Murder With Reservations (6 page)

Denise moved at a stately pace to Sybil’s office, her anger giving way once more to her innate dignity. By the time she knocked on Sybil’s door, Denise was calm and collected.

“Come in,” Sybil called.

The office air was thick with chilled smoke, and the blinds were yellow with nicotine. Sybil’s puff of white hair was barely visible behind the paper piles on her desk. She had an ashtray the size of a turkey platter heaped with lipsticked butts.

Sybil was seventy-five, but seemed older. She was small and stooped, with skin the color of an old lemon. Her face was crisscrossed with so many wrinkles it looked like a street map.

“What is it now?” she said, looking up from an account book. A cigarette dangled from her red lips.

“Rhonda didn’t show up for work,” Denise said. “I warned her, but she didn’t come in.”

Sybil stubbed out the cigarette and said, “That girl’s always been trouble. I hire ‘em reliable. It’s my one talent, but it failed me this time.”

“We have to fire her,” Denise said.

“She’s gone, and good riddance,” Sybil said. “I’ll get the ad in tomorrow’s paper. You realize it’s not going to be easy to find qualified help. You, Cheryl and Helen are going to have to take up the slack till somebody else turns up, and we’ve got a full house.”

“Full? Did you rent 323 already?” Denise said.

“Sure did,” Sybil said. “Carpet was a little damp, but the guy paid cash and didn’t care. Watched him on the security camera, sneaking two women up the back stairs to his room. He thought I didn’t know. I don’t care what they do as long as they’re quiet and don’t break the bed.”

Helen giggled.

“I’m not joking, young lady,” Sybil said, pointing her cigarette at Helen. “They crack my mattresses and ruin my bedposts doing God knows what.”

Denise looked anxious, as if she sensed an impending tirade. “What happened to the guy who was hauled off in an ambulance?” she said.

“Nothing wrong with him but a hangover,” Sybil said. “He flew home to Minneapolis late last night. Wished I could have been there when his wife met him at the airport. When she called here and found out he was in the hospital, she knew he’d been on a bender. Sounded mad as a wet cat.”

Denise shrugged. “She’s welcome to him, smelly old drunk. I’d rather sleep with a pound of Limburger. Helen, we need to start cleaning. I’ll start on the first floor. You and Cheryl can take three, and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle.”

It was hot up on the third floor. Air-conditioning couldn’t keep the hall and rooms completely cool when the Florida sun pounded on the Full Moon’s flat roof. The dirty, bitter odor of cigarettes lingered everywhere upstairs, even in the nonsmoking rooms.

Cheryl met Helen at the elevator with a stocked cart. She was about thirty, with dark brown hair turning gray and tired brown eyes. Worry lines were etched into her forehead and some forty extra pounds cushioned her frame. Comfort weight, Helen thought. She bet Cheryl secretly soothed herself with sweets.

“Shall we begin?” Cheryl gave a dazzling smile. “I like to clean bathrooms. What about you?”

“Beds,” Helen said. “I like making beds. We’re going to get along just fine.”

They made an excellent team, and were soon in the zone, that mindless place where they cleaned automatically, heaving heavy blankets, hauling vacuums, and wiping surfaces smoothly and efficiently.

“People think this is like cleaning house,” Cheryl said. “It’s like cleaning fifteen houses in one day. The only thing worse than hotel work is cleaning houses.”

“Did you do that?” Helen asked.

“Yes, after my daughter was born,” Cheryl said. “I hated it. I had to please ten different people, and they were impossible. I like this job: regular hours, regular pay, no excuses on payday and no bounced checks.”

Cheryl sprayed the bathroom mirrors with rubbing alcohol. There were no wasted movements as she wiped the glass.

“I learned a lot from Sybil,” Cheryl said. “Like her trick of using alcohol to clean glass and mirrors. Works better than glass cleaners, and it’s cheaper. Sybil knows how to squeeze a dollar, but she’s smart.”

Helen was surprised when Cheryl said, “Break time. I’ll be outside at our place.” The morning had gone faster than she realized.

