seemed that the book he had semijokingly promised himself
might really happen. It might even be right here, buried in
these untidy heaps of paper. It could be a work of fiction, or
history, or both-a long book exploding out of this central
place in a hundred directions.
He stood beneath the cobwebby light, took his handkerchief
from his back pocket without thinking, and scrubbed at his
lips with it. And that was when he saw the scrapbook.
A pile of five boxes stood on his left like some tottering
Pisa. The one on top was stuffed with more invoices and
ledgers. Balanced on top of those, keeping its angle of repose
for who knew how many years, was a thick scrapbook with white
leather covers, its pages bound with two hanks of gold string
that bad been tied along the binding in gaudy bows.
Curious, he went over and took it down. The top cover was
thick with dust. He held it on a plane at lip level, blew the
dust off in a cloud, and opened it. As he did so a card
fluttered out and he grabbed it in mid-air before it could
fall to the stone floor. It was rich and creamy, dominated by
a raised engraving of the Overlook with every window alight.
The lawn and playground were decorated with glowing Japanese
lanterns. It looked almost as though you could step right into
it, an Overlook Hotel that had existed thirty years ago.
Horace M. Derwent Requests
The Pleasure of Your Company
At a Masked Ball to Celebrate
The Grand Opening of
THE OVERLOOK HOTEL
Dinner Will Be Served At 8 P. M.
Unmasking And Dancing At Midnight
August 29, 1945 RSVP
Dinner at eight! Unmasking at midnight!
He could almost see them in the dining room, the richest men
in America and their women. Tuxedos and glimmering starched
shirts; evening gowns; the band playing; gleaming high-heeled
pumps. The clink of glasses, the jocund pop of champagne
corks. The war was over, or almost over. The future lay ahead,
clean and shining. America was the colossus of the world and
at last she knew it and accepted it.
And later, at midnight, Derwent himself crying: "Unmask!
Unmask!" The masks coming off and...
(The Red Death held sway over all!)
He frowned. What left field had that come out of? That was
Poe, the Great American Hack. And surely the Overlook-this
shining, glowing Overlook on the invitation he held in his
hands-was the farthest cry from E. A. Poe imaginable.
He put the invitation back and turned to the next page. A
paste-up from one of the Denver papers, and scratched beneath
it the date: May 15, 1947.
POSH MOUNTAIN RESORT REOPENS WITH
STELLAR GUEST REGISTER
Derwent Says Overlook Will Be "Showplace of the World"
By David Felton, Features Editor
The Overlook Hotel has been opened and reopened in its thirty-
eight-year
history, but rarely with such style and dash as that promised
by Horace
Derwent, the mysterious California millionaire who is the
latest owner of
the hostelry.
Derwent, who makes no secret of having sunk more than one
million dollars
into his newest venture-and some say the figure is closer to
three
million-says that "The new Overlook will be one of the
world's showplaces,
the kind of hotel you will remember overnigbting in thirty
years later."
When Derwent, who is rumored to have substantial Las Vegas
holdings, was
asked if his purchase and refurbishing of the Overlook
signaled the opening
gun in a battle to legalize casino-style gambling in
Colorado, the
aircraft, movie, munitions, and shipping magnate denied it...
with a
smile. "The Overlook would be cheapened by gambling," he
said, "and don't
think I'm knocking Vegas! They've got too many of my markers
out there for
me to do that! I have no interest in lobbying for legalized
gambling in
Colorado. It would be spitting into the wind."
When the Overlook opens officially (there was a gigantic and
hugely
successful party there some time ago when the actual work was
finished),
the newly painted, papered, and decorated rooms will be
occupied by a
stellar guest list, ranging from Chic designer Corbat Stani
to...
Smiling bemusedly, Jack turned the page. Now he was looking
at a full-page ad from the New York Sunday Times travel
section. On the page after that a story on Derwent himself, a
balding man with eyes that pierced you even from an old
newsprint photo. He was wearing rimless spectacles and a
forties-style pencilline mustache that did nothing at all to
make him look like Errol Flynn. His face was that of an
accountant. It was the eyes that made him look like someone or
something else.
Jack skimmed the article rapidly. He knew most of the
information from a Newsweek story on Derwent the year before.
Born poor in St. Paul, never finished high school, joined the
Navy instead. Rose rapidly, then left in a bitter wrangle over
the patent on a new type of propeller that he had designed. In
the tug of war between the Navy and an unknown young man named
Horace Derwent, Uncle Sam came off the predictable winner. But
Uncle Sam had never gotten another patent, and there had been
a lot of them.
