Hotel No Tell

by Daphne Uviller

  “Are you … unhappy with the way I’m handling streetlights?” I asked tentatively.

  “Don’t be absurd. Your work is always flawless.” She ran her hands briskly over the black polka dots that danced across her lap.

  In fact, this was the first direct compliment Pippa had ever paid me and thus the first time the rollicking parade of professional self-doubt that was forever marching through my psyche had whistled to a stop. I immediately imagined myself reporting this news to Gregory and just as quickly remembered that that was no longer an option. My stomach did its increasingly familiar aerial show, where it rose at the thought of him, then dropped when I remembered he was gone, and then dipped even farther as I recalled how uncertain I was that I had done the right thing by halting a trip to the altar.

  “Thank you,” I eventually remembered to murmur.

  “Right, then,” Pippa said, holding her hand to her brow to shield her eyes from the sun. “Shall I fill you in?”

  As if “no” was a viable answer. I nodded.

  “Old hotel, southeast corner of Waverly and Sixth. Owned by the same family for three generations. Ballard McKenzie, sixty-two, is the patriarch, and his only child, Hutchinson, twenty-nine, is poised to take over. The mother, Clarissa McKenzie, sixty, hand-painted the murals and whatnot on the walls of the foyer”—Pippa pronounced this foyé—“the grandfather laid by hand the mosaic in the floor, the grandmother wallpapered each room herself. Odd-looking place, to tell you the truth.”

  Pippa paused, distracted, as was I, by the woman with the Crate and Barrel catalog. She was now openly weeping over its pages, though whether it was from joy, longing, or some other reason entirely was not apparent. Pippa cleared her throat and shifted so that her back was fully turned on the spectacle.

  “Right. There’s never been so much as a picked pocket reported at the hotel, not in forty years. Not even an INS dustup with the staff. It’s all very homegrown, lovey-dovey, family pride and all that. Until last spring.”

  I felt a delicious current of anticipation spread through my limbs and an alertness crackle across my brain. This was why I loved my job, or maybe this was how I knew I loved my job. I felt this way whenever Pippa assigned me a new case, no matter how dull it might have sounded to someone else. The truth was, I didn’t mind paging through blurry Xeroxes in my cubicle, trying to cobble together evidence against the nail salons, or riding to interviews in the outer boroughs with the smoke-saturated senior detectives while they mocked me and my sheltered background. My dad’s definition of professional happiness was finding something you love and getting paid for it. I was getting paid to be nosy.

  “Last week,” Pippa continued, “the father finally called intake to tell them he thought something was wrong with the books.” She raised one eyebrow at me. This was her bare-bones version of mentoring. I jumped in, as I knew I was expected to do.

  “I’m guessing there’s a reason he didn’t ask the rest of the family to take a look?”

  “Ballard McKenzie is worried that it’s his son, Hutchinson, who’s cooking them, and he’s devastated. Noticed something nearly a year ago, but it took him this long to admit it might actually be intentional thievery by one of his own.” Pippa fluttered her eyelids to indicate her opinion of family loyalties.

  “Why is this an S.I.C. case?” Our jurisdiction was city employees and contractors dealing with (read: cheating) the city. As far as I knew, the city wasn’t in the hotel business.

  “The Greenwich Village Hotel is one of a handful that agrees to accept a discounted rate for guests visiting the city on official municipal business,” Pippa said. “Guests brought here on the city’s dime, that is.”

  “The city puts up VIPs at boutique hotels?” I asked doubtfully.

  “They’re not necessarily VIPs and this isn’t really a boutique hotel. It’s just small. Say the Board of Ed is toting in a keynote speaker for a principals’ conference. They don’t always want to stick someone in dreary midtown. They want to show off the city’s color. Downtown.”

  “Okay, so how much are we talking?” I looked out over the water as we passed Lady Liberty, feeling a renewed sense of connection to the amber waves of grain that lay beyond her, a surge in my chest that had been dead from Election Day 2000 to Election Day 2008.

  “A hundred grand.”

  I actually choked on my water and turned to stare at my boss.

