Hotel No Tell

by Daphne Uviller

  “Did you find your Thanksgiving dinner in the Bronx?” I asked the woman, holding my breath so I wouldn’t breathe hers.

  “Yih, yih, we found a curry in Queens!” she slurred enthusiastically.

  I glanced over at Hutchinson and watched him effortlessly maintain his welcoming-host face, ready to cater to his guests, no matter how fat-witted or bibulous they might be. In that respect, he was good at his job. What permitted me to loathe him was that it was all an act. He looked down on these people even as he hosted them.

  “Zephyr,” he said smoothly, “since you’re still here, would you be so kind as to help our guests settle in to their room?” Translation: Go upstairs and make sure these unintelligible assholes don’t puke on my furniture, and if they do, take pictures, write up a detailed report, and have reimbursement invoices tucked under their doors by dawn.

  I should have been on the F train ten minutes ago. I glanced at my watch. Hutchinson caught me.

  “I know how much you care about your job here, filling in for Asa and all, so I’m sure whatever plans you have for tonight can wait.”

  It was funny, really, his undertone of threat, his strutting like a castrated peacock, acting as though he could fire me. I could have talked my way out of nursemaid duty, but the truth was that I really didn’t want to spend two hours suffocating underground on the Lower East Side watching The Perilous Apple: One Man’s Interpretation and evading my brother’s blatant attempts to trick me into telling him confidential details about SIC cases, his fingers itching for his notebook. Even though I’d been at the hotel since nine o’clock that morning, I preferred to hang around a little longer on the off off off chance that something—anything—would happen that would give me the tiniest lead in this case, which seemed determined to be the complete downfall of my fledgling career.

  I had reviewed footage from the security cameras stationed over the safe, the owner’s office, and at the hotel bar, but had spotted no one tucking stacks of bills under their arms. I had pored over bank statements on my days “off” from the hotel and agreed with an increasingly pallid Ballard McKenzie that, yes, his balance was off by a hundred grand but could not identify just how that had happened. In three weeks, I had (reluctantly) scratched Hutchinson off my suspect list: That was the full extent of my progress.

  Pippa had been encouraging and patient, but I was getting frustrated, not least because the guys at the office were starting to get curious about my blatant absence from my cubicle. When I was first taken off the streetlight case, I’d gotten a few silent, sympathetic punches in the shoulder and even an anonymous package of condolence Twinkies deposited on my desk. But these guys were veterans, and they knew what the comings and goings of someone on an undercover assignment looked like. Weird hours, less face time at the office. Showing up at six P.M. to deal with desk work. Nothing to offer in the way of water-cooler conversation. I had the feeling they were going to start taking turns tailing me in their spare time.

  My friends, on the other hand, had turned out to be more or less oblivious to my new schedule. I should have been grateful not to have to fend off queries on multiple fronts, but I couldn’t help observing that only a few years ago, before I’d borne bouquets along aisles for three of my Sterling Girls, they would have been unrelenting in the pursuit of their suspicions—interrogating me about my odd hours and teasing me about the effort it took to keep a secret from them.

  While the SGs had certainly not forsaken me post-wedlock—we had our guard up against the dangerous fiction that you need only one other person in this world—I was a touch nostalgic for the days of constant communication and group debriefings on even the most trivial incidents, for traveling en masse and crashing parties around the city in order to secure free food and drink. I knew, as Gregory and I parted ways, that I would not be able to return to the comfort of the group dynamic, but I was determined to adapt to this new climate. When Lucy, who was being consumed alive by her twins, needed me, I was ready with my size-ten shoulders and untested wisdom. When Mercedes wanted to vent about the vestigial vanities of her Hollywood-steeped husband, I was the flying buttress to their union.

  Even as a willing and loyal third wheel, I found myself with plenty of time to catch free Alvin Ailey at SummerStage with my new friend, Macy St. John, to take a stained-glass class in Greenpoint, and to browse the New York Is Book Country festival, all with a steady stream of self-commendation silently broadcasting in my head the whole time: Look at what a successful singleton I am! I had none of the distractions that come with a relationship but, even so, even with the extra time and head space, I still couldn’t crack this case, and that made me scared for my professional future.

