Keep the Baby, Faith Read online

  The desk clerk was a young Korean version of the Great Gildersleeve. He did not say “Nyaaaass?” but he did demand everything short of a birth certificate and a loyalty oath before parting with any information. What he told me was that none of the Letrons was in. He wouldn’t tell me what room they were out of.

  “The Guests, after all,” he said, with one of the best Hollywood-British accents I’ve ever heard, “pay a premium for service and privacy.” He pronounced it “privvacy.”

  It was all very commendable, and I told him so. There was a whole lot of other stuff I would have liked to tell him, but I held it in. I was crippled by the code of The Grayness. Remember all those great old newspaper movies they used to make? Where reporters would go undercover to expose wrongdoing, grease the wheels of the great machine of public information with a few judiciously applied bucks, and in the end, wind up duking it out with the bad guys and handing them over to the cops?

  Well, forget it. The code of The Grayness fixes it so that the only fun a reporter can have is when one of the people he exposes (usually by printing stolen documents provided by the victim’s jealous colleague) resigns or commits suicide. The code of The Grayness forbids: (a) paying anybody money for information under any circumstances; (b) using a false name; (c) using a false occupation; (d) using in a story any material you got from anybody who did not know you were a reporter for The Grayness. This is supposed to protect the Sacred Honor of The Grayness, but what it does, of course, is turn the reporters into fences for stolen documents. It also provides more evidence for the theory that movies are infinitely superior to real life.

  Even I (as I was given to understand the day The Grayness bestowed upon me the honor of allowing me to do its TV listings) was bound by the code. A violation, like if I pretended to be Ronald Reagan and called a station to ask if one of my old movies was on tonight, would be cause for instant dismissal. Yes, I know I hated the job. That didn’t mean I wanted to be fired. Looks bad on the resume.

  I did the only thing I could do. I told a lie not covered by the code. “Are you sure they’re not in?” I said. I raised an eyebrow when I said it. It takes a snob to deal with a snob.

  “Quite sure,” he said.

  “Then why are there no keys in their box? Surely people as important as this would want their messages taken while they are out.”

  The desk clerk looked at me as if he suspected I was some sort of venomous insect. Then he looked in the box. The box positively rattled with keys, and I was suitably embarrassed. I gave him my Harvard apology—the one that implied that it was your fault, you swine, you were out to make me look like a fool, and it’s only my impeccable breeding that keeps me from thrashing you within an inch of your worthless and undoubtedly illegitimate life.

  The good news was that I now knew what room they were in. The Imperial Suite, twelfth floor.

  Then I had to decide what I should do next. I had lots of exciting ideas, most of them so underhanded that The Grayness had never even thought to forbid them. I could sneak up the service stairs. Pick the lock of the suite. Check the garbage cans for stuff. Torn-up pictures of babies. Bloodstained rent-a-car contracts. Like that.

  Sanity, however, prevailed over my sense of fun. I had to put things in perspective. Faith could be married to Paul Letron and still be crazy. Or even misled by a series of nasty coincidences. I wanted to talk to these people, size them up. The last thing I wanted to do was get them paranoid by running around letting all the hotel employees know I was interested. No. I take it back. The last thing I wanted was to be caught tossing the suite of the family of a millionaire financier. Let’s be honest here—I was new at this, and more than a little nervous about what I might be getting into.

  I decided to wait for them, at least for a little while. If they were shopping (which was a good bet in this neighborhood), they could well be back soon. Also, the Korean Gildersleeve would undoubtedly tell them some maniac had been asking about them; it would be a good idea to get in there with my explanation as soon as possible.

  It would help, of course, if I knew what they looked like. I called my apartment. Sue answered. I asked how they were doing.

  Sue said, “Great, we’re making bread pudding.”

  “How’s Faith getting along?”

  “Fine. Pretty amazing stuff, isn’t it?” Faith would hear that and think Sue was talking about bread pudding.

  “Amazing, but at least partially true.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Let me talk to Faith.”

