Chapter 1

I work at Robinchex Puzzle Company. I’m in charge of wrapping puzzle boxes in plastic. An interesting job. Nothing fancy, but I really like to do it. The job pays the bills. I have health insurance and a retirement plan. I get a slew of vacation and sick days. There’s no reason why I should leave my job.

After putting in my eight hours, I decide to have a strong drink at The Hoffstetter Inn on Mayden Street in downtown Pittsburgh, near the old Heinz factory on the North Side. The redbrick and steel building stands seven stories high. Brass doors with lion-shaped handles welcome visitors. Most of its interior is designed with black and gold hues. There are over sixty bedrooms to rent, a restaurant with the same name, and a common bar.

The Hoffstetter was built in late 1891 by brothers Robert and Joseph Hoffstetter. For the next thirty years, it thrived through the steel-making years of Pittsburgh. Things had slowed down during the GreatDepression, though. Robert hung himself in the lobby, losing close to a million dollars in stocks. Joseph vanished, leaving behind his hotel. Rumors suggested he ran away with a young farmer. The two had fallen in love and vanished to Hollywood. Joseph had never been seen since. Nor was he viewed in Hollywood films.

Thereafter, the hotel financially fell into the city’s hands. It sat empty from 1929 to 1941. In the spring of 1941, middle-aged alcoholic Marshall Weddington paid pennies to the city for the hotel. Marshall, unfortunately, died from alcohol poisoning less than three years later. Enter Fitz Hoffstetter-Murrer in 1955, Robert Hoffstetter’s love child to his mistress, Miss Jane Murrer. Fitz was born in 1929 and raised by his mother in Pittsburgh. He went to Yale for business, played the stock market wisely, and purchased six buildings in Pittsburgh, including his father’s abandoned hotel.

I love The Hoffstetter Inn because of its turn-of-the-century extravagance: eighteen-foot-high doors off the lobby, gold banisters wherever I look, mahogany chairs, steel beams inside the lower rooms. English furniture, Pittsburgh Plate Glass windows designed by architect/artist Arthur Bentingstein, and so many other intricate features.

Frankie O’Toole mans the bar, a third-generation bartender at the place; his career for the last fifteen years. He’s a handsome ginger at thirty-five, married with children. I know he’s witnessed more than I can imagine within The Hoffstetter throughout the years. A true friend of mine. Honest. A good listener. I rely on seeing him behind his U-shaped bar, a white towel always hanging over his left shoulder.

Frankie’s all smiles when he sees me enter and knows my drink of choice: two fingers of whiskey over three ice cubes. He has my drink ready for me. “You’re three minutes late, Pete. I’ll make you a fresh one.”

“It’s fine. Thank you,” I tell him as I sit at the bar. “I’ll drink it the way it is.”

“Someone was just here to see you.”

“Who? What woman?”

I’m a handsome man at thirty-five. I have a job. I’m not crazy. City women always find these facts out about me, learn that I’m single, and desire me. Good men are hard to find among so many women. I’m a good man who wants to find another good man. Frankie will tell you if you don’t believe me.

“It wasn’t a woman. A gentleman. Big. Blonde. Blue eyes. He looked like a Hollywood actor.”

“You just described Chris Hemsworth.”

Frankie chuckles. “Sorry, I didn’t see if he had a hammer.”

“Too bad. I’d bed any of the Hemsworth brothers, even at the same time.” I wink at him. “If given theopportunity, of course.”

Marilyn Monroe, Rock Hudson, Prince, and Janice Joplin sit around Frankie’s bar during happy hour. They’re not ghosts. They simply look like dead icons. The quartet is scattered around the bar, searching for new lives, fresh dreams, something, uncertain regarding their current positions in the world, perhaps lost.

I finish my drink. Frankie makes me another one. While doing so, he’s on the phone with his wife, Carly. Their oldest daughter has lice, again.

He mumbles something like, “Fucking public school. If I made enough money, I’d send all three girls to private school.” Frankie slides the fresh drink in front of me and meanders away to wait on Marilyn and Rock, who now sit beside each other, flirting.

“Peter Find,” a masculine voice says to my right.

It’s not someone I already know, or he would call me Pete, like most of my friends and acquaintances. I turn my head to the right and see Thor standing there: awesomely tall at six-four, awesomely muscular at two hundred thirty pounds, awesomely handsome with short hair, under-the-sea blue eyes, and blonde fuzz on his cheeks and chin. His hands are massive, too. And his lips are almost pink. He looks older than me. Maybe by just a year or two because of the acute wrinkles around his eyes. Thirty-eight, tops. I look at his style of dress and approve: tight khakis against his Herculean-like legs, sky blue shirt glued to his chest, nipples hard and pointy, and a brown leather belt at his middle that matches his Italian loafers.