Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 06 (3 page)

“But not in other departments …” She stretched languidly so he could admire her very admirable attributes.

“All you will do is follow the directions on the recipe card,” he said as he joined her on the bed. “It’s just a cooking contest, not ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Now that we have settled that, I would like to buy all your vowels.”

“Oooooh,” Gaylene whispered.

“The contest has been moved up to this Tuesday,” Ruby Bee told Estelle, who banged down the receiver and dashed to her appointment book to get to work canceling everybody.

“Not even a week away,” Eula Lemoy told Elsie McMay.

“Which means I’ll have to wait till the cows come home for my perm,” Lottie Estes told Eilene Buchanon. Eilene was curt and unsympathetic, having hoped the call would be from the newlyweds.

“I’d absolutely die if someone was to send me to New York City,” Heather Riley told Nita Daggs. They lapsed into a giggly three-hour fantasy of limousines, Broadway actors, and penthouses ankle-deep in caviar and champagne. “A good Christian would never set foot in that sinful city,” Mrs. Jim Bob told Brother Verber. “I cannot begin to imagine the depravity and perversion that takes place on the very sidewalks of that place.” Brother Verber could, but he kept it to himself.

“Sending those two to a big city is worse than sending lambs to the slaughterhouse,” Millicent McIlhaney told Adele Wockerman, although it was a mite hard to tell if Adele had her hearing aid turned high enough to follow her.

She was a little surprised when Adele cackled and said, “Or vice versa.”

“There it is!” Ruby Bee shrieked, her finger jabbing the plastic barrier like a frenzied woodpecker. “Driver, do you see it? The Chadwick Hotel, on the right, just past that little vegetable stand!”

“Would you calm down?” Estelle demanded in a spitty whisper. “You are behaving worse than a fat kid in a candy shop, and it’s beginning to try my patience. I swear, you must have spotted the Empire State Building ten times so far, along with the Statue of Liberty, which I seem to recall is out in the middle of water.”

“I take you there?” the driver said in a guttural accent.

“The hotel,” Ruby Bee said, now pounding on the barrier meant to protect the cab driver from robbery—or his fares from his sour odor. “The Chadwick Hotel’s where we’re staying. But don’t let me stop you, Estelle, if you want to keep riding around with this man, so you can find out what it feels like to be smashed to death by a bus.”

She was sounding on the shrill side, but it had been a real heart-stopper of a trip from the airport. Somehow the driver’s ability to speak regular American disappeared right after the luggage was put in the trunk, and for all she could tell, they’d pretty much careened down the same streets two or three times amidst an endless stream of yellow cabs, all barreling along like they were in a race, changing lanes every ten feet, dodging buses, honking continually, missing pedestrians by inches, and begging for an accident. She’d gasped so many times her throat ached, and she was surprised she’d been able to unclench her bloodless, icy fingers from the door handle.

The driver turned around and showed them a few brown teeth. “You want stop here?”

Ruby Bee thought of a lot of scalding comments, but held them back and nodded. “Of course we want stop here, if it ain’t out of your way!”

The cab pulled to the curb, and they all looked at the front of the Chadwick Hotel, or what they could see of it through the scaffolding. As they stared, two men with toolboxes came out the door and continued down the sidewalk. The driver grinned at them. “No can stay here. We go now, yes?”

“No,” Ruby Bee said. She poked Estelle, who was making a face as she tried to read a sign on the door. “Do you aim to sit there all afternoon?”

“That says it’s closed for remodeling and won’t open until next year. This can’t be right. Where’s that last letter you got?”

“It’s in my handbag and it says we’re staying at the Chadwick Hotel on 48th Street. I don’t care what the sign says—this is the right place.”

“Not right place,” the driver said. “We go my cousin’s restaurant, have nice couscous, meet plenty men who like soft white women?”

Ruby Bee and Estelle scrambled out of the cab like it was beginning to sink into the pavement. While the driver removed their luggage, they debated the tip and arrived at a scrupulously fair amount. The driver spat only once as he left them on the sidewalk, and his curse was too foreign to bother about. They were engulfed in stinky black smoke as he screeched away.

“Well, fancy that!” Estelle snorted. She was going to wait for a doorman to fetch their luggage, but a whiskery man in an army fatigue jacket was bearing down with a real peculiar glint in his eye, so she grabbed hers and told Ruby Bee to do the same.

