Hotel

4

The inconclusive conference in the hotel owner's suite left Peter McDermott in a mood of frustration. Striding away down the fifteenth-floor corridor, as Aloysius Royce closed the suite door behind him, he reflected that his encounters with Warren Trent invariably went the same way. As he had on other occasions, he wished fervently that he could have six months and a free hand to manage the hotel himself.

Near the elevators he stopped to use a house phone, inquiring from Reception what accommodation had been reserved for Mr. Curtis O'Keefe's party. There were two adjoining suites on the twelfth floor, a room clerk informed him, and Peter used the service stairway to descend the two flights. Like all sizable hotels, the St. Gregory pretended not to have a thirteenth floor, naming it the fourteenth instead.

All four doors to the two reserved suites were open and, from within, the whine of a vacuum cleaner was audible as he approached. Inside, two maids were working industriously under the critical eye of Mrs. Blanche du Quesnay, the St. Gregory's sharp-tongued but highly competent housekeeper.

She turned as Peter came in, her bright eyes flashing.

"I might have known that one of you men would be checking up to see if I'm capable of doing my own job, as if I couldn't figure out for myself that things had better be just so, considering who's coming."

Peter grinned. "Relax, Mrs. Q. Mr. Trent asked me to drop in." He liked the middle-aged red-haired woman, one of the most reliable department heads.

The two maids were smiling. He winked at them, adding for Mrs. du Quesnay,

"If Mr. Trent had known you were giving this your personal attention he'd have wiped the whole thing from his mind."

"And if we run out of soft soap in the laundry we'll send for you," the housekeeper said with the trace of a smile as she expertly plumped the cushions of two long settees.

He laughed, then inquired, "Have flowers and a basket of fruit been ordered?" The hotel magnate, Peter thought, probably grew weary of the inevitable fruit basket - standard salutation of hotels to visiting VIPs.

But its absence might be noticed.

"They're on the way up." Mrs. du Quesnay looked up from her cushion arranging and said pointedly, "From what I hear, though, Mr. O'Keefe brings his own flowers, and not in vases either."

It was a reference - which Peter understood - to the fact that Curtis O'Keefe was seldom without a feminine escort on his travels, the composition of the escort changing frequently. He discreetly ignored it.

Mrs. du Quesnay flashed him one of her quick, pert looks. "Have a look around. There's no charge."

Both suites, Peter saw as he walked through them, had been gone over thoroughly. The furnishings - white and gold with a French motif - were dustless and orderly. In bedrooms and bathrooms the linen was spotless and correctly folded, handbasins and baths were dry and shining, toilet seats impeccably scoured and the tops down. Mirrors and windows gleamed.

Electric lights all worked, as did the combination TV-radios. The air conditioning responded to changes of thermostats, though the temperature now was a comfortable 68. There was nothing else to be done, Peter thought, as he stood in the center of the second suite surveying it.

Then a thought struck him. Curtis O'Keefe, he remembered, was notably devout - at times, some said, to the point of ostentation. The hotelier prayed frequently, sometimes in public. One report claimed that when a new hotel interested him he prayed for it as a child did for a Christmas toy; another, that before negotiations a private church service was held which O'Keefe executives attended dutifully. The head of a competitive hotel chain, Peter recalled, once remarked unkindly, "Curtis never misses an opportunity to pray. That's why he urinates on his knees."

The thought prompted Peter to check the Gideon Bibles - one in each room.

He was glad he did.

As usually happened when they had been in use for any length of time, the Bibles' front pages were dotted with call girls' phone numbers, since a Gideon Bible - as experienced travelers knew - was the first place to seek that kind of information. Peter showed the books silently to Mrs. du Quesnay. She clucked her tongue. "Mr. O'Keefe won't be needing these, now will he? I'll have new ones sent up."

Taking the Bibles under her arm, she regarded Peter questioningly. "I suppose what Mr. O'Keefe likes or doesn't is going to make a difference to people keeping their jobs around here."

He shook his head. "I honestly don't know, Mrs. Q. Your guess is as good as mine."

He was aware of the housekeeper's eyes following him interrogatively as he left the suite. Mrs. du Quesnay, he knew, supported an invalid husband and any threat to her job would be cause for anxiety. He felt a genuine sympathy for her as he rode an elevator to the main mezzanine.

In the event of a management change, Peter supposed, most of the younger and brighter staff members would have an opportunity to stay on. He imagined that most would take it since the O'Keefe chain had a reputation for treating its employees well. Older employees, though, some of whom had grown soft in their jobs, had a good deal more to worry about.

As Peter McDermott approached the executive suite, the chief engineer, Doc Vickery, was leaving it. Stopping, Peter said, "Number four elevator was giving some trouble last night, chief. I wondered if you knew."

The chief nodded his bald, domed head morosely. "It's a pure business when machinery that needs money spending on it doesna' get it."

"Is it really that bad?" The engineering budget, Peter knew, had been pared recently, but this was the first he had heard of serious trouble with the elevators.

The chief shook his head. "If you mean shall we have a big accident, the answer's no. I watch the safety guards like I would a bairn. But we've had small breakdowns and sometime there'll be a bigger one. All it needs is a couple of cars stalled for a few hours to throw this building out of joint."

Peter nodded. If that was the worse that could happen, there was no point in worrying unduly. He inquired, "What is it you need?"

The chief peered over his thick-rimmed spectacles. "A hundred thousand dollars to start. With that I'd rip out most of the elevator guts and replace them, then some other things as well."

Peter whistled softly.

"I'll tell you one thing," the chief observed. "Good machinery's a lovely thing, and sometimes well nigh human. Most times it'll do more work than you think it could, and after that you can patch it and coax it, and it'll work for you some more. But somewhere along there's a death point you'll never get by, no matter how much you - and the machinery - want to."

Peter was still thinking about the chief's words when he entered his own office. What was the death point, he wondered, for an entire hotel?

Certainly not yet for the St. Gregory, though for the hotel's present regime he suspected the point was already passed.

There was a pile of mail, memos and telephone messages on his desk. He picked up the top one and read: Miss Marsha Preyscott returned your call and will wait in room 555 until she hears from you. It was a reminder of his intention to find out more about last night's events in 1126-7.

Another thing: he must drop in soon to see Christine. There were several small matters requiring decisions from Warren Trent, though not important enough to have brought up at this morning's meeting. Then, grinning, he chided himself: Stop rationalizing! You want to see her, and why not?

As he debated which to do first, the telephone bell shrilled. It was Reception, one of the room clerks. "I thought you'd want to know," he said. "Mr. Curtis O'Keefe has just checked in."