The Chick scowled at her partner. “It’s no biggie.” She turned to André. “He had a heart attack, all right? We just need verification that he was staying here.”
André nodded. “He was.”
Squeaky cut in. “Mr. Ritter’s next of kin will be arriving in the morning from out of town to settle his affairs. May we have your assurance that there’ll be no problem with their accessing Mr. Ritter’s domicile?”
André studied him with an amused smirk, then said, “I will grant them full access to his domicile.”
“Very good,” Squeaky said. “Then our purpose for being here is complete.”
After they were gone, André shook his head and muttered, “What’s this world comin’ to?”
I laughed. “Yeah, they’re a little different.” Then, trying to be real casual-like, I asked, “So, who was this Buck Ritter guy?”
He shrugged. “You know how it is here. They come, they go.” He flipped the paper back open. “Seemed like a nice fella. Said he was a war vet, but a lot of them say that.” He turned the page and eyed me. “Some of them are obviously lyin’, but I don’t know that he was.”
“Why would anyone lie about being a war vet?”
He shrugged. “Sympathy for the state they’re in?”
“That’s sad,” I said.
He nodded and turned another page. “It’s sad, all right. All the way around. Real vets should get respect and sympathy.” He faced me straight on, the cigar stub clamped between his front teeth, looking like the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun. “Which is why fakers are so disgusting.” He took a deep breath and put down the paper. “So, when you wanna start?”
“Start?” I blinked at him. “Uh…how about tomorrow morning?”
He nodded, then went back to his newspaper. “Sounds good.”
Unbelievable as it was, it’s not like I needed the money. And it’s not like I wanted to clean the Heavenly. As my friend Hudson Graham would say, cleaning that hotel would be an exercise in futility. I mean, everything’s beyond old. It’s stained, falling apart, and just plain stinky.
But still. I felt good. I actually had a job! And I’d definitely covered my lie to Marissa, which was a giant relief.
I was also feeling very clever because I was now in a position to find out more about Mr. Buck Ritter. My plan was to get to the Heavenly in the morning and work until his relatives showed up. Maybe I’d strike up a conversation with them while I was conveniently cleaning the hallway of the floor Buck Ritter’s room was on.
Maybe I’d find out why he hadn’t asked me to give the money to them.
Maybe I wouldn’t feel guilty anymore about spending some of that crisp green lining at the bottom of my backpack.
But the next morning when I showed up, I discovered that Buck Ritter’s relatives had already come and gone.
“His brother showed up last night and left with one measly grocery sack, only half full,” André grumbled. “Left a whole heap of junk for me to deal with.” He handed over a box of Hefty bags and said, “Your first job is to shove all his things in bags—I’ll take them to the Salvation Army. Then strip the sheets and toss ’em down the laundry chute. The towel, too.”
“What room?” I asked. “And where’s the laundry chute?”
“Room three-eleven.” He handed over the key, saying, “The chute’s about halfway down the hall, by the fire extinguisher. Just pull down the hatch and dump it in.”
So I took the box of bags and the key, and as I was heading for the rickety, old-fashioned elevator, André called, “It all looked like junk to me, but if you find anything you’d like, go ahead and keep it.”
It felt a little strange letting myself into the hotel room. The only other one I’d ever really been inside was rented to a chain-smoking fortune-teller known as Madame Nashira. And Buck Ritter’s room was a lot like Madame Nashira’s—peeling wallpaper, a stained sink with a cracked and clouded mirror over it, a small lumpy bed, and filthy carpeting. It didn’t reek of cigarettes, though; it smelled like mildew.
The place was also a mess. The bedspread was balled up at the foot of the bed, the sheets were untucked, the mattress wasn’t lined up with the box spring…. It was like he’d tossed and turned for a month straight. The dresser drawers were hanging open a few inches—like he’d been too tired to close them all the way. There were clothes draped over the footboard, over the desk chair, and on the floor. Everything seemed…disheveled.