They were about to go through the door when three more workmen, dressed in jumpsuits and all carrying toolboxes, came out and brushed past them just like they weren’t there. Before they could recover, a van stopped behind them and all of a sudden crates were being carried in and other crates out. The wild man in the army jacket was staring at them, most likely planning how easiest to murder them, and a woman crooning to herself in some funny language and wearing a coat so filthy you could see the fleas hopping asked point-blank for a dollar. Ruby Bee was too startled to refuse her and probably would have given her every last penny (and signed over her traveler’s checks, too) if Estelle hadn’t intervened.

Across the street, two men staggered out of a store, pushing each other and shouting words that were downright rude. The van was blocking traffic, and now horns were blaring and drivers were poking their heads out their windows to yell things that were just as rude, if not a sight worse. The two men began swinging at each other like playground bullies and threatening to call the cops. A couple, both with spiky orange hair, tattoos on their cheeks, earrings in their noses, and matching black leather jackets, weaved down the sidewalk, sharing a bottle in a brown bag and gawking at Ruby Bee and Estelle as if they were the funny-looking ones. A helicopter droned across the sky, and steam swooshed from a grate not ten feet away as the sidewalk trembled ominously.

“This ain’t Maggody,” Ruby Bee opined.

“And here I am thinking it is!” Estelle snapped. “I suggest we get our things and go inside before we get killed.” She took her own advice, and Ruby Bee followed, a little reluctantly since the sounds and the sights and even the smells were interesting. There were plenty more sights and sounds and smells in the lobby. Mysterious pieces of furniture were draped with tarps, and part of the linoleum floor had been ripped up to expose patches of black glue dotted with hairs and dustballs, and in one corner, the mortal remains of a small furry animal. A tablesaw dominated the middle of the room, and as they hesitated, a man appeared from a corridor, switched on the saw, and began to mutter to himself as the sound of screaming wood overpowered the horns still blaring outside. Someone was hammering someplace; that was hard to miss and about as welcome as a bushy-tailed missionary on a bicycle.

The man cut off the saw and disappeared down the corridor. Ruby Bee dropped her luggage and pointed at a counter in front of a dark recess. “Do you reckon that’s where we check in?”

“I think we ought to check out of this place and find out where it is we’re supposed to be.”

“I already told you that this is the place. It’s in the letter, and I don’t aim to go traipsing around Noow Yark City looking for what’s right here under our noses.” She made her way through the patches of glue to the counter, and tapped on a silver bell. “Yoohooo? Is anybody back there?”

The wood-sawing man returned. This time he noticed them and, after a minute of frowning, said, “Closed for remodeling, honey. Why doncha call the YWCA and see if they can help youse two out?”

Ruby Bee took the letter from her purse and showed it to him. “This was sent special delivery, and it says we’re supposed to stay here, so this is where we’re going to stay. Do you happen to know where the manager is? If you can’t spit out the words, you just go ahead and point.”

Before the man could answer (if he indeed intended to), the door opened behind Estelle and a man carrying a suitcase came into the lobby. His expression of disbelief was nearly identical to Estelle’s; Ruby Bee thought about commenting on it, then remembered how Arly had told her not to speak to strangers like they were ordinary folks browsing in the Hardware Emporium on a Saturday morning.

The man wasn’t strange-looking, however. He appeared to be in his early forties, maybe a shade older, with shaggy dark hair going gray at the temples, a kind of messy mustache with its fair share of gray, droopy brown eyes that reminded her of one of Perkins’s hounds, and such poor posture that she had to restrain herself from poking him in the back and telling him to stand up straight. He was wearing a beige raincoat that had seen a lot of rain and a tweedy hat with a single, frayed feather.

He took off his hat and nodded. With a smile as sad as his eyes, he said, “Please excuse me, ma’am. I seem to have found myself in the wrong place, although I could have sworn …”

“You looking for the Chadwick?” Estelle butted in. “Well, so are we, and we didn’t reckon on a construction site.”

He nodded at her. “Yes, the Chadwick Hotel. I’ve been invited to participate in”—he gave them an embarrassed look—“a cooking contest, and I thought this was the place.”

“So did we,” Estelle said tartly, “but someone must have gotten the name wrong, because anyone with the sense God gave a goose can see that—”

“This is the right place,” Ruby Bee said, a little miffed because this gentleman was a real contestant like herself, and Estelle was forgetting that she was merely along for the ride, so to speak. She came back across the room and held out her hand. “I’m Ruby Bee Hanks, and I’m in the contest, too.”

