The Hotel Detective

by Alan Russell

  tered from the lobby, walking inside without knocking and looking like spaghetti western villains out for revenge. “Went back to the restaurant,” he said.

  “Returned to the scene of the crime,” she said.

  “I thought we might get hungry later,” said Whiner. “Midnight snack,” Whiney chimed in.

  “So I asked what happened to my dinner.”

  “'Where is it?' he asked.”

  “And they told me they had thrown it out.”

  “Threw it away without asking,” she said.

  They looked at Am expectantly. That was his clue to offer apologies and compensation. Ile continually amazed guests with his stupidity at not understanding what they thought was obvious.

  “I talked with your server, Mr. Weintraub,” he said. “He told me that both you and your wife had finished your dinners….”

  Whiner held up his right arm and his index finger. “But I hadn't finished,” he said.

  “The only thing you didn't eat was that last piece of veal that—“

  “A man pays for his meal, isn't he entitled to all of it?”

  Am looked from one face to the other. He hoped they were joking, but they weren't smiling.

  “Mr. Weintraub, I find it difficult to believe—“

  “I find it difficult to believe that you charged me for a meal I didn't finish. You did that, didn't you? Authorized that bill to be signed over to our room?”

  “When you left the restaurant you weren't in any condition—“

  “Now I've returned. And I'm hungry. But my meat isn't there. I don't think 1 should have to pay for that entrée. Or I should have another one made for me.”

  “In all fairness, don't you think—“

  “Another entrée, or I refuse to pay.”

  “We’ll make your entrée,” said Am.

  That wasn’t the answer Whiner wanted, but it was still victory enough. “Have it sent to the room,” he said.

  “We wouldn’t dine in one of your restaurants again,” she said.

  “It will be sent up,” Am promised.

  They walked out of his office, and Am walked back to the kitchen. Marcel was sitting in his office, smoking a cigar. His preferred spot was directly under the No Smoking sign. Marcel’s burlap bag was on the floor. Am reached deep inside it and pulled out a particularly sorry specimen of squashed opossum. Even Marcel, who always seemed oblivious to smells, sniffed disdainfully.

  “Weintraubs,” said Am.

  “Mon Dieu,” said Marcel.

  The chef had heard displeasing words from those—those—cretins before.

  “He never finished his veal marsala,” said Am. He held up the opossum. “This,” he said, “is going to be the veal marsala.”

  “But you need to marinate ze possum meat, Ham,” said Marcel. “You need to add ze herbs, and stoop it in ze spices, and—”

  Am dropped the opossum in front of him. “This,” he repeated, “is the veal marsala. They won’t eat it tonight. And you know how the taste and complexion of meat can change overnight.”

  “But what if zay complain? What if zay say eat’s not veal?”

  “Then we play possum,” said Am.

  XXXV

  Most large hotels have resident managers. The perks of such a position are many. A casual observer might consider the job as being the closest thing to royalty. Meals are provided by the hotel, along with daily maid service and laundry privileges. But the sword of Damocles also comes with the job. Am had lived at hotels before but had never much liked it, could never shake the feeling that he was on the job twenty-four hours a day and that doom was always hanging over his head. Whenever the phone rang, he anticipated it to be a problem, not a friend. And there was the fishbowl feeling, the staff monitoring the goings-on of his life as if it were spectator sport. But had he still been a resident manager, Am reflected, staff wouldn’t have had much to talk about lately. Nowadays he was having trouble getting a life separate from work. The antidote for many suffering job burnout is a change of scenery, an escape to some hotel where they can be pampered. But that didn’t work for Am. Whenever he visited other properties he felt like a magician analyzing another practitioner’s tricks. A getaway would be good, though, maybe a surfing trip down the Baja peninsula or a camping excursion to some secluded canyon in the Anza-Borrego Desert. The desert, located within the boundaries of San Diego County, was itself larger than some states, while the county as a whole could claim more square miles than half a dozen states. Within San Diego County were mountains, deserts, and the ocean. Anyone with time and money would be hard-pressed to ask for a more diverse and pleasant locale, but Am always seemed to be short either the hours or the cash.

  Too tired to read, too numb to move, Am resorted to the intended soporific of television. His timing couldn’t have been worse. The lead story on the eleven o’clock news was the murders at the Hotel. According to the report, Jane Doe still hadn’t been identified, and neither had the murderer. There was a clip of McHugh responding to (or was that evading?) the reporter’s questions. Am thought there was more to be learned by the detective’s omissions than in what he said. On air, McHugh never mentioned the cleaning up of the crime scene or how the suspected murderer had gained access to the guest room in the first place.

  For Am, the worst part of the news was having to watch himself being interviewed. He thought he had the presence of a cornered fox in a room of baying hounds. The only good thing about his segment was that it was short. Maybe his unintelligible mumbling had something to do with that. Am was glad he had listened to the housekeeper’s suggestion of filling the room with flowers. He had sarcastically asked if she wanted to make it look even more like a funeral parlor, but Barb had countered that the viewers might notice the pretty arrangements more than the story being presented. She had artfully positioned the flowers in front of the dais so as to obscure the Hotel California display (usually burnished to a high polish whenever the media was around). Barb’s flowers had shown up beautifully.

