Creepers

  As a bitter smell escaped from the interior, five helmet lights and flashlights blazed on the contents.

  No one moved.

  “I feel like I’m going to be sick,” Cora said. “What am I looking at?”

  The suitcase was filled with fur. A mummified torso and head. Paws. Hands.

  “My God, is it human?” Vinnie asked. “A child wrapped in—”

  “A monkey,” Balenger said. “I think it’s a monkey.”

  “Yeah, welcome to Wild Kingdom.”

  “Why would anybody…do you think somebody put it in there, locked the suitcase, and smothered it?” Rick said.

  “Or maybe it was already dead,” the professor suggested.

  “And somebody was carrying it around for old times’ sake?” Cora raised her hands. “This is one of the sickest things I’ve ever—”

  “Maybe it was a pet and somebody tried to smuggle it into the hotel. But it suffocated before the owner could let it out.”

  “Sick,” Cora said. “Sick, sick, sick. If it was such a prized pet, why didn’t the owner take it out of here and bury it?”

  “Perhaps the owner was overcome with grief,” Balenger said.

  “Then why lock the suitcase before leaving?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have an explanation for that,” Balenger said. “In my experience, all the human-interest articles I’ve written, people are more crazy than they’re sane.”

  “Well, this is crazy, all right.”

  Balenger reached into the suitcase.

  “You’re going to touch it?” Vinnie said.

  “I’m wearing gloves.” Balenger nudged the carcass, which felt disturbingly light. The fur scratched along the bottom of the suitcase as he moved it. He found a rubber ball with flecks of red paint on it.

  Noticing a flap on the inside of the suitcase’s lid, he looked inside. “Here’s an envelope.”

  The paper was yellow with age. He opened it and found a faded black-and-white photograph that showed a man and woman of around forty. They leaned against the railing of a boardwalk. It stretched to the right while the ocean extended behind them. Presumably, the boardwalk was Asbury Park’s. Balenger thought he recognized the shape of the casino at the end. The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt, squinted from the sun, and looked to be in emotional pain. The woman wore a frilly dress and smiled desperately. Each wore a wedding ring. They had a monkey between them. It held a ball that looked like the one in the suitcase. It grinned and reached toward the camera as if the photographer were holding up a banana.

  Balenger turned the photograph over. “There’s a film-processing date. 1965.” He looked closer at the envelope. “Something else is in here.” He removed a yellowed newspaper clipping. “An obituary. August 22, 1966. A man named Harold Bauman, aged forty-one, died from a brain embolism. An ex-wife named Edna survived him.”

  “‘Ex’?” Rick asked.

  Balenger used his flashlight to study a name tag on the suitcase. “Edna Bauman. Trenton, New Jersey.” He took another look at the photograph. “They have wedding rings in 1965. Within a year, they divorced, and the ex-husband—what’s his name? Harold?—died.”

  “A portrait of despair,” Vinnie said. His camera flashed.

  “Shut the suitcase,” Cora demanded. “Lock it. Put it back where it was on the pillows. We shouldn’t have disturbed it. Let’s get out of this room and close the damned door.”

  “Reminds me of what I said back at the motel.” Vinnie lowered his camera. “Some buildings make the past so vivid, it’s like they’re batteries. They’ve stored the energy of everything that happened in them. Then they leak that energy, like the emotion coming from that suitcase.”

  “Rick?” Cora asked suddenly, continuing to rub her arms.

  “What?”

  “Do me a favor. Go into the bathroom.”

  “The bathroom? What on earth for?”

  “Go in there, and look in the bathtub. Make sure there’s not another body in here, someone who slit her wrists or took pills or…”

  Rick studied her, then touched her hand. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

  Balenger watched Rick guide his light back the way they’d come, to the bathroom. The young man went in. A silence lengthened, broken by the scrape of hooks on a shower-curtain rod.

  “Rick?” Cora asked.

  He remained silent a moment longer.

  “Nothing,” he finally answered. “Empty.”