“Ah,” he said, his forehead wrinkling while he appraised her as if she’d presented herself as an entry rather than a contestant. “I’m Durmond Pilverman. I’m not quite sure what we ought to do at this point, Mrs. Hanks. I was under the impression that the marketing representative would be here to handle the hotel reservations and such. Unless the gentleman in the cap is he, we may have a problem.”

The subject of the remark shook his head. “Naw, but lemme see if I can hunt up Rick. He’s what you might call the site supervisor. Maybe he can sort this out.”

Estelle stuck out her hand. “I’m Estelle Oppers, Mr. Pilverman. I came along with Ruby Bee so she wouldn’t get herself mugged in the airport, or get hopelessly lost before she ever caught sight of the hotel. We’re from Maggody, Arkansas.” She gave him a moment to respond, but he was now regarding her with the same sharply quizzical look he’d given Ruby Bee—who was not pleased with the remark about getting mugged or lost. “Where’re you from?”

“Connecticut,” Durmond said with a vague gesture. Estelle opened her mouth, but Ruby Bee wasn’t about to listen to any more aspersions. “Why, I used to have a second cousin who lived in Connecticut,” she inserted neatly. “Elsbeth Matera was her name, but of course she died way back in 1952, so I don’t suppose you’d remember her, even if you knew her. She had palsy something awful during her last few years, bless her soul, and the nurse’s aides had to read the little cards and letters I sent her on her birthday and at Christmas. Did you ever happen to …?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. He glanced over her head as a door behind the registration counter opened. “Perhaps we have someone to help us?”

Ruby Bee wasn’t real sure the man was the one she would have picked, given her druthers. For one thing, he looked meaner than a rattlesnake, with his squinty eyes, fancy hair swept back in a televangelist’s pompador, and snooty sneer. He probably wasn’t even thirty years old, but he was regarding them like he owned the hotel and everything else on the block, and they were nothing but those homeless people that Arly had warned her about. Mr. Pilverman’s mustache was messy but friendly; this man’s was nothing more than a thin black line that could have been drawn with a felt-tipped pen. His lips were thinner than Mrs. Jim Bob’s.

She wasn’t a bit surprised when he said in a real cold tone, “The hotel is closed for remodeling. Please be about your business elsewhere.”

Durmond Pilverman stepped forward, saving both Ruby Bee and Estelle the necessity of what might have been a fine display of indignation. “These ladies and I were told that the Krazy KoKo-Nut cookoff is to be held here, and we have letters to that effect. Are you the manager?”

“In a manner of speaking. May I see this purported letter?” He extended a hand with well-manicured nails and a ring as gaudy as a carnival prize. His cuff fell back to expose a heavy silver bracelet. If that wasn’t bad enough, he had several gold chains around his neck like he thought he was one of those egotistical Hollywood movie stars.

Ruby Bee was about to warn Mr. Pilverman not to hand over anything to this fellow with all the jewelry when the door again opened. This time it admitted several folks, all of them looking unhappy in varying degrees. The unhappiest of them all was a pretty young woman in a pale green skirt and jacket, carrying a briefcase in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Her eyes were flashing like the taillights on a taxi.

“Are you Richard Belaire?” she demanded as she strode across the room. She sounded as if even a hint of affirmation would result in bloodshed. “Are you?”

The snooty man behind the counter got snootier. “No, dearie, I’m president of the Junior League, but I must have left my white gloves and pearls at home today.”

“You have not returned my last four calls, Mr. Belaire, and it’s caused me a great deal of inconvenience. We need to talk. In the office—now.” She went down the corridor, and after a pause, Mr. Snooty Pants went through the door from which he’d come earlier. “Goodness gracious,” Ruby Bee murmured.

“What on earth is going on here?” gasped a woman in the doorway. She nudged her companion, a teenaged girl, then let her luggage fall to the floor. “What kind of hotel is this? This will not do—not at all!” She spotted them and managed a tight, harried smile. “I’m Frances Vervain, but please call me Frannie. I presume you’re here for the contest? Catherine is thrilled to be selected as a finalist, but we were led to believe we would be staying in a decent hotel, and this won’t do. Catherine has a terrible time with allergies. At the first hint of dust, her eyes water and she cannot breathe.”