We'll Always Have Parrots(36)

The junior bellhop was giggling. I could tell the senior bellhop wanted to, but he kept a stern face.

“Yeah, go ahead and laugh,” he said. “Just wait until they pull the same thing on you.”

At that point, they spotted some late arriving guests and hurried off to pounce on the luggage. I had to smile when I saw that the new arrivals were a just-married twenty-something couple, the bride still improbably wearing her wedding dress and the groom in his tuxedo.

Had they been in such a hurry for the wedding night that they’d forgotten to change into their going-away outfits? And clearly the hotel hadn’t warned them about who’d be sharing their honeymoon hideaway, I realized, as I stood in line behind them.

“I thought you said this was a nice hotel,” the bride hissed through clenched teeth.

The groom shrugged, and pretended to be totally unaware of the group of Amblyopian belly dancers rehearsing in the middle of the lobby, although the bride seemed more disconcerted by the people bedded down for the night under the fake foliage. Evidently the hotel had given up trying to control the convention. Apart from the night cleaning crew, deliberately vacuuming as close as possible to the sleepers’ heads, no one was taking any steps to relocate the squatters.

Well, better the lobby than our balcony, assuming our new room even had a balcony.

Just as long as we had a room. The lobby wasn’t an option. The cleaning crew departed, but the scarlet-clad musicians returned and appeared to be succeeding where the vacuums had failed. Though it was less the quality of their performance that evicted the squatters than the fact that they were trying to compose a sentimental eulogy to the QB, set to the tune of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy.”

The newlyweds finally made it through registration and disappeared down a corridor, earning the bellhops’ visible scorn by dragging their own matching wheeled suitcases behind them. My turn at the desk. Though the clerk initially seemed intent on ignoring my request that he find a new room for one of the convention’s guests of honor, my eloquence charmed the steadily growing crowd of monkeys who suspended themselves from the ceiling as close behind me as they could manage, and who added a chorus of hoots, grunts, and shrieks to the end of every sentence I uttered.

“I’d like to speak to the manager,” I said, finally.

“She’s not here,” the desk clerk said.

“What about the assistant manager?”

“They were both fired yesterday,” the desk clerk said. “Their replacements are supposed to be here Monday. I’m acting manager, but if you want to wait and speak to the new manager…”

“No,” I said, pounding my fist on the desk. “I want a room, now!”

The monkeys went wild at that. Several of them jumped down onto the registration desk and began pounding on it with their tiny furry fists. Inspired by their presence the desk clerk suddenly remembered an unoccupied room and managed, with trembling hands, to convince his computer that Michael and I should have it. I breathed more easily when he finally handed over a pair of card keys.

As I headed off to liberate our luggage from police custody, I passed the bridal party returning to the lobby. This time the husband was dragging both suitcases.

“‘Oh, no!’” the bride was saying, in a voice clearly intended to mimic her groom. “‘They’re not heavy; we can carry them ourselves.’”

“I’m sure it’ll be down that corridor,” her husband replied.

She stopped in the lobby, hands on hips, looking round and nodding, as if the scene before her summed up some long-festering doubt about the wisdom of the day’s proceedings.

“I’ll get directions,” her husband said, and began picking his way through the squatters. “Pardon me. Oh, sorry, sir; I didn’t mean to step on your light saber.”

His wife suddenly spotted something that made her jaw drop. Since I had paused to eavesdrop anyway, I sidled to a new vantage point where I could see what she was staring at.

A convention poster, with giant photos of Michael, Walker, and the QB arched across the top.

I frowned, and then realized, with a combination of relief and indignation, that she was gaping at Walker’s photo, not Michael’s. Well, to each her own. As I watched, she picked up her skirt at both sides and began sprinting down the corridor toward the ballroom.

“Jen?”

I turned to see the husband, still trailing the suitcases, looking around with a tired, puzzled expression on his face.

I shrugged, and continued on to our former room. Or the neighborhood of our former room, anyway. The POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS tape blocked the door. I stuck my head in one of the two nearby rooms that the police had commandeered for their operations center. The good-natured sergeant who seemed to be in charge told me that they’d packed our stuff and had it ready in the next room.