The Golden Inn doesn’t come within a mile of living up to its name. It’s an isolated, four-story tenement converted into single rooms. Totally out of place in an industrial neighborhood. Still, it serves its purposes, luring the few hookers who still work beneath the elevated highway on Fourth Avenue. The whole of South Brooklyn is rapidly gentrifying and the working girls will soon be gone, along with the bodegas, the check-cashing joints and the payday lenders. The Golden Inn will be gone as well, probably converted into million-dollar condos.
The inn hangs on for now, though in midafternoon on a workday it’s practically deserted. I march through the front door, then toward a small, bullet-proof cubicle where the desk clerk sits. He’s just as I remember him, a tired old man who’s lived his life in a tarnished corner of the world. His eyes are ancient. They seem to look in rather than out.
He examines me carefully as I approach. I don’t see a glimmer of recognition, but his eyes brighten when I hold up a twenty. “I’m a reporter,” I tell him. “Checking into the murder of a man named Henry Grand.”
“Yeah, last week. Not the first this year, by the way.” His voice is indistinct, as if he’s speaking through a wad of phlegm. Which, given the full ashtray on his desk, seems likely. “OK, tell me what ya want from me?”
“Well, for starters, were you on duty the night he was killed?”
“Yeah, I was.”
I take a step closer and pass the twenty through the slot, but he still doesn’t recognize me. Does that mean we weren’t here?
“Can I get into his room?” I ask.
“That’s Room 307. Cops have it sealed off. They got the key, too.”
“What about the room next to 307? Is there a connecting door?”
“Yeah, but it’s probably locked on the other side.”
“Do you mind if I check it out?”
He glances behind him, discovers the key for 309 on its hook. “You ain’t gonna take someone up there?”
“Are you kidding?” I step back and raise my elbows, the better to display an outfit I chose because there’s nothing about it that says hooker. The demonstration brings a smile to his face, revealing missing teeth on both sides of his mouth.
“Name’s Tom Randall. With two l’s.” He slips the key through the slot. “You decide to use my name in the papers, spell it right.”
Beyond the front desk, the Golden Inn is a series of stacked corridors broken by an elevator and a stairwell. I don’t bother with the elevator. I climb the narrow stairway, passing a middle-aged hooker and her teenage client on the way. At the third-floor landing, about halfway down the corridor to my right, two strips of yellow, crime-scene tape form an X across one of the doors. It’s Hank Grand’s death chamber and I’m drawn to it, the pull irresistible.
A few seconds later, I’m facing the door wondering if I should try the handle, when a hand closes on my right forearm. Closes hard.
“Hey, baby, you up for a date?”
I turn and try to shake my arm free. No dice. He’s tall and fat and smells of recent sex. He’s also drunk enough to be totally obnoxious but not drunk enough to fall over. I look up and down the empty hall. Nothing there.
“Let go of me.”
“What, my money’s not good enough? Gimme a break.” His tongue flashes across his already-wet lips. “Half-and-half. How much?”
“I’m not a prostitute.” My purse is hanging near my right hip and there’s no way I can reach the canister inside while he’s holding my arm. I tell myself to calm down. I’m not about to let this jerk get me in a room behind a locked door. I’ll scream if it comes to that. But I could still take a beating.
“That’s right, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a whore.” His left hand comes up. There’s a fifty-dollar bill between his thumb and his forefinger. “Like, if you’re not a whore, what the fuck are you doin’ inside the hotel?”
His eyes travel across my body as he searches for a place to put the fifty. I’m not wearing a skirt and my sweater rises to my throat, but the man’s just drunk enough to come up with a solution. He tries to push the bill into my mouth. Now I’m thinking I have only one chance here. I’m going to turn into him, drive my knee into his crotch, and jerk my arm away. One move, real, real fast. If I succeed, I’ll run.
I’m staring up at the john, at the sneer on his face. I’m thinking, He wants you to resist. He wants to hurt you. Then the door to Hank Grand’s death chamber opens and the cop, Detective Ortega, ducks under the tape. He evaluates the scene in an instant, including the intensity of the man’s grip and the relief on my face. Then he flips his jacket open to reveal a gold badge, the badge of a detective, attached to his belt.
“What’s going on here?” His eyes bore into mine, the beginnings of a tiny smile just touching the corners of his mouth. My belly tightens and I raise my chin. I want him at that moment as much as I’ve wanted any of the men who’ve flitted in and out of my life. Not least because his eyes are on fire.
“This guy solicited me, Officer,” I say.
“He did what?”
“He solicited me. And I never saw him before in my life.”
The man’s already let go of my arm. Now he speaks. “I never touched her.”
“Soliciting isn’t touching,” Ortega says. “Though you were definitely touching her when I opened the door. So, Miss, what did he actually say?”
