Chapter 6

The next morning dawned gray and damp, the kind of morning that made the hotel's glass facade look like a wall of fog. Elliot had not slept. He had sat in his apartment, a studio in the staff quarter's block, with the leather notebook open on the kitchen table and a cup of coffee he'd made at noon and forgotten to drink. He mapped names on a sheet of paper—names from three years of watching, of documenting, of telling himself that a man could keep the books of his own conscience without ever having to balance them.

Now the books lay open before him, and he was the one who had to close them.

At eight-thirty, he walked into the hotel through the service entrance, past the laundry loading dock where a young woman in a housekeeping uniform was taking out a bin of linens. She looked up, and for a moment she seemed about to smile—then she recognized him, and her face closed like a door.

"I'm Elliot," he said. "Junior manager. I know that's not a name that means anything good to you right now."

The young woman hesitated. "You're the one who kept the notebook."

The words fell between them like a stone. Elliot felt his throat tighten. "You know about that."

"Everyone knows," she said. "Housekeeping talks." She looked down at the bin in her hands. "My name's Pilar. I worked with Marta—the one who got her wages docked for the glass." Her jaw tightened. "She quit last month. Went back to her village."

"I want to make it right," Elliot said. "I'm going to make as much of it right as I can. Starting with the people she hurt."

Pilar's eyes searched his face for a long moment. Then she set down the bin, wiped her hands on her apron, and said, "There are nine of us left who've been here since Miss Alvarado took over. We meet every Tuesday at the bus stop, before the first shift. We talk. We compare notes." She paused. "If you want to find out what she did, you don't need a notebook. You need to listen to us."

It occurred to Elliot, standing in that loading dock, that in eleven years Victoria had never once climbed the service stairs. She had never entered the building through the laundry. She had never stood where the floors were rough concrete and the fluorescent lights buzzed like trapped flies. She had managed a hotel she had never seen from below.