A/N: I've nearly finished my non-fiction Chuck projects and I had this new idea. A novel. A period piece. The 60's. My apologies to They Might Be Giants for the song title I have pressed into service as my story's title.

(She Was A) Hotel Detective

Chapter One: First Floor, Lobby

Sarah Walker glanced surreptitiously across the lobby, crossed her legs, brushing away a bit of imaginary lint from her skirt, her leg-crossing and brushing both covers for her visual sweep of the grand room beneath the beautiful, vaulted ceiling.

She stole a look up at the ceiling, the Rigal Grecian Art Deco murals, the massive, Tiffany and Company 24-karat, gold-winged candelabras. Expensive, opulent, overwhelming. The lobby made her feel like she was little.

She looked back down. Her skirt was pine green and she wore a lime green blouse above it, divided from the skirt by a black belt. Her low-heeled shoes were black too. The outfit, while nice, whispered 'librarian'.

She carefully folded the city paper, The Chicago Tribune, on her lap, finished, for now, using it as a prop. She could see the date at the top, Friday, November 5, 1965.

She had spent the morning as she typically did, watching guests check out of the Palmer House, the historic, luxurious hotel where she was one of two house detectives. She reached for her purse, stationed by her chair, and took out a small brass compact. She opened it and checked her appearance, giving herself a perfunctory smile, and rotating her head a bit, side-to-side.

Her long brown hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail. Her glasses, the lenses non-prescription, were tortoise and blended into her hair, and hid, minimized, her blue eyes.

She had yielded to the hotel manager in order to get the job — she had dyed her hair and donned the glasses. The Palmer's manager, a former Marine named John Casey, a Korean War veteran, had been adamant that no woman as attractive as Sarah could achieve the anonymity a hotel detective had to have. Sarah had hated him a bit for insisting, but she also knew that he was right, so she had 'toned herself down', to use Casey's repeated, demanding phrase.

It had been the final sticking point: Casey had been impressed by her, by her resume, and she knew he was not simply being chauvinist. He was being chauvinist, but the truth was that most of the Palmer House's guests were far worse. She could not do her job if men kept hitting on her in the lobby. Eventually, someone would begin to wonder why she was so often there and would have guessed her either a prostitute — or a house detective. Either guess was problematic for her, interfered with the job.

So she had toned herself down — golden blond to mousy brown, flatteringly form-fitting to slightly frumpy — and managed to sit in the lobby unobtrusively, most often mostly hidden behind an unfurled Tribune. Watching. Listening. Considering. When she was not in the lobby, she was in her basement office, the one she shared with the other house detective, Devon Woodcomb. She spent little time in that office; usually, only a few minutes to begin and end her shift.

She checked her wristwatch. It was the time when she usually stepped out to get a cup of coffee, her break. Check-out was finished and the late morning-early afternoon lull had begun. Casey stepped out of the office and stood behind the massive, gleaming oak desk. He caught her eye for the briefest of seconds and nodded. He would be at the desk, watching, until she returned.

She put her compact back in her bag, picked it up, and her coat, folded on the back of the chair. She walked to the front desk. Without looking at Casey and without speaking, she put the newspaper on it.

The morning desk clerk, Morgan Grimes, slid it toward himself. He would return it to her when she came back. Inside the paper was her small notebook, the one in which she jotted often when working, making notes, keeping track.

Observation and prediction were two of her specialties; she was astoundingly good at seeing trouble coming, and knowing where, and when, and how, it would occur — and who would be responsible for it when it did.

Observation and prediction. Specialties.

She walked out the gleaming, revolving doors, putting on her coat, out from under the soaring ceilings of the Palmer House and out under the low grey sky, onto the cold, drizzle-swept street. She reviewed her past as she walked along, hunched forward into the wet, icy wind.

She had acquired her specialties by traveling a serpentine path.

Her mother had died when Sarah was just six, and she had been raised by a father who made a living as a con artist. He had involved her in the business right away, and she had been raised on the road, in motel rooms, moving from con to con. Just as Sarah was about to enter high school, her father had made a serious error: he had tried to con on a man who turned out to be an undercover CIA agent. Luckily, the agent, Robert Rizzo, had taken a liking to Sarah's father, Jack Burton, and to Sarah (he had a daughter around Sarah's age, he said), and he had intervened with the Agency's director, Silas Joad. For the next four years, Jack and Sarah were occasional off-the-book participants, conscripts, not volunteers, in CIA missions.

When Sarah graduated from high school, Silas Joad appeared at her door and...offered...her a job with the CIA. He estimated she had the makings of a spy, a remarkable spy. She took the job, not really sure she could have turned it down, and she went off to the Farm, to spy school, where she turned out to be far more than even Joad had imagined. She was at the top of her class in everything, outperforming the best male agents.