  I ignored Hutchinson McKenzie’s idle threat and trailed the now-singing New Zealanders up the narrow, plushly carpeted stairs, reminding myself how convenient it was not to have someone waiting for me at home, demanding to know why I was late and where I’d been. Of course, Gregory, being an undercover NYPD detective himself, probably wouldn’t have grilled me, but tinting him with a bit of 1950s TV husband made my current situation a little easier to contemplate.

  “ ‘The river was deep but I swam it, Janet!’ ” the stooped, blotchy Kiwi bellowed as he swayed unsteadily. I remembered too late that they were staying on the fifth floor. To make them turn around and use the elevator seemed more trouble than forging our way up the steps.

  “ ‘The future is ours so let’s plan it, Janet,’ ” continued Ringlets. He lost his balance and I put both hands in the middle of his back to steady him. His sweat had soaked through his shirt, and I choked back a wave of disgust. He turned to me and crooned, “ ‘So please don’t tell me to can it, Janet.’ ”

  “Okay, I won’t,” I assured him, pushing them down the hall and through the door to room 506. “But you need to quiet down—”

  “ ‘I’ve one thing to say and that’s …’ ”

  All three of them shrieked, “ ‘DAMMIT, JANET, I LOVE YOU!’ ”

  “Shut UP,” I hollered at them, and then immediately questioned my abilities to pass as a concierge. “Please shut up,” I amended. I closed the door.

  “Tha’s from The Rocky Horror Show!” the woman informed her reflection in the vanity mirror.

  “Great,” I said, as the men collapsed onto the beds.

  “Iz a Kiwi wrote that, yih?” said Blotchy. “You noy that? Richard O’Brien, you noy him?”

  “Not personally,” I said, unsure what to do next. Pull off their shoes? Make them brush their teeth? I surveyed the room, thrilled to get a glimpse into their privacy. As pretend concierge, I didn’t often make it into the rooms while they were occupied. Like the others, this one was an eclectic—bordering on visually distressing—amalgam of art deco and Amish, with black-and-white portraits of 1930s movie stars gazing out at hand-carved furniture. The New Zealanders were a disorganized bunch, their backpacks and clothing strewn about. The air smelled a little like patchouli, but the room wasn’t trashed and was no worse than you might expect from three pseudo-adults nearing the end of a round-the-world trip.

  “Rocky Horror belongs to New Zealand,” slurred the woman, growing serious. She swayed forward until her mouth was almost touching the mirror. She repeated herself slowly, entranced by her own lips. “It belongs to us.”

  “But not the platy,” Ringlets chirped, wiping his damp forehead against a wall. “That’s all Ozzie. You evah seen a platypus?”

  I shook my head apologetically.

  “No …” That one word had about four syllables: na-ah-oh-oy. “Me, neithah.” His affect quickly grew morose. “Twinty-siven yee-ahs awld and nivah seen a platy. God’s spare pahts, you know.”

  “Okay!” I clapped my hands like a camp counselor. “Shoes off! Right now.”

  To my amazement, they all obeyed. My goal, I decided, was to see our guests through to a safe state of unconsciousness and meet my brother as the play was letting out, just in time for a glass of wine at ’inoteca.

  “Who n
eeds to use the bathroom? Who wants Alka-Seltzer? Who’s sleeping where?” There were two beds and three people. The thought of this woman coupling with either of these objectionable representatives of the species was not pleasant. At the foot of one of the beds was a magenta nightie, neatly folded.

  “Is that yours?” I asked the woman. Dreamily, she glanced at it.

  “Na-ah-oh-oy. ’S Marty’s.”

  Smack in the heart of Greenwich Village and I assume the negligee belongs to the woman. No wonder this case was still open.

  There was a faint knock at the door. I took quick stock of my charges, confirmed there were no signs of imminent upchuck, then pulled it open.