  “Exactly.” Pippa nodded, satisfied with my reaction. “He tried to convince himself that it was acceptable not to be able to reconcile a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Any leads at all?” I asked incredulously.

  “Not a one.”

  “Great,” I muttered, trying to sound annoyed, when, in fact, I could have soared the rest of the way to Staten Island on my own excitement. I was getting in on the ground floor of a completely untouched case! No one else’s notes and musings and misleading hypotheses to politely consider. Virgin soil.

  “You know you love it,” Pippa commented drily. “Don’t try to be like your world-weary colleagues. Those blokes love it, too, you know.”

  I blushed. Someday I’d be like Pippa—an enigma, a closed book—but for now I had to make peace with being as understated as a carousel. The construction worker with the beautiful shoulders strolled past, and it became apparent to all that his shoulders were not even close to being his best feature. I inhaled the salty air and tried to regain focus.

  “Why did you want to discuss this on the boat?” I asked suddenly. This assignment could easily have taken sixty seconds in her office. “Not that I’m complaining,” I added hastily.

  “Two reasons,” Pippa said immediately. She glanced to her left and seemed startled to discover that the catalog cryer had left. She looked around quickly, and I could tell she was disturbed that she’d lost track of someone, as if she’d failed a surveillance exercise. “First, most important, this case will not be tracked through our central system.” She paused to let this sink in.

  “You mean, this is”—I tried to sound nonchalant—“confidential?”

  She studied me, a wry smile playing on her lips. Clearly, I was failing at cool. “Yes. You are not to discuss this with your colleagues. Can you manage that, Zephyr?”

  I blushed. The detectives had once tacked a sign to my cubicle that read Morning Zoo with Zephyr Z. But that would end now, I vowed to myself. This was the chance I’d been looking for, an opportunity to make a name for myself, to finish out my three years of training and finally get my private-investigator license, allowing me to work pretty much anywhere I wanted. I’d arrive at my state licensing exam in a hail of fireworks. Or at least not be teased so much by the senior detectives.

  “You are most especially not to discuss this with family or friends.”

  I swallowed and tried not to think of my parents: Ollie, the assistant district attorney, and Bella, the founder of a financial-seminar franchise, who lived upstairs from me and who were once again my repository for daily musings now that Gregory was gone. I tried to block out thoughts of my coterie of four high school friends—we referred to ourselves as the Sterling Girls, in honor of the Upper East Side prep school we’d narrowly survived—who probably knew how much I’d weighed at birth. I ignored thoughts of my current confidante, a fabulously neurotic woman named Macy St. John with whom I consumed vast quantities of Roasting Plant coffee at the Leroy Street dog run, even though neither of us owned a dog. And I pushed aside the image of my auteur brother, who seemed to think my career served no better purpose than as a lode of material for his screenplays.

  “Of course,” I said.

  She studied me for a moment. “Good.”

  “What was the other reason?” I asked, eager to get past the subject of my capacity for keeping my mouth shut.

  Pippa looked uncomfortable, which was such a rare occurrence that I did a double take. She wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something peculiar.

  “Right. Well. I wanted to make sure you were … all r
ight. You know. After …”

  I didn’t want to make it hard for her, but I had no idea what she was getting at. After holding too many one-woman gelato-sampling events along Bleecker Street? After staying up too late with Sterling Girl Mercedes Kim and her movie-star husband, watching an early cut of his latest film in their multimillion-dollar loft? After accidentally dropping hummus into the cage of Hitchens, my post-breakup Holland Lop bunny?

  “After Gregory.”

  I tried to hide my shock. This made two attempts to delve into my personal life during a single conversation, and it unnerved me.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I said lightly, waving my hand, hoping to locate an escape hatch from the conversation. In fact, I had not been fine, but talking about it with Pippa Flatland was not my idea of a useful step on the road to recovery.

  She touched her hair and straightened her shoulders. “As I suggested earlier, I really don’t believe you should chuck the whole notion of motherhood. Of family and all that. Perhaps Gregory just wasn’t the right fit for you. I assigned you to the hotel because the scion, Hutchinson … that is, he’s, well …” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “He’s a bit of all right. You know. Rather handsome.”

