“Who listens?” said the stranger with the bandaged eye.
Hubbard’s stomach felt sore. He pressed the soreness and remembered Dave Daniels, the looming size of him, the leathery equine face, the soured breath, the torso that looked as if it had been built of raw timbers and scrap metal. He marveled for a moment at his own idiocy in actually wanting to try to fight a beast like that. Then a pure terror came into his mind, like a silent white explosion. He started to spring up out of the chair, believing for one deadly moment that he had given Daniels the key to a room where Jan was, where she slept defenseless in the darkness. And then he remembered that Jan was far away, and Cory was in the room. He settled back into the chair and drank the coffee and put the cup on the floor. He told himself there was never any such person as the Cory of the night wind, the sea wind on the flat roof over the cabanas. She had never been. There was only Cory-whore, who could handle Daniels.
He told himself it did not matter, not to him, or Cory, or Daniels. It was an incident at a convention. Conventions were thickets of incidence and accident. So he smiled in a rather rigid way at the Honey-Bunny blonde, and tried to think of something that might make her laugh and be happy. Water started to run out of his eyes, for no reason. He blinked rapidly but it would not stop. In his teary and distorted vision he saw her face change, saw it quicken with interest and a tender concern. She sat up so she could reach him, cupped her palm against his cheek and said, “Hey now! Hey now, mister!”
“I … I can’t make it stop,” he said.
“It’s real bad, isn’t it?”
“There’s nothing wrong. Really, there’s nothing wrong at all,” he said, and stood up, turned to the door, stumbled once, and made his way through the sound and the people and out into the corridor, and was astonished to find himself still on the eighth floor, and only a couple of doors away from the hospitality suite. He started slowly down the corridor toward the elevators.
The Honey-Bunny startled him when she took his arm. He stopped and leaned against the wall and, to his own vast annoyance, snuffled like a child. She stood close in front of him and dabbed at his face with a tissue from her purse, musky with her perfume.
“It happens to me, honest,” she said. “All of a sudden for no damn reason. Honest to God, seeing it happen to you, my heart all of a sudden turned over, you know?”
“It’s just from drinking. It’s a crying jag.”
“But you’re not drunk enough for that, sweetheart. You were talking fine. Gee, you still can’t stop, can you?”
“No. I can’t seem to stop.”
“You got a room here?”
He remembered the other key. He had forgotten the number. He took it out of his pocket. She took it from him and took his arm again and steered him to the elevators.
“This is idiotic,” he said.
“Don’t try to talk about it or think about it or feel sorry for it.”
They went up to eleven, and walked an incredible distance, and got lost once. She opened the room, and bolted the door after they were inside. She made murmurous sounds of comfort, eased him out of his jacket and made him lie down on one of the beds. She brought a small cold towel and folded it and laid it across his eyes, then unlaced his shoes and took them off.
He felt the bed tilt and settle slightly, and knew she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She took his hand.
“Better?” she asked.
“I think so.”
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Floyd. Floyd Hubbard.”
“Don’t feel bad about bawling. A man should be able to cry, you know? Hughie, the son of a bitch, couldn’t cry a drop unless maybe a horse runs out of money for him. That I should have known before I married him.”
“You’re the married one.”
“Yeah. Honey, with the mole. He’s on a gig in Jax.”
“What?”
“He’s playing in Jacksonville. Two weeks to go.”
There was a long silence. “What’s it like,” she asked, “when the tears come? What are you thinking?”
“It hasn’t happened since I was a kid, Honey.”
“But what were you thinking?”
“I … I don’t know. As if … everything was moving away from me, and I couldn’t get hold of anything any more. As if I’d never really known anybody and never would know anybody, all my life.”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it? When there’s no way to get close enough, and you wait and wait for wonderful things that are never going to happen. Floyd. Floyd, sweetheart?” She took the towel from his eyes, moved so she was looking down at him. “Look, I don’t mess around. You understand that?”
“Yes.”
“People get enough wrong ideas already, the business we’re in.”
“I can see how that might be.”
“But if you want me … right now this time it’s okay.”
“I don’t know if I can even …”
“So who cares? Mostly it’s just to hold you, that’s all. Somebody for both of us to hold, okay?”
She left a single lamp burning on a far table and draped it with a bath towel. She undressed and came to the bed and undressed him as gently and impersonally as if he were a drowsy child. He climbed under the sheet and blanket, and she came in beside him and sighed, and took him into the warm abundance of her arms, and hitched about until she could nest his head against her breasts. When, more out of a sense of duty than out of desire, he started to caress her, she said, in a murmurous whisper, “Don’t, sweetheart. Just you lie quiet. If it has to happen, we’ll let it happen, and if doesn’t, that’s all right too. We’re both so damn tired. You know it? Tired of a million things.”
He drifted off and awakened and drifted off again and when he awakened again, he wanted her, but in a quiet, unemphatic way. It went easily, and it was drowsy and unreal, and not very important. There was the strong, steady, docile movement of her and, far away from him and below him, like something at the foot of a dark stairwell, a recurrent arcing and glimmering of specific sensation which neither diminished nor increased until finally she quickened, and became very strong, and, as she brought it about, sobbed once, sighed several times, and sweetly slowed to rest.
