The Fat Innkeeper (20 page)

No one needed to introduce Am to Mr. Kaufman; perhaps no one dared. He was standing outside of the Spinnaker Room wearing
a tux. His arms were folded, and he was glaring at anyone who appeared to be employed by the Hotel.

Now how was it that Gary did it?

“Mr. Kaufman? Am Caulfield. It’s my pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Why was it that guests had always taken up Gary’s hand so readily? And why was it that Mr. Kaufman ignored Am’s outstretched
hand?

Mr. Kaufman started his long harangue. Am knew better than to interrupt, figuring the man needed to relieve himself of his
anger; and besides, if he talked long enough, the chicken might be delivered before he finished. In the absence of roasted
chicken, Mr. Kaufman accepted roasted employee. Am felt well-done after about five minutes.

“It was an affront.” (To his credit, Kaufman never repeated his descriptive words—prior to “affront” had been the words insult,
travesty, miscarriage, perversion, and Am’s favorite: “A scenario that would have made clowns weep.”) “My mother, she’s almost
ninety, wanted to know why they started serving the food, then took it away. I told her it wasn’t hot enough. She’s Orthodox.
God forbid that I should tell her you tried to serve us ham. That was an outrage. That was offensive. I wonder if it wasn’t
done purposely, wonder if it was meant as an anti-Semitic deed.”

He stopped talking, gave Am his first opportunity to answer. “I can assure you, Mr. Kaufman,” Am said, “that there was absolutely
no anti-Semitic message in what occurred. It was one of those very sorry misunderstandings. Please believe me when I tell
you it was just a mistake, and please accept my apology on behalf of the Hotel.”

Kaufman looked as if he still had his doubts. Am worked on those. “And as recompense for your inconvenience, I’d like to offer
your party some complimentary wine.”

Kaufman showed signs of weakening. “And,” Am added, “maybe in the few minutes it takes to bring out the chicken, we can also
scare up some appetizers for you.”

“What kind of appetizers?” he asked.

Am thought for a moment. The popular items were made in bulk every day. “How about some shrimp or crab cocktail? Or maybe
some lobster parfait?”

Maybe Gary was successful because he just made sympathetic noises. Am, on the other hand, tried to communicate with words.
In this case, apparently ill-chosen words. Kaufman’s red face showed him the error of his ways. But what had he said?

“Why don’t you offer poison while you are at it?” he hissed. “Have you been listening to me at all? Many of our guests are
Jewish. Does that mean anything to you?”

Am suddenly understood. What he had offered were shellfish selections, about as in keeping with kosher dietary standards as
the three little pigs.

Am spoke from his heart, even if his speech sounded like a squeal: “Mr. Kaufman, it’s not that we are anti-Semitic…”

His words hung in the air, made everyone walking by in the hallway pause to listen.

“…it’s just that we are incompetent.”

Support for Am’s assertion came from an unexpected source. Bradford Beck was walking by, overpriced champagne in hand.

“Truer words were never spoken,” said Bradford. “This place reeks of incompetence.”

Am gratefully accepted the endorsement. “Thank you,” he said.

The swingers had been entirely too understanding, Am thought. They hadn’t checked out en masse, hadn’t said conditions in
the Hotel were unacceptable to them. They were disappointed that their meeting rooms were out of service, and went so far
as to say that the Hotel guest rooms needed refurbishing, but that wasn’t enough to deter them from their “love-in.”

Any other group, thought Am, would have walked out. It was just their luck to have a patient gathering of perverts. Why couldn’t
they act like other conventioneers and be totally unreasonable, threatening, and uncompromising?

The good news was that the swingers seemed to be keeping to themselves, content to stay within the boundaries of their second-
and third-floor room blocks. Employees (self-described as “sex sentries”) were positioned around their rooms to make sure
it stayed that way.

Am remembered what Harry Truman had said: “If I hadn’t been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up
a piano player in a bawdy house.” Despite the fact that his repertoire only included “Chopsticks,” Am felt that he had ended
up in Truman’s other career.

His walkie-talkie sounded. “Am, this is Central,” said Fred. “There is a Ms. Donnelly waiting for you at the front desk. That’s
a
D
—David,
O
—Ogden…”

“Understood,” responded Am.