  I blinked at her in astonishment. “You’re setting me up with a suspect?” Only my own mother was that desperate to see me reproduce—so desperate that, for the first time in my adult life, our relationship was truly suffering. Not the adolescence-era kind of suffering caused by an unauthorized borrowing of a leather jacket, but a gut-wrenching, I-don’t-feel-like-I-know-you-anymore kind of suffering.

  She scowled at me, giving me hope that we would, once again, depart the realm of the personal. “Don’t be absurd. Eye candy, merely. And I wasn’t finished. I also think that, working in a hotel, you’ll have an opportunity to meet a variety of new people and it may help you move on.”

  “Really?” I said incredulously.

  “Oh, never mind, Zephyr,” she snapped. “I give a damn about all my employees, and I give two damns about the young ones. Three damns about the young women, who are notoriously few and far between. I think being around a good-looking man—who may or may not be a criminal, I remind you—and whatever interesting guests might pass through the hotel will help get your mind off that chump and move you along. Let me remind you, though, lest there be any doubt, that I am giving you this case primarily because I believe you are ready for it. But never mind,” she repeated petulantly.

  I felt like I was gaining a window onto Pippa’s skewed and impoverished perception of the human heart. To her, A plus B equaled forty-seven: Her equations didn’t match up with any noetic format I’d encountered. Still, I was pretty sure she was attempting a generous gesture, and I was touched.

  “Thank you,” I said, as the boat bumped up against the banks of Richmond County. We stood and prepared to make a U-turn inside St. George Terminal, then board the same boat for the return voyage. Our feet would barely skim the surface of Staten Island. One day, I promised myself as we hustled down the ramp, I would explore this mysterious and occasionally seditious borough.

  “One more thing,” she said, clutching her oversize Harrods’s tote bag tight against her chest as the crowd pressed in around her. “You’re not permitted to interview witnesses or suspects. You start Tuesday morning as Greenwich Village Hotel’s new concierge. Ballard McKenzie is the only one—and I mean the only one, Zephyr—who will know your true identity. You, me, him. There are simply too many unknowns to make the circle bigger just yet.”

  “I’m going undercover?” I suddenly had a little trouble catching my breath.

  “Can you handle this?” she said, turning a steady gaze on me. “If not, tell me now and I’ll put someone else on the case. It’s embezzlement, likely forgery, and probably mail fraud, which means a federal indictment, if we’re lucky.”

  I nodded vigorously, never imagining that embezzlement, forgery, and mail fraud indictments would be the least of the McKenzie family’s problems and merely the beginning of mine.

  Chapter 2

  The night Jeremy Wedge was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital was not a night I was supposed to be working the speckled Corian front desk of the Greenwich Village Hotel. I was supposed to be on my way to Orchard Street with my brother Gideon for a night of obligation art: two hours of tedious and under-costumed performance by a friend of a friend of Gid’s in a poorly ventilated basement generously referred to as a black-box theater.

  I’d finished my shift a half hour earlier, after a typically Rubik’s Cubish day, one that included cadging backstage passes to BAM’s Next Wave Festival for the puppeteers staying in room 203 and helping the Kiwis in 506 locate a restaurant in the Bronx that they’d heard served authentic Thanksgiving dinners all year long. But I was covering for my friend Asa Binsky and hoping Hutchinson McKenzie, Ballard’s son, wouldn’t notice the time.

  Asa was late for the third time that week and lurching ever closer to unemployment. He insisted that his sessions with the Wiccan acupuncturist in Fort Greene were healing the chronic pain in his ankle, the result of an election-night-joy injury. He’d been at a Gay Deadheads for Obama party in the East Village the year before, and when Ohio was called, Asa and all his two hundred twenty pounds jumped off the baby grand. He’d been paying for it ever since but maintained that “Rosie Two”—Asa’s sweetheart term for the man he considered Roosevelt II—was worth every twinge. It didn’t help his case that when he was at the hotel, Asa had trouble curbing his 800-number habit. He regularly phoned a wide variety of companies to offer comments, suggestions, questions, and critiques about their products on the proven theory that most conversations resulted in free stuff being sent to him.

