Winter at Death's Hotel by Kenneth Cameron Page A

carriage. Everybody’s out of the way?”
    â€œAll o’ them. The body’s been pulled out.”
    â€œI want you to go ahead of us and make absolutely sure nobody will see him. Harding’s an eminent man.”
    Cleary went off into the building, and Roosevelt did an about-face and marched back to his carriage and opened its door. Seconds later, a man stepped down, but he kept his shoulders hunched and his hat slightly raised and tipped so that it masked his face. The two men raced across the pavement, Roosevelt even faster than the other so that he could open the mortuary door.
    They went through, then moved along a tiled corridor whose overhead electric bulbs seemed less to drive the dark away than to dilute it into some kind of gray-green soup. Both encountered, but neither acknowledged, a smell that was the odor of death: chemicals, rot. Roosevelt led the way toward Cleary, who waited at the far end; when they got close, Cleary vanished to their right. They followed; there was Cleary, holding a door; again he vanished; they hurried to the door, found a stairwell, Cleary at the bottom.
    In the cellar, Cleary pointed at a chipped metal door.
    The two men went through. On the other side was an enormous room with an arched ceiling. Seemingly far away, like something on a stage whose perspective has been manipulated, a table was covered with a white cloth whose undulations suggested a mountain range shaped like a female body.
    Roosevelt led. Behind him, the other, no longer trying to hide his face, had straightened and revealed himself as a man of sixty or so with a deeply lined face and not much hair. Roosevelt reached the table. He grabbed a corner of the white cloth and, as if brutality were required, twitched it off so that a woman was revealed from her copper-colored hair down to the tops of her breasts.
    The other man looked and then bit his lip and nodded.
    Roosevelt left him alone with the body and went back up the huge room and into the corridor, where he found Cleary. He said, “This is never to come out. Can you handle it?”
    â€œThere has to be an investigation.”
    â€œWe’ll leave it that an unidentified woman of the streets was murdered. It will be an unsolved case.”
    Cleary was not stupid. He was not foolish, either. “Are you ordering me to end the investigation, Mr. Roosevelt?”
    â€œI’m ordering you to keep the identity of the woman and of her husband out of the public record. Can you do that?”
    The two men looked into each other’s eyes for several seconds. Cleary said, “I guess I can. I just hope you appreciate what I’m doing here, sir.”
    Roosevelt stared at him some more. “Mr. Harding will be grateful for your help.”
    Cleary gave the faintest of smiles. “That’s all any man could ask, isn’t it?”
    ***
    The departure from the hotel next morning was nerve-racking and mostly unpleasant, everything ready to go wrong, Arthur in the deep gloom he always fell into when he had to get somewhere on time. Worse, he grumbled that it was Sunday and they hadn’t time to go to church. Louisa pointed out that they often didn’t go to church at home. He said she was being “light.”
    Ethel had been put in charge of the luggage and had commandeered two boys; they had immediately mixed everything up, grabbing the smallest things first and marching off with them, although the smallest (and most female) things were the very ones that Ethel and Louisa had meant to carry themselves so they wouldn’t get left behind.
    â€œWhere’s my satchel with my manuscripts?” Arthur demanded halfway through the hurly-burly that was moving them out of the suite and down to the lobby.
    â€œOh, I’m sure the boys have taken it already, dear.”
    â€œI didn’t see it go! If I arrive in Buffalo without that satchel, I’ll be finished! Cooked! Plucked and boiled!”
    Louisa ran into the