Everything except a tidy stack of Styrofoam to-go boxes. There were about thirty of them nested together on the floor by the desk, large ones on the bottom, medium in the middle, small on top. They were dirty, but stacked neatly—like a load of dishes ready to be washed.
And the boxes being so tidy made me think that maybe Buck’s brother had messed the place up.
Maybe he’d torn through everything looking for something.
Something that fit easily inside a grocery sack.
But what?
And maybe I should have felt creepy, snooping around the room of a man I’d scared to death, but I didn’t feel creepy.
I felt curious.
What was a man with so much money on him doing living in a place like this?
Maybe he really had robbed someone.
Maybe that someone lived in the Senior Highrise.
But…nobody I knew kept stacks of cash lying around waiting to get stolen.
Especially at the Senior Highrise!
And the bills were all twenties. It was more like he’d robbed a bank.
So I was feeling more curious than grossed out or guilty, and I found myself snooping around a little desk near the window, looking for something that might explain what he’d been doing on the Highrise fire escape late at night with a boatload of cash in his pockets.
All I found on the desk, though, was an ancient black phone—one with no punch pad, let alone a redial function—a rusted lamp, a small notepad, and a gnawed-on pencil.
Inside the single drawer, I found a Bible, a small stack of sketches, and about a hundred years of grime.
The sketches were done on the same paper as the notepad that was on top of the desk. Three of them were of birds—one in flight, one on a branch, and one that was just the head. The other two were human faces, but just the eyes, nose, mouth, and eyebrows. Like faces floating free from their skulls.
The sketches were all really lifelike, which was amazing because they were actually made of really fine lines that weren’t actually lines.
They were lines that were made up of gazillions of tiny dots.
The more I looked at the pictures, the more mind-boggling they seemed. How could you make a bird look that real out of dots?
But still. Mind-boggling or not, what did pictures made out of gazillions of dots tell me?
Not a doggone thing.
So I laid them on the desk and was just deciding to do what André had asked me to when the phone rang.
“Aaargh!” I cried, jumping back.
Then I just stood there like an idiot, staring at the phone as it clanged away on the desk, wondering who could be calling.
Well, duh, I finally told myself. It’s someone who knows Buck Ritter from Omaha, Nebraska! And then I had the brainy idea that maybe I’d be able to figure out something from them.
“Hello?” I said in a deep, rich Buck-Ritter-from-Omaha-Nebraska kind of voice.
“Sammy?” came the whispered response.
“André?” I asked in my normal voice.
“Get out of there,” he said. “Get out of there fast!”
SEVEN
I was starting to slam down the phone when I heard André say, “And don’t…”
I put the phone back up to my ear. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t take anything! Dump whatever’s in the bags!” Then he added, “But take the bags!”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it!”
Dumping what I’d put in the bags was easy—which goes to prove that it
sometimes pays to get sidetracked. I grabbed the box of garbage bags and slipped out of the room, locking it behind me.
The trouble was, I didn’t know where to go or why I was supposed to get out of there so fast. But I hurried away from the room, and when I heard the elevator clanging open down the hallway, I ducked into the stairwell.
The Heavenly’s stairwell is like a house of horrors. It’s lined with mirrors that bounce your reflection back and forth to infinity. And since the people who stay at the Heavenly are usually kinda deranged-looking to begin with, running into them on the stairs can be very scary. Most people would rather risk their lives on the elevator.
So I tried to ignore my reflections as I hung around the corner, waiting to see who had just come out of the elevator. I was dying to know what could possibly have made André so jittery. I mean, when I first met André, he scared me with his tough looks, growly “Scat, kid,” and menacing cigar. Now I get that he acts like that because of the people he has to deal with every day. Some may be down on their luck, but most of the people who stay at the Heavenly seem to spend their days walking a shaky line between freedom and jail.
Anyway, there I am, hanging back, waiting for some ghoulish monster, or maybe the police, to come clomping down the hall, when what do I see?