  I was savoring a brief lull in front-desk activity, surreptitiously browsing Facebook—while maintaining a slight frown to give the illusion of work—when the voice that belonged to the love child of Katharine Hepburn and William Buckley pounded through my respite like a dropped anvil.

  “Where’s your friend?” drawled Hutchinson McKenzie. He had slithered around the corner of the desk and settled his square chin onto his white-knuckled fist. Hutchinson was a constant lesson to me that a foul temper and unchecked arrogance were not automatic grounds for becoming a suspect.

  “I have many friends,” I muttered, casually tabbing back to the EZ-CheckIn screen.

  “And with how many are you currently playing Word Scramble?”

  Bite me, you overbred, J. Press–dressed ass. Was there a camera I didn’t yet know about trained on the desk? I shuddered at the thought of Hutchinson McKenzie watching me on the closed-circuit TV in his office, the office he didn’t know I had a key to. I adjusted the collar of my crimson mandarin jacket and met his gaze.

  “Hutchinson,” I said lightly, pretending not to ignite a firestorm, “is there anything that needs doing that isn’t being done?”

  His porcine nostrils flared. Hutchinson and I had gotten off on the wrong foot three weeks earlier, the day I began work at his family’s hotel, and we’d continued our angry waltz without pause. He, for reasons I assumed had roots in some high-school-era insecurity, wanted to be called by his last name—McKenzie—but in my field reports I had to refer to the McKenzie men by their first names for clarity. It was too hard to switch gears in person and so I didn’t. In any case, the man’s first name sounded like a last name, so I couldn’t understand why he even bothered trying to switch.

  Hutchinson had what some people might have called preppy good looks—tall, with a chiseled face, aforementioned square chin, broad forehead, hair the blond that only a decade of Clairol can bring—but I thought there was a coldness to his slate-blue eyes that hinted at ugly secrets. After some of our sharper exchanges, I conjured up scenarios involving the hotel basement and unwilling, undocumented female workers, even though I knew this wasn’t fair, not even for someone with a sphincter as constricted as Hutchinson’s. Mostly I hated him because he hated me, and he hated me because, twelve years earlier, he had not
gotten into Harvard, whereas the bogus résumé that Pippa and I had whipped up indicated that I had. We had assumed that the more white glove my pedigree, the more likely it would be that my hiring would pass muster with Junior. We had assumed wrong.

  “I’m not paying Asa for you to do his job,” he said through his perpetually clenched teeth.

  “So it’s on principle only that you don’t want me covering for him?” I tried to make it sound like an earnest question.

  “Yes, principles. You’ve heard of them.”

  Professional. I silently intoned my sporadically functional mantra. I’m a professional. I don’t actually work for this depauperate Ken doll. I just needed him to keep believing that I did.

  “My apologies.” I eked out a grimace, the closest I could come to smiling at Hutchinson. McKenzie. Hutchinson. Maybe I should call him Chuck and see what happened. “Would you prefer that I leave?”

  Before he could answer, the front doors slid open, letting in a cloud of humid, leftover summer air and a pile of drunken New Zealanders.

  “Oy!” they cried cheerfully.

  “Oy!” Hutchinson and I replied in unison. We threw each other startled glances, embarrassed as much by how stupid we sounded trying to echo our antipodal guests as we were by the undesired bond briefly forged by the shared stupid response.

  “Whoa.” I hurried out from behind the desk in time to catch the escaped contents of the handbag belonging to an inebriated twentysomething. She was being inadequately supported by two unsteady mates: one a stooped, blotchy-faced bloke with a diamond cross dangling from one ear, the other a rotund fellow sporting ringlets that belonged to another century. Right behind them was Asa, looking sheepish—more sheepish than usual. He made a beeline for the desk, avoided Hutchinson’s eyes, and stood in front of the computer I’d vacated, apparently ready to act as though he’d been there all along.