All three of us shook our heads, caught up in his breathless monologue.
“My loving partner decides we’re to do nothing. Even though we’ve got more than enough money to fix the place up, he wants to leave it as is and live out our golden years here in Faulkneresque splendor and while it falls down around us!”
Neal and I looked properly horrified, but Shar asked, “So why’d you put up the tape?” maybe a single-minded focus is an asset in a private investigator, but it seems to me it plays hell with interpersonal relations.
Chris wanted to talk about the tape, however. “Ira and I divided the place, straight down the middle. He took the common room, utility room, and the area on the floors above it. I took the restaurant, kitchen, bar and above. I prepare the meals and slip his under the tape on the reception desk. He washes our clothes and pushes mine over here to me. I’ll tell you, it’s quite a life!”
“And in the meantime, you’re selling off the fixtures in your half?”
“Only the ones that won’t fit the image I want to create here.”
“How can you create it in half a hotel?”
“I can’t, but I’m hoping Ira’ll come around eventually. I wish I knew why he has this tic about keeping the place the way it is. If I did, I know I could talk him out of the notion.”
Shar was looking thoughtful now. She walked around the jukebox, examining its lovely lines and gnawing at her lower lip. She peered through the glass at the turntable where the 78 of “You Belong to Me” now rested silently. She glanced through the archway at the yellow plastic tape.
“Chris,” she said, “what would it be worth to you to find out what Ira’s problem is?”
“A lot.”
“A reduction of price on this jukebox to one my friends can afford?”
I couldn’t believe it! Yes, she was offering out of the goodness of her heart, because she’d seen how badly Neal and I wanted the jukebox, and she knew the limits of our budget. But she was also doing it because she never can resist a chance to play detective.
Chris looked surprised, then grinned. “A big reduction, but I don’t see how-”
She took one of her business cards from her purse and handed it to him. Said to me, “Come on, Watson. The game’s afoot.”
“Mr. Sloan?” Shar was standing at the tape on the porch. I was trying to hide behind her.
Ira Sloan’s eyes flicked toward us, than straight ahead.
“Oh, Mr. Sloan!” now she was waving, for heaven’s sake, as if he wasn’t sitting a mere five feet away!
His scowl deepened.
Shar stepped over the tape. “Mr. Sloan, d’you suppose you could give Ted and me a tour of your side of the hotel? We love old places like this, and we both think it’s a shame your partner wants to spoil it.”
He turned his head, looking skeptical but not as ferocious.
Shar reached back and yanked on my arm so hard that I almost tripped over the tape. “Ted’s partner, Neal, is in there with Chris, talking upscale. I had to remove Ted before they end up with a tape down the middle of their apartment.”
Ira Sloan ran his hand through his longish hair and stood up. He was very tall-at least six-four and so skinny he seemed to have no ass at all. Had he always been so thin, or was it the result of too many cooling meals shoved across the reception desk?
He said, “The tape was his idea.”
“So he told us.”
“Thinks it’s funny.”
“It’s not.”
“I like people who appreciate old things. It’ll be a pleasure to show you around.”
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.”