  Sue put her on. I told her I’d been to the paper.

  “And?”

  “And it checks out. I do not apologize for doubting you, but I’m not surprised you think I should. Can we leave it that I’m glad the doubts were wrong, and be friends again?”

  “We were always friends.”

  “Good. Describe your in-laws for me.”

  She wanted to know why, but I said I’d tell her later. We must have been friends. She bought it right away, and gave me five thumbnail sketches. I thanked her, told her to save me some of the pudding, and hung up. Then I tightened The Grayness’s financial hold on me by making two credit-card phone calls to Europe. After that, I went to the Westbrook’s famous Willow Room, where I sat at a marble-topped table facing the door and waited for the Letrons to show up.

  I drank tea and ate crumpets with lemon curd while I waited, paying a fortune for them. Something I discovered during my junior year abroad is that the stuff Americans imagine the British Aristocracy eating while they run around the house in tuxedos, is actually consumed for breakfast at the kitchen table by guys in torn sweaters who need a shave. They eat it because it’s cheap.

  Nothing could be cheap at the Westbrook, of course, or even economical, but at least it was good.

  Good timing, too. I was just finishing up the second cup of tea (the Westbrook serves you in a two-cup pot) when a few bells went off, and three bellhops hastened to the brass-and-glass front door to aid the doorman with some packages. When the door swung open, I could see a driver in the discreetest possible gray pop out of a Rolls-Royce much the same color, and dash around opening doors.

  The car disgorged a strikingly handsome woman with silver-streaked black hair and three blonds, two men and a woman with the tall, cool good looks of a Candice Bergen. Not all the tall, cool good looks of a Candice Bergen—she was no movie star, or anything. She would, however, do, until one came along.

  This had to be Lucille, the wife of Paul’s half brother Robert. Robert himself was not among us, it seemed, unless he had shaved off the golden beard Faith had told me about. That seemed unlikely, though. Like many fair-haired men, Robert had had to wait the best part of nine months before the growth on his face looked like a beard rather than a skin disease, and he had taken ceaseless teasing from his wife and siblings (Paul always excepted, according to Faith) while he was waiting.

  So, assuming someone who put up with that kind of crap to grow a beard would keep it around awhile before he got rid of it, I assumed the two blond young men were Louis (twenty-seven) and Peter (twenty-two), Alma’s sons by Paul’s father.

  I must admit they were impressive. The young people (Lucille, I had been surprised to find out, was younger than I was, and the missing Robert was only thirty), tall and clean and golden the way they were, looked like nothing so much as a bunch of Thais, those incredibly virtuous and beautiful characters from “Doctor Who,” who managed to evolve on the same planet as the disgustingly evil Daleks.

  Alma looked like Circe, although from the way she skewered a bellhop with her eye when he jostled a package, she wasn’t the type to be content merely to turn men into swine. She’d turn them into porc à la Boulangère, and then eat them.

  Grandly, they turned their backs on the hired help struggling under the weight of their purchases, and walked grandly into the elevator. The interesting thing about the whole process was the fact that none of them made the slightest noise—they seemed to glide across
the carpet (a Dalek trait, actually), and they never uttered a sound. All the way across the vast Westbrook lobby, their lips never parted. It was as if they were walking around with mouthfuls of liquid gold, and they didn’t want to spill a drop.

  I would have to find some way to make them change their minds about that.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I SPENT THE TRIP up in the elevator concocting elaborate plans to get the Letrons to let me inside their suite. I wasn’t, after all, a cop or anything. And it could be safely inferred from what Herbert Helverson had told me that Faith’s in-laws (her real, honest-to-God in-laws, I had to keep telling myself) were a little shy around reporters. But I had to talk to them. Somebody had to, and there were two reasons I didn’t think trying to persuade a cop to do it would be a good idea. One, Faith had already tried it, with no success, and two, while I might be able to get a more respectful response from the police with the awe and might of The Grayness behind me and the evidence that at least part of Faith’s story was true, I just plain didn’t want to.