In the late twenties and early thirties, Derwent turned to
aviation. He bought out a bankrupt cropdusting company, turned
it into an airmail service, and prospered. More patents
followed: a new monoplane wing design, a bomb carriage used on
the Flying Fortresses that had rained fire on Hamburg and
Dresden and Berlin, a machine gun that was cooled by alcohol,
a prototype of the ejection seat later used in United States
jets.
And along the line, the accountant who lived in the same skin
as the inventor kept piling up the investments. A piddling
string of munition factories in New York and New Jersey. Five
textile mills in New England. Chemical factories in the
bankrupt and groaning South. At the end of the Depression his
wealth had been nothing but a handful of controlling
interests, bought at abysmally low prices, salable only at
lower prices still. At one point Derwent boasted that he could
liquidate completely and realize the price of a threeyear-old
Chevrolet.
There bad been rumors, Jack recalled, that some of the means
employed by Derwent to keep his head above water were less
than savory. Involvement with bootlegging. Prostitution in the
Midwest. Smuggling in the coastal areas of the South where his
fertilizer factories were. Finally an association with the
nascent western gambling interests.
Probably Derwent's most famous investment was the purchase of
the foundering Top Mark Studios, which had not had a bit since
their child star, Little Margery Morris, had died of a heroin
overdose in 1934. She was fourteen. Little Margery, who had
specialized in sweet seven-year-olds who saved marriages and
the lives of dogs unjustly accused of killing chickens, had
been given the biggest Hollywood funeral in history by Top
Mark-the official story was that Little Margery had contracted
a "wasting disease" while entertaining at a New York
orphanage-and some cynics suggested the studio had laid out
all that long green because it knew it was burying itself.
Derwent hired a keen businessman and raging sex maniac named
Henry Finkel to run Top Mark, and in the two years before
Pearl Harbor the studio ground out sixty movies, fifty-five of
which glided right into the face of the Hayes Office and spit
on its large blue nose. The other five were government
training films. The feature films were huge successes. During
one of them an unnamed costume designer had juryrigged a
strapless bra for the heroine to appear in during the Grand
Ball scene, where she revealed everything except possibly the
birthmark just below the cleft of her buttocks. Derwent
received credit for this invention as well, and his
reputation-or notoriety-grew.
The war had made him rich and he was still rich. Living in
Chicago, seldom seen except for Derwent Enterprises board
meetings (which he ran with an iron hand), it was rumored that
he owned United Air Lines, Las Vegas (where he was known to
have controlling interests in four hotel-casinos and some
involvement in at least six others), Los Angeles, and the U.
S. A. itself. Reputed to be a friend of royalty, presidents,
and underworld kingpins, it was supposed by many that he was
the richest man in the world.
But he had not been able to make a go of the Overlook, Jack
thought. He put the scrapbook down for a moment and took the
small notebook and mechanical pencil he always kept with him
out of his breast pocket. He jotted "Look into H. Derwent,
Sidwndr Ibry?" He put the notebook back and picked up the
scrapbook again. His face was preoccupied, his eyes distant.
He wiped his mouth constantly with his hand as he turned the
pages.
He skimmed the material that followed, making a mental note
to read it more closely later. Press releases were pasted into
many of the pages. So-and-so was expected at the Overlook next
week, thus-and-such would be entertaining in the lounge (in
Derwent's time it had been the Red-Eye Lounge). Many of the
entertainers were Vegas names, and many of the guests were Top
Mark executives and stars.
Then, in a clipping marked February 1, 1952:
MILLIONAIRE EXEC TO SELL COLORADO
INVESTMENTS
Deal Made with California Investors on
Overlook, Other Investments, Derwent Reveals
By Rodney Conklin, Financial Editor
In a terse communique yesterday from the Chicago offices of
the monolithic
Derwent Enterprises, it was revealed that millionaire
(perhaps billionaire)
Horace Derwent has sold out of Colorado in a stunning
financial power play
that will be completed by October 1, 1954. Derwent's
investments include
natural gas, coal, hydroelectric power, and a land
development company
called Colorado Sunshine, Inc., which owns or holds options
on better than
500,000 acres of Colorado land.
The most famous Derwent holding in Colorado, the Overlook
Hotel, has
already been sold, Derwent revealed in a rare interview
yesterday. The
buyer was a California group of investors headed by Charles
Grondin, a
former director of the California Land Development
Corporation. While
Derwent refused to discuss price, informed sources...
