Press Club years ago, back when reporters drank and smoked, but for sixteen years it’s been Olive May’s place and will remain so until she decides to retire. Like me, Olive has tenure at the Lord Douglas Hotel, at least for as long as Leo Alexander is alive. Maybe longer if it’s the same will he wrote seven years ago when I managed to stumble into the path of a few bullets that were meant for him.
Olive’s is quiet. The stockbrokers have gone home and the jazz buffs don’t start showing up until after nine o’clock when Olive does her first set. This week she’s booked a California trio doing Latin-flavoured stuff. Sometimes she sits in with the guest artists. She plays piano like Joe Louis boxed: no fuss, no muss, both hands. She sings, too.
Olive isn’t there yet, but Barney Geller is behind the bar. “Hi, champ,” he says as I come in. Barney won a thousand dollars on me one night in 1985, one of the good nights, which is why he insists on calling me “champ.” He still has a picture of me taped to the long mirror behind the row of Scotch. I have my gloves up like a good boy. I look young and eager. What did I know?
“Those movie people still in the house, champ?”
“Checked out this afternoon, Barney.”
“Too bad. Good tippers.”
“They’ll be back in a week. They’re blowing up a boat down in Steveston.”
“Too early for your beer.”
“Just passing through, Barney. I’ll see you later.”
I keep moving, down the long bar and up three steps to the street entrance. Outside are four more steps, concrete this time, and then I’m on the sidewalk about halfway down the block from the main entrance. It’s a warm evening. Early September. The office building across the street has a fine sunset splashed high across its glass wall, and the Lord Douglas is benefitting from the lighting effect. The old girl looks good.
As I walk up the street towards the main entrance, I spot Maxine, a wiry little woman with a cute monkey face and straight black hair, getting out of her cab. She talks to me across the hood. “You missed it, Grundy. Andrew’s eyes nearly fell out of his head.”
Andrew, our doorman, wears a uniform that would look good on a Bolivian field marshal. He wears it well, with a straight face. On him it doesn’t seem completely ridiculous. Maxine wears a black T-shirt and no bra. She’s built like a twelve-year-old boy.
“He was looking like there was a bad smell somewhere and then the guy slipped him a tip and Andrew nearly had a bird.”
Andrew has come up behind my left shoulder.
“How much was it, Andrew?” Maxine asks.
“That is none of your affair,” Andrew says. “Good evening, Mr. Grundy.”
“Hi, Andrew. Nice evening.”
“Very pleasant.”
“Andrew’s being coy.” Andrew turns on his heel with grave dignity and returns to his post in time to open the big brass door for a young couple who don’t bother to tip him, an oversight Andrew disdains to notice.
“Don’t know what he’s being so secretive about. I got the same thing.” She’s come around to the sidewalk.
“Yeah, well, don’t go yelling too loud, okay, Maxine?”
“What ya gonna do, Grundy, punch me out?”
She hits me in the belly. She has a bony fist.
“You’ve got a bony fist,” I tell her.
“Too slow, Joe. That’s why you were a bust as a fighter.”
“That and my glass jaw,” I say.
“This your cab?”
Some guy is opening the passenger door, looks like he’s in a hurry.
“Yeah, wanna buy it?” She fakes another shot at my gut, and I reach out with my left hand and tug her right earlobe. She doesn’t get it. She climbs into the cab, and I hear the passenger say, “Channel 20, the side door,” before they pull away.
Andrew opens the front door for me. “It was a hundred-dollar bill,” he says quietly.
“Nice tip,” I say.
Andrew fixes my tie for me. He’s a bit of a fuss-budget. He likes things to look nice.
“Yes,” he says. “None of her business, though.”
The lobby of the Lord Douglas Hotel is old style, with a wide, curving staircase leading up to the mezzanine level and a balcony overlooking the half-acre of burgundy carpet below. The reading area has leather couches and a newspaper rack, and the front desk is as long as a Texas bar. The six elevators have polished brass doors, and the floor indicator lights are like rubies set in a sundial. Maurice, the bell captain, is getting off one of the elevators as I cross the floor, and I see him sneak a peek at a folded bill in his hand.
“It’s a C-note, Maurice,” I tell him.
“That’s what I thought it was.”
“Is it real?”
“That’s what I was trying to find out,” he says. “The guy looked like a street person. Could be a rock star, I guess.”
Margo Traynor, the assistant manager, is trying to catch my eye. When she gets it, she nods me towards her office, back of the front desk. When I get to the desk, I see that Melanie, the reservations manager, is checking her computer.
“Get your hundred?” I ask her as I walk by.
She looks coy for a second. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Must be nice.”
“Didn’t get one?”
“Not my night, I guess.”
Melanie goes back to her customer, a luminous woman with curly dark hair and a face I almost recognize. “Yes, Ms. Gagliardi,” Melanie says. “Here it is. Room 1221.”
“Is that a non-smoking floor?” Connie Gagliardi asks.
I’ve identified her now. Channel 20, NewsWatch. Her face is familiar even to a non-viewer, because it’s on the side of quite a few buses and at least three billboards downtown. She’s shorter than I thought she’d be.
Margo Traynor is occupying Lloyd Gruber’s office while our general manager is enjoying his first vacation in ten years, a fact he found it necessary to belabour us with on more than one occasion before he actually pried himself loose. Margo is sitting at Lloyd Gruber’s desk, and I think she looks as if she belongs. There’s someone else in the room.
“Joe, this is Mr. Axelrode,” she says. “Joe Grundy, our head of security.”
“Hi, how are you?” I say to the guy. It’s Green Jacket. He looks like a linebacker ten years and thirty pounds past training camp. Almost as tall as I am, certainly wider. His jacket button will pop any minute. He’s pretty sure he scares people. He doesn’t offer to shake my hand.
“How many men have you got?” he asks me.
“On duty tonight? There’ll be three.”
“That won’t be enough,” he says, standing to better confront the problem. I worry about his jacket button.
“I’m not having policemen walking up and down the hallways,” Margo says.
Axelrode had the solution all along. “I was thinking along the lines of a private security team.”
Margo stands, too. Now we’re all standing. “No,” she says. “And I have that on the authority of Mr. Gruber, the manager, who is unfortunately not with us at this time. I mean, he’s away. I’m in charge.”
“What do you want me to do, Ms. Traynor?” I ask.
She appreciates that