Hotel No Tell Read online

  I bolted through the sliding doors with Tommy O. a few feet behind me. Inside, Asa was alone at the front desk.

  “Where is she, Asa?” I shouted.

  “Zephyr? Are you wearing makeup? And that suit—Oh my God, is that Dior? You look amazing!”

  “Where is she!” I was going to start crying if we’d lost her. I briefly thought of Zelda’s tattooed eyeliner.

  “Relax. She’s in the little girl’s room. We’re having a very nice chat, though she is really playing it cool. Pretending not to know this season’s colors. She is an excellent undercover—”

  At that moment, Paulina appeared from the direction of the bathroom, but when she saw me, she turned and headed for the stairs.

  “Freeze!” I screamed. “S.I.C.!”

  And then I pulled my gun, which, in retrospect, probably wasn’t strictly necessary, since Paulina had, in fact, frozen after my command. Asa yelped and dropped down behind the desk, the most sensible move he’d made in weeks.

  “Hands in the air,” Tommy added.

  Paulina did as she was told. So did the unfortunate guests who happened to emerge from the elevator at that moment.

  “S.I. what?” Asa asked from beneath the desk.

  “You’re under arrest,” I began, looking at Pippa for confirmation. She nodded, and Tommy produced cuffs. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will—”

  “What the hell is going on?” Hutchinson strode out of his office. He looked at me, in high heels and brandishing a gun, and did a double take. “Zephyr?” For once, he was speechless.

  “Is there a room we can use?” Tommy asked irritably in the direction of Asa, who lifted one finger and pointed at Hutchinson to identify him as the resident authority.

  Two minutes later we were installed in a ground-floor room, with Paulina, blond wig in shackled hands, perched indignantly on one of the beds. Pippa, Tommy, and I sat on the other bed, facing her.

  I finished the Miranda warnings. “Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer my questions without an attorney present?”

  “I don’t need a lawyer,” she sneered.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I’m smarter than any lawyer, and I’ve done nothing wrong. Ask me anything you want.”

  I touched the fake diamond digging into my clavicle, restarting transmission. A video wasn’t necessary, but as long as I was saddled with the equipment and a conniving suspect, it couldn’t hurt.

  “Say it again,” I instructed Paulina. “State your name and your intention to waive counsel.”

  She raised her eyebrows: amateurs. “And how will that help you?”

  I pointed to my necklace. “I’m a traveling show.”

  Paulina’s expression of surprise laced with grudging admiration was extremely gratifying.

  “Can I smoke?” Paulina demanded, after we had dispensed with formalities.

  “Of course not,” I told her.

  “Idiotic country,” she muttered.

  “Want some nicotine gum?” Tommy offered. Paulina glared at him, then opened her palm. She began chewing furiously and then, to my surprise, she let herself collapse sideways against the pillows, keeping her back rigid. It was a pose of resignation.

  “Okay,” I said, taking my own first deep breath in a couple of hours. “How about you tell us what we want to know.”

  Paulina was thirty-eight years old, originally from the Czech Republic, and had come to the United States on a full scholarship to Barnard. She went on to get her MBA at Columbia but, even armed with two of the best degrees in the country, she didn’t know what to do with herself. So she went to a What Color Is Your Parachute? seminar, where she met other highly educated but aimless graduates, including Jeremy Wedge. It surprised me to discover that the laissez-faire Lothario had ever entertained a moment’s doubt about his scientific destiny. At one point, he’d considered becoming a tree surgeon. In any case, he and Paulina began dating and fell in love. Or, rather, she fell in love. No, she was certain he had loved her, too. Anyway—she shrugged—it didn’t matter now.

  No, we agreed, it probably didn’t.

