McCone and Friends (15 page)

The common room was full of big maple furniture with wide wooden arms and thick floral chintz-covered cushions, faded now. The chairs and sofas would’ve been fashionable in the thirties and forties, campy in the seventies. Now they just looked tired. Casement windows overlooked the lawn and the river, and on the far side of the room was a deep stone fireplace whose chimney showed chinks where the mortar had crumbled. Against the stones hung an oval stained-glass panel in muddy looking colors. It reminded me of the stone in one of those mood rings that were popular in the seventies.

By the time we’d inspected the room, Shar and Ira Sloan were chattering up a storm. By the time we got upstairs to the guestrooms, they were old friends.

The guestrooms were furnished with waterbeds, another icon of the sybaritic decade. Now their mattresses were shriveled like used condoms. The suites had Jacuzzi tubs set before the windows, once brightly colored porcelain, but now rust-stained and grimy. The balconies off the third-story rooms were narrow and cobwebby, and the webbing on their lounge chairs had been stripped away, probably by nesting birds.

Shar asked, “How long was the hotel in operation?”

“Tom closed it in ‘eighty-three.”

“Why?”

“Declining business. By then…well, a lot of things were over.”

It made me so sad. The Riverside Hotel’s brief time in the sun had been a wild, tumultuous, drug-hazed era—but also curiously innocent. A time of experimentation and new found freedom. A time to adopt new lifestyles without fear of reprisal. But now the age of innocence was over, harsh reality had set in. Many of the men who had stayed here were dead, many others decaying like this structure.

Why would Ira Sloan want to keep intact his monument to the death of happiness?

Back downstairs Shar whispered to me, “Stay here. Talk with him.” Then she was gone into the reception room and over the tape.

I turned trying to think of something to say to Ira Sloan, but he’d vanished into some dark corner of the haunted place. Possibly to commune with his favorite ghost. I sat down on one of the chairs amid a cloud of rising dust to see if he’d return. Against the chimney the stained-glass mood-ring stone seemed to have darkened. My mood darkened with it. I wanted out of this place and into the sun.

In about ten minutes Ira Sloan still hadn’t reappeared. I heard a rustling behind the reception desk. Shar—who else? She was removing a ledger from a drawer under the warning tape and spreading it open.

“Well, that’s interesting.” She muttered after a couple of minutes. “Very interesting.”

A little while more and she shut the ledger and stuffed it into her tote bag. Smiled at me and said, “Let’s go now. You look as though you can use some of my famous sourdough loaf and a walk by the sea.”

When we were ensconced on the sand with our repast spread before us, I asked Shar, “What’d you take from the desk?”

“The guest register.” She pulled it from her tote and handed it to me.

“You stole it?”

Her mouth twitched—a warning sign. “Borrowed it, with Chris’ permission.”

“Why?”

“Well, then I went back to talk with him some more, I asked how the two of them decided who got what. He said Ira insisted on his side of the hotel, and Chris was glad to divide it that way because he likes to cook.”

Neal poured wine into plastic glasses and handed them around. “Bizarre arrangement, if you ask me.”

Shar was cutting the sourdough loaf, in imminent danger of sawing off a finger as well. I took the knife from her and performed culinary surgery.

“Anyway,” she went on, ‘then I asked Chris if Ira had insisted on getting anything else. He said only the guest register. But by then Chris’d gotten his back up, and he pointed out that the ledger was kept in a drawer of the desk that’s bisected by the tape. So they agreed to leave it there and hold it in common. Ira wasn’t happy with the arrangement.”

I filled paper plates with slices of the loaf. Its delicious aroma was quickly dispelling my hotel-inducted funk.

“And did the register tell you anything?” Neal asked. “Only that somebody—I assume Ira—tore the page out for the week of August 13, 1978. Recently.”

“How d’you know it was recent?”

“Fresh tears look different than old ones. The edges of these aren’t browning.” She flipped the book open to where the pages were missing.

“So now what?”

“I try to find out who was there and what happened that week. Maybe someone well known who was still in the closet stayed there. Or somebody who was with a jealous person he wasn’t supposed to be.”

She stabbed her finger at the first column on the ledger page, then at the last. “Date checked in, date checked out. Five individuals who checked in before the thirteenth checked out on the eighteenth. My job for this weekend it to try to locate and talk with them.”

“Hey, Ted, come along with me!”

Shar was in the driver’s seat of the agency van parked on the floor of Pier 24 ½, where we have our offices. I was dragging tail down the iron stairway from the second level, intent on heading home after a perfectly outlandish Monday. I went over to the van and leaned in the open window. “What’s happening?”

“With any luck, you and I are going to collect your jukebox this evening and have it back at your place by the time Neal closes the store.” Anachronism, Neal’s used bookstore, is open till nine on Mondays.