15. Joseph Palmer Jumps.
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Room 1150
Joseph Palmer was examining his mustache in the mirrored face of the lobby’s grandfather clock when, in the reflection, a streak of scarlet flashed behind him.
He spun and saw a young brunette woman in a red dress passing through the lobby. She was in the middle of a costumed group, giggling and rambunctious, all looking to be in their late 20s or so. Another big Halloween party tonight in the Tabor Hall, Joseph thought, just like old times.
The woman in red glanced at Joseph with her aqua blue eyes, then did a double take, a smile forming on her face. She pulled urgently at the air in front of her lips. Joseph took it as a signal. His fingers found the mass of hair and glue already drooping off the side of his fake mustache. He nodded a thank you in her direction, but she’d already moved along.
He turned back to the grandfather clock.
It was seven feet tall and made of ashen oak that, family rumors said, predated even their own possession of the building. It was supposedly a leave-behind from previous ownership, before the turn of the new century when it was still called The Winthrop. Joseph’s mom, Jacqueline, had always called it “the albatross,” but never said anything else about it. Just that “it came with the place, and here it will stay, ticking away long after we’ve moved on.” This proved to be the truth.
As a precocious kid running around the business that would one day be his own, Joseph would lounge in the lobby and let the ticks of the clock’s pendulum lull him to sleep. When it began to sound a little funny, he’d tell mom and she’d invariably send down Hoight with his box of tools. The bellhop would perform some kind of magic with his screwdrivers and wrenches, and get it sounding right again in no time at all.
“Just know how she works is all,” Hoight would say with a wink. “Know all her secret spots.”
Joseph looked in the mirror, saw how silly the fake mustache looked, and pulled it off. By the looks of things, it wasn’t going to be the sort of visit that necessitated a disguise anyway.
Back when his family owned the joint, back when his mom was still in charge, she taught him to wear costumes when lurking around. At first, it was to help her keep track of staff—see who was slacking, who was putting in the elbow grease and could be leaned on to take over more duties. But after a while, that felt like an actual job to Joseph, so he stopped keeping a strict ledger of who was adding value and who was subtracting. He just spent his time watching, not spying.
He’d get pretty intricate with these disguises, too. Fake mustaches and eyelashes, pillows to make his frame appear weightier, accents and prosthetics. That became part of the fun, pretending to be someone else. But all of that ended when his mom passed, thrusting him into a position of real responsibility. There wasn’t time for watching and playacting when you were the boss.
His employees saw his reign as mostly benign, especially after his mother’s strong fist. More than a few employees came to her funeral, and that meant a lot to Joseph, especially after the long strike. And when Joseph took charge, he rewarded folks by delegating to those employees that he trusted.
Most of all, that meant Hoight.
It was vital for Joseph to have him around all those years, walking around the hotel hallways in those curious uniforms of his. He was the one who knew how it all ran, how the circuitry was designed. He’d also pick up the slack whenever Joseph was on one of his mental safaris. Hoight always took care of the place like it was his own.
It had been over a decade since Joseph saw him, since he saw any of them. The last time was the big announcement that the deal had closed with Latham, that investment firm. Joseph hadn’t heard of them before they showed up with lawyers and an offer—the kind of money that’d let his sons and at least three generations get by without needing to work. Legacy money.
It had felt like the right time too, business-wise. The industry was changing, Joseph could tell, what with the rise of the internet and all that new booking technology. “Disruption” they called it, and no one was questioning it yet. Just wide open space to do what you wanted. It meant the offer would only get worse with time, and so, Joseph sold.
The first years after the sale were an extended trip around the world with Annie and the boys. The best hotels in the poshest cities, private museum tours, dining on the most exquisite cuisines prepared by Michelin-starred chefs. But after a few years of that, Annie started getting worried that the boys needed a more stable setting to grow up in, so the Palmers came back to their estate across the river.
Joseph spent a few years involved with local politics, but without an ownership stake in the city, he was always kept at arm’s length. He was invited to parties when the old generation retired, but not when the new generation was introduced. Hobbies bubbled up, but nothing took. The only one that fit the bill was having his driver take him past this old joint whenever he happened to be nearby.
And all of that’s the long way of answering why Joseph Palmer ended up here on the last day of his life.
Now free of his fake mustache, Joseph strolled to the front desk and was greeted by a young woman. Maybe greeting wasn’t the right word, as she largely ignored him. It took three rings of the desk’s bell to rouse her from behind the cover of her paperback.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s really fucking good,” she said.
Things sure had changed around here, Joseph thought. He’d already noticed the desk without its Jack-o-Lantern, something Hoight would never let slide on today of all days. But this casual cursing was an entirely new style of service.
“Anyway, can I help you?” she finally said.
“I’d like a room,” Joseph said. “Something on the 11th floor, if you got it.”
“We probably do, but here’s the deal,” she said, leaning forward with a key card. “We told this party of techies that they got the whole place to themselves. But no one’s paying attention, and frankly we could use the extra bit of dough, so just kinda go along with that if anything weird happens.”
He nodded with a heavy wink.
“Say, is there someone named Hoight who works here?” Joseph asked.
“Who?” she responded.
“What about a fella named Gerald Stroud?” he asked.
“Sure, Gerry,” the clerk said. “He’s around somewhere, but who knows where. Haven’t seen him in a few hours, but I could send him up if he shows.”
“No, no, that’s okay,” Joseph said, and tapped his fingers on the desk as he went through his mental Rolodex. “What about Barbs?”
