The Fat Innkeeper (27 page)

Norma with the Bette Davis voice had alluded to the same thing. The doctor appeared to be an incorrigible flirt—or worse.

“What medical questions did he ask you?”

“Specifics about my near-death.”

Just as he had done with his other UNDER interviews. Am gave her an inquiring look, asked Angela in his glance to elaborate.
“I can see you haven’t read my book yet,” she said.

As if there had been time. “A real death has taken precedence,” he said.

“Without any of the medical jargon,” she said, “I fell and struck my head. It was a severe blow. I was in a coma, and the
prognosis was that I was going to die. The doctors were right in that—I did die. Dr. Kingsbury wanted to know about the particulars,
and I gave them to him.”

Am asked her to remember as much as she could of their conversation. She said they hadn’t been together all that long, no
more than ninety minutes. The doctor had spent some of the time “filling in his blanks,” some of the time “eyeing her speculatively,”
and the rest “just talking and drinking.” She remembered that he had “at least” four shots of Goldschlager to her two. The
drinks had loosened him up for some freer talk.

“He got on his soapbox and played the skeptic,” she said, “claimed that death was the end of the human organism, save for
some residual recycling. He knows better now.”

When Am finished with his questions, Lady Death had a few of her own. They talked for a while, each getting more comfortable
with the other. Am told her about the investigation and couldn’t help but sound pessimistic. There were so many trails, he
said.

Lady Death tried to appear unconcerned, but she didn’t quite pull it off. “Do you think there’s a connection,” she asked,
“between the threat left for me and Thomas’s killer?”

Am reached out a comforting hand, lightly placed it on her shoulder, and offered some reassuring words. Kingsbury had enough
of his own enemies, he said. It was likely she had just riled up the indignation of some zealot. He told her that people who
threatened rarely followed through, and that it was the quiet ones you had to watch out for. Am didn’t know if that was really
true, but she seemed to appreciate his words. She put her hand atop his, placed him in a position where he couldn’t easily
remove his hand from her shoulder.

“This is all new to me,” she said. “The speeches, and radio, and television, and the fancy hotel rooms, and the lines of people
waiting to talk with me. New and somewhat disconcerting.”

Not to mention the new death threats, thought Am.

“I miss home already.”

“Where’s home?”

“A little town in Colorado. Paonia. Right now I just want to click my heels together and say, ‘There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.’”

She was wearing black pumps, managed to ease them off her feet and let them drop to the thick carpeting. Her toes worked their
way under Am’s pant leg and moved along his calf.

“It will be difficult for me to stay in this room by myself tonight,” she said.

Am considered her words. He wasn’t sure if her toes were actually warm, or whether it was his skin that burned wherever they
moved.

“We can move you to that other room…” he said.

“I don’t want that bother,” she said, still massaging his calf.

“I think I could use that drink now,” Am said.

She took her time removing her digits, withdrew her fingers first, then her toes. While she was pouring his drink, Am called
the Rover on his walkie-talkie and asked him to return to the Crown Jewel Suite. It would be his second visit in less than
half an hour; he had already rekeyed the locks to the room. Angela slid Am’s glass of Goldschlager over to him, and finished
pouring another of her own.

“What was that last page all about?” she asked.

“I’m going to assign you a private sentry tonight,” said Am. “He’ll be posted on your doorstep.”

It wasn’t the solution she had proposed, and he wasn’t sure if it was the one he wanted to offer, but it was the right thing
to do. Angela raised her glass, albeit a little slowly, and Am did the same thing. Before they touched glasses, Am asked,
“Did Dr. Kingsbury offer any toasts the night he was with you?”

Lady Death thought a moment. “Yes,” she said. “He repeated the same one several times. ‘All that glitters is not gold.’”

“I appreciate your walking me to my room,” said Cleo, “but it’s really not necessary.”

“It’s my pleasure,” said Jimmy.