He had sold out everything, lock, stock, and barrel. It
wasn't just the Overlook. But somehow... somehow...
He wiped his lips with his hand and wished he had a drink.
This would go better with a drink. He turned more pages.
The California group had opened the hotel for two seasons,
and then sold it to a Colorado group called Mountainview
Resorts. Mountainview went bankrupt in 1957 amid charges of
corruption, nest-feathering, and cheating the stockholders.
The president of the company shot himself two days after being
subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.
The hotel had been closed for the rest of the decade. There
was a single story about it, a Sunday feature headlined FORMER
GRAND HOTEL SINKING INTO DECAY. The accompanying photos
wrenched at Jack's heart: the paint on the front porch
peeling, the lawn a bald and scabrous mess, windows broken by
storms and stones. This would be a part of the book, if he
actually wrote it, too-the phoenix going down into the ashes
to be reborn. He promised himself he would take care of the
place, very good care. It seemed that before today he had
never really understood the breadth of his responsibility to
the Overlook. It was almost like having a responsibility to
history.
In 1961 four writers, two of them Pulitzer Prize winners, had
leased the Overlook and reopened it as a writers' school. That
had lasted one year. One of the students had gotten drunk in
his third-floor room, crashed out of the window somehow, and
fell to his death on the cement terrace below. The paper
hinted that it might have been suicide.
Any big hotel. have got scandals, Watson had said, just like
every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and
go...
Suddenly it seemed that he could almost feel the weight of
the Overlook bearing down on him from above, one hundred and
ten guest rooms, the storage rooms, kitchen, pantry, freezer,
lounge, ballroom, dining room...
(In the room the women come and go)
(... and the Red Death held sway over all.)
He rubbed his lips and turned to the next page in the
scrapbook. He was in the last third of it now, and for the
first time he wondered consciously whose book this was, left
atop the highest pile of records in the cellar.
A new headline, this one dated April 10, 1963.
LAS VEGAS GROUP BUYS FAMED COLORADO
HOTEL
Scenic Overlook to Become Key Club
Robert T. Leffing, spokesman for a group of investors going
under the name
of High Country Investments, announced today in Las Vegas
that High
Country has negotiated a deal for the famous Overlook Hotel,
a resort
located high in the Rockies. Leffing declined to mention the
names of
specific investors, but said the hotel would be turned into
an exclusive
"key club." He said that the group he represents hopes to
sell memberships
to highechelon executives in American and foreign companies.
High Country also owns hotels in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah.
The Overlook became world-known in the years 1946 to 1952
when it was
owned by elusive mega-millionaire Horace Derwent, who...
The item on the next page was a mere squib, dated four months
later. The Overlook had opened under its new management.
Apparently the paper hadn't been able to find out or wasn't
interested in who the key holders were, because no name was
mentioned but High Country Investments-the most anonymous-
sounding company name Jack had ever heard except for a chain
of bike and appliance shops in western New England that went
under the name of Business, Inc.
He turned the page and blinked down at the clipping pasted
there.
MILLIONAIRE DERWENT BACK IN COLO-
RADO VIA BACK DOOR?
High Country Exec Revealed to be
Charles Grondin
By Rodney Conklin, Financial Editor
The Overlook Hotel, a scenic pleasure palace in the Colorado
high country
and once the private plaything of millionaire Horace Derwent,
is at the
center of a financial tangle which is only now beginning to
come to light.
On April 10 of last year the hotel was purchased by a Las
Vegas firm,
High Country Investments, as a key club for wealthy
executives of both
foreign and domestic breeds. Now informed sources say that
High Country is
headed by Charles Grondin, 53, who was the head of California
Land
Development Corp. until 1959, when he resigned to take the
position of
executive veep in the Chicago home office of Derwent
Enterprises.
This has led to speculation that High Country Investments may
be
controlled by Derwent, who may have acquired the Overlook for
the second
time, and under decidedly peculiar circumstances.
Grondin, who was indicted and acquitted on charges of tax
evasion in
1960, could not be reached for comment, and Horace Derwent,
who guards his
own privacy jealously, had no comment when reached by
telephone. State
Representative Dick Bows of Golden has called for a complete
investigation
into...
That clipping was dated July 27, 1964. The next was a column
from a Sunday paper that September. The byline belonged to
Josh Brannigar, a muck-raking investigator of the Jack
Anderson breed. Jack vaguely recalled that Brannigar had died
in 1968 or '69.
MAFIA FREE-ZONE IN COLORADO?
