The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [87]
Wayne stared at the photo. Three people in it. In the past week, one of them had been murdered, another had gone missing, and the third, according to a Puma employee Wayne had been hounding with phone calls, hadn’t shown up for work in twenty-four hours.
Wayne turned and walked out of the Mojave Room and into the foyer, where he double-checked the guest book. Canada hadn’t been here and she wasn’t coming. That meant wherever she was, she either couldn’t leave or she hadn’t heard about Bea’s murder. He knew Nada would do anything to get back for the funeral of a friend. Anxious and bored at the same time, he wondered if this was what soldiers felt—both the weight of tedium and the fear of the unknown crushing him from both sides. He had to do something, but whatever something was, he couldn’t do it here.
He moved through the foyer and out into the parking lot, passing three unrelated smokers clinging to the asphalt nearest the building. Wayne pulled out his phone and dialed the Puma Lounge and got the same, flat story he had the last three times. “David isn’t here. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know when he’ll be in.” Four one one again. Amoyo’s home number was unlisted. If he still had the apartment he shared with Nada, then he lived in a newish high-rise condo building downtown. She had enjoyed the health club, she’d told Wayne, and she liked having a doorman.
Traffic wasn’t too bad yet—or at least it wasn’t at a dead stop like it would be on the Boulevard in another hour—and Wayne called Peter from the car to tell him he’d be gone just a little longer, which was certainly understating it, but fuck ’em. It all sounded crazy, but if Amoyo knew who Bea was, then maybe he knew why she was dead. Maybe he knew without even knowing it. Maybe Amoyo had noticed something else in the last couple of days. Someone suspicious around the club.
Maybe he would remember something about the day they took that picture for the magazine. Anything.
He pulled into a visitor space at the apartments and the middle-aged doorman—a career hospitality guy, all shoe shine and hair gel and straight back and creased pants—buzzed him in. Wayne told him he was there to see David Amoyo, and with a nod the doorman deferred to a touch-screen kiosk in the wall. The doorman had a round face and a bad toupee with a part in it. Wayne scrolled through only three names before he found Amoyo/Chester—Sandy’s last name—and he laughed quietly at that and wondered if her name was as fake as those tits Nada used to bitch about, and when there wasn’t any answer, he went back to the doorman and pleaded with him to let him go upstairs.
“Is Mr. Amoyo expecting you?” He cleared his teeth of the remains of a Subway club sandwich with his tongue.
“No.”
“I can’t let you up, then, sir.”
“I think something might be wrong with him.”
“Why’s that?”
“I just do. He didn’t show up for work today.”
“As I understand it, Mr. Amoyo spends many days working away from the office.” He said the word office in an ironic way, perhaps to indicate he understood it was a strip club.
Wayne said, “Please. It’s a well-being check. You do those, don’t you?”
“With our elderly tenants. When the situation warrants.”
“It warrants. It warrants.” Wayne removed his lanyard and showed the doorman his casino ID and then pointed to the plastic name tag on the doorman’s blazer, which looked to be the closest thing the man had to a badge, and as he handed over his ID for inspection, he passed a pair of twenties underneath it with his thumb. Wayne said, “Come on. One security professional to another.”
The doorman puckered and then nodded slowly. He called someone from maintenance to watch his station and when the much younger and more casually dressed replacement arrived, Wayne and the doorman rode the elevator together.
“What kind of trouble do you think Mr. Amoyo is in?” His name tag read HOOVER.
“How many kinds of trouble are there?” Wayne said, and as Hoover fingered his keys, Wayne started to worry that they were going