The manager of the hotel, Michelle Tillman, came out and showed me a folder with all the benefits and special rates that the Crown Group offered. We talked for about ten minutes or so.
“Can you show me the bar, Ms. Tillman?” I asked. “You know, I find that our members, and those that often employ their talents, like to meet while, um, lubricated.”
Tillman was a café au lait — colored woman who had the pleasing figure that unmarried professional workingwomen had to maintain. She smiled knowingly and led the way.
When we approached the entrance to the bar my heart rate increased. I might have been going into a life-and-death situation and so my body wanted to give me all the help that it could.
Crown Bar was a perfectly round room maybe a hundred feet in diameter. The central floor was a yard lower than the arc bar that occupied the northern quadrant of the circle. There were three bartenders. The barstools were fewer than half filled because most of the customers were sitting at the thirty small round tables three feet below.
Johnny sat at a table near the bar.
I looked up and saw our quarry seated on one of the barstools. In front of him was a newspaper, a deli sandwich of some type, and a frosty glass mug of beer.
“As you can see,” Michelle Tillman was saying, “this room can hold more than a hundred people. At night we have live music, usually jazz. But it’s never so loud that it interferes with conversation.”
I looked around and nodded, noting at least two men who might have been bodyguards. One wore a tan suit that accented his broad shoulders and the other had a burgundy jacket and black slacks. Both men were sitting alone down in the people pit. Even if they were security they didn’t have to be working for Ericson. This was Washington, DC. There might have been half a dozen people in that room who needed protection.
“Do you mind if I sit at the bar?” I said. “To go over the information you gave me?”
“Of course,” she said forcefully.
She gestured with her left hand and after a moment of looking I took the vacant barstool next to my target. Michelle went to one of the bartenders, pointed at me, and told him to lubricate me — no doubt. She waved good-bye and I waved back.
I had made it to Melbourne Westmount Ericson’s side with an invitation from the establishment he frequented. Any security would have noticed and downgraded my presence from potential threat to unlikely danger.
“What can I get you, Mr. Brownley?” the head mixologist asked, using the name on my fake business card.
“Cognac,” I said. “XO.”
“On the rocks?”
“Straight up.”
“Yes sir.”
When the rosy-cheeked bartender went off to pour my drink I looked around, appraising a room that I’d probably never be in again.
“Ms. Tillman says that you represent a union of painters,” the barkeep asked when he returned with my snifter.
“More like a brotherhood,” I said. “Specialists like landscape artists can help each other out in dozens of ways.”
“My dad’s a painter,” the young man said.
“What kind?”
“I don’t know what you call it. Big canvases with a lot of circles and triangles. Real colorful.”
“Abstract.”
“Yeah, I guess, but if you said that to him he’d just get mad. He gets mad a lot.”
Just then the bartender noticed something or someone down the way.
“Excuse me,” he said. I couldn’t have scripted better dialogue or timing.
“You like this place?” I asked Melbourne Westmount Ericson.
“What?” he asked, turning to me.
He had the kind of face that in some ways defied description. The features themselves were young, possibly placing him somewhere in his thirties, a man who hadn’t experienced much and knew little, if any, hardship. But his hair was thinning and the puffy flesh around those features sagged like that of a man nearing retirement if not death.
“My brotherhood is thinking of having our next convention here,” I said.
“I heard you and Ralph,” Melbourne said. “Some kind of artists’ union?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he said, “I thought—”
I held up a finger, arresting my target with a silent command.
“I’m the piece opposite Alexander Lett in the chess game you’re playing,” I told him. “Lett’s got you, so Marella has procured my services with the proceeds from the sale of her engagement ring.”
A look of wonder spread across Ericson’s confusing face.
It was then I noticed that Johnny had come up to the bar. His signal to Ralph the bartender was actually telling me that there was danger afoot. Looking up into the curved mirror, I saw the man in the tan suit coming up behind me.
I was ready for the tussle, but before Tan Man could put a hand on my shoulder Melbourne gestured and said, “That’s okay, Philip.”
Tan Man stopped and leaned against the bar behind me. Johnny Nightly took the same position behind the billionaire.
“What’s your name?” the young/old man asked.
I told him the truth.
“Aren’t you the one who took her from the train?”
I told the story from my point of view.
“But,” Melbourne stammered, “but he was there only to deliver a message.”
“There was no message.”
“He was supposed to get her alone,” Melbourne said. “I know how much she treasures her privacy. He told me that she kept avoiding him and then you, you interfered.”
“Huh,” I grunted, pondering his words. “That may have been right. But it doesn’t say why he came up on me with a gun at my offices.”
“You broke his wrist and put him in the hospital. Alex is a proud man. Pride sometimes makes a man stupid. I should know.”
“You didn’t send him to retrieve the ring you gave Ms. Herzog?”
“Certainly not,” he said with real conviction. “I understand why she took the ring. She needed money. I had lost my temper and broke it off with her. She had every right, every right...”
“You can see where she has a whole different interpretation about your intentions,” I said.
“Yes. Yes, of course. She’s a woman alone in the world. She must protect herself.”
Anybody who tells you that they’re a good judge of character is telling you the truth but still they’re wrong. The best liars are impossible to read. They not only give misinformation, they become the lie. I thought I knew what I was looking at, but Melbourne could have been better than I was. There’s always somebody better. Mardi had deeper perceptions than I ever did. For all I knew, Jones’s man Fortune was a genius of misdirection.
I believed Melbourne but, at the same time, I knew I could be wrong.
“Are you in contact with Mar?” Melbourne asked.
“She calls me at certain times to see how I’m proceeding,” I admitted.
“She pays you?”
“Yes.”
“What if I were to pay you?”
“That would most probably be a conflict of interest.”
“But I told you,” he said, oh so honestly, “I don’t want the ring.”
“So? George Bush told me he was the education president.”
“I need to speak with her.”
“That’s up to her,” I said. “My job is to make sure that no more men with guns come trying to get to her.”
“After getting the firearms charges dropped I called Mr. Lett back home.”
“Excuse me if that doesn’t mean much.”
“Can you ask her if she’ll meet with me?”
“I could ask but I’d have to give her a good reason.”
“I want to give her another engagement ring,” he said. “I want to apologize for losing my temper and saying the things I did.”
If he was a liar he was good; if he wasn’t he was a fool.
“Mr. McGill?” he said after maybe a minute of silence on my part.