The Grifters

Roy Dillon lived in a hotel called the GrosvenorCarlton, a name which hinted at a grandeur that was wholly non-existent. It boasted one hundred rooms, one hundred baths, but it was purely a boast. Actually, there were only eighty rooms and thirty-five baths, and those included the hall baths and the two lobby restrooms which were not really baths at all.

It was a four-story affair with a white sandstone facade, and a small, terrazzo-floored lobby. The clerks were elderly pensioners, who were delighted to work for a minuscule salary and a free room. The Negro bellboy, whose badge of office was a discarded conductor's cap, also doubled as janitor, elevator operator, and all- around handyman. With such arrangements as these, the service left something to be desired. But, as the briskly jovial proprietor pointed out, anyone who was in a helluva hurry could hurry right on out to one of the Beverly Hills hotels, where he could doubtless get a nice little room for fifty bucks a day instead of the Grosvenor-C arlton's minimum of fifty a month.

Generally speaking, the Grosvenor-Carlton was little different than the numerous other 'family' and 'commercial' hotels which are strung out along West Seventh and Santa Monica and other arterial streets of West Los Angeles; establishments catering to retired couples, and working men and women who required a close-in address. Mostly, these latter, single people, were men-clerks, white collar workers and the like-for the proprietor was strongly prejudiced against unattached women.

'Put it this way, Mr. Dillon,' he said, during the course of their initial meeting. 'I rent to a woman, and she has to have a room with a bath. I insist on it, see, because otherwise she's got the hall bath tied up all the time, washing her goddamn hair and her clothes and every other damned thing she can think of. So the minimum for a room with a bath is seventeen a week-almost eighty bucks a month, just for a place to sleep and no cooking allowed. And just how many of these chicks make enough to pay eighty a month for a sleeping room and take all their meals in restaurants and buy clothes and a lot of frigging goo to smear on the faces that the good Lord gave 'em, and-and-You a God-fearing man, Mr. Dillon?'

Roy nodded encouragingly; not for the world would he have interrupted the proprietor. People were his business, knowing them was. And the only way of knowing was to listen to them.

'Well, so am I. I and my late wife, goddamn-God rest her, we entered the church at the same time. That was thirty-seven years ago, down in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I had my first hotel. And that's where I began to learn about chicks. They just don't make the money for hotel livin', see, and there's only one way they can get it. By selling their stuff, you know; tapping them cute little piggy banks they all got. At first, they just do it now and then, just enough to make ends meet. But pretty soon they got the bank open twenty-four hours a day; why the hell not, is the way they see it. All they got to do is open up that cute little slot, and the money pours out; and it's no skin off their butts if they give a hotel a bad name.

'Oh, I tell you, Mr. Dillon. I've hotelled all over this wonderful land of ours, and I'm telling you that hookers and hotellin' just don't mix. It's against God's laws, and it's against man's laws. You'd think the police would be too busy catching real criminals, instead of snooping around for hookers, but that's the way the gravy stains, as the saying is, and I don't fight it. An ounce of prevention, that's my motto. If you keep out the chicks, you keep out the hookers, and you've got a nice clean respectable place like this one, without a lot of cops hanging around. Why, if a cop comes in here now, I know he's a new man, and I tell him he'd better come back after he checks with headquarters. And he never comes back, Mr. Dillon; he's damned well told that it ain't necessary, because this is a hotel not a hook shop.'

'I'm pleased to hear that, Mr. Simms,' Roy said truthfully. 'I've always been very careful where I lived.'

'Right. A man's got to be,' Simms said. 'Now, let's see. You wanted a two-room suite, say, parlor, bedroom, and bath. Fact is, we don't have much demand for suites here. Got the suites split off into room with bath, and room without. But…'

He unlocked a door, and ushered his prospective tenant into a roomy bedroom, its high ceilings marking its prewar vintage. The connecting door opened into another room, a duplicate of the first except that it had no bath. This was the former parlor, and Simms assured Roy that it could be converted back into one in short order.

'Sure, we can take out this bedroom furniture. Move back the parlor stuff in no time at all-desk, lounge, easy chairs, anything you want within reason. Some of the finest furniture you ever saw.'

Dillon said he would like to take a look at it, and Simms conducted him to the basement storeroom. It was by no means the finest he had ever seen, of course, but it was decent and comfortable; and he neither expected nor wanted anything truly fine. He had a certain image to maintain. A portrait of a young man who made rather a good living-just good, no better-and lived well within it.

He inquired the rental on the suite. Simms approached the issue circuitously, pointing out the twin necessities of maintaining a high- class clientele, for he would settle for nothing less, by God, and also making a profit, which was goddamn hard for a Godfearing man to do in these times.

'Why, some of these peasants we get in here, I mean that try to get in here, they'll fight you for a burned- out light globe. You just can't please 'em, know what I mean? It's like crackerjacks, you know, the more they get the more they want. But that's the way the cinnamon rolls, I guess, and like we used to say down in Witchita Falls, if you can't stand posts you better not dig holes. Uh, one hundred and twentyfive a month, Mr. Dillon?'

'That sounds reasonable,' Roy smiled. 'I'll take it.'

'I'm sorry, Mr. Dillon. I'd like to shave it a little for you; I ain't saying I wouldn't shave it for the right kind of tenant. If you'd guarantee, now to stay a minimum of three months, why-'

'Mr. Simms,' said Roy.

'-why, I could make you a special rate. I'll lean over backward to-'

'Mr. Simms,' Dillon said firmly. 'I'll take the place on a year's lease. First and last month's rent in advance. And one hundred and twenty-five a month will be fine.'

'It-it will?' The proprietor was incredulous. 'You'll lease for a year at a hundred and twenty-five, and-and-'

'I will. I don't believe in moving around a lot. I make a profit in my business, and I expect others to make one in theirs.'

Simms gurgled. He gasped. His paunch wriggled in his pants, and his entire face, including the area which extended back into his balding head, reddened with pleasure. He was a shrewd and practiced student of human nature, he declared. He knew peasants when he saw them, and he knew gentlemen; he'd immediately spotted Roy Dillon as one of the latter.

'And you're smart,' he nodded wisely. 'You know it just ain't good business to chisel where you live. What the hell? What's the percentage in chiselling a hotel for a few bucks-people you're going to see every day-if it's going to make 'em a little down on you?'

'You're absolutely right,' Dillon said warmly.

Simms said he was damned tootin' he was right. Suppose, for example, that there was an inquiry about a guest of the peasant type. What could you honestly say about him anyway, beyond saying that he did live there and it was your Christian practice to say nothing about a man unless you could say something good? But if a gentleman was the subject of the inquiry, well, then, honesty compelled you to say so. He didn't simply room at the hotel, he lived there, a man of obvious character and substance who leased by the year and…

Dillon nodded and smiled, letting him ramble on. The Grosvenor-Carlton was the sixth hotel he'd visited since his arrival from Chicago. All had offered quarters which were equal to and as cheap or cheaper than those he had taken here. For there is a chronic glut of rooms in Los Angeles's smaller hotels. But he had found vaguely indefinable objections to all of them. They didn't look quite right. They didn't feel quite right. Only the Grosvenor-Carlton and Simms had had the right feel and look.