In the bedroom, Shelly heard her first scream, and the Scotch spattered against the wall as he dropped the glass and leaped to the door. He wrenched at the knob and shoved inward but it only bowed slightly, and would not give. He threw himself against it, realizing Stag had barricaded the door, and terror flicked like a running greyhound through his mind as he heard Stag bellow in pain, then the rip of something tearing, and shorter more painful shrieks as Stag did something to the girl.
“Open this door! Open the door, you sonofabitch!” he screamed, slamming his fist against the solid paneling. “Stag! Stop it, stop it you bastard, let her alone! Open this goddam effing door, you stupid rotten—open this DOOR!”
In the living room Stag took his hand from his reddened, watering eye, and wrapped it in the material of what was left of the peasant blouse. He put one hand in the girl’s face and shoved her as hard as he could. The blouse ripped away completely, leaving two huge strips hanging down her back and a fistful of fabric in Stag’s hand. She screamed again, very high, like a bird in pain, and stumbled back against the wall. Red welts appeared on her skin. There was open, unhindered terror in her face. The red hair was flying loose now, the body a hopeless, unmuscled jumble of thrashing legs and arms.
“Stag! Open the door!” Shelly bellowed as he threw his shoulder against the paneling. Unlike the movies where it seemed so easy, he bounced back, a shattering pain in his shoulder. He hit it again and once more rebounded. A third time, a fourth. One of the panels began to bow outward, then split. He launched himself at it again, fanatically, lost in any thought but getting out into the next room where the screams were coming closer together—like labor pains.
Stag advanced on the girl and wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug. She tried to bite him, pleading incoherently now, not giving a damn if he was Stag Preston, out of her mind with horror at the mauling and the blood all over her—but mostly his blood. They wrestled for a moment, stumbling backward, just as the paneling of the bedroom door shattered and Shelly’s face appeared in it.
The publicist took one look and his face went white as the shock wave of violence smashed him. He screamed wordlessly, and ripped at the chair blocking the knob. It fell away.
Stag and the girl caromed off the wall, still locked in each other’s arms, her legs covered with abrasions and blood from where he had tried to wrap his legs about her. They hit the wall a second time, bounced off it and fell back, striking the French doors leading to the balcony.
They crashed the doors open, snapping the delicate tiny lock-decoration and thrashed out onto the small balcony over Broadway. He had a grip on her shoulders, was digging his fingers into the white flesh where the blouse had torn away, and this time all the songs in the world could not win this girl for him.
Shelly reached through and turned the knob, came storming into the living room just as—
Stag tried to pull her close, to drag her back inside, but she shoved against him, as hard as she could; she was redolent of an animal fear that only signaled she had to stay out of his reach. He tripped on his own feet and his grip on her broke…the force of her pushing against him hurled her backward, and she hit the low balcony railing with her buttocks; the force of her fury to remain untouched pulled her up onto the railing and for a moment she flailed there, her arms now reaching for her idol, Stag Preston, to help her regain balance.
He took a confused half-step toward her, even as the scream came silently, filling her eyes with endless wide-open falling, and then the force of her backward fall threw her weight across the railing, and in a flash of legs she went over and was gone.
From where Shelly stood, transfixed, in the middle of the living room, he could hear her screams, all the way to the sidewalk.
It sounded like a ride-out ending to a rock’n’roll number.
SEVENTEEN
Time hung suffocating. It did not move though it struggled inwardly, to grasp air, to reach sanity. Then, in an instant, everything moved:
Stag fell backward, his eyes maddened, wide, bloody, unbelieving, hot and frantic, utter disbelief on his face, a rag of peasant blouse still in his hand. His other hand was in mid-air, at the point where it had rested on her shoulder when she’d pulled loose. He bumbled forward, staring down into the street, in clear view from below, and Shelly could hear other screams drifting up from the street now.
A flight of shrill birds, deathly-white, rising on wide-spread wings into the sky. Screaming. Screaming.
