The Keystone

The Keystone

Ethan Holmes

©Ethan Holmes

Smashwords Edition

©FrozenMan Productions

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This novel is a work of fiction. All the names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination and/or are used fictitiously. All references to any and all characters in this novel are strictly fictional. Any semblance to any real person is strictly unintended and deemed incidental by the Author. The Author hereby acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. The author does not endorse or otherwise recommend any of the various products/services which may be mentioned in the novel.

Chapter 1: Room Please

Chapter 2: Going Up, Going Down

Chapter 3: Riding the Gargoyle

Chapter 4: What a Mess

Chapter 5: The Short Road Down

Chapter 6: A View Through the Bars

Chapter 7: The Wheels of Justice

Chapter 8: Home is Where the Money Is

Chapter 9: A Friend in Need

Chapter 10: Lost and Found

Chapter 11: Money Don’t Grow on Trees

Chapter 12: Life is Full of Surprises

Chapter 13: Now Fix Me

Chapter 14: Who’s the Crazy One?

Chapter 1: Room Please

Her frail, thin body was slumped back, her head tilted to the left and supported only by the black rubberized foam handle of the wheelchair. Opaque drool dribbled down the corner of her wrinkled, purple mouth. Straw-like, salt and pepper hair was matted with half-dry sweat and stuck flat to her head. She looked like she barely weighed ninety pounds and her cheek bones jutted out from paper-like skin tinted an icy blue. The pink and white pin-striped smock she was wearing just sort of hung on her like it would prefer to be back on the hanger in the closet instead of pasted to this dead old woman.

Dang! That’s a big-ass needle! Toby pointed to a hypodermic hanging just above her right collar bone, the weight of it tugging down at her skin like a cactus spine on steroids.

What do ya think, Titus? She looks like she hung on a bit past her prime, don’t she?

Toby laughed and patted his size fifty-two waist struggling to burst out of his dark blue Dunmore Heights EMT uniform.

Titus looked at big, black, bald Toby standing over the old lady grinning ear to ear eagerly waiting for a reaction to his morbid humor.

Toby, Titus growled, Are you always a pinhead or do you just play one on TV? And by the way, when are you going to quit pretending you still fit in someone else’s uniform? You know, someone three sizes smaller than you?

Toby’s facial expression quickly turned to dismay.

Hey Ty, ain’t no need to go gittin’ personal my man. I was jus’ tryin’ to keep the situation light. Ya dig?

Titus blew him off as he continued his examination of the dead lady’s room. It stinks in here like a mixture of old bleach and cheap whiskey.

HEE HEE! That’s a fact Jack! You got it. You just described this whole place man! This hotel has smelled like that for years. ‘Bout the only place you can breathe is down in the damn lobby. HA! But only when the doors are turnin’.

Toby was back to smiling as he lit a cigarette.

Titus knew it was an accurate description of The Keystone. It was a thirteen story, gray and tan stone structure complete with gargoyles on the two front corners of the building looming down on the street below. Located at Harrison Avenue and Roselyn Street in the Dunmore Heights section of North Scranton, Pennsylvania, (a place the late Harry Chapin politely referred to in song as that coal-scarred city,) it presently served as a locally infamous haven for life’s down on-their-luck castaways.

Sick, elderly patrons with no known family and no money to pay for nursing home facilities or in-home care roomed side by side with allegedly recovering drug addicts, alcoholics and state subsidized mental cases barely able to live on their own.

More traffic was generated by Pennsylvania State social workers going in and out of the ancient revolving glass doors of The Keystone than by its own guests. Sprinkled among them were some of the city's ugliest bottom-feeder whores who couldn't keep enough of their earnings out of their noses and veins to afford better accommodations.

Built in 1939, The Keystone quickly became the landmark hotel of North Scranton. Positioned strategically to handle passengers from the Reading & Pennsylvania Railroad at the nearby Wheeler Avenue Station, The Keystone was, at the time, the grand dame of hotel accommodations in that area. If you looked carefully you could still see signs of the past glory of the place, from its dual ten foot revolving glass doors, to the black marble floor of the lobby. The Keystone’s nam was etched in elaborate script and gold leaf above the cherry wood front desk which, ironically, still had the faint aroma of cherry, but only if you stuck your nose right on it. You wouldn’t want to do that.

A stale, rancid cloud hung in the air unless one of the revolving doors let in a blast of fresh air to stir it around.

