Thursday, 24 March 2022

The Maid

 by Nita Prose

This is the story of a maid at a large hotel.  She appears to have some level of autism, judging from her  thought processes and behaviour.  She is very lonely as her grandmother who raised her died about a year ago.  She is struggling to make ends meet because a beau she had cleaned out all hers and her grandmother's savings.

She is a hard worker and prides herself on making rooms very clean.  She has a crush on the bartender and thinks he likes her.  She helps out a dishwasher in the kitchen by giving him the key to rooms that are empty as she has been told he is homeless.  She then cleans the rooms the next morning before they can be booked out.  This is a bit fishy, how  would she know the room wouldn't be rented out later in the day?  One day she enters one of the rooms to find the bartender, two big thugs and the dishwasher in the room.  She is puzzled but they tell her everything is okay so she heads on her way.

She befriends the trophy wife of one of the wealthy couples that frequently stay at the hotel.  The husband is rude and abusive of his wife.  The wife confides in the Maid and the maid thinks they have become friends.  One day she goes back to the couple's room to finish cleaning the bathroom and finds the husband dead on the bed.  She reports this to the office and is brought in for questioning.  Her behaviour confounds the police and she doesn't tell them everything as she wants to protect the wife.

Later the wife shows up at her apartment and asks her to retrieve a gun she had stored in the ceiling in the bathroom.  The Maid, Molly, agrees to do this and puts the gun in her vaccuum cleaner. Molly confides this information to the bartender who she thinks has a crush on her. Shortly after the police show up at her apartment and arrest her for the murder of the rich man.  They tell her they found the gun in her vaccuum cleaner and found drugs in her locker.

The doorman of the hotel, and his daughter who is a lawyer, seek to defend the maid.  Eventually she tells the police about the activities of the bartender and the dishwasher.  It turns out the bartender had been blackmailing the dishwasher into helping them move drugs.  The rich man was also involved in this drug business.

Molly still feels sorry for the trophy wife and helps her leave the building.  It turns out the trophy wife was having an affair with the bartender and planned to leave her husband, going with the bartender to a property in the caribbean. It turns out the bartender was using both women.  He is eventually arrested for the drug dealing and murder of the rich man.  Molly later learns that it was actually the rich man's ex wife who murdered him but she doesn't share this information with anyone.

It was an interesting mystery story.


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