by Alan Russell
Praise for Alan Russell and The Fat Innkeeper
WINNER OF THE LEFTY AWARD FOR BEST HUMOROUS MYSTERY
CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARD WINNER
“Perfect . . . screamingly funny.”—Ocala Star-Banner
“Booked solid with humor.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“The Fat Innkeeper makes Alan Russell one of the best of the comic detective novelists.”—Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star
“Ebullient and irresistible.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Russell and his readers have great fun.”—Publishers Weekly
“Like Tony Hillerman and Sue Grafton, Russell has created characters we care about, whom we want to visit again.”—San Diego Blade-Citizen
“A dandy piece of humorous storytelling guaranteed to produce laughter. Russell and his readers have a rollicking good time.”—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Well-written and very funny.”—Mystery News
“Am Caulfield is . . . charming, witty, and appealing.”—Booklist
“The characters are reminiscent of masters like Hiaasen . . . Am’s east-vs.-west meeting with the new management is terrific.”—Mystery Collector’s Bookline
THE fat innkeeper
Books by Alan Russell
Hotel Detective Mysteries
The Hotel Detective
The Fat Innkeeper
Gideon and Sirius Novels
Burning Man
Guardians of the Night
Lost Dog
Gideon’s Rescue
Detective Cheever Novels
Multiple Wounds
The Homecoming
Stand-Alone Novels
Shame
Exposure
Political Suicide
St. Nick
A Cold War
Stuart Winter Mysteries
No Sign of Murder
The Forest Prime Evil
THE fat innkeeper
A Hotel Detective Mystery
Alan Russell
Copyright © 1995, 2018 by Alan Russell
All rights reserved. Please comply with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of this book in any form (other than brief quotations embodied in critical reviews) without permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Damonza
Three Tails Press, New York, New York
For author contact and press inquiries, please visit alanrussell.net.
To the memory of my mother, Carolyn Lois Falconi Russell, and to the grandson she never got the chance to spoil, Hart Crane Russell.
Contents
Praise for Alan Russell and The Fat Innkeeper
Books by Alan Russell
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
About the Author
Chapter One
The Hotel California’s mailer had announced: Grunion Fun! There were a lot of things about the promotion Am Caulfield didn’t like. Most Americans, he was sure, were as suspicious of exclamation points as he was. And just how much hype did a two-ounce toothless fish merit? These weren’t killer whales or great white sharks or smiling dolphins—these were grunion.
Grunion wouldn’t look too out of place in a sardine can, but they distinguish themselves from other fish in ways that humans find fascinating (or at least a subspecies of humans—Southernus californicatus). Birds do it, and bees do it, but not like grunion. The fish come ashore to spawn on California’s and Mexico’s coastal beaches, with the height of the so-called grunion runs occurring in April and May. Spring is announced in San Diego not by an explosion of greenery, or a rise in temperature, but by the pronouncement of grunion runs. Local news, always hard-pressed to make exciting weather forecasts, invariably turns to grunion-run prognostications to use up air time. The grunion visits are predictable in that they occur only at night during the full moon, and happen within several hours of the evening’s high tide.
As a native San Diegan, Am had grown up as a surf rat and experienced his share of grunion runs. He had watched the curious and the hopeful turn out to the beaches, had even tried to snatch a few grunion (it is legal to catch grunion with your hands, but about as easy as holding on to a greased pig). Nature’s display usually brought families, the adults content to hunker around fire rings to wait for the fishy fireworks, their children running around laughing and screaming.
That, in Am’s mind, was how it should be, but it certainly wasn’t that way tonight, at least not along the stretch of beach in front of the Hotel California known as the La Jolla Strand. What marketing had done was to turn something special into a three-ring aquarium. Not that reality has ever stood in the way of any good promotion. The Hotel’s mailer sent to its guests had allowed a few paeans to nature, but basically promised sex on the beach, and plenty of it.
Those in the hotel business often try to claim a kinship with show business. Though Am believed the relationship between hotels and show business was overstated (at least on the hotel end—it wasn’t as if he had ever heard Brad Pitt or his ilk going around saying, “Acting is very much like the hotel business”), he still wasn’t one to discount the two cardinal rules of performance: You never follow an animal act, and you never count on Mother Nature. When first informed about Grunion Fun! Am had pointed out the potential dangers of violating not one, but both of those rules. The marketing people had not been inclined to listen to his warnings. What was the security director of the Hotel doing critiquing their work? Why wasn’t the man trying to track down lost towels? In so many words they told Am to “go fish.”