The staff used the bench in the side garden as their rest spot. The maids didn’t eat lunch. Food made them sleepy in the afternoon. But they’d stop for a smoke or a snack. In the laundry room, Cheryl pulled a Hershey bar the size of a license plate off a shelf. Helen searched for the bag she’d brought that morning.

“I can’t find my pretzels,” she said. “Maybe Denise knows what happened to them.”

Denise’s cart was parked in front of room 119, but there was no sign of her. Helen walked the length of the hall, then turned the corner to the elevator alcove. The head housekeeper was standing by the plant urns. She’d pulled a small palm out of a pot and was running her fingers through the dirt at the bottom.

“What are you doing?” Helen said.

Denise dropped the plant and it landed crookedly in the pot. “I’m checking for root rot.”

“I thought we had a plant-care service,” Helen said.

“We do,” Denise said. “But they’re not very good. That palm tree is in bad shape.”

She mopped her forehead with the wad of tissues she kept in her pocket.

The plant looked OK to Helen, but she couldn’t tell a palm from a petunia. “Have you seen my pretzels?”

“I moved them over by the time clock when I was folding sheets,” Denise said. She stood awkwardly by the crooked palm until Helen left the floor.

Helen enjoyed her ten remaining minutes of peace. Cheryl silently nibbled her candy bar. Neither woman spoke. Helen wondered what Denise had really been doing with that plant.

Last night, Rhonda had disappeared somewhere and returned with a head full of dust bunnies. Sondra, their ambitious African-American clerk, had been rooting around in an air-conditioning vent, ruining her clothes. Now Denise was pulling up palm trees. What was going on at this hotel? Helen could think of no explanation for their odd behavior.

At eleven fifteen, Cheryl said,”Now that we’re rested, we can clean room 323 if the occupants are out. The
Do Not Disturb
sign was still on the door when I checked.”

“It can’t be worse than yesterday,” Helen said.

“Don’t bet on it,” Cheryl said.

When they rolled their cart down the hall, they saw a huge man closing the door to room 323. His beer gut flopped over his low-hanging jeans, and he had a Semi-nole Sam tattoo on his wrist. His dirty brown hair and gray beard were in biker braids. A lush blonde with brassy hair and bad skin was hanging on his arm. Beside her, drinking Busch out of a can, was a woman so skinny her tube top didn’t bulge in front. The biker nodded to the two maids and said, “It’s all yours, ladies.We’re outta here.” His grin showed a missing eyetooth.

Beer cans rolled across the floor when Cheryl opened the door. They were hit with the odor of cigarettes and the feral, meaty smell of sex.

“Glad you’re making the bed,” Cheryl said. She flipped on the bathroom light and groaned.

“What is it?” Helen said.

“Someone peed in the coffeepot,” Cheryl said.

Helen gingerly gathered up the twisted bedsheets. She felt something odd and hard buried in the sheets. She shook them and out fell a longish green object with straps. It took Helen a few seconds to realize she was looking at a strap-on dildo.

“Ohmigod,” she said.

“Holy cow,” Cheryl said, peeking around the corner. “That thing’s big.”

“Should it go to the hotel’s lost and found?” Helen said.

“Can you imagine anyone going to the front desk and asking, ‘Did I leave my dildo in room 323?’ ” Cheryl said.

“Yeah. Those three characters who just left here,” Helen said.

“Throw it out,” Cheryl said. “Sondra is a nice girl. She shouldn’t see something like that.”

Helen used a pillowcase to carry the object to the trash. She threw the case away, too.

“Ugh,” she said. “Let me wash my hands.”

“Use a fresh bar of soap and a clean towel,” Cheryl said. “Don’t touch anything they used.”

While Helen washed her hands, Cheryl reached in her pocket for a plastic holder. “Here,” she said. “You need to see something nice.” It was a photo of a little girl with long dark hair and soft brown eyes with an upward slant. She wore a pink party dress iced with white ruffles, and smiled happily for the camera.

“She’s beautiful,” Helen said.

“Yes, she is,” her mother said. “My daughter, Angel. She has Down syndrome.”

Of course, Helen thought.That explained the upward-slanting eyes and slightly flat face.

“How old is she?” Helen said.