‘No Smoking’ signs hung everywhere in the hotel despite the fact that it was probably the most violated rule in the place aside from ‘NO PEEING IN THE HALLS!’ Management’s best efforts at confining smoking to the lobby resulted in a rather odorous concoction of cheap cigarettes, crusty pipe tobacco and the occasional whiff of the cheapest marijuana you could imagine assaulting you at the lobby entrance. Combine that with the odors of old bleach, human waste and body odor topped with a chaser of cheap grain alcohol and you had an atmosphere NASA couldn’t reproduce.

No one who worked at The Keystone thought they were paid enough to be either the smoke Gestapo or the pee police. Fortunately most of the tenants didn’t pee in the halls but a few of them either could not remember where their bathroom was or didn’t care. Management just found it easier to buy bulk bleach and pay more to the housekeepers than they paid the front desk personnel.

Yo, Ty, check it out dawg! Ya think they’d mind if I kept this for my girlfriend?

Toby dangled a gold-plated heart-shaped locket from the fat fingers of his left hand.

Ain’t got much gold left to it anyhow but my lady would sure enough dig it.

Titus walked over to Toby.

AAAHOWW! Man! What you have to go an’ do that for man?!

Titus had given Toby’s wrist a quick, sharp snap sideways which made the locket fly to floor and Toby scream in pain.

You know better than to tamper with evidence Toby. You should learn to keep those thieving, sticky fingers to yourself or you’re liable to lose them.

Toby flinched as he heard a loud click. He blinked and saw Titus suddenly holding a shiny, very sharp looking, four-inch knife blade in front of his face. Titus reached down and cut the dead old lady’s hospital ID bracelet off and put it in a plastic baggie. He did the same thing with the locket while Toby just stood there pouting and rubbing his wrist.

Man, you ain’t no cop! You got no right to do that!

You know what, Toby? You’re right. But I do have the right to throw your big ass out this fourth floor window if you don’t finish bagging and tagging Miss Emmy Lou Rabowski here,

He glanced at the ID bracelet, Get her the hell out of here…, NOW! This place doesn’t need to smell any worse than it already does.

Toby looked over at the window Titus was referring to and decided that the ancient and frayed yellow drapery that graced it wouldn’t be enough to stop him if Titus had his way. Anyone who knew Titus knew they couldn’t assume he wouldn’t do it.

Toby had seen Titus in action before with a most unfortunate fireman. Titus didn’t like firemen to begin with and this one was the epitome of everything he hated about them.

And who the fuck do you think you are? the fireman asked.

Titus had shown up at an arson scene and told him to turn off the hydrants and stop watering the scene until he could get in there in take a look around.

Well, I’ll tell you who I am if you think your little pea-sized brain can handle that much information. I’m the well-paid private investigator hired by the city, your employers by the way, to find out why this place burned down and took four people with it.

I don’t give a flying fuck who you say you are. We ain’t turning the damn water off till we get this place soaked and secured. If we drive away and there’s a flare-up we have to drive all the way back here and I don’t feel like makin’ my guys do that tonight.

Titus didn’t say another word. Toby, bagging and tagging one of the charred bodies on the scene, watched as Titus walked over to a nearby fire truck and took a hydrant wrench off the rear bumper. Whirling around, he stuffed the handle end of the large wrench into the gut of the fireman following close behind him and then came down on his helmeted head with the working end of it. CLANG!

Toby figured if the guy hadn’t been wearing his helmet there would have been a fifth body to drag off from the scene.

Bending over the crumpled form of the man Titus whispered, Do you give a fuck now?

Tossing the wrench into the street after turning the hydrant off, Titus started talking to himself, quietly at first.

Damn firemen! Nothing but bags of testosterone and ego running around calling themselves heroes. You think you pyros are something because you have a uniform that impresses all the girls and you’re all buddies with the cops?

Titus spoke louder to no one in particular as Toby watched.

You’re not heroes and I’ll tell you why! Real heroes don’t get paid!

Toby remembered that look in Titus’ eyes, the same look he had in them just a moment ago when he offered to throw him out the window. Toby didn’t like that look.

The cops had already been in to check in on the deceased Emmy Lou Rabowski. They hadn’t spent more than fifteen minutes in the room.

We’ll write up a report when we get a chance and they can call us if they want a copy. One of the cops shouted to the front desk.

Dawn Roebuck, the husky, heavily-bleached blonde front desk receptionist barely looked up. She knew that ‘they’ meant the owners but she also knew the owners didn’t care much when somebody died at The Keystone. All it meant was that there was another room available to rent and it was a good opportunity to raise the rate on the new tenant.

Dawn had worked at The Keystone now for four years. During that time she had seen so many strange things go down at the hotel that she was pretty certain she had seen it all.

