I pounded the table with my fist; I surprised myself with the force it exerted, coffee cups jumping all around.
Sardini reached across the booth and put a hand on my arm. “Mal. Are you all right?”
“Haven’t you ever seen a tough guy cry before? I’ll see you guys later.”
I went back up to my room; the maid, a black woman about twenty-three, was in there and said, “You didn’t have no sign on the door.”
I didn’t follow that. I said so.
“You don’t want the room made up,” she said, defensively, “you gots to leave the do-not-disturb sign on the door.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt-you go on with your work. I’ll go for a walk or something.”
I was to the elevators when it occurred to me to go back and ask her something.
“Miss?”
She turned and gave me a sullen stare. She said nothing.
“Did you work yesterday?”
“I work damn near every day, mister.”
“Please back off a little. I’m not trying to give you a bad time or anything. I just wondered if you worked yesterday, because I wanted to ask you if you’d run short of towels.”
“Huh?”
“Let me start over. Do you work just on this floor?”
“No such luxury.”
“Did you happen to make up room 714 yesterday afternoon?”
She smirked and pointed upward with a thumb. “Yeah, so what?”
“It was a late make-up, wasn’t it? The guest had left the do-not-disturb sign on his door till late afternoon, right?”
Unimpressed, bored, she nodded. “I gots work to do, mister.”
“Were you short on towels?”
“No, I wasn’t short on towels.”
“You weren’t. How many towels did you leave in 714?”
“You’re crazy, man. I gots work to do.”
I showed her a five.
“How many towels?”
She snatched the bill out of my hand.
“Four,” she snapped. “How many you think?”
5
There was a do-not-disturb sign on the knob of door 714.
Hardly surprising, considering what Mae Kane had been through; but an unpleasant little ironic reminder of why I was here….
I knocked, and when there was no answer, knocked again, then paused to say, “Mae? It’s me-Mal.”
A few seconds later the door opened a ways and Mae’s face appeared over the taut nightlatch chain, a game little smile in the midst of the pretty but puffy face.
“Hello, Mal,” she said. “You’re a dear, but… I’m not really up to visitors right now….”
“Sure,” I said. “I understand. But we need to talk, soon as you’re up to it. It’s important we talk.”
The big brown long-lashed eyes, which had a red filigree this morning, narrowed and the lipstick-free lips pursed; she nodded and let me in.
Her bags were packed, by the door.
“When are you leaving?” I asked her.
She went over to the far bed and sat down, crossing pretty, nyloned legs; though she wore no make-up, she was a stunningly beautiful woman: her high-necked dress, brown and silky, clung to her trim figure, and her hair was its wig-perfect twin arcs of silver.
Her sexual attractiveness had always bothered me when her husband was alive, constantly made me feel ashamed of the impulses she stirred; now that he was dead, the guilt was like a heavy coat I was required to wear, perhaps because the zipper was caught.
“I’ll be driving back to Milwaukee this afternoon,” she said finally. Her voice was husky; it was always husky, but it was especially husky today. Alcohol husky; grief husky.
I sat on the edge of the other bed and faced her. “I really don’t mean to be a bother,” I said.
She managed a sad little one-sided smile. “You’re no bother,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d ’ve done without you there last night. I came completely apart.”
“I wasn’t the epitome of cool myself. I suppose you need to get right home, to make arrangements and everything.”
She shook her head. “I made all the arrangements by phone, this morning. A local funeral home is driving Roscoe back this afternoon to a funeral home in Milwaukee. There’ll be a little service Monday afternoon. Roscoe didn’t have many friends, you know. Some reporters, some people in a writer’s club he had helped out. A few blue-collar drinking buddies. Just a handful.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Drive all the way to Milwaukee just for that? It’s a sweet thought, Mal, but Roscoe would tell you to save your gas.”
I smiled. “He would at that. But I’ll still be there. Have you contacted Evelyn?”
Her face turned into a cold, stony mask.
“I tried,” she said. “She wasn’t home.”
Evelyn was Roscoe’s second wife; she lived in Milwaukee, too. There was much bad blood between Mae and Evelyn, though why Mae was so bitter when, to be frank, it was she who stole Roscoe away from Evelyn, I couldn’t say. I did know, from personal experience, that Evelyn and Roscoe had built a marriage on combat: Evelyn, like Roscoe, was a heavy drinker, and they had battled verbally almost constantly, occasionally getting physical, their hostility erupting in mutual slap-’n’-slug fests. It hadn’t been an idyllic marriage, by any means.
“I did get through to Jerome,” she said. “He took it hard. I was surprised, actually; he and his father had hardly seen each other in recent years.”
Jerome Kane was Roscoe’s only child, though he wasn’t a child any longer, but a man in his forties whose profession-fashion designer-had embarrassed his macho old man. Roscoe had never come to grips with his son’s homosexuality, either, and would deny it if it came up in conversation. “Just because the kid designs dresses,” Roscoe would say, “that doesn’t make him a fruit salad-that’s a bigger cliche than Gat Garson!” (As a matter of fact, some critics in The Armchair Detective and other mystery fanzines had built a case for Gat Garson being a latent homosexual; to my knowledge, Roscoe never saw those articles-he didn’t follow the fan magazines, and I certainly would never show such articles to him.)
“Will Jerome be flying in for the funeral?” I asked. I felt awkward referring to Roscoe Kane’s son by his first name, since I’d never met him.
“Actually, he’s already here,” Mae said.
“What? I thought he lived in San Francisco-”
“He does, but he’s visiting friends in Chicago, coincidentally. Apparently he and his father had dinner together last night.”
“That’s funny. Roscoe never mentioned it. And when I ran into him in the lobby last night, he’d just gotten back from dinner, he said.”
“You would think Roscoe’d have mentioned it, wouldn’t you? Well, Jerome mentioned it to me, right off. In fact, he said he and his father had gotten along ‘famously.’ Their best meeting in years.”
“I hope Jerome isn’t exaggerating. It’d be nice to think Roscoe and his son came to terms with each other, after all these years.”
Mae’s smile was almost wistful. “Yes, it would. I’d like to think Roscoe had some happy moments on his last day. His last months have been… well… stormy.”
“What was bugging him?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. You’d think with Gorman planning to publish the Gat Garsons, it would’ve given him a shot in the arm. But I can’t say it did.”