Hotel No Tell Read online

  Under their wise, patient direction, I had finally selected the Levi’s that were almost torn at the knees, which had won out over the brand-new Levi’s and the ones with the paint stain. The new jeans would have been at odds with the familiarity between Gregory and me, but the paint-stained ones would indicate that we were jumping right back to the level of intimacy at which we’d left off.

  Even more arduous had been the issue of the shirt. It couldn’t be so snug and sexy as to prohibit the occasional slouch (which would result in visible tummy roll or, worse, back roll), as this might be a tough evening and I had to be comfortable, but obviously the shirt couldn’t be so loose as to be classified as baggy or sloppy. Color, collar, cut—the possible interpretations of all were painstakingly identified and assessed, and by the time I chose the white, slightly stretched out, long-sleeved, V-neck cotton shirt, I realized I was in an outfit nearly identical to the one I’d worn three days earlier, when I’d set out to see Delta and wound up at Bar Six with Gregory.

  “Take a deep breath,” Mercedes reminded me as I escorted her and her finery to the door. “Drink some juice. Put your feet up. You still have over an hour. You’re fine.”

  “It shouldn’t be this hard,” I said, unable to keep the whine out of my voice. “It’s so easy for you and Dover. Why can’t I fall in love with someone who wants what I want?”

  She shook her head, sending her mini-dreads bouncing. “Maybe you should have given yourself more than three months to find an alternative.”

  I shot her an injured look.

  “But that’s why the two-week cap is a great plan,” she added.

  “You really think it is?” I said hopefully.

  “For all of us.”

  I socked her. “You’d tell me if this was a dumb idea, right?”

  “First in line,” she assured me, picking up her viola case. “Seriously, this way you can get over him and find someone who fits the bill.”

  I felt my vital organs seize up at the suggestion.

  “You think that’s how this will turn out?” I said shakily.

  She looked at me sharply. “Does the thought of losing him again make you nauseous?”

  “Completely.”

  “And he still insists on kids and you still refuse?”

  “Last I checked.”

  She opened the door and tapped her fingers against it, unconsciously performing an excerpt from the evening’s program. “This really sucks. Just as much as it did in June.”

  Embarrassment made my face grow hot. “I hope my problems aren’t boring you, Mrs. Movie Star with the perfect husband who could afford to hire someone to wipe away his drool every time he looks at you.”

  Mercedes was unfazed. “Movie star is the one thing that keeps him from being perfect. And I’m not bored, toots. It’s just hard to see you struggling all over again. Really hard. For all of us.”

  I rubbed at my brow with both hands. “I know. And I’m sorry to drag you guys into this again.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said brightly, giving me a quick hug. “That’s what we’re here for. But, like I said, it’s also why we’re enthusiastic about the deadline.”

  “What deadline?” said a breathless voice. My mother appeared, Lycra-clad and red-faced, on my landing. “Mercedes, darling! How are you!” she cheered.

  Mercedes curtsied from her great height.

  “I’d hug you, Bella, but not in the silk.”

  “Oh, I know, I’m all ick,” my mother said, pulling at her silvery French braids in an incongruously schoolgirl gesture. “Ollie and I kickboxed and then jogged back. He stopped off at Chelsea Market for ciabatta and some kind of pumpkin spread he read about on a spread blog: He’s discovered how to make technology work for him. So what’s on your menu tonight?”

  “Brahms, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Vivaldi.”

  “Smorgasbord!”

  “All that’s missing is a roast ham and some mead,” Mercedes agreed. “Okay, ladies, I’m off. Good luck,” she said quietly as she hugged me again.

  My mother and I watched her glide carefully down the stairs.

  “I love that girl,” my mom said, snapping her shirt against her skin. “Always have. I hope that Carter Dover guy is treating her right.”

  “Dover Carter,” I corrected her. “And he adores her.”

  “Excellent news. Only the best men for my Sterling Girls. I’m so glad they’re all finding the right partners.”

