Howard Norman - Next Life Might Be Kinder

I had told Istvakson nothing of my observations and opinions of Alfonse Padgett, absolutely nothing. I’d read somewhere that he’d had a few “audiences” with Padgett in the interim prison in Bedford, on the outskirts of Halifax. (Padgett had been sentenced to forty years to life. It would be twenty years before he’d qualify for a parole review.) So I could only assume that some of Istvakson’s screenplay was based on things Padgett had told him. After much preparation — crew members checking the lobby furniture, various actor-bellmen and hotel patrons standing around in costume, sound and lighting equipment set up — Istvakson appeared. Lily Svetgartot followed close behind, carrying a clipboard and a thermos of coffee. (“Coffee spiked with God knows what,” she had said.) Next, the actor playing Alfonse Padgett — I never learned his name — stepped onto the set. The physical resemblance to Padgett unnerved me. But when he spoke his first lines (“I’m taking those dance lessons Arnie Moran is giving, whaddaya think of that, Mr. Isherwood?”), I felt great relief that his voice scarcely resembled Padgett’s. Actor-Isherwood replied, “You trip over your feet just carrying a suitcase to the lift. The thought of you doing the lindy makes me think that ten notes into the first dance, you’ll end up in hospital.”

They shot the scene a total of twelve times. Finally Istvakson said, “I’ll look at all this in dailies later on. Okay, everybody, go home, and thank you very much.” He spoke briefly with Lily Svetgartot, and she pointed to what was obviously a shooting schedule on the clipboard, because Istvakson said loudly, “More hotel lobby scenes starting at six A.M. Nobody late, please!” The crew went to their rooms or out the front door of the hotel, and the onlookers in the street dispersed.

Call it perverse intuition. I don’t know what it was, really, but when I saw Istvakson step into the lift (Lily Svetgartot had gone to her room, which was right off the lobby), I inquired at the desk — there was a clerk on duty whom I didn’t recognize — about leaving a note for the director. The clerk, a woman of about thirty whose name tag read Miss Claridge, said “Certainly.” She slid a piece of hotel stationery over to me, and then a pen. I wrote, “You are getting it all wrong.” I didn’t sign it. I folded the note and handed it to Miss Claridge, and saw her put the note into a slot in the wooden mail-and-key hive: room 58, Elizabeth’s and my former room. Istvakson had done his research, all right.

I got back in my truck and drove to the cottage, getting home by about five-thirty A.M. There was the faintest tinge of light on the horizon out to sea.

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.”