The Hotel Detective (2 page)

There are some long breaths you take in your life that suck in everything around you and make a photograph forever on your
viscera. Am took one of those breaths. The bullet had missed him.

Or had it? Had a spell been struck then? Had he been enchanted? Am almost awakened. But the play wasn't quite concluded.

Am heard strange sounds. It took him a few moments to identify them as laughter. Bill wasn't used to laughing. The auditor
started choking, but that seemed to please him all the more. When he finished, after he wiped away some tears, he looked at
Am with true admiration.

“Kid,” he said, “I think you were made for hotels.”

That's when Am awakened from the dream. As always. And he wondered his usual Scrooge-time muse: Was that an anchorite night
auditor talking, or was that the fates?

Damn fine knife, was David’s first thought as he cut into the filet. If they ordered in a few more times, he just might try
to collect a set of the cutlery and slip them into his luggage to take home with him. Hotel life. There was nothing like it.

He cut into the meat again. Not for the first time, David thought he should have been a surgeon. Except that doctors had to
pay too much for malpractice premiums. He should know. He had sued enough of them.

“This is a great hotel, Deidre,” he announced. “At great hotels they don’t give you the usual butter knife with a hint of
a serrated edge. They give you a real steak knife. A cutting instrument.”

David demonstrated for the woman, sliced off a particularly rare and juicy morsel, and then dangled it in front of her face,
unmindful of its dripping on the bedspread. From the oversize bed, she leaned over and opened her mouth, took a bite, and
let the juice dribble down her chin. Deidre’s robe fell open, and the man reached for her breasts. The couple hadn’t—except
to raise themselves for room service—risen from the bed since they had arrived the night before. It was now late afternoon.

The knocking at the door stopped their groping. “The belated bubbly,” the lawyer announced. A minute before, a bellman had
made a surprise delivery of wine and cheese, no doubt from his secretary. He rose, stretched languidly, then reached for a
towel. “Hold that thought,” he said to Deidre.

She reached over and swatted at his bare bottom. The knock came again. He postured for her for a moment, then wrapped the
towel around his waist, positioning the blue-and-gold Hotel California logo directly in front of his privates. As he walked
out of their bedroom, David paused at the full-length mirror and admired himself. There were lots of mirrors in the suite,
but not too many for his taste. That damn personal trainer cost him a fortune, but he sure delivered the goods. Forty-five
years old, and he had the body of a twenty-year-old athlete. You swim with sharks, he thought, and you better look like you
can bite. Business had never been so good. Clients liked his bait.

He had worked up a thirst, and was looking forward to the Dom Pérignon. There was nothing better than ordering a hundred-and-fifty-dollar
bottle of champagne, especially when someone else was paying for it. These were billable hours, he thought. When Deidre got
her settlement, there would be enough zeros in it that she wouldn’t object. The room was registered under his name, of course,
but for all practical purposes everything would eventually be part of her legal expenses. For consultation, he thought. And
for services. Especially that. The getaway was their little secret. Their precelebration.

David took a breath and pushed out his chest before opening the door. There were more and more women room service waiters
these days, and he always liked to look his best for the ladies. Head lowered, he motioned the cart inside, waving his towel
like a matador leading on a bull. “Ole,” he said. But when he looked up, he could see there was no room service cart, no display
of Irish linen and crystal glasses, no rose in a vase, no iced champagne. There was only a man. Given a choice, David might
have preferred the bull.

The man stepped inside the suite. He was of average height and had thick glasses. Over the years his red hair had grown thinner,
while his waist had grown thicker. For once the lawyer was short on words. “C-Carlton…”

The man didn’t answer. He started walking toward the bedroom. David was at a loss as to what he should do. He was too surprised
even to articulate a threatened lawsuit.

In the bedroom, Deidre waited. She didn’t know anything was amiss. The suite was well insulated, the walls designed to keep
the noises of the world at bay. She was laughing to herself at what David had said. “Hold that thought.” She was holding more
than that. He liked her vamping, but that wasn’t what he said he liked best. The door opened, and Deidre raised her lashes
in her best come-hither look. Then she screamed.

