The Case of the Linen Pressed Guest (The M.O.D. Files Book 2)

by K. W. Callahan

  BOOKS BY K.W. CALLAHAN

  THE SYSTEMIC SERIES: DOWNFALL

  THE SYSTEMIC SERIES: QUEST

  THE SYSTEMIC SERIES: DESCENT

  THE SYSTEMIC SERIES: FORESAKEN

  THE SYSTEMIC SERIES: ASCENSION

  THE M.O.D. FILES: THE CASE OF THE GUEST WHO STAYED OVER

  THE M.O.D. FILES: THE CASE OF THE LINEN PRESSED GUEST

  PALOS HEIGHTS

  K.W. CALLAHAN

  THE M.O.D. FILES: THE CASE OF THE LINEN PRESSED GUEST

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual person living or dead, businesses, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Text and image copyright © 2015 KW Callahan

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Callahan, K.W.

  The M.O.D. Files: The Case of the Linen Pressed Guest / K.W. Callahan

  ISBN 1-514-61496-0

  THE M.O.D. FILES:

  THE CASE OF THE LINEN PRESSED GUEST

  * * *

  For my hardworking friends at the PHH. Thank you for your dedication and inspiration (and all the great memories)!

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  Friday, December 23rd

  11:18 a.m.

  The Lanigan Hotel

  Downtown Chicago

  It was the standard run-around – guest calls hotel operator regarding their child’s lost blankie. The child is of course going nuts, screaming in the back of a cab as the family has already departed for the airport. The parents are upset because their kid is upset, and now they’re taking it out on the hotel operator because they think the blanket might have been wrapped up with the sheets when the housekeeper changed the bed linens yesterday. Not wanting to bear the brunt of the angry couple’s ire, the hotel operator transfers the call to security where the whole story has to be rehashed. This only irks the parents more as they try to talk over the wails of their little one to retell the tail. The security dispatcher puts the parents on hold while she pulls up the hotel “lost and found” database on her computer screen, first searching by room number and then by item description. Finding nothing matching the description of the little nipper’s prized possession, she reluctantly tells the family that she’ll have to take their information and call them back. With the moans of the tiny tot echoing in the background, the parents relent, helpless and at the mercy of the Lanigan Hotel’s staff to recover this holy grail of cherished childhood possessions.

  With the suffering family temporarily waylaid, security checks the status of the room where the blankie was supposedly lost and finds that it is showing “VD” – short for “Vacant and Dirty” – since the room attendant has yet to clean the room after the family’s departure. In hopes of retrieving the blankie, security sends an officer to check the room. After striking out in his search of the room, he radios back that he’s found nothing and sees no blankie matching the description he was given. In turn, the security dispatcher calls housekeeping to track down the floor manager for that particular room. The floor manager is asked whether she has seen the blankie, and upon her response of “no”, is requested to check with the room attendant who’d had the room assigned to her over the past several days to see if she remembers seeing it. The floor manager pulls the paperwork to find out who has been assigned to clean that particular room during the guest’s stay and then tracks down the room attendant. The room attendant reports that she doesn’t remember seeing anything like that, but the floor manager makes a cursory check of the attendant’s linen cart. She also checks inside the floor’s linen closet, just to make sure the blankie wasn’t set aside and forgotten about or found by the houseperson disposing of soiled sheets in the linen closet’s laundry chute. But again, finding nothing, the floor manager calls back to security to report her findings – or lack thereof.

  Bruised but not yet beaten, and certainly not wanting to have to call the irate family back and report that their little one’s blankie had gone missing at the hands of the Lanigan Hotel, the security dispatcher has one last trick up her sleeve…she calls the hotel M.O.D. – or Manager on Duty – that’s me, Robert Haze.

  I’m the one who usually takes the call when there’s no one left to contact or nowhere else to look. When the problem just won’t go away, it gets handed off to yours truly, M.O.D. of the world renowned Lanigan Hotel, an 1832 room landmark property located in the heart of downtown Chicago.

  The hotel M.O.D. is a jack of all trades – a hotel “everyman.” I have to know a little bit about everything and understand each position in all the hotel’s departments. I’m kind of like the general manager but without the pay or title. If I was a military unit, I’d be the Navy Seals or Green Berets – a specialized force called in to handle the stuff that no one else can or will. And since I live at the hotel, there’s typically little excuse for my not taking any and every call that comes my way.

  While I’d been offered the role of general manager just over a year ago, the position was a little too tame for my blood. I needed action, activity, chaos that I could attempt to put some order to. And while on this low occupancy December day just before Christmas, it might not have seemed like it, I was about to get the chaos that I was looking for.

  After the security dispatcher gave me the rundown from start to unfinished finish regarding the lost blankie, I had an inkling of what needed to be done. And so I rose from the desk chair in my office situated just behind the front desk and headed out to our grand lobby.

  The hotel was usually pretty quiet at this time of year. The billowy cushioned sofas and armchairs that adorned the vast lobby were almost all empty. The space’s white-marble lobby floor that had become one of the Lanigan’s trademarks, and that had been imported from a vast villa in the Italian Alps during the late 1920s, gleamed with a honed surface so shiny you’d swear it had just been mopped. It was said that the stone had been quarried from the same marble pit that Michelangelo had used to create his masterpiece, David.

