Dead Tenants
Dead.
All dead now.
Deceased.
Perished.
Defunct.
Rose Thornton—a 70‑year old spinstress who’d worked behind the glass counter at Fenton’s Jewelers for 35 years—found keeled over beneath the sill of her wide-open 7th floor window, a bag of birdseed (she fed the rooftop pigeons) clutched to her breast. Henry Carter—ticket agent at the Republic Greyhound depot for almost 40 years—found head‑down at his 4th floor kitchen table: dozens of neatly clipped Sunday newspaper coupons spread in front of him like an unfinished hand of solitaire. Gus Meyerson—retired Republic Country Club janitor and former North Dakota farm boy—laid out with the jumble of shoes at the bottom of his walk‑in closet. And little Martin Debussey—former WWII flying ace heavily decorated for gallantry displayed in bombing raids over the North Sea and English Channel—found floating in his second floor bathtub three days after a heart attack (and might have remained suspended there longer if his tub’s dripping faucet hadn’t caused it to overflow and create a curious rose‑shaped stain on the ceiling of a popular bookstore beneath him).
Dead and former tenants of the Grand Coulee Hotel: a bleak seven‑story Prohibition‑era building on the eastside of downtown Republic. This . . . a short list of the scores of pensioners and retirees that died each year within Grand Coulee’s crumbling walls. The kind of older men and women you see leaning against parking meters to catch their breath, stooping over their canes and walkers to say hello to small children and stray dogs, standing hesitantly at dangerous downtown crosswalks several series of reds and greens until they’ve gotten the muster to cross in time. The family-less and the friendless. The pious and the reprobate. The ne’er‑do‑well and the ne’er-a‑bit‑of‑luck. Drawn to the Grand Coulee and the Republic eastside like aging elephants in pilgrimage to their sacred burial grounds: to self‑medicate on cheap well drinks at nearby eastside bars and to reminisce upon the golden years of their youth. All bound by one thing: the opportunity the Grand Coulee’s antiquated rent allowed them to spend their last days in comfortable poverty and blessed obscurity.
In other words, the men and women of the Grand Coulee had it pretty good; that is, until Harry Grimes, owner and long-time resident of the Grand Coulee, died, and Harry’s only living relative and heir, Leo Grimes, took over operations.
Leo Grimes was Harry’s nephew: a 45 year-old three‑times married three‑times divorced retired military man from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Leo’s hair was prematurely gray; he wore thick black‑rimmed eyeglasses, and sported a rather stunning seashell white mustache that made him look a little like Mark Twain. He went about in a neon yellow Desert Storm windbreaker with George Bush’s “We kicked the Vietnam habit!” stenciled in back and was continually attempting, and continually failing, to win camaraderie amongst the Grand Coulee’s sizeable World War II veteran population by bragging how he’d begun his own military career with the somewhat dubious distinction of participating in the 1973 terror‑bombing of the Cambodian countryside.
But what unsettled the Grand Coulee’s tenants most was Leo Grime’s hornet‑like energy. Pete Steiglich, long‑time 3rd floor tenant, summed up the general impression Grimes had made amongst the Coulee’s rank and file:
“Leo was a friendly enough fella, all right—but friendly in an overly eager to please sorta way that, frankly, had us ducking for cover the minute we got wind of the approaching buzz of his wings. He got to treating us like we were a bunch of dang cripples: racing ahead of us to open a door . . . packing our groceries up a steep flight of stairs . . . offering to hook up Cable TV in our rooms ‘free‑of‑charge.’ Weren’t long before we got to suspecting his motive behind all these acts of Christian charity.”
More and more Leo Grimes was observed stomping up and down the Coulee’s broken‑bulbed hallways carrying great sacks of garbage, the sleeves of his windbreaker rolled up past his elbows. He’d taken to smoking actual corncob pipes (also a la Mark Twain), and was often heard grumbling out loud about “the pigsty” his Uncle Harry had left him.
“Great God almighty!” Leo would say, munching on the ends of his mustache with his lower lip and shaking his head slowly. “All these poor folks living here like this makes a fella wonder if he ain’t living in Sodom Hussein’s I‑raq! Lordy! What we need here is a thorough rebore and overhaul of the present situation. Yes, sir. Time to say hello to the 21st century and bye‑bye to the Stone Age!”
It was around this time that the woman showed up: Leo’s “Idaho Potato Queen.” One of the Coulee’s tenants had tagged her such because she was “built like a sack of ‘taters—bulging out all over the place.” Leo had met her at the Coeur d’Alene dog track, and she’d moved in with him shortly thereafter. Grimes claimed she had some kind of degree in “interior decorating” from a North Idaho community college. They went about like the King and Queen of the Grand Coulee: measuring tape and leveling bar in hand, making plans where new carpeting or wallpaper might be put in here, chintz curtains or a breakfast nook added there.
