Concrete Angel (30 page)

“C
an I buy you a drink?” he asked, minutes after she slid onto the red leatherette stool two seats away. He was tall, skinny, and had thinning salt and pepper hair worn in a pony tail. No exactly her usual type, but he had a way about him. Cocky, glib. He’d do in a pinch. He was wearing blue scrubs, but they didn’t look like a doctor’s. Lab tech?

She’d decided to get a drink at the bar after an unusually hard day. The hotel was shorthanded and didn’t maintain much of a list of backup help. Adele wouldn’t mind watching Ryan a little longer. Half the time, Eve arrived at her mother’s house in the middle of his nap and was made to cool her heels while Ryan finished sleeping. Déjà vu from the days when Christine’d been in her care. And now Christine was trying to horn in too. Her kid didn’t fool her.

Eve thought she deserved a drink, and the first drink for hotel employees was often free if the right bartender was working. He was.

“Got it covered,” Tom, the barkeep, told her skinny companion when he saw him pulling out a billfold. His voice was brusque. It was obvious Tom didn’t like the fellow. Eve wondered whether there was a reason for it.

“Know each other?” she asked, her eyes sweeping back and forth.

Each man had the same clenched-jawed look, the same twitchy eyes. Both shook their head. Perhaps Tom had a crush on her. She hadn’t considered this before. He had to be under thirty, and his shoes were scuffed when he walked over to a table to clear it.

When Tom went to attend to another customer, she took a careful sip of the gin and tonic, looking the new guy over more openly. She winced; Tom had apparently decided to impress her with the strongest drink he could make. She set it down carefully, pacing herself but remembering, somewhat fondly, when she drank like this all the time. Lesson learned. The smell of the lime was the nicest thing about it.

The guy with the ponytail noticed her sniffing. “Best smell in the world, isn’t it?”

“The booze or the lime?”

“Well, what’s one without the other?” They both laughed. Click.

“Second best smell anyway,” she said.

“And the first?”

“Cut grass.”

“Gasoline. But grass isn’t bad either. And if you cut it with a power motor, well, you get both. Like a gin and tonic.” He took a swig of his beer. “Bud Pelgrave.” He didn’t smile or hold out a hand, and she didn’t offer hers.

“Eve… Moran.” She’d used Mickey’s name for more than two years despite having no legal claim to it, but returning to Moran was easier than she’d expected.

“You don’t act too sure of your moniker. Have a purse full of fake IDs there?” His eyes shot to her lap where her handbag nestled. “Hey, you’re not trouble, are you?” He said it like he was hoping she was.

“Not lately,” she said sadly. Recently all she did was clean hotel rooms and dream about her yesterdays. No need to tell him this though. Not yet, at least. She carried herself like a hotel patron and would act like one. She put on her best smile.

And so it began. Bud Pelgrave entered her life.

“I
can get you a job as a personal housekeeper, secretary. Something cushy,” Bud Pelgrave told her a few weeks later. “It’d be lot easier than this gig. This job’s for wetbacks.” He was lying on a guest bed on the 10
th
floor of The Philadelphia House, watching her go through her routine. “You already dusted the phone, honey.”

“It’s grimy. And you’re distracting me, Bud. I told you to come over at four and it’s not three-thirty. You shouldn’t be here…”

She looked around warily, wondering if the room might be bugged. Examples of her inadequacies as a chambermaid kept coming up when she ran into her boss punching out. Maybe there was a video device somewhere. On her cart? Or, more likely, inside the TV. It’d be like Mr. Duggan to install expensive surveillance equipment at the same time he claimed poverty if anyone asked for a fifty-cent an hour raise.

Bud glanced at his watch. “Place is deserted, Babe. Let up a little. The room is clean.” He struggled to sit, putting another pillow behind him. “Look, here’s the thing I came early to tell you—just occurred to me today. I run into old guys who need help all the time at work. They’re completely lost once their wives go—one way or the other. I can introduce you to one of ‘em. They’ll probably pay you more than you earn here if only to listen to their life story, flash a pretty smile.” He paused. “Mostly that’s what I do—just listen. Lots of ‘em seem more lonely than sick.” He closed his eyes and settled back into the pillows. “This mattress stinks. Sleep on this bed a few nights and I’ll be needing my own services. Maybe I can make a deal with the hotel. Or stick a card under the doors.”

“This room’s scheduled for refurbishing so a new mattress is on the way. Whole floor is. They’ll bump the rates to pay for it. Same rooms on Floors 1-5 are ten dollars more a night.” She stopped what she was doing. “Don’t you do exercises to prevent back pain? Leaning over a massage table all day long must be murder.” She knew because she did this herself—leaned over beds half the day. “Isn’t there some reciprocal arrangement with one of your pals?”

Bud was an acupuncturist and ran a practice touting the benefits of vitamin therapy, acupuncture, relaxation tapes, massage—all the stuff beginning to flood the market. Lots of stressed-out people turned up at his practice once they’d exhausted everything else, or when their medical plan wouldn’t cough up the dough for a legitimate orthopedist. Bud didn’t have a degree in anything requiring state licensing, but it didn’t stop him from hanging a vaguely worded sign above his office on a side street in Manayunk. A mail-order degree in one of the new-age procedures from a non-disclosed school permitted him to call himself Doctor. His greatest talent was in the art of persuasion.

Sometimes his clients or patients did get better, mostly due to either the passage of time or the placebo effect. He was careful not to fool with someone genuinely ill. Careful not to charge too much or make too many promises. His disposition could be quite pleasing when he set his mind to it. He was a good listener—or knew how to appear so.