The scream moved her lover to action. David didn’t like it that their privacy had been violated and that his client was upset.
He felt wronged, transgressed upon. But he chose to ignore one salient point: the man who had entered their hotel room was
her husband.

“Get the hell out of here,” David said.

Carlton took a swing at him and missed. David was almost amused. His assailant was lumpy and slow, already red-faced and puffing
after just one attempted blow. David figured he could beat him with one hand tied behind his back, and he was glad of that,
because his left hand was holding up his towel. With his right, he shoved.

Carlton was not particularly nimble. His last fight had been in the sixth grade, over thirty years ago, and he hadn’t done
very well back then, either. He fell into the room-service tray, landed on the floor with all the remains from the half-eaten
plates: the filet mignon, the lobster thermidor, the wilted dandelion greens, the curly endive with bacon dressing, the celery
braised in white wine, and the mushrooms florentine. There were also all the condiments and utensils and the melted butter.
When Carlton raised himself up from the floor, Deidre stopped her screaming and started laughing instead. It was probably
hysterical laughter, but Carlton only heard the scorn.

The lawyer apparently wasn’t a believer in not kicking people when they’re down. He kicked Carlton in his dirtied pants and
sent him sprawling to the floor a second time.

“I told you to get out of here,” he said, then took a few moments to try to readjust his towel. It was difficult to do that
and keep his chest inflated at the same time.

When Carlton rose from the floor for the third time, he didn’t come up empty-handed. He turned on David and struck at him.
The lawyer was still fussing with the towel. Counsel proved right about one thing: it was a good knife. It found the lawyer’s
heart.

Deidre was still laughing. She hadn’t noticed the red stain appearing on her lover’s towel or the knife in her husband’s hand,
only saw the food and goo dripping from Carlton. It was so like him to appear the buffoon.

A moment later, and her laughter suddenly stopped.

A geologist had once told Am that earthquakes didn’t frighten him as much as the aftershocks. Am felt the same way about his
dream. It always seemed to presage some momentous event in his life. The changes hadn’t been all bad, but at the moment Am
did not feel like embracing flux. When you work at a beach resort, the end of summer is like the bell sounding the end of
the fifteenth round. You’ve survived, and you’re not anxious to leave your corner.

Damn dream. It had Am on edge. He wondered why, at certain intervals in his life, that vision of things past came to him.
Am thought his dreaming about hotels was unfair. Wasn’t it penance enough that he worked in one? He had once read about a
psychologist who studied the dreams of murderers. The shrink had discovered that most murderers remembered their dreams as
being beautiful, and he had said their nightscapes were much more sublime than those of the general population as a whole.
Am had always wondered if that was an endorsement for insomniacs to commit murder.

The fantasy wasn’t unappealing. In hand Am held a memorandum from the general manager, Raymond Kendrick. The memo addressed
personal effects on the office walls in the Hotel California. It described, in Kendrick detail, what was appropriate and what
was not. The GM had apparently nominated himself Miss Manners. Diplomas were appropriate. Pinups were not. Quotations or aphorisms
were allowed, but none that exhibited bawdiness or profanity. Wildlife animal photography was acceptable, but wildlife human
shots were out. The memo’s concluding paragraph stated the rule of thumb was that nothing should be displayed that might be
objectionable to others,
especially
to any guests who might visit. Am would have chosen to ignore the memo, save that Kendrick had handwritten on his copy: “Your
drawing and your cartoon must go.”

Am’s office was not rife with mementos and memorabilia, as were those of so many others. On display were the Bill of Rights,
a picture of Am surfing, an old photograph of Harry Houdini pulling off an incredible escape, and the drawing and cartoon
in question.

He reached for the ink drawing first. Cassie had made it for him, had signed it with her trademark artistic “Cassandra.” They
had lived together for two years in Ocean Beach in a funky little cottage on Voltaire Street. Cassie had been a bohemian artist
then. He hadn’t seen her in a dozen years but heard she’d been married, had had two kids, had gotten divorced, and now ran
a preschool. Cassie’s preschool would be full of colors, he thought. She liked vibrant yellows and reds. He remembered how
she had painted her VW with flowers, and he had had to fight off her trying to do the same thing to his Dodge Dart. Crazy
Cassie.

