Free Smart Moves by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page B

messages. Sudsburry was on duty. We acted as if we didn’t know each other as he checked my box and handed me an envelope.
    “Life gets tedious, don’t it,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t know,” he said and turned to another customer.
    I tore open the envelope and read: TRY TO FORGIVE ME. PAULINE. I stuffed the letter into my damp pocket and went for the elevator. I had a gun to get, an actor to meet, and a scientist to save. I felt like telling somebody but there wasn’t anybody to tell except the little woman operating the elevator. What the hell. Maybe this was a lifelong resident of the big city who would be happy to cluck a little sympathy for a visitor. The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened.
    “You want to hear something?” I said to the woman as I stepped forward into the corridor.
    “Sure,” she said, looking up at the flashing lights of her elevator panel, her yellow hair piled high and stiff, her dreams someplace else. “How about a few bars of something from Die Fledermaus ?”
    The doors closed and I was alone in the hall with the last echo of New York sarcasm to keep me company. I left a trail of wet prints on the way to my room. Thunder shook the building as I opened the door and stepped into the darkness. A crack of lightning turned the hotel across the street white for an instant, and I thought I saw or felt something in the room. The room went dark. I was a target against the hall light. I kicked the door shut and tried not to breathe. I thought I heard someone else breathing. It might have been someone in the next room or my own breath echoing from some corner. But it wasn’t, and I knew I didn’t have a chance in China of getting to the .38 in the ceiling light before Povey took target practice on my bouncing body. I sensed a figure on the bed. I didn’t have time to wait for my eyes to adjust. I took a chance—a step forward and a leap onto the bed. I felt flesh and smelled something like a men’s locker room.
    The guy beneath me let out a yowl of pain and twisted to his right, breathing cigar-stale breath in my face. His elbow caught my jaw and I rolled onto the floor. He gurgled and went off the bed, but didn’t get more than a step away toward the door when I scrambled over the bed and caught him from behind. I had my right arm around his neck and a look of pure delight on my face, which I was happy no one could see. A look like that can get ten years at the coo-coo farm.
    “No, no,” he cried, and recognition pulsed through me. I let him go and reached for the light switch. It clicked on.
    “Shelly,” I said, looking at the crumpled, chubby figure on the floor. “What the hell are you doing here?”
    “Being assaulted, assaulted,” he told the wall as he adjusted his thick glasses, realized he was looking the wrong way, and found me. “Assaulted,” he repeated, reaching up with a pudgy right hand to straighten the hair he did not have on top of his head. I’d seen him do that before, which had led me to the conclusion that Shelly had once not been bald. There he sat, panting and patting. He wore a dark suit, properly rumpled, and a tie coming loose at the collar. He waved my hand away and tried to get up by himself. He grunted, failed and reluctantly let me help him. Shelly Minck belonged back in Los Angeles with his dental office in the Farraday Building. I rented a small room off of Shelley’s office and maintained a cooperative arrangement. He messed up messages to me and I complained about the unsanitary conditions of his dental practice.
    I leaned back against the wall and watched Shelly stagger to the one small upholstered chair in the room. He sat with a thud and pointed to his neck. “You did this.”
    “Heredity and overeating did that,” I said.
    “I mean the marks,” he cried, pointing furiously. “You tried to strangle me.”
    “What are you doing here, Shell?”
    “I could be marked for life,” he rambled on. “Have to wear a scarf like … like