Shelly took three steps and reached Stag. He grabbed him by the back of the neck and violently threw him back into the room. He looked down, and so many eyes stared back up at him it was frightening. She was down there, all twisted up into herself, and at the same time spread out, with the red hair against the dirty gray of the pavement. There was a tight little circle around her.
He saw the ash-colored faces of the Secaucus Stag Preston Fan Club turned toward him. Or were they turned to watch their sister go to whatever Heaven was reserved for foolish rock’n’roll fans? Even as he stared down at them staring up, a girl with a camera flashed light at him, and he knew the whole thing had been recorded.
They had waited for Marlene to step out onto the balcony with her God, to wave the tiny souvenir he would have given her. They had stood, staring up—
—as she fell, twisting, screaming, trying to fly the way they do when there is nowhere else to go but down, and too ripped up the center with their own screams of horror as she plunged down amid them, barely missing a passing tourist. It was all there, and the fat girl with pimples had it on film. Black and white or color Kodachrome, she had it, and it was that thought, only that thought, filling all space and sucking up all air, not a thought but a goddamn black hole, that sent Shelly scurrying back into the suite. In a panic, he closed the French doors tightly and relocked them. Then he thought better of it and unlatched them again. This was going to have to be a fast, a perfect. He would have to snap Stag out of it…cooperation was the most important thing, now.
Stag was braced against a high Chinese breakfront, the bit of peasant blouse still wrapped in his fingers. It was a scene from Hogarth, full of madness and the imperative of hurry!
“She—pulled away. She hit me and…went—she went over…I tried to stop—to stop her, but she—she—” The cruel mouth was a baby’s now, the dark eyes dim with confusion and fright. “What’ll they do to me?”
Shelly’s face was made of lead. The lead that was quicksilver, melting and running slowly, reforming. He grabbed Stag by the lapels and forced him to his knees, talking intently into the insanity still lingering on the boy’s face: “Listen to me. Listen, you sonofabitch, listen! That kid is dead in the street down there and you want to know if you’re going to have to pay for it!
“I’d like to beat the hell out of you right now, you miserable effing bastard, but there’s too much to do…God only knows why…give me that cloth …give it to me,” he said ferociously, ripping it out of the boy’s hand. “Now listen close, you ratty sonofabitch. I want you to go in that bathroom and wash all that blood off you, do you understand? I want you to put on a fresh shirt and a new jacket and comb your hair. Then I want you to come back in here and set up everything you knocked over. And then—so help me God in Heaven you’d better pull it off, you ratty scummy bastard—then I want you to sit down and compose yourself. I’ll tell you what to tell the police when they get—”
“Police! Jesus Christ, Shelly, they’ll come, won’t they? They’ll come—Jesus, you gotta help me, Shelly, you got to help me—tell me what to say to them cause I don’t know I mean you’re my friend and you’ve got a piece of the action and it’ll all go down to hell if you don’t—”
Shelly let go of one lapel and cracked him fiercely in the mouth. It brought Stag’s eyes back into focus.
He dragged the singer erect and propelled him through the bedroom into the bathroom. “Move, you ignorant bastard! Move! And leave this door open.” He indicated the shattered bedroom door. “I
f it’s against the inner wall I might be able to keep them out of there and they won’t see it. Now do what I told you, and pray, no, forget that, you dirty sonofabitch, just forget it.”
Shelly ran out of the bathroom—it had only been a matter of seconds since she had fallen, though it seemed centuries, slowly dragging—and grabbed up the piece of peasant blouse. He could not chance running down the hall to the incinerator in the maid’s cubby, but there was the kitchen. He pulled the half-filled bag of garbage out of the pail and thrust the cloth down into the bottom. Then he plopped the bag of garbage on top of it.
Stag had not yet emerged from the bathroom, but in a few minutes the hotel staff, the police, crowds of curious peepers, the world…they’d all be in the suite. He stood the pedestal table upright; the one the girl had knocked over, retreating from her idol. He picked up the ashtray and the unbroken Swedish vase and set them in place. He fluffed the pillows on the sofa. Now, no one had sat there.
