The Grifters Read Free

hotels which are strung out along West Seventh and Santa Monica and other arterial streets of West Los Angeles; establishments catering to retired couples, and working men and women who required a close-in address. Mostly, these latter, single people, were men-clerks, white collar workers and the like-for the proprietor was strongly prejudiced against unattached women.
    "Put it this way, Mr. Dillon," he said, during the course of their initial meeting. "I rent to a woman, and she has to have a room with a bath. I insist on it, see, because otherwise she's got the hall bath tied up all the time, washing her goddamn hair and her clothes and every other damned thing she can think of. So the minimum for a room with a bath is seventeen a week-almost eighty bucks a month, just for a place to sleep and no cooking allowed. And just how many of these chicks make enough to pay eighty a month for a sleeping room and take all their meals in restaurants and buy clothes and a lot of frigging goo to smear on the faces that the good Lord gave 'em, and-and-You a God-fearing man, Mr. Dillon?"
    Roy nodded encouragingly; not for the world would he have interrupted the proprietor. People were his business, knowing them was. And the only way of knowing was to listen to them.
    "Well, so am I. I and my late wife, goddamn-God rest her, we entered the church at the same time. That was thirty-seven years ago, down in Wichita Falls, Texas, where I had my first hotel. And that's where I began to learn about chicks. They just don't make the money for hotel livin', see, and there's only one way they can get it. By selling their stuff, you know; tapping them cute little piggy banks they all got. At first, they just do it now and then, just enough to make ends meet. But pretty soon they got the bank open twenty-four hours a day; why the hell not, is the way they see it. All they got to do is open up that cute little slot, and the money pours out; and it's no skin off their butts if they give a hotel a bad name.
    "Oh, I tell you, Mr. Dillon. I've hotelled all over this wonderful land of ours, and I'm telling you that hookers and hotellin' just don't mix. It's against God's laws, and it's against man's laws. You'd think the police would be too busy catching real criminals, instead of snooping around for hookers, but that's the way the gravy stains, as the saying is, and I don't fight it. An ounce of prevention, that's my motto. If you keep out the chicks, you keep out the hookers, and you've got a nice clean respectable place like this one, without a lot of cops hanging around. Why, if a cop comes in here now, I know he's a new man, and I tell him he'd better come back after he checks with headquarters. And he never comes back, Mr. Dillon; he's damned well told that it ain't necessary, because this is a hotel not a hook shop."
    "I'm pleased to hear that, Mr. Simms," Roy said truthfully. "I've always been very careful where I lived."
    "Right. A man's got to be," Simms said. "Now, let's see. You wanted a two-room suite, say, parlor, bedroom, and bath. Fact is, we don't have much demand for suites here. Got the suites split off into room with bath, and room without. But…"
    He unlocked a door, and ushered his prospective tenant into a roomy bedroom, its high ceilings marking its prewar vintage. The connecting door opened into another room, a duplicate of the first except that it had no bath. This was the former parlor, and Simms assured Roy that it could be converted back into one in short order.
    "Sure, we can take out this bedroom furniture. Move back the parlor stuff in no time at all-desk, lounge, easy chairs, anything you want within reason. Some of the finest furniture you ever saw."
    Dillon said he would like to take a look at it, and Simms conducted him to the basement storeroom. It was by no means the finest he had ever seen, of course, but it was decent and comfortable; and he neither expected nor wanted anything truly fine. He had a certain image to