  Murders and festive flowers made for conflicting signals. The day had been full of those. Things are not always as they seem, thought Am, words he associated with Conrad, an elderly bellman who had worked at his last hotel. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, Conrad said, he could gauge his tip to within a dollar of what he would ultimately receive, but every so often he encountered a guest who fooled him, who offered him a hauteur and a smile that all but guaranteed a substantial promissory note. “The kind of guest,” according to Conrad, “who passes along a folded bill into your palm as if deeding you the world.”

  Bellmen know they’re supposed to offer a performance commensurate with their tip. The sure knowledge of a large gratuity makes them execute bows that come to within an inch of kowtowing. When receiving a palmed bill, bellmen must read the signals with which it is offered and then take a leap of faith. The etiquette of the situation requires the bellman to offer adequate pomp and circumstance even before knowing the denomination given to them. That moment of truth comes only after the bellman has exited the guest quarters and is out in the hallway.

  “You open your hand,” said Conrad, “and you expect Jackson, but sweet Ben Franklin or handsome U. S. Grant aren’t unheard-of. You’ll settle for Hamilton, a fair trade for your performance, but you know that Lincoln sometimes comes up.

  “But damn,” said the bellman, “if there aren’t times when you don’t find yourself looking eye to eye with solitary George Washington. Things are not always as they seem.”

  Was this one of those times? thought Am. Had the police offered only a one-dollar explanation to a big-ticket crime?

  As if listening for answers, Am heard a voice, then realized it was only the call of the stationmaster. Because his California bungalow was so close to Del Mar’s train station, Am heard the train announcements often enough to know all of Amtrak’s offerings. This would be the last commuter train of the night, the 11:05 P.M. run, heading south to downtown San Diego. Am had set his
alarm early enough that he’d probably hear the 5:47 A.M. train going north.

  With stops in Oceanside, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fullerton, and Los Angeles, he thought, stops he had heard announced thousands of times.

  One day I’m going to play hooky from work, Am vowed, and I’m going to take that train north, and get off at every one of those stops.

  And then what? Author Paul Theroux had just kept traveling, finding more and more train lines, rails across continents. But there is a profound difference between being a traveler and a hotelier. Am had made his permanence out of transience. He had shared in enough stories and travels as to almost satiate his own wanderlust. Travelers need their ports. That’s what they talk about over the next horizon. And there were some things in his port he needed to make right—for the travelers, for himself.

  There came a long train whistle, and then there came sleep.

  XXXVI

  “I’m just going to work,” said Am, using the same soothing tones he would employ if encountering a large, mean-looking, unchained dog. “Just a beautiful drive along the coast.”

  Annette started right up. She probably would have been scrap years back if it hadn’t been for Am’s neighbor, Jimbo, who liked nothing better than working on old cars. Jimbo volunteered his time for “parts and beer,” neither one of which came cheap. His beer belly (proudly referred to by Jimbo as his “Milwaukee goiter”) would have done a sumo wrestler proud; by Am’s figuring, he was in to him for a micro-brewery.

  I’m raising a car instead of raising a child, Am thought. Maybe it was time to trade in Annette for something whose upkeep wouldn’t be so expensive—say, the Queen Mary. It was not an observation he dared make aloud.

  As if to belie her age and temperament, Annette cantered along old 101. The route winds along the coast, and through Del Mar offers such scenery as to make even jaded commuters look twice. On the approach to Torrey Pines State Reserve, there are no buildings to obscure the view of the water; to the west there is only the beach and the expanse of ocean. Am did his usual morning scouting for dolphins (he did the same in the afternoon but usually spotted more bikinis than wildlife) but didn’t see any. The dolphins often liked to gambol along the surfline, sometimes even taking the waves like seasoned surfers. A storm had passed through Baja a few days earlier, unusual weather for September, but it suited the surfers just fine. They were out in abundance, waiting for their rides to glory. The wind was up, and the waves were high. Spindrift dotted Annette’s windshield, enough to necessitate turning on the wipers. They worked, if irregularly: the story of the car.

  There is a point in every commute where the workday begins, where you are on company time even if you’re nowhere near the time clock. When Am passed Torrey Pines Beach, and the cliffs blocked any potential roadside viewing of dolphins and mermaids, he started thinking about work. He didn’t consciously see the Torrey Pines (found naturally in only two places in the world and distinguished from other pine trees by its cluster of five needles), or Scripps Clinic, or the Salk Institute, or the University of California at San Diego, or even the long pier marking Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For the last six miles of his drive Am was planning out his workday and praying that there wouldn’t be any new land mines waiting for him.

  On his desk were only two incident-related reports, one of which was written on cocktail napkins numbered one through six. The thespians must have decided it was their turn to make a nuisance of themselves. They had closed down the Breakers Lounge the night before, and the bartender had reviewed their show. Between drinks, the actors had taken turns doing scenes from their favorite plays: Shakespeare in the rounds.

