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the lavatory had been used by Mrs. Harris. There was a wet washcloth and a damp fluffy hand-towel, and a cake of soap had been removed from its hotel wrapper and was in the soap dish.
    Martha wiped up the bathroom thoroughly, and picked up the blouse from the floor and hung it on a hook in the closet. She got a dusting rag from her cart and spent at least three minutes wiping off the telephone and the ashtray beside it which held cigarette ashes, and desultorily flicking the cloth around on other surfaces that were already immaculate.
    She placed a fresh towel and washcloth in the bathroom, and closed the door of 326 behind her not more than ten minutes after she entered it. She wondered, greedily, where Mrs. Harris had spent the night, and hoped, unenviously, that it had been enjoyable.
    Then she went into 328 which was occupied by a young couple from Baltimore on their honeymoon and found the same sort of mess they left for her every morning. But she didn’t mind the work cleaning it up because they were a sweet young couple, obviously very much in love with each other and obviously thoroughly enjoying every moment of their honeymoon. It was a pleasure to make the room neat and comfortable for a nice young couple like that, and Martha didn’t mind at all that she anticipated receiving a tip of not more than a dollar when they left after a two-week stay.
    She thought no more about Mrs. Harris and the unused condition of 326 until she went off duty at two o’clock that afternoon and mentioned it in a brief report to the housekeeper which the hotel rules required her to do.
    Robert Merrill, Chief Security Officer of the Beachhaven Hotel, read Martha Hays’ report on the unused condition of Room Number 326 at five o’clock that afternoon. It consisted of a few typewritten lines near the end of two typewritten pages of somewhat similar reports which Merrill received in his office each afternoon. Most of them were no more important and meant no more to the management of the hotel than Martha’s report on 326. Yet, you never could be sure. It was Robert Merrill’s job to read this daily report on the doings and activities of guests in the hotel, and carefully evaluate each item. He didn’t really care, and the hotel management didn’t care, who was sleeping with whom, or what sort of wild parties were being thrown in which suite, so long as the decorum for the hotel and the sensibilities of other guests were not endangered… and so long as the credit rating of a guest did not come under suspicion. This was the most important part of Merrill’s job. He was hired to see, and it was his duty to see, that fraud was not successfully practiced on the Beachhaven by departing guests.
    Thus, anything whatever out of the norm was noted by each employee of the hotel and eventually reached Merrill’s desk. Very few hotel guests realize the type of surveillance they are subjected to every hour of the day. If they did realize it, most of them would protest honestly and vigorously against what they would consider an invasion of privacy, yet such protests would avail them nothing. If they managed to remain reasonably discreet during their stay and paid their bill in full on departure, they were rated as “Xlent” by the hotel and were welcomed as favored guests any time they wished to return.
    Thus, when Robert Merrill noted that the maid on the third floor reported that Mrs. Herbert Harris from New York had not occupied her room the preceding night, he was only mildly interested. It was something that had to be checked, but nothing to get excited about. There could be dozens of legitimate reasons why Mrs. Harris had decided to spend the night elsewhere, and certainly she was under no obligation to inform the hotel of her intention or reason for doing so. The only important question was whether she could reasonably be expected to pay for the room she had not occupied.
    Merrill had Ellen Harris’ registration brought to him with her