Over two hundred guests of the Hotel California were trying to do just that. They had taken the promotion’s bait, but the grunion weren’t cooperating. For hours now, the guests had been waiting for the grunion, assured that the fish did indeed have reservations. Bermuda shorts and dark soc
ks didn’t identify the guests as out-of-towners, but their “official” grunion catching equipment, which consisted of complimentary neon buckets, flashlights, and Greek fishing caps emblazoned with the Hotel logo, did advertise that they weren’t locals. Zen question, thought Am: Who are the real fish?
It was clear the guests were beyond restless. They had come for fun. They had paid good money for fun. And hadn’t fun been promised? Wasn’t that how the weekend had been advertised? After “cavorting with nature,” after watching “the wet and the wild,” there was supposed to be a fabulous fish fry. (“We like grunion,” the brochure had gushed, “especially with onion.”) The participants had been primed for a spectacle, for the “the slippery, sliding, spawning grunion” (there had been fold-out pictures to prove it). The veritable piscine orgy had been played up like the goings-on of a Bangkok brothel. To Am’s mind, the scribed spectacle of fish writhing in the sand brought up visions of From Here to Eternity. He was surprised that “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing” wasn’t being piped out to the beach.
The May fog was rolling in a lot faster than any grunion. The pimple on San Diego’s mostly perfect climate is that a marine layer likes to hang around the coast for much of May and June, what the locals call “Gray May” and “June Gloom.” It’s not something the Chamber of Commerce is likely to promote, but if you pine for London fog, you need only to travel to San Diego during late spring or early summer.
“Damn fog,” complained one of the Hotel’s grunion runners. “Getting so we won’t even be able to see the fish. That is if they do turn up.”
There were a few surly grunts of agreement. Am was glad the fog had grown thick enough to obscure his identifying Hotel blue blazer and name tag. You call weather information, you get a recording. You find a hotel employee, you have an ear to complain to.
“Where are those fish?” groused another would-be grunion runner.
“Fish,” shouted a voice (the fog was getting thicker by the moment—so the caller had become just that, a voice, and a neon bucket), mimicking the call of a fishmonger. “Hey, fish!”
Another voice took up the call, and then another. “Fish,” everyone started calling, “Fish.”
Waiting for Godot this wasn’t. It must have looked quaint from the Hotel California’s four restaurants: the fog rolling in, the revelers on the beach with their pant legs rolled up, and the flashlights probing the incoming waves in search of the elusive grunion. From Am’s perspective, it had the makings of a riot.
“Fish! Fish! Fish!”
Enough voices had now joined in with the calling to challenge the roar of the surf. But the chorus wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out all sounds.
“Isn’t it exciting, Am?”
Mary Mason (aka Typhoid Mary) was the Hotel’s social director. In another life she had to have been the activity director for the Titanic. With the ship sinking, she had likely suggested that everyone gather for snow cones.
“Grunion Fun!” said Am through clenched teeth. “There are few enough natural phenomena in Southern California, if you discount earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides. This all seems very wrong to me.”
Why did this promotion bother him more than others? Hotels, even venerable hotels like the Hotel California, resorted to such fanfare to keep heads in beds. Given any holiday, even an obscure one, the Hotel had some event. There were promotions offered for Groundhog Day (“Who cares about some woodchuck’s shadow? Get rid of your own shadows with a complimentary facial in our spa”) to Guy Fawkes Day (special prices on English beer and a fireworks display that ended with a bang). The Hotel had Easter Bunny Hops, and Santa arriving on a surfboard. You do those kinds of things when you are trying to fill 712 rooms 365 days a year. And when you run out of holidays, you scratch your head and create events. Last week someone had suggested, half-seriously, a Muzak-appreciation festival.
“You’re a party pooper, Am Caulfield.”
“Apparently I’m not the only one. The grunion aren’t coming.”
“No one guarantees when the grunion will arrive,” said Mary. “There’s just an ETA.”
She sounded like a flight attendant. It was probably a position to which Mary had aspired. He could feel the jet nosediving, could picture Mary still offering earphones for the in-flight movie.
“Fish . . . fish . . . fish . . . ”
The chanting had changed, and to Am’s ear, not for the better. The raucousness was gone, replaced by something different, something deeper, and something more dangerous. Grunion Fun! had probably appealed to the same kind of crowd that would have turned out for a witches’ Sabbath. The calling was slower now, and more insistent. It sounded like a summoning.
“Maybe next year we should try Grunion Gun!” said Am. “All we need is an NRA mailing list and a few hundred handguns. The object will be for everyone to shoot at the fishies as they come ashore.”
Mary ignored Am’s grousing, but finally awakened to the chanting all around her, the voices crying out from the fog. A little defensiveness (or was that fear?) crept into her Pollyanna voice: “I don’t know what everyone is getting so antsy about. There’s still the fish fry whether anyone catches any grunion or not.”
