The Hotel Detective

by Alan Russell

  Most maintenance workers would categorize themselves as being “independent.” Their co-workers might endorse other phrases, “rogue elephants” being one of the more kindly. Engineers think themselves the embodiment of the self-sufficient man and have a hard time hiding their disdain for a damn-fool world that can’t understand, let alone be able to, jury-rigged solutions out of bubble gum, chicken wire, and maybe a little chewing tabacky. To an engineer, the accepted definition for a Do Not Disturb sign, especially those that announce themselves in five languages, is “Ignore Me.”

  Cotton knocked at the door of room 605 (his hands were greasy, but he didn’t care that he left a calling card of his oily fingerprints—cleaning was housekeeping’s job). When no one answered, he reversed the sign, then used his pass key to let himself in.

  Something was gumming up the plumbing, and Cotton was trying to narrow down the offending section. Old bitch of a building, he thought. Rust and rot covered up by fancy wallpaper and doo-dads. Function sacrificed to aesthetics (“horseshit” was the word he preferred).

  Cotton’s first stop was the bathroom, where he checked the bathtub. It wasn’t full of shit like the last one he’d seen. He hadn’t minded the shit half as much as the guests in 501, who had been running around like the goddamn world had come to an end. Bad piping, he’d told them. Misdirected plumbing. Which translated that a couple of crappers were taking aim on their tub. After his pronouncement, Cotton had gone on the hunt. It wasn’t his job to deal with the mess or calm the hysterical. He was there to fix.

  He flushed the toilet a few times, with not a little satisfaction. Taking aim, he thought. But he knew those old pipes, and from the sound he didn’t think 605’s crapper was a contributing factor to 501’s problem. Just to be sure, though, Cotton decided to do a little more checking. Some of the plumbing was visible from the walk-in closets.

  Cotton went to take a look.

  XXVI

  Without saying it, Am and Sharon knew their case had come to a standstill. There was nothing to indicate that Tim Kelly had met up with a Mickey Finn in his guest room; there were no witnesses who could place him with a drug-administering woman; there wasn’t even that accursed condom. The thrill from playing cops and robbers (or detectives and murderers) had worn off.

  Am’s beeper sounded and was followed by the voice of Mary Mason requesting his presence. Emphatically he turned off his pager. Sharon’s eyes had followed his rather dramatic gesture. He decided to take her look as a challenge, declaring: “I am not going to talk to the Bob Johnson Society about hotel security.”

  Her hands, and mouth, and eyebrows, all opened up at the same time. She wasn’t the one asking him to speak. But Am conveniently ignored her body language.

  “I could, you know. But I didn’t ask for this responsibility, and I certainly didn’t volunteer to speak. Is it fair to work a job where they ask you to give blood every day?”

  Sharon’s tongue got as far as her front teeth when he announced: “Infra hospitium.”

  She waited a moment to see if she was expected to respond with a question. Apparently she wasn’t.

  “Latin,” he said. “It means within the inn. There was a time when hotels were responsible for the loss of a guest’s property, when they had an obligation to watch out for the safety and protection of guests. Inns were sanctuaries from the highwaymen and brigands. But nowadays hoteliers don’t have to worry about the onus of infra hospitium. They just have to supply what the courts deem ‘reasonable care.’ Of course, that responsibility seems to change with the frequency of the flavor of the week.

  “This week’s ruling is that we’re supposed to be psychics. We’re supposed to foresee the potential for guest injury. But just how are we expected to be the Praetorian Guard? Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a hotel, and when Ronald Reagan was president of the United States he was shot and wounded on the grounds of a hotel. If a troop of Secret Service agents can’t protect one man at a hotel, then how is a solitary hotel dick expected to protect a thousand guests?”

  Sharon knew a rhetorical question when she heard one. It took Am only a moment to catch his breath.