She was glad he was insisting, but didn’t want him to know it. Cleo felt a little guilty for leading Jimmy on. She expected
to leave him at her doorstep, say good night, and never see him again. The thought didn’t appeal to her, but she had arrived
at the Hotel with another man, someone until that very afternoon she had considered her dream man. That vision was slightly
tarnished, but Cleo still wasn’t willing to believe that Bradford was part of the swinger’s group. There were some nagging
questions, though. Why hadn’t he volunteered to go with her to the police station when he thought she was being arrested?
And why hadn’t he insisted they check out if, as he said, their accommodations were so unacceptable?

Jimmy said little as they walked, but he, too, had questions. Why was that yuppie even with Cleo? She wasn’t his type. He
had carried the bags for thousands of Bradfords before, the kind of guys who lived for appearances, whose women were always
stick-thin and ate only yogurt and fruit, and drank spring water. Jimmy preferred a woman with a little meat, and a little
spunk—like Cleo.

They arrived at room 212. There wasn’t any noise coming from inside, the mariachis, and the party, apparently long departed.

“Thank you for everything,” she told Jimmy.

“I’ll wait out here to make sure everything is okay,” he said. He wasn’t going to be dismissed that easily.

She liked his answer. Cleo wasn’t sure what she wanted to see inside, she only knew that she had to go through the door and
look. The room was dark and unkempt. Nothing had changed on that front. Cleo stumbled forward trying to see. Was that a figure
in the bed, or just a lumpy bedspread? “Bradford,” she called, walking closer. She called out his name a second time, then
patted the bedspread, confirming its rumpled state, and Bradford’s absence. Where was he?

Cleo looked around for a note, but didn’t find one. What she did find was Missy’s Velcro underwear, a calling card she could
have done without.

“You okay?” Jimmy’s voice came from the door.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

Cleo stood in the middle of the room considering her options. Maybe Bradford was looking for her, had gotten over his shock
of seeing her being escorted away and was now raising Cain at the front desk trying to find out where she was. When she reappeared
at the doorway she wasn’t carrying suitcases as Jimmy had hoped, but she did have a thoughtful expression on her face.

“Do you have a pass key?” she asked Jimmy.

“I can get one in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” he said.

It wasn’t a lamb’s tail she was thinking about. Jimmy ran off to get the key. In his absence, Cleo started walking around
the second floor, her movements tracked by the sex sentries. She reminded them of a robin, walking forward, pausing with a
slightly cocked head, then continuing along. Jimmy proved almost as fast as his boast, arriving back at her side breathless.
In the past, only the promise of a big payoff had made him move quickly. It had to be love.

Cleo didn’t notice, or chose not to, his breathless state. “You say the Hotel segregated the swingers in certain sections?”
she asked.

“Second and third floors,” panted Jimmy. “Most of the rooms are connecting. You might have noticed the staff we have posted
to make sure they don’t try wandering off and…”

“Let’s go to the third floor,” said Cleo.

Jimmy led the way. There were several parties on the third floor, or maybe it was one party spread along half a dozen of the
connecting rooms. The noise was loud in several rooms, but Cleo kept walking forward, oblivious to the laughter and shouting,
listening for something.

“If all the people attending this orgy were laid from end to end,” said Jimmy, pausing for effect, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Cleo didn’t look amused. Quite rightly so, he thought. No woman he was interested in should have been amused at such a remark.

As they moved away from the party rooms, other noises became apparent. Someone’s smoke alarm was sounding, thought Jimmy.
No, it was the fire alarm. But it wasn’t that either.

“Ohhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhh, Gawddddddd.”

“Open that door,” said Cleo.

Jimmy would have opened it anyway. Someone was in pain. Someone needed help. He followed Cleo inside. And there, she saw what
she had to see. Bradford and Missy didn’t notice them. They were busy.

“I’ll need some help with my luggage,” Cleo said to Jimmy.

The insistent flashing red light of Am’s message machine wouldn’t let him pass by. He was thankful to see that there was only
one message. Still, why did he always feel that pushing the machine’s “play” button was like playing the slots, with the end
result usually bad news? Don’t be the Hotel, he prayed.

