“It strikes me that everyone behaved very well”—this was what Paul Goode said in interviews. The nice, older gentleman didn’t take advantage of the seventeen-year-old girl. The Hotel Jerome didn’t disclose the identity of the older gentleman, but no one accused the hotel of protecting their client at the expense of their innocent young maid. “Over the years, to my mother and to me, the Hotel Jerome has been a model of good behavior,” Paul Goode always said. The little kindergarten man wasn’t kidding when he called the Jerome “a good father.” Growing up, he had the run of the hotel. The Jerome cherished Paulina. The hotel did everything it could to accommodate the needs of the young, unwed mother; the Jerome was no less warm and welcoming to her illegitimate child. “The Jerome did more for my mom than maternity leave—let’s leave it at that,” Paul Goode tried to say, but his interviewers pressed him for more details. Had the hotel helped Paulina pay for childcare? “More than helped” was Paul Goode’s only comment. Later, if the boy got out of school when his mom was working, he came to the Jerome. “The hotel was my home, the other maids were all mothers to me—I had a very happy childhood,” Paul Goode said.

Wouldn’t the circumstances of a child born out of wedlock to a hotel maid have sparked some expression of reproof? Weren’t at least one or two of the hotel maids reproving of Paulina Juárez? Wouldn’t you think that one or more of them might have manifested some measure of reproval toward little Paulino? These were questions journalists asked Paul Goode. How could his young mother’s situation, and the circumstances of his birth, have led to a happy childhood? “Baloney!” my mom said, when Molly or I asked her about this line of questioning from Paul Goode’s interviewers. “He seemed like a very happy kid to me,” Little Ray maintained.

The snowshoer had said the writing was the most über-noir thing about The Wrong Car, and of course I knew how much Mr. Barlow disparaged her parents’ potboilers and their adoration of overkill noir. My writer gene must have been on my mind when I wrote the little English teacher, expressing my disbelief in Paul Goode’s happy childhood. “I couldn’t write a credible novel about people behaving in such an exemplary fashion,” I wrote the snowshoer. “How is it possible that everyone at the Hotel Jerome behaved admirably to a knocked-up maid and her kid?”