  I think I was concentrating on ways to get the door open in an unsuccessful attempt to keep from speculating about the reasons I didn’t want to. Could it be I didn’t like the idea of my sister’s best friend married to a hundred-millionaire? Did Faith’s admission that she’d once had a crush on me awaken some unholy and previously unadmitted passion a teenaged Harry Ross had conceived for the sub-teen Faith Sidon all those years ago? Or was it something else, like a recurrence of journalistic ambition, stifled (I thought) since I had gotten such an intimate knowledge of how the working press worked?

  This was, let’s not kid anybody, one hot story. Herbert Helverson had shown me that. I had left him wiping drool spots from his terminal just at the idea that I had met and spoken to someone who’d even seen Paul Letron since the big disappearance. Could I be looking at this situation, not as a way to help an old friend, but as my ticket off the TV listings and on to better things?

  I decided it was just that after a lifetime of mystery stories and science fiction and swashbucklers, I was in this for the adventure. Besides, there was nothing to say the cops wouldn’t laugh at me, too. In the current state of my life, I didn’t need cops (or anybody) laughing at me.

  Despite all this, or maybe because of it, by the time I walked up to the door, I still had no idea how I was going to get inside.

  It turned out to be just as well I didn’t show up at the door carrying a pizza, or ring the bell (the rooms had doorbells at the Westbrook) and announce Avon Calling. For want of a better idea, I simply pressed the button. I heard chimes from inside the suite, then the sound of a peephole cover being slid back (rooms at the Westbrook also had peepholes in the doors). A soft, low, throaty voice said, “Yes?” The owner of the voice had undoubtedly intended it to sound sexy, and hadn’t entirely failed. The only thing undecided was what sex.

  I said, “Good afternoon. My name is Ross. I’d like to come in and talk with you for a few moments.” I put a rising inflection on the end of the sentence, enough to remove the curse of making a demand, but not enough to make an actual request out of it. The idea was to convince everyone concerned, including myself, that I actually had a right to be here.

  “I’m afraid—” the voice began. I was trying to decide which of the men or women I’d seen downstairs was the owner of the voice. Whoever it was, it sounded amused, maybe a little tipsy.

  I didn’t give it a chance to tell me what it was afraid of. Still polite, I added, “It’s about Faith.”

  “I wasn’t aware they let Jehovah’s Witnesses solicit in the Westbrook.”

  I raised an eyebrow. It took me hours in front of a mirror when I was a kid to learn how to do that, so I hoped the owner of the voice could see it through the peephole. I can also pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time.

  “Faith Letron,” I said. “The former Faith Sidon. The wife,” I added, “of Paul Letron.”

  “Oh,” the voice said. “The Waif. Just a second.”

  The peephole clapped shut, and I could hear the oiled click of locks and the dull rattle of a chain bolt.

  It occurred to me after my previous mental gymnastics that the whole process was easier than it should have been. I mean, they didn’t even ask me what about her. I had accomplished a lot for just one raised eyebrow. I was still okay as far as the Code of The Grayness went, because I hadn’t asked anything that would produce an answer that might be published.

  The hardware noises stopped, followed by a silence that took considerably longer than a second. It took longer than the entire conversation through the door had.

  I had just about concluded that they beat it down the fire escape. I decided this was a good thing, since flight is evidence of guilt. At least I thought it was. Perry Mason always said it was. My mother always says I should have gone to law school (like every time I complain about The Grayness), and for the first time, I was beginning to see some merit in her arguments.

  Before I could get this one completely worked out, the door swung open, and I walked in on what looked like a hastily called convention. The room was rich and dark, like something on the ground floor of a Victorian mansion instead of something near the top of a pile of Manhattan concrete. It was paneled in oak, and the furniture (which consisted of either genuine antiques or damned good reproductions) was upholstered in a subdued blue. The fabric wasn’t actually worn, just old enough to avoid looking as if someone actually intended it to be used in a hotel.

