Body Blows by Marc Strange Read Free Book Online

me.”
    â€œIf he really thought you were in danger he’d have a platoon of rent-a-cops at the main entrance. The old man doesn’t fool around.”
    â€œYou work for him?”
    â€œI do security at the hotel.”
    â€œWhat hotel is that?” I ask.
    I didn’t know much about the Lord Douglas back then. I’d never stayed there. It was out of my price range. My manager, Morley Kline, liked to have a drink in the Press Club once in a while, shoot the breeze with the sportswriters, Hap Reynolds sometimes gave us a promo for an upcoming fight. I guess the hotel was showing her age, had faded somewhat from her heyday. Still, she had that look, the look that grand hotels have — a lobby as big as a ballroom, lofty as a cathedral, crystal chandeliers, washroom attendants, and mahogany doors on the water closets. If the Persian rugs had a wide pathway worn from entrance to elevators, and the leather sofa cushions sagged a little in the middle, there was no mistaking the era, or the refined sensibility of the people who had built the place. The Lord Douglas wasn’t a rush job. She wasn’t poured concrete, she was cut stone.
    â€œThe house dick, Ceece Lund’s his name, had a thrombosis about, I don’t know, six months ago maybe,” Gritch is telling me. “I was working for him for seventeen, eighteen years, so I’ve been filling in. I don’t think he’s coming back. Ceece.”
    â€œShouldn’t you be over there?”
    â€œI’m not the only guy working,” he says. “I’ve got assistants. Don’t know their asses from their elbows, either of ’em, but Leo knows where I am if something comes up.”
    â€œWhat kind of stuff comes up?”
    â€œWhat doesn’t?” he says.
    Leo was reopening the original owner’s penthouse above the Fifteenth Floor and was planning on living there. When I arrived there were workmen all over the place — plumbers, glaziers, electricians. Leo was personally overseeing every phase of the operation. He had already established a small office complete with phone, fax, computer, and a leather couch where he was spending his nights pending completion of his bedroom.
    â€œJoseph,” he says. “How are you feeling? How’s the arm?”
    â€œI’ve healed up just fine, sir,” I say. “How are you?”
    â€œVery busy, very busy, Joseph.”
    â€œI can see that.”
    â€œI don’t mean all the hammering,” he says. “I’m retrenching, circling the wagons so to speak. Backing away from a number of interests, going to concentrate on getting the Lord Douglas back on her feet.”
    â€œThat’s nice, sir. She’s a fine old hotel.”
    â€œAnd I want you to be part of that.”
    â€œIn what capacity, sir?”
    â€œHotel security. There’s a job opening.”
    â€œWorking for Mr. Gritchfield?”
    â€œNo. He’d be working for you.”
    Gritch had spent much of his working life sitting between a fern and a palm tree in the lobby of the Lord Douglas, from which observation post he surveyed every entry and departure. He was a married man, but his wife maintained that he was a bigamist and that his first wife was the hotel.
    In the old days Gritch would lift whatever newspaper he was hiding behind to sip from a flask but when we first teamed up he told me he was on the wagon.
    â€œI’ve been sober for three years,” Gritch told me. “Three years, three months, and one, two, three days, hey, no, it’s after midnight, four days.”
    â€œCongratulations,” I say.
    â€œNo mean feat,” he says. “I was never a binge drinker. I was a steady, well-schooled, dedicated souse, ambulatory and capable of coherent discourse. I was a pro.”
    â€œWhat made you stop?”
    â€œOh, you know, wife.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œShe said there were three things in my life: the hotel, the