Free The Empty Trap by John D. MacDonald Page A

a stupendous ugliness.”
    She started to object and then understood and smiled back. “No man can claim more.”
    “I will begin a new work. I will rent my face to mothers all over Mexico to frighten disobedient children.”
    She made the usual automatic correction of his grammar and said, “You will have much work. It will be successful. Mexico will have only good children.”
    “For love, I will have a mask made. It will be the face of the Señor Roberto Taylor. Then young maidens can fall madly in love with me. I will have great success in that work, also.”
    “For me,” she said, “that is not a needed thing.”
    “This face does not alarm you?”
    “If it does, I have the privilege of closing my eyes, Lloydito. What work did you do? You have never told.”
    “I am sorry. That is a rudeness. I was a manager of hotels. One hotel at a time. I went to a school and learned what must be done, and then had a small job, and then a bigger one, and a bigger one.”
    “Ah, you were good at that work. And important.”
    “Good, but not important.”
    She gave him a brooding look. “This Sylvia, she lived in your hotel?”
    “Yes. She was the wife of the owner.”
    “Then he was not a thief as you said?”
    “I did not lie. The money was made by gambling. The gambling was dishonest.”
    “Oh. Was it a big hotel? With many rooms? With … twenty rooms?”
    He laughed aloud. “The land of the hotel is almost as big as all of this valley. There was a great pool of water to swim in. There were many buildings. There are more than two hundred rooms.”
    “Truly, you are the greatest liar of all.”
    “It is the truth.”
    Her questions had brought back memories. The next morning he worked with Armando, helping to clear land that would be planted in the spring. They felled the trees, dragged and rolled them down into the valley. It was hard work and he tired quickly. He had to rest often. Though he protested, Armando would not let him work longer than a half day as yet. After he had eaten hugely of tortillas and beans, he went off to his protected place in the rocks, stripped, and stretched out on his serape. The basic honesty of these people was an insidious thing, he realized. When you were exposed to it long enough, you were forced to reexamine your own motives. And he knew it was time for self-analysis, to go back over all of the events leading up to his flight with Sylvia, and try to understand completely why he had been able to become thief and wife-stealer.
    Lloyd Wescott first met Harry Danton in the late summer of 1963. Lloyd, at that time, had just been promoted to manager of a deluxe resort hotel on the coast of Maine north of Portland. He had turned twenty-seven that summer, and was trying very hard to both look and act older. It was an old hotel, with a regular clientele who had become so accustomed to the sedate ways of the previous manager that they tended to treat Lloyd as though he were a half step higher than a bell hop. This was the first season under new ownership, and the new owners hoped to attract new business. Lloyd, then working as assistant manager of a very large and successfulsummer hotel in the Adirondacks, and in the winter as assistant manager of a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, owned by the same people, heard of the vacancy in Maine and applied for the job. He was thoroughly astonished when they hired him. He got to Maine six weeks before opening. A new pool and a new lounge were being constructed. He worked an estimated twenty-hour day for six weeks, lived through the first three days of the opening, and then went to bed for forty-eight hours.
    His delicate mission was to attract younger people without alienating the old hands. The hotel had not been operating at capacity for several years because far too many of the elderly clientele had died, and too many had become unfit for travel.
    In his greenness and in his eagerness to have a full house, he had taken several chances on mail