“He called me at seven thirty,” Uncle Dirk said. He’d finished his coffee and was ready to get back to work. He stood in the doorway, shifting from side to side. “I picked him up, brought him here, watched him answer the phone all day hoping it would be her.” The older man shook his head, maybe disgusted that Randy had been blown off by a woman.

  “You were worried,” Perry said.

  “Hell, yes, I was worried.” Randy looked angry, embarrassed, and resentful all at the same time. “I shoulda gotten up to go with her, or made her stay. I shoulda . . . I don’t know what I shoulda done. Something.”

  “Did the motel desk clerk say that Angel herself had come back to get her things?”

  “No. When I went straight to the room, I found out it was locked, and her car wasn’t there. I went to the office to see if she’d checked out.”

  “Had she?”

  “He told me after he left the office for a second to go to the john, he came back and found the key on the counter. The maid told him the room had been cleaned out when she went in to make the bed.”

  “That car isn’t fixing itself,” Uncle Dirk said abruptly. Apparently, he was tired of Angel and her problems, or maybe Perry’s disruption of the shop routine. He went out into the bay after shooting a pointed glance at his nephew.

  “Yeah,” Randy said, “I gotta get to work. Listen, I hope you find Angel. She’s world class in the sack, and I . . . yeah, I feel kind of bad about her going out into the night like that. At the time I didn’t think anything of it,” he said, changing his tune, “just mysterious rich-people shit. But now . . . ” He shrugged again.

  “Thanks for your help,” Perry said.

  “Yeah, right,” Randy said heavily, and went back to work.

  Perry hunched down into his trench coat again for the short sprint to his car. The rain was still pelting down, and Perry felt cold to his bones. He sat in thought for a moment, then pulled out his cell phone to call Henry Watson. When he’d been on the force, he and Henry had been close, and after Perry had become a private eye they’d cautiously maintained a friendship.

  “Watson,” said a gruff voice. In the background, there was a lot of noise. With the pounding of the rain on the car at his end, Perry could barely make out what Henry was saying.

  “You got a minute?” Perry said loudly.

  “Let me get out of this,” Henry said, and a moment later the noise abated to a tolerable level. “I was on the street,” Henry explained. “I’m in a lobby now.”

  Perry said, “I need a favor, and I’ll tell you why.” As briefly as possible, he explained the situation to the cop.

  “So you want me to run a check on this Randy Hyde?”

  “Yeah, if you can. I’ll owe you the best bottle of Scotch you can find.”

  “I can find a pretty good bottle.”

  “I’m counting on it. This Randy, he seems genuinely concerned about Angel, but on the other hand, he’s quick with the kicks and punches. Lots of room for something bad to have happened. And can you run her mother and father? Julia Drusilla and Norman Loki? I can’t imagine them having records, except maybe Loki for pot, but the minute you don’t check—”

  “Yeah, it’ll come back to bite you on the ass,” Henry said. “Okay. In my copious spare time.”

  They chatted for a minute more, Perry asking after Henry’s new kid and new wife, Henry admitting they were all doing great and trying not to sound as proud as he was of his wife’s career and his kid’s being gifted. Just as the conversation was winding down, Henry said, “Wait a minute! I know a local out there, on the force. We were together at a gunshot-wound seminar. His name’s Arthur Gawain, and he’s a strange bird. But I think he’s a good cop. Give him a call. He should definitely know where the bodies are buried in East Hampton.”

  “Thanks,” Perry said. Some local insight could be a big help. The area cops always knew plenty of stories that never made it into a courtroom. Perry had gotten tight with a couple of cops in Southampton when he was on the Derace McDonald case, but Southampton was not East Hampton, and that case had been two years ago. He was thankful for the new contact. “Got his number?”

  He scribbled it down as Henry read it off. “Thanks, Henry, and give my love to Maria,” he said.

  When he’d hung up, he sat in the car for a moment. Through the small windows in the doors of the service bay, he could see movement, and he knew Randy and Dirk were back at work. As he himself should be. With a sigh, he raised his phone and dialed Detective Arthur Gawain.

