Hotel

The voice, with a Deep South accent, said, "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?"

Peter explained patiently. "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."

The woman, obviously relieved, said, "Yes, sir, I'll do that." 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 a bit, what with her daddy being away and all."

Replacing the telephone, he found himself thinking again about Marsha Preyscott. He decided he would have a talk with her tomorrow to find out just what happened before the attempted rape occurred. The disorder in the suite, for example, posed several unanswered questions.

He was aware that Herbie Chandler had been glancing at him covertly from the bell captain's desk. Now, walking over to him, Peter said curtly, "I thought I gave instructions about checking a disturbance on the eleventh."

Chandler's weasel face framed innocent eyes. "But I went, Mr. Mac. I walked right around and everything was quiet."

And so it had been, Herbie thought. In the end he had gone nervously to the eleventh and, to his relief, whatever disturbance there might have been earlier had ended by the time he arrived. Even better, on returning to the lobby, he learned that the two call girls had left the hotel without detection.

"You couldn't have looked or listened very hard."

Herbie Chandler shook his head obstinately. "All I can say is, I did what you asked, Mr. Mac. You said to go up, and I did, even though that isn't our job."

"Very well." Though instinct told him that the bell captain knew more than he was saying, Peter decided not to press the point. "I'll be making some inquiries. Maybe I'll talk to you again."

As he recrossed the lobby and entered an elevator, he was conscious of being watched both by Herbie Chandler and the house officer, Ogilvie.

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

Christine was waiting in his office. She had kicked off her shoes and curled her feet under her in the upholstered leather chair she had occupied an hour and a half before. Her eyes were closed, her thoughts far away in time and distance. She summoned them back, looking up as Peter came in.

"Don't marry a hotel man," he told her. "There's never an end to the work,

"It's a timely warning," Christine said. "I hadn't told you, but I've a crush on that new sous-chef. The one who looks like Rock Hudson." She uncurled her legs, reaching for her shoes. "Do we have more troubles?"

He grinned, finding the sight and sound of Christine immensely cheering.

"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'm a whiz at omelets."

Peter helped her up and steered her to the door where he switched off the office lights. "An omelet," he declared, "is what I really wanted and didn't know it."

9

They walked together, skirting pools of water which the rain had left, to a tiered parking lot a block and a half from the hotel. Above, the sky was clearing after its interlude of storm, with a three-quarter moon beginning to break through, and around them the city center was settling down to silence, broken by an occasional late taxi and the sharp tattoo of their footsteps echoing hollowly through the canyon of darkened buildings.

A sleepy parking attendant brought down Christine's Volkswagen and they climbed in, Peter jackknifing his length into the right-hand seat. "This is the life! You don't mind if I spread out?" He draped his arm along the back of the driver's seat, not quite touching Christine's shoulders.

As they waited for the traffic lights at Canal Street, one of the new air-conditioned buses glided down the center mall in front of them.

She reminded him, "You were going to tell me what happened."

He frowned, bringing his thoughts back to the hotel, then in crisp short sentences related what he knew about the attempted rape of Marsha Preyscott. Christine listened in silence, heading the little car northeast as Peter talked, ending with his conversation with Herbie Chandler and the suspicion that the bell captain knew more than he had told.

"Herbie always knows more. That's why he's been around a long time."

Peter said shortly, "Being around isn't the answer to everything."

The comment, as both he and Christine knew, betrayed Peter's impatience with inefficiencies within the hotel which he lacked authority to change.

In a normally run establishment, with clearly defined lines of command, there would be no such problem. But 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 - an honors 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. He had arrived at the St. Gregory under a cloud, which was likely to remain - hampering his chance of other employment - for a long time to come.

Sometimes he reflected glumly on the botchery he had made of his career, for which no one - he admitted candidly - was to blame except himself.

At the Waldorf, where he had gone to work after graduation from Cornell, Peter McDermott had been the bright young man who appeared to hold the future in his hand. As a junior assistant manager, he had been selected for promotion when bad luck, plus indiscretion, intervened. At a time when he was supposedly on duty and required elsewhere in the hotel, he was discovered in flagrante in a bedroom with a woman guest.

