Without saying it, Am and Sharon knew their case had come to a standstill. There was nothing to indicate that Tim Kelly had met up with a Mickey Finn in his guest room; there were no witnesses who could place him with a drug-administering woman; there wasn’t even that accursed condom. The thrill from playing cops and robbers (or detectives and murderers) had worn off.
Am’s beeper sounded and was followed by the voice of Mary Mason requesting his presence. Emphatically he turned off his pager. Sharon’s eyes had followed his rather dramatic gesture. He decided to take her look as a challenge, declaring: “I am not going to talk to the Bob Johnson Society about hotel security.”
Her hands, and mouth, and eyebrows, all opened up at the same time. She wasn’t the one asking him to speak. But Am conveniently ignored her body language.
“I could, you know. But I didn’t ask for this responsibility, and I certainly didn’t volunteer to speak. Is it fair to work a job where they ask you to give blood every day?”
Sharon’s tongue got as far as her front teeth when he announced: “Infra hospitium.”
She waited a moment to see if she was expected to respond with a question. Apparently she wasn’t.
“Latin,” he said. “It means within the inn. There was a time when hotels were responsible for the loss of a guest’s property, when they had an obligation to watch out for the safety and protection of guests. Inns were sanctuaries from the highwaymen and brigands. But nowadays hoteliers don’t have to worry about the onus of infra hospitium. They just have to supply what the courts deem ‘reasonable care.’ Of course, that responsibility seems to change with the frequency of the flavor of the week.
“This week’s ruling is that we’re supposed to be psychics. We’re supposed to foresee the potential for guest injury. But just how are we expected to be the Praetorian Guard? Robert Kennedy was assassinated in a hotel, and when Ronald Reagan was president of the United States he was shot and wounded on the grounds of a hotel. If a troop of Secret Service agents can’t protect one man at a hotel, then how is a solitary hotel dick expected to protect a thousand guests?”
Sharon knew a rhetorical question when she heard one. It took Am only a moment to catch his breath.
“So many things can go wrong at a hotel. Every decade brings a new tragedy. The seventies had Legionnaires’ disease at the Bellevue Stratford in Philadelphia; the eighties had the horror of the collapsing skywalk at the Kansas City Hyatt. And let’s not forget the MGM Grand fire in Las Vegas, or the inferno in Puerto Rico. Those are only the headline stories. For every major catastrophe, there are thousands of smaller, but not less terrible disasters: guests killed by exploding hot-water heaters; murders and rapes and robberies; deaths resulting from design negligence; guests hurt as a consequence of property neglect or, worse, because no one at the hotel ever cared enough to try to make things right.
“Did you know one Las Vegas hotel lost as many as five hundred room keys a week for twenty-five years, but in all that time they never bothered to rekey their locks? It wasn’t until tort cases started bringing sizable settlements that hotels began to try to see to that ‘reasonable care’ of their guests. They learned they couldn’t mint keys like the U.S. Treasury does money, or house guests in rooms with known faulty locks or broken window latches. These days a hotel’s responsibility doesn’t end with handing out a room key and wishing the guest a good day.
“Not that there aren’t times I think the pendulum has swung too far the other way,” he added. “Like the woman who sued the Ritz for forty thousand, claiming that her contraception pills had either been stolen or thrown away by the maid, and that her pregnancy was a result of hotel negligence. What? Are we supposed to be conducting bed checks?”
Am sighed long and loud. He looked at Sharon and acted as though he were conceding to her. “All right. I’ll give the talk.”
Odd, she thought. Not her being quiet, and not his speech making. But just that she was beginning to think of all this madness as being totally normal.