“Six. I’m really lucky. She doesn’t have a lot of the symptoms. No heart defects, thank goodness. The retardation is mild. She goes to regular school, and she’s proud of that. She wears thick glasses, but not for pictures, and she has a hearing aid, but you can’t see it with her long hair. Someday I’m going to get her an operation and she won’t need those glasses anymore, not the Coke-bottle-thick ones, anyway.”

How was Cheryl going to afford an operation on her salary? Helen wondered. “She looks happy,” she said.

“She is,” Cheryl said. “People think children with Down syndrome are naturally happy, but that’s not true. They have moods like everyone else. There’s a little boy at the clinic who’s mean as a rattlesnake and in trouble all the time. But Angel is just like her name. I’m so lucky.”

Lucky. How many women would feel that way in her circumstances? Cheryl was as special as her daughter.

“My mother wants me to put Angel in a home,” Cheryl said. “She says if I lost forty pounds and didn’t have Angel, I could marry. She even offered to pay for the home, but I told her no. Children with Down syndrome do better when they’re mixed in with the community. I can’t convince Mom. She’s got old ideas. She still slips sometimes and calls Angel ‘the retard.’ Her own granddaughter. Why can’t she see how beautiful Angel is?”

“She’s too busy being ugly,” Helen said.

“My mother says Angel is the punishment for my sin,” Cheryl said.

“What sin?” Helen was too shocked to say more.

“I wasn’t married when I got pregnant, and her daddy abandoned me. Mom says Angel’s Down syndrome is my punishment.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Helen said.

“No! She’s a gift,” Cheryl said fiercely. “She’s the only good thing that ever happened to me. My Angel is going to graduate from school and get a job and even marry, if she wants to.” Helen got the feeling that Cheryl had repeated that last sentence to herself many times. She put the plastic-covered photo back in her smock pocket.

After that outburst, they worked in silence for the rest of the afternoon. They finished the hot third floor and started cleaning on two. The feeling was companionable, not embarrassed. When they closed the door on their last room a little after three o’clock, Cheryl said formally, “Thank you, Helen. You’re a hard worker.”

That was the highest compliment one maid could give another.

“We made good time, even shorthanded,” Helen said. “I’m afraid Rhonda won’t be missed,” Cheryl said. “All her whining made me tired. I’m glad she’s gone.”

Helen was, too, but she didn’t say so.

They pushed their cleaning cart toward the housekeeping room on the second floor. When they reached the balconied section overlooking the lobby, Helen saw a man checking in at the front desk. Something about him seemed familiar. She leaned over the railing for a closer look.

Helen nearly overturned the cart. It was her ex-husband, Rob.

C
heryl saw Helen’s pale face. “Are you going to faint?” she asked. “No,” Helen said, as everything went dark. She woke up in the housekeeping room with a mean headache. She was stretched out on two chairs with her legs propped on a box of toilet tissue. Helen tried to sit up, but the chairs wobbled ominously, and she remembered why they’d been retired.

“Easy there,” Cheryl said. She held an open bottle of ammonia under Helen’s nose. Helen breathed in and choked.

“I think she’s awake now,” Denise said. “You can put that away.” The head housekeeper draped a cool washcloth on Helen’s forehead.

Her head pounded. She felt foolish and angry at herself. Helen hadn’t seen her ex-husband in years. She’d spent hours imagining what she would do if she ever ran into Rob. Chain saws, crowbars and knockout punches were at the top of her list. Fainting was not.

“Are you OK?” Cheryl said.

“Sure,” she said. “I didn’t eat anything, that’s all.”

“Nonsense,” Denise said in a voice that sounded like “liar.” When the head housekeeper folded her arms and frowned, she looked like Sister Mary Justine, one of Helen’s high school teachers. Helen felt sixteen again, explaining that she hadn’t gone drag racing with Tommy McIntyre on her lunch hour.

“You saw that man in the lobby and passed out,” De-nise said. “What did he do to you?”

“Uh,” Helen stalled. For years she’d kept quiet about Rob. It was her protection. Now silence couldn’t save her, but talking might. Helen decided to trust the two women with some information. She had no choice.