Read Online Flashpoint by Ed Gorman - Free Book Online

desperate enough to have to pay for sex. ‘No. Somebody who might be staying here.’
    â€˜Oh. Good. Because I could lose my job otherwise. So who’s the lady?’
    I described her.
    â€˜Sounds like the Cabot woman. That’s why all those reporters are over there. A cop said somebody killed her out at the senator’s cabin.’
    Amazing how quickly and how much the press had already picked up on. Amazing and terrifying for us.
    â€˜So she’s been staying here?’
    â€˜Oh, yeah. I’d have to check to be sure but I’d say four, five nights offhand.’
    The Regency would probably get a B rating in one of those travel guides. It had a kind of worn opulence like a grand dame on her uppers. The other bellmen I’d seen were much younger than this guy and much more clean-cut. I suppose every hotel needs a crafty old bastard. He would know where all the bodies were buried, sometimes literally.
    â€˜She get many visitors?’
    â€˜Lots of guys around the restaurant and bar who wanted to be visitors, if you know what I mean.’
    â€˜How about anybody who actually got into her room?’
    â€˜One. This little bastard. Thought he was pretty important. Like they say, you can tell a lot about a guy by the way he treats the help.’
    â€˜He have a name?’
    â€˜She called him Howie.’
    â€˜Howie? Howie
Ruskin
?’
    â€˜Oh, yeah. Come to think of it, that’s what that candy-ass desk clerk called him. Mr Ruskin. He some kind of big deal?’
    He obviously didn’t understand the implication of what he’d just told me.
    Ruskin. Howie Ruskin. I’d never met him, but I’d heard way too much about him. In college he’d been a supporter of our party. Then, or so the story goes, he switched parties because a girl he loved dumped him. She’d been on our side. In revenge he spent his years as a political saboteur doing everything he could to demolish us. He was especially good at opposition research and at using the press to spread rumors. He was equally good at setting up traps for unwary politicians. His specialty was using women (or men on a few occasions) to seduce said politician and then outing the relationship. This had worked at least nine times in critical elections. It had brought down six of the nine, which was a damned good record. Throughout this time he’d paid a ghostwriter to concoct three bestsellers for him.
    Then there was Howie himself. Good Catholic boy/man in his late-thirties now. He was five-four and weighed around two hundred pounds. He was losing his hair and insisted on fitting his ball-like body with the latest fashions, said fashions being designed for teen-gaunt bodies. Once or twice a year you could see him on TMZ or in one of the supermarket rags on the arm of a model or a starlet. A publicist had always set it up for him. I was told that, pathetically, Ruskin had convinced himself these women actually wanted to go out with him.
    My favorite Ruskin story involved Mensa, the organization for people whose IQ registers in the top two percent of all humanity. He qualified as brilliant; the problem was he also qualified as one of the most obnoxious self-promoters the group had ever had to deal with. There were so many stories about his jerk-off behavior at various functions that his publicist had pulled him out of the organization.
    Among his other problems was his gambling addiction. By all accounts he was a terrible poker player but insisted on spending hours with some of the pros. He’d lost a lot of money – he’d also tried to welsh by claiming he’d been cheated. One of the pros, obviously a man of little sensitivity, sent a goon after Howie baby and gave him a black eye. Another apparently suggested he might meet with a fatal accident if he didn’t pay up within twenty-four hours. It was whispered that at any given time somebody in Vegas had it in for him.
    The one thing his