“Winnie wouldn’t —” Bear started to say before he was interrupted.
“Hi, guys!” Chris came bounding through the doors from the lobby. “Just the man I was looking for,” he said to Bear. “How does a Belmont Quolis Q-5000 sound? I don’t know what colour you want, though, or where to have it shipped.”
“I don’t need another damn chair,” Bear grumbled.
“A chair?” Rob sounded confused.
“A dentist’s chair. That girl, the one with the long black hair, she said Bear liked them and I want to buy one for him.”
“I told you, I don’t want one. Do you mind? We’re kind of in the middle of something here.” Bear had little to no patience for Chris, no matter how many Oscars he’d won.
“Sorry!” Chris flipped his hands up in the air in quick mock surrender. “Excuse me for trying to be nice. I’ll let you get back to whatever super important stuff you were doing.” He turned to walk away, but I stopped him.
“Actually, Chris? I think you might be able to help me.” Winnie was out doing her nightly run. Winnie locked her office. Chris was good an unlocking things.
“Cool!” He excitedly came back to us and looked like a puppy dog eagerly waiting for his human to throw a tennis ball.
“How would you feel about opening another locked door for me?”
“Oh, no! I’m not going to be a part of this.” Bear shook his head.
“But if we can look at what’s on those discs …” I tried to explain.
“Nope! Don’t want to know about it.” He stuck his fingers in his ears and went back to work with the crew, chanting a mantra of “La-la-la-la-la,” as he walked away from us.
“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Rob asked me.
“Chris opened the locked door to the laundry room at James’ place for me earlier today,” I explained.
“You want me to break into another laundry room? Do you have a laundry fetish? I played this character once that had a fetish, but it wasn’t for laundry. Actually, maybe it was more of an OCD kind of thing. He —”
“Chris? Stop talking. Just for a minute.” I couldn’t believe that I’d just told one of the world’s most famous movie stars to shut up, but I had. And it worked. “Are you in, Rob?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Why not?”
Winnie’s office was on the third floor of the hotel. Her door was definitely locked, but there was nothing Chris could do to open it. His picks were useless. The electronic lock required a keycard to open it.
“What do we do now?” I asked Rob as we stood in the hallway.
Chris didn’t join the conversation. Instead, he tried the door to the left of Winnie’s office, but it was locked. Then he tried the door to the right of her office and it opened. As he walked into the room we heard him exclaim, “Do people really stay in rooms this small?” but neither of us bothered to answer him.
“Does James have a master key?” Rob asked me.
“I don’t think so and even if he did it would be back on Virgin Gorda with him.” Talking about James and master keys reminded me of something he’d said when he’d been at my place. He’d borrowed Winnie’s master key to get into my cottage. Why did Winnie have a master key?
“Do you think Judy or Ted would give us one?”
“Ted might, Judy wouldn’t.”
“Hi there!” The door to Winnie’s office opened — Chris had opened it, from the inside. “That was too easy.”
“How did you get in there?” I asked.
“I climbed over from the balcony of that room,” he pointed at the room we’d last seen him disappear into, “and came in through the balcony of this one. The door wasn’t locked. People usually forget about locking their balcony doors. I learned that when I was making Crosshairs. Did you see it?” He asked Rob.
“Yeah, it was pretty good.”
“You know the scene where I rappel down the side of …”
I heard a ding announcing the arrival of an elevator on the floor and pushed both men into the office, closing the door behind me. “Let’s continue this discussion in here.”
The room was the size of a standard Butler deluxe room, big enough for two king-size beds and a sitting area. Even though there weren’t any lights on the beam from the full moon lit up the room well enough for me to see where the furniture was. Instead of beds there was office furniture — a couple of chairs and a small sofa, a desk, a big three-drawer file cabinet, and all the required electronic equipment. I tried the drawers in the file cabinet and the drawers on either side of the big desk, while Chris boasted to Rob about how he’d done his own stunt work on Crosshairs, including rappelling down the side of a fifteen-storey building.
“Everything’s locked.”
“Oh! That’s why I’m here.” Chris happily pulled out his lock pick kit and started opened drawers.
Rob and I looked in each drawer as soon as it was opened. We did the file cabinet first and, not surprisingly, saw a lot of files. I took the right side of the desk, Rob took the left. Chris opened each lock with the speed of a break-and-enter expert.
In the second drawer I saw a collection of discs that looked just like the ones Bear had given me earlier that day. “I think I found them, but I can’t read the labels.”
A small beam of light waved over the open drawer.
Chris was standing behind us, a miniature flashlight in his hands. “Does this help?”
The two discs we were looking for were at the front of the drawer.
Rob and I used the door to get back out in the hallway. Chris did his balcony hopping thing. Once we’d regrouped Rob led us to the emergency exit stairwell and down to Bear’s technical control room on the main floor. We used his electronic keycard to open the door.