  With his expertise in genetics and his internship experience at a fertility lab, Jeremy supplied all the technical know-how for their nascent plan. Paulina brought to the partnership a head for business. Indeed, her acumen was astounding. Not only had she identified a commodity for which a certain market was willing to pay exorbitant prices—high-quality ova—and found a surefire way to keep supply plentiful—tell the donors it was only for research—but she’d even come up with the idea of making the eggs go twice the distance: They’d harvest seven or eight eggs from a donor and plant four in one recipient and four in another. So for the cost of fifteen thousand dollars to the donor, they were pulling in not just two hundred thousand on the other end, but sometimes four hundred thousand. They would have made a killing if they’d found only two recipients a year. As it was, they—Recherché—were doing two or three transfers a month.

  It was all going swimmingly until Jeremy took an eye to the donors: young, bright, beautiful. He came up with the idea of housing them in the family hotel, as a way to throw some business their way. (I’d been right about one hunch! That was definitely going in the report.) But then he was unable to resist the sight of the intelligent beauties alone at the bar, far from home, and so began hitting on them. Paulina said she didn’t care. She was hurt at first but soon concluded the romantic portion of their program and got over him.

  The problem was, she said, Jeremy became paranoid. No matter how many times she reassured him, he didn’t believe that she wasn’t angry. Paulina had shrewdly structured the business so that she was majority owner, and Jeremy grew afraid that she was going to turn him out into the cold world of unemployment. He began to steal from their operation. Nearly a million dollars.

  “A million?” I said sharply, glancing at Pippa. If this case didn’t connect to Ballard’s missing hundred grand, I was going to implode under the sheer force of frustration.

  Paulina shrugged. “We had plenty. I figured I’d let him take a bit, pretend I didn’t notice, and then maybe he’d feel he had a cushion and would calm down and stop on his own.”

  “How thoughtful of you.”

  “Yes, well, he didn’t stop, and I started to get annoyed.”

  “Anyone would,” I couldn’t resist quipping.

  “But then I thought about how to confront him. He was already so paranoid and crazy, there was no way he’d admit to stealing. I was nervous about what he’d do to me or the business if I brought it up.”

  “So you decided to kill him.”

  She flinched and cleared her throat.

  “Have him killed,” she clarified.

  None of us said anything.

  “This was maybe not such a good idea,” she conceded. “Perhaps a little too far.” Then she perked up and said hopefully, “Self-defense?”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” Tommy said.

  “We’ll get back to you hiring Samantha to kill Jeremy in a minute,” I said. “I need to ask you why—”

  “It was a brilliant idea,” Paulina interrupted.

  “Your egg scam?”

  “I do not like that word: ‘scam.’ It is a brilliant business model, but I meant using the Bernie Madoff list to find Mrs. Hodges. Don’t you think? I mean, really, I do understand motivation.”

  Kimiko Hodges, I thought, and almost burst out laughing. Do not laugh, Zephyr. This is anything but funny. This is one of the most ethically vile cases you will ever have the good fortune to encounter.

  “Congratulations,” I said, my voice choking with the effort of suppressing laughter. “But here’s my question. You could easily have run a legitimate business. You were this close.” I pinched my fingers together. “Why the ruse about the intelligence studies? Why not just solicit girls willing to have their eggs fertilized?”

  Paulina pushed her gum
into her cheek and sneered.

  “Because they’re so snotty about keeping their precious smart genes to themselves. You can’t possibly attain the quantity and quality that we do if they think some nice couple might benefit. Really, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. We simply took advantage of their selfishness.”

  “Is selfish worse than greedy?” Pippa asked suddenly, her voice steely with an anger that surprised me.

  Paulina looked at her, startled.

  “You could have run a legitimate business,” Pippa said, “if only you were willing to earn—and I use that term extremely loosely in your circumstance—a bit less. Instead, now we have, what—dozens? scores?—hundreds of young women who will need to be notified, whose lives will never be the same. We have families who will have to know their children were ill-got. It’s an ethical and legal quagmire of vast proportions. All because you wanted to make two hundred a pop instead of fifteen.”

  Paulina squared her shoulders but said nothing. For the first time since the capture, I thought of Lucy. Of Alan and Amanda. How would Lucy and Leonard feel once they learned they’d gotten their eggs under tainted circumstances?

  “So there’s no INH study? No studies of any kind?” I clarified.

  Paulina merely snorted at me.

