How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

her key, dropped it somewhere, and the killer found it.”
    “And knew the room number, right?” Mackenzie said. “’Cause it’s never on those keys.”
    “Well, maybe—”
    “Sasha didn’t lose her key, Mandy. She used it to let herself into the room, remember?”
    I sat in silence, fiddling with the wedge of lime on my Virgin Mary. Was it possible that Sasha had become involved in somebody else’s bad dream? That she was involved, and the second man, the accomplice, was one of her evening’s two men? Dunstan, or even Frankie the good guy?
    The red-haired bartender eyed me and my second-shift male companion either enviously or suspiciously.
    Mackenzie ordered orange juice.
    “This is very strange.” My voice sounded hollow, foreign, as if coming in on a poorly engineered sound track. I had the dissociated sensation that this wasn’t really happening. Soon, I’d wake up and chuckle over how real it had felt. “Every detail makes it stranger,” I said. “And there are so many details.”
    I squeezed the lime over my ice cubes. “She wasn’t there!” I bleated, lamely, because how was she going to prove that, or anything? Even I was beginning to find her denial boggy and suspect. I couldn’t think my way past the bloody slip or the business card in her slacks, or the witness or the door key. The only possible route around that seemed with Dunstan, who, I hoped, wouldn’t turn out to be part of the crime, the second man the witness saw. I stood up. “We have to find that lousy date of hers.”
    Mackenzie’s expression was blank, as if he’d turned off his mind. “Not now, surely,” he murmured. “I was plannin’ on maybe a little rest. It’s nearly tomorrow. My eyes feel corrugated.”
    “Aren’t you the one who always says the first forty-eight hours are the most important?”
    “Yes, but…but…”
    I went over to the bartender. Business was slack, even here, at three-thirty Tuesday morning. The combo played “Sunrise, Sunset,” in a whine of violins, but softly. “Hate to bother you again,” I said, “but I need Dunstan’s last name.”
    She put down a glass she’d been polishing and looked at me with open disgust. “Why?” she asked. “Your new one’s cuter. And he’s not a lounge lizard. In fact, I’ve never seen him in here before. Isn’t it time to end the stereotype of women only wanting rats? The Dunstans of this world have had a free ride for too long!” She seemed on the verge of climbing onto the bar and declaiming.
    “Halt,” I said. “This has nothing to do with me. I agree with you completely, but I’m asking on behalf of a friend.”
    “Hah! The old friend business! You tell your friend that I don’t want anything to do with Dunstan and neither should she!”
    “Do you know his last name?”
    “He’s just Dunstan. Like Svengali. Or Zippy, in the comics.”
    “Do you know anybody who knows his last name?”
    “He gave me his card. Slick piece of work, just like him. Looks like a camera. Clear plastic in the middle, for the lens. That’s where his name and phone number were. But why give it to me, a bartender? Unless I was supposed to pimp for him—pass it along to likely conquests.”
    “Could I see it?” I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.
    The red spikes of hair looked lethal. “Think I’d keep it? Tossed it right out!”
    I sighed. “Can you remember what it said?”
    “I’m not procuring for an arrogant lounge lizard with an accent!” For emphasis, she pounded her fist on the copper-topped bar. “I’m not one of those traitors who swoons at the sound of the King’s English. I don’t care what Princess Di wears. I don’t even think they should keep that parasitical royal family!”
    “All I want is Dunstan’s last name.”
    “I swear, if my daughter shows tendencies in this self-destructive direction, I will personally take her out and—”
    Bartenders were supposed to be listeners, not impassioned orators. Another myth