20. Stroud's Night Shift.
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The Guts
With his hands folded and resting on the lobby’s front desk, Gerald Stroud’s pockmarked face glared at the grandfather clock as it ticked off the last minutes left on his shift.
He heard the whoosh of the revolving front door as it sucked in the outside air. Another guest to waste his time. He unfolded his hands and ran his long fingers through his full head of black hair as he diverted his attention from the clock.
Through the door came two young kids in ghost costumes, eyeholes torn out of sheets, their chaperoning mother close behind. They each carried a small bucket for their freeloader take. Stroud rolled his eyes at this disturbance.
“Trick or tr—”
“No candy,” Stroud interrupted with a rasp, shooing them away.
The mother audibly gasped and, with a sour expression, collected the pair by their shoulders. She took them out the way they came. Good riddance. Silly tradition for a silly holiday, Stroud thought.
As they spun out the door, they passed another fool walking in: Stroud’s replacement for the night shift, Hoight. He always worked Halloween. He loved it so much that he’d always stick a costume on top of his bellhop uniform. Tonight’s was a cape, slicked back hair, and plastic fangs.
“How’s it going, partner?” Hoight shouted through the lobby, hefting two bags of candy in his arms.
Stroud ignored this and retreated back into the employees’ breakroom, a small space behind the desk with a table, a radio, and a set of lockers. He twisted his combination, collected his bag, and walked back out into the lobby, passing Hoight, who was already pouring his sweets into silver bowls for the approaching horde of precocious candy siphoners.
“Have a blast out there today,” said Hoight with a fanged smile.
“Never do,” Stroud croaked on his way out.
Stroud warmed his hands in the chilly autumn air by cupping them around his mouth. Wisps of cotton puffed out from between his fingers. The howl of an approaching train screeched through the air. Stroud wadded his thumbs into his ears, muffling that grating sound.
He turned the corner and ran a pale, frozen hand along the building’s grainy brick surface. Halfway down was the Palmer’s side door—metal, handleless, flush against the wall.
Old Red had taught him the trick to get in this way. Push really hard and the door, always unlocked as per the fire code, rebounded from its frame just enough that you could fit your fingers into the gap before it closed. Then, you just had to pull and enter back into the ground floor hallway with the twin banks of elevators, away from any inquisitive eyes at the front desk.
Stroud entered and found the hall decorated in fake cobwebs and hanging skeletons. He rolled his eyes at Hoight’s earnest handiwork as he slunk to the double doors of the Tabor ballroom, silently opened one, and slipped inside.
Slowly, Stroud crossed the ballroom’s wooden floor. When he got to the stage, he bent to reach the loose panel on its right side. He slid it open—just enough room for him to dangle his legs inside. He eased himself through, and his feet hit the ground in the dank, mildewed crawlspace. He slid the panel shut behind him.
He reached into his pocket and removed his flashlight; it spilt orange haze onto the concrete. The light caught the glint of a brass ring bolted into a wall. Stroud pulled it.
The slab of concrete opened on a hinge. Stroud stuck his flashlight in his mouth and dropped to his hands and knees. After he passed through the small door, he was able to stand upright again. He brushed the dust and cobwebs from his knees and began to walk.
So began Stroud’s night shift inside the Palmer’s guts.
He’d happened upon this space simply by good fortune. Two weeks after Stroud had gotten the gig years back, he was on an overnight at the front desk when, as is the case with any job, the great expansion of his agreed-upon duties inevitably began. His boss Chet asked him to, if he could, you know, no pressure or anything, sweep up the ballroom, if nothing else was going on up front. Around two in the morning, Stroud had snagged the broom from the maintenance closet and walked in.
As luck would have it, just as he did, Old Red, who was off his shift hours ago, was crawling out from the hidden space under the stage.
“Maybe it’s best if you forget this,” Red had said, wiping dirt from his knees, and walking away. “Not for the meek of heart.”
A few months after that, Stroud had enough information to make his ultimatum. He told Old Red to show him what was under the stage, and if not, perhaps Chet—hell, maybe even Jacqueline Palmer herself—would be interested in a detailed chart of all of Red’s unapproved smoke breaks, and how much that sum might amount to when multiplied by his hourly wage.
So, late one night after all the guests had checked in, Red gave Stroud a tour.
Past the short concrete door was a tall corridor that stretched too far for Red’s flashlight to illuminate. Old Red called it “the guts.” The name had stuck well enough.
They walked forward through this hidden space between the walls; the old man had to shuffle sideways with his bulging stomach, but it was plenty wide enough for Stroud’s sinewy figure. Red clicked off his flashlight. Pinholes of white light projected out from the walls. It looked like a clear night sky dotted with constellations.
“Quiet now,” Red had said. “People are sleeping but that don’t mean they’re dead.”
Stroud stepped up to an eye-level pinhole and leaned forward to peer inside.
A room on the ground floor. A squat man was inside, wearing only a white t-shirt stained with spaghetti sauce. He nodded off in a chair in front of the television.