  “Then why not take any woman’s eggs—no fancy degrees—and just lie about their credentials? Save yourself the trouble.”

  She opened her eyes wide in surprise. “That would be dishonest.”

  I was pretty sure that some scientist, at the INH or elsewhere, would pay a pretty penny to get a glimpse inside Paulina’s twisted three-ring circus of a brain. I glanced at my colleagues, who wore identical expressions of stupefaction.

  “Let me ask you something else, Paulina,” I said after I’d recovered from my own astonishment.

  “Please address me as Ms. Glantz.”

  “No, I don’t think I will. Paulina, you’re attractive, healthy, and in possession of two excellent degrees yourself. Did you ever donate your eggs?”

  I felt Tommy and Pippa stiffen with interest.

  Paulina regarded me coldly. “I didn’t need the money.”

  “Well, but you’re so interested in personal motivation,” I persisted. “I’d think, in the course of creating your business plan, you might have gone through the process yourself. You know, to understand your clients.”

  “You’d think wrong.”

  There was a knock on the door. Tommy got up and returned with Letitia Humphrey and Bobby Turato pushing Jeremy Wedge, hands cuffed, ahead of them. As usual, everything about Jeremy was bright red, but now he had deep circles under his eyes and appeared to have lost some extra padding during his stint at Bellevue.

  Behind them was Ballard McKenzie, his bald head shining and his bushy white eyebrows furrowed in anxiety. Hot on his tail was Hutchinson, who’d been lurking in the hall, outraged at his exclusion from our mysterious proceedings.

  “Why the hell would you come here, you stupid bitch?” Jeremy spat at Paulina by way of a greeting.

  “I figured you had cash. After I saw her,” she pointed to me, “I knew our accounts would be frozen.” She really was a very bright woman.

  Jeremy looked at me and pulled his chin down in surprise.

  “Zephyr? I didn’t recognize you.”

  That was the other line that would be repeated endlessly at the White Horse Tavern until it was etched into the story like handprints in cement. It was almost enough to make me stop shopping in thrift shops. Almost.

  I let Jeremy and Paulina snipe at each other for a while as they perched on the bed. The mattress was so thick that their feet barely touched the floor, making them look like two siblings bickering in their bedroom. Jeremy studiously avoided his uncle’s pleading face. If nothing else, the sight of Ballard McKenzie seemed to elicit from him some trace of shame.

  Jeremy possessed more business aptitude than Paulina had given him credit for. He had, in fact, used the hotel’s accounts to launder more than a million dollars from the Summa–Recherché operation. He’d done it perfectly for months but had finally slipped up and lost track of one hundred thousand dollars. He recorded the debit but not the credit, which was why Ballard noticed it as missing but why none of us could make it reconcile with the final balances. It was why there was no video of anyone tampering with the safe. Jeremy hadn’t actually stolen a dime from the hotel.

  And while he had made a point of having the lovely young donors stay at the Greenwich Village Hotel, he was careful to make sure the couples never did. So when Mr. and Mrs. Whitcomb of Akron, Ohio, just happened to choose the hotel over all the others in Manhattan, Jeremy kept vigil in the hotel’s public spaces to make sure they didn’t accidentally start chatting with the Summa donor who was staying there on the same two nights—the donor for whom he had drunk the lemon-flavored love potion.

  His conversation with the donor at the bar had been going well—he was over the moon to discover she was a Ph.D. candidate in economics, though he took issue with her adherence to the Chicago School—when he spotted the Whitcombs bidding farewell to Geraldine, the bartender. With a hasty apology to his would-be conquest, he fled to their room—room 502—to clear it of any evidence that might have exposed the purpose of their visit. This included emptying their garbage can. But just as he grabbed the scraps and prepared to return to the bar, Samantha Kimiko Hodges’s would-be-fatal love potion took effect.

  “Idiot,” Paulina muttered, when Jeremy was finished. She spat her gum into a tissue and put the wad on the bedside table. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ballard shift as he absorbed the final insult to this colossal injury.

  “Shrew,” Jeremy replied.

