Hotel

The St. Gregory is a grand, old fashioned five-star New Orleans hotel owned by Warren Trent, whose family built it eighty-five years earlier. In this day and age, it is seen as a throwback to olden times, for all its good and bad. The hotel's General Manager, Pete McDermott, who worked his way up the ranks, has tried to reverse its recent sagging fortunes by changing certain aspects where it counts - such as ending its official unofficial segregation policy - while resisting many of the modern yet impersonal conveniences. Regardless, the hotel is in trouble financially, and requires a major influx of capital to keep it afloat. Those problems are known in professional circles, and despite the hotel not being officially for sale, Trent has had an offer from a real estate developer, who wants to tear it down. He also expects an offer from Curtis O'Keefe, a chain hotelier whose hotels run figuratively and literally like machines, and who has come to stay at the hotel with this expected offer. O'Keefe has his own ulterior motives for wanting the hotel beyond expanding his empire. O'Keefe's travel companion is a beautiful Parisienne named Jeanne Rochefort, who doesn't much like O'Keefe but likes what he can provide her. She becomes an unwitting pawn in O'Keefe's bid for the hotel. McDermott is hoping that a deal with a hotel union - the needed capital in exchange for the hotel employees becoming unionized - is what saves the hotel in much its current form. While working through these financial offers, McDermott also has to deal with some day-to-day operational aspects of the hotel, including: a rash of robberies, which hotel authorities believe is being conducted by a known thief named Keycase Milne, whose M.O. is to use errant hotel keys to break into hotel rooms; a constantly missing hotel detective named Dupere; the supposed theft of the Jaguar owned by hotel guests Geoff and Caroline, the Duke and Duchess of Lanbourne, who know more about the theft than they try to let on; the reservation of Dr. and Mrs. Elmo Adams, who didn't mention that they were black when they made the reservation; and an aging elevator, which may play into the fortunes of the hotel more than McDermott realizes.