By Josh Brannigar
It now seems possible that the newest r&r spot of
Organization overlords in
the U. S. is located at an out-of-the-way hotel nestled in
the center of the
Rockies. The Overlook Hotel, a white elephant that has been
run lucklessly
by almost a dozen different groups and individuals since it
first opened
its doors in 1910, is now being operated as a security-
jacketed "key club,"
ostensibly for unwinding businessmen. The question is, what
business are
the Overlook's key holders really in?
The members present during the week of August 1623 may give
us an idea.
The list below was obtained by a former employee of High
Country
Investments, a company first believed to be a dummy company
owned by
Derwent Enterprises. It now seems more likely that Derwent's
interest in
High Country (if any) is outweighed by those of several Las
Vegas gambling
barons. And these same gaming honchos have been linked in the
past to both
suspected and convicted underworld kingpins.
Present at the Overlook during that sunny week in August
were:
Charles Grondin, President of High Country Investments. When
it became
known in July of this year that he was running the High
Country ship it was
announced-considerably after the fact-that he had resigned
his position in
Derwent Enterprises previously. The silver-maned Grondin, who
refused to
talk to me for this column, has been tried once and acquitted
on tax
evasion charges (1960).
Charles "Baby Charlie" Battaglia, a 60-year-old Vegas
empressario
(controlling interests in The Greenback and The Lucky Bones
on the Strip).
Battaglia is a close personal friend of Grondin. His arrest
record
stretches back to 1932, when he was tried and acquitted in
the
gangland-style murder of Jack "Dutchy" Morgan. Federal
authorities suspect
his involvement in the drug traffic, prostitution, and murder
for hire, but
"Baby Charlie" has only been behind bars once, for income tax
evasion in
1955-56.
Richard Scarne, the principal stockholder of Fun Time
Automatic Machines.
Fun Time makes slot machines for the Nevada crowd, pinball
machines, and
jukeboxes (Melody-Coin) for the rest of the country. He has
done time for
assault with a deadly weapon (1940), carrying a concealed
weapon (1948),
and conspiracy to commit tax fraud (1961).
Peter Zeiss, a Miami-based importer, now nearing 70. For the
last five
years Zeiss has been fighting deportation as an undesirable
person. He has
been convicted on charges of receiving and concealing stolen
property
(1958), and conspiracy to commit tax fraud (1954). Charming,
distinguished,
and courtly, Pete Zeiss is called "Poppa" by his intimates
and has been
tried on charges of murder and accessory to murder. A large
stockholder in
Scarne's Fun Time company, he also has known interests in
four Las Vegas
casinos.
Vittorio Gienelli, also known as "Vito the Chopper," tried
twice for
gangland-style murders, one of them the ax-murder of Boston
vice overlord
Frank Scoffy. Gienelli has been indicted twenty-three times,
tried fourteen
times, and convicted only once, for shoplifting in 1940. It
has been said
that in recent years Gienelli has become a power in the
organization's
western operation, which is centered in Las Vegas.
Carl "Jimmy-Ricks" Prashkin, a San Francisco investor,
reputed to be the
heir apparent of the power Gienelli now wields. Prashkin owns
large blocks
of stock in Derwent Enterprises, High Country Investments,
Fun Time
Automatic Machines, and three Vegas casinos. Prashkin is
clean in America,
but was indicted in Mexico on fraud charges that were dropped
quickly three
weeks after they were brought. It has been suggested that
Prashkin may be
in charge of laundering money skimmed from Vegas casino
operations and
funneling the big bucks back into the organization's
legitimate western
operations. And such operations may now include the Overlook
Hotel in
Colorado.
Other visitors during the current season include...
There was more but Jack only skimmed it, constantly wiping
his lips with his hand. A banker with Las Vegas connections.
Men from New York who were apparently doing more in the
Garment District than making clothes. Men reputed to be
involved with drugs, vice, robbery, murder.
God, what a story! And they had all been here, right above
him, in those empty rooms. Screwing expensive whores on the
third floor, maybe. Drinking magnums of champagne. Making
deals that would turn over millions of dollars, maybe in the
very suite of rooms where Presidents had stayed. There was a
story, all right. One hell of a story. A little frantically,
he took out his notebook and jotted down another memo to check
all of these people out at the library in Denver when the
caretaking job was over. Every hotel has its ghost? The
Overlook had a whole coven of them. First suicide, then the
Mafia, what next?
The next clipping was an angry denial of Brannigar's charges
by Charles Grondin. Jack smirked at it.