  “So many things can go wrong at a hotel. Every decade brings a new tragedy. The seventies had Legionnaires’ disease at the Bellevue Stratford in Philadelphia; the eighties had the horror of the collapsing skywalk at the Kansas City Hyatt. And let’s not forget the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas, or the inferno in Puerto Rico. Those are only the headline stories. For every major catastrophe, there are thousands of smaller, but not less terrible disasters: guests killed by exploding hot-water heaters; murders and rapes and robberies; deaths resulting from design negligence; guests hurt as a consequence of property neglect or, worse, because no one at the hotel ever cared enough to try to make things right.

  “Did you know one Las Vegas hotel lost as many as five hundred room keys a week for twenty-five years, but in all that time they never bothered to rekey their locks? It wasn’t until tort cases started bringing sizable settlements that hotels began to try to see to that ‘reasonable care’ of their guests. They learned they couldn’t mint keys like the U.S. Treasury does money, or house guests in rooms with known faulty locks or broken window latches. These days a hotel’s responsibility doesn’t end with handing out a room key and wishing the guest a good day.

  “Not that there aren’t times I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way,” he added. “Like the woman who sued the Ritz for forty thousand, claiming that her contraception pills had either been stolen or thrown away by the maid, and that her pregnancy was a result of hotel negligence. What? Are we supposed to be conducting bed checks?”

  Am sighed long and loud. He looked at Sharon and acted as though he were conceding to her. “All right. I’ll give the talk.”

  Odd, she thought. Not her being quiet, and not his speech making. But just that she was beginning to think of all this madness as being totally normal.

  XXVII

  “You see, Am?” said Mary. “Everything turned out all right.”

  The Bob Johnsons were noisily finding their seats, the same Bob Johnsons whose imminent arrival had wreaked panic on the Hotel. Anything short of a death, and Mary would always maintain that everything had turned out all right.

  Am wasn’t listening. He was intent on thinking up a speech. On the way over to the Spindrift Room he had thought of a grand theme. Everyone who worked in a hotel was a hotel detective, even if the cases they toiled over weren’t the sort to make headlines. Hotel detectives tried to answer the little questions and concerns that popped up on any given day. So far Am’s speech had translated into the words Welcome, Bob Johnsons. Maybe it wasn’t such a grand theme after all. The rest of his draft was still blank.

  Mary tapped on the microphone to see if it was operational. It was something she needn’t have done. Herman Gerschlach was the director of meeting services. He was a now he didn’t want a wake-up call, dammit, because he’d probably be up for the rest of the night.

  There were a few amused laughs from the Bob Johnsons, but Am sensed he hadn’t gotten through. They didn’t want wake-up stories. They didn’t want human nature. They wanted true crime tales, and he was hard-pressed to provide that. Wiping the sweat from his face, Am stole a glance at his watch. He’d been talking for less than ten minutes, but enough was enough. It was time for a grand finale he didn’t have.

  “Being the hotel detective usually isn’t glamorous,” he said. “Sometimes it’s figuring out which room has the pet in it. Sometimes it’s deciphering who a message is for. Sometimes it’s as mundane as determining whether you should be charging for a single or a double. And sometimes it’s just tracing a little child’s steps to find a lost stuffed animal.”

  And sometimes it’s just boring an audience, he thought. When he stopped talking, not too many people noticed. “Are there any questions?” he asked.

  “I hear you had a leaper last night,” said Bull with his foghorn voice, suddenly awakening the au
dience.

  “An unfortunate incident,” Am said. “Out of respect for the deceased’s family, it is not a subject open to discussion.”

  Bull was sidetracked—a little. “You had any murders here?” he asked.

  “Not in the years I’ve been here,” said Am. There was a collective sigh from the Murder Mayhem Weekend participants. He realized his guilt at their disappointment was not logical, but at the same time he began to understand why performers would try anything, and say anything, to regain an audience.

  “But we have had some serious disturbances. Why, recently there was even gunfire.”

