Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

recognition in his eyes though I’d just talked to him an hour or so earlier about a medical emergency. “What can I do for you?”
    “I wanted to write a few letters,” I told him, “but there’s no stationery in my room.”
    “You’ve come to the right place.” He slid off the stool and pulled his jacket down over his thin body. “You just wait right here,” he said. He started toward the office door, then turned and came back to the counter. “Unless you’d like it sent up.”
    “Oh, no, I can wait.” I shot him a Kaminsky family grin.
    As soon as the door closed, I ducked under the shelf at the right side of the counter and began to look for Rick’s box. I didn’t know if he’d been carted off to the morgue with his key still in his pocket, but there were usually two, so that husbands and wives could go out and do their own thing and illicit lovers could arrive and leave separately, fooling only themselves, never the staff. I reached in and took the spare key from the back of the box for room 404, but didn’t get to crouch back under the shelf in time. The skinny old coot was standing in the open doorway to the office, a surprised look on his wrinkled, dry face.
    “I was coming to knock, to save you a trip,” I said. “I need a pen, too. I was sure I’d packed one, but you know how it is; you’re always wondering, What will the weather be? Do I need a raincoat? Are these shoes dressy enough? You always leave something home. This time it was my pen,” I said, shrugging and trying to look honest and harmless.
    He walked over to the shelf, unlatched it, and held it up for me. “Insurance regulations,” he whispered. “Guests aren’t allowed back here. It’s not that I’d mind a little company. This isn’t exactly Grand Central Station. But rules are rules. I’ll get you something to write with.” He walked slowly back to the office, adding, “I hope you’re writing your parents.”
    I was still behind the counter even though I could get to the other side without bending. I needed other keys—well, one more. What I really needed was a passkey. But the only keys I saw were the ones in the guests’ mailboxes, and the old man had left the office door ajar so I couldn’t go pulling open drawers behind the counter. Besides, the office, where he was, was more than likely where the passkeys would be kept
    I walked around to the appropriate side of the wooden counter and waited. He came back with a pen and laid it on top of the pile of stationery and envelopes he’d brought out the first time.
    “You need anything else, just ask. And when I go off, you can ask my son. Works the second shift.”
    I remembered a woman on in the late afternoon, a tough old bird, looked like a retired cop. Or like some of the women who hang out at Henrietta Hudson’s in my neighborhood, the ones who pick up the tab and sometimes, when tempers flare, the bar stools.
    “Name’s Jimmy. Anything you need, even from the outside, he’s your man. Don’t request nothing from Mabel. She’s like to take your head off just for inquiring.”
    So he meant to keep the tips in the family. I picked up the stationery and the pen.
    “I met him when I checked in. He seemed to have a little problem with some of the dogs. I’ve been taking the stairs.“
    „No need to do that. He’s got to take you. That’s his job. Though, to tell the truth, he nearly wet hisself the day you all checked in.”
    I headed for the stairs, the old man’s chuckling following me all the way up to two. I stopped on three for Dashiell before heading for Rick’s room. There’s something so creepy being in someone else’s private space. Even when it’s a hotel room and all you get to see is what brand of toothpaste they use, it still feels as invasive as checking their bank balance, seeing if they’re a grasshopper or an ant, or hiding behind the curtain and watching someone else have sex. Just as thrilling, too. Perhaps it was how I’d replaced the rush of working with aggressive dogs. That aside, it was how I earned my living, and I needed my partner to share the load.



SO YOU’RE PERFECT? MY MOTHER USED TO SAY

    T here was no crime scene tape sealing Rick Shelbert’s room, a courtesy to the hotel, I suspected, since it might well have caused a mass exodus. I unlocked the door and stepped inside before Dashiell. Then I called him to follow me, put him on a down-stay, and let the door go. It locked, as they all did,