The clipping on the next page was so large that it had been
folded. Jack unfolded it and gasped harshly. The picture there
seemed to leap out at him: the wallpaper had been changed
since June of 1966, but he knew that window and the view
perfectly well. It was the western exposure of the
Presidential Suite. Murder came next. The sitting room wall by
the door leading into the bedroom was splashed with blood and
what could only be white flecks of brain matter. A blank-faced
cop was standing over a corpse hidden by a blanket. Jack
stared, fascinated, and then his eyes moved up to the
headline.
GANGLAND-STYLE SHOOTING AT
COLORADO HOTEL
Reputed Crime Overlord Shot at Mountain Key Club
Two Others Dead
SIDEWINDER, COLO (UPI)-Forty miles from this sleepy Colorado
town, a
gangland-style execution has occurred in the heart of the
Rocky Mountains.
The Overlook Hotel, purchased three years ago as an exclusive
key club by a
Las Vegas firm, was the site of a triple shotgun slaying. Two
of the men
were either the companions or bodyguards of Vittorio
Gienelli, also known
as "The Chopper" for his reputed involvement in a Boston
slaying twenty
years ago.
Police were summoned by Robert Norman, manager of the
Overlook, who said
he heard shots and that some of the guests reported two men
wearing
stockings on their faces and carrying guns had fled down the
fire escape
and driven off in a late-model tan convertible.
State Trooper Benjamin Moorer discovered two dead men, later
identified
as Victor T. Boorman and Roger Macassi, both of Las Vegas,
outside the door
of the Presidential Suite where two American Presidents have
stayed.
Inside, Moorer found the body of Gienelli sprawled on the
floor. Gienelli
was apparently fleeing his attackers when he was cut down.
Moorer said
Gienelli had been shot with heavy-gauge shotguns at close
range.
Charles Grondin, the representative of the company which now
owns the
Overlook, could not be reached for...
Below the clipping, in heavy strokes of a ball-point pen,
someone had written: They took his balls along with them. Jack
stared at that for a long time, feeling cold. Whose book was
this?
He turned the page at last, swallowing a click in his throat.
Another column from Josh Brannigar, this one dated early 1967.
He only read the headline: NOTORIOUS HOTEL SOLD FOLLOWING
MURDER OF UNDERWORLD FIGURE.
The sheets following that clipping were blank.
(They took his balls along with them.)
He flipped back to the beginning, looking for a name or
address. Even a room number. Because he felt quite sure that
whoever had kept this little book of memories had stayed at
the hotel. But there was nothing.
He was getting ready to go through all the clippings, more
closely this time, when a voice called down the stairs: "Jack?
Hon?"
Wendy.
He started, almost guiltily, as if he had been drinking
secretly and she would smell the fumes on him. Ridiculous. He
scrubbed his lips with his hand and called back, "Yeah, babe.
Lookin for rats."
She was coming down. He heard her on the stairs, then
crossing the boiler room. Quickly, without thinking why he
might be doing it, be stuffed the scrapbook under a pile of
bills and invoices. He stood up as she came through the arch.
"What in the world have you been doing down here? It's almost
three o'clock!"
He smiled. "Is it that late? I got rooting around through all
this stuff. Trying to find out where the bodies are buried, I
guess."
The words clanged back viciously in his mind.
She came closer, looking at him, and he unconsciously
retreated a step, unable to help himself. He knew what she was
doing. She was trying to smell liquor on him. Probably she
wasn't even aware of it herself, but he was, and it made him
feel both guilty and angry.
"Your mouth is bleeding," she said in a curiously flat tone.
"Huh?" He put his hand to his lips and winced at the thin
stinging. His index finger came away bloody. His guilt
increased.
"You've been rubbing your mouth again," she said.
He looked down and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess I have."
"It's been hell for you, hasn't it?"
"No, not so bad."
"Has it gotten any easier?"
He looked up at her and made his feet start moving. Once they
were actually in motion it was easier. He crossed to his wife
and slipped an arm around her waist. He brushed aside a sheaf
of her blond hair and kissed her neck. "Yes," he said.
"Where's Danny?"
"Oh, he's around somewhere. It's started to cloud up outside.
Hungry?"
He slipped a hand over her taut, jeans-clad bottom with
counterfeit lechery. "Like ze bear, madame."
"Watch out, slugger. Don't start something you can't finish."
"Fig-fig, madame?" he asked, still rubbing. "Dirty peeotures?
Unnatural positions?" As they went through the arch, he threw
one glance back at the box where the scrapbook
(whose?)
was hidden. With the light out it was only a shadow. He was
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