16. Natalie Cleans Up.
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Room 155
Natalie closed her eyes and retreated into her own thoughts as she always did at this point during the date. Facing away made it easier.
She calculated how many more dates she’d have to go on. There was the tuition fee, but also those heavy books at marked-up prices. Sure, you could sell them back at the end of the semester, but for like a tenth of the cost. What a great scam, she thought. And then there were the expenses of moving across the country, and rent and food for the four years that she wouldn’t be working. At least not as much as she was now.
“Maybe once or twice a week, just for walking around money,” she thought, before Mr. Opal dragged her from her mental cocoon by digging his nails deeply into the fat of her hips.
She slowed her grinding for a moment to give him the benefit of the doubt. Mr. Opal didn’t seem like one to get rough, let alone do something that’d leave a mark. She had him marked as more the older, gentle type with a nice slow, steady rhythm before that tiny little pop at the end. She hadn’t been wrong before, but she knew that first mistake was always looming just around the corner.
His nails kept digging into her hip. Like he was trying to draw blood.
“Stop,” she said, and grabbed both his wrists.
He kept squeezing.
Natalie shifted her weight and adjusted her knees so that they dug directly into his shins. It was a self-defense move a friend had taught her. She twisted into a spin and out of his grasp with such force that she fell off the bed onto the hotel room carpet. She quickly stood up in a defensive stance, naked and still on the clock.
“What the fuck, man?” she said.
Then she saw the strange look in his wide brown eyes.
They ignored her completely and focused entirely on the darkness outside the window.
His lip was quivering, his eyes wide and filled with tears. His hips still thrust the air, as if he was stuck in some loop of horniness, so his condom-wrapped dick flopped against his thigh like a fish dying on the deck of a boat.
“Woman,” he whispered. “Falling.”
Natalie walked to the window and, remembering that she was naked, draped the white curtain across her body as she scanned the Palmer’s courtyard. Only the red light from the roof and the white shining up from the dining hall. No woman, no body lying on the ground. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she turned back to her customer.
Mr. Opal’s face had a new look to it. A contorted smile. A strange clarity. She’d seen this look once before, and with that as her only frame of reference, a hot flash shot up through her as she ran over to him.
“Fuck!” she said. “Are you fucking dying on me!”
“Woman,” he hissed. “Falling.”
He grabbed the side of his neck and tipped off the bed. She heard the crack of his skull against the sharp corner of the bedside table; jolted by his weight, it toppled over. The lamp fell to the ground and its shade twisted off. The exposed white bulb spilled bright and strange new shadows onto the ceiling.
“Fuck!” she said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Natalie ran around the bed and he was face down on the carpet. She grabbed Mr. Opal’s black trousers from the floor and crumpled them into a ball. She went to her knees and spun him over, prepared to apply pressure to the surely gaping wound. When she flipped him over, his eyes were closed, but it didn’t seem bad other than the odd indentation in the center of his forehead.
Then all at once, as if someone had turned on a faucet, blood flowed down his face.
“Fuck!” she said, her tone reaching a new register.
She bunched the trousers onto the gash to fight the gusher.
“You’re going to be fine, Mr. Opal,” she said for some reason.
She waited a moment then slowly peeled back the soaked clump. The hemorrhage was now at a manageable trickle. But beyond that, there was no response from him. Only the heavy, soggy limpness of flesh and bone.
“Mr. Opal?” she asked.
She slapped his cheek and the cut on his forehead gushed another spurt of blood down his right eye. Still, no response. She slapped him again, harder this time.
His left eye popped open.
There was awareness in the eye, and frustration. It said that despite all those years of preparation and organization, none of them ended up mattering to him at all. It said that this was how it was going to end, and there was an awe in knowing that truth.
“Chloe,” he managed.
It was the name she gave anyone who was roughly twice her age. Something unique, but more than that, a name that wasn’t likely to ruin the mood by being the same as their mother or daughter.
Mr. Opal’s open left eye shifted from Natalie’s face and looked again out the window, then shut for good. She felt his wrist, and his pulse slowed and stopped.
Natalie exhaled and reclined against the edge of the bed. She stretched her foot out and used her toes to retrieve her black dress. She wore it whenever she worked The Anchor. She used to think it was good luck.
She wrapped it around her shoulders and sat at the desk to consider the angles.
There was plenty of evidence that wouldn’t put her on the hook for any kind of manslaughter charge. But still, she’d be questioned, and with that interrogation came the inevitable questions. How she knew Mr. Opal, or whatever his real name ended up being? What was she doing in The Anchor? What was this wad of bills in her purse? And, anyway, what was it specifically that she did for a living?
Natalie thought about who’d seen them together. Barbs the bartender—she was always good to keep her mouth shut—as was Hoight, the bellhop. Beyond that, just a few random strangers in the lobby. That clinched the decision for her.
She put on her dress and took a moment in front of the mirror to press an errant strand of hair back into place. She wiped off her smeared lipstick, strapped on her high heels, shouldered her purse, and went to the door. She gave Mr. Opal’s still body one last look, made the sign of the cross for his journey to the other side and for her own good luck, then walked out.
Two steps down the hallway, she remembered the conversation she’d with Mr. Opal in The Anchor’s corner booth.
“Our family tradition was always that you handed the old car off to the new generation on their sweet sixteenth,” he’d told the woman he knew as Chloe. “What Sally doesn’t know is that I got a different one all picked out for her.”
He had reached into his back pocket and pulled out an old washed-out photo of a yellow Mustang. A mustachioed man was sitting inside with a grin, waving at the photographer.
“That’s me as a teenager,” Mr. Opal had told her. “It took me forever to track it down, but I finally found it here in the city. Made an offer, and when they hesitated, I tripled it. Having it looked over. New tires, new steering, the works. Just in time for Sally’s birthday on Sunday.”
She had seen a little twinge in his eye, the kind that precedes teardrops, before he blinked it away and stuffed the photo back into his pocket.
In the Palmer’s first floor hallway, Natalie spun around and ran back to the door.
She jammed it open with her high heel just before it shut and locked her out. Inside, she slipped off her heels and walked to the bathroom sink. She turned on the faucet, waited a moment for the water to warm, and soaked a towel.
She returned to Mr. Opal’s body and, with the warm towel, pulled off the still-slick condom. She wiped down the rest of the area to remove any trace of her presence, then wrapped up the discards and stuffed them into her purse. She examined the room again and saw gold glinting from the carpet. Mr. Opal had set his wedding ring on the bedside table before they began.
She picked it up and squeezed it back onto his clammy ring finger. That’s when she noticed the metal grate on the wall behind where the bedside table had been. There was a faint mark on a corner. She dropped to her hands and knees to take a closer look.
In the grate’s corner was a small rust-colored shape. A spiral. Someone must have etched the symbol into it years ago.
She extended a finger to trace it, and when she touched it, the grate shifted off the bolts that held it in place and swung down freely against the wall with a loud screech.
Natalie peered into the dark opening.
There was a bag. Bulging and brown. Covered in cobwebs. Looked like it had been there for decades.
Natalie reached inside and pulled it out. Sitting against the wall, she slowly unzipped it.
When she pulled it open to look inside, her eyes glowed at the find. She realized then that Mr. Opal was going to be her last date for a nice long while.
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).