Hotel

Christine considered. "We could go to the Quarter. There are plenty of places open. Or if you want to come to my place, I'm a whiz at omelets."

Peter helped her up and steered her to the door where he switched off the office lights. "An omelet," he declared, "is what I really wanted and didn't know it."

9

They walked together, skirting pools of water which the rain had left, to a tiered parking lot a block and a half from the hotel. Above, the sky was clearing after its interlude of storm, with a three-quarter moon beginning to break through, and around them the city center was settling down to silence, broken by an occasional late taxi and the sharp tattoo of their footsteps echoing hollowly through the canyon of darkened buildings.

A sleepy parking attendant brought down Christine's Volkswagen and they climbed in, Peter jackknifing his length into the right-hand seat. "This is the life! You don't mind if I spread out?" He draped his arm along the back of the driver's seat, not quite touching Christine's shoulders.

As they waited for the traffic lights at Canal Street, one of the new air-conditioned buses glided down the center mall in front of them.

She reminded him, "You were going to tell me what happened."

He frowned, bringing his thoughts back to the hotel, then in crisp short sentences related what he knew about the attempted rape of Marsha Preyscott. Christine listened in silence, heading the little car northeast as Peter talked, ending with his conversation with Herbie Chandler and the suspicion that the bell captain knew more than he had told.

"Herbie always knows more. That's why he's been around a long time."

Peter said shortly, "Being around isn't the answer to everything."

The comment, as both he and Christine knew, betrayed Peter's impatience with inefficiencies within the hotel which he lacked authority to change.

In a normally run establishment, with clearly defined lines of command, there would be no such problem. But in the St. Gregory, a good deal of organization was unwritten, with final judgments depending upon Warren Trent, and made by the hotel owner in his own capricious way.

In ordinary circumstances, Peter - an honors graduate of Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration would have made a decision months ago to seek more satisfying work elsewhere. But circumstances were not ordinary. He had arrived at the St. Gregory under a cloud, which was likely to remain - hampering his chance of other employment - for a long time to come.

Sometimes he reflected glumly on the botchery he had made of his career, for which no one - he admitted candidly - was to blame except himself.

At the Waldorf, where he had gone to work after graduation from Cornell, Peter McDermott had been the bright young man who appeared to hold the future in his hand. As a junior assistant manager, he had been selected for promotion when bad luck, plus indiscretion, intervened. At a time when he was supposedly on duty and required elsewhere in the hotel, he was discovered in flagrante in a bedroom with a woman guest.

Even then, he might have escaped retribution. Goodlooking young men who worked in hotels grew used to receiving overtures from lonely women, and most, at some point in their careers, succumbed. Managements, aware of this, were apt to punish a single transgression with a stem warning that a similar thing must never happen again. Two factors, however, conspired against Peter. The woman's husband, aided by private detectives, was involved in the discovery, and a messy divorce case resulted, with attendant publicity, which all hotels abhorred.

As if this was not enough, there was a personal retribution. Three years before the Waldorf debacle, Peter McDermott had married impulsively and the marriage, soon after, ended in separation. To an extent, his loneliness and disillusion had been a cause of the incident in the hotel.

Regardless of the cause, and utilizing the readymade evidence, Peter's estranged wife sued successfully for divorce.

The end result was ignominious dismissal and blacklisting by the major chain hotels.

The existence of a black list, of course, was not admitted. But at a long series of hotels, most with chain affiliations, Peter McDermott's applications for employment were peremptorily rejected. Only at the St. Gregory, an independent house, had he been able to obtain work, at a salary which Warren Trent shrewdly adjusted to Peter's own desperation.

Therefore when he had said a moment ago, Being around isn't the answer to everything, he had pretended an independence which did not exist. He suspected that Christine realized it too.