Stag came out of the bedroom, his hair combed, his face pink from having been scrubbed. Only the wild light in his dark eyes and the hollows in his cheeks belied the naive adolescence of him.
He was buttoning a fresh blue piqué shirt, a Scotch plaid sports jacket under his arm. “That thing’s too bright. Take it back and get something black, something dark blue. Jump!” Stag turned on his heel, almost an automaton, and a few moments later reemerged wearing a dark blue blazer with brass buttons. He looked good…reserved…not like the sort who would cause a girl to fall to her death escaping a rape.
Shelly shoved him down in a chair. “Now look,” he said, carefully, so it would penetrate, “when the cops get here your story is that she was invited up for an autograph, a souvenir, a talk because she was the president of one of your fan clubs, and you like to take personal interest in these kids because it’s good business relations and—are you listening, you simpleton?”
“She—she just—fell…” His eyes were glazing again.
The slap across the cheek brought him back and Shelly tried frantically to get it across again. “They will take your ass out and string it up, do you understand, Big Man? They will kill you the way you killed her unless you get control of yourself and start doing some of that acting the critics raved over. Now, dig: she flipped at being with you, tried to make a pass and rip off your jacket, you jumped and she caught you with her nails.” He touched the four furrows still livid on Stag’s face. “You shoved her away and she started chasing you…”
Shelly snapped his fingers, disengaged himself from Stag and moved on to a floor lamp plugged in by the breakfront. He moved it near the French doors and laid the cord out on the rug as though it had been pulled from its socket.
“Now you get it? She chased you, tripped over the cord and went out through the French doors. The force of her fall threw her over. You’re desolate with sorrow that one of your fans should have such an accident. You’ll pay all funeral expenses and the family will never have to worry again. You got that?”
He nodded tightly. He was starting to come around.
The doorbell went off like a gunshot.
Had he been just another slob on the scene, just another faceless guy brought to official attention, it might have been an Inquisition, and downtown to the Tombs for questioning. But he wasn’t. He was Stag Preston. Had the Colonel been around (no one seemed to know just where he had gone) even the mild questioning they suffered might have been averted. One call by The Man to his contacts downtown, and like a stream being diverted, they would have talked to intermediaries, left Stag alone. But Shelly had been forced to handle this little performance, and he handled it well.
It didn’t take much talking at all, but what there was—was fast. Shelly caught them as they came through the door, juggling them like sterling silver globes. They spun madly, faster and faster, until the publicity man hurled them over to Stag.
Easily Academy Award quality. He acted the role of the half-crazy-with-torment star so well that at times Shelly had to stop to correct his thinking: He is acting. He isn’t actually sorry, or innocent, or in anguish. This is an act.
But what an act:
“We’re sorry to bother you, Mr. Preston, but the girl did fall from your balcony.” Heavy irony in their voices; an idol was an idol, and they knew their steps could only be so many, so far, so hard; but it didn’t preclude irony, heavily, in the voices. “Now what, Mr. Preston, exactly, happened?”
Shelly had told it, but it had to be told again.
Then again.
And a third time. (And still no sign of the Colonel.) But simply told it was simply told: Mr. Preston had seen the young lady—he didn’t even know her name—at the theatre. She had been making quite a spectacle of herself, apparently. Mr. Preston had invited her—under Mr. Morgenstern’s chaperoning—to stop by for a souvenir and an autograph. Mr. Preston always takes special pains with his fans, because every fan is something special to him. Once in the suite, the girl had acted very badly, pawing and trying to kiss Mr. Preston—aw, hell, fellas, you can call me Stag—and had even clawed at him in an attempt to rip off a piece of his clothing as a memento. She had made embarrassing advances and Stag had tried to get away. In the scuffle she had tripped over a lamp cord and fallen through the French doors.
“The force of her fall must have just thrown her over,” Stag concluded, desolation and misery in his eyes, the timbre of his voice. “I—I didn’t know what, what to do…she was there one minute and the next…” He shuddered eloquently.
