DEREK BUDNICK WAS sixty-two years old. He’d been a policeman in Halifax for twenty-five years and then a security guard at Pier 21, the museum of the history of immigration into Canada; after that he became house detective at the Essex Hotel. He was a bachelor and lived in room 28. Elizabeth and I were on a first-name basis with him.
It wasn’t more than five minutes after Elizabeth telephoned him in his room and described the damage we’d found to the chaise longue that Derek walked through our open door. He held a Kodak flash camera. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said. “Let me first take a few pictures and then—can you make some coffee, please? Then let’s sit and talk.”
We must have woken Derek up. His hair was mussed and I could see the collar of his pajama shirt under his sweater; he had on his woolen trousers and sports coat and black shoes. He took snapshots of the chaise longue from three different angles.
“That’s a nasty tear in the fabric,” he said.
After one sharp inhale of sobbing, Elizabeth said, “Definitely it is.”
“Derek,” I said, “you have to talk to Alfonse Padgett about this.”
“Let’s have coffee,” Derek said. “Let’s sit down and talk.”
I made coffee and we sat at the kitchen table. “Okay, let me get my notebook out here,” Derek said. “Okay, how did you discover this violation?”
Elizabeth sat down across from Derek. “I’m taking lindy lessons offered by Arnie Moran in the ballroom,” she said. “Tonight was lesson number two. Alfonse Padgett was in the ballroom. He acted like a creep. Toward me, he acted like a creep. After the lesson, Sam and I went to a café. We got home maybe eleven, eleven-thirty. We’d left a floor lamp on. That’s about it. I mean, we walked in and saw the tear in the fabric right away. Then we telephoned your room.”
Derek nodded and said, “Sam, it’s a serious accusation, your mentioning Padgett. Him being a hotel employee.”
“He should be in jail. Starting tonight. Starting right now.”
“Calm down, now,” Derek said. “It doesn’t come out of the blue, your naming Padgett, right? You have your reasons?”
“He’s a creep,” Elizabeth said. She placed her hands over mine on the table. “He assaulted me at the lindy lesson.”
“What?” Derek said. “How do you mean? Assault’s a serious—”
“Close your eyes a minute, Derek. Please. Then I’ll tell you.”
Derek set down his coffee cup and closed his eyes. Consciously or not, he held on to the side of the table as if for dear life. “I’m all set,” he said.
“He touched my breast,” Elizabeth said. “You can open your eyes now. I just didn’t want you looking at me when I told you what I just told you.”
Derek opened his eyes and took a sip of coffee. “During a dance lesson, doing that might’ve been not on purpose,” he said.
“The lindy doesn’t call for a lot of holding close,” Elizabeth said. “No, he definitely, um, copped a feel. I pushed him away.”
“He assaulted me this morning in the lift,” I said.
“Whoa, Jesus, hold on here,” Derek said. He set down his cup again. “Two assaults on the same day?”
“He pushed me against the wall of the lift,” I said.
Derek, as he finished jotting a note, said out loud, “. . . against the wall of the lift.” He sighed painfully. “I think I’d better ask Mr. Isherwood to call the police.”
“This all must sound strange to you, I bet,” Elizabeth said. “Try to understand. He’s a creep, bellman Padgett is. I agree with my husband. Padgett did this awful thing to the chaise longue. Bellmen have master keys, don’t they? They can go into any room in the hotel.”
“I think I’d better get the police involved here,” Derek said.
“Why not get Padgett in a room with you, us, Mr. Isherwood? What do you think of that idea?” Elizabeth said. “Confront him.”
“Obviously there’s no love lost between you both and Alfonse Padgett. My concern is, just because he’s a creep is not exactly evidence that he tore the fabric on this nice sofa, eh?”
“Chaise longue,” Elizabeth said, a little snappishly, then shook her head and said, “Sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. You’re upset. You should be upset. I need to get my vocabulary correct, anyway, for my report. I’m careful with my reports. I don’t like to spell even one word wrong, so if I’m in doubt, I look it up in the dictionary.” He wrote down and said out loud, “Chaise . . . longue.”
“Nobody but Alfonse Padgett would do this,” Elizabeth said. “He’s acted like a creep. He’s said creepy things. He’s done creepy things.”
“Okay, but this had to be from a knife. This is more than creepy, I’m afraid. You’ve called the house detective, which is exactly what you should have done, by the way. Exactly what you should have done. But it’s now officially hotel business. Someone wielding a knife against a private piece of furniture like this. I have to make a report. There’s got to be an investigation.”
“Derek,” I said, “he left the ballroom before we did. He knew we weren’t home. He used his passkey.”
“Sam,” Derek said, “maybe you want me to drag Padgett—and by the way, I have my own judgments about him—drag him out of his room and kick the hell out of him in the alley next to the garbage cans. But what if later I find out it wasn’t him did this thing? Just consider that. Please consider my position here. We have to follow procedure. Now, Mr. Isherwood will be in at eight o’clock this morning, and I’m going to talk to him first thing, I promise you both that. I’m going to get these photographs developed first thing, too. If you can think of anything else I can do for you in this circumstance, tell me. Ring me right up. I mean it.”
“It’s just that this chaise longue means a lot to me,” Elizabeth said. “And Alfonse Padgett—I just thought of this—he delivered it to our apartment. He knew it was here.”
“I’ll put that right into my report,” Derek said. “I’m going back to my room and start to type it up.”
Derek, with some formality, shook Elizabeth’s hand, then shook my hand. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said. “I’m sorry it happened at all, especially on my watch. Believe me, there’s all sorts of things happen in a hotel. House detectives can tell all sorts of things out of school, if they’re so indiscreetly inclined, they could. I’m very upset to see you suffer this violation.” Derek left and closed the door behind him.
Elizabeth took an antique quilt out of the bottom drawer of her bureau and laid it over the chaise longue. “Let’s go to bed, Sam,” she said. “Maybe neither of us will be able to sleep, but if we can’t sleep, at least we’ll stay awake together. I hate that goddamn creep bellman.”
“We could tune something in on the shortwave. Try for Amsterdam. Or London.”
“Good.”