the poor things had to put up with.
In this instance, it wasn’t the crap they had to clean that had her hunkering down with Theresa, it was the stuff they saw.
“I saw dead bodies two times,” Theresa said.
She was eating an empanada that smelled so good Mia was cursing her yogurt. But then Theresa was five-ten at least, statuesque and curvy. Not her five-two with barely a curve to be seen.
“One was just an old guy who had a heart attack. That was okay, but the second one, oh, baby.”
“What?”
Theresa leaned closer. “Autoerotic asphyxiation.”
“No.”
“Yes. And you know what was the worst part?”
“What?”
“He was alone. I found him on the bathroom floor, his hand still on his wing wang. He’d strangled himself with his own belt, and let me tell you, it took some doing. He was blue. His tongue stuck out.” She shivered, making her long, dark hair shimmer. “It put me off my soup, you know what I mean?”
Mia nodded as she took another spoon of key lime yogurt. “I do.”
“I’m not surprised,” Theresa said, just before taking another bite. Releasing another dose of that delectable scent into the air. Cumin. Cilantro.
Swallowing her urge to grab the empanada out of her friend’s hand, Mia focused. “Not surprised about Geiger?”
“That’s right, chica. I knew that man was going to get himself into hot water.”
“Why, what do you know?”
“He was inside the director’s suite the night he was killed.”
“Eccles’s suite?”
Theresa nodded.
Mia was almost going to ask her if she was sure, but of course she was. “How did you find out?”
“Room service. Andy served them late last night. He saw Geiger in the mirror. This morning Yolanda found a piece from his camera. It was in a bag with his initials on it. They’d done some serious drinking. Most of the bottle of scotch was gone.”
“Whoa. What did she do with the camera thingy?”
“Nothing. Yolanda knows better than to take something from a guest’s room.”
Mia sat back, stunned. Peter Eccles was a really famous director, although she’d heard somewhere that he’d lost his deal with Paramount, which had cost him a pretty penny. This shoot was supposed to give him that boost he needed to get back on the A list.
She wondered what Eccles had to hide. Had Gerry caught him stealing
