8

It had been a full evening, Peter thought – with its share of unpleasantness – though not exceptional for a big hotel. When the elevator arrived he told the operator, “Lobby, please.” Christine was waiting on the main mezzanine, but his business on the main floor would take only a few minutes.

He noted with impatience that although the elevator doors were closed, they had not yet started down.

“Are you sure the gates are fully closed?”

“Yes, sir, they are. It isn’t that, it’s the connections I think, either here or up top,” the operator explained.

With a jerk the mechanism took hold and the elevator started down.

Peter made a mental note to ask the chief engineer exactly what was wrong.

It was almost half-past-twelve by the lobby clock as he stepped from the elevator. Peter turned right toward Reception, but had gone only a few paces when he was aware of an obese figure approaching him. It was Ogilvie, the chief house officer. As always, he was accompanied by an odor of stale cigar smoke.

“I hear you were looking for me,” Ogilvie said.

Peter felt some of his earlier anger return. “I certainly was. Where were you?”

“Doing my job, Mr. McDermott. I was over at police headquarters reporting some trouble we had here. There was a suitcase stolen from the baggage room today.”

“Police headquarters! Which room was the poker game in?”

“Maybe you should speak to Mr. Trent about it.”

Warren Trent would never take action against Ogilvie, who had been at the St. Gregory as long as the hotel proprietor himself. There were some who said that the fat detective knew where a body or two was buried, and thus had a hold over Warren Trent.

“Well, you’ve missed a couple of emergencies,” Peter said. Perhaps after all, he reflected, it was good that Ogilvie had not been available.

The night clerk whom he had telephoned earlier to ask for a room was at the desk. “Thank you for helping me out with that problem on the fourteenth. We have Mr. Wells in 1410. Dr. Aarons is arranging nursing care, and the chief has brought up oxygen. But I am concerned why Mr. Wells was moved into that other room earlier.”

“I’ll find that out.”

“We’ve had some trouble on the eleventh, too. Do you mind telling me whose name 1126-7 is in?”

The room clerk flipped through his records and produced a card. “Mr. Stanley Dixon. He’s the car dealer’s son. Mr. Dixon senior is often in the hotel.”

“Thank you. Have his bill sent to me tomorrow, and I’ll write a letter. There’ll be a claim for damages.”

“Very well, Mr. McDermott. And as I understand it, the suite is available now.”

“Yes.” With a friendly “good night” to the room clerk he crossed the lobby to an unoccupied desk, used in daytime by one of the assistant managers. He found Mark Preyscott at a Garden District address in a phone book.

The ringing tone continued for some time before a woman’s voice answered sleepily. Identifying himself, he announced, “I have a message for Anna from Miss Preyscott.”

“This is Anna. Is Miss Marsha all right?”

“She’s all right, but she asked me to tell you that she will stay the night at the hotel.”

The housekeeper’s voice said, “Who did you say that was again?”

“Look,” he said, “if you want to check, why don’t you call back? It’s the St. Gregory, and ask for the assistant manager’s desk in the lobby.”

In less than a minute they were reconnected. “It’s all right,” she said, “now I know who it is for sure. We worry about Miss Marsha.”

He decided he would have a talk with Marsha Preyscott tomorrow to find out what happened before the attempted rape occurred.

This time he rode up one floor only, to the main mezzanine.

Christine was waiting in his office.

“Don’t marry a hotel man,” he told her. “There’s never an end to the work.”

“I hadn’t told you, but I’ve a crush on that new sous-chef. The one who looks like Rock Hudson. Do we have more troubles?”

“Other people’s, mostly. I’ll tell you as we go.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere away from the hotel. We’ve both had enough for one day.”

Christine considered. “We could go to the Quarter. There are plenty of places open. Or if you want to come to my place, I prepare perfect omelets.”

They went to the door where Peter switched off the office lights. “An omelet,” he declared, “is what I really wanted and didn’t know it.”

9

A sleepy parking attendant brought down Christine’s Volkswagen and they climbed in. She reminded him, “You were going to tell me what happened.”

He frowned, bringing his thoughts back to the hotel, then in short sentences told her what he knew about the attempted rape of Marsha Preyscott. Christine listened in silence, heading the little car northeast as Peter talked, ending with the suspicion that Herbie Chandler, the bell captain, had ignored the incident intentionally. “He always knows more than he says.”

“That’s why he’s been around a long time.”

“Being around isn’t the answer to everything.”

In the St. Gregory, a good deal of organization was unwritten, with final judgments depending upon Warren Trent, and made by the hotel owner in his own capricious way. In ordinary circumstances, Peter – a brilliant graduate of Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration – would have made a decision months ago to seek more satisfying work elsewhere. But circumstances were not ordinary.

At the Waldorf, where he had gone to work after graduation as a junior assistant manager, Peter McDermott had been the bright young man who seemed to hold the future in his hand. At a time when he was supposedly on duty, he was discovered in a bedroom with a woman guest. He might have escaped retribution. Good-looking young men who worked in hotels got used to flirting with lonely women. A warning from the management was usually the highest possible punishment for such relationships. Two factors, however, happened to be against Peter. The fact that it was the woman’s husband, aided by private detectives, who discovered them, and a messy divorce case, which resulted in publicity hotels abhorred. The end result was unofficial blacklisting by the major chain hotels. Only at the St. Gregory, an independent house, had he been able to obtain work.

