Crowded Lives, page 19
George Simms did not have to worry about answering that one, because at that moment Charlie Hosey walked in.
“I can really use you,” Hosey said as he showed Simms around the hotel. He was an older, short, balding man with a vague whiskey smell about him. “It ain’t bad keeping up with the big stuff—the boiler, the hot water heaters, the electrical systems; it’s the little stuff that runs me ragged. You know, the minor plumbing repairs, jammed locks, hot plates that are shorted out, lighting fixtures that don’t work. You can handle all that kinda stuff, can’t you?”
“Sure,” Simms said. “Those are the same problems I used to take care of in the cellhouse. Except for jammed locks, that is; I wasn’t allowed to mess with locks.”
“I guess not,” Hosey said, laughing.
“Did you come here through the halfway house too?” Simms asked.
“Me? No. I used to work here when the Algiers was a real hotel. I was maintenance superintendent when the place closed down. After that I went to St. Luke’s Hospital for a few years. Then when I seen in the paper where the city was gonna lease the Algiers as a welfare hotel, I went and seen about coming back. They was glad to get me, I’ll tell you. Keeping this place going is like working in a secondhand tire shop: it’s patch, patch, patch all the time.” They paused at the chained doors. “That’s the Moroccan Ballroom,” Hosey said. “The Duke and Duchess of Windsor used to throw parties in there. I seen’em. It’s got picnic tables in it now; the Help for the Homeless people come in twice a day and serve free meals. Over here,” the little man led Simms across the lobby to a pair of locked leather-padded doors, “is the Casablanca Club. Used to be a real ritzy nightclub. All the big show people used to perform in there: Jolson, Helen Morgan, Blossom Seeley and Bennie Fields, Ruth Etting. I seen’em.” He sighed wistfully. “Yeah, this place used to be something.”
They rode a service elevator, which Hosey had to unlock, down to the boiler room in the basement. On the way down, Simms asked, “What’s with this guy Wallace anyway? He comes on like a concentration camp guard.”
“Ex-cop,” Hosey said. “Takes his job real serious.” After a beat to think it over, he added, “Guess I ought to tell you: Max don’t much like the halfway house sending guys to work here. You’re the third one they sent; the other two didn’t last long. Max, he don’t give a guy much slack. He particularly don’t like nobody messing around with none of the young women that lives here.” Hosey shrugged. “I ain’t telling you what to do, understand; but you asked and I thought you should know.”
“Thanks,” said Simms. “I appreciate it.”
Off the big boiler room was the maintenance office: a badly scarred wooden desk littered with papers and miscellaneous junk, in front of a padded chair that had a patch repaired with black electrical tape. A wooden straight chair stood in front of the desk, an old metal file cabinet next to it. A pin-up girl calendar from a plumbing supply company was thumbtacked to the wall. At the back of the office was a curtained doorway leading to a small storeroom. The curtain was not closed all the way and Simms caught a glimpse of a cot in the room. He did not ask about it.
“Here’s where I list all the minor repairs to be done,” Hosey said, showing Simms a clipboard hanging on a nail. “Every day you just go down the list and do as many of’em as you can. I ain’t gonna dog you as long as you do a reasonable amount of work; I know all’s you’re getting is minimum wage for now. But if you work out and want a permanent job when you’re released from the halfway house, why, we can talk about it.”
“I’ll do a good job for you, Mr. Hosey,” Simms told him.
“Just call me Charlie,” said the little man.
A week later, Simms was sitting on the fire stairs at the end of the seventh floor corridor, having a smoke and drinking coffee from a small thermos he had bought. His tool belt and the clipboard of job orders lay on the step next to him. He had been sitting there for nearly an hour. Finally the door to room 704 opened and a little Puerto Rican girl, five or six years old, came out into the corridor to play. Pretty, clay-colored, with raven hair, she had on jeans and a sweater, and carried a doll that was missing a hand. Sitting on the worn carpet with her back to the wall, the child propped up her knees, sat the doll on them, and began to braid the doll’s hair.