Where Leo Grimes would find the capital to implement these improvements was, of course, the question on everyone’s mind. No doubt Leo was receiving a healthy pension for his 20‑plus years in the Armed Services, and no doubt he was making a fair profit off the Coulee’s tenants even with their antiquated rents. But it was also known that Grimes was up to his neck in back alimony payments for the long line of children and ex‑wives he’d graced the globe with from Okinawa, Japan to Biloxi, Mississippi. If this wasn’t enough, it was said that Grimes had a gambling debt as long as his soliloquies on the virtues of U.S. Patriot and Tomahawk cruise missiles. So it came as no real surprise when, on April 1st 1991, a large yellow flyer appeared in the lobby of the Grand Coulee Hotel with these words:
AS OF THIS DATE—APRIL 1, 1991—ALL PRE‑EXISTING RENTAL CONTRACTS ARE
HEREBY DECLARED NULL AND VOID, AND THEREFORE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
SINCERELY,
LEO GRIMES
And beneath this flyer Grimes had tacked a copy of an official 1988 Republic City Council court ruling banning all present and future rent control acts.
While this notice shook the Grand Coulee’s hive somewhat—and hastened the death of a few more of its inhabitants—by and large it merely confirmed what many of the tenants had already begun to suspect: Leo Grimes was even stupider than they’d originally thought. Grimes had completely overlooked a grandfather clause near the bottom of the ruling that “honored all preexisting rental contracts ad infinitum.” In other words, since over 90% of them had moved into the Grand Coulee before the 1988 ruling, Leo Grimes would have to literally wait until each one of them dropped dead before he could even think of squeezing another coin out of a new tenant.
It wasn’t long after this that the rumors began: that Leo Grimes was stealing from the dead.
“We noticed a change in Leo’s demeanor almost overnight,” Pete Steiglich later recalled. “It was sorta Jekyll‑and‑Hydish. He got all internal. He went about in crumpled clothing, unshaven and reeking to high heaven half the time. Bill Pullman said Grimes was spending half his day in front of the pull‑tab gambling machines at P.M. Jacoy’s, drinking port wine and smoking cherry‑flavored tobacco. Grimes had been known to tip the bottle before . . . but now was going about loaded to the gills . . . listing to starboard . . . falling off barstools . . . locking himself out of his own goddamn hotel!”
Pearl Ray—2nd floor tenant at the Coulee—overheard “a very inebriate Mr. Grimes” all but confess of the crime to a young bartender at the El Sombrero:
“I ain’t saying there might be monies stashed in these hole‑in‑the‑wall apartments of mine—I’m telling you there’s heaps of it, son! I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Fat rolls of twenties thick as my wrist jammed behind a dresser mirror! Shoeboxes stuffed with dollar bills at the back of a high cupboard! Cleanly pressed Ben Franklins sandwiched between a mattress and box spring—smiling back at you when you slip ‘em out! I know it ‘cuz I’m the lucky- son‑of‑a‑bitch who gets to report the deaths to the authorities. I’m the one who gets to clean up the mess they leave behind and make an inventory of all their earthly belongings. And I’m the sucker who gets to contact any known relatives—which they most never have anyways. Alone—I’m telling you! Just me and that dead body and all that good green minty cash just a‑laying there ripe for the taking. And all the while I’m thinking if a fella was desiring—I ain’t saying actually doing the act!—but just desiring to pocket some of this loot for himself—say to reimburse himself for services rendered—why who in this great wide world but you and me and that corpse would know any different!”
What made folks think there might be some truth to these rumors was that Leo Grimes and his Idaho Potato Queen were often seen painting the town within days of a tenant’s death— oftentimes on the very day. Limousines would idle up to the Ambulance/Emergency Only parking stall and wait until Leo and his Potato Queen emerged from the hotel decked out in pricey cowboy and cowgirl gear: gaudy Western rose‑stitched shirts and tight-fitting rhinestone jeans, black Stetson hats and snakeskin boots. Ethel Rodgers—6th floor tenant and aging flower lady at Republic’s Davenport Hotel—reported that Grimes and his Potato Queen were checking into the Davenport’s 14th floor Honeymoon Suite (and had nearly got themselves 86ed for midnight skinny‑dipping in its rooftop pool). Clarence Timmins—4th floor tenant and the Grand Coulee’s newly hired janitor—was finding $100 bottles of champagne and what he believed to be “reefer cigarettes” in their trash. And Delbert Jones—Timmin’s neighbor—swore he saw “Grimes and his Queenie” lay down a $500 bet on a single race at the Coeur d’Alene track.
But as with all good things, Leo’s luck came to an end early one July morning.