“Ten-four,” said Fred, the disappointment in his voice palpable.

Marisa hadn’t arrived empty-handed. She was carrying two full briefcases, and had an assortment of papers wedged under her
arms. She didn’t object when Am volunteered to lighten her load.

“The lives and times of Dr. Thomas Kingsbury,” she said.

“I was sort of hoping for an abridged version,” said Am. He had only assumed the burden of half the paperwork, and that was
still weighty enough. He wondered if his feeling weak was the result of the day, or of his low blood sugar. He was hungry
enough to eat anything—except chicken.

“Have you eaten dinner?” he asked.

“I haven’t even eaten breakfast,” she said.

“Then let’s look at a menu before we look at these papers.”

He took her to Poseidon’s Grill, the darkest of the Hotel’s four restaurants, and the least ostentatious. There was a booth
available for them, which was just as Am wanted. All of the booths were partitioned off, allowing very private spaces. Am
and Marisa sank into the dark burgundy leather, and were immediately comfortable. The Grill didn’t have the ocean view of
the other restaurants, and wasn’t nearly as trendy. The food was familiar, and when ordering, diners weren’t required to try
and pronounce unfamiliar words. Beer could be ordered from the tap, most of the brands American. The biggest choice of the
evening was whether to call for rare, medium, or well-done. There are times, thought Am, when it is a pleasure not to have
to think.

He looked at Marisa as she scanned the menu. She appeared different in candlelight; that, or maybe he was viewing her with
new eyes. This was the closest thing resembling a dinner date he had had with anyone since Sharon. He was finally beginning
to accept that he and Sharon were now just friends, but his heart was slower on the uptake than his brain. He remembered how
he and Sharon had been brought together by three deaths and their resolve to figure out what had happened. Reminiscing about
their courtship was like trying to remember a white-water rafting trip, the two of them navigating treacherous currents and
reacting to forces greater than they were.

Was that his initial attraction to the hotel business? Had he been seduced by the sheer energy of hotels? At the Hotel he
knew that on any given day over five hundred rooms could be checking out, and another five hundred checking in. But the business
wasn’t rooms, it was people, humanity in many guises and agendas. The challenges were always immense. Maybe he was an adrenaline
junkie, needing greater and greater stimuli to kick him over the edge. It was strange, and maybe sick, that women seemed to
come into his life only when somebody died. Or was that the only time he let himself be vulnerable?

Marisa looked up from her menu, saw him gazing at her, read what was in his glance, and didn’t immediately close the shutters.

“Is this the time we tell each other our carefully edited biographies?” she asked.

“No,” said Am, acknowledging the sudden presence of their server, “this is the time we order.”

She said she rarely ate red meat, and then ordered a rare New York steak with bourbon-glazed onions. He wasn’t sure whether
her pun was deliberate, but smiled anyway and wondered why it was that women always announced what they rarely did. He had
the sixteen-ounce T-bone, and didn’t bother to tell her that he, also, didn’t often eat red meat. But then he didn’t eat much
tofu either.

When the server had left, they looked at each other again. Leisurely, fully. Though Am was famished, Marisa’s presence provided
him a form of sustenance. Inside him something was stirring, something that had been missing, something indefinable except
in its loss. It was nice to know that certain feelings weren’t forever lost to him. They had just been misplaced.

“Say something, philosopher,” she said.

At least, Marisa thought, she knew that much about him.

“ ‘There is more to life,’ “ he said, “ ‘than increasing its speed.’ Mahatma Gandhi.”

“Do you agree with that?”

“Wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, I seldom practice what I believe, or do so with about the frequency that I surf, which isn’t
very often these days.”

“Why?”

“I have a demanding mistress. Or I’m getting older. Or maybe I’m not as certain of what I believe as I should be, and it’s
easier getting caught up in other currents.”

“You sound like a confused philosopher.”

“I told you I wasn’t a philosopher. I’m just someone acquainted with many philosophies.”

“You also told me you weren’t really a house dick.”

“I didn’t want you to think of me as a type.”

“A type?”

“I don’t spend my time watching cop shows. I don’t even own a handgun.”

