Yesterday's News by Jeremiah Healy Page B

but it depends. Everybody thinks these little places are gold mines, you know? They count the units, let’s say it’s twenty like I got here, and they do the figures in their heads and come out to twenty rooms times twenty or so bucks which is four hundred a day times seven days is near three thousand a week. That’s a hundred fifty thousand a year, and they figure to pay the place off in two, maybe three years, then roll in the gravy.”
    â€œBut what’s your occupancy rate?”
    â€œThat’s where you gotta start, alright. I think nationwide the average is something like 65 percent per night, but that includes all those resorts run 90, even 95 percent in season. Place like this, no tourists staying reliably for weeks at a time, 25 or 30 percent’s more like it. So, right away, your intake’s way less than the max.”
    â€œAnd expenses?”
    â€œYou wouldn’t believe it. Insurance? Off the scale since that singer won the case saying the motel should have kept that guy from attacking her. Then there’s air conditioners, mattresses and springs, new TV’s, you name it. Every year something major needs replacing. And that’s with me doing all the electrical and plumbing and the building inspector doing some winking.”
    â€œThink you’ll stay with it?”
    â€œHard to say. The really tough part’s you never get a day off. You’re here twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and boy, that gets tiresome.” He crossed his knife and fork on the plate. “I got some cherry vanilla in the freezer, and the Red Sox are going to be on the cable.”
    â€œThanks, but I’m stuffed, and I’ve still got work to do tonight.”
    â€œWork? Where?”
    â€œCouple of places called the Strand and Bun’s. Know them?”
    Jones winched the Fu Manchu up over his front teeth. “Work, huh?”

Ten
    T HE DIRECTIONS J ONES gave me were excellent, but even without them I wouldn’t have had any trouble finding The Strip. I joined four other cars cruising it north to south, then made a U-turn and came back south to north. The movie theaters had old-fashioned marquees showing as many bulbs dead or missing as lit. The windows of the strip joints had publicity photographs of women even a feminist would call bimbos, the hairdos dating from the mid-sixties. The bookstores advertised peep shows and prices in hand-printed signs.
    The Strand was in the second block, Bun’s diagonally across the street in the third. Parking spaces were plentiful, most of the patrons seeming to be pedestrians. I left the Prelude in front of the Strand and approached the ticket window.
    A faded, fat woman obliterated all of what must have been a cocktail stool under and behind her. She looked at me through a streaked and scratched glass window thick enough to be bulletproof. She said, “Three features, seven bucks, no repeats.”
    â€œI want to see Mr. Gotbaum.”
    â€œCan’t help you.”
    â€œCan’t you call him?”
    â€œMister, I just sell tickets here. I look like an executive secretary to you?”
    â€œSomebody tried to stick you up, there a buzzer or something you can push?”
    She gave me a different kind of look. “I don’t want no trouble.”
    â€œI’m not trying to give you any. Just call somebody who can get me to Gotbaum.”
    After thinking it over, she put a hand under the ticket counter, pressed twice, and brought it back. We waited for thirty seconds. Then the blacked-over door to the theater opened and a tall, skinny kid came through it. He had dirty blond hair made to appear dirtier by being slicked back, and his double-breasted, chalk-stripe suit was a size too large for him. As he got closer, I put him nearer to thirty than twenty, but he still looked like his mother had been scared by an early Richard Widmark film.
    â€œThis guy giving you trouble, Connie?”
    I said,