The Name on the Floor
Chapter 01 - The Name on the Floor
The first thing Gabriel Moretti noticed was that the waitress had taken off her shoes.
They stood side by side beneath a linen-covered service cart, inexpensive black flats, their heels worn crooked. Beyond them, broken glass made a bright, dangerous little sea across the marble floor of the Alder House Hotel. In the center of it lay a young woman in a white shirt and black apron, one hand curled beneath her cheek.
The dining room doors had been closed. Music still played on the other side. A violin, something cheerful, absurdly cheerful, considering the blood on the woman's sleeve.
“Is she drunk?” Daniel asked.
Gabriel gave him a look.
“I didn't say she was,” Daniel muttered. “I asked.”
Two minutes earlier Gabriel had been going upstairs to meet a man who owed him four million dollars. He had not slept more than three hours the night before. His left knee hurt when it rained, and tonight Chicago had delivered an entire river from the sky.
For nearly twenty years he had used the hotel as a place where inconveniences could be moved out of sight. He knew the owner, approved its renovations, and could identify three waiters by name. Until that night he'd never asked where they changed their shoes or what happened to them when they were too sick to finish a shift. The discovery embarrassed him, though he would not have called it that aloud.
He knelt anyway.
“Call an ambulance,” he told the hotel manager. “And keep everyone out of this hall.”
“Mr. Moretti, we can handle—”
“Then why haven't you?”
The manager vanished. Gabriel lifted a shard of glass away from the woman's hair. There were bruises at her wrist, four dark ovals, as though someone had gripped her too hard. Another bruise, older and yellowing, marked her cheekbone. He felt a brief, old anger that had nothing to do with business.
The waitress opened her eyes. They were gray, frightened, unfocused.
“Easy,” he said. “Help's coming.”
She recoiled from his hand so sharply that her shoulder struck the cart.
“No. I have to go.” Her voice was almost lost under the music. “Mitchell's ring. I have to go home.”
Gabriel stopped breathing.
It was a common enough name. He knew that. Chicago held hundreds of Mitchells. But he hadn't heard it spoken in that particular frightened way for twenty-two years, not since a boy with dark curls had shouted from the far side of a locked loading gate.
He leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“Please.” Her fingers tightened around something beneath her shirt. “Don't let him take it.”
“Who?”
“Mitchell—”
“Do you mean Mitchell Moretti?”
Her eyes sharpened. So did her fear.
Daniel crouched beside him. “Gabe. The meeting.”
“Cancel it.”
“Victor's already upstairs.”
“Then he can enjoy the view.”
A siren rose outside. The woman tried to sit. Gabriel supported her without pulling her toward him. He knew men who confused strength with the right to hold someone still. He had once been one of them.
“My mother,” she whispered. “She'll be waiting.”
“What's your name?”
“Nora. Nora Ellis.”
“Where's home, Nora?”
She looked at his face. Her gaze paused at the thin white scar running from his left ear toward his jaw, a scar his beard could never quite hide. Something like recognition moved through her.
“He said you'd have that,” she murmured.
Gabriel had forgotten the blood on the floor. “Who said?”
But the paramedics arrived, bringing a stretcher, sensible questions, blue gloves. One of them examined Nora's wrist and asked whether she had fallen. Her eyes traveled to the manager, now watching from the far end of the corridor.
“Yes,” she answered after a moment. “I fell.”
Gabriel saw the lie settle over her like a second coat.
At the hospital he could have arranged everything through his staff. Instead he stood in a narrow treatment room while a doctor stitched the cut in Nora's forearm. She had a mild concussion, bruised ribs, and the particular exhausted look of a woman who had been afraid long before she was hurt.
Daniel waited outside, speaking into his phone.
“Why were you at the hotel?” Gabriel asked when the doctor left. “Your manager said you weren't scheduled.”
“I picked up a shift.”
“Why?”
“My mother needs money for the house.”
“What house?”
Nora looked down. “It isn't a house people like you would know.”
“Try me.”
“Women stay there when they have nowhere else.”
The words called up a memory of Gabriel's own mother carrying grocery bags through a January storm, before the chandeliers and private planes and men who waited to open doors for them. His father had despised that part of her life.
Nora reached inside her shirt and drew out a short chain. A gold signet ring hung from it, heavy for such a delicate chain, its face worn nearly smooth. A small blue enamel star was set into the metal.
Gabriel did not touch it.
His mother had given that ring to his younger brother on his eighteenth birthday. She had made the cake herself, a lopsided chocolate thing, and Mitchell had worn the ring to bed because he was too proud to take it off.
They had argued over it afterward. Gabriel called the blue star childish, and Mitchell said Gabriel wouldn't know beauty if it jumped out of a jewelry box and bit him. Their mother laughed so hard she spilled coffee on her skirt. Gabriel remembered rushing to get her a towel, as though such small usefulness could last forever. He had not thought of the coffee stain in years.
A year later they buried an empty coffin after the fire at their father's warehouse. The coroner had told them there was nothing left to identify.
“Where did you get that?” Gabriel asked.
Nora held the chain tight. “He said it was mine to carry until I found you.”
“Who did?”
She seemed to be deciding whether to trust his name more than his face.
“Your brother.”
Gabriel looked away toward the rain beating against the dark window. He had imagined this moment in so many shameful dreams that he knew exactly what a false hope could do. It arrived like mercy. It left like punishment.
“Mitchell died in 2004,” he said carefully.
“That's what they told you.”
A knock came at the door. Daniel put his head inside, his expression unusually tight.
“Gabe. Victor Ferraro is here. He says Nora Ellis stole something from him.”
Nora's hands shook. She hid the ring inside her shirt.
Across the corridor, beyond Daniel's shoulder, stood a broad older man with silver hair and a perfectly dry overcoat. Victor had served the Moretti family for thirty years. Gabriel trusted him with accounts, contracts, even the keys to his mother's grave.
Victor smiled without showing his teeth.
May you like
“Gabriel,” he said, “whatever the girl told you, don't let her leave with that ring.”
And for the first time in twenty-two years, Gabriel was more frightened of a living man than of a ghost.
