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

by K. W. Callahan

  There was the sound of crying from the bedroom.

  “Enrique!” Ms. Gonzalez shouted. “Take care of your brother!”

  “But mommy…” the older boy called back.

  “Do it!” his mother yelled back, obviously feeling the strain of the situation.

  But the detective forged ahead, looking to press any advantage the distraction or added stress might provide.

  “If someone else was involved, if they pressured you or forced you to help them, we might be able to work a deal if you talk. But you’ve got to help us understand so that we can help you.”

  “I wasn’t even there!” she began to weep.

  “What do you mean?” the detective frowned. He began searching for the proper paperwork on the table.

  I quickly found what he needed and handed it to him.

  He pointed at one sheet of paper in particular. “You were scheduled the same day that Mr. Statler was killed. Here’s your room assignment sheet.”

  She shook her head, “Yes, I was scheduled, but I only worked the morning. I have a strained back muscle. I was under light duty restrictions, but I tried cleaning rooms that day so I could see him. I just couldn’t do it. After we…met…early that morning, my back started aching again,” she looked somewhat embarrassed by the confession. “I hurried and finished my rooms, they were all occupied so I could do them fast, but I hurt so bad that I left at lunchtime to see the doctor. And Derrick was still alive. I kissed him goodbye just before I left. He was in his room…he was fine,” she choked slightly on the words, the emotion overwhelming her. “After that, I was at the clinic for the rest of the day.”

  “You never said anything about this in our first interview,” the detective said.

  Felicia snorted and wiped a tear away. “Why would I? I could lose my job.”

  The detective paused, thinking. “The doctor can confirm this…that you were at his office the rest of the day?”

  Felicia nodded, then hesitated, “Well, I was in the waiting room for most of the afternoon. I think the lady that checks people in could verify that I was there…she might remember me. There were so many people there though, I can’t be sure. But I have the paperwork. I can show you that,” she offered eagerly. “I was there until four o’clock, and then I came home on the train. I still have my train tickets too! My sister was here watching the kids. I got home at around five. Ask her, she can tell you. She’ll remember. She was mad because I was late.”

  “We’ll certainly be checking Ms. Gonzalez,” Detective Marino assured her. “But you can’t think of anyone else who might have had reason to kill Mr. Statler if you didn’t? You haven’t been very forthright with us up to this point, so I think it’s time you started. You could be getting yourself into a lot of trouble here, especially with the safety and care of two small children to think about,” he nodded toward the bedroom.

  She swallowed hard and shook her head, “I can’t think of anyone. And they say he was put in the linen chute. How could I do such a thing? I loved him. And with my back, I could never have lifted him. Even without the injury, I couldn’t have.”

  I could tell that the detective didn’t want to give up, but there wasn’t much of an option at this point.

  “I’ll need the name and address of the clinic you visited as well as the name of the doctor whose care you are under,” he conceded.

  She nodded, excused herself from the table, and left to retrieve the necessary documentation.

  Once she was gone the detective hissed, “Shit!” under his breath as he scooped up the papers he’d laid out. “I thought we had something, Haze.”

  “We might still,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that she’s telling the truth.”

  The detective scowled and nodded to a nearby chair. “Look,” he said. A black elastic back brace was slung over its arm.

  “I doubt she bought that just for proof of her story in the off chance we’d show up.”

  I took a deep breath, “Yeah, I suppose; but you never know.”

  The detective gave me a look. “It ain’t like in the movies,” he said. “Most killers aren’t too bright…that’s why they kill people.”

  “Now what?” I asked.

  The detective shrugged, “I go meet with the doctor, make sure what she’s telling us is true, and if it is, then I start looking for new suspects.”

  * * *

  The drive back to the hotel took place largely in silence. I think both the detective and I were pretty down about the results of the interview with Ms. Gonzalez. I know our hopes had been high on what I’d discovered, and while our flame hadn’t been completely extinguished, it’d taken a pretty good dousing.

  Detective Marino dropped me off at the hotel at a little after seven. I no longer felt like having the drink that I’d hardly taken three sips of before dashing off to do my investigating in housekeeping. So I went upstairs to my room feeling defeated and somewhat depressed. It’s not that I particularly wanted to see a hotel employee arrested for murder, just the opposite in fact, but I also didn’t want a murder in our hotel going unsolved.

  * * *

  I slept poorly that night, tossing and turning while visions of Derrick Statler being loaded into the linen chute intermingled with protections of physics – weights, levers, momentum, friction, angles, forces. Every time I envisioned the act of Statler’s body being lifted up, shoved through the linen chute’s door and tumble down into the dark tubular abyss, I saw a man. It could only have been a man, or a really strong woman, or maybe a combination of the two who did the deed. Maybe the detective had been onto something. Maybe if Ms. Gonzalez had help – but no, she wasn’t there, she was at the clinic getting her back checked out. So it was either a strong lone person or two other people, both of whom were not Ms. Gonzalez. The thoughts kept coming. Who? How? Why? Guest or employee? Murder of purpose or crime of passion? Planned in advance or conducted in the heat of the moment?

