The door to the adjacent room opened and out stepped a man in his sixties. He was wearing a white hotel bathrobe, his belly wrapped as tight as a Christmas ham in butcher’s twine. He had the thick hair of a teenager, and without the pomade in it, Darren almost didn’t recognize him. But when the man pushed a lock of it from his face, Darren blinked, and it came back to him at once: it was the man who’d escorted the brunette woman into the hotel earlier this evening. He remembered thinking that they’d been coming from Rosemary King’s place and that they’d been drinking. The man looked stone sober now. A bemused expression on his face, he stared at Darren, who realized he was wearing only his boxers. “Well, if you don’t look a sight,” the man said.

“Heard trouble in your neighbor’s room.”

“Don’t see how. There’s nobody in there.”

“How do you know that, sir?”

“I always rent the rooms on both sides of me when I travel. Else what the hell am I working this hard for, right?” He gave Darren a faint smile. He was ruddy…or flushed. His lips were plump and cherry red, even though his skin was spotted with patches where melanin had fled his face, like ghost freckles on his skin. “I don’t sleep too good, and people play their TVs too damn loud.”

“I’d like to search the room,” Darren said, indicating 207. “Both, actually.”

In the end he searched all three of the rooms rented to the man and found nothing. No woman in distress, no sign of a struggle, nothing out of the ordinary except for a pair of pink sponge curlers resting on the nightstand by the bed the man had been sleeping in when Darren’s “banging and shouting” had woken him. He took the loose lock of hair in front—a good three inches longer than the rest of his hair—divided it into two sections, wound each one around a pink foam roller, then snapped each roller into place. Darren, half naked, watched with utter bafflement the careful work the man made of it and wondered vaguely why, if he’d been asleep, he was just now putting up his hair for the night. “And you didn’t hear anything?” he asked. “No commotion in any of the rooms?”

“Not a peep. But I threw back quite a few this evening.”

“Where were you coming from, sir?”

“Dinner party.”

“At Rosemary King’s house?”

“Yes.”

“And who was the woman I saw you with earlier?”