فصل 02 - بخش 06

2

Holly arrived at the Fairview Hotel at 3:17 PM, not quite optimum but not bad. She reckoned it would have been 3:12, had not every fracking traffic light been against her once she left the turnpike. The room was fine. The bath towels on the shower door had been hung a bit crooked, but she set that situation to rights after using the toilet and washing her hands and face. There was no DVD player attached to the television but at ninety-two dollars a night, she hadn’t expected one. If she felt a need to watch the film she had brought, her laptop would be perfectly adequate. Made on the cheap, and shot in probably no more than ten days, it wasn’t the sort of movie that required high resolution and Dolby sound.

Tommy and Tuppence was less than a block from the hotel. Holly could see the sign as soon as she stepped from beneath the hotel awning. She walked down and studied the menu posted in the window. In the upper lefthand corner was a pie with steam rising from its crust. Printed below this was STEAK & KIDNEY PIE IS OUR SPECIALTY.

She strolled down another block and came to a parking lot, which was about three-quarters full. CITY PARKING, said the sign out front. 6-HOUR LIMIT. She went in, looking for tickets on windshields or a traffic warden’s chalk marks on tires. She saw neither, which meant that no one was enforcing the six-hour limit. It was strictly honor system. It wouldn’t work in New York, but it probably worked just fine in Ohio. With no monitoring, there was no way to tell how long the van had been here after Merlin Cassidy had abandoned it, but she guessed that with the doors unlocked and the keys dangling invitingly from the ignition, it probably hadn’t lasted too long.

She walked back to Tommy and Tuppence, introduced herself to the hostess, and said she was an investigator working a case that had to do with a man who had stayed nearby last spring. It turned out the hostess was also part-owner, and with the evening rush still an hour away, she was perfectly willing to talk. Holly asked if she happened to remember just when the restaurant had leafleted the area with menus.

‘What did the guy do?’ the hostess asked. Her name was Mary, not Tuppence, and her accent was New Jersey rather than Newcastle.

‘I’m not at liberty to say,’ Holly told her. ‘It’s a legal matter. You understand.’

‘Well, I do remember,’ Mary said. ‘It’d be funny if I didn’t.’

‘Why is that?’

‘When we first opened two years ago, this was Fredo’s Place. You know, like in The Godfather?’

‘Yes,’ Holly said, ‘although Fredo is best remembered for Godfather II, especially for the sequence where his brother Michael kisses him and says “I know it was you, Fredo, you broke my heart.”’

‘I don’t know about that, but I do know that there are about two hundred Italian restaurants in Dayton, and we were getting killed. So we decided to try British food, you can’t exactly call it cuisine – fish and chips, bangers and mash, even beans on toast – and changed the name to Tommy and Tuppence, like in the Agatha Christie books. We figured we had nothing to lose at that point. And you know what, it worked. I was shocked, but in a good way, believe me. We fill this place for lunch, and most nights for dinner.’ She leaned forward and Holly could smell gin on her breath, bright and clear. ‘Want to know a secret?’

‘I love secrets,’ Holly said truthfully.

‘The steak and kidney pie comes frozen from a company in Paramus. We just heat it up in the oven. And you know what? The restaurant critic from the Dayton Daily News loved it. He gave us five stars! I shit you not!’ She leaned forward a little more and whispered, ‘If you tell anyone that, I’d have to kill you.’

Holly zipped a thumb across her thin lips and turned an invisible key, a gesture she’d seen Bill Hodges make on many occasions. ‘So when you re-opened with the new name and the new menu … or maybe just before …’

‘Johnny, he’s my hubby, wanted to paper the neighborhood a week before, but I told him that was no good, people would forget, so we did it the day before. We hired a kid, and printed enough menus for him to cover a nine-block area.’

‘Including the parking lot up the street.’

‘Yes. Is that important?’

‘Would you check your calendar and tell me what day that was?’

‘Don’t need to. It’s engraven on my memory.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘April nineteenth. A Thursday. We opened – re-opened, actually – on Friday.’

Holly restrained an urge to correct Mary’s grammar, thanked her, and turned to go.

‘Sure you can’t tell me what the guy did?’

‘Very sorry, but I’d lose my job.’

‘Well, at least come in for dinner, if you’re staying in town.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Holly said, but she wouldn’t. God knew what else on the menu had been shipped frozen from Paramus.