Sometimes he fooled her until he was forced by some circumstance or other to admit he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

“Learned how to listen as a kid. My mother never stopped talking. She was a hairdresser, and I used to clean the place after she closed. Sweep the floor, clean the combs, untangle cords. And all the time, gab, gab, gab as she sat in her chair and drank a six-pack.”

Eve saw through the snake oil pitch immediately but liked Bud for other reasons. Most of the men she knew were like Bud. Even Hank, to some extent. Had Hank not had access to his parents’ money, he’d probably been forced into something dicey. Certainly Mickey DiSantis was similar to Bud, selling used cars where the speedometers were turned back and the damage carefully masked. Mickey’s boss had a process to temporarily hide rust, for instance. It bled through within weeks, especially in wet weather, but the legal papers the customer blindly signed took care of things. She pushed thoughts of Mickey out of her head.

“Gonna smooth that out before we go?” she asked, emptying the wastepaper basket and shooting him a look. “The bedspread, I mean.” He sighed. “And watch out for your shoes, Buddy. It’s hard to get scuff marks off the fabric.” She shook her head. “The world’s still bonkers for polyester. They haven’t caught on yet. You should see how nasty cigarette burns look on that sheen. I bet the place goes up like a torch some night.”

“You sound like a regular little hausfrau, Eve. Dispensing housekeeping information like Erma Bombeck.” Bud jumped up and gave the spread a swipe. “See, no wrinkles at all
. It’s magic
.”

He sang it like the old Sinatra song. Most of the men in her life were Sinatra fans. Maybe she was attracted to this one type of guy and would choose him over and over again until one of them murdered her. Or she killed him. Whoops, no, she’d done that already. What had his name been?

“That’s its one asset. Polyester,” she said when he looked blankly at her.

“You could drive a car over it and not make a crease.”

“So why you buggin’ me?”

“I don’t know. It makes me tense having you in here. Like it or not, I need this damned job. The doofus, Duggan, shows and finds you here, I’m toast.”

“Duggan’s probably nailin’ one of the Latinas in a room down the hall.”

“Hardly. His wife has him on a six-inch leash.”

“You’d be surprised how much wiggle room six inches gives you.”

“Very funny.”

Bud stalked around the room, picking things, examining them, and putting them back in the wrong spot. “Come on, old girl. This room was clean ten minutes ago.” He raised and lowered his shoulders impatiently. “I’m getting the idea you’re trying to avoid me.”

She wiped the wastepaper basket off, placing it under the desk. If it were up to her, they’d put plastic bags in those trash baskets. There was always a coating of dust or grime or sticky stuff inside from the crap people pitched. God, she was beginning to think like her mother. Spend too much time on wifely duties and shit happened.

“Looks tacky,” Mr. Duggan told her when she mentioned her idea about bag inserts. “Plus an added cost. Just wipe ‘em down.” He demonstrated the proper method on a trashcan already pristine, his eyes narrowing with attention. “Hotel’s already paying you, right?” He shook his head like she’d suggested something crazy.

Duggan had trained her himself, going through the room with unrepressed pleasure, showing her the mistakes often made by newbies. He dusted the light bulbs, for instance, and vacuumed the inside of the closet.

“Course you’ll have to complete each room in a timely manner,” he said. “If it’s been trashed, these niceties will need to be dispensed with.” The room he chose had already been cleaned so he could accomplish the task in about fifteen minutes. “Not saying fifteen minutes should be your benchmark at first,” he said, running a hand along the windowsill and wincing as his hand came away coated with grime. “Like to nail these damned windows shut. Look at it out there. Why do they need to open the window? Cities are filthy places.” He turned to glare at her. “Think of thirty for dirty.” When she didn’t show she understood him, he added, “Minutes. Thirty minutes a room.”

She’d like to see Duggan take on the typical trashcan she handled. More days than not, she’d find a used condom inside, although she’d rather find them there than in the bed. Often she’d miss one, yank the sheet off, and send a rubber flying through the air. God, she hated this job. Oh, and gum—gum was bad. No one would believe how many people tossed chewed gum, opened cans of soda, half-filled coffee containers, lit cigarettes, and drug paraphernalia into those little, brown, fake-leather cans. It was amazing the number of guests who assumed she wouldn’t rat them out for their drug usage. Wouldn’t call a cop in to see what the Browns’ had been up to in Room 1014. Did they think she took a secrecy oath as a maid? A confidentiality pact? Did they think two bucks on the desktop was a fitting recompense for fishing needles and assorted drug paraphernalia out of the trash can? For having to flush unflushed toilets. For crawling around on her hands and knees retrieving things from under the sink because they couldn’t be bothered to aim better. And speaking of a better aim…

She’d also suggested wearing gloves to Mr. Duggan, but he said gloves implied their guests were riddled with germs. “People see you coming out of a room in gloves and they’ll think we have Legionnaires Disease in here. Remember that disaster a few years ago. Right around the corner too.”

A precaution such as gloves might have prevented Legionnaires Disease, she wanted to say. Eve regretted Adele’s hygiene standards had permeated her brain, but what could she do? She could attest to the germ issue by the sheer number of tissues, swabs, and medications lining the guests’ rooms, from the bandages, bottles of antiseptic ointments, and heating pads, from the odors of decay hanging in the air when she walked in. Most people were a walking medicine chest. And they had no compunctions about expecting her to clean their mess.

“Look, I know this guy who needs one right now.” Bud was still talking but she had no idea what he was talking about. “He’s practically begging me to help him out.” His mouth was inches from her ear.