The business about the station-wagons opened my eyes to the seamy side of the motel business. It seemed that there were people, particularly young couples just married and in process of setting up house, who would check in at some lonely motel carrying at least the minimum ‘passport’ of a single suitcase. This suitcase would in fact contain nothing but a full set of precision tools, together with false licence plates for their roomy station-wagon that would be parked in the car-port alongside their cabin door. After locking themselves in and waiting for the lights to go out in the office, the couple would set to work on inconspicuous things like loosening the screws of the bathroom fixtures, testing the anchoring of the TV set and so on. Once the management had gone to bed, they would really get down to it, making neat piles of bedding, towels and shower curtains, dismantling light-fixtures, bed-frames, lavatory-seats and even the lavatories themselves if they had plumbing knowledge. They worked in darkness of course, with pencil torches, and, when everything was ready, say around two in the morning, they would quietly carry everything through the door into the car-port and pile it into the station-wagon. The last job would be to roll up the carpets and use them, the reverse side up, as tarpaulins to cover the contents of the station-wagon. Then change the plates and softly away with their new bedroom suite all ready to lay out in their unfurnished flat many miles away in another State!
Two or three hauls like that would also look after the living-room and spare bedroom and they would be set up for life. If they had a garden, or a front porch, a few midnight forays around the rich, out-of-town ‘swimming-pool’ residences would take care of the outdoor furniture, children’s heavy playthings, perhaps even the lawn-mower and sprinklers.
Mrs Phancey said the motels had no defence against this sort of attack. Everything was screwed down that could be screwed down, and marked with the name of the motel. The only hope was to smell the marauders when they registered and then either turn them away or sit up all night with a shot-gun. In cities, motels had other problems – prostitutes who set up shop, murderers who left corpses in the shower, and occasional holdups for the money in the cash register. But I was not to worry. Just call for Jed if I smelled trouble. He could act real tough and he had a gun. And, with this cold comfort, I was left to ponder on the darker side of the motel industry.
Of course it all turned out perfectly all right and the job was no problem. In fact there was so little to do that I did rather wonder why the Phanceys had bothered to take me on. But they were lazy and it wasn’t their money they were paying me and I guessed that part of the reason was that Jed thought he had found himself an easy lay. But that also was no problem. I just had to dodge his hands and snub him icily on an average of once a day and hook a chair under my door handle when I went to bed to defeat the pass-key he tried on my second night.
We had a few overnighters in the first week and I found that I was expected to lend a hand with the housekeeping, but that too was all right with me, and anyway the customers slacked off, until, after October tenth, there wasn’t a single one.
Apparently October fifteenth is a kind of magical date in this particular holiday world. Everything closes down on that day, except along the major highways. It is supposed to be the beginning of winter. There is the hunting season coming up, but the rich hunters have their own hunting clubs and camps in the mountains, and the poor ones take their cars to one or another of the picnic areas and climb up into the forests before dawn to get their deer. Anyway, around October fifteenth the tourists disappear from the scene and there is no more easy money to be made in the Adirondacks.
As closing day came nearer, there was a good deal of talk on the telephone between the Phanceys and Mr Sanguinetti in Troy, and on the eleventh Mrs Phancey told me casually that she and Jed would be leaving for Troy on the thirteenth and would I mind staying in charge that night and handing over the keys to Mr Sanguinetti, who would be coming up finally to close the place around noon on the fourteenth?
