Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

York. But you know how it is—she always missed him. Why do we always fall in love with bad guys?” She turned to me. “No offense.” She turned back to Dehan. “Anyways, she says she’s called him and she’s going to go and see him. He says he misses her and he wants her back. Says he’s changed, there’s no more sleeping around and now he’s going to treat her right—yuh, right! Like we would believe that! Whatever! She said she was going to go see him.”

“In New York?”

“Yeah. That’s where he lived.”

“This guy have a name?”

She puffed out her cheeks and blew. “Pffff… One of those boring names.”

Dehan smiled. “A boring name?”

“You know, normal, like John.” Again she looked at me. “No offense.” I winked at her, and she turned back to Dehan. “Bob, Steve… It might have been Steve.”

“Did she ever mention the name Sanders to you, Gloria? G. Sanders?”

She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t think so, but it was two years ago. All I know is that she was really excited because she’d got this part to play, and it was going to make her really successful and rich. And her ex had asked her to get back with him. We met for a girls’ night out, and I never seen her again. I figured she’d got rich and forgotten all about me. You sure that’s not what happened?”

Dehan smiled at her. It was a sad smile. “Pretty sure, Gloria.”

We left her looking sad and naked on her stool, with all her makeup and her reflection behind her.

We stepped out into the street. Evening was tingeing the air. Headlamps and streetlamps were coming on. I rested my ass against the trunk of the Mustang and looked down the hill. Dehan stood in front of me and leaned against the lamppost.

I sighed. “We have two, maybe three key people here.” I lifted my hands and looked at them, like I was positioning pieces on a board. “We’ve got Steve. He can’t help us because he’s dead, and in any case, I don’t get the feeling he knew anything until it was too late. Tammy told Gloria Steve had asked her to go back with him, but I don’t believe that. It sounds to me like Tammy was making all the running. She was the one who was suddenly excited and talking crazy, making plans.”

Dehan nodded. “I agree. So the question is, what happened to make her excited?”

“What happened was the two other people, Mr. G. Sanders and the mystery millionaire. The mystery millionaire can’t help us because right now we have no idea who he is, and we have no immediate way of finding out. Which leaves us Mr. G. Sanders.” I paused, staring at Dehan’s face. She stared back. It was something we did sometimes to help us think. “And when you think about it,” I said after a moment, “Everything starts with Mr. G. Sanders.”

“Yup. So we need to go and talk to the Hyatt Regency.”

I scowled. “They will not be cooperative.” I opened the door and got in. “Let’s go prod them, see what they do.”

She got in next to me. “Then I want to eat, overlooking the Bay. What was that place we ate at when we were on the Nelson Hernandez case?”

I smiled and fired up the big V8. “The Epic Steak House.”

As I pulled out into the traffic, she said, with a kind of casual air, “I think an epic steak might just inspire us. What do you think?”

“I think we are going to go and poke the security manager at the Hyatt and see what he does, and after that we are going to go and have a couple of epic steaks.”

“You’re the man, Stone.”

“I am the man.”

Six

We stepped through the glass doors into a set from Mad Max—the hotel. Everything was brown and brass and seemed to be the wrong shape for what it was. It was as though Salvador Dali had designed it during his steampunk period. We eventually worked out where the reception desk was and approached it through giant spheres and cubes that turned out to be cubicles where people could sit and talk, and probably make dimensional shifts. A bank of elevators like brass bullets vaguely reminded me of a gigantic church organ.

A guy with a name tag that said “Pierre,” but who was probably called Bobby Brown, smiled at Dehan and said, “Meh ah ’elp you, mademoiselle?”

She leaned on the desk with her elbows and gave him a wink. “Yeah, we are police officers, and we would like to talk to the head of security.”

He looked at her the way a man looks at a glass he thought contained fine old whiskey, only to discover it was a urine sample. He gathered his dignity about him and used the internal phone. A couple of minutes later, a man of about fifty with Navy Seal written all over him came striding across the lobby. It is hard to stride sedately, but he managed it. His face smiled at us while his little blue eyes calibrated us.

“Don’t show me your badges,” he said as he took Dehan’s hand in both of his. “You don’t come to the Hyatt,” he added, laughing and shaking my hand warmly, “to see cops flashing badges. Come to my office.”

He led us through the vast space, past gigantic orbs and blocks that served no apparent purpose, to a brown door in a brown wall. He opened it and let us in. His office was not designed by anybody who had been abusing chemicals. It was Swedish functional in vinyl and aluminum.

He sat behind his desk and said, “May I see some IDs?”

We showed him our badges. He took them and examined them meticulously, then stared at us