  6

  SARAH WEINMAN

  Perry Cristo mentally kicked himself as he got back onto Route 27. Here he’d just spent the past thirty minutes at an auto shop and it had slipped his mind to check the needle on the gas gauge. It was at the three-quarter line, enough to get him to the motel, and maybe fifty miles after that, but not much more. Normally he wouldn’t care where he filled up the car, but February in Montauk was more damp and bone chilling than in the city, which was saying something. And the light disappeared early enough to make the prospect of freezing his ass off to fill the gas tank that much more unpleasant.

  But this was the Hamptons, and there wouldn’t be another gas station for ten miles. Fuck it, Perry thought, might as well get to the motel and figure things out from there. That strategy had worked for him in the past, as a cop, and it worked still as a detective without the badge. He’d only had a vague sense of what to ask Randy Hyde at the auto shop, and the kid had still told him something important. They almost always did, no matter how hard they tried to hide things. Sometimes it took a little extra cajoling, a longer beat of silence they couldn’t bear to leave unfilled, but inevitably something spilled out. Even the smallest nuggets paid off in the most unexpected ways.

  Now, thanks to Randy, Perry was on his way to a place he’d never visited but had certainly heard of before. The Memory Motel. He wondered if Angel was a Stones fan, too, if their song had lodged in the back of her memory, or if she and Randy had shacked up in a room there because it was convenient. There was no point in asking Randy about it; the kid, once he’d spilled the info to Perry, had nothing else to give. It had been the same, even more so, with Lilith, the artist. Now there was a piece of work. He still heard her smooth-talking seduction in his head. For someone who chose to live the artist’s isolated life, Lilith had gone out of her way to be memorable. Plus, she’d lied to his face about not knowing Randy Hyde when she knew him in the way that counted most. Then again, maybe Randy had been lying about fucking her. Everyone lied. Why did it always come down to that?

  Perry looked down at the GPS he’d installed to make sure he hadn’t missed the turnoff. He didn’t like to rely on the device’s artificial voice. Too prim, too proper, too grating, and since he liked long drives to work through the thorny knots that cases always presented him, hearing words with a robotic sound pissed him off even more. And more often than not, the voice was wrong, and “recalculating” was really code for “where the fuck are we.”

  Perry saw he had another three miles to go. But as he looked down, he felt something whisper up his spine. He glanced in the rearview mirror, but there was nothing behind him. No cars ahead, either. He’d had that feeling before, and it was never good. The case was already starting to move away from simple math to more complicated algebra, but he wasn’t ready to admit there might be a darker force lurking. And if there was, he hoped he could at least fill up the gas tank.

  The turnoff arrived—as always, a hair sooner than Perry anticipated—and he skidded a bit before hitting his mark. And there it was, the Memory Motel, the joint where Mick Jagger sang about hanging with Hannah baby, of curved nose and teeth. Then Perry’s mind drifted to a very different memory, of his ex-wife’s nose curving above her laughing mouth. He shook his head to make the image disappear. Not the time, not the place.

  This place, though, didn’t live up to the song. It was trying too hard to be respectable. The old gaudy sign was gone, replaced by some upscale piece of crap that pretended toward upward mobility. Two statues stood on either side of the door, and when Perry went up close he won the bet with himself: they were gargoyles, the ugliest kind. He’d heard the Memory had been sold a couple of years ago to one of those tech billionaires who claimed he was going to do something “major” with it. But those plans had been cut off at some point. The outside was in dire need of a paint job, and the lobby walls were covered in a greenish tinge that couldn’t be anything else but moss.

  Perry was alone in the lobby. He sniffed at the air, a stale mix of booze and cigarettes. As he did so a voice from behind him said, “What are you, a health inspector?”

  Perry turned. The man’s voice was “Long-Guyland,” but the face was a generation and a half younger, at least, than he’d expected. Tattoos covered both of the man’s arms, and while Perry hoped to hell never to see underneath the all-black garb, he was sure there was more ink on the guy’s torso and legs.

  “Nope. Just a visitor. You responsible for the smell?”

