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  “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 puir 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.”

  5

  Curtis O’Keefe marched into the busy, cavernous lobby swiftly, like an arrow piercing an apple’s core. And a slightly decayed apple, he thought critically. Glancing around, his experienced hotel man’s eye assimilated the signs. Small signs, but significant: a newspaper left in a chair and uncollected; a half-dozen cigarette butts in a sand urn by the elevators; a button missing from a bellboy’s uniform; two burned-out light bulbs in the chandelier above. At the St. Charles Avenue entrance a uniformed doorman gossiped with a news vendor, a tide of guests and others breaking around them. Closer at hand an elderly assistant manager sat brooding at his desk, eyes down.

  In a hotel of the O’Keefe chain, in the unlikely event of all such inefficiencies occurring at once, there would have been whip-cracking action, slashing reprimands and perhaps dismissals. But the St. Gregory isn’t my hotel, Curtis O’Keefe reminded himself. Not yet.

  He headed for Reception, a slender, dapper six-foot figure in precisely pressed charcoal gray, moving with dance-like, almost mincing, steps. The last was an O’Keefe characteristic whether on a handball court, as he often was, a ballroom floor or on the rolling deck of his ocean-going cruiser Innkeeper IV. His lithe athlete’s body had been his pride through most of the fifty-six years in which he had manipulated himself upward from a lower-middle-class nonentity to become one of the nation’s richest—and most restless—men.

  At the marble-topped counter, barely looking up, a room clerk pushed a registration pad forward. The hotelier ignored it.

  He announced evenly, “My name is O’Keefe and I have reserved two suites, one for myself, the other in the name of Miss Dorothy Lash.” From the periphery of his vision he could see Dodo entering the lobby now: all legs and breasts, radiating sex like a pyrotechnic. Heads were turning, with breath indrawn, as always happened. He had left her at the car to supervise the baggage. She enjoyed doing things like that occasionally. Anything requiring more cerebral strain passed her by.

  His words had the effect of a neatly thrown grenade.

  The room clerk s
tiffened, straightening his shoulders. As he faced the cool gray eyes which, effortlessly, seemed to bore into him, the clerk’s attitude changed from indifference to solicitous respect. With nervous instinct, a hand went to his tie.

  “Excuse me, sir. Mr. Curtis O’Keefe?”

  The hotelier nodded, with a hovering half smile, his face composed, the same face which beamed benignly from a half-million book jackets of I Am Your Host, a copy placed prominently in every hotel room of the O’Keefe chain. (This book is for your entertainment and pleasure. If you would like to take it with you, please notify the room clerk and $1.25 will be added to your bill.)

  “Yes, sir. I’m sure your suites are ready, sir. If you’ll wait one moment, please.”

  As the clerk shuffled reservation and room slips, O’Keefe stepped back a pace from the counter, allowing other arrivals to move in. The reception desk, which a moment ago had been fairly quiet, was beginning one of the periodic surges which were part of every hotel day. Outside, in bright, warm sunshine, airport limousines and taxis were discharging passengers who had traveled south—as he himself had done—on the breakfast jet flight from New York. He noticed a convention was assembling. A banner suspended from the vaulted lobby roof proclaimed:

  WELCOME DELEGATES

  CONGRESS OF AMERICAN DENTISTRY

  Dodo joined him, two laden bellboys following like acolytes behind a goddess. Under the big floppy picture hat, which failed to conceal the flowing ash-blond hair, her baby blue eyes were wide as ever in the flawless childlike face.

  “Curtie, they say there’s a lotta dentists staying here.”

  He said dryly, “I’m glad you told me. Otherwise I might never have known.”

  “Geez, well maybe I should get that filling done. I always mean to, then somehow never …”

  “They’re here to open their own mouths, not other people’s.”

  Dodo looked puzzled, as she did so often, as if events around her were something she ought to understand but somehow didn’t. An O’Keefe Hotels manager, who hadn’t known his chief executive was listening, had declared of Dodo not long ago: “Her brains are in her tits; only trouble is, they’re not connected.”

  Some of O’Keefe’s acquaintances, he knew, wondered about his choice of Dodo as a traveling companion when, with his wealth and influence, he could—within reason—have anyone he chose. But then, of course, they could only guess—and almost certainly underestimate—the savage sensuality which Dodo could turn on or obligingly leave quietly simmering, according to his own mood. Her mild stupidities, as well as the frequent gaucheries which seemed to bother others, he thought of as merely amusing—perhaps because he grew tired at times of being surrounded by clever, vigilant minds, forever striving to match the astuteness of his own.

  He supposed, though, he would dispense with Dodo soon. She had been a fixture now for almost a year—longer than most of the others. There were always plenty more starlets to be plucked from the Hollywood galaxy. He would, of course, take care of her, using his ample influence to arrange a supporting role or two and, who knew, perhaps she might even make the grade. She had the body and the face. Others had risen high on those commodities alone.

  The room clerk returned to the front counter. “Everything is ready, sir.”

  Curtis O’Keefe nodded. Then, led by the bell captain Herbie Chandler, who had swiftly materialized, their small procession moved to a waiting elevator.

  6

  Shortly after Curtis O’Keefe and Dodo had been escorted to their adjoining suites, Julius “Keycase” Milne obtained a single room.