This had not made her popular. Not that she had ever been popular. Not in high school, where lies and shame kept her from opening up or making real friends, and not at the Farm, where competition reigned — and resentment rode high.

The men, of course, resented her most, and more or less openly, and took every opportunity to make a pass or grab at her, manhandling her, evidently believing that if one of them were to bed her, then some proper order would be restored — men, or a man, anyway, on top.

But Sarah had...aggressively refused the passes and had twice injured her manhandler, once permanently, and soon the efforts to bed her stopped. The bitter joke became that she had acquired her skills by choosing to become frigid, unsexed, and so soon she became the Ice Queen, first to the men, then to the other women (there were not many) and eventually even to the instructors. Defiant until the end, she had eventually embraced the nickname herself, turning their term of abuse into her shield and cudgel.

Joad had been delighted by her prowess at the Farm and had swooped in to claim her after graduation. He immediately began using her in top-priority infiltration missions. Her years with her father augmented the Farm's training, and she excelled in the field. But she rapidly became unhappy. Joad's empty patriotic rhetoric and her fellow agents' chilling pragmatism about the job and its limits, or lack of limits — it all began to turn her stomach. She felt low-grade nausea constantly.

By comparison, her cons with her father, while unforgivable, had seemed...less unforgivable, wrong but not...vile. But she knew better than to try to talk herself into a hierarchy of sins. She had done wrong as a girl, wrong again as a young woman, and now she wanted to do right.

Sarah pulled her coat closer around her, wishing that she had not left her scarf hanging in her apartment that morning. She had not expected the day to be — to feel — so cold.

The breaking point came after Joad sent her back to the Farm as a 'volunteer' subject in the Agency's new 'premier course', a three-week course in interrogation. Joad billed it to her as a chance to move up, to expand her skills. Again, he gave her a 'choice'. His.

But it turned out that the only way to secure a seat in the course was to agree to serve as a subject in it first. For three weeks, Sarah endured hell: she was deprived of sleep, starved then fed tainted food, forced to participate in staged executions.

One of the interrogation instructors — an instructor in hand-to-hand combat when Sarah went through the Farm the first time — decided to take advantage of her fatigue and sickness, pressing himself upon her. But she fought him off in a bloody melee and ended the fight by kicking him so violently between the legs that he needed an operation. He had also lost his front teeth and had a shattered wrist.

And that had been enough for Sarah.

She quit the CIA.

Joad resisted her decision and made a number of vague threats when he became convinced that she was serious, but he could not coerce her into staying. She signed the paperwork and she walked out of Langley, free at last of cons and covers, but also unemployed.

Sarah stepped into the revolving door of a small diner she frequented, Patel's, and stood for a moment enjoying the warmth of it, the odd, familiar smell of coffee and cumin and cigarettes, smoke hazing idly mid-air over the counter.

She shook off the cold.

She put her past out of her mind and waved in response to the wave from the diner's owner, Lester Patel. She waved but her heart was not in it. Lester served decent food and good coffee, but he was a constant annoyance. He was once convinced that it was him, and not his diner's proximity and coffee, that kept her coming back. She had disabused him of the notion, but he had bragged about her supposed infatuation with him so often to the regulars that he felt obliged to keep up the facade to save face. It had been bad enough when the innuendo was served up in hope that it would have the desired effect. It was somehow worse when it was served up out of secret defeat.

She was no longer sure the coffee was good enough to put up with Lester, but she was a creature of habit in many ways, slow to acclimate to people, and so she tended to stay overlong in situations that she should have escaped.

She took a spot on a stool at the counter and picked up the menu from beside the napkin dispenser. A habit: she did not need to look at the menu.

"Well, hello...beautiful."

The surrounding, syrupy words sounded from behind her, not from Lester, who stood in front of her, order pad in hand, an obligatory intimate smile on his face. Sarah rotated her stool to find herself looking into the handsome face of her most recent former employer, Bryce Larkin.

Bryce Larkin, PI. The best example, other than the CIA, of a habit, a situation she stayed in overlong when she should have escaped.

Bryce batted his long eyelashes at her and gazed at her through them, a favorite trick of his and one she had found endearing for the three dates it took before she had realized that Bryce had no intention of ever letting her move from secretary to detective, as he had promised when he hired her.

The only movement he had planned was from her office desk to his office couch, from her seated to her reclining, but doing his bidding in either posture.

She had figured that out but not until after she had gone out with him. After the third date, he had explained to her that his intention was to put M-R-S in front of her name not P-I behind it. That was to be her 'promotion'. She had quit the following Monday, and, not long afterward, she had applied for and gotten the Palmer House job.