Simms watched her for a couple of minutes, then leaned forward a little and spoke to her. “Hello.” He said it very quietly so as not to frighten her.
She looked at him but did not speak back.
“My name’s George,” he said. “I work here.” He showed her the tool belt. “See?”
The little girl looked, then turned her attention back to the doll.
“That sure is a pretty doll,” Simms said. “But what happened to her hand?”
“She was in a accident,” the child said, not looking at him.
“That’s too bad,” Simms said consolingly. “But she’s a very lucky little doll to have you to take care of her.” From the pocket of his denim work shirt, Simms took a pack of chewing gum. Slowly unwrapping a stick, he put it in his mouth. He knew the little girl was watching him. “Would you like some gum?” he asked. She looked back at her doll without answering. “It’s fruit flavored,” he said. “Sure is good. Here,” he held out a stick, “have some—”
The girl rose and walked over to him. She stood before the stairs he was sitting on and Simms gave her the gum and watched as she unwrapped it and put it in her mouth. As she began to chew, she smiled.
“See, told you it was good,” Simms said. A lock of hair had fallen over her forehead and Simms reached out and brushed it back. “I told you my name, but if we’re going to be friends you’ve got to tell me yours—”
Just then a woman came out of 704 and strode urgently over to them. “Debbie, what are you doing?” she said irritably.
Simms frowned. Debbie? Debbie? What the hell kind of name was that for a Puerto Rican kid?
The woman took the girl by one arm. “You know you’re supposed to stay right by the door! And not talk to strangers!”
“It’s okay,” Simms said, smiling. “I work here.”
“I don’t give a damn where you work, mister!” the woman snapped. She was pretty, an older version of the child, except that her eyes had no innocence left in them. “What have you got in your mouth?” she demanded of Debbie. “Spit it out,” she ordered, holding her hand under the child’s mouth. “Now get back in the room!” As the little girl hurried away, the woman turned her anger on Simms. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, giving gum to my kid? Who the hell are you anyway?”
“My name’s George,” Simms said, shrugging. “I work here.” He held up the tool belt. “I fix things.”
“Yeah, well if I ever catch you giving anything to my kid again, I’m gonna fix you,” the woman threatened. She stuck the wad of gum on the handle of his screwdriver. “Stay away from my kid, mister!”
She stalked away.
A few days later, Simms went down to the maintenance office for some new work orders, and Hosey was not at his desk. Simms pulled the curtain aside and looked into the storeroom for him. He was not there either. It was the first time Simms had seen the storeroom except for an occasional glimpse when the curtains were left open an inch or so. Now he looked around curiously. The cot that he had seen his first day there was of the ordinary folding variety, with a blue-striped mattress and a couple of gray blankets that had ST. LUKE HOSPITAL printed on them. An upturned wooden crate served as a nightstand; on it was a cheap little lamp, an ash tray full of cigarette butts, and a glossy porno magazine with a nude woman in bondage on the cover. Standing on the floor next to the cot was an almost empty Jim Beam bottle. A few of Hosey’s extra clothes hung from nails in the wall.
The phone on Hosey’s desk rang. Simms closed the curtain and answered it. “Maintenance.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
Simms recognized Max Wallace’s voice. “I don’t know, I just walked in.”
“Find him,” Wallace ordered crisply. “Then the two of you get up to my office—fast.”
Simms found Hosey over in a section of the basement that had been converted into a laundry room for the welfare tenants. He had the drum out of a clothes dryer and was resetting its axle. Simms told him about Wallace’s call and Hosey put aside his work.
“Did he say what it was about?” the little man asked.
“No,” said Simms. “He just sounded mad—as usual.”
When they got to the security office, Max Wallace was with a little black girl of eight or nine and her mother. Wallace glanced at Hosey, glared at Simms, and knelt in front of the girl. “Sweetheart, I want you to look at these two men and tell me if it was either one of them that scared you.” The child hesitated and Wallace gently patted her head. “It’s all right, come on now, take a look for me.”