Am acted like a visitor to a museum, viewed his own piece of art from a number of angles. Devoid of colors, the sketch wasn’t
typical of Cassie’s work. She had created it in a matter of minutes, inspired by one of his hotel stories. Cassie was like
that. In some ways she had opened his eyes to his own profession. “Your hotel’s like
Canterbury Tales,
” she said. “People all going on that one important pilgrimage. And the characters!”

Cassie’s drawing wasn’t titled. Over the years Am had kept coming up with his own titles, descriptions that had become more
cynical with time. The picture showed a happy Procrustes leading one of his guests to a bed. According to Greek myth, Procrustes
was a giant who enjoyed putting guests up, though he did have an odd way of accommodating his visitors. Procrustes lopped
off the feet of those who were too tall for his iron beds and stretched the limbs of those who were too small. Unofficially
Procrustes was a hero to the innkeeping world. Whenever Am came home feeling he had suffered enough guest abuse to last him
a lifetime, he would announce to Cassie, “Procrustes had the right idea.” There were circumstances and guests, he said, that
called for procrustean solutions. Cassie had drawn him a giant who had a “
mein
host” exterior, a welcoming arm and a smile, but whose gimlet eyes were taking a measure of the guest.

Was there a hint of Am’s visage in the Procrustes? He supposed there was. But Cassie had also known his working in hotels
was more than just a paycheck. She had labeled his vocation Am’s “noble quest,” words spoken only half-sarcastically. And
sometimes she had called him “Myron,” after the hotel man in Sinclair Lewis’s
Work of Art.
Am touched Cassie’s drawing but couldn’t bring himself to remove it from the wall. He figured taking down the cartoon would
be easier. It wasn’t.

Capitulation is usually done in degrees of swallowed pride. Complying at the point of a gun didn’t settle well with Am. When
he finally took down the framed cartoon from the wall, he saw how its removal left a dark rectangular patch and revealed how
faded the rest of the wallpaper had become. Like my principles, he thought.

How long had the cartoon been hanging? Eight years? No. Nine. Am wiped an accumulation of dust off the cover plate. It was
a gift from his last hotel job. The cartoon, or one like it, was on the walls of most hotels in the country. It showed a beleaguered-looking
front desk clerk trying to cope with a domineering guest. Clearly the clerk had been put through the wringer. The caption
read “Suppose we refund your money, comp your stay, send up a fruit basket, close the hotel, and have the manager shot. Would
that be satisfactory?”

Am put down the cartoon, then traced his finger around the rectangle of where it had hung. He thought back to when he had
first arrived at the Hotel California, popularly known simply as “the Hotel.” That first day he had felt drunk, a good drunk.
His senses were heightened, aware as never before. It was as if he were in love. He had walked around the Hotel, had breathed
its rich air and been giddy. He was the assistant general manager (AGM in hotel parlance) of San Diego’s landmark hotel,
the
Hotel, and life was good.

For a moment Am remembered the feeling, but the high didn’t last. Now he felt only the hangover.

After a few minutes’ thought, Am arrived upon a solution. It wasn’t exactly procrustean, didn’t cause him to lose a limb,
but it did allow him to save face. When he returned the cartoon to the wall, he reversed it. He did the same with Cassie’s
drawing. Guests couldn’t possibly be offended by the back of a frame. Even Kendrick would have to concede that.

As if to contradict that thought, Am’s phone rang. The telephone display showed the call came from Kendrick’s extension. Reluctantly
Am picked up the receiver.

“In my office,” said Kendrick. A dial tone followed. Kendrick never bothered with salutations or closings.

The executive offices were located well away from the front desk, out of sight and hearing of any of the front of the house
operations. Insulated from reality, thought Am, not for the first time.

Kendrick’s secretary, Maria Ortiz, gave her usual sign language of support to Am. She had large brown eyes, sympathetic beacons
to those who entered Kendrick’s office. Am paused for a moment before speaking, but his presence had already been detected:
“Mis-tah Caw-field.”