  Eject! Eject! Escape hatch! Locate parachute!

  “Okay, well, I’ve got some work to do and then I’m gonna go meet Macy,” I lied.

  “Uh-huh.” My mother put her hand on the banister, lifting my hopes for her quick departure. “Hey, you know who I saw the other day?”

  I waited, raising my eyebrows in a simulation of interest.

  “Gregory. He seems to be back.”

  Subtlety, thy name is not Bella Zuckerman.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess I’d heard he’s back in New York.” I could match her parry for parry in the battle of the absurd.

  “Back in your apartment.”

  “Mom. Stop. Just stop.”

  But clonk went the drawbridge.

  “Zephyr, we can’t go through this again!” she cried dramatically.

  “We?” I inhaled through my teeth and strode into my living room. She followed me inside and closed the door. “This is not your problem, last I checked!” In a far corner of my brain, though, I thought of my dating-by-committee approach and conceded that I would do well to thin out my army the next time I waged romantic battle.

  “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best choice of words, but, you know, we get attached.”

  “What, the royal ‘we’?” I spat, plopping defiantly onto the sofa and crossing my arms. I glared at the dying fern sitting on the floor, its brown leaves brushing the cushions.

  “Zephyr.” She perched across from me on the coffee table and put her hand on my knee. “You can act like I have no right to feel anything about this, but that would be childish. We’ve opened up to Gregory, we love him, and we’re trying to see your side of things, but honestly …” She trailed off.

  I stared at her, incredulous, and as nervous as if my toes were curled over the lip of a canyon: We hadn’t ever directly broached the subject of her genetic legacy, though she’d made her feelings abundantly clear.

  “Honestly what?” I said coldly.

  She moved her jaw from side to side, deciding how far she would go.

  “Honestly? Honestly, I didn’t object when you dropped out of Hopkins—”

  “Ha!”

  “And I kept quiet when you decided not to go to law school—”

  “Revisionist history!” I declared to imaginary spectators.

  “The point is, I let you make mistakes. I do, Zephyr. Because I respect you. And because you can go back to med school at the age of sixty if you want. But this? This you can not undo if you change your mind.” She squeezed my knee. I moved so that her hand flopped off.

  “I’m not going to—”

  “Yes. You are going to change your mind.”

  I swayed back as if she had struck me.

  “You’re acting as if I’m a child,” I said quietly.

  “Well, you’re acting like one. And if you never become a parent, you will always be one.”

  I blinked slowly at her.

  “You did not really just say that.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have, but I did.” She stood up and rubbed hard at her temples. It irritated me to recognize how many of her gestures I’d inherited. “Zephyr, do you see any limitations Daddy and I have had to accept because of you and Gid? Did we not travel? Do I not have a career? Do you think he and I aren’t romantic—”

  “Gross,” I said, and immediately regretted it. The epitome of a childish reaction.

  “Are you afraid you’re not selfless enough? Is that it? Because, honey, every parent is worried they won’t be able to give enough, but I know you. I know what a big
heart you—”

  “See, no, right there!” I interrupted. “Of course I could be selfless enough. It’s that I don’t want to be selfless.”

  My mother shrank back in horror. I’d never imagined being sucked into such a riptide of parental disappointment, but, to my surprise, I kept breathing and the clocks kept ticking and the horns outside kept honking.

  “Then I really don’t understand,” she whispered.

  I plucked a dead leaf off the plant and traced its veins, trying to find the perfect words. “It’s not just the sleepless nights and the whining and the getting sick. I could probably handle that. It’s that they’re always there. Forever. You have to dress them in weather-appropriate clothing and feed them on a regular basis and get them playdates and make sure they don’t become Hitler or someone who goes on Wife Swap. There’s homework and there’s social backstabbing: I don’t want to live through the cruelty of thirteen-year-old girls again.” My insides lurched at the very thought. “Your life as you know it is gone. No spontaneity, not enough money or time for plays and concerts and trips.” I resented her for making me spell it out; it sounded so shallow, broken down into its parts. “It’s a kind of death,” I concluded.