“Somebody close,” she said in a sighing voice, “to hold.”
“I know.”
“It was kinda sweet.”
“Yes.”
“Stay just like this, please, for a while.”
The phone began to ring.
Nine
AS SOON AS DAVE DANIELS came sagging back down out of the wildness, back to awareness of himself, back to the ability to identify this time, this place and this woman beneath him, he pushed himself away from her and stood up in the dark room, his heart still hammering, his breathing still ragged.
He squatted and fumbled at his discarded clothing and found his cigarettes and lighter. He lit a cigarette and walked to the terrace door, slid it open and stepped out onto the tiny triangular terrace. There was a slight breeze in the humid night, and it felt more pleasant against his sweaty flesh than had the air conditioning in the room behind him, where the woman lay.
He perched one hip on the rough texture of the concrete wall and, as the heart beat ever less rapidly, he looked at another angle of the hotel, at the few rooms where he could see in, where people moved and talked in their little bright boxes. It made him feel remote, wise and powerful to be naked and unseen in the darkness and look at people who could not know he was there. Below him were the areas of brightness and shadow, tinted spots on the palm trunks, twisted shadows of tropical plantings, the bright outlines of the lighted pools. He heard the merged sounds of many kinds of music and the gutturals of the sea and the constant soft alto of city traffic, pierced by a yap of car horn, a far siren, a woman’s bright tipsy laugh from the shadows far below him.
He knew he was still a little bit drunk, but not very much, because the prolonged strenuous taking of the woman had
boiled it out of his blood. He felt tired, calm, wise and agreeably wicked. The bitch had been a disappointment. After fighting him so explosively, she had been stubbornly inert, but he had built himself to such a peak of wanting her that her reactions were not truly important.
Daniels scores again, he thought. Daniels never misses. Sometimes it is damned close to what they call rape, but they usually find out it’s exactly what they want. Twice it didn’t work out just right and it was expensive to settle it quietly. But not with this one. Not with a girl on call.
He snapped his cigarette out into the night and went back into the room, half expecting her to have gone into the bathroom, but she was as he had left her, tumbled and spread diagonally across the foot of the bed she had been in when he had come into the room, her head over the edge. He could just make her out in the small light that filtered into the room.
He stood near the foot of the bed and said, “You’re not that worn out, cutie.”
He reached down to touch her in a hearty, familiar, casual way, put his hand against flesh, snatched it away, backed slowly until his shoulders touched the wall. He stood there breathing through jaws held wide.
After a long time he found the energy to go draw the draperies and turn a single floor lamp on and look at her. “But I didn’t hit you that hard!” he whispered. “You shouldn’t have got loose and run for the door. You shouldn’t have done that, damn you!”
He wanted a drink desperately, and at the same time was glad there was no liquor in the room, because he knew he was going to have to start thinking very soon, thinking with great care and caution. Because now, unless he was very careful, everything could go whirling down the drain. He wanted to cover the body so he could stop looking at it, but he knew he should take no meaningless action. It was like being in a pit with a poisonous snake. If you moved perfectly, you were home free. If you did the smallest thing wrong, you were dead.
He went into the bathroom, turned on the cold white blaze of fluorescence, filled the basin with cold water and sloshed his face and head, snorting and snuffling. As he dried himself, he remembered the night bolt on the room door and fixed it.
After making certain there was no gap in the closure of the draperies, he turned on every light in the room. He paced back and forth, glancing at the body, accustoming himself to it, because he knew he would have to touch it sooner or later. He hummed to himself. He beat his fist into his palm. He cheered himself by thinking, I have been in a hundred jams. I have gotten out of every one. I can get out of this one.
He sat on the other bed, facing her, and her upside-down face was close enough to touch, her eyes partially open. He got up quickly and checked the room for her possessions, found clothes, purse, swimsuit, bathing cap.
The big limiting factor was how much Floyd Hubbard might remember. There was too good a chance he would remember giving the room key to Daniels. That seemed to eliminate the chance of leaving her just as she was, or dressing her and dumping her over the edge of the terrace railing.
He hit himself over the ear with his clenched fist, shook his head violently, and went over it again. Any look of murder would result in a more careful investigation than he could stand. There was a subtle, sickening exaggeration to the angle of her head. The backhand blow had snapped her neck just before he had caught her up and tumbled her back onto the foot of the bed. There was a faint blue bruise on the delicate line of her jaw.
He looked at his upper arm, near his shoulder, at the three deep parallel gouges her nails had made as she had gotten away from him the second time. They could check the meat and blood under her nails, type it.