Chester Nimitz—sometimes referred to as “Jiminy Cricket” because of his likeness to the Disney character (the same diminutive physical stature belying a commanding voice and presence)—was slinking down the rear hallway of the Grand Coulee Hotel. Chester had been at an after-hours card party, and had to use the unlocked rear entrance because he’d left his keys in his room earlier that evening. There were only three small apartments here along the rear hall, and the door to one of them, big Mabel Moore’s, was slightly ajar. Mabel was a “favorite” with many of the Grand Coulee’s elderly gentlemen: a big shapely woman with a fetish for naughty lingerie who claimed (falsely) to have been a dancer in her youth. Chester Nimitz had “made some time” with Mabel himself. Upon hearing the sultry strains of an old Billie Holliday jazz tune issuing from Mabel’s prize RCA Victor radio, Chester slicked back the few strands of hair on his cue ball head and drew near the sliver of yellow light emanating from her doorway.
“Mabel?”
Chester was stopped outside Mabel’s door by a nose‑crinkling stench: part sickly sweet odor of brown rotted roses, part acrid stench of death itself. He pulled a handkerchief from a hip pocket and covered his nose. He rapped softly on her door three times, waited, then eased it open.
“Mabel?”
The wanton carnality of what Chester observed next—or thought he’d observed—made even an old salt such as him shudder.
“Well . . . I’ve never—!”
There, flat‑out on the pink‑carpeted floor beside Mabel’s big brass bed, laid none other than Leo Grimes with Mabel Moore on top of him. Mabel was wearing the very same red and black teddy Chester Nimitz had bought her last Valentine’s Day. Leo’s face was half‑smothered beneath Mabel’s prodigious breasts, his black‑rimmed glasses hanging from an ear, and his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
“In all my days—!”
Chester bolted back out into the hallway, yelling, “Help! Necrophiliac!” at the top of his powerful little lungs. In a fit of panic, he pulled the fire alarm at the base of the Grand Coulee’s main stairway.
“People! Come quick!”
Thirty minutes later, Mabel Moore’s room and the entire rear hallway were cordoned off with yellow police ribbon. Republic Fire Department, Police Department and ambulance personnel were bumping into each other, every last one of them wondering what in the hell was going on. The Grand Coulee’s narrow lobby was to wall‑to‑wall with disgruntled tenants in bathrobes and pajamas, with crowd carryover stretching out past the Coulee’s front doors to the sidewalk. Back in Mabel Moore’s studio, Leo Grimes was sitting on Mabel’s bed, fully awake now and handcuffed to one of her bed’s brass bars. He sat with his head down, an ice pack firmly strapped to the top of his head, quietly moaning to himself.
Many stories were circulating as to what had happened in Mabel’s room: necrophilia being, of course, a central and a popular theme. But the version logged by Sgt. Paul Delaney in his police blotter later that day was perhaps closest to the truth:
Monday, June 12, 1991
Location: The Grand Coulee Hotel, W. 330 Riverside Avenue
Suspect Leo Grimes entered Miss Moore’s room at approximately 3:45 this morning. He smelled what he’d rightly surmised to be a dead tenant within Room No. 8 of the hotel. Mr. Grimes states that he knocked several times, then entered said premise via his master key. He found Miss Moore dead on her bed of what medical evidence now confirms as an overdose of sleeping pills. Mr. Grimes, while attempting to lift Miss Moore (a 250-pound woman) from the bed, was knocked over backwards. While falling with Miss Moore still in his arms, the suspect clipped his head on Miss Moore’s coffee table, suffering a concussion and an apparent blackout upon impact. While Mr. Grimes denies all that follows, it is our strong opinion that Mr. Grimes may have been attempting to lift Miss Moore to get at the $300 found beneath her mattress. We infer this because a coin purse of Miss Moore’s containing $200 was found in the suspect’s pocket upon rousing him. Also, upon searching Mr. Grimes’ own third floor apartment, several suspicious jars, matchboxes and other containers were discovered filled with various sums of monies ranging from $13.64 to $514.
Final Note:
All suspicion of possible acts of necrophilia between Mr. Grimes and the body of Miss Mabel Moore are hereby considered erroneous by this department. No medical evidence can be established to support these claims. The origin of these suspicions and rumors may be attributable to the suggestive female dominant/male submissive positioning of bodies one Chester Nimitz encountered upon entering Miss Moore’s room at approximately 4:07 this same morning. It is known that Mr. Nimitz had romantic relations with Miss Moore in the past. Furthermore, Mr. Nimitz has now admitted to the purchase of the red and black lingerie Miss Moore was found in at the time of our arrival upon the scene.
Dave Barrett lives and writes out of Missoula, Montana. His fiction has appeared most recently in Hobart, Quarter After Eight and Whiskey Island. His novel GONE ALASKA was published by Adelaide Books in July 2019. He teaches writing at Missoula College and is at work on a new novel.