  “Jesus, Zephyr, I’m not talking about evangelical reproduction. I’m talking about one or two kids.” A vein in her forehead was pulsing.

  I shook my head.

  “So what are you going to do instead?”

  I held my palms upward in an angry question.

  “You have to give, Zephyr. There are no free rides on this earth.”

  “I do give,” I protested, thinking of my occasional visits to the nursing home, though even I knew I couldn’t count this last one—an interrogation—as community service.

  “You know, it’s actually easier to give to your own kids than to try to save the world.”

  “Those are my choices?” I crumbled the dead fern in my palm and wiped it on the cushion. I thought enviously of Macy, with her long list of volunteer organizations. Macy had a better sense of responsibility than plenty of parents. Whatever her character flaws and mysteries, she was a certifiable grown-up.

  “You’re a loving, giving person, Zeph. I’m glad you devote so much to your work and to your friends. But I think—no, I know that there’s going to come a day when you’ll wish you had given more. And gotten more. You have no idea, Zephyr, what you’d be missing.” Her voice cracked.

  I shook my head, bracing myself against her tears. “Are you going to give Gideon this hard a time?”

  She pressed her fingers against her eyes. “If he comes up with the same stu—I mean the same idea, yes. But as far as I know, he hasn’t ruled out parenthood.”

  “Would you leave me alone if he popped out a few grandkids?” I asked, and began weighing potential incentives. When I was in fifth grade and Gideon was in second, he got me to pay him fifty cents every day to make my lunch. Surely we could work out a deal now.

  “No. It’s not about giving Daddy and me grandkids.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not, Zephyr,” she said softly. “It’s about your happiness.”

  “I’m so done with this conversation,” I informed her.

  “As am I,” she sighed, heading for the door. She had never, not once in my entire life, left me without a hug. But now she simply let herself out and shut the door behind her, which stung more than anything she’d just said.

  I toppled facedown on the couch, feeling my throat ache and my eyes sting. A few tears slipped out, tears of anger, self-doubt, and anger about the self-doubt. There was a light tap on the door. I sat up quickly and wiped my eyes, trying to look merely angry.

  “What?” I yelled.

  “Honey?”

  Maybe she wanted to apologize. Or at least open the door for a hug.

  “What?” I yelled again.

  “Can I make a suggestion? Change your clothes before you go out. Those jeans look ragged and that shirt is all stretched out.”

  Chapter 13

  Gregory had arrived with flowers—lovely—and announced that Barbuto was booked—understandable—but that a restaurant was kind of a boring date and since he had two more punches left on his ten-visit card to the Polish–Czech baths on East 6th, why didn’t we go there instead? While I tried to hide my disappointment, he reminded me that the two owners operated on alternate weeks and that his card was valid only for Stanislav’s weeks. This being one of Stanislav’s weeks … Gregory spread his arms as if to say, Well, the stars are aligned.

  I recognized that look of oblivious optimism—my dad had invented it—and knew I’d be spending my evening surrounded by two thousand pounds of hot stone in an Eastern European establishment that prided itself on not being overly solicitous of its customers. And so here I was, at nine o’clock on a coed night, crammed alongside eight sweaty strangers with only my Miraclesuit to remind me that I was not on the subway.

  But it turned out that a schvitz in a dark down-at-the-heels spa, punctuated by a few buckets of icy water over my head, was exactly what my scrambled brain and shaky heart needed. Between trying to wrap my head around the fact that I had an attempted murder case on my hands and trying to calculate who was less likely to flee their respective institutions first—Samantha or Jeremy—while trying to recover from the stour with my mother and also avoiding thinking about how extensively I’d blown my cover at the hotel, I was feeling as though all roads had arrived at the same intersection. It was an intersection jammed with stalled cars, blaring emergency vehicles, smashed traffic lights, and even some honking geese. If I didn’t proceed with great caution, I’d definitely have some human casualties to answer for.