Chris’ disappointment when he learned that his skills wouldn’t be needed any more quickly disappeared when he saw the large and varied collection of electronic equipment in the room. “What’s this?” he asked Rob repeatedly.
Rob answered in short sharp answers that sounded more and more exasperated by the minute as he turned on some lights and equipment. He shoved the first disc into the slot on the front of an electronic box and the small monitor above it came to life.
“Oh-oh,” I heard Chris say.
I turned around to see that he was struggling to get what looked like a large nylon circle to bend over on itself.
“It’s a reflector,” he explained. “I’ve seen the lighting guys fold them up, but I can’t figure out how they do it.”
It reminded me of the floating beds that Dad had for his pool. While I showed Chris how to re-twist the reflector back on itself, Rob fast forwarded through most of the footage on the first disc.
Out off the corner of my eye I could see that the camera had been watching a long beach. The sun had just started to light the sky when Rob quickly pushed a button and stopped the playback.
“Look.” Rob rewound a bit and then let the images play at normal speed.
Winnie stepped onto the beach. She was wearing another drab suit, but it was her footwear that really caught my attention — brown leather loafers that were obviously too big for her feet. She walked slowly toward the water, stretching her legs out to elongate her strides, and she put force into each footstep. In her hands she was holding something that had been wrapped in a dishtowel (one with a Butler B embroidered on it). She walked into the water until it was up above her knees, bent over, unwrapped the dishtowel, and placed something white in the water, holding it down just under the surface for a few minutes. She slowly pulled her hand out of the water, balled the dishtowel up, and made her way back to the treeline, leaving a second set of footprints in the sand. Her two lines of footprints formed a V that pointed right to the spot where she’d stood in the water.
“Wow, these things are heavier than I thought.”
Both Rob and I turned to see what Chris was doing. He was holding a long pole high above his head with both hands.
“S
top playing with the Goddamn boom poles,” Rob said firmly, and then went on to mutter, “He’s like a little kid,” under his breath.
“You know what that means, right?” I pointed at the monitor.
“Yeah,” Rob took the disc out of the machine and slid the second one in.
The monitor came to life again.
“The lighting sucks on that shot,” Chris shared his opinion with us.
He was right. It was like we were looking through night-vision goggles, everything was slight green-grey. I could just make out the shapes of some trees and bushes. Moonlight reflected off the Caribbean far below where the camera was positioned.
“Hey! That’s up near my place.” Chris leaned in, putting his head in the small amount of open space between my head and Rob’s. “See that?” He pointed at the screen. “That’s the little backhoe they’re using up at Manderley.”
I took his word for it. The backhoe was parked beside a stack of lumber in a clearing on the top of the hill; the empty bucket was resting on the ground and various long-handled gardening tools were leaning against it. A pair of weak lights flickered across the clearing, growing brighter. Then the front end of a golf cart drove into the picture from the right side of the screen. A pole moved diagonally across the screen, very close to the camera.
“Boom in the shot!” Chris called out.
“That’s not a boom pole,” Rob corrected him. “There’s no audio on this.”
The pole had stopped moving, but was still visible on the right side of the screen.
The driver got out of the golf cart and walked in front of it, her silhouette lit from behind by the golf cart’s lights. Kate. Her head turned as she looked around. The pole flew across the screen and connected with Kate. Both dropped out of the picture. Then the pole rose up again. Moonlight flashed off of the long curved blade on the end of it just before it knocked the camera. The camera jerked forty-five degrees to the right.
Someone was running up the hill, toward the camera. She had an athlete’s body and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Winnie. She ran across the screen, her eyes glowing dark green like an alien’s.
“Whoa, dude,” Chris said in barely more than a whisper. “Nobody told me the Grim Reaper was hanging out here. Did you see that blade thing?”
“It was a scythe.” Just like the ones I’d seen the gardeners using.
The screen went black.
“What happened?” I looked at Rob. “Why did it stop?”
“That’s the end of it.” Rob pulled the disc out of the machine. “Whatever came next would be on the next disc.” He, too, was talking softly.
“That means that Winnie didn’t …”
“But she saw who did.”
Glenn had to think fast. The first thing to come to his mind was what he was supposed to be investigating. “I’m doing a piece on identity theft.”
“No way!” Ted Robarts sounded less angry and suspicious. “Somebody’s pretending to be me? Son of a bitch! It must be whoever stole my wallet.”
How would the Ted Robarts (or Jake Purcell) (or Phil) in the British Virgin Islands have had the opportunity to steal the real Ted Robarts’ wallet? “When was it stolen?”
“A couple of days before I left Toronto. I had to cancel all my credit cards and get new ones super fast, but thankfully the thief didn’t have time to charge much on my Visa. She got away with an expensive visit to the salon across the street from the hotel. She got the works — cut, colour, massage, facial …”
“She? How do you know it was a she? Did the police catch her?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything from them since I reported it stolen. I just assumed it was a she. But she must have sold it or given it to the man who’s now pretending to be me.”