  The ceiling was probably fourteen feet high, with decorations. It wasn’t the Sistine Chapel or anything, just carvings of grapes and the occasional faun. The kind of job that fed an immigrant woodcarver’s family for a month or two back around the turn of the century.

  Faith had told me that her husband’s family never stayed at the Westbrook for more than a few days, while the staff at the main house in Connecticut got the place ready for occupancy. Faith had never stayed at the Connecticut place herself, but she’d gotten the impression from the way Paul talked about it that it made the château outside Paris look like a shack.

  I wondered how much per day it cost to rent this suite. And I wondered at the kind of mentality that could spend that kind of money (it had to be astronomical, whatever it was) just to keep a roof overhead for a few days while you waited to get back to your mansion.

  I tried to imagine the kind of people who’d seem natural in a place like this. Arab oil sheikhs. Royalty. People with names like Cadwallader St. Buffington III. It occurred to me that the one thing they had in common was the fact that none of them earned money for themselves. That must make a difference. Even if I become rich, so rich I can buy The Grayness itself, I don’t think I really see myself deliberately staying in a suite like this. That’s not to say I won’t develop a letch for carved oak walls and ceilings, or something equally extravagant. One of the nice things about having a lot of money, I deduce on the basis of the amount I already do make, is being able to work up an enthusiasm for buying things you don’t really need. But I doubt I’ll ever get so attached that I’ll have to rent the stuff during the few days I’m between houses and out of touch with my own.

  Of course, as far as I’m concerned, if I can’t be home with my books and my tapes, I’d just as soon be in a Holiday Inn, where I know there’s a good TV in the room and the showers are hot. I had no right to judge the Letrons by my own disgustingly bourgeois standards. Anyway, by the criterion I’d just established, these people did belong here. It was Paul Letron and his father who’d done all the earning. Faith didn’t like them, but all my actions today were based on the possibility that Faith could be some kind of paranoid nut. I certainly didn’t want to let Faith’s attitude prejudice me. For all I knew, the Letrons were perfectly nice people.

  From the looks on their faces, though, the odds were against it.

  “What has The Waif to say?” It was the owner of the voice. Lucille, this was, the younger of the two women I’d seen downstairs; tall, blond, high chee
kbones. The look explained the voice, or at least went with it. Lucille had been exposed to a lot of old movies, apparently, and had decided at an early age to be Lizabeth Scott, or if she got lucky, Tallulah Bankhead. I wasn’t surprised to see the full makeup at three o’clock in the afternoon, or the high heels, or the shiny gray silk dress. I wondered where the foot-long cigarette holder was.

  She was certainly looking me over the way a movie siren would. Slowly, with no shame. She kept looking at my hair. Aside from a little premature gray at the temples, there is nothing special about my hair. It began to get on my nerves.

  Everything about her began to get on my nerves. The crooked little amused smile she gave me, the dirty chuckle in her voice when she asked me to come in. Everything about her seemed to say “Let’s see what you can offer in the way of amusement.” She was the kind of woman to whom a man develops an irresistible urge to teach a thing or two. I keep running into them. I don’t think I’ve managed to teach them much.

  “The Waif?” I said.

  “That’s what we call her.” Lucille Letron told me her name, then sat on a gilt chair composed primarily of circles and curlicues. It suited her, but it seemed too fragile to support even her slender weight. “It’s more or less a joke. Isn’t it, Louis?”

  He’d just entered the room. Louis Letron, according to Faith, could be charming, practically irresistible. He worked (when he could be persuaded to work) for the family business, training sales personnel. Paul had always said he did a very good job, but that he could do one of the best, if he would only devote as much energy to the business as he did pursuing his hobby. Paul had never told Faith what Louis’s hobby was, but it didn’t take her long to figure it out for herself. It was dark-skinned women—Oriental, Hispanic, African, Arabic, good sun tan, it didn’t seem to matter. As long as she was beautiful, intelligent, and dark, there was no limit to the amount of time, money, and effort he would spend to get her into bed with him, presumably because he liked the contrast. Then, he’d lose interest, until another caught his eye.