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  “Which elevator is this?”

  “Number four.”

  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. As was usual by this time, some of the activity in and around the lobby had quieted down, but there was still a fair number of people in evidence, and the strains of music from the nearby Indigo Room showed that supper dancing was in progress. Peter turned right toward Reception but had gone only a few paces when he was aware of an obese, waddling figure approaching him. It was Ogilvie, the chief house officer, who had been missing earlier. The heavily jowled face of the ex-policeman—years before he had served without distinction on the New Orleans force—was carefully expressionless, though his little pig’s eyes darted sideways, sizing up the scene around him. As always, he was accompanied by an odor of stale cigar smoke, and a line of fat cigars, like unfired torpedoes, filled the top pocket of his suit.

  “I hear you were looking for me,” Ogilvie said. It was a flat statement, unconcerned.

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

  “Doing my job, Mr. McDermott.” For an outsize man Ogilvie had a surprisingly falsetto voice. “If you want to know, 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?”

  The piggy eyes glowered resentfully. “If that’s the way you feel, maybe you should do some checking. Or speak to Mr. Trent.”

  Peter nodded resignedly. It would be a waste of time, he knew. The alibi was undoubtedly well established, and Ogilvie’s friends in headquarters would back him up. Besides, 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. But whatever the reason, Ogilvie’s position was unassailable.

  “Well, you just happen to have missed a couple of emergencies,” Peter said. “But both are taken care of now.” Perhaps after all, he reflected, it was as well that Ogilvie had not been available. Undoubtedly the house officer would not have responded to the Albert Wells crisis as efficiently as Christine, nor handled Marsha Preyscott with tact and sympathy. Resolving to put Ogilvie out of his mind, with a curt nod he moved on to Reception.

  The night clerk whom he had telephoned earlier was at the desk. Peter decided to try a conciliatory approach. He said pleasantly, “Thank you for helping me out with that problem on the fourteenth. We have Mr. Wells settled comfortably in 1410. Dr. Aarons is arranging nursing care, and the chief has fixed up oxygen.”

  The room clerk’s face had frozen as Peter approached him. Now it relaxed. “I hadn’t realized there was anything that serious.”

  “It was touch and go for a while, I think. That’s why I was so concerned about why he was moved into that other room.”

  The room clerk nodded sagely. “In that case I’ll certainly pursue inquiries. Yes, you can be sure of that.”

  “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.”

  “Dixon.” It was one of the two names Aloysius Royce had given him when they talked briefly after leaving Marsha.

  “He’s the car dealer’s son. Mr. Dixon senior is often in the hotel.”

  “Thank you.” Peter nodded. “You’d better list it as a checkout, and have the cashier mail the bill.” A thought occurred to him. “No, have the bill sent to me tomorrow, and I’ll write a letter. There’ll be a claim for damages after we’ve figured out what they are.”

  “Very well, Mr. McDermott.” The change in the night clerk’s attitude was most marked. “I’ll tell the cashier to do as you ask. I take it the suite is available now.”

  “Yes.” There was no point, Peter decided, in advertising Marsha’s presence in 555, and perhaps she could leave unnoticed early. The thought reminded him of his promise to telephone the Preyscott home. 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 a listing for Mark Preyscott at a Garden District address and asked for the number. 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.”

  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 it.”

  “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
r />   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. Good-looking 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 stern 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 ready-made 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 half-expected.

  Curtis O’Keefe was a name to conjure with. Head of the worldwide 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.”

  “What is it?” Peter said. “What’s happened?”

  “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. Kid was killed outright. Whoever was in the car must have known. They drove right on.” Beneath his breath he added, “Bastards!”

  “Will you find out who it is?”

  “We’ll find out.” The officer nodded grimly, indicating the activity behind the barrier. “The boys usually do, and this one’s upset them. There’s glass on the road, and the car that did it must be marked.” More headlights were approaching from behind and he motioned them on.

  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 nagging impression, an errant 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.”

  They had left Elysian Fields for Prentiss Avenue. A moment later the little car swung right, then left, and stopped in the parking area of a modern, two-story apartment building.

  “If all else fails,” Peter called out cheerfully, “I can go back to bartending.” He was mixing drinks in Christine’s living room, with its soft tones of moss-green and blue, to the accompanying 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, then reached for Angostura and Peychaud’s bitters. “Sometime I’ll tell you about it.” As an afterthought he increased the proportion of rye, using a handkerchief to mop some extra drops which had fallen on the Wedgwood-blue rug.