Read Online Redemption Street by Reed Farrel Coleman - Free Book Online Page A

brochure had been taken a very long time ago. A very long time indeed.
    A bent little man patrolled the front desk, his bald head and crooked back barely visible above the mahogany counter. There was a big old-fashioned bell atop the counter, but, like the rest of the room, the bell hadn’t been polished in recent history.
    “You Prager?” the gnome asked as I approached. “Molly gave a call from the town, said you might be coming. I’m Sam Gutterman, the proprietor of this lovely establishment. The brochure says Swan Song Hotel and Resort. Considering the age and health of our guests, it’s more like the Swan Song Hospice and Last Resort.”
    I was laughing by the time I shook Gutterman’s hand. It felt good to laugh again. His grip was surprisingly firm. In spite of his sparkly blue eyes and white smile, I figured him for his mid-seventies.
    “I’m Prager. And you should have been a comedian.”
    “Anybody ever tell you you got a flare for the self-evident?” Gutterman wagged his finger at me. “What, you think I owned this palace my whole life? I used to be Sudden Sam Gutterman, Blue Boy of the Borscht Belt. You shouldn’t know from it! I used more four-letter words than Webster’s Unabridged! You know what one wise-guy critic once wrote?”
    “What?”
    “ ‘Sudden Sam Guttermouth is …’ Wait,” he said, rubbing his chin, “I vanna get this right. ‘Sudden Sam Guttermouth is perhaps the only man alive—if you call what he does living—who could make Belle Barth sound like Oscar Wilde.’ You know Belle Barth?”
    “My folks had her records,” I said. “I used to listen to them when I stayed home sick from school. My favorite joke of hers was about the famous Yiddish actor Boris Tomashevsky.”
    “If you want bread, go bang a baker,” he recited the punch line without missing a beat.
    “That’s the one.”
    He glowed. “We’re gonna get along, you and me. You’re a good audience.” Sam turned behind him to the maze of little mailboxes, recited eenie-meenie-minie-moe, and picked a key. “This is where you would expect me to say that I’m giving you our best room. But since we don’t have even a good room, this one will have to do.” He handed me the key.
    “Two twenty-one,” I said, reading the number off the tag.
    “I could lie to you and say I gave you that room so you wouldn’t have trouble carrying your bag upstairs. You can guess already the elevator hasn’t worked since the last time I got laid. And you wouldn’t want to insult an old man by guessing how long ago that was.”
    “I didn’t know they had elevators during the Civil War.”
    “Don’t be such a wiseass.” He wagged his finger again. “You’re supposed to be the straight man. Got it?”
    “Got it.”
    “Like I was saying, it’s not about how far you gotta carry your bag. It’s about how far you’d fall when the fucking building collapses.”
    I feigned dismay. “Maybe I’d like a room on the upper floors. This way I’d fall on top of the rubble instead of it falling on me.”
    “It’s your funeral, bubeleh , but the heat don’t work up there.”
    I shook Sam’s hand good night and asked if I could have breakfast with him. In spite of his protestations, he accepted my invitation. When I reached for my bag, the former Blue Boy of the Borscht Belt ordered me to stop.
    “I gotta ring the bell for the hop,” he explained. “It’s tradition.”
    “Let me guess, you haven’t had a bellhop since the last time you got laid.”
    “Since the first time I got laid.” Sam laughed. “George Washington was in the next bed.”
    The room was actually clean and quite a bit more pleasant than the rest of the Swan Song. The furnishings were old, but neat. They dated back to the late fifties or early sixties, all very retro, very Jetsons . There were lots of big square cushions covered in thick orange wool. The lamps sort of looked like B-movie rocket ships. The Bakelite phone on the bedside table was a