  There would be no answers, only a lot of tossing and turning as my bed sheets became my enemies. Each time I became entangled in them, I flashed back to Derrick Statler, and my mind would again turn to more questions.

  CHAPTER 13

  To: allstaff.lanigan@sharedresorts.com

  Subject: 1/6 MOD Report

  THE LANIGAN HOTEL

  CHICAGO, IL

  MANAGER ON DUTY REPORT

  Friday, January 6th

  Weather: 31/26 Sunny

  Occupancy: 57%

  Arrivals: 837

  Departures: 209

  Event Resume:

  Grand Ballroom (8 p.m. - midnight) – Carlson/Winters wedding reception

  Triton Club (Open 4 p.m. – 1 a.m.)

  Carlisle’s Whiskey Lounge (Open 6 p.m. – 1 a.m.)

  Blue Velvet Room (7 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.) – Maynard Stoddard 100th birthday party

  Lake Ballroom (6 p.m. – 8 p.m.) – “Those Were the Years” radio/dinner show

  * * *

  I was almost glad when my M.O.D. phone rang at 5:37 in the morning. It being Friday, and with a nice influx of guests set to arrive to the hotel, I hoped that calls would keep me busy and less preoccupied with the nagging questions surrounding Mr. Statler’s murder. While the call was only to handle a guest who was disputing several charges on his room bill, it was enough to get my mind off the case of our poor linen pressed guest.

  I quickly handled the early-morning guest charge issue that had resulted from parking fees that had accumulated for the entirety of the guest’s four-day stay even though he had returned his rental car upon arriving to the hotel. Then I went back upstairs to shower, shave, and re-dress. Then it was back to cover the front desk until Jason rolled in around eight.

  Things were already starting to pick up by the time I got back downstairs. There a large wedding reception at the hotel later in the evening. Many of the wedding guests were staying in a block of over a hundred rooms reserved by the two coupling families and were arriving early to start getting things prepared fo
r the event. Then there would be the Those Were the Years radio program being broadcast from the hotel’s famed Lake Ballroom. And we also had a huge event taking place in the Blue Velvet Room for the Stoddard family to celebrate the 100th birthday of their patriarch, Mr. Maynard Stoddard.

  Mr. Stoddard had been staying at the Lanigan since he was a child, and he was the only person we knew of who had actually been here at the time of the hotel’s first major renovation back in the 1920s. Hotel historian Ken Prouce was master of ceremonies for the event, and several local newspapers, and even a local television station, were arriving to cover the event. Ken would be presenting Mr. Stoddard with a 14-karat gold Lanigan-logoed employee lapel pin from the date of his first stay back in 1923.

  By lunch time, I’d barely had a chance to take a breather. Between answering my office phone, taking calls on my M.O.D. phone, speaking with guests at the front desk, and replying to emails, the first half of my day was a blur of activity that actually left me feeling somewhat invigorated. A little after noon, things calmed a bit, but I knew the reprieve wouldn’t last long as the list of checkouts dwindled but the number of arrivals remained high. Most guests would likely start arriving for check-in around three. We’d therefore bulked up the front desk’s second shift to help cover not just the weekend leisure crowd but the guests arriving for three sizeable events taking place in our ballrooms later in the evening.

  I decided that it being Friday, and the end to a long week for both of us, I’d offer to treat Detective Marino to a hearty meal and the radio dinner show taking place in the Lake Ballroom. We both deserved a break, and I thought the detective might enjoy the “Those Were the Years” radio program, a weekly three-hour radio program that replayed vintage programs and music. Episodes from radio dramas like The Lone Ranger, Little Orphan Annie, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar: the man with the action-packed expense account, old news pieces, and Command Performance bits from the war and post-war years were just a taste of what one might expect to hear on the show. It was wonderfully nostalgic, and when I couldn’t catch the program at its regular time, I often streamed it online during one of my days off or on my office computer when I was doing paperwork or responding to emails.

  The detective didn’t really sound like he was in the mood for a night out, but since he was a single man like me whose work was his life, I figured he probably didn’t have much else on his plate for the evening’s entertainment.

  After I made the call and booked our reservations for the radio program, I rode the service elevator down to 2B. The dimly lit hallways of the sub-basement level were quiet at this time of day as most employees were upstairs, cooking, cleaning, setting up, and assisting guests. Today was even more peaceful than usual with everyone busy preparing for the night’s activities.

  There was nary a sole about as I walked past the still shuttered linen sorting room. The entry doors were closed. The police had taped several lengths of yellow and black crime scene tape across the door. An officer had initially been posted in the corridor outside to protect the space. After a few days, and once the police had collected their evidence and taken their crime scene photos, the guard had been removed. The tape however, had remained, and the space continued to stay off-limits to employees, something Marian Marshall in housekeeping had complained about but had to deal with nonetheless.

  I kept walking, on passed the sorting room, hooking a left by the linen scale where loaded carts of sorted and soiled linens were weighed before being sent out to be laundered. I took a right, on past multiple rows of freshly cleaned and returned linens waiting to be taken upstairs and placed in the linen closets. Then I took another right down a shorter hallway, and another left into a large storage area with more fully-loaded linen carts. At the far end of this space was a door that led into a small property operations department locker room. Down from this was a short stairway leading up to a locked door that entered the basement of an old jewelry store that used to be connected with the hotel. Between these two doors was a third door that was almost obscured from view by the linen carts that were pushed up in front of it.

