Time Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page B

evening? To buy a paper or magazine or anything?”
        
        “Twice,” Simmons said, “A paper both times.”
        
        Pete frowned. He could not remember having read a paper. Considering how brilliant were his memories of the rest of those three days, that was an odd ommission.
        
        “Did we talk about anything?” he asked.
        
        “The weather,” Simmons said. “Pleasantries.” He blushed, an unpleasant change on the pallid, round face. He looked as if he were ready to burst. “You'll excuse me if I don't remember exactly what was said. So many strangers go in and out, and the talk is always the same.”
        
        He had nothing else to tell them. At last, Pete took out his checkbook and said, “How much do I owe?”
        
        Simmons looked startled. “You paid for three days, when you came in.”
        
        Pete looked in his book; he could not find a stub to verify what Simmons had told him.
        
        “No, you paid by cash,” Simmons said. “It was unusual. You insisted on paying me then. You said you might have to leave in a hurry and you didn't want to chance getting caught in a line at the desk if you had to depart during a rush hour.”
        
        Outside, on the concrete veranda before the office, Della breathed the golden, late afternoon air and said, “Well, he threw a little light on the situation, anyway.”
        
        “None at all,” Pete corrected.
        
        “What?”
        
        He took his wallet from his hip pocket and opened it. There were two fives and two ones in the money clip. “I had twelve dollars Thursday afternon, in these same denominations. I remember that clearly. I think this is the same twelve. What did I pay him with?”
        
        “I don't understand-”
        
        “That makes two of us.”
        
        To their right, a maid pushed a cart of cleaning tools along the wide cement walkway, stopped before the open door of the maintenance room and pushed her equipment inside, wiped her hands on the dust rag at her waist, then threw that after the cart. As she closed the door, Pete approached her.
        
        “Excuse me,” he said.
        
        She looked up, wide-faced, perhaps Spanish or Puerto Rican. She had been pretty, once, twenty years and a hundred pounds ago. The years had worn her down while building her up, and her dark eyes looked at him suspiciously out of the layers of fat that cushioned them.
        
        “Yes?” she asked.
        
        “Have you been cleaning Room 34 these past three days?”
        
        She squinted her eyes, an act that made them all but invisible. “I didn't touch anything,” she said.
        
        “I'm not accusing you,” he said. He took a five dollar bill from his wallet, folded it and held it out to her. “I only want some information.”
        
        She looked at Della, down at the five, up at Pete, then down at the five again. She took the money and stuffed it in one of her uniform pockets. “What do you want to know?”
        
        “Have you noticed anything unusual about number 34? Anything at all, no matter how insignificant it might seem.”
        
        “The bed is never slept in. And the towels are never used. I don't believe anyone's even in there-though they say someone's renting it.”
        
        Della stepped forward now. “Haven't you seen my husband in there, or hanging about the hotel somewhere, waiting for you to finish with the room?”
        
        The maid looked him over as if he were an interesting fungus that had sprung up in the center of the veranda. “Never seen him,” she told Della. She seemed more at ease talking to a woman. “And he wouldn't have had to hang around somewhere waiting for me to finish with his room, 'cause it hasn't taken me even a minute the last three days. I just walk in, check that the bed is empty, look at the