Yesterday's News

rate?”
    “That’s where you gotta start, alright. I think nationwide the average is something like 65 percent per night, but that includes all those resorts run 90, even 95 percent in season. Place like this, no tourists staying reliably for weeks at a time, 25 or 30 percent’s more like it. So, right away, your intake’s way less than the max.”
    “And expenses?”
    “You wouldn’t believe it. Insurance? Off the scale since that singer won the case saying the motel should have kept that guy from attacking her. Then there’s air conditioners, mattresses and springs, new TV’s, you name it. Every year something major needs replacing. And that’s with me doing all the electrical and plumbing and the building inspector doing some winking.”
    “Think you’ll stay with it?”
    “Hard to say. The really tough part’s you never get a day off. You’re here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and boy, that gets tiresome.” He crossed his knife and fork on the plate. “I got some cherry vanilla in the freezer, and the Red Sox are going to be on the cable.”
    “Thanks, but I’m stuffed, and I’ve still got work to do tonight.”
    “Work? Where?”
    “Couple of places called the Strand and Bun’s. Know them?”
    Jones winched the Fu Manchu up over his front teeth. “Work, huh?”

The directions Jones gave me were excellent, but even without them I wouldn’t have had any trouble finding The Strip. I joined four other cars cruising it north to south, then made a U-turn and came back south to north. The movie theaters had old-fashioned marquees showing as many bulbs dead or missing as lit. The windows of the strip joints had publicity photographs of women even a feminist would call bimbos, the hairdos dating from the mid-sixties. The bookstores advertised peep shows and prices in handprinted signs.
    The Strand was in the second block, Bun’s diagonally across the street in the third. Parking spaces were plentiful, most of the patrons seeming to be pedestrians. I left the Prelude in front of the Strand and approached the ticket window.
    A faded, fat woman obliterated all of what must have been a cocktail stool under and behind her. She looked at me through a streaked and scratched glass window thick enough to be bulletproof. She said, “Three features, seven bucks, no repeats.”
    “I want to see Mr. Gotbaum.”
    “Can’t help you.”
    “Can’t you call him?”
    “Mister, I just sell tickets here. I look like an executive secretary to you?”
    “Somebody tried to stick you up, there a buzzer or something you can push?”
    She gave me a different kind of look. “I don’t want no trouble.”
    “I’m not trying to give you any. Just call somebody who can get me to Gotbaum.”
    After thinking it over, she put a hand under the ticket counter, pressed twice, and brought it back. We waited for thirty seconds. Then the blacked-over door to the theater opened and a tall, skinny kid came through it. He had dirty blond hair made to appear dirtier by being slicked back, and his double-breasted, chalk-stripe suit was a size too large for him. As he got closer, I put him nearer to thirty than twenty, but he still looked like his mother had been scared by an early Richard Widmark film.
    “This guy giving you trouble, Connie?”
    I said, “No trouble. I just want to see Mr. Gotbaum.”
    “Mr. Gotbaum, he don’t see many people.”
    “It’s about Charlie Coyne and Jane Rust.”
    He smirked. “What, you think you hit a magic button or something?”
    “I look like a cop to you?”
    He stopped smiling. “You got ID?”
    “Yeah.” I showed it to him. “But I’m not a cop.”
    “You’re not a cop.”
    “No.”
    “Then why the fuck you ask me whether I thought you was or not?”
    “I asked you if I looked like a cop. I think I do. I think your customers, probably all five of them, will think so too. Especially if I walk up and down the aisles a few times and stare them in the face a minute or so each. Then maybe I’ll stand out here, on the nice public sidewalk by the ticket office, and stare for a minute or so into each face that comes to Connie here. I think maybe I could do that for two or three days, and Mr. Gotbaum will want to talk to me.”
    He said, “That’s pretty good, you know?”
    “So, how about we save my time and Mr. Gotbaum’s money and see him now. Together.”
    “You carrying?”
    “I’d play it that way.”
    “You gotta leave it with me.”
    “Not a