Two roly-poly middle-aged ladies.
“There it is, right there,” one of them says. She’s wearing a red-and-white checkered blouse that’s really just a big rectangle with a hole for the head. And with her broad shoulders and the way the blouse is kinda flowing out behind her, this lady looks like a picnic table that’s decided to get up and go for a stroll.
The other one’s got on dark red pants and a bright yellow top and has a speckled green scarf swooped around her neck. “I cannot believe he spent his final days here,” she says, keeping her voice low. “What was he doing here?”
As I watch them pass by the stairwell, it hits me that if the one lady’s a picnic table, the other’s the picnic condiments. And instead of the dish running away with the spoon, the ketchup, mustard, and relish are running away with the table!
Something about that totally cracks me up. Dumb, I know, but the more I watch them hurry down the hall, the goofier I get about it.
Then all of a sudden there’s a growl in my ear. “What are you snickerin’ about?”
I jump, and there’s André, eyebrow arched, cigar clamped between his teeth. “Nothing! Sorry!” I tell him, then try to act cool. “What’s going on, anyway?”
“I let the wrong person in last night.” He spies around the corner and adds, “Mr. Ritter had no brothers. Not livin’, anyways.”
“So wait. The guy you let into his room last night told you he was his brother but wasn’t?”
“Uh-huh.”
I wrap an eye around the corner, too, and whisper, “So those are his…”
“Daughters,” he growls, and shows me a Sew Superior business card with the name Sandra Ritter-Boswell on it. Specializing in Alterations, Curtains, and Quilts. “I feel like a moron. I have no idea who that guy was last night or what he made off with.”
“But it couldn’t have been much, right? You said it all looked like garbage.”
“Yeah, but who knows? And why’d he do that if it wasn’t something important?”
I think about this a minute. “What did he look like?”
“Old. Old and bereaved.” He snorts. “I even refunded Buck’s unused days. Man, I got suckered.”
I tisk and say, “Ouch,” ’cause at the Heavenly it’s cash up front only, so for André, refunding money to a guy who’d duped him was like adding injury to insult.
As we watch the Picnic Sisters fumble open the door to room 311, André mutters, “What if he did have something valuable? What if they’re here to get it? What if they find out I let some joker in last night without checkin’ ID or anything? I don’t need the heat. I don’t need another investigation!” He curses, then growls, “And I hate bein’ duped.” He eases back and says, “I’ve got to get back to the desk.” He eyes me as he grabs the box of trash bags. “You know nothing, right?”
I nod. “Not a thing.”
He heads back down the stairs, and his mutant reflections make the mad dash to infinity as he whispers, “Keep an eye on them. I’m willing to pay for useful information!”
Now, I find it hard to keep an eye on anyone I can’t see. And since the Picnic Sisters have disappeared into room 311, I mosey over and stick my nose inside. “Excuse me,” I say, trying hard to block the thought that I had, in fact, scared their father to death. “The manager sent me up to see if I could help you in any way.”
They blink at me, and finally Condiments mutters to the Table, “This is a mighty strange place.”
“You’re right about that,” I say with a laugh. Then I step inside the room and tell them, “I just help around here part-time.” I shrug. “It’s summer vacation. It’s a job.”
“Well, we appreciate the offer,” Picnic Table says to me, “but we’re fine.”
“You’re Buck’s daughters?” I ask, not taking the hint to leave. “I’m sorry about…I’m sorry he…died.”
“You knew our daddy?” Condiments asks.
I hesitate, then give a nod. “A little. He seemed nice.” Then I add, “And he was an amazing artist.”
Both ladies smile real big and say, “Yes, he was!” and that’s when I notice that the Picnic Sisters are wearing some serious bling—rings, earrings, necklaces…. The stuff looks real, too.
Obviously, they didn’t need the cash.
“We had no idea he’d taken a trip. Do you know what he was doing here?” Picnic Table asks me.