  “Thank God. Sorry, everybody,” Cora said. “I’m embarrassed that I let my emotions get carried away. When I was a kid, I had a cat that disappeared just before my family moved from Omaha to Buffalo. Her name was Sandy. She used to spend most of the day sleeping on my bed. The day we moved, I looked everywhere for her. After several hours, my dad said we needed to get in the car and leave. We had two days of driving ahead of us, and he said we couldn’t waste any more time—he had a new job in Buffalo and couldn’t arrive late. He asked the neighbors to look for Sandy and let us know if they found her. He promised he’d pay them to send the cat to us. Two weeks later, when I was unpacking some of my toys, I found Sandy in a box she’d crawled into. She was dead. You wouldn’t believe how dried out her body was. She suffocated in what my dad said would have been the hundred-and-twenty-degree heat that accumulated in the moving van. A month later, my parents told me they were getting a divorce.” Cora paused. “When I saw that dead monkey in the suitcase…I don’t mean to be a…I promise I won’t get upset again.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Vinnie said. “My imagination got carried away, too. I wish I hadn’t brought us in here.”

  Cora smiled. “Always a gentleman.”

  Outside, after everyone left the room, Vinnie closed the door. Balenger stood across from the group, his headlamp showing Vinnie and Rick next to each other. Vinnie was thin, with slightly rounded shoulders and pleasant but soft features, while Rick had an athlete’s solid build and was outright handsome. All things being equal, it was easy to see why Cora had chosen the latter, Balenger thought. It was also easy to see that Vinnie still cared for her. That was no doubt one of the reasons he went on expeditions with them.

  As Vinnie and the professor looked toward Cora, Rick stroked her shoulder. He was clearly bothered about what had happened in the room. In the harsh lights, his face was stark, his eyes now darting toward the door.

  “The photograph appears to have been taken on the boardwalk outside.” Rick’s voice was tight as he tried to express what troubled him. “I wonder if the woman came back here to try to revive better memories. The likely time for her to do that would have been while her grief was strongest, right after her ex-husband’s death, not a couple of years later when she wasn’t in as much shock.”

  “A reasonable assumption,” the professor said.

  “So let’s say 1966, or 1967 at the latest.”

  “Again, that’s reasonable.”

  “Carlisle died in 1971. The suitcase sat on that bed at least four years prior to that. Professor, you said Carlisle had peepholes and hidden corridors that allowed him to see what his guests were doing in private. He must have known about the suitcase. Why the hell didn’t he do something?”

  “Have it removed? I don’t know. Maybe he liked the idea of gradually shutting down the hotel, leaving each room the way it was when its final guest checked out, wanting every room to have a memento that he could visit.”

  “What a wacko nutjob,” Vinnie said.

  “Yeah, we’ve come a long way from calling him a visionary and a genius.” Rick’s face remained stark. “How many other rooms have stories to tell?”

  Vinnie moved toward a door farther along. He tested the knob, pushed the door open, and stalked into blackness, the door banging against the interior wall, the noise reverberating.

  The others followed, Cora reluctantly. Balenger heard drawers being opened and closed.

  “Nothing,” Vinnie said, his light probing the room. “The bed’s made. Everything’s tidy. Apa
rt from the dust, the place looks ready for its next guest. Nothing in the drawers, not even the customary Bible. Hotel toiletries on the bathroom counter, but nothing else, and nothing in the waste cans. Towels on a rack next to the shower. Everything the way it should be, except for this.”

  Vinnie opened the closet doors wider and showed them a Burberry raincoat, its wide lapels drooping, its tan belt dangling. “Back then, these things were a status symbol even more than they are now. Dustin Hoffman talks about how much he wants one but can’t afford it in Kramer vs. Kramer. Okay, that movie’s more recent than when the hotel closed, but the point’s the same. Burberrys were exclusive and damned expensive. So why would somebody not take this?”

  “An oversight,” the professor suggested. “We’ve all forgotten something when we’re traveling. It happens.”

  “But this isn’t a pair of socks or a T-shirt. This is a very desirable overcoat. Why didn’t the owner phone the hotel and ask a staff member to look for it?”

  “You’ve got a point.” Rick looked troubled. “But I’m not sure where you’re going with it.”