Even then, he might have escaped retribution. Goodlooking young men who worked in hotels grew used to receiving overtures from lonely women, and most, at some point in their careers, succumbed. Managements, aware of this, were apt to punish a single transgression with a stem warning that a similar thing must never happen again. Two factors, however, conspired against Peter. The woman's husband, aided by private detectives, was involved in the discovery, and a messy divorce case resulted, with attendant publicity, which all hotels abhorred.

As if this was not enough, there was a personal retribution. Three years before the Waldorf debacle, Peter McDermott had married impulsively and the marriage, soon after, ended in separation. To an extent, his loneliness and disillusion had been a cause of the incident in the hotel.

Regardless of the cause, and utilizing the readymade evidence, Peter's estranged wife sued successfully for divorce.

The end result was ignominious dismissal and blacklisting by the major chain hotels.

The existence of a black list, of course, was not admitted. But at a long series of hotels, most with chain affiliations, Peter McDermott's applications for employment were peremptorily rejected. Only at the St. Gregory, an independent house, had he been able to obtain work, at a salary which Warren Trent shrewdly adjusted to Peter's own desperation.

Therefore when he had said a moment ago, Being around isn't the answer to everything, he had pretended an independence which did not exist. He suspected that Christine realized it too.

Peter watched as she maneuvered the little car expertly through the narrow width of Burgundy Street, skirting the French Quarter and paralleling the Mississippi a half mile to the south. Christine slowed momentarily, avoiding a group of unsteady wassailers who had wandered from the more populous and brightly lighted Bourbon Street, two blocks away. Then she 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 halfexpected.

Curtis O'Keefe was a name to conjure with. Head of the world-wide O'Keefe hotel chain, he bought hotels as other men chose ties and handkerchiefs.

Obviously, even to the sparsely informed, the appearance of Curtis O'Keefe in the St. Gregory could have only one implication: an interest in acquiring the hotel for the constantly expanding O'Keefe chain.

Peter asked, "Is it a buying trip?"

"It could be." Christine kept her eyes on the dimly lighted street ahead.

"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. And as for the presence of Curtis O'Keefe, that electrifying news would telegraph itself around the St. Gregory tomorrow morning within minutes of the great man's arrival.

"I suppose it had to come." Peter was aware, as were other executives in the hotel, that in recent months the St. Gregory had suffered severe financial losses. "All the same, I think it's a pity."

Christine reminded him, "It hasn't happened yet. I said W.T. doesn't want to sell."

Peter nodded without speaking.

They were leaving the French Quarter now, turning left on the boulevarded and tree-lined Esplanade Avenue, deserted except for the receding taillights of another car disappearing swiftly toward Bayou St. John.

Christine said, "There are problems about refinancing. W.T. has been trying to locate new capital. He still hopes he may."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then I expect we shall be seeing a lot more of Mr. Curtis O'Keefe."

And a whole lot less of Peter McDermott, Peter thought. He 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 if his record remained good. But not yet.

It seemed likely that he might soon have to search for other employment.

He decided to worry when it happened.

"The O'Keefe - St. Gregory," Peter ruminated. "When shall we know for sure?"

"One way or the other by the end of this week."

"That soon!"

There were compelling reasons, Christine knew, why it had to be that soon. For the moment she kept them to herself .

Peter said emphatically, "The old man won't find new financing."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because people with that kind of money want a sound investment. That means good management, and the St. Gregory hasn't got it. It could have, but it hasn't."

They were headed north on Elysian Fields, its wide dual lanes empty of other traffic, 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. Directing his flashlight onto the Volkswagen, he circled the car, inspecting it. While he did, they could see that the section of road immediately ahead was blocked off by a rope barrier. Beyond the barrier other uniformed men, and some in plain clothes, were examining the road surface with the aid of powerful lights.

Christine lowered her window as the officer came to her side of the car.

Apparently satisfied by his inspection, he told them, "You'll have to detour, folks. Drive slowly through the other lane, and the officer at the far end will wave you back into this one."