The little girl looked at Hosey and Simms, frowned, seemed to ponder, and finally said, “I’m not sure. It was so dark—” Her voice broke and she whimpered a little. Wallace gestured to her mother.
“I’ll talk to her again later. Meantime, try to go on with her normal routine as much as you can. Don’t avoid the subject but don’t talk about it like it was the end of the world either. Understand?”
“Yes, all right,” the mother replied in a strained voice. She took her daughter and left.
Wallace sat behind his desk and studied Hosey and Simms with cold eyes. “That little girl,” he said evenly, “was on her way down the stairs to go to school this morning when a man accosted her on the landing between the lobby and two. She says the man tried to kiss her. The light on the landing was out, but she saw that he was a white man and she says he had a funny smell—”
“Well, why pick on us?” Charlie Hosey said indignantly.
“You’re white and you’re in the building,” Wallace said.
“For Christ’s sake, there’s prob’ly two or three dozen white guys living in the place,” Hosey argued. “And there’s boyfriends that sneak in and spend the night, there’s johns that some of these women go out and pick up for extra money—you got no right to single us out, Wallace.” The little maintenance man was decidedly irate.
“Nobody said I was singling you out; I always check the obvious first.” The security man reached for his phone. “You can go,” he told them.
His eyes lingered on Simms until he was out the door.
That afternoon, Simms was helping Hosey rehang one of the lobby doors that the kids had misaligned by swinging on it.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have got so hot at Max,” the little man mused. “He’s just trying to do his job. It ain’t an easy one either, I’ll tell you. There’s lots going on in this place that shouldn’t be going on: prostitution, drug sales, stolen property being sold—”
“I guess you never expected to see those kind of things in the Algiers,” Simms commented.
“Not stuff like that, never,” Hosey declared. “Course, in any big city hotel you’re gonna get your share of illegal goings-on. Hell, I used to see Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano come in here regular to have a drink in the Oasis Bar; there’s no telling what kind of crooked business they was talking about. And one time we found out there was a high price call girl ring operating out of what used to be the penthouse suite. It was supposed to be rented to this wealthy Texas dame and her four daughters; well, they wasn’t her daughters at all, if you know what I mean.” Hosey grinned. “Funniest thing that ever happened was the time some teller over at Chase Manhattan got conned by a blonde who was a dead ringer for Lana Turner. She was supposed to run away with him, see, after he embezzled a bundle of dough, but what she really did was run away from him—with the dough. Cops arrested him right here in the hotel, sitting on the bed, suitcase all packed, waiting for her to come back.”
While Hosey was talking, Simms noticed Debbie’s mother go into the coffee shop across the street from the hotel. Debbie was not with her.
“She got caught later on,” Hosey said.
“What?”
“The blonde that looked like Lana Turner. She got caught down in Florida somewheres. Only had about ten thousand dollars left. Claimed the bank teller only gave her twenty. The bank said a hundred thousand was stole. Ask me, the bankers prob’ly took the difference.” Hosey used an electric drill on a long extension cord to screw in the last door hinge. “Well, that about does it. Wish there was some way to keep the kids from swinging on it, but I guess there ain’t. We’ll be fixing it again in a month.”
“Okay if I take a few minutes off, Charlie?” Simms asked. He could see Debbie’s mother sitting by the coffee shop window with a cup in front of her.
“Sure, take a break,” Hosey said, winding up his extension cord.
Simms trotted over to the coffee shop and went up to the table where Debbie’s mother sat. “Can I talk to you a minute?” he asked.
She looked up from a folded section of classified ads. “What about?”
Simms sat across from her. “I just wanted to tell you I was sorry for what happened about the gum. I guess I wasn’t thinking. I mean, it was just a natural thing to offer the kid a stick of gum. It never occurred to me how it might look.”
“Just stay away from my kid, okay?” the woman said firmly.
“Yeah, sure I will,” Simms assured. “I just wanted you to know I didn’t mean nothing by it. I was only trying to be friendly.”
“Okay, but don’t let it happen again.” She sighed wearily. “That place over there,” she bobbed her chin at the hotel, “is a sewer. A mother with a kid, she can’t be too careful.”