  “What if Carlisle arranged for the owner to be told that the Burberry wasn’t here? What if Carlisle made the owner think he’d lost it someplace else?” Vinnie suggested.

  After Vinnie took a photograph of the coat, they left the room. On the balcony, it was now Rick who went to the next door. It too wasn’t locked. He pushed it open. “For the love of…”

  The group followed. The room was a mess: a pile of used towels on the bathroom floor, the wastebasket full, the bed unmade, sheets rumpled, bedspread thrown aside, a full ashtray on the nightstand, a glass and an empty bottle of whiskey next to it.

  “I guess it was the maid’s day off,” Balenger said.

  The professor read the bottle’s label. “Black Diamond bourbon. Never heard of it. Must have gone out of business a long time ago.”

  Vinnie used a gloved hand to lift a cigarette butt from the ashtray. “A Camel. Unfiltered. Remember how people used to smoke all the time, how awful hotel rooms smelled?”

  “Well, this room isn’t a bouquet of roses.” Balenger turned. “What’s your theory, Professor?”

  “Another room with a story. When Carlisle stopped accepting guests in 1968, he could have made sure the hotel was spotless and sanitized. But it looks as if he stopped renting the rooms one at a time and kept each in a kind of suspended state, each room retaining a hint of life.”

  “Or death,” Cora said, glancing back toward the room where they’d found the suitcase.

  “Professor, are you suggesting that after Carlisle closed the hotel, he wandered from room to room, looking in at scenes he’d preserved, absorbing himself in the past?” Balenger asked.

  Conklin spread his hands. “Maybe to him it wasn’t the past. Maybe the riots and his advanced years caused a nervous breakdown. Maybe he imagined the hotel was still in its heyday.”

  “Jesus,” Vinnie said. He took a photograph and left the room. “Let’s see what other surprises he created.”

  His light wavering, Vinnie walked along the balcony, reached the next door, twisted its knob, and pushed with obvious confidence that the door would open.

  But it didn’t, and its resistance startled him. A DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on it. Vinnie turned the knob with greater force, pressing his shoulder against the door. “The others aren’t locked. Why is this one?” He rammed against it, the door shuddering.

  Conklin restrained him. “You know the rules. We don’t disturb anything.”

  “Then what was that we did to the door in the tunnel? Taking a crowbar to it? That wasn’t disturbing anything?” Vinnie slammed his shoulder against the door again.

  “Granted,” Conklin said, “but an argument can be made that the door in the tunnel wasn’t part of the time scheme of the site. What you’re doing is wrong.”

  “What difference does it make if I smash it? They’re going to tear the place down in a couple of weeks.”

  “I can’t allow us to become vandals.”

  “Fine. Okay.” Vinnie looked at Balenger. “You know something about locks. Can you get this open?”

  Balenger studied the lock, which had an old-fashioned design with a large slot. He unclipped his knife from his pocket, assuring the professor, “Don’t worry. I won’t damage anything.” He opened the blade and tried to slide it past the edge of the door to pry at the bolt. “There’s a lip I can’t get past.”

  “Can’t you pick the lock?”

  “I suppose I could get a coat hanger from one of these rooms, make a hook out of it, and try to—”

  “No need,” Cora said behind everybody.

  They turned, their lights merging on her.

  “Downstairs, when I was behind the check-in counter, I noticed keys in the mail slots.”

  “Keys?” Rick chuckled. “Now there’s an original idea. What’s the door number?”

  “Four twenty-eight.”

  “I’ll go down and get the key.”

  “Are we sure we want to do this?” Conklin asked. “Our objectives were the penthouse and the vault in Danata’s suite.”

  “If the unlocked doors have weird things behind them, I want to know what’s behind a locked one,” Balenger said.

  “Do we?” Cora asked.

  “If we don’t,” Rick said, “then why are we here?”

  The professor sighed. “Very well. If you’re determined. But you can’t go alone, Rick. That’s always been another rule. We don’t explore anywhere alone.”

  “Then we’ll all go down,” Balenger said.