“Am, this is Sharon. It’s about midnight. Maybe I should call the Hotel. No, I guess not. If you get in, call me. And if you’re
asleep, sweet dreams.”

He looked at his watch, saw that it was a little past one o’clock. It was unusual for Sharon to call this late. Hell, it was
unusual for her even to be calling. He dialed her number. She picked up on the third ring.

“Hajimemashite,”
said Am, doing his best to sound Japanese, and give Sharon cardiac arrest.

“That means ‘Nice to meet you,’” she said.

Wrong greeting, thought Am. But at least she sounded a lot more awake.

“I think the Japanese are better at relationships than we are,” she said.

“We?” asked Am.

“Americans,” she said, then after a long pause: “Us.”

He wondered what was coming. Sharon was usually direct, but tonight she was rambling.
“Giri
takes place over
ninjoo,”
she said. “Duty over feeling. They always think of the
ie,
the household, or social organization. The
ie
is a basis, a framework, where they know their positions, and roles, and obligations. You know what makes a Japanese person
more guilty than anything else? It’s when they fail to behave as expected.”

In an intuitive flash, Am asked, “And what makes you feel guilty?”

There was a long silence. “I went on a date tonight,” she said.

It hurt, but not as much as it would have five hours earlier. She’d been ending their relationship for months now, or at least
trying to change it.

“The Japanese don’t trust love,” she said. “I think I’m the same way. Romantic love is
mono tarinai
—lacking something. It doesn’t have the concrete foundations of the family, and business, and the outside world. That’s
why Japanese don’t understand western romance. They think it’s unreasonable for two people to believe they can get so much
out of a relationship. Love is not enough for them.”

“Did your date tonight have those same passionless views?”

“We have many of the same goals.”

He felt compelled to play devil’s advocate. “Are goals enough?”

She didn’t answer, at least not directly. “Is it so wrong to try and look down the road ten or twenty years? Relationships,
like businesses, need to take that long view. By some accounts, half of Japanese marriages are
omiai
, arranged. Their divorce rate is far lower than ours. The marriage prospects are discussed and considered among the family. It isn’t
just a man and a woman entering the marriage, but families, and extended families, and even society.”

“You keep forgetting you’re not Japanese,” Am reminded her. “Was your date?”

“No.”

“So you went on one date and decided you needed to plan the rest of your life?”

“No,” she said, “I went on one date and decided it was time to get on with my life. What’s between us isn’t settled. It needs
to be.”

“Got a silver stake?” asked Am. “When you’re killing love, or the undead, you have to pierce the heart.”

“I know,” she said.

She did know. Am decided to make it easier on both of them. “I went on a date tonight, too,” he said. “You’d probably be happy
to know it started as business, but that’s not how it ended, at least I don’t think it did.”

The news was a relief to her. She wanted to know details, which meant Am had to tell her about his day, a telling which took
quite a while. Sharon had advice for him, as usual, revealing background about the Fat Innkeeper he didn’t know. When she
finished, there was the silence of the hour.

“You weren’t good for me, Am Caulfield,” she said. “There were too many nights you kept me up like this.”

“I was good for you.” Even as he said it, Am knew he was speaking in the past tense.

“I’d go to work the next day and be tired.”

“It was a good tired.”

“You’re a hopeless romantic. You’re a dreamer.”

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

“I tried it,” she said wistfully.

Another silence between them. Their words were said, and passing under a bridge, flowing, flowing, to wherever the spirits
of lost love go.

“Tell me a Japanese folktale,” she said.

He considered excerpting from the
Tales of Genji,
revealing to her that the Japanese could wax romantic themselves, but that wouldn’t be a folktale, and the time for that
was already past.

“In northwestern Japan,” he said softly, “the snow sometimes reaches a depth of ten feet or more. Half the year the landscape
is covered with snow.

“She arrived with the first snowstorm. The young man, a bachelor, heard a noise outside the door, and opened it up to find
her. She was naked, but not shivering, her hair long, her skin very white. The young man helped the beautiful woman inside.
Within a week they were married.