  I had to lower my gaze substantially to see the top of Samantha Kimiko Hodges’s head. Mrs. Hodges was a bantam version of a grown woman without actually being a midget. Everything about her, except her attitude, was miniature. Her husband had died earlier in the year: She had sold their apartment on Gay Street and was now trying to figure out what to do with whatever was left of her eighty-one-year-old life. This, Ballard McKenzie told me as we reviewed regular guests on their roster, was how she had phrased it to him while working out a reduced rate for her extended stay. When I began working at the hotel, she’d been living there for a month.

  Mrs. Hodges kept to herself, leaving at eight every morning, returning at six, dining in the restaurant adjacent to the lobby, and retiring upstairs by seven. She appeared to own exactly seven dresses, which she wore in the same sequence every week. Monday was the blue paisley, Tuesday was the red kimono-looking silk, Wednesday was the green stripes, and so on. She wore stockings with seams up the back, even in ninety-degree weather, and her silver hair formed a shiny cap around her walnut-wrinkled face.

  I had exchanged words with her only a few times. Despite her unmistakable Japanese provenance, she seemed to have learned her English from a kasha-cooking, free-advice-for-all bubbe.

  “So, what’s the ruckus?” she demanded.

  “My apologies, Mrs. Hodges—” I began.

  “I’ve told you, it’s Mrs. Kimiko Hodges. Like Rodham Clinton.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Kimiko Hodges,” I continued, not bothering to point out that while our secretary of state did indeed use three names, she used only one of them in conjunction with “Mrs.” “I’ll have this under control in a moment.”

  “Dammit, Janet, the fuckin’ platy,” moaned someone behind me, and I heard a retching sound. I whipped around in time to see Ringlets lurching for the bathroom.

  “Some Pepto they should take,” Mrs. Hodges proclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “Before they drink. You oughta line your stomach in preparation if you’re gonna drink.”

  “I’ll suggest that,” I told her anxiously. “I’m really sorry to have disturbed you. How about breakfast on us tomorrow?” I loved offering compensatory meals without prior approval. Hutchinson would be apoplectic.

  “I should hope so,” she said, crossing her arms and trying to peer around me into the chaos. The young woman who had been admiring her oratory skills in the mirror groaned as she took Ringlets’s spot on the bed. I felt a flutter of panic in my belly and began to wish I was elbow-to-elbow with my brother in a subterranean theater.

  “Again, Mrs. Hodges, so sorry.” I began to close the door on her.

  “Wait!”

  “Mrs. Hodges,” I pleaded, “I really have to deal with this now!”

  “No, I hear something else. You hear it?” She pointed down the hall. “Sounds like an emu.”

  I blinked at her. How was I supposed to know what an emu sounded like? How would she know?

  “There’s somebody yelling, you hear that? You got another one of these drunk foreigners down the hall?” I spent a quarter of a second observing the irony of a Japanese woman with a Yiddish accent calling someone else foreign, but then, a foreigner in New York was anyone who arrived on the boat after one’s own.

  I was about to ignore her when I heard it. A horrible, guttural moan. A long, sickly summons for help. A whole other class of moaning from the garden variety on display here in room 506. I bolted down the hall and stood still, heart pounding, waiting for another one.

  There it was. I spun around. Room 502. I pounded on the door, aware of Samantha Kimiko Hodges’s tiny form trailing close behind.

  “Hello? Hello? Open the door! Are you okay in there?” I pounded again, feeling guilty for loving a good adrenaline rush while truly hoping nobody inside was mortally wounded.

  “No,” came the raspy voice. “Help me.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I whispered in alarm, digging out the master key only Ballard knew I carried. “Mrs. Hodges, please go call 911, then tell the front desk I need help,” I said, knowing that, even in a crisis, the old woman was not going to take kindly to being ordered around.

  I turned to look at her. Pale and scared. Great. All I needed was for our octogenarian widow to collapse from heart failure.

  “Never mind.” There was only Asa at the desk, anyway. I let myself in and heard Mrs. Hodges gasp behind me.

  Hanging upside down off the foot of one of the unmade beds was a khaki-clad man who was well under six feet tall and probably only a hundred seventy pounds, but who looked enormous given his dramatic presentation. His face was puffy and pink, his eyes bulging. His red hair stuck straight down, making his head look like a stuffed animal. He was clutching a fistful of paper scraps.