  That drew some appreciative murmurs. And the demand for details.

  “The guest was annoyed with the seagulls,” said Am.

  The Bob Johnsons’ reaction made Am wonder if gladiator contests had drawn more charitable crowds. Their disappointment was palpable. He tried to talk up the story anyway.

  “The man had called the desk a few times to complain about the birds,” he said. “The gulls were interfering with his nap. He said he couldn’t even step out onto his balcony without them harassing him. We explained that we would be glad to move him to another room, but he told us he didn’t want to move. He said that if we couldn’t help him, he’d help himself, and that’s when he started shooting at the gulls.”

  “What happened?” Bull shouted.

  “It’s against the law for guests to have firearms in their rooms,” Am said. “The police confiscated the man’s gun and cited him for shooting within the city limits.”

  Bull shook his head, or at least swiveled it back and forth. He was one of those people who seemed to be missing a neck. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, looking rather disgusted at Am’s denseness. “Did he hit any of the birds?”

  The microphone amplified Am’s surprised intake of breath. The sound was not unlike a birdlike squawk.

  “Hard hitting birds with a handgun,” Bull announced.

  A number of heads nodded in agreement. Am had heard of round robin discussions, but this was a group he suspected would prefer dead robin discussions. Stiffly he asked: “Any other questions?”

  Someone else besides Bull finally spoke up, a happy-looking red-haired man who was holding hands with an equally happy-looking platinum blonde. “What was your most unusual case?” he asked.

  Dare he mention the bra thefts? But that was an ongoing investigation. Am tried to think of anything vaguely resembling a case that he had ever worked on. There were the times he had confiscated bad credit cards at the front desk, and there were the noise complaints he had attended to personally. He had helped separate fighting husbands and wives, and he'd once evacuated the building when there was a bomb threat. But a case?

  “Most unusual case,” Am said aloud, acting as if there were hundreds for him to choose from. A case indicated a mystery, something he had solved. And while at the moment he felt he was in the middle of too many mysteries, he couldn't say that he had ever really figured out a crime. Or had he?

  “That would probably be the mad remote controller,” he said.

  Over a period of three days and nights a number of guest rooms had called to say that their televisions had mysteriously shut off on them. Most of the transmission disruptions had occurred on the first floor. Some sets had deactivated five, even six times. Maintenance hadn't found anything wrong with the televisions or electrical system. The staff began crediting supernatural explanations, pointing primarily to the Hotel ghost (Am still wasn't sure whether he believed in that poltergeist), but the culprit proved to be flesh and blood and hardly a hardened criminal.

  It wasn't genius that helped Am to solve the crime. It was the woman's legs. They were extremely attractive and made him pause on a stairwell to admire them. When she also paused, ostensibly to tie her tennis shoe, Am was being more observant than usual. And that's when he noticed her surreptitiously pull out a television remote control from her purse. He watched her aim and shoot.

  All of the Hotel's television sets are the same; all operate by remote control. The woman had been scouting out rooms where she could use her censor's touch. Her easiest targets had been first-floor rooms with their patio doors open.

  Am explained the woman was mad at her husband. She said that even though they were on vacation, they might as well have been at home. Apparently, he didn't want to do anything except watch TV. She had stormed out of their room after they had argued, had unwittingly departed with a remote control in hand. She hadn't set out with the intention of being a vandal of the airwaves, but while walking around the courtyard trying to gain her composure, she had been interrupted by a blaring television. Before the woman knew what she was doing, she had taken aim and knocked the offensive set off the airwaves. That was the beginning of her mission, her vendetta. She was only sorry that her room was on the fifth floor, too high up to zap their television out of commission.

  The woman had given up her remote control without a fight. It wouldn't have ended that way on the TV, she had told Am.

