Chapter 4

Nellie Prine looked at the half-tag in his hand and did not move.

She had seen it before, of course. She had seen it every day for forty-one years, in the only place she had ever kept it, which was the fold of her uniform pocket, right under her reading glasses. What she had never seen was the other half of it.

The tear had gone straight down through the pencil. His half said Nellie Prine - Halstead W, and stopped there. Hers said oolen, Gate 3, and carried the little nick where the pencil had caught.

He had not needed the rest of it to read it. He'd had forty-one years of practice.

"Mr. Rourke." Doran Voss arrived at his elbow with his hands open, the way men open their hands when they want to look reasonable. "Whatever that is, it has nothing to do with tonight. That woman has worked here for thirty-four years and tonight she was caught-"

"Where is the coat?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The sable." Ellis didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. Two hundred people had already stopped pretending not to listen. "Celia Voss's coat. Where is it?"

Doran's mouth opened and closed.

"Because you didn't check the rack," Ellis said. "You didn't check the ledger. You didn't ask the number on the tag. You pointed at her and you ended her, in front of a room, in forty seconds. So you either know something, or you don't care. Which is it?"

"I don't answer to-"

"You do tonight."

Somebody near the windows laughed, one short bark, and cut it off.

Nellie stood with her hands at her sides and felt the old familiar weight settle onto her shoulders: the certainty that whatever happened next, she would be the one it cost. That was how it had always worked. She was sixty-eight years old. She had no lawyer, no union, no children to make a scene, and a sister who worked nights. She had eleven months left on a pension and a name that people in this city said the way you say the name of a street.

And in her pocket she had the only private thing she owned.

She was afraid of it now. Not of losing it - of using it. Because the second she pulled it out it would stop being hers. It would be evidence, and the room would decide what it meant, and a man would look at it and think, she kept it for this, and thirty-four clean years would come down to a woman with a piece of cardboard and a story.

Doran Voss turned on her. His flush had reached his jaw.

"You want to play this out?" he said. "Fine. Security. Search the cloakroom, search her locker, search her-"

"Imani." Ellis said it without turning around.

The hotel's security director, Imani Boyd, stepped out of the crowd by the doors with her radio already in her hand and her face unhappy. "Sir."

"Nobody searches anybody. Nobody calls anybody." He looked at Doran. "You had your forty seconds."

Nine years Doran Voss had run this group, and not one share of it had been offered to him in the sale. He stood in the middle of his own lobby with nothing to say.

Nellie's hand went into her pocket.

Past the glasses. Past the bus fare and the brass button she'd picked up off the marble at quarter past seven and never got to sew back on.

Her fingers closed on the torn half of the tag.