  “Zephyr, help me,” he gurgled, right before he surrendered to unconsciousness. Mrs. Hodges scurried out of the room.

  This inverted, florid bear of a man was Jeremy Wedge, whom I’d come to know in the previous three weeks as a slightly aggressive, slightly hypochondriac genetics researcher who was first cousin and best friend to Hutchinson McKenzie. The two of them often hung out in the hotel bar, sipping sherry and saying things like “physiocrats,” “distortionary costs,” and “fucking Adam Smith,” loud enough to be overheard by whatever attractive young woman was within earshot. I didn’t know why they had settled on a general bashing of eighteenth-century economic theory as a mating call (especially since they were both obvious beneficiaries of laissez-faire in more ways than one), but I had begun to notice that Jeremy loitered around the hotel only when there was a gaze-worthy beauty staying upstairs. Clearly, his thoughtful cousin was looking out for him.

  I quickly scanned the messy room for signs of whatever guest he had managed to seduce, but there was no concrete evidence of a woman. No suitcases on the folding stand, no clothes anywhere, no shoes, no hairbrush, no earrings on the sustainably harvested mango-wood mission-style dresser. But the room looked post-checkout: bedspreads balled up (Mrs. McKenzie would be incensed—she had personally selected every quilt in the building, a detail proudly touted in the hotel brochure), damp towels over the backs of the chairs, smudged water glasses on the bedside table.

  Apparently, Jeremy had been used and left behind by one of his conquests. That gave me a certain amount of satisfaction insofar as I maintained a low-frequency desire for ill to befall him, merely by dint of his familial connections. But this? I did not want this to happen to him. Or to me. I didn’t want anyone dying on my watch, but I specifically didn’t want a McKenzie relative dying on my watch.

  I bent over him and put my ear to his mouth. Breath, check. I put my fingers to his carotid, marveling at the chances of having unwillingly touched two sweaty men in the space of five minutes. Pulse, check.

  Fortunately, everyone at the SIC was required to become certified in first aid and CPR training during their orientation weeks. Unfortunately, everything I’d learned promptly flew out of my head and so I resorted to slapping Jeremy’s mottled cheeks and screaming his name.

  My fourth heroic shriek was interrupted by three firefighters storming into the room. Until that moment, I had never indulged in rescue fantasies. Sure, there had been a few dark years when I had wished that anyone—man, woman, goat—would help me figure out what to do with my life, but I didn’t actually dream that they would pick up the
various pieces and bond me into a coherent whole. I hoped that maybe they would take me to the art-supply store and show me where the glue aisle was.

  However. I was now an instant convert to rescue fantasies. These men tromped in with their boots and their oversize gear; these men disregarded civilized niceties like wiping their feet or making sure the doorknob didn’t gouge the wall when it swung open; these men embodied aptitude and control, and I’d never seen anything sexier. They were sexy in their utter domination of the situation, and they were sexy because confidence-verging-on-cockiness radiated from the yellow stripes of their open jackets to their clean-shaven faces. Why the paramedics right behind them—one with a thin ponytail, the other with a tattoo of a bull that ran down his neck—were not sexy, even though they, too, had the power of rescue, was an intriguing mystery I’d devote some time to later.

  “Outta the way!” the shortest of the firefighters bellowed. I jumped away from the bed. In fact, all he did was make way for the paramedics to move in with their defibrillator, stretcher, and bags of tubes, needles, and vials. I was handed off from one firefighter to another until I was back in the corridor, straining to see over their bulk and equipment.

  “Do you know what happened? How long have you been with him?” asked a baby-faced fighter with absurdly long lashes. Surely those lashes were a fire hazard. Could firefighters be required to trim lashes, the way they were required to shave off beards? (A tidbit I’d picked up from one of the Tommys at work: Chin whiskers interfered with the seal of oxygen masks.) I spent a distracted moment watching him blink, then found my voice.

  “I have no idea. I was working the desk downstairs, then came up with some other guests who needed help. We heard Jeremy and came running—”