The eyelash trick now just made Sarah want to punch Bryce.

"Hi, Bryce," Sarah responded in a tone as blankly gray as the day, "what are you doing here? I thought you only ate at...fancy...fancier...places."

Bryce nodded and flashed his neon white teeth — Sarah knew there was no such color but it seemed the only correct description of Bryce's half-moon, lunar-glow smile. Bryce was staring at her glasses, her brown hair. "True, normally, but today I decided to slum it…" he looked at her hair intently, "at least, you know, in terms of cosmetics…"

Sarah could not, would not follow for a second, then she reacted. "Oh, you mean, comestibles…?"

Bryce shrugged as if the comment was beneath notice. "That's what I said."

Lester raised his hand, ballpoint pen in it. "No, you said…"

"It's alright, Lester," Sarah offered quickly, cutting the short-order cook short. "Bryce knows what he said."

Sarah pointedly spun her stool around to face Lester and to de-face Bryce. Behind her, she heard Bryce curse beneath his breath.

Sarah, brightly: "Coffee, Lester, and a donut, if you still have a plain cake one around this late in the morning?"

Lester grinned as if they shared a secret and answered too loudly: "For you, Miss Walker, I always keep a donut waiting…" He walked down the counter and through swinging doors into the kitchen. Sarah watched him go, hoping Bryce would leave.

Sarah felt a hand on her shoulder. "Bryce," she said softly but with a threat, "don't make me injure your only steady girlfriend…"

She quickly spun the stool to see another man, not Bryce.

Bryce was walking out of the diner. Framed in the front window, she saw him stop and light a cigarette.

The new man was tall and nicely dressed, a trench coat over a navy bespoke suit. His hair was stalled somewhere on the way to curly from wavy, brown. She was giving the man Bryce's glare.

The man pulled his hand back as if he had touched a flame, his face hurt. "Sorry, Miss, but your purse...you spilled it when you spun your stool. I guess that other guy — the smile — didn't notice. But this is yours, right?"

She realized he had her Parker 51 fountain pen in his other hand. Her purse had toppled over, and a few items were on the floor, luckily nothing embarrassing, personally or professionally. Her extra tampon had remained hidden, as had her gun.

She bent down and scooped the things back into her purse and sat it upright. Then she extended her hand, and the man gave her the teal pen. It was the only item Sarah owned that had belonged to her mother's mother, and it was precious to her.

"Thanks," she said, looking up into the man's hazel eyes, "I appreciate you rescuing that. It doesn't look like much, but it's an heirloom."

He nodded, studying the pen more closely as she held it. "They're fine pens. I use one myself."

Lester cleared his throat. Sarah spun, more carefully this time, and saw Lester standing on the opposite side of the counter, a plain cake donut atop a paper doily on a small plate. "Your donut, Miss Walker…" Lester spoke the words and placed the donut on the counter with a flourish, all the while staring at the trench-coated stranger. Sarah looked down at the donut and up at Lester. "My coffee?"

"Oh, oh, right." Lester started away but the man in the trench coat sat down beside Sarah and called after him: "Make that two, please!"

Lester's shoulders hunched visibly but he did not turn around or otherwise acknowledge the man.

Sarah glanced at him. "The coffee here is good, at least worth having."

The man gave her a smile that lacked the lunar glow of Bryce's but which shone with a warmer, more human hue, dayglow, not moonglow. Bryce's smile was to be looked at; the trench-coated stranger's smile was meant to be shared, basked in.

Sarah smiled back at him. "I'm Sarah, by the way, Sarah Walker." She extended her hand, then realized she was still clutching her fountain pen. "Um, sorry." She reached down and slipped the pen into an inner pocket of her purse, then sat up and extended her hand again. "Take two…" she said with a soft laugh.

The man's smile grew in size and warmth. He shook her hand. "I'm Charles...that is...Chuck...Bartowski."

"Good to meet you, Mr. Bartowski."

His smile became a self-conscious grin. "No, really, Chuck. I mean, as long as that does not seem too familiar…"

"No," Sarah said with a chuckle, "that seems friendly. And although Lester calls me Miss Walker, you may just call me Sarah."

Lester arrived a moment later with two saucered cups of coffee. He put them down, careful to spill a portion of Chuck's into the saucer. Sarah's Lester did not spill. He walked away with a just-audible huff.

Chuck gave Sarah another grin and shrugged. "Coffee and attitude, I guess." He picked up his cup with one hand and slid his saucer from beneath it with the other. He put the cup down and then emptied the saucer into the cup, putting the saucer down after it dripped the last. Then he put the cup back down on the saucer. "See, good as new…" He glanced at her doily-riding donut and shrugged again. "But not fancy. Looks like some rate and some don't, some really don't. "

Sarah felt herself blush. Not a common phenomenon. "Don't pay any attention to Lester, he's...well, Lester."

