In the first-floor window beside her head, a hand-lettered cardboard sign proclaimed “NO VACANCIES.”
She felt a sob start climbing up inside her chest and a sense of panic gripped her, but she sensibly forced it down. This wasn’t turning out the way she’d planned, but panicking wasn’t going to make it better. So Coral wouldn’t have her—fine. It was a big city, there were lots of places for a girl to stay. So she didn’t happen to know any of them—fine. Fine. How hard could they be to find? She looked around her. Maybe one of these people would know, maybe this man coming toward her, with his nice panama hat and glasses and his white seersucker suit with the wide braces peeking out under his jacket.
He swept his hat off his head with one hand and offered the other to her to shake. “Miss, I’m sorry to bother you,” he said in a rapid, delicate voice, “but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation, and you seemed as though you might be in need of some help—”
“Am I ever,” Tricia said. “I was just trying to decide who I could ask for some.”
“Well, if it’s not too bold,” the man said. He pulled a wallet from his pocket and took out a card with writing printed on one side. “It sounded as though you needed a place to stay. As it happens, my family owns a residential hotel for young women. A thoroughly respectable establishment, I assure you, and though generally we have no rooms available, as it happens just this morning one of our tenants moved out.” He passed the card to her. In the center were the words THE KLONDIKE ARMS. Beneath this, it showed an address on Seventh Avenue and a telephone number, KL5-2703.
Tricia looked the man over. He looked to be in his middle thirties. His suit was certainly nice enough, his hat as well, and his manner seemed, if not refined exactly, at least proper. His voice had a plummy Eastern Seaboard accent to it, the sort she associated with certain radio program hosts and movie actors, and the way he expressed himself was awfully formal. “Your family owns this hotel?” she asked.
He shrugged slightly, as if embarrassed to admit it. “It’s one of several. But this is the only one where we allow unaccompanied young women to rent rooms. And the rules are quite strict—no men above the lobby after five, under any circumstances. No guests overnight. It’s quite safe.” He shook his head gently at her. “Not all your options would be. I don’t want to frighten you, but this city can be dangerous for a girl in your situation.”
“I’m sure it can,” Tricia said, thinking of her sister’s letters, thinking also of what she had just learned about Coral’s living arrangements.
“There’s just one thing,” the man said, apologetically. “I can’t be sure the room is still available. It was this morning—but it may have been rented since. There are so many young women in the city these days, and so few rooms.”
“How can we find out?” Tricia said.
“I can phone my father and ask him—but if he says the room is still available, I’ll need to be able to tell him you want it, so he’ll take it off the market immediately. Otherwise...”
“What?”
“It could be available now and gone by the time you make it uptown.”
“Surely your father would hold it,” Tricia said, “if you told him I was on my way.”
He shook his head ruefully. “You haven’t met my father. He can’t bear to turn down money. If I don’t tell him I have a month’s rent in my hands and that I’m on my way to the bank to deposit it right now, he’ll gladly give the room away to the next woman who shows up at the front desk with cash in her hand. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Tricia said, “I understand.” She reached into her purse, found the small roll of bills she’d stashed there. An elastic band held the roll together and she worked it off now. “I can give you the money, that’s not a problem. How much is it?”
He seemed embarrassed again. “It’s one of our nicer rooms, I’m afraid. It rents for a dollar and a half a night. But,” he hastened to add, “by the month it’s just thirty-six dollars. And it comes with meals. Breakfast and dinner, anyway.”
Well, that was something. She’d have to stretch to cover her other expenses, but with the food included in the monthly rate she could manage, for a while a least.
She handed over two ten dollar bills and two fives and then carefully counted out six ones.
“I’m going to be right over there,” the man said, pointing at a telephone booth near the corner. “If he tells me the room’s been rented, I’ll bring the money back and see if I can help you find some other place to stay. But if the room’s available, I’ll tell him you’ll take it.”
“Thank you,” Tricia said. She watched him run into the booth, pick up the receiver, wait while his call was put through, and then talk excitedly for a few moments. While he was doing that, she tucked the typewriter case under one arm and lifted the two suitcases, one in each hand, as Coral had. It was a struggle for her—she didn’t have Coral’s build or her strength—but she could manage it if she had to. By the time she’d wrestled the bags down to the sidewalk, the man was bounding back to her, a grin on his face.
“It’s all set,” he said. “But he says you have to get there immediately, there’s someone else looking the room over right now.”
“Will you come with me?” Tricia said. “I hate to ask, but with all this to carry...”
“I wish I could,” he said. “But he insists I deposit the money today, and the banks close at three. Perhaps I can put you in a taxi?”
She stiffened. “I’m afraid I can’t afford—”
The man’s eyes sparkled. “Here.” He handed her back one of her dollar bills. “Don’t tell the old man.”
He stepped into the street and flagged down the first checker cab he saw, shoved her bags into the back seat and closed the door firmly once she was inside. She leaned on the open window, stuck her head out. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help,” she said.
“It’s no problem,” the man said.
“It’s funny,” Tricia said, “I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Carter,” he said, quickly enough. Then he seemed to have to pause to think for a second. “Carter Blandon.” But before she could remark on the peculiarity of a man not remembering his own last name, the cab had already pulled away from the curb and was racing uptown.
The driver pulled up alongside the Klondike Arms, helped her out with her bags, gave her back two dimes in change from the dollar she presented and touched his cap in a casual salute when she returned one as a tip. Then he was gone and Tricia was left to maneuver her bags through the building’s revolving door on her own.
It didn’t
...and so on, through WHITEMAN AND SON, DDS in 404 and something merely called ZIEGLER in 1111.
Beside the board, screwed tightly to the wall, was an angled metal dispenser containing a stack of business cards for anyone to take. Tricia took one and compared it to the one Carter Blandon had handed her. It was identical.
A residential hotel for unaccompanied young women? This was an office building! And the worst sort, by all appearances, the sort that rented tiny airless suites to desperate businessmen and get-rich-quick schemers—she knew the sort, she’d seen them often enough in the movies, read about them in the two-bit crime novels they sold in every drugstore.
The louse! The dirty...dirty...
She couldn’t even return home as Coral had urged her to do—she didn’t have the train fare.
She wiped her eyes on a handkerchief she retrieved from her purse, then got up and hefted her bags once