“I know, I realize that now. I’m sorry, okay?” He took a pack of gum from his shirt pocket. “How about you?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “You want a stick of gum?”
She half smiled in spite of herself. “Why not?” She took a stick and put it in her mouth.
“Looking for a job?” Simms asked, nodding at the classifieds.
“Yeah. Soon’s I find one, I’m getting out of that dump over there.”
“Listen,” he told her, “I go to this place at night, it’s kind of a community center, and sometimes I hear about job openings over there. If I hear of anything I think might interest you, I’ll let you know.”
Her eyes flashed suspicion. “What do you think that’ll get you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t sleep around, man, if you’re looking to score.”
“Hey,” Simms said righteously, “I’m just trying to be a nice guy. Lighten up a little.”
She sighed again. “Well, you just never know. Seems like everybody’s out to get something.”
“I know,” he sympathized. “It’s hard to tell who’s being straight with you sometimes.” Simms drummed his fingers on the tabletop. After a moment, he asked, “So where’s Debbie?”
“She’s in daycare until three.”
“Say, how’d you ever happen to give her a name like Debbie?” he asked. “I mean, that’s kind of an all-American girl-next-door name.”
“Maybe I’d like her to grow up to be an all-American girl next door.” There was a hint of defiance in her words. “Anything wrong with that?”
“No, not at all. Listen, no offense intended,” he said quickly. “Hey, speaking of names, what’s yours?”
“Lupe Mercado,” she told him.
“I’m George Simms,” he said. He extended his hand and, after first hesitating, she shook it.
“If you ever need anything fixed in your room,” he said, “just let me know; you don’t have to fill out a form and wait your turn, I’ll do it for you right away.”
Lupe shrugged. “Okay.” There was a tiny pinch at the top of her nose.
“I better be getting back,” Simms said, rising. “Thanks for not being mad at me anymore.”
Outside, as he waited to cross the street, Simms looked back and saw her watching him suspiciously. He smiled and waved. She still doesn’t trust me all that much, he thought. But for his purposes, that was okay.
All he needed was a little trust.
For a week Simms watched Lupe Mercado come and go. Her routine never varied. First thing in the morning she took Debbie to daycare, then spent the rest of the morning jobhunting. Usually at noon she was back at the hotel for the free meal served by Help for the Homeless. After lunch she would sit in the lobby or go across to the coffee shop and read the classifieds again to see if there was anything she missed that morning. Sometimes Simms would see her using one of the pay phones in the lobby to call about jobs. Just before three she would leave to go get her daughter from daycare.
Now and then Simms would speak to her in passing, or wave to her across the lobby, but he did not intrude on what she was doing, encroach on her time, or in any way act as if he was presuming a friendship. All he wanted to do was keep her aware of him until he was ready.
He picked Thursday as the day. Thursday: late in the week when people were tired, not as alert, laboring toward the weekend. Simms had already selected the boiler room door that led to the alley as the way by which he would leave the hotel. He knew he would have to move fast; Max Wallace would be after him very quickly.
At three-thirty Simms was on the seventh floor when Lupe Mercado got off the elevator with Debbie and came down the corridor to 704. Simms pretended to be in a hurry.
“I was hoping I’d run into you,” he said in a rush of words. “I only got a second; there’s a bad leaky pipe in the basement I got to tend to.” Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out a slip of paper. “This lady’s got a dress shop in the village. She wants somebody to work in her stockroom. Says she’ll train somebody with no experience. Said it was good pay plus a discount on clothes. Give her a call as soon as you can; the job might still be open.” Pressing the slip of paper into her hand, he said, “Listen, I’ve got to hurry; that pipe’s leaking all over the basement. Hope you get the job.”
Simms hurried down the corridor to the fire stairs. He made sure his footsteps sounded loudly as he ran down to six, and halfway down to five. Then he abruptly turned and crept quietly back up to seven. Standing just around the corner from the corridor, he heard Lupe Mercado speaking to her daughter.
