Henry Gold was not the type of man to judge strangers solely on the way they chose to dress. And yet as someone who in his four decades as general manager of the Gibson Hotel had welcomed thousands of guests to his esteemed establishment, he long ago determined that a refined taste in sartorial fashion tended to indicate good breeding, steadfast character, and a stable moral foundation. Just as poor taste often signaled the opposite. Of course over time, as fashions changed, Mr. Gold had been forced to take into account the fickle nature of trends. In the sixties and seventies, for instance, a young man sporting ragged cutoff jeans and one of those ludicrous tie dyed T-shirts raised the distinct (not to mention worrisome) possibility of a raucous party that evening in room 217. Because hippies, Mr. Gold had discovered, liked to gather in tribes willing to share whatever bounty they carried with them on their aimless journeys across America. A packet of marijuana. A pint of cheap booze. A new cassette tape by Crosby, Stills and Nash, or one of those other long-haired bands, Led Zeppelin. And yet nowadays a young woman who favored garish peasant blouses or bell-bottom blue jeans might well be the vice president of a branch bank in Toledo. Or she might be on the lam. It was getting harder and harder to tell.
Fortunately the other end of the fashion spectrum remained much easier to parse. Whenever an elderly couple strolled into the Gibson’s ornate lobby wearing the kind of old-world finery that dominated his clothes closet too, Mr. Gold’s spirits invariably brightened. For the gentleman a herringbone suit coat, or if it was August, a navy blue dress shirt tucked neatly inside grey slacks divided, in the front, by creases as sharp as knives. A little starch in the collar, a checkered ascot, perhaps a fob watch dangling from the inner pocket of a three-button vest? As for his lovely companion—oh how Mr. Gold cherished the aura of a well-heeled matron—an elegant but subdued evening gown accompanied by a slender string of black pearls and a jaunty white plume hat combined a sense of decorum with the whimsical nature befitting a woman who, in modern parlance, was comfortable in her own skin. Sadly, with so many malcontents bemoaning the fate of the white egrets slaughtered en masse to provide those lovely feathers, you rarely saw plume hats any more. And while Mr. Gold appreciated just as much as the next fellow an occasional glimpse of an egret or heron gliding across the salt flats on the outskirts of town, in his opinion the absence of such sartorial finery was merely one more reminder of misplaced political passion. First mink stoles. And now plume hats!
Still, whenever one of those distinguished older couples strolled into the Gibson, his expectations markedly rose. For more often than not these were the types of guests who would linger in the lobby after they had dressed for their evening out, politely requesting Mr. Gold’s culinary recommendations while offering, in response, a few nuggets of insight into their personal affairs. Or better yet, urging Mr. Gold to cast a few of his own personal nuggets their way. For there was nothing the genteel manager liked better than to entertain strangers with the well-rehearsed sketch of his life here in Crooked River. What pleasure it gave him to describe his saintly mother, his steady, stoic father, and his dear, departed wife Virginia whose lovely face filled like a blossom the photo frame Mr. Gold had recently hung on the wall behind the front counter in the hope, he wasn’t ashamed to admit, that a guest would inquire just who that splendid creature might be.
Unfortunately refined, well-bred guests were becoming a rarity these days, roundly replaced by a less civil, less courteous, less cultivated breed of customer. Such as the young man now leaning over the counter to sign the register. Once in a while the manager’s initial misgivings about a new patron turned out to be wrong (how could he forget, for instance, his first inaccurate impression of William Dieter?), and he was more than willing under those circumstances to admit his mistake. But this time Mr. Gold doubted that his suspicions were unfounded. Slovenly dress (in this case, a pair of plaid shorts two sizes too large for the young man’s slender frame topped by an outlandish green T-shirt featuring a cartoon duck) was one thing; a stringy, unwashed mop of black hair clearly revealing a tangle of blond roots quite another. Why, the manager couldn’t help but wonder, would a handsome young man like this do such a thing to his hair? It was the worst dye job Mr. Gold had ever seen. And he had seen some real doozies.