The banquet was to take place in the Montezuma Room, with the evening to be highlighted by a reading from The Old Man and the Sea. To Am, it was all about as natural as mauve shoes.
“Fish . . . fish . . . fish . . . ”
The voices were coming into their own, like a pack of howling dogs harkening back to an age before rubber bones and squeak toys. There was something primeval about the chant. The Druids probably chanted like that. From grunion run, thought Am, to a gathering of the neophyte occult.
“Fish . . . fish . . . fish . . . ”
The offshore breeze picked up. It had been blowing out, but now the wind was pushing back at them. Mary had lined the beach with tiki torches. They were by no means Am’s favorite prop, but he wasn’t altogether happy to see them blown out. Clouds and the fog obscured the full moon; suddenly the street-lamps lining the boardwalk couldn’t be seen. Am’s senses were short-circuited. It felt as if he was on the set of a Halloween slasher movie. He caught glimpses of the fluorescent pails. Pushed by the wind, they looked like dancing will-o’-the-wisps. Shrouded beams of flashlights ineffectively challenged the fog, weakly signaling more than illuminating.
He could feel the ocean’s pounding through his feet, could feel its pushing through the heavy sea air. Others were aware of its strong rhythm, their chanting/groaning called out in time with the waves, as evocative as galley slaves at the oars.
Everyone caught the scent at the same time. There were glad cries. Surely the grunion were running; by the ubiquitous smell, there was an ocean full of them. But the promise changed along with the scent. The hint became an olfactory fist, a reckoning of decay and death and brine turned rancid. The smell became an assault. The neon grunion buckets were raised not for fish, but to lips, and it wasn’t grunion that were deposited within.
No more chants, there was only retching. Delivered from the sea were not a horde of six-inch grunion, but a solitary leviathan.
Chapter Two
“Call me fucking Ishmael,” said Am.
The whale wasn’t white; the fog had lifted enough for Am to see it was a dark gray. Handkerchief over nose, he made his approach. The dead whale was its own monument. In a body of water, it is difficult to gauge how immense these mammals are. Am suspected it was a gray whale (also called California gray whale, though mostly by Californians). From the shores of La Jolla Strand, he had often witnessed their spouting plumes off in the distance. Their annual migration is one of nature’s great commutes, the whales traveling over five thousand miles, from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of California.
The whale was half in the water and half out. The strong surging of the ocean could neither take the whale closer to shore, nor return it to the sea. The whale was firmly landlocked. Am had heard of living whales beaching themselves, but thi
s one had been dead upon arrival.
The beach was deserted; fear, confusion, and most of all, the smell, dispersing the crowd. As safety and security director of the Hotel, Am knew he should be tending to the scattered guests, but having endured their grumbling, and even worse, their chanting, he didn’t have much sympathy for them. Let them eat fish, he thought. He doubted if many of the Grunion Fun!ners would be going to the fish fry.
Alone with the whale, with the huge presence, Am asked, “What happened to you?”
His voice was masked by the cries of birds. Hundreds of gulls had appeared, and they were sounding the dinner bell for thousands more. One of the mighty had fallen, reason for lesser beasts to rejoice. At least most of them. Curiosity, and sympathy, propelled Am past the shoreline. It was a different kind of whale watching than he was used to. San Diego has a flotilla of whale boats that carry curious people, not harpoons. Am walked into the waves, unmindful of the water, searching for some visible wound on the whale, something to account for its death, but there was nothing he could see.
The whale had died during its migration. Gray whales migrate in pods, staying close to the coastal waters. Am couldn’t help but wonder about the whale’s end. Had the creature died alone? Am had seen film footage of cetaceans helping their young and their injured. He wondered if the pod had slowed down for this one, had helped the whale into shallower waters. Maybe he was being anthropomorphic. Somewhere in Am’s music collection were a few whale-song albums. He felt an urge to play one, to broadcast it over loudspeakers. It would be an appropriate dirge, even if it couldn’t be heard at the moment. The gulls were beyond raucous, acting and sounding like humans confronted with a thirty-ton ice-cream sundae.
Am raised his arms and shook them, shooing off the birds closest to him. Thinking of the whale songs made him nostalgic. In the nineties, when a record track was more important than a career track, he had enjoyed sipping wine with friends and listening to the whales. The otherworldly calling of the giants had spurred on some discussions that went deep into the night—and sometimes other nocturnal activities as well. He remembered making love, half of his ear to the whale’s cries, the other half to his partner’s. Their eldritch chorus had transported him. It was a special moment; almost, if he dared to admit it, a holy one. Wine, woman, and whale song. The trinity sounded contrived, but it wasn’t. The trinity sounded dated, and it was.