The plan was vague at first, but as he went over it in his mind it became ever more specific. The single crucial factor was the night bolt and chain. He turned all the lights off and went out onto the terrace again. The vertical sawtooth construction made it impossible to reach the terraces to the right or the left. When he was certain he was not being watched by anyone, he stepped over the railing, stood on a narrow edge of concrete, crouched and, holding onto the railing, looked down onto the terrace directly below. The room was dark. It would be a simple matter to lower himself, hang from the edge on which he stood, swing in and drop onto the terrace below. He had always been a good athlete. He trusted his body to perform as he wanted it to, without fear or hesitation. It was unlikely that the terrace door below would be locked on the inside. It could be forced if it was. And if the room was empty, or if people were asleep there, in either case he would go quickly and quietly through the room and out into the seventh floor corridor.
He went back into 847 and turned the lights back on. He wiped his hands on his thighs several times before he could force himself to touch the small body, so eerily still, so oddly flattened. Once he had begun, he worked steadily and quietly.
He did not know how long it took. When it was done, he tried to look at the scene the way a policeman might. They would have had to use nippers on the night chain. They would find both beds neatly made, her clothing laid out on one of them. They would find one lamp on in the bedroom, and the room key on the desk. They would hear the sound of the shower, and when they opened the bathroom door they would find her sprawled halfway out of the shower, the glass shower door open. She would have her swim cap on, and she would be belly down across the raised sill of the shower stall, the damp cake of soap inches from her outstretched hand. (And they would not guess how he had gagged as he had cleaned the nails of that outstretched hand.)
Because they would have to cut the chain to get in, they would not be suspicious. And he knew he could not take the risk of leaving by way of the room door. He had not been seen entering, he knew.
He dressed quickly, put one shoe in each side pocket of his jacket, took a long, slow look around, then went through the orange-yellow draperies and out onto the terrace and eased the glass door shut behind him. He was glad to see that very little light came through the draperies—not enough to silhouette him in any dangerous fashion.
Once again he looked for a long time in all possible directions. He could not see down into the shadows of the pool area. Somebody could be down there, staring up at the sky. It was a risk he would have to take, a minor one compared to all the others.
When he was quite ready, he rehearsed in his mind the moves he would make. He straddled the railing, found the small edge with his stocking foot, swung the other leg over and crouched as before. The terrace wall was pierced with ornamental holes which provided safe, sturdy hand-holds. When his hands were secure, fingers locked on the inner edge of two of the lower holes, he lowered himself carefully until he was extended at full length, his legs dangling. It brought his eyes below the level of the cantilevered slab which formed the deck of his own terrace, the one he was leaving. The railing of the terrace below was about a foot below his toes. He decided that rather than risk the noise of swinging in and dropping, he would be able to reach the railing with his toes if he took a second hand-hold on the narrow edge on which he had previously braced his feet. He brought his left hand down first, clamping his fingertips on the edge, then slowly transferred his weight to his left arm. The strain on his fingertips of his left hand was great, but he knew he could endure it for the small part of a second it would take to slide his right hand down to the same small edge, and then his toes would reach the lower railing.
In the instant he let go with his right hand, he felt the small edge crumbling under the fingers of his left hand, powdering away. He spasmed his body inward, dropped the few remaining inches and landed on the railing, in precarious balance for one moment of triumph and gladness, and then he was tilting back, flailing his arms, barking the skin off his knuckles on the cement overhead. As he knew he was going, he tried to squat and catch the edge of the railing he was on, but all he was able to do was flick his fingertips against the outer edge of it. He went down, and all the lights were going around him in a huge slow wheeling. He filled his lungs with the moist air that was rushing by his face and gave a
great despairing roar which ended when the small of his back smashed the ornamental iron fence which separated the pool area from one of the service areas. A woman began a metronomic screaming, becoming perceptibly more hoarse with each earnest effort.
Alan Amory, the Public Relations Director of the Sultana Hotel, walked behind the bar of the Hideaway Club to make a drink for fat Captain Brewhane of Homicide, the last arrival. It was after midnight. All lights were on in the office suite, all draperies closed. Amory had the feeling it was going rather well, better than he had expected at first. There was a special protocol about these matters whenever a major hotel was involved, particularly in a resort area. The problems were delicate. You had to be particularly careful about the way things were said. Any hint of challenge had to be avoided at all costs.
One small victory had been gained already. He had stalled the members of the working press beyond the final moment for any possible inclusion in the morning papers. So, unless it turned out truly gaudy, there would be a patina of staleness which would limit coverage in the afternoon papers tomorrow.
He carried the drink back toward the quiet mumbling of male conversations at the big table in the rear of the small club room. When he put the drink in front of Brewhane, they all looked up at him. They wore the mild little smiles of poker players: Brewhane, Detective Lieutenant Al Farrier, Rick DiLarra—the convention director for the Sultana, Detective-Sergeant Milton Manning, Rice Emper, legal counsel for the hotel and Peter Lipe, an assistant state’s attorney.
Amory said, “If you gentlemen will excuse me a moment, the people in my office could be getting impatient. I don’t want them leaving. The reporters are camped out in the shrubbery.”
“Who have you got?” Brewhane demanded.
“A Mr. Frick. He’s the one who …”
“Friend of mine,” Al Farrier interrupted. “Bill, he’s the one called me early about helping him out with the drunk who fell into the courtyard.”
A Key to the Suite Page 14