“I do,” she said.

Marisa could see his surprise. “Guess you’ll have to reevaluate my type, won’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “I’ll just have to reevaluate whether I should ever argue with you.”

Their salads were brought out, and their waiter asked them if they’d like pepper. Both nodded. Marisa wasn’t satisfied with
just a few cranks of the pepper mill. She put the server through the mill—literally.

“Would you like some salad with your pepper?” asked Am.

“When I was a little girl, my father called me a Mexichaun,” she said. “He told me I was half Leprechaun and half Mexican. That translates to being half Mexican and half Irish. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise
that I like my food spicy.

“Thank you,” she finally told the waiter, whose face was a little red from his exertions.

Marisa Donnelly, mused Am. The name fit her roots. Southern California continues the melting-pot tradition of the country.
“Mexichaun,” he said aloud. The word seemed to apply. She was exotic, had the dark hair, and the green eyes, and the olive
complexion. And there was something fey about her, something otherworldly, or at least it seemed that way looking at her.
“Does that mean you’re ready to reveal some hidden treasure?”

“You’ll have to catch me first,” she said.

There was a look between them, and some mutual shortness of breath, and two minds wondering what was really there between
them. “Are Mexichauns hard to catch?” he asked.

“Extremely,” she said. “But I hear not impossible.”

She had been caught before, but not held, and to hear her hints, she had never been able to give her treasure up completely.
They offered bits and pieces of themselves, confirming to each other that, yes, they were that person the other saw. Marisa
learned about Am’s on-again, off-again love affair with the Hotel. The looming presence of the Other Woman didn’t bother her.
To be fully human, she said, was to indenture yourself to something other than flesh. In her own case, she thought that words
mattered, that certain stories should be pursued like the Holy Grail.

They discussed their days. Am was torn about whether he should tell her about the swingers; in the end he did. He made her
promise it was “off the record,” but her pledge didn’t call for her not to laugh. Wayward whales, swingers, the near-dead,
the actual dead, “fowl”-ups, the meetings between East and West, and pretenders to the throne prompted her to comment, “This
is a very strange kingdom.”

Am liked her phraseology. “Strange kingdom” summed up the Hotel California very nicely. And what was he, the knight-errant?
Or just plain errant? No, he remembered, he was the samurai.

Perhaps the oddest thing about their dinner was that even in the midst of the pheromones and fantasies neither of them forgot
about what had brought them together—the death of Dr. Thomas Kingsbury.

Even before dessert (a very decadent mud pie), they were sorting through the pile of papers that Marisa had brought with her.
Flashlights supplied by the maitre d’ helped illuminate the documents that made up Thomas Kingsbury’s life. It must have looked
odd to the other diners, almost like a scene from a campground, with lights playing out from behind their booth much like
the illumination offered from a shrouding tent. To Am and Marisa, that was almost how it felt. They were enclosed, together
in their task. By mutual consent, they put aside the doctor’s scientific papers, most having to do with blood diseases (“Even
Dracula,” said Marisa, “wouldn’t want to read these”), and concentrated on the newspaper and magazine articles. Dr. Kingsbury
invariably made for good copy, always exposing one fraud or another. He loved putting the spotlight on cons and bunco artists,
and was quoted as saying that “in the light and heat of the sun, slugs shrivel quickly.”

The names changed, but many of the stories were the same: healers who claimed to have cures for everything from lung cancer
to AIDS—all at a price, of course. Am was reading yet another of those pieces, the modern medicine man supposedly touched
by God, but at the same time touching up his terminal patients for as much mammon as possible, when he suddenly recognized
the familiar name of the Reverend Mr. Gardenia. Kingsbury had enrolled in one of Gardenia’s “healing within” classes, and
then documented how the weak and sick had been preyed upon. Through the media, the doctor publicly challenged all of Gardenia’s
purported cures. The reverend had tried to counter the arguments of his detractor, had even produced some true believers who
stood up and said they had been made well by his course and their faith in God, but Kingsbury had been relentless and loud,
and in the end had prevailed. The workshops had closed down, and the Reverend Mr. Gardenia had disappeared. Until the reemergence
of Brother Howard, that is.