  The man folded his arms and glowered. It would have been pitiful because of the other man’s babyish, fine-boned face framed by wispy blond hair, but Perry knew better. He’d been young once, too, with a few bar fights under his belt. He’d made sure not to get his ass kicked much, but the one time he hadn’t been able to avoid it was because of a guy like this one, barely suppressed rage ready to boil over at the next possible customer.

  “You could say that. So what can I do for you?” he asked with undisguised hostility.

  Perry took a long breath. There was no sense in being anything other than calm. “I’m going to take something out of my pocket. Are you the kind of guy who flinches when someone does that, or will you stay quiet?”

  As he’d expected, the tattooed man flinched at the question. How much time he’d done and where, Perry wasn’t about to ask.

  “I’ll stay quiet,” the other man said, the hostility ebbing a little.

  “Good.” Perry took out his PI license. On this guy, using expired NYPD credentials, like he had for other cases in the past, wouldn’t work. He let the other man take his time examining the laminated card. “I’m tracking the movements of a girl named Angelina Loki. Know her?”

  “It’s my business to know,” the tattooed man said. “I manage the place.” The man extended his hand and let out a hearty chuckle. “Elisha Hook. Man, I never thought I’d meet a guy with a more ridiculous first name than mine. Pericles?”

  “Yeah, and that was reserved for only one person: my mother. Everyone else calls me Perry. Anyway, how long have you been the manager here?”

  “Three years. Took over from my dad, who took it over from his dad. Otherwise, the new owners would have tossed me out with the trash, like they did with so much shit around here.”

  “The sign?”

  “The sign. The chandeliers. The railings. You name it. They said they wanted to make it a classier joint. Instead, a week doesn’t go by before some asshole declares himself cock of the walk in the bar and we have to boot him out. Last Saturday was terrible. This one spic fills himself up with Jägermeister and throws a roundhouse on the black guy sitting next to him. For no reason. We never used to need bouncers around here. Now the economy’s made everybody more crazy.” For extra emphasis, Hook circled his temple with his left index finger.

  Perry didn’t tune out Elisha Hook, but his little speech was useless. Now Perry knew Hook would ramble on unchecked if he didn’t steer the conversation in the direction he wanted. When Hook took a breath, Perry found his opening.

  “But back to Angel Loki.”

  “Yeah, what about her?” Hook’s face changed, pupils widening with anticipation.

  “So you do know her?”

  The light in Hook’s eyes dimmed, and he shifted uncomfortably. “Depends on what you mean by knowing.”

  “Well, she was here at the Memory?”

  Hook paused, as if he didn’t know how to phrase what he was going to say next. Perry’s ears pricked up, but Hook didn’t break the silence.

  “She was here, then?” Perry asked. “For how long?”

  “Couple of weeks, on and off. Mostly off,” Hook said, his voice dropping to nearly nothing.

  “Sounds like she made an impression on you.”

  “You seen her?” Hook upped his volume. “Photos don’t do that girl justice. She has . . . not sure how to describe it exactly, but she has something. So many celebrity big shots come and go around here, and so I know how to spot it.”

  “Star quality, you mean?”

  “Sure,” said Hook, “if that’s how you want to put it. That girl, she had it. She could walk into a room, stay for thirty seconds, tops, and everyone would remember. I saw it happen in the bar a couple of nights. Guys and gals alike, they all wanted to know who she was and she wasn’t talking to any of ’em.” Hook’s face scrunched up like he was trying to stave off a bad memory.

  “So she didn’t talk to you, then,” said Perry. His voice had softened, too, not by design, but because the situation seemed to call for it. Something about Hook didn’t quite sit right, and as the other man launched into an embellishment of what was clearly an incidental encounter—beautiful woman, clearly unavailable and unattainable, only speaks when she needs to check in, check out, or call up for room service—Perry realized what it was: Hook had the appearance, and the first initial presentation, of a man who’d done violence, but he didn’t have the physical bearing, that weird pheromone all hyped-up types give off, of a true offender. It was as if he pretended to a rap sheet of felonies when he was lucky to have third-degree misdemeanors, at best. Perry figured Hook had been dealing with this disconnect his whole life.