We’re in each other’s heads now, whirling around, playful as kittens. “He offered me fifty dollars for half-and-half. I always thought half-and-half was something you find in the refrigerator.”
“And look,” Ortega points. “There’s the fifty dollars between his fingers.” He shakes his head. “Know what? I could be mistaken, but it looks like he was trying to shove that bill into your mouth.”
“Before he shoved in something else.” I put my hand on my hips. “And I’m a respectable woman.”
Ortega jerks his chin at the man, who hastily slips the fifty into his pocket. “Take off, jerk. Right now.”
A quick learner, the man heads for the stairs, weaving a bit. I start to speak, but Ortega holds up a hand. A minute later, as his head disappears, the man yells out, “Fuck you!”
We laugh, the both of us, but only for a few seconds. Then we’re in each other’s arms, our mouths joined, the two of us equally heedless. Consequences are for later. Consequences be damned.
“Wow.” He allows his hand to linger on the side of my face for a few beats, then drops it to his side. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“You don’t recognize me?”
“Oh, yes, I recognize you. I just want to know the name you call yourself.”
“Eleni.”
“And the woman I took to the morgue? Her name is Martha, right?”
“Do you mean the woman you took to the morgue when you could have done the ID in our apartment using the medical examiner’s website?”
His face reddens, the skin above his cheeks turning the color of polished mahogany. But he doesn’t apologize. “And the woman I met first, on the sidewalk outside your building?”
“Serena.”
“And the first time? When Greco and I notified you of your father’s death?”
“Kirk. He’s a boy.”
His laughter is without derision. It continues on for a moment, until he says, “May I kiss you again?”
Slower this time, slower and deeper and so confident in my response, in his. This is a road we haven’t traveled and the outcome is entirely unknown. As for me, the idea that someone could know who we are and still want me is one I’ve refused to entertain.
He steps back. “Why did you come here?”
“I wanted to see the room where my father died.”
“Why?”
“Since when do crazy people need reasons?”
I laugh and he joins me. “Well, there’s nothing to see.” He reaches behind him, turns the knob, and pushes the door open. “The bed and the bedding have been taken into evidence, but you’re welcome to look.”
He’s right. Except for a small table and a chair, the room’s empty. No bloodstains anywhere, on the floor or the walls.
“I came to do a final check,” he explains. “We’re turning the room back to the hotel this afternoon.”
“Did you find anything?”
“No, not today.”
Neither of us speaks or moves for a moment. But there’s nothing awkward about the pause. The outcome’s not in doubt. I can see that in his eyes, as I’m sure he can see it in mine. I finally reach out to run the flat of my right hand, gently, from his chest to his waist. His flesh is unyielding, but the smile that lights his face can’t be faked. He takes my hand and brings it to his mouth. My whole body’s on fire by this time. My crotch is near to molten.
He lowers my hand but doesn’t let go. Still, his touch is gentle and I know I can pull away if I want to. I know he’s giving me a final choice.
“Shall we?” he asks.
“We shall.”
On our way to the stairs, we pass an empty room and duck inside, clothes flying in all directions. I’ve always believed that the size of women relative to men is one of the great cosmic injustices. Especially because it’s one of those always-was-and-always-will-be situations. It can’t be remedied and there’s no escape. Yet that resentment inevitably vanishes when I hold a man in my arms like I’m holding Bobby Ortega. All in an instant, as if the outrage had been felt by someone else, probably Martha. Now I want to feel Bobby’s strength as I dig my fingers into the bunched muscles of his shoulders, as I grip the backs of his arms. I want to be overwhelmed without being forced. Which is exactly the way I feel when Bobby lifts me and lays me on the bed, when I drape my arms across his back, when his mouth drops to mine.
I’d be hard put to name a sexual act I haven’t performed at one time or another, but I know a kiss to be more intimate than any joining of body parts. I’m thinking that Bobby knows it, too. Like he knows who we are, what we are. Like he knows that the woman holding his cock isn’t even a whole person but some fragment of a deranged freak’s imagination. He knows, and he doesn’t care.
Bobby’s first kisses are tender, almost kind, deepening only as my body responds. “What a woman you are,” he tells me. “What a woman you are.”
And me, fool that I am, I believe him. And I don’t resent his craziness being crotch centered. No, right now I don’t resent anything, not even the near certainty that I’ll be replaced before dawn. I raise my hips, an invitation he readily accepts. I whisper the words I know he wants to hear.
“Fuck me, Bobby. Fuck me now.”
He slides one arm beneath my lower back, the other beneath my shoulders. Then he rises to his knees, taking me with him. I can feel my brain shutting down, a flush building in my face and throat, and I know I’m going to take Bobby home tonight. Fuck the rules. Fuck Martha and her gray world. I want, just this one time, to lie in my own bed with a man in my arms. I don’t care if he arrests me tomorrow.