“Sitting room here, shower here, television’s in the cabinet, the remote control for it is in the—” “I’ll find it, thanks,” Pickett said. He tried to decide if he sounded gruff. Magazine articles about him never failed to include the phrase “the gruff-voiced octogenarian,” but Gus never thought he sounded gruff. Gus thought he sounded just fine. With a skill born of a million stays in a million hotel rooms, Gus had the kid tipped and out of there before he started to lose his patience. He’d been a hard-working man for seventy-two years, now, and he didn’t plan to waste what time he had left in small talk with bellboys. “In town for the primary?” the kid had asked. “Got business,” Gus had replied. “All my trips are business.” Then he’d tipped the kid five dollars, or fifty times what the job was worth—okay, at least five times, allowing for inflation—and told him to scoot. Of course, his business here was the primary, but that was nobody’s concern.