  “I see,” Perry said, fighting off a creeping discomfort. “When did she leave?”

  Hook did a double take. “Oh, right. Really early in the morning. Like she was just waiting for the sun to come up to get out of town. Which was weird. She was more the type to show up in the bar at the tail end of last call.”

  “When everyone would look at her but she wouldn’t give them the time of day,” said Perry.

  “Something like that.”

  “How did she seem when she left? In a hurry? Scared? Happy?”

  “Definitely in a hurry,” Hook said. “Scared? Nah, I wouldn’t say that, but she wasn’t calm, either. Maybe she was on something. I don’t know, and I don’t check. But that early, hers was the only car zooming off onto the highway. Hell of a motor on it, too.”

  “That’s the Memory Motel policy: to keep clear but watch everybody?”

  Hook laughed without any trace of humor. “Is that it?” The question offered a single response. Perry went for it because there was no other choice.

  “For now, but I may be in touch.” Perry fished out a business card and put it on the desk. Hook didn’t take it, his arms folded, as they were when they first started talking. “Thank you for your time.”

  But to Perry’s surprise, the other man hesitated, his face growing sheepish. Perry waited a beat. “Don’t tell anyone what I told you, okay?” Hook muttered.

  “Why’s that?”

  Now Hook was blushing full-on. “I, ah, might have let on something else to the guys. You know, after she left. When it was late, in the bar.”

  Perry did everything in his power not to burst into a grin. “I won’t tell a soul,” he said.

  Hook wasn’t done. “I mean it. It took a hell of a lot of work for me to build my reputation back up in this part of town. Everyone thought I was some kind of pussy. It never mattered what I did.” He held out his arms, showing off the elaborate art on it as he rotated his forearms. “It never mattered what I inked. My old man gave me the business, but if he’d found any other way, he would have. There’s nobody else to run this motel. Just me. And now that things are starting to fall apart, who’s going to take my place?”

  Then the man shifted again, like he was snapping out of a trance. His eyes zeroed in on Perry’s, and the PI knew an exit line when he saw it approach like a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball.

  Perry mumbled good-bye and left Hook to his fantasies of manhood and thwarted romance. Sometimes that’s all a man ever gets.

  But as he got back into his car and found his way back to the Montauk Highway, Perry wondered if he had played the scene right. By his reckoning, Elisha Hook was the last guy to see Angel. He’d corroborated Randy’s story of the on-and-off timetable, but no one else saw Angel leave. For good measure Cristo had peeked into the adjacent bar, to see if he might question one of the bartenders, but it wasn’t set to open for another hour.

  The rain was still pissing down and the temperature had dropped another five degrees at least while Perry was talking to Hook, and he reached down to crank up the car’s heater to the max. As he did he caught a glimpse of headlights in his rearview mirror. His spine tingled again, but he had no place to stop the car. Perry drove another mile down the highway before he was sure there was a car behind him, keeping pace several lengths back, but conspicuous enough to indicate this was more of an announcement, not a stealth job.

  Why follow him?

  Perry peered into the mirror to see if he could make out anything about his new friend. The car was way too far away and the rain coming down too hard for him to discern any numbers on the plates, but the car was clearly boxy and black.

  At the next turnoff, for East Hampton, Perry veered a hard left and then another sharp right around Aboff’s paint store. He did so again. The car kept pace, though it dropped back a few more feet. But before then Perry saw it was, indeed, a black car. Midsize, a Toyota like one he rented for a job a few years back. There was mud on the plate, too. Intentional? Had to be. What the fuck? He’d only started looking for Angel this morning and already someone was on him. Well, whoever it was, Perry would have the last laugh. His car-evasion skills were legend, dating all the way back to his academy days.

  Here we go, he thought.

  Left, right, turns at the very last minute, rolling stops. Perry had to give the Toyota’s driver credit for keeping up, especially in the pouring rain, but he couldn’t be experienced at it—and definitely wouldn’t relish the expensive bill that would come due when the suspension blew out. Perry sighed. He could give another ten minutes to this crap—that was it.