The golden-brown leather seat in the window looked like a waffle; it was next to a table like a dish of creamy butter and two sleek backless chairs that reminded me of coffee mugs. It would have been enough to make me hungry if the room hadn’t been so relentlessly full of mirrors. It was hard to find somewhere to look that didn’t nauseate me with the wreckage of my face.
A tiny orange light blinked on the phone next to an unmade bed. Since the housekeeper was watching, I opened drawers, moved the curtains around, bent carefully to look underneath the edges of the bed, but meanwhile I was noticing something else entirely: there was nothing in the room but some papers in the trash can. No clothes strewn about, no suitcase, no razor, no hair product. I tried to touch as little as possible in case this was a crime scene, but I did nudge open the mirrored closet door to find no clothes hanging. No shoes, no bags. I looked at the glassy surface of the computer desk, and the microscopic layer of accumulated dust was the final nail in my certainty: this viscount fellow had packed up several days ago, hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign, and never come back.
I turned my attention to the window for a moment, trying to get my damaged brain into gear and make some sense of this. The curtains were open, affording me a view of Los Angeles that might have been striking if I’d been in a different mood. At the moment it was just a bunch of palm trees and terra-cotta rooftops, and me failing at my first assignment.
“What are you doing?” Teo’s voice was sharp from the doorway.
I turned around, trying not to let the oh crap show on my face.
The housekeeper said something to him in Spanish, and he waved her away irritably, pushing past her into the room.
“Teo, please be nice to the lady. She’s helping me look for my phone.” I tried desperately not to emphasize my words, waggle my eyebrows, or do any other kind of work with me dance, because I can smell stupid a mile off, and this woman was not giving me the faintest whiff of it.
Teo visibly clenched his jaw, then turned to the housekeeper. “Can you give us a few minutes alone?” he asked her.
She said something else to him in Spanish.
Teo shook his head irritably again. “Do you not speak English?”
“I speak it fine,” she said, her eyes cold.
“Okay then,” he said. “I need to have a private conversation with my friend here.” He pulled out a wad of bills and held them out to her.
She made a sound of disgust and walked away without taking his money. She muttered something in Spanish as she went, and I know Teo understood her, because his slouchy posture went ramrod straight before he came in and shut the door behind him.
“I was getting along with her just fine,” I snapped. “Would it have killed you to be polite? Now she’ll report us.”
“To who? Anyone important knows I do business with the viscount. Now relax. Since we’re here, we may as well get something out of it. Go through the trash.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re the one who decided to trespass, so you get to be the one to touch his snotty tissues or whatever.”
“Don’t these sort of people use handkerchiefs?” I went to the bathroom and found a shower cap to put over my hand.
“Lady, you have no idea what sort of person you’re talking about.”
“A vampire?” I guessed. I picked up the trash can—which held a frankly absurd number of Reese’s cup wrappers—and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Nope,” said Teo, casually, like it had been a decent guess.
“I was kidding,” I said, taking out the wrappers carefully, one at a time, using the shower cap as an ill-fitting glove.
“You weren’t kidding,” said Teo. “Not really. I bet you believe all kinds of crazy shit, or Caryl wouldn’t have recruited you.”
I found something near the top that wasn’t a candy wrapper: a folded piece of white paper. I clumsily eased it open with my shower-capped hand, hoping to find a scribbled address or phone number like you always do in the movies, but instead it was just a little sketch made with a ballpoint on hotel stationery. I stared at it.
Teo chattered on, poking around the room. “So apparently instead of checking out, the viscount extended his stay by a whole month. Either he completely forgot when his visa expires, or—Millie, you okay?”
The sketch was of the view out the window, the one I had just dismissed, but somehow in a few spare lines the artist had captured L.A.’s restless energy. DREAMLAND was written at the bottom in a bold, masculine hand. I stared at the paper and remembered, on a primal level, the thrill I’d felt when I first saw the city from the freeway eight years ago: sun low and heavy in the sky, downtown’s high-rises glittering in the vermilion light. I felt a stinging at the back of my eyes and let the drawing slip to the floor.
“What is that?” said Teo.
“Nothing. Just a sketch of the city.”
He bent and picked it up as I continued sifting through candy wrappers, and then he did something odd. He pulled a pair of nineties-retro mirror shades out of his pocket and put them on, peering at the paper through them. He hadn’t worn them the whole ride over, even when we were driving into the sun, but now he put them on in a fashionably dim hotel room?