Moreover, three years before the Waldorf case, Peter McDermott had married impulsively and the marriage, soon after, ended in separation. To an extent, his loneliness had been a cause of the incident in the hotel.

Christine said, “There’s something I think you should know. Curtis O’Keefe is arriving in the morning. “

It was the kind of news that he had feared, yet half expected.

Curtis O’Keefe, head of the world-wide O’Keefe hotel chain, he bought hotels as other men chose ties and handkerchiefs.

Peter asked, “Is it a buying trip?”

“It could be. W.T. doesn’t want it that way. But it may turn out there isn’t any choice.” She was about to add that the last piece of information was confidential, but checked herself. Peter would realize that. “There are problems about refinancing.”

Peter wondered if he had reached the point where a hotel chain, such as O’Keefe, might consider him rehabilitated and worth employing. He doubted it. Eventually it could happen, but not yet.

He decided to worry about new employment when it happened.

“When shall we know for sure?”

“One way or the other by the end of this week.”

“That soon!”

They were headed north on Elysian Fields, when abruptly a flashing white light, waving from side to side, loomed directly ahead. Christine braked and, as the car stopped, a uniformed traffic officer walked forward. Christine lowered her window as the officer came to her side of the car.

“You’ll have to detour. Drive slowly through the other lane, and the officer at the far end will wave you back into this one.”

“What is it?” Peter said.

“Hit and run. Happened earlier tonight.”

Christine asked, “Was anyone killed?”

The policeman nodded. “Little girl of seven.” Responding to their shocked expressions, he told them, “Walking with her mother. The mother’s in the hospital. Whoever was in the car drove right on. Bastards!”

They were silent as Christine drove slowly through the detour and, at the end of it, was waved back into the regular lane. Somewhere in Peter’s mind was a half-thought he could not define. He supposed the incident itself was bothering him, as sudden tragedy always did, but a vague uneasiness kept him preoccupied until, with surprise, he heard Christine say, “We’re almost home.”

“If all else fails,” Peter said cheerfully, “I can go back to bartending.” He was mixing drinks in Christine’s living room to the sound of breaking eggshells from the kitchen adjoining.

“Were you ever one?”

“For a while.” He measured three ounces of rye whiskey, dividing it two ways. “Sometime I’ll tell you about it.”

When he took the drinks to the kitchen, Christine was emptying beaten eggs from a mixing dish into a softly sizzling pan.

“Three minutes more,” she said, “that’s all.”

He gave her the drink and they clinked glasses.

The omelet proved to be everything she had promised – light, fluffy, and seasoned with herbs. “The way omelets should be,” he assured her, “but seldom are.”

“I can boil eggs too.”

“Some other breakfast,” he smiled.

Afterward they returned to the living room and Peter mixed a second drink. It was almost two a.m. Sitting beside her on the sofa, he pointed to the odd-appearing clock. “I get the feeling that thing is staring at me.”

“Perhaps it is,” Christine answered. “It was my father’s. He was a doctor and the clock used to be in his office where patients could see it. It’s the only thing I saved.”

Once before Christine had told him, matter-of-factly, about the airplane accident in Wisconsin. Now he said gently, “After it happened, you must have felt desperately alone.”

She said simply, “I wanted to die. Though you get over that, of course – after a while. That part – wanting to die – took just a week or two.”

“And – after?”

“When I came to New Orleans,” Christine said, “I tried to concentrate on not thinking. For a while I considered going back to university, then decided not. It seemed as if I’d grown away from it all.”

Christine sipped her drink, her expression pensive. “Anyway,” she went on, “one day I saw a sign, which said ‘Secretarial School.’ I thought – that’s it! I’ll learn what I need to, then get a job involving endless hours of work. In the end that’s exactly what happened.”

“Why the St. Gregory?”

“I was staying there. I had since I came from Wisconsin. Then one morning I saw in the classifieds that the managing director of the hotel wanted a personal secretary. It was early, so I thought I’d be first. In those days W.T. arrived at work before everyone else. When he came, I was waiting in the executive suite.”

“He hired you on the spot?”

“Not really. Actually, I don’t believe I ever was hired. It was just that, when W.T. found out why I was there, he called me in and began dictating letters. By the time more applicants arrived I’d been working for hours, and I told them the job was filled. About three days later I left a note on his desk. ‘My name is Christine Francis,’ and I suggested a salary. I got the note back without comment – just initialed, and that’s all there’s ever been.”

“It makes a good bedtime story.” Peter rose from the sofa, stretching his big body. “That clock of yours is staring again. I guess I’d better go.”

“It isn’t fair,” Christine objected. “All we’ve talked about is me.” She found herself wondering what it would be like to be carried in his arms.

“Anyway, there’ll be other times.” He stopped, regarding her directly. “Won’t there?”

As she nodded in answer, he leaned forward, kissing her lightly.

Already in a taxi to his own apartment he decided that whatever, if anything, developed between Christine and himself should happen slowly, with caution on his own part.