  “Ya both disgusting, so pipe down,” Tommy told them.

  “I’m done with them for now,” I announced. “Let’s go downtown.”

  “What could you possibly charge me with?” Paulina said huffily.

  Even Tommy’s eyes went wide.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “For starters, Paulina, you get accessory to an attempted murder. You both get scheme to defraud. There’s also larceny by false pretenses, forgery, money laundering, and mail fraud, I’d bet. I guarantee you a charge for each girl you stole from and every couple you swindled.”

  Jeremy and Paulina, at last, were too stunned to protest. When Letitia and Bobby nudged them, they stood up. Paulina’s eyes were expressionless, but Jeremy’s were wild, those of a trapped animal. I heard a small yelp come from Hutchinson’s direction as his cousin’s future disintegrated right in front of him. Ballard pushed his glasses to his forehead and pressed his fingers against his eyes. They shuffled out, gently escorted by my colleagues.

  I caught sight of Asa’s round, surprised face hovering at the entrance to the room. His mouth gaped as Jeremy passed him.

  “What are you staring at?” Jeremy snapped. Asa shrank back like a bullied kid.

  “Oh, Jeremy,” Ballard moaned quietly to himself, sinking down on the bed we’d vacated.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. McKenzie,” I said.

  “I promised my sister I’d look after him, and I failed.”

  “Mr. McKenzie, he’s thirty-five years old. I think you can confidently assume that he was no longer your—”

  “Oh, Amelia, I’m so sorry!” Ballard wailed, thrusting his forehead to his clasped hands.

  Pippa tapped me on the shoulder and nodded toward the door. Tommy came with us and we left the McKenzie men to their grief and betrayal.

  “Commish, the last time I was undercovah, you sent me to be an apprentice taxi dispatcha in Floral Park,” Tommy said the second we shut the door behind us. “Zepha gets down comfuddahs and mini-fridges. I think yuh playin’ favorites.”

  “O’Hara, how long do you think you would have lasted at the front desk fielding petty complaints from wealthy guests?”

  “Awwwww, c’mon, gimme some credit,” he chortled, digging his knuckles into my scalp in lieu of making any jovial physical contact
with Pippa, which was unthinkable.

  Speaking of credit, I was hoping for a tad myself. I solved a case! I just solved a case! I wanted to shout. Or had I simply been lucky, managed to be in the right places at the right times, like Tommy and his soda bread? And, really, did it matter? Was the key to some cases just sticking around and not giving up?

  “Well done, Zephyr,” Pippa said, picking up where my thoughts left off.

  I shrugged. “I was in the right places at the right times,” I said, hoping to be contradicted.

  “No, it was more than that. You persevered. You questioned Jeremy based on nothing more than some garbage scraps and an empty vial. You pursued Samantha and had the sense to search her room before it was too late. You pursued Zelda as a source when others might have dismissed her as irrelevant.”

  I thought about Zelda standing before me at the hotel desk just days earlier. I thought about all the young women who would need to be told they had biological children running around the world. To whom would that task fall? Certainly not me, and for that I was immensely grateful. Therapists and social workers would need to be enlisted. And who would tell the parents? Was I obligated to tell Lucy? Was I even allowed? For many people, this case would go on forever. The inherent incompleteness unsettled me.

  “Samantha!” I said suddenly.

  “Indeed,” Pippa said.

  “We need to go arrest her,” I said reluctantly.

  “I don’t imagine any of us relishes the prospect. I’ll have a word with Mr. McKenzie, and then O’Hara and I will go with you to the nursing home.” Pippa knocked on the suite door and let herself in.

  I finally noticed Asa, still standing with us in the corridor, listening to every word, his hands stuck to his chubby cheeks in shock.

  “Zephyr, you’re a … cop?” he said with wonder.

  Tommy guffawed.

  “No, a peace officer. I work for the Special Investigations Commission.”

  “Is that like a cop?”

  “Kind of,” I relented.

  “So … so …” The squeaky wheels of his brain churned as he revisited our interactions over the past month. “Who knew?”