William opened his file again to remind himself quickly of the salient facts. There was a line drawn through the name of the original client, a Mr. Davis Leroy. It had been replaced by that of the morning's visitor, Mr. Abel Rosnovski.

William vividly remembered the last conversation he had had with Mr.

Rosnovski, and was already regretting it.

It took Abel about three months to appreciate the full extent of the problems facing the Richmond Continental and why the hotel went on losing so much money. The simple conclu sion he came to after twelve weeks of keeping his eyes wide open, while at the same time allowing the rest of the staff to believe that he was half asleep, was that the hotel's profits were being stolen.

The Richmond staff was working a collusive system on a scale which even Abel had not previously come across. The system did not, however, take into account a new assistant manager who had, in the past, had to steal bread from the Russians to stay alive. Abel's first problem was not to let anybody know the extent of his discoveries until he had a chance to look into every part of the hotel. It didn't take him long to figure out that each department had perfected its own system for stealing.

Deception started at the front desk where the clerks were registering only eight out of every ten guests and pocketing the cash payments from the remaining two for themselves. The routine they were using was a simple one; anyone who had tried it at the Plaza in New York would have been discovered in a few minutes and fired. The head desk clerk would choose an elderly couple, who had booked in from another state for only one night. He would then discreetly make sure they had no business connections in the city, and simply fail to register them. If they paid cash the following morning, the money was pocketed and, provided they had not signed the register, there was no record of the guests ever having been in the hotel. Abel had long thought that all hotels should automatically have to register every guest. They were already doing so at the Plaza.

In the dining room j the system had been refined. Of course, the cash payments of any casual guest for lunch or dinner were already being taken. Abel had expected that~ but it took him a little longer to check through the restaurant bills and establish that the front desk was working with the dining room staff to ensure that there were no restaurant bills for those guests whom they had already chosen not to register. Over and above that there was a steady trail of fie, titious breakages and repairs, missing equipment, disappearing food, lost bed linen, and even an occasional mattress had gone astray. After checking every department thoroughly and keeping I iis ears and eyes open, Abel concluded that over half of the Richmond's staff were involved in the conspiracy, and that no one department had a completely clean record.

When he had first come to the Richmond, Abel had wondered why the manager, Desmond Pacey, hadn't noticed what had been going on under his nose a long time before. He wrongly assumed the reason was that the man was lazy and could not be bothered to follow up complaints. Even Abel was slow to catch on to the fact that the lazy manager was the masterinind behind the entire operation, and the reason it worked so well. Pacey had worked for the Richmond group for over thirty years. Mere was not a single hotel in the group in which he had not held a senior position at one time or another, which made Abel fearful for the solvency of the other hotels. Moreover, Desmond Pacey was a personal friend of the hotels' owner, Davis Leroy. The Chicago Richmond was losing over thirty thousand dollars a year, a situadon Abel knew could be redeemed overnight by firing half the staff, starting with Desmond Pacey. `that posed a problem, because Davis Leroy had rarely fired anyone in thirty years. He simply tolerated the problems, hoping that in time they would go away.

As far as Abel could see, the Richmond hotel staff went on stealing the hotel blind until they reluctantly retired.

Abel knew that the only way he could reverse the hotel's fortunes was to have a show - down with Davis Leroy, and to that end, early in 1928, he boarded the express train from Illinois Central to St. Louis and the Missouri Pacific to Dallas. Under his arm was a two - hundred page report which he had taken three months to compile in his small room in the hotel annex. By the time he bad finished reading through the mass of evidence, Davis Leroy sat staring at him in dismay.

These people are my friends,' were his first words as he closed the dossier. 'Some of them have been with me for thirty years. Hell, there's always been a little fiddling around in this business, but now you tell me they've been robbing me blind behind my back?'

'Some of them, I should ffiin~ for all of those thirty years,' said Abel.

'What in hell's name am I going to do about it?' said Leroy.