A nervous blond young man in tan slacks, his white shirt open at the collar, jangled across the lobby with his hands in his pockets.
“Change for a hundred,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crinkled bill.
The clerk nodded, opened the cash drawer, and took the bill. The nervous guy eyed me and turned to get his money. He counted it and moved away.
“I work for Mr. Forbes,” I said to the clerk.
“Who doesn’t?” answered the clerk, closing two books in front of him and looking up at me.
“You’ve got a point. Listen, I need a break here,” I whispered, reaching for my wallet. “I’m a private detective. I’ve been hired to investigate the murder of Luna Martin.”
The clerk waved my hand away before I even got the wallet out of my back pocket.
“You have nothing in that billfold that would overcome my fear of what Mr. Forbes might say or do to me were he to find out I gave you his address.”
“Then you do know it,” I said.
The clerk sighed, pursed his lips, and looked across the lobby at the hotel doors, which had just opened to an arguing couple. The man looked like he was in his late forties. The woman was under thirty and properly round.
“Good evening, Mr. Hooper,” the clerk said.
Mr. Hooper, in a white suit and a bad mood, waved and kept walking.
“Claims to be a movie producer,” the clerk confided, leaning toward me. “Car dealer from Chicago. That’s his secretary. Wife’s back home fighting the wind and watching the kids.”
“You’re sharing this information with me for a reason or you just want to be pals?”
“I’m a born gossip,” the clerk said. “Probably why I’m still a desk clerk and not on my way up the ladder at Paramount. I liked Miss Martin. She was tough, knew what she wanted, and always had a good word and a few minutes for me and the bellhops. You hang around Mr. Forbes and his friends and bad things are bound to happen.”
“Ever trade gossip with Luna Martin?”
“That,” he said with a smile, “I can sell.”
My wallet came out again. I pulled out two tens and handed them to the clerk, who glanced around to be sure no one was watching. He handed one back to me and stuffed the other into his pocket.
“Too much,” he said. “I don’t have that much to sell. Luna thought Mrs. Forbes was well aware of her existence and her relationship to Mrs. Forbes’s husband.”
“Was she?”
“Is Lincoln dead? Luna was putting pressure on Mr. Forbes to divorce the missus and marry her,” the clerk said.
“She confided all this to you?” I asked.
“I’m easy to talk to,” the clerk said. “You want to listen or you want to talk?”
“I’ll listen,” I said.
“I think Luna gave him a time limit, but I don’t know what it was. Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Forbes had no intention of divorcing his wife and marrying Luna. Mrs. Forbes is the daughter of Guiseppi Cortona. Mr. Cortona is very much alive, very fond of his daughter, and very much in charge of Minneapolis.”
“She told you this?”
“I stand behind here playing with keys, sorting mail, writing in ledgers, and listening to people who stand five feet away from this desk and talk softly in the mistaken belief that the desk makes them invisible and me deaf.”
“Got you,” I said. “Anything else?”
He shook his head.
“Slow night,” I said, surveying the empty lobby.
“Tomorrow morning will be hell and a half,” he said, looking around as if he were seeing the hordes of dawn. “When the newspapers hit the streets tonight, the ghouls will suddenly decide that a weekend at the Monticello might be fun. You know, a peek at the ballroom and the lobby, maybe a glimpse of Mr. Forbes. Mostly would-be writers who see a quick script. You know.”
“It’s happened before?”
The clerk shrugged. “A former business associate of Mr. Forbes’s from Detroit was the unfortunate victim of a robbery in the elevator the week Mr. Forbes took possession of the then St. Lawrence. The former associate was a Mr. Seymour Bratz, also known as Rat-tat-tat Bratz. The elevator came down.” He nodded at the elevator. “The door opened and Mr. Bratz was sitting inside alone and very dead.”
“You saw it?”
“Though I didn’t note at the time that the robber had taken the time between the eighth and ground floors to remove two of Mr. Bratz’s fingers. These two.”
The clerk put up his right hand and held up the pinkie and the finger next to it.
“The ghouls came?”
“Descended,” the clerk said with a nod.
“So it doesn’t get boring behind the Monticello desk.”
“It beats being shot at by the Japs,” he said. “My two younger brothers are both having that pleasant experience. My older brother was killed on Guadalcanal.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Well, I got the waiver. Mother insisted. I was considered to be the weak one and a bit. .”
“Sensitive.”
“Let’s call it ‘fey,’ ” he said.
“You tell your life story to everyone?”
“Just the ones who pay ten bucks for it. You’ve got a phone call.”
“What?”
“The lobby phone. Over there.”
There were two phones sitting on a table with a dark marble top. The table was about a dozen feet away against a wall. The phones weren’t ringing and the clerk hadn’t spoken to anyone.
“I don’t. .”
“I do,” he said, cocking his head to one side while I took a beat to figure out the situation. I moved to the phones and picked one up. Nothing. I picked up the other one.
“Mr. Peters?”
I looked back at the desk. The clerk wasn’t there.
“Yes.”
“Forty-seven Mountain Top Road, Huntington Beach.”
The line went dead. I hung up the phone and looked over at the desk, where the clerk was just moving back behind it, a stack of papers in his hands. I nodded to him, but he didn’t look up.
I went through the front doors and into a threat of rain.
Cotton Wright, the parking-lot attendant, was seated on a low wooden stool, trying to make sense out of a crumpled issue of the
“Yes,” he said, looking up at me.
“My car.”
“Your. .”
“This is the parking lot,” I said. “And that little Crosley back in the corner is mine.”
“I know,” said Cotton, standing up and touching his scalp through his thin hair.
“Your head humming?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Did I tell you about that?”
I nodded.
“Sometimes I get the wars confused,” he said, heading for the Crosley past a wide array of vehicles that made my car look like a tiny battered rolling refrigerator, which it was.
Whatever else was Cotton’s problem, he could drive. He eased the Crosley out of a tight space that wasn’t really a space, and pulled the car smoothly to my side.
