by Alan Russell
Sharon raised herself from her beach viewing in time to see Am making an entry on a notepad. She looked at him hopefully, but he shook his head.
“Just another work order for maintenance,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In theory, at least, guests are supposed to be able to flag their desires to the housekeeping department through their door signs. The typical makeup of these signs has one side requesting privacy, with the reverse side welcoming maid service. To further eliminate any confusion, the Hotel words its signs in five languages: English, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. As if giving international significance to Do Not Disturb and Please Clean Room weren’t enough, the Hotel’s signs feature two distinct drawings: on the one side a slumbering guest and on the other a smiling maid brandishing a duster.
To some Hotel employees, these signs were about as closely regarded as the fifty-five-mile speed limit on Interstate 5. In particular, the engineering department has never regarded the Do Not Disturb signs as significant obstacles. Maintenance workers have learned to knock at the guest room doors (although there are a few engineers who think the knocking part is optional), look both ways, and then quickly turn a sleeping guest into a dusting maid. Voilà! In five languages the engineers find themselves encouraged to enter.
The human race distinguishes itself from animals by stating that we’re tool users. No one could deny that “Cotton” Gibbons was a tool user, although it would have been hard to amplify on that. Cotton’s neck was about the reddest in San Diego County. He drove to work from El Cajon in a jacked-up Chevy pickup that had one of the country’s last “Guns Don’t Kill, People Kill” bumper stickers. His sole window decal was the message “Insured by Smith & Wesson.” But for all of Cotton’s social shortcomings, he was a tool user par excellence.
His nickname had been bestowed early in his career at the Hotel, the result of his frequent refrain of “I don’t cotton to no fools” (typically words aimed at management). What Cotton did cotton to was wiring, and plumbing, and fixing. His world was one of circuits, pumps, capacitors, and compressors. He patched and repaired, greased and lubed. His fraternity spoke a language of augers, casings, conduits, and ballcocks, joints, coil fins, valves, and sequencers. Cotton and his engineering brethren were never seen without their tool belts, ever weighing down the propriety of their pants, and their dirtied uniforms (clean at the beginning of the shift, but a sign of dishonor if still unstained more than thirty minutes into a workday.).
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 engineering passkey 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.
Chapter Twenty-Six
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, cla
iming 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.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“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 nerd with a mission, happy only when he could improve upon state-of-the-art equipment. The more complicated the AV needs, the more content Herman was. Even though the Bob Johnson Society had probably asked only for a simple microphone, Herman’s setup was designed to make a mouse roar.
Mary’s fingernail test didn’t quite shatter eardrums, but it did get everyone’s attention. Her welcoming address was brief but would have been even shorter had she not used the phrase lots of fun at least a dozen times. She introduced Am as “the Hotel detective,” and he tried not to cringe. His talk, she assured everyone, was “going to be lots of fun.”
Am stepped up to the microphone, took a long breath, and wondered how the hell he was going to fudge the suggested half-hour speech out of three words. His confidence wasn’t helped by a loud critique directed at him by a man sitting directly beneath the dais: “He don’t look like no hotel dick. Probably one of them actors. I’ve been to a few of these mystery things, and they’re always trying to pull surprises.”
The man had a name tag like all the other Bob Johnsons, but his scrawl made his name look more like “Bull” Johnson. Bull was about fifty pounds overweight, had a red face, red eyes, and the sympathetic demeanor of a confirmed heckler.
“They’re big on trying to pull one over on you,” Bull said, broadcasting not only to his neighbors, but to the continental United States. “Pull out their rabbits from their hats when you don’t expect them. All part of the show.”
As good as Herman’s microphone setup was, Am’s voice didn’t carry as well as Bull’s. “Welcome, Bob Johnsons,” he announced.
Silence greeted his first, and only, draft.
“Before I begin my talk,” Am said, “I should explain that although I am currently in charge of safety and security matters in the Hotel, I am not the Hotel’s detective per se, but rather the assistant general manager.”
“Told you he was no hotel dick,” said Bull.
Am pretended to look at his notes. He also pretended to ignore Bull. “Large hotels are called ‘a city within a city,’” he said. “There’s some truth to that cliché. Many of the same problems that society experiences also surface in hotels.”
Reaching for a glass of water, Am made as long a production out of his drinking as he could. Herman’s microphone picked up the descent of the liquid down his gullet. Most of the audience laughed, probably thinking it was part of the show.
“Of course,” continued Am, “the Hotel California isn’t exactly the downtown precinct, but nonetheless there are those situations that require the services of a host of hotel detectives.”
He described how the accounting department tracked down charges, and how the front desk deciphered signatures, and how housekeeping and security tried to match up lost and found items. Am pointed out that hotels, like life, were rife with little mysteries (“the missing sock, the multiplying hangers”) and related what he hoped were amusing anecdotes. In the middle of a story that involved the tracking down of a lost reservation, he paused to assess his audience. They seemed a very long way from the edge of their seats. They needed a wake-up call.
Am clung to that thought and tried to tell them about the time an operator had forgotten to record a wake-up call and how the front desk had been forced into calling and awakening half the hotel just to find the right room. They had solved their mystery, but had it been worth it? Was the guest pleased with the Hotel’s diligence and concern? No. He complained that he’d been awakened from a sound sleep, and 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 audience.
“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 h
eads 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.