  The elderly man shook his head from side to side. “The stairs were too strenuous for me. I’m afraid I’d take forever to walk down and come back.”

  “And we don’t need any heart attacks,” Vinnie said.

  “I seriously doubt there’s any risk of that, but—”

  “I’ll go with Rick.” Cora glanced again toward the door to the room that contained the suitcase.

  “Use your walkie-talkies.” Conklin unhooked his from his equipment belt. “Set one to transmit and the other to receive. That way I can hear you go down and come back. At the same time, I can talk to you without pressing buttons all the time and saying ‘over.’”

  “Fine.”

  Rick and Cora each unclipped a walkie-talkie from a belt.

  “I’m ‘transmit,’” Rick said.

  “I’m ‘receive,’” Cora said.

  “We’ll do the same,” the professor said. “Vinnie, set your walkie-talkie to receive. I’ll set mine to transmit.”

  Rick and Cora went to the top of the staircase and started down, their headlamps and flashlights making arcs in the gloom.

  Balenger heard their footsteps echoing as they descended. A distorted version of those sounds came through Vinnie’s walkie-talkie.

  “We’re at level three.” Rick’s voice reverberated from below while a staticky version came from Vinnie’s walkie-talkie.

  The footsteps sounded fainter. Balenger peered over the balustrade. Their lights were weak below him.

  “Level two,” Rick said.

  Balenger could barely see or hear them.

  Rick’s voice crackled. “One. We’re starting toward the lobby.”

  Vinnie’s headlamp moved, causing Balenger to look in his direction. Vinnie was inspecting his surroundings. “Hey, there’s an elevator in this corridor.”

  “We’re crossing the lobby,” Rick’s voice said. “While I’m here, maybe I should go into the ballroom and play an encore of ‘Moon River.’”

  “Please, don’t,” Cora begged, joking.

  “Besides,” the professor said into his walkie-talkie, “that music is far too recent for this hotel. Carlisle would never have allowed it. More likely, the tune would have been something like ‘On the Banks of the Wabash’ or ‘My Gal Sal.’”

  “Did you know Theodore Dreiser’s brother wrote both of those?” Vinnie asked.

  “We’re approaching the check-
in counter,” Rick’s voice said.

  “For God’s sake!” Cora exclaimed.

  “What’s wrong?” Conklin blurted into his walkie-talkie.

  “Another rat. I’m so sick of rats.”

  Balenger heard breathing from Vinnie’s walkie-talkie.

  “We’re at the message slots. They have keys attached to metal discs with ‘Paragon Hotel’ stamped on them. Almost every mail slot has a key. Except in four twenty-eight.”

  “What?” Vinnie asked, puzzled.

  “There’s no key for six-ten, either,” Rick’s voice said.

  “That’s Danata’s suite,” Conklin said.

  “Or to three twenty-eight, five twenty-eight, and six twenty-eight.”

  “Rooms directly above and below this one,” the professor said.

  “Wait,” Rick’s voice crackled.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I heard something.”

  Balenger, Vinnie, and the professor listened tensely.

  “Rick?” Conklin asked.

  Something scraped.

  “Another damned rat,” Cora’s voice said. “I think they’re having a convention.”

  “This is bullshit,” Vinnie said. Balenger suspected that he was annoyed with himself that he hadn’t gone with Cora.

  Rick’s voice said, “We’re looking in the office behind the check-in counter.”

  Vinnie aimed his flashlight at his watch. “It’s already near midnight. At this rate, we’ll never finish before dawn.”

  “No keys,” Rick said from the walkie-talkie. “But there are several filing cabinets.”

  Balenger heard a metallic sound from the walkie-talkie, presumably a cabinet drawer being slid open.

  Rick: “Mostly maintenance records. Staff assignments. Bills and receipts of payments.”

  Cora: “This drawer has a reservation folder. It’s empty. There’s a folder devoted to which rooms are occupied. That’s empty, too. But a lot of other folders are crammed. Guests who used to come here on a yearly basis, any special needs they had, any preferences for particular rooms, flowers, favorite foods. The most recent guest in that category stopped coming in 1961.”