The Falcon's Malteser by Anthony Horowitz

only guessing. But it took me ten minutes to walk from the newsstand to the hotel and that was just about all the time they needed to arrange my death.
    The hotel was just like I remembered it, leaning carelessly against the overpass. The plainclothes policeman and the dog had gone, of course, but the garbage cans were still there, spitting their leftovers into the gutter. It was after three and already it was getting dark, the sun sliding behind the horizon like a drunk behind a bar. An old man carrying two plastic bags full of junk stumbled past, on his way from one nowhere to another. A cold wind scattered the litter across the street. Depressing? Well, it was five days to Christmas and I was pretty depressed myself.
    I went into the hotel. Jack Splendide was sitting behind the counter where I’d found him on my first visit. He was reading a dirty paperback. It was so dirty, you couldn’t read half the words. It looked like somebody had spilled their breakfast all over it. He was still sucking a cigar—probably the same cigar, and he hadn’t changed his shirt either. The last time he’d changed that shirt I probably hadn’t been born.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Yeah?” He really knew how to make a guy feel welcome.
    “I want a room.”
    “How long for?”
    “One hour.”
    He frowned. “We only rent by the night. Fifteen dollars. Sixteen dollars with a bed.”
    I’d managed to grab all Herbert’s cash before we parted company and now I counted out the money on the counter. Splendide took it, then stood up, reaching for the key.
    “I want Room thirty-nine,” I said.
    “Suppose it’s taken?”
    I gestured at the hooks. “The key’s there,” I said. “Anyway—who needs it? The room doesn’t have a lock.”
    “This is a class hotel, kid.” He was offended. The cigar waggled between his teeth like a finger ticking me off. “You don’t like it, you can check in someplace else.”
    I didn’t like it. But I had to go through with it. “Just give me the key,” I said.
    He argued a bit more after that. I thought he was holding out for more money, but of course he was keeping me waiting on purpose. That was what he had been told to do. In the end he let me have the key—like he’d been intending to all the time. I should have been smart enough to see right through his little act, but it had been a long day and I was tired and . . . okay, maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought.
    Anyway, he gave me the key and I climbed up the stairs to the fifth floor, then along the corridor to Room 39. It was only when I’d opened the door and gone in that I began to think that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It was unlikely that the room had been cleaned since the dwarf’s death—it was unlikely that the rooms at the Hotel Splendide were ever cleaned—but the police would have been through it with a fine-tooth comb. But now that I was here, it wouldn’t hurt to have a look. And I had paid.
    I began with the drawers. There was a big, asthmatic chest of them. They groaned when I pulled them open and the brass rings rattled. But apart from a bent safety pin, a moth-ball, and the moth it had killed, they were empty. Next I tried the table. That should have had two more drawers, but somebody had stolen them. That just left the bed. I went and sat on it, remembering how Johnny Naples had lain there with that red carnation blossoming in the buttonhole of his shirt. He had sat in this room. He had lived in it. He had worked out the location of a five-million-dollar fortune in it. And he had died in it.
    The traffic thundered past about six feet away from the window. It was still a mystery how Johnny Naples had ever managed to sleep here at all.
    My eye was drawn to a wastepaper basket in one corner. It was a green plastic thing, so broken and battered that it should have been in a wastebasket itself. I leaned across and flicked a hand through the rubbish that lay in the bottom. There wasn’t much: two