I shake my head. “They’re kinda in the business of not asking questions around here…if you know what I mean.”
She turns to her sister. “His trailer may have been small, but it was always clean and tidy. This place is just…awful.” Then she sees the notepad sketches sitting on the desk. “Oh, look, Marabelle. Here’s some of Daddy’s doodles right here!”
They admire them for a minute, and then Condiments gives a little shudder. “Let’s just collect his things and go, okay? I don’t want to remember this. I want to get out of here.”
So they move around, piling things up, but after collecting everything on the bed and checking the place over, Picnic Table shakes her head and says, “None of this is worth taking. There’s nothing even sentimental here. What do you say, Marabelle? Should we just leave it?”
Condiments nods. “There’s plenty of sentiment back in his trailer.”
“David’s going to want his uniform, you know that.”
“Well, then you and I will divide his medals.”
“David’ll have a fit.”
“He can’t expect to get everything! He couldn’t even be bothered leavin’ work to help with the arrangements.”
“He’s probably at Daddy’s now, pickin’ over things for what he wants.”
“Oh!” Condiments gasps. “You think so?”
A storm cloud has suddenly gathered over the Picnic Sisters. “Yes, I do,” the Table says. “I’m a fool not to have thought of it sooner.”
Now, what my brain picks out of this inside conversation is that Buck Ritter from Omaha, Nebraska, was a war vet. “He was in the army?” I ask.
“That’s right,” Condiments says.
“He was a war hero,” her sister huffs. She shakes her head. “And he wound up here.”
I follow them down the hall. “But…he didn’t move here, right? He was just visiting, right?”
Picnic Table turns on me. “Look, honey, what’s it matter? This ain’t the Four Seasons like he deserved.”
And with that, they marched for the elevator.
The instant they’re a safe distance away, I race down the Stairway of Ill Re-Puke, passing by a rickety man who’s taking each step carefully. He seems confused. Like he’s not sure if he’s himself or one of his mutant reflections.
“Huh?” he says as
I dart by, and then I hear him breathe in and out in a real choppy way.
So I glance back, and what I see is him and all his mutant reflections clutching his chest with both hands, eyes peeled back in terror.
“Oh no!” I say, screeching to a halt. But when I go zipping back up the stairs, his warbly voice says, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” He gives me a shaky smile. “But you just about scared me to death!”
“I seem to be good at that,” I mutter, then call, “I’m sorry!” and hurry down to the lobby.
Even with that little detour, I beat the Picnic Sisters by a mile. “Everything’s cool,” I tell André. “They’re upset that he was staying here, but they weren’t searching for anything. They’re leaving everything behind.”
“You talked to them?”
I nod. “You don’t have a thing to worry about.”
André takes a big, relieved breath, so I slip in a question I’d been wondering about all morning. “How long did he stay here?”
“Six weeks? Maybe seven?” He frowns. “Who was that cat from last night? What did he take? Bugs me.”
Just then the elevator bangs and clangs and dings, so André whips out two green bills, shoves them toward me, and wags his cigar stub at the front door. “Scat.”
I grab the cash and tell him, “I’m gone,” then zip out of there before the Picnic Sisters can spot me.
Once I’m outside, I look at the money and gasp, “Forty bucks! Forty bucks?” ’Cause come on. I snoop all the time. I don’t expect to be paid for it!
But as I’m jaywalking across Broadway, my brain starts racing faster than my feet, replaying everything that had happened. Running into Buck, scaring him to death, creeping out in the middle of the night to find his money…everything.
Which totally bugged me. I mean, why couldn’t I just be jazzed about adding the forty bucks to my jackpot of cash? Why did I have to think about Buck Ritter at all? Unless I found out that he’d robbed someone, it was over. Done with. Buck and his daughters would be winging back to Omaha, Nebraska, Buck’s stuff would be donated to the Salvation Army, and someone new would move into room 311.