Chuck nodded. He sipped his coffee. "Hey, that is good. I didn't get much sleep last night." He took another sip, longer. "Maybe I can get a cup to go — for my meeting?"

"Business meeting?" Sarah could not prevent the question.

Chuck bit his lower lip while shaking his head. "Yes, business. That's the reason for this monkey suit."

"Expensive monkey," Sarah said, glancing at his suit, her eyes sliding down to his Italian leather dress shoes.

His eyes followed hers to his feet. He laughed and sighed all at once. "Very expensive monkey. But I'm not really the monkey I seem."

Sarah turned her stool to face him. "I don't understand. It's a nice suit."

"It is. Very nice. My sister…" he paused then decided to finish, "...she bought it for me. Insisted I get it, wear it, for the meeting…"

"And your sister can afford the...expensive monkey?"

"Yeah. She was married for three years to an actor. Back in LA. He died doing one of his own stunts in the filming of a movie, left her everything…Do you remember Aidan Mills?"

"No, but I've never really been much for movies, TV, music, popular stuff. I read some but mostly the classics."

"Oh, well, Aidan was in a big, lavish, costume-production of Great Expectations a few years ago, back before he was killed. Cleopatra gone Victorian England. Maybe you…"

"No," Sarah interjected. "Read the book. Why see the movie? It would just mess up the way I imagined it all when I read it."

Chuck laughed. "I know you're right, but if I love a book, the temptation to see the film always wins out for me in the end. I'm curious how someone else imagines it, I suppose."

Sarah shrugged in thoughtful silence, breaking her donut in two. She slid half of it toward Chuck, leaving that half on the doily while pulling a paper napkin from the steel napkin holder. She sat her half on the paper napkin. Chuck watched the maneuvering in obvious amusement. He gestured at the half before him. "For me?"

Sarah nodded but did not speak. "I don't know. When you imagine something, you can't imagine it all, every detail. But the details you imagine are the ones that seem to you to matter, to carry the story. Why do you need to know how someone else imagines it?"

Chuck whistled soft and low, his cheeks bulging a little as he did. "Huh. That's kinda deep for donuts."

Sarah took a bite of her half. Chuck took one of his.

Sarah sipped her coffee and then smirked genially at Chuck, swallowing her bite before responding. "So, pastries and profundities don't mix?"

Chuck took another bite, shaking his head while considering her question. "Not for me, but I now see that's a personal issue, not a universal truth. I must have a hard time thinking straight when…" he slowed his cadence and looked at her, "...when I'm eating something sugary sweet."

Sarah felt her blush return, heighten. Chuck had somehow made that comment seem very much a compliment. And with Sarah all toned down too.

Sarah turned away from Chuck and finished her donut, trying to conceal her blush. It was unlike her to make conversation like this, particularly like this, and she was unsure why she was doing it. Chuck was attractive and well-dressed, but she saw attractive, well-dressed men by the dozens daily; she could barely move through the Palmer House lobby without bumping into one. That was one reason she preferred her chair in a corner.

Chuck addressed himself to the remainder of his donut and he then sipped more coffee. He glanced at his watch and pulled some bills from his pocket, looking at the abbreviated menu sign over the grill for prices. "The donut and the coffees are on me, Sarah Walker, if that's okay. I'll pass on the to-go cup, I think. It was a pleasure to meet you." He put a couple of dollars down and gave her a long, earnest look, waiting.

"Thanks, Chuck, that's nice of you." He started to get up but Sarah could not keep herself from going on. "Are you in town for long?"

Chuck shook his head. "Not really sure. It depends on my meeting today. If it goes well, I may be around for a while. If not, I may head back to LA in the next couple of days." He stood and Sarah took him in, shoes to curls, fully aware for the first time how just how tall he was, just how well the expensive suit fit him. But her eyes lingered in contact with his. She saw something there that she did not completely understand, something unfamiliar and that overran her workaday categories.

Until she felt something that was familiar, workaday — that tell-tale tingle that told her trouble was traveling her way. Observation and prediction. She knew her blush was gone.

"It was nice to meet you too, Chuck. Good luck with the meeting." She heard a business-like tone creep into her voice.

He seemed like he wanted to say more but did not know what, so he just grinned weakly and nodded. "Keep warm, Sarah Walker."

A moment later, he was gone, the wind whipping through the briefly open door reminding Sarah of how cold it was outside.

A/N: This begins the first arc, Sudden Thaw.