Stroud remembered checking this man in earlier that evening. He’d been decked out in a tailored suit and an expensive tie, an attractive young woman on his arm. She giggled at his bad jokes and nibbled his ear. He’d seen this man before tonight, too, but couldn’t recall when.
As he snooped, a blast of orange light flashed in the corner of his vision. He pulled back from the pinhole and saw Red at the far end of the corridor, shaking his flashlight, beckoning him on. Stroud left the fat, dozing man behind and walked to Red, who stood where the corridor dead-ended at a brick wall. On it hung a steel ladder.
“Courtyard’s on the other side,” Red had said, rapping his knuckles against the brick. “And the rest of the guts are up there.”
Red aimed his flashlight upward. Stroud followed the light and saw that the ladder stretched up into the hotel’s other floors. Each level was illuminated by a small, oval window on the brick wall, facing into the courtyard, allowing a tunnel of faint moonlight to filter into the hidden space.
“The guts run all through it,” Red had said. “Nothing in here hides from the guts.”
The next day, on his morning shift at the front desk, Stroud checked out the fat man he’d seen nodding off at the TV. He paid his bill and left—and then, Stroud remembered why he looked familiar. He’d come to the hotel a few months back to check on a suicide on the sixth floor. The fat man was a police captain. Volley was his name.
All at once, Stroud was seized by a vision of what was to become his life project.
But this was years ago, before Red disappeared. Nowadays, Stroud had the guts all to himself.
After entering the guts on this Halloween night, Stroud turned into another corridor on the ground floor, in which glowed a wide shaft of light—the one-way mirror Stroud had surreptitiously installed behind the face of the lobby’s grandfather clock.
He walked to it, sat on the stool that he’d placed there, and examined the lobby. On the front desk, the face of a Jack-o-lantern glowed with sharp, grinning teeth. He heard a shuffle of feet, and then saw Hoight leading a group of kids past him to the front desk, presenting each with the bowl of candy to snatch from. When they departed, Hoight returned to his station behind the desk with a smile on his face.
Stroud tucked the flashlight into his armpit as he grabbed a notebook and pen that he’d hung in the corridor by strings. Along with the stools, he’d placed them sporadically throughout the guts. He scrawled a note on a sheet of paper that was already filled with them.
October 31st, 1968 / Hoight dressed & acting like a child.
He set the notebook against the wall, but when he did, his flashlight came untucked and fell to the floor. It snapped on at impact, and bright white light filled the corridor.
Stroud fell to his knees and scrambled in the dust, his hands finding the light, frantically switching it off. He stayed perfectly still for a moment, modulating his breath. He stood hesitantly, peeked through the one-way mirror, and saw Hoight still behind the desk, undisturbed. Stroud allowed himself to let out a slight sigh of relief.
He left the lobby peephole, returned down the main corridor, then climbed up the steel ladder to the fourth floor. He walked to the pinhole into Room 419, sat on a stool, and peered inside.
The guest was “Mrs. Beverly Clauson” on the registry, but he knew better. She was disguised with a grey wig and thick bifocals, but those didn’t hide the deep brown mole on her left temple. Her real name was Rita Wurtz, a senator’s wife, and through the pinhole he watched her shoulder-length blonde hair thrash as she straddled some as-yet-unknown party.
Stroud removed his eye from the pinhole. He never liked this part, glimpsing how grotesque and animalistic humans became when they believed that no one was watching. After their grunts collapsed into exhaustion, he looked into the pinhole again.
Mrs. Wurtz and her partner reclined in bed, sharing a cigarette. Stroud noted his description. Brown hair. Short. Muscular shoulders. A tattoo on the left bicep. When the man retrieved his glasses and put them on, it clicked. Stroud crossed out his descriptions and wrote down “Jeff Gregorian.” The DA.
He let the notebook dangle from the wall and moved on.
Room 839. Checked in here was Sam Alston, one of the city’s power brokers. His exact position and credentials were unclear, but he had his hands in any number of city investments. The room’s bed was empty. Then, Alston came into view, wearing black trousers and an unbuttoned white collared shirt, carrying a hotel towel. He folded the towel and set it on the carpet, then opened the bag on his bed and took out a leather cat o’ nine tails.
Alston then let his shirt fall from his shoulders; Stroud saw a grouping of red, swollen slashes across his back. He fell to his knees on the towel and began lashing himself. The third one drew blood. Stroud made another note and left.
As the night drew on, Stroud continued his rounds, checking in on his known marks, peering into random pinholes to see if any strangers had something new to offer. Perhaps his observations would come in handy someday; if they did, he couldn’t imagine when, if ever. But the duty he felt to his work was more than purely mercenary; in large part, it was simply about the act of collection.
One by one the pinholes began to blink out as the Palmer’s guests went to sleep. Stroud climbed down to the second floor, where Emily was staying again. He peered into the pinhole and watched the bedsheets rise and fall with her breath. And there he stayed, enraptured, until the first rays of sunlight came in through her window.
When there was light enough to see, he pulled the dangling notebook over to him, flipped to the correct page, and lost himself in shading his lovingly rendered sketch of Emily’s prone and distant form.
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).