Possible. But why would a CSIS agent use ID from a stolen wallet? It wasn’t adding up. None of it. “Do you remember the date she went to the salon?” It was a long shot, but maybe the person who did all the fluffing and pampering on the thief would remember what the person they worked on looked like.
“It was the nineteenth of March, the day after I left. The credit card company let me off on the charges because I could prove I wasn’t in the country. So, who’s this guy and how did you find him?”
“It’s a long story,” Glenn started. He then edited and shortened the story drastically. The man on the phone said he was Ted Robarts and maybe he was. Maybe he was even calling from Dubai, the display on Glenn’s phone only showed “Long distance, Unknown Number.” No matter who he was, Glenn wasn’t going to tell him everything. Instead, he got creative and made up a story about coming across Ted Robarts’ stolen wallet report to the police while researching the story he was working on and then accidentally stumbling across the same name being used by a contestant on a reality-TV show.
“I’d like to look the guy in the face and let him know how much trouble he caused me.”
That could be arranged, sort of, if technology was on Glenn’s side. “Are you near a computer?”
Within minutes, a cropped version of the photo of Ted Robarts/Jake Purcell from the CSIS card image was magically transported across the globe.
“It’s here. Let me look at him.” Glenn felt his heart rate increase slightly as he waited for Ted Robarts’ reaction to seeing Ted Robarts. “Nope, he doesn’t look familiar, but hundreds of people came through the hotel every day, so that doesn’t mean much.” Ted laughed. “He kind of looks like one of our waiters, actually. Like a distant cousin or something.”
“Which waiter? Here or in Dubai?” Glenn tried to sound calm.
“Phil London. He was with us for years, in Toronto. He’s probably still there. Maybe you should go ask him if he’s got a cousin with sticky fingers?”
“Could he have stolen your wallet?”
“Phil? Nah! He was an employer’s dream — on time, good at his job, excellent with the guests. He probably made a fortune in tips, too. Nobody schmoozed the guests as well as Phil.”
He couldn’t go to the Crystal to ask about him — the restaurant Phil worked in didn’t open until eleven. Same thing with the salon across the street from the hotel; according to its website it didn’t open until seven-thirty.
His heart was racing. He was close, he could feel it.
He dialled the number for the Butler BVI again. The phones still weren’t working.
Glenn stood up and walked out into the living room. “I’m going to the British Virgin Islands.”
“Okay, bye.” Brandon didn’t look away from the television screen.
Glenn walked in front of the screen, blocking Brandon’s view. “I need your help.”
Brandon blinked a few times as if trying to come out of a trance. “Let me just finish this mission …”
Glenn didn’t move. “I need your help — now. Come show me how to buy plane tickets online?” He walked away from the screen and into his office. He could hear Brandon following him.
“You’re serious?” Brandon looked surprised as he sat down in Glenn’s chair and started
to click the mouse. “You’re really going? When?”
“Today?”
Brandon looked up at his dad. “Have you had a stroke or something? You don’t do stuff like this.”
“Stuff like what?”
“You know, spur of the moment stuff. On top of that, you’re scared of flying. Remember?”
“I am not scared of flying.” Glenn immediately denied Brandon’s accusation … and then clarified it a bit. “I’m scared of crashing. The flying part doesn’t bug me that much.”
“You go with that. But seriously, you’ve taken one trip in ten years, and you wouldn’t even have done that if Ria hadn’t talked you into it. What’s up?”
“It’s Ria, we’re working on something together, well not together together …”
“But you’re still together, right?”
“Yeah!” Glenn said with conviction, hoping it was true. “But she’s in the British Virgin Islands and I’m here and it’s like the right hand is in one place and the left hand is in another, and neither one can fully grasp the whole thing without the other.”
“Wow. That was deep.” Brandon looked at the computer screen. “What’s the name of the airport you want to go to?”
“Virgin Gorda.” Glenn felt rather proud of himself. His right hand/left hand description of his relationship with Ria had been kind of deep. He quickly jotted it down in point form, because he planned to use an expanded version of it when he was face-to-face with her to explain how he felt about them as a couple.
“When do you want to come back?”
“In a week? Get a ticket I can change, just in case.”
“Credit card,” Brandon held out his hand and then quickly typed in Glenn’s credit card number once he had the card. “Done.” The printer came to life. “Your flight leaves at eleven-thirty. You have to make a connection in Miami and then another one in San Juan. That one will be really tight, but if your other flights aren’t delayed you should be able to make it.”
“What time do I have to be at the airport?”
“Three hours before departure to clear U.S. Security.”
“That’ll work, just.” Glenn began walking back into his bedroom. “Now show me how to get everything into a carry-on bag.”