  There was also a rumored curse attached the marble. Supposedly, after Michelangelo had finished work on his famed sculpture, he said that stone from the quarry should always be used for works completed in and to remain in Italy. But his request had gone unheeded, and he was said to have cursed any structure or work of art for which the stone was used outside of his home country. I found the story hard to believe, but if nothing else, it added a little flavor to the history of the hotel.

  I pushed my way through the swinging black double-doors into the back-of-house area. The Lanigan’s back-of-house spaces were a twisting labyrinth of corridors, alcoves, and storage closets that allowed staff to move relatively unnoticed by guests, as well as to store and transport the immense amounts of supplies necessary for maintaining and sustaining this city within a city. And with three full-service restaurants, a lounge, a fitness center, spa facilities, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, four ballrooms, a salon and barber shop, a street level full of world-class shopping venues, and tens of thousands of square feet of meeting and convention space all set within a hotel that had been a downtown fixture since shortly after the Chicago fire of 1871, there was plenty of maintaining and sustaining to do.

  I rode one of the service elevators down to the second sub-street level – or “2B” as it was more commonly referred to among hotel staff – and exited onto the shiny wax-sealed concrete of the back landing. The housekeeping department waxed or sealed just about anything that wasn’t tied down.

&
nbsp; To my immediate right was the recycling room. To my left was a T-junction. The right side of the junction led to the property operations offices and the repair shop where much of the in-house work on damaged hotel equipment – vacuum cleaners, floor extractors, shampoo machines, power tools, and similar items – was conducted. To the left, the corridor led out to an underground honeycomb. There was a huge staff locker room and shower area, a separate engineering locker room, storage for excess linens, additional storage for property operations equipment, and my intended destination – the linen sorting room.

  I didn’t get down to these hotel nether-regions too often, but I made an effort to stop in occasionally since it was my role as hotel M.O.D. to be familiar not only with the various areas of the hotel, but with the staff manning those areas as well. Keeping up relations with all the hotel departments, and understanding their inner works, made my life easier. It also made the lives of the assorted department heads and managers easier when I handled issues that they might otherwise have been called to handle during their time off.

  The linen sorting room was a large, two-story room behind the service elevator banks. About a quarter of the room was filled with loaded linen carts full of sorted dirty towels and bed linens waiting to be sent to an off-site laundry facility where it would be washed, dried, pressed, folded, stacked in linen carts, shrink wrapped to protect against any dust, dirt, or natural elements on the return truck-ride back to the hotel where it would be sent upstairs to the linen closets for use. The hotel had found long ago that this method was more cost effective than trying to process all the linens in house. The volume of linen and required manpower to handle it, as well as to maintain the massive industrial washers and dryers, was just too much, especially on heavy checkout days.

  The hotel did however manage to sort all the dirty linens ahead of time. This reduced our laundry costs and cut the turnaround time it took to process the linen. It also allowed us a more accurate count on what was going out and coming back – or not coming back. Linen waste could be quite substantial without proper accounting. Damage and theft could easily run the hotel tens of thousands of dollars each year. It was up to the linen sorting department, under the authority of the hotel’s linen control manager, Chandra Davis – who ultimately reported to the housekeeping department – to oversee the functions of the linen sorting room.

  I was well aware that with current low occupancy and the Christmas holiday looming, Chandra would be on vacation and there would only be a skeleton crew in the linen sorting room. Usually what happened around this time of year was that a supervisor and maybe one line-level employee remained on hand to keep things moving. Meanwhile, the linen chute would be allowed to slowly back itself up to around the 15th or 16th floor of the hotel until after the holidays when the rest of the laundry staff returned to take care of the excess.

  Today, it was only Frank Rizdy – the linen sorting room’s supervisor – who was at the helm. Frank was a long-termer at the Lanigan and had been hidden away down in the depths of 2B since the late-80s, long before I arrived on the scene. He was a grizzled half-Russian, half-Italian in his mid-50s who liked hard work, enjoyed the relative isolation of the sub-basement, and kept things moving efficiently on the sorting line even when no one was watching. This self-sufficiency was something that our director of housekeeping, Marian Marshall, found extremely attractive in a supervisor located a distant 27 floors below the watchful eye of his home department.

  “Hi, Frank,” I said as I sauntered into the room. He was sitting at a long table at the far end of the room eating his lunch – a lengthy sub sandwich of some sort that had been sliced into more manageable three-inch cuts.

  “Uh oh…to what do I owe this unexpected visit today, Mr. Haze?” he eyed me warily. “I know I’ve always got a 50/50 shot with you. Either you’re just down here to shoot the breeze or you need something. I’m hoping, being that it’s almost Christmas, that it’s the former, not the latter.”