  The darkness and nearly unbearable heat calmed me, as did having a crack NYPD detective with whom to dissect the case. I told Gregory everything, forgetting the sweat pooling in my cleavage, dripping behind my knees, drenching my scalp. It was a relief to unload, especially after the effort of keeping my mouth shut around Macy and Lucy. I began with Ballard McKenzie’s missing money, my inability to find anything unusual in the hotel’s accounting, and Hutchinson McKenzie’s inability to tolerate my presence. Then I recounted the night of the drunken Kiwis, Jeremy’s brush with death, my enlightening trip to Samantha’s hotel room, and her subsequent confession—if you could call a meeting yielding precious little information a confession—at the nursing home. I told him about Jeremy’s genuine surprise upon learning that Samantha had received half a million dollars from his company, and I described Jeremy’s threat and Pippa’s concern for my safety. I also mentioned Zelda Herman, the hotel guest who had had an appointment at Summa earlier that week, even though I wasn’t sure it meant anything; Jeremy might have been throwing some business to his family by recommending the hotel to people doing business with Summa—whatever that business might be. The only detail I omitted was the date with the firefighter immediately following Jeremy’s egress in an ambulance.

  And even though a hirsute woman was being slathered with Dead Sea mud in a far corner of the room, and even though a former mayor was (willingly) being beaten with a platza—a broom made of oak leaves, dripping with olive oil—just ten feet from us, Gregory gave me his full attention. He listened like no other person I knew, besides my parents. It was genuine listening, not the glazed-over kind some men perfected after being accused by ex-girlfriends of not listening. He interjected with questions, but not too often, and they were questions that helped me think, not just intended to showcase his smarts. He reassured me that I wasn’t taking too long to collar Samantha and reminded me of the case that had brought us together: His nervous-nelly boss had been so anxious for Gregory to make an arrest on a small bid-rigging scam that Gregory was thwarted in his pursuit of an entire crime family.

  “So one other piece in all this,” I continued as the mayor turned onto his back with a grunt, “or it might be a piece, I don’t know, is some garbage Jeremy was holding when the ambulance came.”

  I didn’t admit that I’d fo
rgotten the two receipts and the crumpled hotel stationery until an hour earlier, in the women’s locker room. The jeans that my committee had selected with such care (time wasted given that I’d be trading my pollo al forno and pinot grigio for some cherry pierogies and a bowl of borscht) were the same ones I’d changed into after my shift on Saturday night. I’d shoved the scraps into a back pocket, where they’d remained until they appeared on the damp floor in front of locker 120. In addition to mishandling potential evidence, I was also guilty of pushing the boundaries of acceptable laundry behavior.

  “Garbage? From the room you found him in?” Gregory uselessly wiped his chest with a soggy towel.

  “It seems like it, but I don’t know. No, wait, it definitely was. The pharmacy credit-card receipt had the husband’s name on it—Martin Whitcomb.”

  “And Samantha said Jeremy headed straight for their room after he saw the Whitcombs say goodbye to the bartender?”

  I held my hands up: I had no idea if these pieces made a complete puzzle.

  “Receipt and what else?”

  “Two receipts. And some hotel stationery with a phone number I traced to Large Tomato Walking Tours. Nothing suspicious.”

  Gregory stretched, leaning away so that his armpits wouldn’t be staring me in the face. Ever the gentleman.

  “Well, clearly you need to pay Summa a visit while Jeremy’s still trapped at Bellevue—”

  “Maybe call Zelda Herman and see what she can tell me first?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was gonna suggest. So you don’t go in blind.”

  “And take a look at the Whitcombs’ reservation,” I added, making a verbal to-do list. “See if there’s anything in the notes about what they were doing in town.”

  “And tell your boss you need twenty-four–seven on Hodges and Wedge,” he reminded me as he stood up. He pretended to pant. “I think I need a break.”