Graham Masterton - Mirror

The great chandelier hung from the lobby ceiling like the desiccated corpse of a giant spider, still dangling in its web.

Martin and Ramone approached the desk. The desk clerk was surprisingly young and clean: a young man in a shocking-pink shirt with blond crew-cut hair. It was only when he laid his thin arms on the marble counter that Martin saw the needle tracks.

'You people checking in?' he asked them. His eyes were as pale and as expressionless as two stones you find on the beach.

Martin shook his head. 'I was wondering if you still had safe-deposit boxes here.'

'Safe-deposit boxes?' The young man blinked.

'Yes, you know. Somewhere your guests can keep their valuables.'

'What, are you kidding? If any of our guests happen to have any valuables, they keep them on their persons. Besides, they don't usually stay for longer than a half hour.'

'But are the original boxes still here - the boxes that were put in when the hotel was built?'

'I don't think so,' the young man told him. 'Pretty much everything has gone. Somebody walked out with a goddamned bathtub last week. Can you imagine that? Nobody knows how he got it through the door.'

Martin gave a tight grimace and looked around him. One of the scarecrows was waving his arms and singing. 'Sur ... wannee song! Suwannee song! You c'n blow your flute 'n' you c'n bangy'r drum 'n' you c'n —

'Will you shut up?' one of his companions screeched at him. 'Will you shut up?'

Martin stared at the old scarecrow for a while. Then he turned back to the desk clerk and said, 'Who's that?'

'Who's what?' The young man may have looked quite presentable, but his brain was somewhere in another galaxy.

'That old bum singing. The one singing "Suwannee Song".'

The young man focused his eyes across the lobby. 'Oh, that's Fido. Well, everybody calls him Fido. He's been hanging out for just about a hundred years. I think he used to work here or something. He's always telling stories about how he walked in on Bill Haines, and Bill Haines was wearing nothing but a brassiere and a garter belt and a picture hat.'

Martin left the desk and walked across to the group of scarecrows. Fido was sitting right in the middle of them, on one of the leopard-skin banquettes. His face was puffy and flowered with gin blossoms. He wore a fifties-style suit with wide flappy lapels. It had once been fawn, but now it was greasy gray. Martin couldn't approach too close. The collective stench of these down-and-outs was overwhelming.

'Fido?' he asked.

Fido looked up at him blearily. 'That's me, your honor.'

'They tell me you used to work here,' said Martin.

There was a chorus of groans and raspberries from Fido's companions. 'Don't ask him!' one of them begged in a voice reedy with phlegm. 'Do us a favor, will you, friend? Don't ask him!'

'Was the gemmun addressing your Fido demanded with all the indignation of an Oliver Hardy.

'He worked here, he worked here, now go!' the other scarecrow appealed.

Martin said to Fido. 'Maybe we can talk in private? I wouldn't like to antagonize your friends.'

'Friends? Call this riffraff friends? These just happen to be items of flotsam who have eddied their way into the same backwater.'

'Oh, can it, Fido,' groaned another scarecrow. 'You make my ears want to scream.'

Fido teetered his way out of the assembly of winos around the banquette and accompanied Martin and Ramone to the far side of the lobby, beside the gilded fountain that had long ago dried up, and whose shell-shaped bowl was now crammed with cigarette butts and empty bottles and used needles.

Ramone wrinkled up his nose as Fido lurched a little too close to him. 'You won't get arrested for taking a shower, did you know that?'

Martin said, 'Ssh,' and waved Ramone to keep quiet. He didn't want to upset Fido before he'd had the chance to talk to him.

'Is it true you worked here?' he asked.

'What's it worth?' Fido wanted to know.

Martin held up a ten-dollar bill. Fido sniffed, and took it, and snapped it between his fingers to make sure that it was genuine. 'All right, then,' he said. 'I worked here.'

'Were you here in 1939?'

Fido nodded, his white prickly chin making a crackling sound against the collar of his grubby shirt. 'Sure, 1939. I was promoted to bell captain that year. March 1939.'

'Did you ever see Boofuls here?'

'Boofuls?' asked Fido suspiciously. 'Why'd you ask that?'

'I'm just interested, that's all. I'm writing a book about his life.'

'Well,' sniffed Fido, 'he didn't have too much of a life, did he? But he sure had a memorable death.'

'Did you see him?'

'Of course I saw him. He was here all the time, him and that Redd woman. Every month; and all kinds of others, too. Famous actors, you'd know them all. Famous directors, too.'

Martin frowned. 'You mean Boofuls used to meet a whole lot of other actors and directors here, every month?'

'That's right. It was a joke. Nobody was supposed to know. Big secret, don't tell the press, that kind of thing. And to tell you the truth, I don't think the press ever did find out. But we knew, all of the staff. You couldn't help recognizing somebody like Clark Gable, now, could you? And there was George Cukor and Lionel Atwill and dozens of others. All the big names from 1939, they came here. Maybe not every month, but pretty well.'

Ramone warned, 'You'd better not be putting us on, Mr Fido.'

'Why should I put you on?' Fido challenged him. 'It's true, it happened. Every month, here at the Hollywood Divine, in the Leicester Suite.'

'And Boofuls was always here?' Martin asked him.

Fido nodded. 'They wouldn't start without Boofuls.'

'Wouldn't start what?' said Ramone.

Fido puffed out his blotchy cheeks. 'Don't ask me, how should I know? It was all supposed to be secret, right? We laid them on a spread before they started - chicken, lobster, stuff like that — and then we had to lock the doors and leave them to it — whatever it was they were doing. But believe me, they were all famous. You'd have known them all. Errol Flynn, he used to come. Joan Crawford. Wilfred Buckland, the art director. Fifty or sixty of them, every month, sometimes more.'

Martin said, 'You're sure about this?'

'Sure I'm sure. I was the bell captain.'

'Well, how long did these get-togethers go on for?'

'Two, three in the morning, sometimes longer.'

'And Boofuls stayed there all that time?'

'I used to see him leaving, four o'clock in the morning sometimes. That Redd woman used to cover him up with a cloak and a hood, but you couldn't mistake him.'

Martin said, 'He was only eight years old, what was he doing staying up all night?'

Fido coughed and then noisily cleared his throat. '/ don't know what the hell he was doing, staying up all night. We used to listen at the door sometimes, but we could never hear nothing. Sometimes music. But they used to have girls in as well. Not exactly hookers but what you might call starlets.'

Martin looked at Ramone, but all Ramone could do was shake his head. 'Don't ask me, man, I never heard of anything like this. Either this guy's shooting us a line, or else his brain's gone, or else we just came across the biggest Hollywood mystery that ever was.'

'Listen,' Martin told Fido, 'when you were working here, where did they keep the safe-deposit boxes? Can you remember that?'

'Certainly I can remember,' said Fido. 'What's it worth?'

Reluctantly, Martin handed Fido another ten-dollar bill. He snapped it, the same way he had snapped the first one. Then he sniffed and said, 'They used to keep the safe-deposit boxes in back of the manager's office, through the archway behind the desk. But if you're looking for them, I can save you some trouble, because they ain't there now. Round about 1951, when the Hollywood Divine really started losing money, there was some kind of plan to refurbish it, you know, and they shifted a whole lot of stuff down to the basement. The only trouble was, the plan fell through, lack of money, zoning problems, something like that, and everything that was shifted down to the basement just stayed there.'