  “Sorry to disappoint, Frank. It’s the linen chute I’m interested in today,” I nodded toward a long steel tube about two and a half feet in diameter that extended down from the room’s ceiling close to its rear wall. The chute ran from the 25th floor where the housekeeping department was located, all the way down to 2B where it stopped about six feet from the floor and dumped its contents onto an angled conveyor belt that led up and over to another flat conveyor belt about five feet higher in elevation. Behind this was a short flight of stairs that led up to a walkable scaffold that ran along behind the conveyor belt where the sorting room staff worked. From this position, they could toss the assorted mix coming from the chute into several large linen carts that were marked for sheets, bath towels, and other assorted items like bathrobes, room service napkins and the likes lining the other side of the conveyor belt. Today the end of the chute was closed with a steel door on rollers that could be slid over the tube’s exit to control the flow of linen from above.

  “Oh no,” was Frank’s only response to the reason for my arrival. He knew what was coming, and his countenance as well as his shoulders continued to sag as I explained the situation regarding the lost blankie. “Damn kids and their crap. I’m always finding that kind of junk coming down with the bed sheets,” he said, shaking his head. “Stuffed animals, blankets, little toy cars…” he frowned.

  “Hey, better than used condoms, bars of used soap, and hypodermic needles,” I offered.

  “Get enough of that stuff too,” he grimaced. “So what’s the plan here? Not that I don’t already know,” he mumbled.

  “Have to bust it, Frank.”

  He nodded, “Yep,” and then took a deep breath. “For some reason, I knew I wasn’t going to get away with a whole day to myself down here.”

  “At least you have your favorite M.O.D. here to assist you,” I grinned, unbuttoning my shirt sleeves and rolling them up past my elbows and then undoing a center button on my shirt and tucking my tie inside to keep it out of the way.

  Personally, I liked “busting” the linen chute as it was commonly referred to in the sorting room. It was probably only because I didn’t have to deal with the aftermath.

  “How far is it backed up?” I asked.

  Frank took a deep breath, “’Round fifteenth or sixteenth floor I think.”

  “Pretty far,” I said.

  “Yeah…pretty far,” Frank’s gloomy countenance agreed. “Gonna be a mess when we’re all done,” he added dejectedly.

  “Anything for the guest…right?” I offered.

  “Right,” he gave me an unconvincing stare.

  Frank was a great guy and a fantastically motivated employee, but there was a reason he liked 2B – guest relations was not his strong suit. Still, he’d put forth the extra effort to find the blankie, because that was Frank. His work ethic wouldn’t allow for anything less.

  “Bite to eat first?” he nodded toward the remaining pieces of his sub sandwich that lay splayed on the table.

  “What the heck,” I shrugged. “Got to get my energy up for what’s coming,” I walked over, grabbed a section of sandwich, and took a big bite.

  I made it into my third chew before my gag reflexes hit and I spit my mouthful into my hand. I was all for being polite, and I didn’t want to offend Frank, but whatever he’d just given me tasted absolutely terrible.

  “Ugh,” I grimaced, sticking my tongue out and cringing in disgusted. “What the hell is this?”

  “Peanut butter and sardine,” he grinned evilly and then started with a full-bellied laugh that echoed out of the sorting room and down the empty corridors of 2B.

  “You son of a gun,” I gave him a narrow-eyed stare. “Okay, you got me,” I half-smiled, always up for a good prank.

  I walked over to deposit the rest of the nastiness in a big trash barrel that sat in one corner of the room.

  “No! Not that one!” Frank waved me off. “That’s for dry stuff only…stained linen, junk that comes down the chute, and other non-food trash. We only
dump that one about once a month. That little one over there,” he pointed to a much smaller trash can beside the barrel, “that one’s for food and stuff that’ll rot. It gets dumped daily. Can you imagine if you put that sandwich in the barrel and left it for another couple weeks?”

  “Dear god!” I cringed at the thought, depositing my sandwich in the smaller trash bin.

  “You ready?” Frank asked, having enjoyed his little trick on me.

  “I suppose,” I said as I spit into the trash can and then swallowed over and over again as I worked to clear the horrific taste that had seared itself into my palate.

  “Just remember,” Frank said as I walked over to him and he handed me a pair of rubber gloves, “stay out of the way when things get rolling. This stuff can come out with a lot of force behind it when it’s stacked up this high.”

  “Gotcha,” I nodded.

  “And watch out for debris. Broken glass, silverware, pins, needles, and other sharp stuff can all get you if you’re not careful.”

  “Will do,” I said. “This ain’t my first rodeo, remember.”

  “I know, I know,” Frank nodded, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t remind you.”

  “Right enough.”

  “Okay, you ready to do this?” Frank asked, walking over to the linen chute.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I followed behind him.

  “Help me get this conveyor belt out of the way,” he said, grabbing one end of the contraption.

  I moved in beside him and assisted him in sliding the smaller conveyor that sat beneath the linen chute over and out of the way. Then Frank went back to the chute where he unclipped several latches and slid the heavy steel door on rolling tracks out from beneath the linen chute’s exit. In the process, he released from within a tightly-packed tubular mix of sheets and towels. The tube of linen smacked down against the room’s concrete floor with a heavy “thud” and struck with enough force to rattle the nearby conveyor belt and attached scaffolding before it stopped fast. It reminded me of a massive piece of white lipstick jutting downward from within its tube.