She had watched old Mr. Johnson die right in front of her in the lobby last Christmas eating a chicken sandwich. He was choking on a piece he hadn’t chewed very well considering half his teeth were gone and he got so bad that Dawn called 911. Unfortunately they took eighteen minutes to get there from six blocks away and Mr. Johnson turned a weird shade of opaque blue and died. Dawn didn't feel the hotel paid her enough to put her mouth on old Mr. Johnson’s spittle and foam covered face to resuscitate him.

At least it wasn’t another ‘birdcage’. Dawn thought to herself when she found out Miss Rabowski was dead. ‘Birdcage’ was the term The Keystone’s employees gave to the occasional tenant who hurled themselves out of the windows or tiny patios lining the inner atrium of the hotel that went all the way up to the twelfth floor.

Those are the gross ones, really messy. I almost feel sorry for the housekeepers.

She even managed to get over it quickly when she came in to work one day a few months ago and a couple on the sixth floor had left a note at the front desk.

"Dear Dawn, please come up to our room, #602. We have left something for you. We are so grateful for all you have done for us and your kindness to my wife."

Oh yeah, they left me something all right. They left me with my kidneys layin’ on the damn floor. Scared the shit out of me.

Dawn remembered opening the door of Room 602 after getting no response to her knocks. Mrs. Ellison was lying on the single twin bed in the room neatly covered from head to toe with a worn, embroidered pink sheet. Mr. Ellison, nattily dressed in beige pants and a white, short-sleeved, stiff-collared shirt, was hanging from the swag bar of the ceiling fan in the center of the room.

On the night stand next to the bed was an envelope with Dawn’s name neatly hand printed on it. She picked it up and opened it slowly while staring up at the dangling, gray-faced Mr. Ellison. Inside were five crisp twenty dollar bills, the exact amount of the Ellison’s weekly rent.

Dawn put the money in her pocket, tore the envelope and the note into little pieces and told the cops nothing about it, certain that one of them would have kept the money for themselves. Nor did she tell them, or anyone else, that all she had done was let Mrs. Ellison in the room one day when she locked herself out. Apparently Mr. Ellison never forgot.

She would learn later that Mrs. Ellison was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Married for thirty seven years, the elderly couple came to the mutual decision they didn’t want to stick around without each other.

The cops called it what it was technically; a murder/suicide. Room #602 would be available for rent as soon as the coroner removed the bodies and the housemaid gave it a quick once-over. No one would say a word about what happened in the room and not enough of The Keystone’s residents were lucid enough to miss the Ellisons or question what happened to them. That was life…, and death at The Keystone these days.

Titus Kofi, private investigator and former cop, pulled his black leather, casual jacket together at the unbuttoned front. It was late March in northern Pennsylvania; a time of year when one day you could walk outside into bright warming sunshine and literally smell spring coming or steel yourself against forty mile an hour gusts the next day, so gray and cold you could almost understand why people threw themselves off the Lackawanna Bridge on a regular basis. This was one of the latter and Titus, who didn’t even like wearing a jacket let alone zipping it up, was pissed.

Listen Mr. Kofi, when do you figure we can open up that room for rent? We got a waiting list a mile long just from the State Hospital.

Titus pulled his sleek Blackberry cell phone away from his ear for a moment as he walked back to his car.

These morons; the damn body isn’t even cold yet. It’s all about the money.

Mike, Titus put the phone back up to his ear to address the day manager of The Keystone, if the cops say you’re all clear then you’re all clear. I have all the information I want from that room and the dead lady. All you have to do is clean it up and you’re good to go.

Well dammit, Mr. Kofi, they said I had to get the okay from you first. Mike Kozolowski could never get it through his sandy blonde Polish head that Titus didn’t like being called Mister by anyone.

That’s just the cops foisting responsibility for the call off on someone else. If they said they’re through then just clean it up. If you talk to them first, you tell the owners we’ll have a coroner’s report for their records in about ten days. Can you do that Mike?

Well yea, sure, I guess so. They’ll probably call you first though. I never hear from ‘em unless they think the deposits are short.

Titus knew Mike was right. The owners didn’t have a problem bothering him at all hours of the night and day. It was the price of his monthly draw. They were more concerned with the week's receipts from The Keystone than the health and welfare of the tenants.

The Keystone was one of those buildings that left you wondering how in the world it still had a certificate of occupancy. Well, it left you wondering only if you were too stupid to know that money talks. Titus knew money talks. He knew it because he sometimes used the handy little tool himself to procure information he might not be privy to otherwise.

He knew how the Keystone kept its occupancy certificate. He knew the three sisters and one brother comprising the corporation that owned The Keystone were perfectly willing