Spider Kiss

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 which sent Shelly scurrying back into the suite. 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. “If 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 re-emerged 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…

Then the last of the hospital staff, leaving the royal chamber, genuflecting and bowing out backward, hoping Mr. Preston and the Colonel would not feel the management had acted in bad faith by calling in the police so quickly, after all, the girl had fallen from one of their suites, and their hands were tied, it was only the natural thing to do, because they had to maintain their repu—

"G’wan, get the hell out of here!" Shelly snapped.

(Was it his imagination, or did they all have huge, gnome-like pointed ears, to hear all the more, to tell all the more?)

And where in the name of Jesus Almighty was the Colonel? Or were they one and the goddam same?

A splitting headache cromped down on Shelly the moment he had slammed the door on the toadies. They would open their mouths, he was sure of it. It was bound to leak out; after all, midafternoon on Times Square, a header into the street, a little chick from Secaucus of all places, and her crowd standing there watching. This was going to hit every penny-ante fan-mag in the country unless the payola was spread thick as peanut butter. The headache grew more intense the harder he thought. He leaned against the closed door, ignoring Stag Preston in the center of the room, still onstage, and he tried to think it out.

The effort was simply too much.

Forget the thinking and let the reflexes take over. It was synapses time, and he was the Old Sheldon Morgenstern, as he had been all afternoon. Was it inevitable, then, that he was doomed to return to that hideous shell of hipness, that shallow shell he had thought cast off? Every time the alarm went off, would he once more revert?

It was too horrible to consider.

The poor man’s Jekyll-Hyde, he thought, wildly.

Break. The story was going to break. Click click click. It was going to get out all over the place unless he acted. He jumped, then, and found the phone again.

Once he had the number, and the dial tone had broken, he barely waited for a voice on the other end. “Joe? Me. Did you take care of it?

“Yeah … yeah … uh-huh, yeah … what about Atra Baer?

“Yeah, yeah … okay, good. Have any trouble with Kilgallen or Wilson?

“Yeah … yeah … right. What? Sullivan hadn’t heard? Good, that way we tipped him ourselves. Maybe he’ll figure we’re playing tight with him.

“Now look: get with Herman and Buddy on the Coast and have them get to the columnists—trade and otherwise. Particularly the second-string schlock magazines; the ones we deal with won’t screw us, but the others’d sell a story like this to our audience in a minute if they thought they could get away with it. I want them all sewed up. All of them. Have Herman and Buddy work on it all night if it takes that long and get back to you. I want a statement on how we stand by morning. Don’t forget, they’re three hours behind us out there. They’ve got—” he glanced at his watch, “—five good hours before six o’clock.

“Yeah … right … right … now you’ve got it!

“Look, Joe, I want this sewed up tight before you go home tonight, you got that? Yeah … yeah … that, too … yeah … okay, keep on top of it, and ring me if you come up against anything boygus.

“Yeah, it’s Yiddish. It means tough. And I’ll have your tuchus in a sling if you don’t cement this thing up.

“What? How the hell do I know why the moron picks days like this to get in trouble … ? I’m only paid to wipe his ass for him. No, that ain’t Yiddish. Now jump, willya!”

He hung up and walked back into the living room. Stag was standing by the French doors, now closed. He was silent, with a drink in his hand.

Shelly slumped down into a chair. Suddenly, it was very quiet in the suite and he felt utterly drained. It had not been an easy afternoon.

At that moment the door opened and Colonel Jack Freeport came in. Shelly started to speak, but never got the words past his throat.

“What has been going on here, today?” The Colonel was furious. “Everybody in the lobby was rushing up and saying how sorry they were it had happened. Did this miserable kid do something big again, or is it just another minor emergency?”

Shelly started to speak again. To tell the big, white-haired Messiah that his pride and joy had tossed a teen-aged fan out the window. The words would not come.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, anyhow,” Freeport said, without waiting for an answer, “I’ve sold the kid’s contract.”

Did you know there are bombs that make no noise at all?