seymoure

Checking In, To Start Checking Out

“Be kind to your mother-in-law, but pay for her board at some good hotel.”

-Josh Billings

I got to the hotel and it was better than I thought. I half expected to see something that had escaped from the Las Vegas Strip.

Even though it was on Hollywood Blvd., it was not any showier than some of the places at home. It was very nice, with a huge lobby and nice rooms. Free snacks were a bonus (Why? Dammit, I’m rich, but it still seems like a nice thing. I still don’t think of myself as rich, I guess)

Why is it when you can afford to buy anything do people insist on giving you even more stuff? Perhaps because they think some of that rich will rub off?

I set up Chester’s suite and then went up to mine.

I was going to have to be sure I was ready. In the small canvas bag I always carried I found my “illegal stuff.” My identity cards for the NTSB (for the Air Crash investigation) for the death of Sarah Browning, Otis Elevator Company Papers (since the elevators were installed in the teens, it was a pretty sure bet) for the death of Gary Barton, the insurance guy.

The rest was there, too, but these two were what I was going to look into first.

Now to get on the phones and set up the first steps in both investigations.

First call had to go to police in the two areas that handled the elevator “accident” and the plane crash.

Sacramento said they had turned everything back to the owners of the hotel, but they were more than ready to open their files for a representative of the elevator company, like me. The same was true of the low-level official in San Diego. He wasn’t aware that anyone from NTSB was doing a follow-up, but they had no secrets.

I set up appointments and then called down for dinner. The fewer people who saw me, the better chance no one recognized me from pictures in the papers or on the news. I hadn’t sought publicity, but it did find me. And notoriety could really block my doing any of the things I wanted to get accomplished. It would force me to turn this over to one of my associates, but I’d rather do it myself.

Though what lay just ahead for me was the most boring part of any investigation. Combing through files looking for tiny inconsistencies that might give away something that could break the case was not the most exciting way to spend time, but it was how the greatest number of cases are broken.

And I was going to break this case.

For Eddie.

Back to the Beginning

Continue on to Chapter 8