A sharp-eyed plainclothesman, who had been examining the nap of the rug, the placement of the lamp’s trailing cord and the way the French door had snapped open the flimsy lock, stood up, and made an, “Uh, Stag?” of attention.
The singer turned to him, and Shelly saw in that face of the law what he was hoping not to see. The man was not fooled; he knew the girl had been struggling ferociously, had not fallen as accidentally as Stag Preston told it. “Uh, Stag, where’s the piece of her blouse?”
The boy came through beautifully. There was a briefest flicker of the dark eyes, and a recovery so swift there might never have been a fumble. “What piece of her blouse?”
The detective’s jaw muscles bunched and he said very smoothly, “The girl’s blouse had been ripped down the front. We thought it might be here in the hotel somewhere.”
Shelly leaped in abruptly: “She must have, uh, she must have ripped it on her way down, or perhaps on the door handle here—” He stepped across theatrically, very much like a schoolteacher or a television announcer, pointing to the product, directing (or misdirecting) everyone’s eyes. He pointed to the door handle. The plainclothesman turned back to Stag. The man was no dummy.
“You didn’t see the blouse, is that it?”
Stag shrugged and spread his hands in all directions, turning. “No, you can look if you like.” They didn’t look.
“Perhaps one of her friends grabbed it up, those nutty teen-agers, you know,” Shelly said, interceding again, misdirecting. “She was with some fan club, a whole bunch of them…you know how they are…maybe one of them grabbed it up.”
“Perhaps,” the detective murmured, turning away; he knelt down again to study the patterns of ruffling on the carpet.
It went on for some time. Shelly managed to get away once and hit the phone in one of the bedrooms. “Hello…this is Shelly…let me talk to Joe.
“Joe? Shelly. Listen, we’ve got it and bad this time. The kid had a groupie up here…” He launched into a Reader’s Digest condensation of the episode, concluding, “…they’ve got us sewed-up here. I told them I was calling The Palace to cancel Stag’s performance. Do that, but get with the columnists. Every goddam busboy and maid in this joint has found some excuse to breeze past the door or the dumbwaiter while the fuzz’ve been here. It’s probably with every stringer in the city by now. Get with them and keep their mouths shut. I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”
When he reappeared, his face was a twist of sadness. “
Captain,” he addressed the senior investigating officer, “this has been a helluva strain on the kid. He’s pretty much attached to his fans, you know. We’ve canceled the performance at the theatre, but I’d like to see him in bed for the day. Do you think you’ve got enough for now?”
The Captain, a man with over twenty years on the force, and a staunch believer in the old saw, You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, a man who knew the Colonel and what he could or could not do, thought he very well might have enough for now. There would, of course, be more questioning later, and the coroner’s inquest, but he was sure everything was just as Mr. Morgenstern and Good Old Stag had it.
The girl must have had some kind of unbelievable strength to throw herself out a window like that, but hell, anyone could see Stag was really broken up about this thing, and yes, it’s terrible, and sure, we’ll refer the newsmen to you, Mr. Morgenstern, I guess you want to handle the way they talk about this thing…some of them got real nasty mouths on them, and sure, we understand, and you betcha we’ll pass along the Colonel’s regards to the Commissioner for his interest and his help. Thanks a lot, gang.
Then the door was opening and closing and people were leaving. If they had arrived and been juggled like silver globes, then their leaving could only be compared to fog. They left like fog.
Great gouts of them left at one time—harness bulls, the police photographers, the analysts, the reporters, the plainclothes detectives, the Captain. Then smaller wisps drifted away, unseen: the morbidly curious ones who had heard the terrible news and who wanted, for a few instants, to bathe in the glow of the famous, the notorious, the colorful. They were the gray ones, like fog itself, who drift and are never really seen. Who derive all their glamour vicariously, all their color by reflection and refraction, like the oil slick on asphalt after the rain. They disappeared, but only when they were certain nothing more was happening…