“Then what?” Jack asked.
“Then I waited for the cops.”
“You didn't go into the hall?”
“Why would I?”
“To see what happened.”
“Are you crazy? How was I to know who might be out there in the hall? Maybe one of them with a gun was still out there.”
“So you didn't see anyone. Or hear anything important, like a name?”
“I already told you. No.”
Jack couldn't think of anything more to ask. He looked at Rebecca, and she seemed stymied, too. Another dead end.
They got up from their chairs, and Burt Wicke — still fidgety, still whining — said, “This has been a rotten trip from the beginning, absolutely rotten. First, I have to make the entire flight from Chicago sitting next to a little old lady from Peoria who wouldn't shut up. Boring old bitch. And the plane hit turbulence like you wouldn't believe. Then yesterday, two deals fall through, and I find out my hotel has rats, an expensive hotel like this—”
“Rats?” Jack asked.
“Huh?”
“You said the hotel has rats.”
“Well, it does.”
“You've seen them?” Rebecca asked.
“It's a disgrace,” Wicke said. “A place like this, with such an almighty reputation, but crawling with rats.”
“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated.
Wicke cocked his head, frowned. “Why're you so interested in rats? That's got nothing to do with the murders.”
“Have you seen them?” Rebecca repeated in a harsher voice.
“Not exactly. But I heard them. In the walls.”
“You heard rats in the walls?”
“Well, in the heating system, actually. They sounded close, like they were right here in these walls, but you know how those hollow metal heating ducts can carry sound. The rats might've been on another floor, even in another wing, but they sure sounded close. I got up on the desk there and put my ear to the vent, and I swear they couldn't've been inches away. Squeaking. A funny sort of squeaking. Chittering, twittering sounds. Maybe half a dozen rats, by the sound of it. I could hear their claws scraping on metal… a scratchy, rattly noise that gave me the creeps. I complained, but the management here doesn't bother attending to complaints. From the way they treat their guests, you'd never know this was supposed to be one of the finest hotels in the city.”
Jack figured Burt Wicke had lodged an unreasonable number of vociferous, petty complaints prior to hearing the rats. By that time, the management had tagged him as either a hopeless neurotic or a grifter who was trying to establish excuses for not paying his bill.
Having paced to the window, Wicke looked up at the winter sky, down at the street far below. “And now it's snowing. On top of everything else, the weather's got to turn rotten. It isn't fair.”
The man no longer reminded Jack of a toad. Now he seemed like a six-foot-tall, fat, hairy, stumpy-legged baby.
Rebecca said, “When did you hear the rats?”
“This morning. Just after I finished breakfast, I called down to the front desk to tell them how terrible their room service food was. After a highly unsatisfactory conversation with the clerk on duty, I put the phone down — and that's the very moment when I heard the rats. After I'd listened to them a while and was positively sure they were rats, I called the manager himself to complain about that, again without satisfactory results. That's when I made up my mind to get a shower, dress, pack my suitcases, and find a new hotel before my first business appointment of the day.”
“Do you remember the exact time when you heard the rats?”
“Not to the minute. But it must've been around eight-thirty.”
Jack glanced at Rebecca. “About one hour before the killing started next door.”
She looked troubled. She said, “Weirder and weirder.”
XI
In the death suite, the three ravaged bodies still lay where they had fallen.
The lab men hadn't finished their work. In the parlor, one of them was vacuuming the carpet around the corpse. The sweepings would be analyzed later.
Jack and Rebecca went to the nearest heating vent, a one-foot-by-eight-inch rectangular plate mounted on the wall, a few inches below the ceiling. Jack pulled a chair under it, stood on the chair, and examined the grille.
He said, “The end of the duct has an inward-bent flange all the way around it. The screws go through the edges of the grille and through the flange.”
“From here,” Rebecca said, “I see the heads of two screws.”
“That's all there are. But anything trying to get out of the duct would have to remove at least one of those screws to loosen the grille.”
“And no rat is that smart,” she said.
“Even if it was a smart rat, like no other rat God ever put on this earth, a regular Albert Einstein of the rat kingdom, it still couldn't do the job. From inside the duct, it'd be dealing with the pointed, threaded end of the screw. It couldn't grip and turn the damned thing with only its paws.”
“Not with its teeth, either.”
“No. The job would require fingers.”
The duct, of course, was much too small for a manor even a child — to crawl through it.
Rebecca said. “Suppose a lot of rats, a few dozen of them, jammed up against one another in the duct, all struggling to get out through a ventilation grille. If a real horde of them put enough pressure on the other side of the grille, would they be able to pop the screws through the flange and then shove the grille into the room, out of their way?”
“Maybe,” Jack said with more than a little doubt.
“Even that sounds too smart for rats. But I guess if the holes in the flange were too much bigger than the screws that passed through them, the threads wouldn't bite on anything, and the grille could be forced off.”
He tested the vent plate that he had been examining. It moved slightly back and forth, up and down, but not much.
He said, “This one's pretty tightly fitted.”
“One of the others might be looser.”
Jack stepped down from the chair and put it back where he'd gotten it.
They went through the suite until they'd found all the vents from the heating system: two in the parlor, one in the bedroom, one in the bath. At each outlet, the grille was fixed firmly in place.
“Nothing got into the suite through the heating ducts,” Jack said. “Maybe I can make myself believe that rats could crowd up against the back of the grille and force it off, but I'll never in a million years believe that they left through the same duct and somehow managed to replace the grille behind them. No rat — no animal of any kind you can name — could be that welltrained, that dexterous.”
“No. Of course not. It's ridiculous.”
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. She sighed. “Then you think it's just an odd coincidence that the men here were apparently bitten to death shortly after Wicke heard rats in the walls.”
“I don't like coincidences,” he said.
“Neither do I.”
“They usually turn out not to be coincidences.”
“Exactly.”
“But it's still the most likely possibility. Coincidence, I mean. Unless…”
“Unless what?” she asked.
“Unless you want to consider voodoo, black magic—”
“No thank you.”