What's The Worst That Could Happen?

Through all those spaces the new richer mix of air circulated, silent and persistent. Richer now, not with the oxygen normally laced into the mix, but with something chemically not that much different, a combination of oxygen and nitrogen called nitrous oxide. Or, to give it its familiar name, laughing gas.

53

Just around the time the mixture of cooled air and laughing gas began to fill the public areas of the Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, the last airplane for the day from the east was coming in to a landing out at McCarran International Airport. A pair of Las Vegas policemen, in uniform, had driven out especially to meet that flight, and they stood patiently to one side until they saw their man. They’d never seen him before, and he hadn’t waved at them or done anything else to identify himself, and he was dressed in ordinary civilian clothes, and he was in a crowd of two hundred deplaning passengers, but there was no doubt in their minds. He was their man, all right. A cop can always tell a cop.

They approached him, where he was walking along with that stiff-legged weariness that follows long plane rides, carrying his battered black soft suitcase, and one of them said, “Detective Klematsky?”

“Bernard Klematsky,” he told them. “Nice of you to come out to pick me up.”

“Our pleasure,” one of the cops said. “I’m Pete Rogers, and this is Fred Ba

There was a round of handshakes, and Ba

“Not much worse,” Klematsky said, and they all chuckled.

Rogers said, “You wa

“Nah,” Klematsky said. “He isn’t going anywhere. My flight back isn’t till nine-thirty in the morning. Let him have a good night’s sleep, and let me have a good night’s sleep, too. We can go over, oh, I don’t know, say about seven in the morning.”

“You’ll have a different escort, in that case,” Rogers said. “Me and Ba

Klematsky blinked, but then he nodded and said, “Uh huh.”

Ba

“Thanks,” Klematsky said.

54

Max prowled his prison. It was a prison, complete with guards, and he didn’t like it at all, even though he’d sentenced himself to this plush incarceration, and even though the term of imprisonment was to be very short; by tomorrow evening, he’d be out of here, one way or the other.

Not the other, please. One way, and one way only: With the burglar in custody, in jail, or in the morgue. The fellow had to make his move while Max was still here in Las Vegas, he just had to.

In the meantime, Max prowled, from the large L-shaped living room to the big square bedroom with its big square king-size bed to the slightly smaller second bedroom with its own compact bathroom and with, at the moment, Earl Radburn napping as neatly as a corpse atop the bedspread; and on to the completely furnished gleaming white-and-chrome kitchen with its sink currently full of dirty glasses and cups, and around to the pleasingly pink large bathroom with all the mirrors and all the little bottles and boxes of sundries: shampoo, hand and body lotion, bath gel, hair conditioner, shoe polish, shower cap, toothpaste . . .

Irritated, Max slapped the tiny bath gel bottle back onto the bathroom counter, and glowered at himself in the wall-length mirror. In his boredom, he was reading the little bottles’ labels again. Again!

The business meetings he’d scheduled here had gone well, better than might have been expected under the circumstances, but now they were done, and he was still here, and there was nothing to do, nothing to do. Fuming, restless, struck livid by e

Max hated that, the shut drapes. He’d argued against it, pointing out that the idea here was to let the burglar know he was actually present in this cottage. So why not let him see that Max was present? But Earl Radburn had said, “I’ve been thinking about this problem, Mr. Fairbanks, and I’ve been thinking what I might do, if I was the fella we’re looking for. It’s always a good idea to put yourself in that other fella’s place. And it seemed to me, if what I wanted was that ring on your finger there, and if I could see you through a plate-glass window, I just might decide to fire a high-powered rifle through that window, and put a bullet in your head, and count on stripping that ring off your finger in the subsequent confusion.” While Max had blanched at this idea—the bullet in the head was just too graphic an image—Earl had gone on, “Now, I’m not saying this fella’s the kind that might do such a thing, or not. I’m just saying, if I was that fella, that’s one of the possibilities I’d consider.”

So the drapes would stay closed. Every once in a while, a battle would take place out there on the Battle-Lake, unseeable beyond the drapes, and during the period of explosions, and the roaring of the crowd, Max and his guards would pace more restlessly than ever inside this prison, the guards with hunted looks, their hands hovering over their sidearms as the ca

A knock on the door. Max at once removed himself to the kitchen doorway, feeling ashamed of his caution, but knowing nonetheless that caution was his only friend at this moment. One of the guards crossed the room to cautiously—caution was everybody’s friend in this cottage—open the door.

A murmur of voices. The guard stepped back, and a dapper black fellow in a tux came in, with a clipboard in his hand and a gold nametag reading JONES on his left lapel. “Evening, sir,” he said, with a broad toothy smile and a slight bow of the head in Max’s direction.

Max grimaced in return. Evening? It was after midnight, and nothing had happened yet. He could almost wish this was the burglar himself, or at least one of his friends.

“Housekeeping,” the guard explained to Max, u

“Just checking,” the fellow from Housekeeping said, still with that broad smile, “to be sure everything’s all right.”

“Everything’s,” Max said savagely, “hunky-dory.”

“Well, we’ll just look around,” the fellow from Housekeeping said. “With your permission, sir?”

“Go ahead,” Max told him, and moved out of the kitchen doorway, so the fellow could go in.

The guard had already returned to his conversation in the conversation area, and now Max went over there to say, “You recognized him, did you?”

The guard had just resumed his seat on one of the sofas, but now he stood and said, “Sir?”

“The fellow from Housekeeping,” Max said. “You recognized him.”

“No, sir,” the guard said. “Why would I recognize him?”

Max only now looked at the shoulder patch on the guard’s uniform, and realized it did not say Gaiety Hotel, Battle-Lake and Casino, it said Markus Plaza, which happened to be a shopping mall owned by TUI outside Phoenix, Arizona. So he was part of the extra security force brought in for the occasion.

Max now looked more carefully at the other guards’ uniforms and shoulder patches. He said, “None of you work here at the Gaiety?”

“No, sir,” they said. “No, sir.”

“So you won’t recognize bona fide employees of the Gaiety,” Max said.

“Well,” the first guard said, “they have to show us ID.”