  With the Bob Johnsons finally receptive, and his speaking pump primed, Am remembered a few other victories over crimes, talked about the capture of the haughty man with the epicurean stomach who had falsely signed in their restaurants at least a dozen times before being caught. He liked good food but didn't have the means to pay for it. When apprehended, the man was anything but repentant. While being led off, he had opined to Am that they should get some new menus in the Marina Restaurant.

  “They're getting to be the scratch and sniff variety,” he had announced disdainfully.

  Everyone laughed, except maybe Bull. Am felt good. Now he had them. Maybe he could tell them about—

  Jimmy Mazzelli ran into the room. How many times had Am told him not to run? Hotels were an illusion, and illusionists weren’t supposed to rush or sweat. Through sleight of hand, with a flourish, hotel workers were expected to conjure up visions of beauty. No one cared how the tricks were done, no one wanted to know that to make ice displays and floral arrangements, or to feed five hundred people and bring water and then wine (or, better yet, change water into wine), there were hundreds of invisible staff working, some circulating as anonymously as possible, others toiling feverishly behind the scenes. But here was Jimmy, being anything but invisible, bounding right up onto the stage where Am was speaking and wildly motioning him away from the microphone. Reluctantly he stepped back.

  Jimmy spoke for Am’s ear only. He didn’t count on Herman’s acoustical wizardry. His excited whisper was converted into a reverberating screech: “Am, Cotton just found two fucking corpses in one of the rooms.”

  It would have been difficult distinguishing who looked more shocked: Jimmy, listening to the echo of his profane words, or Am, who didn’t want to believe the messenger.

  Unwillingly: “Two?”

  Jimmy had learned his lesson. He nodded mutely.

  “Hokey,” announced Bull Johnson, loudly enough for the rest of his brethren to hear. “I was up in Frisco for one of these murder mystery weekends, and they started their program in just the same way.”

  XXVIII

  In every life there has to be a worst day. Am was hoping this was his. What had Nietzsche said? “What doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger.” But then Nietzsche had never worked in the hotel business.

  Two guests had been murdered in his Hotel. Detective McHugh had displayed a facsimile of the suspected murder weapon to the press, and had identified the knife as Hotel California cutlery. Because the assailant hadn’t brought the knife in from the outside, the press later announced that the deaths were the result of an interrupted robbery. The burglar had entered the room while the couple was in bed, and the speculation was that he hadn’t known they were in the room. There was a struggle with the male victim, a prominent Bay Area attorney, and afterward, no doubt in a panic, the knife wielder had stabbed the Jane Doe to silence her screams. It had originally been assumed that the woman was the lawyer’s wife, a theory based on the one-carat-
plus diamond on her ring finger, but later it was learned that the lawyer, a man identified as David Stern, was unmarried. Because it was believed the woman's wallet had been removed from her purse, her identity was still in question.

  In an effort to keep Hotel guests from panicking, it was reported that the criminal had fled the scene the day before. Am wished he had done the same. There wasn't anyone else who could speak for the Hotel. No one was stupid enough. Kendrick and the owners could not be reached in their inviolable retreat, and Am knew it wouldn't be proper for the Hotel to respond to double murders with a “No comment.” Melvin Carrelis, the Hotel's legal counsel, had cautioned Am to speak in generalities and appear very sympathetic. He was advised to refer as much as he could to the police, decry the basic sickness of society, and try to avoid referring specifically to what had occurred at the Hotel. The plan was for Am to read a short statement, answer a few questions, and then encourage the reporters to let the police conduct their investigation without interference. Two words into his statement, Am was deluged with questions.

  There is a taint of scandal associated with even the poshest of hotels. The business of selling rooms isn't perceived to be quite as respectable as selling insurance, or groceries, or bonds, or flowers. Beyond all the sanitized-for-your-protection sealants, hotels are among the most human of all environments. They are ports of call, destinations, and offer an allure more salacious than salubrious. One manager had once confessed to Am that he could never quite shake the feeling that he wasn't working so much for a hotel as for a bawdy house.