“Oh sure, through there,” the clerk said. With her fingers she made a mock gun aimed at the wooden door with the anchor carved into it.
“Thanks,” Joseph said, and pushed the bar’s door open.
A few hugs and bourbons later, and Barbs was dishing all the gossip. The place across the way got a sleek new coffee shop. They found another dead guest last week, up in Room 916—he’d suffocated on a damn hot sandwich. And, not surprising or anything, but Stroud was still the same old suck-up to management as he’d always been.
“Whatever do you mean, suck-up to management?” Joseph said, feigning amazement with a casual twinkle in his eye.
Joseph asked about Hoight as the TV in the corner loudly spit analysis about the upcoming presidential election between Obama and McCain.
“A graphic that is surely on everyone’s mind—” the commentator got out before Barbs hit the remote’s mute button.
“Hoight just disappeared one day,” Barbs told him. “One day he was there, one day he wasn’t. Not upstairs in his room or anything. He left everything behind. We never figured it out.”
Joseph sipped his bourbon, considering this strange news.
“People blame new management,” Barbs said with a raised eyebrow. “But honestly, I never heard him complain, even though he had plenty of reasons to.”
She took the rag from her shoulder and silently wiped down the bartop. Barbs said she had to get to her other drunks, so Joseph said goodnight and walked back into the lobby.
One more pass around to see if he was missing any old faces, but none showed. He breathed it all in, remembering how he walked that space as a kid. It seemed so giant back then, its ceilings so tall, the crowds waiting to check in like a whirling hurricane of black coats.
But those days were over now.
The revolving door out front squeaked as the wind battered it from outside. The lobby furniture was not in need of repair as much as full replacement. The grandfather clock ticked, but its time was off.
He walked past the front desk and said goodnight to the clerk, who mumbled back something incoherent. He saw that the dining hall was closed, even at this relatively early hour, and heard the raucous noise from the Halloween party in the Tabor ballroom. He took the elevator up to 11, and the doors opened onto his favorite floor.
Joseph didn’t love this floor because its décor or layout were anything special—just because of its height. One floor above was the penthouse, which was off limits, but through the courtyard-facing windows on the 11th, you got city views augmented by that red rooftop sign he loved so much.
Halfway down the hallway, a storage closet door stood open.
As he approached, Joseph saw that standing inside was a woman in a maid’s outfit. He subtly coughed into his hands and she leaned back to investigate the noise. She was Latina and past middle age, with black hair pulled tightly back into a ponytail, emphasizing her forehead. She held a lit cigarette in her mouth, which she quickly stubbed and tried to dissipate the smoke with frantic waves of her hand.
“Sorry, sorry,” she said. Her name tag read Amber. “Didn’t think we were renting out this floor tonight. Can I help you?”
“Depends?” Joseph asked. “Can I have one of those?”
She reached into her front pocket and took out the pack. They lit up.
“You new here?” he said as he exhaled.
“Not too long,” she said, then began shaking her head. “Wait, that’s not right. Half a decade now. Time kind of runs into itself here.”
“You’re telling me,” Joseph said. “Do you like it here?”
She opened her mouth to say something but thought better and instead took another drag. The orange amber glowed to life as she inhaled. She shrugged off the question again and blew smoke into the hallway.
“Hey, do you mind if I see something?” he asked.
But before she could answer, he’d reached past her to pull on the light in the closet. She stepped to the side, and he reached towards a metal shelf that was stacked with clean white towels. He lifted them up and handed them to her, and leaned forward to examine the wall.
There it was: His spiral. Faint, but still there.
He tapped it with his finger and turned to Amber with a broad smile.
“I carved that,” he said. “Back when I was a kid.”
Amber didn’t know how to react, so she just said “okay.” A silence simmered around them.
Joseph thanked her for sharing her break with him, then walked past and entered his room.
He didn’t know why he’d settled on those spirals. The first one was on the underside of a table in the lobby. He’d rushed to finish carving it before he got caught. There was a strong “fuck you, mom” element to them all, a rebellious streak that, now in retrospect, was likely just a cry for attention. He liked the look anyway though, and so would carve them in whenever he had the chance.
Those were fun times, he thought, standing in his last room.
Joseph took his prewritten note out of his pocket and set it on the desk. He picked up the chair and moved it to the window, watching the red light of the rooftop sign. Its flickers, every few seconds, put him into a sort of trance. He thought about Annie and the boys, then once more about what his diagnosis portended, and then his memories here in this hotel itself as he traced spirals with his fingers on the wood of the windowsill.
At some point Joseph felt it was time. He used the chair to boost himself up to the window ledge, then out onto the fire escape. In the gusting wind he peered out at the windows of the hotel’s other wing; most were dark, only a sporadic few still lit. And then he looked down to the courtyard, bathed in that perfect combination of red and moonlight.
He stepped off the ledge.
The gravity drop turned his stomach into a fluttering quiver, and the wind rushing past made his eyes tear up.
Then he saw a figure a few stories below him, falling too.
It was a woman, that woman in red he’d seen earlier in the lobby. She fell with her back to the ground, facing him. It was almost as if they were dancing in the air.
Joseph waved and thought of how strange of a world it had been. And then he slammed shut his eyes so as not to see the woman’s crumpled and painful landing a moment before his own arrival.
Artwork by Tiffany Silver Braun.
If you like Tales from the Palmer Hotel, tell a friend. If you really like it, the suggested donation for the series is a one-time payment of $6.66. Venmo (@Rick-Paulas) or Paypal (rickpaulas@gmail.com).