  Keycase telephoned at 10:45 A.M., using the hotel’s direct line from Moisant Airport (Talk to us Free at New Orleans Finest) to confirm a reservation made several days earlier from out of town. In reply he was assured that his booking was in order and, if he would kindly hasten cityward, he could be accommodated without delay.

  Since his decision to stay at the St. Gregory had been made only a few minutes earlier, Keycase was pleased at the news, though not surprised, for his advance planning had taken the form of making reservations at all of New Orleans’ major hotels, employing a different name for each. At the St. Gregory he had reserved as “Byron Meader,” a name he had selected from a newspaper because its rightful owner had been a major sweepstake winner. This seemed like a good omen, and omens were something which impressed Keycase very much indeed.

  They had seemed to work out, in fact, on several occasions. For example, the last time he had come up for trial, immediately after his plea of guilty, a shaft of sunlight slanted across the judge’s bench and the sentence which followed—the sunlight still remaining—had been a lenient three years when Keycase was expecting five. Even the string of jobs which preceded the plea and sentencing seemed to have gone well for the same sort of reason. His nocturnal entry into various Detroit hotel rooms had proceeded smoothly and rewardingly, largely—he decided afterward—because all room numbers except the last contained the numeral two, his lucky number. It was this final room, devoid of the reassuring digit, whose occupant awakened and screamed stridently just as he was packing her mink coat into a suitcase, having already stowed her cash and jewelry in one of his specially capacious topcoat pockets.

  It was sheer bad luck, perhaps compounded by the number situation, that a house dick had been within hearing of the screams and responded promptly. Keycase, a philosopher, had accepted the inevitable with grace, not bothering even to use the ingenious explanations—which worked so well at other times—as to why he was in a room other than his own. That was a risk, though, which anyone who lived by being light-fingered had to take, even a skilled specialist like Keycase. But now, having served his time (with maximum remission for good behavior) and, more recently having enjoyed a successful ten-day foray in Kansas City, he was anticipating keenly a profitable fortnight or so in New Orleans.

  It had started well.

  He had arrived at Moisant Airport shortly before 7:30 A.M., driving from the cheap motel on Chef Menteur Highway where he had stayed the night before. It was a fine, modern terminal building, Keycase thought, with lots of glass and chrome as well as many trash cans, the latter important to his present purpose.

  He read on a plaque that the airport was named after John Moisant, an Orleanian who had been a world aviation pioneer, and he noted that the initials were the same as his own, which could be a favorable omen too. It was the kind of airport he would be proud to thunder into on one of the big jets, and perhaps he would soon if things continued the way they had before the last spell inside had put him out of practice for a while. Although he was certainly coming back fast, even if nowadays he occasionally hesitated where once he would have operated coolly, almost with indifference.

  But that was natural. It came from knowing that if he was caught and sent down again, this time it would be from ten to fifteen years. That would be hard to face. At fifty-two there were few periods of that length left.

  Strolling inconspicuously through the airport terminal, a trim, well-dressed figure, carrying a folded newspaper beneath his arm, Keycase stayed carefully alert. He gave the appearance of a well-to-do businessman, relaxed and confident. Only his eyes moved ceaselessly, following the movements of the early rising travelers, pouring into the terminal from limousines and taxis which had delivered them from downtown hotels. It was the first northbound exodus of the day, and a heavy one since United, National, Eastern, and Delta each had morning jet flights scheduled variously for New York, Washington, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.

  Twice he saw the beginning of the kind of thing he was looking for. But it turned out to be just the beginning, and no more. Two men, reaching into pockets for tickets or change, encountered a hotel room key which they had carried away in error. The first took the trouble to locate a postal box and mail the key, as suggested on its plastic tag. The other handed his to an airline clerk who put it in a cash drawer, presumably for return to the hotel.

  Both incidents were disappointing, b
ut an old experience. Keycase continued to observe. He was a patient man. Soon, he knew, what he was waiting for would happen.

  Ten minutes later his vigil was rewarded.

  A florid-faced, balding man, carrying a topcoat, bulging flight bag and camera, stopped to choose a magazine on his way to the departure ramp. At the newsstand cash desk he discovered a hotel key and gave an exclamation of annoyance. His wife, a thin mild woman, made a quiet suggestion to which he snapped, “There isn’t time.” Keycase, overhearing, followed them closely. Good! As they passed a trash can, the man threw the key in.

  For Keycase the rest was routine. Strolling past the trash can, he tossed in his own folded newspaper, then, as if abruptly changing his mind, turned back and recovered it. At the same time he looked down, observed the discarded key and palmed it unobtrusively. A few minutes later in the privacy of the men’s toilet he read that it was for room 641 of the St. Gregory Hotel.

  Half an hour later, in a way that often happened when the breaks began, a similar incident terminated with the same kind of success. The second key was also for the St. Gregory—a convenience which prompted Keycase to telephone at once, confirming his own reservation there. He decided not to press his luck by loitering at the terminal any longer. He was off to a good start and tonight he would check the railroad station, then, in a couple of days maybe, the airport again. There were also other ways to obtain hotel keys, one of which he had set in motion last night.

  It was not without reason that a New York prosecuting attorney years before had observed in court, “Everything this man becomes involved in, your honor, is a key case. Frankly, I’ve come to think of him as ‘Keycase’ Milne.”

  The observation had found its way into police records and the name stuck, so that even Keycase himself now used it with a certain pride. It was a pride seasoned by such expert knowledge that given time, patience, and luck, the chances of securing a key to almost anything were extremely good.