  Some of their performances had been inspired by the Bob Johnsons. The appearance of Bob Johnsons (identified by their name tags) had prompted denunciatory scenes (Tennessee Williams was evidently a popular selection, as was Eugene O’Neill), and several times during the course of the evening the hennaed playwright had, with pointed finger, announced her plight: “It was supposed to be a six-act play, one for every meal, and red herrings for snacks, but, alas, the Philistines would not have it.” The bartender/critic didn’t think their vituperation as commanding as other performances. The thespians’ final curtain call came at two A.M., with closing scenes from Our Town, and apparently there wasn’t a dry eye in the lounge.

  The last of the cocktail napkins suggested employing the actors at the Breakers for just such performances, as they had proved more popular than the usual piano bar. The postscript, which was written around what looked to be the partial remains of a green olive, noted that the actors had run up a six-hundred-dollar bar bill. Am didn’t find that tab as frightening as the bartender’s suggestion and firmly filed his note away.

  The other report was left by one of the Brown’s Guards. Included was a Polaroid shot of a Hotel reader board that had been tampered with. Apparently someone had neglected to lock up the display, and the Jackson-Ropenhauser Dinner Party in the Whaling Room had been changed into Jack the Ripper Was Here. Am was sure the alteration was only a prank, but given the circumstances it didn’t strike him as funny. Any signboard is a magnet for attempted highjinks. Given the opportunity, people like to play Scrabble with the letters. At most hotels electronic reader boards have taken away that creativity. Entries on an electronic board are typed on a terminal, which eliminates the laborious process of hand-posting the letters, but the Hotel California still eschewed such gadgetry, preferring its wooden letters and large oaken reader boards. Am wondered when tradition would yield to labor costs.

  The reader boards were scrutinized by more than group and banquet participants trying to find out where their function was being held. The Hotel was visited daily by sales representatives of other hotels, callers the industry refers to as reader board readers. The readers were there for the sole purpose of writing down which groups the Hotel was hosting. They compiled their lists with the hope that in the future they could lure those same conventions to their properties. One GM Am worked under had vehemently hated reader board readers. He was all too aware of the half dozen or so “vultures” who visited the property daily, and the sight of their “carrion feeding” always incensed him. The happiest Am had ever seen his boss was the day of the bogus reader board entries. On display were the purported gatherings of a Pornography Making Workshop, a Jim Jones Kool-Aid Tasting, a Symposium on Endangered Faeces, and a Reunion of the Manson Family. What delighted the GM most was how the reader board readers blithely wrote down the entries in front of them, never questioning what was there.

  Was Am doing the same thing? Was there something about the murders he was taking at face value? Getting the chance for deep thought in any workplace is a rare event. There was something in the back of Am’s mind that wanted to come out, but the thought was driven away by the rapping at his office door. Whoever was doing the knocking had taken loud lessons from a bull elephant.

  Shouting, of necessity: “Come in.”

  Jimmy Mazzelli opened the door. “Problem, Am,” he said.

  Problem. Why was that a word that usually prefaced his nickname? Jimmy helped himself to an empty chair, his slouch instantaneous.

  “What’s the problem, Jimmy?”

  “Gent’s losing his cool at the front desk. Last night one of my boys apparently delivered his laundry to the wrong room. Man didn’t notice until this morning. We’re tracking it down now.”

  Jimmy liked to refer to himself as the bell captain and the other bellmen as “his boys,” but his was a self-appointed title.

  “Man’s name?”

  “Hazleton.”

  “Room?”

  “Three thirty-eight.”

  “How much laundry?”

  Jimmy handed over two pink laundry slips, and Am whistled. The last time he had seen a similar laundry bill was when the duke and duchess had stayed at the Hotel.

  “Who delivered it?”

  “Wrong way.”

  “God. Find it, woul
d you?”

  “Like I told the gent, won’t be more than fifteen minutes before we get it to him. We already talked to Wrong Way on the phone, and he narrowed it down to half a dozen rooms or so.”

  “How could he forget where he delivered that much laundry?” asked Am. “How is that humanly possible?”

  Jimmy coughed behind his hand. Wrong Way wasn’t someone he ever bad-mouthed; he made Jimmy appear the epitome of competence.

  “Why don’t you send Mr. Hazleton back to me.”

  “Righto, Am.”

  As usual, Jimmy had left out a telling part of the story. When Mr. Hazleton walked into the room, Am expected a man dressed to the nines, but Hazleton looked more like he was auditioning as a flasher. He was wearing a raincoat and shoes and apparently nothing else. Am remembered to extend more than his jaw, but Hazleton favored a harangue to his handshake.

  “I'd like to know what kind of hotel you're running here?” he asked.

  It was a good question, one Am often asked himself. “Why don't you sit down, Mr. Hazleton,” he said. “Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  The offer calmed the guest slightly. “Nothing,” he said. “I just want my laundry.”

  “Lots of laundry,” said Am.

  “Yes,” he said, “lots of laundry. And the last time I stayed at this hotel the same damn thing happened. This is the second time my laundry's turned up missing in action.”