  I shoved two of these carts aside, pulled my M.O.D. key ring from my pocket, found my hotel master key, and unlocked the door. I fumbled in the darkness for a moment until I found the light switch and flipped it on. It illuminated a mid-sized room, maybe 15 by 20 feet that was piled high with cardboard file boxes and stacks of books. The books were what I was most interested in today. The room itself had served as a store room for old documents and financial files until the mid-50s when the hotel started storing such items off property. By that time, all the stuff stored here was so outdated that no one saw the need to move it to the new storage site. There was no longer a reason to keep the old documents, but no one had ever taken the time to haul all the heavy boxes to the trash. This left the documents as well as the space itself to largely be forgotten about by the rest of the hotel employees…except for me of course. I liked sneaking down here to the bowels of the hotel occasionally and selecting a file box or a couple books to pilfer through, using them as a time machine to transport me back to a different age and to explore the hotel’s past.

  It took me about 15 minutes of hunting and rearranging stacks of books of boxes to find what I was looking for – a dusty copy of the hotel registration book from July, 1923. After a few more minutes of cleaning off the relic and hunting through its yellowed musty pages, I found what I was looking for. About halfway through the book, under the date “July 11th” I found the handwritten signature of Claude Stoddard, Maynard’s father, alongside the names of his mother Agnes, and little Maynard and Merle, their children. I smiled, nodding to myself, and then snapped the book closed. I gave it a final blow to remove the last bits of dust from its black leather cover and made my way out of the store room.

  Pleased with myself, I navigated the dank halls back to the floor’s main corridor. Just as I rounded the corner near the linen scale, I caught a glimpse of a dark figure darting down the end of the hallway and around the corner toward where the service elevators were located. It seemed strange that anyone would be moving so quickly to get back to work, but I didn’t think much of it – at least not until I was passed the linen sorting room and caught the smell of smoke.

  Doing a quick inspection, I could tell that the crime scene tape covering the room’s entry doors had been disturbed. My first thought was that the mystery person I saw running away was on a quick smoke break, not wanting to brave the winter temps to enjoy their cigarette outside. With 2B mostly empty at this time of day, and with the sorting room cordoned off, it seemed the logical spot for a secret smoke. But what wafted gingerly into my nostrils was not cigarette smoke; it smelled more like something burning.

  I shoved open the doors to the sorting room, dislodging the rest the crime scene tape in the process. The lights were on, and I could see smoke and a few flames rising from the pile of linen still left on the floor from when Frank and I busted the chute two weeks ago. I immediately wondered if this was a smoke break gone awry, the hustling employee having hastily ditched their cigarette butt in the piles of linen to escape being caught down here, or if it was something more.

  I dropped my book and ran over to grab a fire extinguisher off the wall. It took me but a few seconds to extinguish the burgeoning blaze, but a good amount of damage had already been done as a large section of the linen pile had already been charred and blacked in spots.

  “Well there’s a couple hundred bucks down the drain,” I grumbled.

  The fire out, I called security to make a report and have them take pictures and investigate. Steve came down looking displeased. I took a few moments to explain what I’d seen and help him search for the cause of the blaze.

  We didn’t find any cigarette remains, but we did pick up the faint scent of lighter fluid.

  “Looks like arson,” Steve frowned. “You can’t give us a better description of the person you saw running from here?”

  “No,” I shook my head. �
��It’s so damn dark in that hallway that it’s hard to see much of anything. Plus, it looked like the person was wearing dark colored clothing or a dark uniform.”

  “Well that’s not much help. Eighty percent of the hotel staff wears black, blue or dark green uniforms,” Steve frowned.

  “I’d better call the detective,” I said. “Someone apparently wanted to get rid of this linen for a reason, and he’ll want to know why. Better not touch anything else,” I told Steve.

  “Sounds good to me,” he said, glad to shovel the issue onto the detective’s plate.

  * * *

  As soon as Detective Marino heard about the fire, he huffed into the phone. “We went through that place with a fine-tooth comb,” he explained. “Makes me wonder if we missed something. Now it looks like we’re going to have to go through it with a sieve. You sure it was arson?”

  “Pretty sure. Steve and I looked for signs of a cigarette, but there was nothing. We detected a hint of lighter fluid though.”

  “You know what it means if you’re correct about this, right Haze?”

  “I know,” I said, not liking the implications. “Means the killer…or at least an accomplice of the killer, is trying to cover something up. Something we missed.”

  “Also means that the killer is likely one of your employees,” the detective added.

  “Yeah…that too,” I agreed, my spirits sinking again.

  “By the way, everything Ms. Gonzalez told us panned out regarding her light duty work, her back injury, and her clinic alibi. Looks like she was telling the truth.” There was a pause on the other end of the line before the detective added, “I am going to have her phone records checked, just to be on the safe side.”