"Phil, have you seen the front page of the _Daily News_ yet?"
"Damn right, I've seen it. I saw it right after I left you this
morning. I tried to get the edition killed, but I was too late. It was
the final, and it was already on the stands everyplace."
"Phil, that was my picture right there on the front page! I'm ruined!
Everyone will know--"
"Calm down, baby, calm down. Listen, I'm working hard to fix things up
right now. The _Post_ had the same picture for the afternoon edition,
but I got it killed on the grounds that you weren't booked and so it
would be libelous to imply you were a prostitute. They got scared when
I pulled that. And--"
"Sure, Phil, but that doesn't unprint the _News_ photo, does it?"
"What are you afraid of? Laura, honey, you got the wrong idea. People
aren't going to look close at that picture. They pick up the paper and
it shows a bunch of women going into the clink. You happen to be the
first in line, that's all. But they don't pay any special attention to
the faces. Inside of two minutes after they've turned the page, they
forget what they saw."
"But some people _will_ notice. My friends--the people in my house--"
"How many of your friends read the _Daily News_, anyway?" Spinelli
asked.
"That isn't the point. They'll _get_ to see it, somehow. Somebody will
notice, and the phone-calls will start going around. I'll be ruined,
Phil!"
Spinelli was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Would it make you
happy if I transferred you to San Francisco for a couple of months?"
"Would that help?"
"I could set you up there until, say, October. Same pay, same kind of
clientele, only West Coast people. Then if you wanted you could come
back here. By that time everything would blow over."
"I don't know--"
"You don't like Frisco? Hell, I got branches everywhere. You want to go
to Montreal? St. Louis? Chicago? Detroit? Just say the word, Laura."
"Let me just stay here and calm down for a couple of days," she told
him. "Then maybe I'll move on. I don't know. I'm so mixed-up right now,
Phil. So goddam terribly mixed-up."
She got off the phone, went to the sideboard, fixed herself a drink.
She stared into the glass for a long time before she raised it to her
lips. The newspaper lay on the floor nearby, the incriminating front
page staring up at her. She wondered if the doorman had glanced at the
photo and had thought of comparing it with the face of the tenant known
as Miss Haynes. She wondered how long it would be before she got her
eviction notice from the management.
Spinelli would take care of it, she thought, bitterly. Spinelli takes
care of everything. He got her the apartment in the first place, and
with a little judicious fixing he would make it possible for her to
keep it. Unless, of course, she chose to accept a transfer and do her
whoring in San Francisco or Montreal or Chicago or Detroit or some
other city on Spinelli's circuit.
But everything was smashed. McDermott ruined--well, that was his own
fault, she had to admit. Still, he had offered her a princely deal, and
now it was shattered. Dan ... he would probably go out and get good and
drunk and swear off women for the rest of his life, after this latest
demonstration of their faithlessness.
_So I better stick to what I've got_, she thought. _I'll go on being a
high-priced party girl, and I'll salt away more money in the savings
bank, and I'll buy shares of American Tel & Tel, and I'll grow rich. I
won't ever have children or love or a husband, but at least I'll have
plenty of money._
Spinelli was a slick devil. It was hard to hate him, except when you
looked past the mask to the monster beneath, and then you saw what a
cesspool he was. Spinelli could fix anything. Spinelli could glibly
lead girl after girl into prostitution, by promising the moon and
delivering it. Laura hadn't had any experience with the dope-peddling
part of Spinelli's enterprises, but she could guess that he operated
the same way there, manipulating his deluded pushers and the deluded
addicts, giving them all what they thought they wanted and milking off
plenty for Phil Spinelli, Esquire.
Laura finished her drink. She put the bottle away quickly. It would be
so easy to go on, drinking sip after sip, until she lay sprawled out
naked and unconscious on the floor, her troubles temporarily blotted
out by liquor. But that was no solution.
Nothing was.
There _was_ no solution.
She turned on the radio. Mindless music flooded the apartment. Laura
stretched out on the bed, listening to the vapid tunes, the talentless
rock'n'roll yammering, the caterwauling lyrics, and the music flooded
her, shutting off her mind. She listened for hours. The station played
nothing but music, and in between numbers a disk-jockey went on and on
with juvenile drivel aimed at his audience of morons of all ages. Laura
barely listened to the words, to the meaning. The pure sound flowed
through her, like a narcotic coursing in her veins. Every hour on the
half hour there was a news broadcast, but she paid no attention to what
they were saying.
The afternoon moved along, and darkness began to descend over New York.
It was five o'clock now, six, seven, seven-fifteen. Laura did not get
up. She felt utterly weary, without the strength necessary to get up
and dress and have dinner. She just wanted to lie there and listen to
the music....
The news was being broadcast again.
Words impinged on Laura's consciousness.
Horrible words.
"_Three people were injured this afternoon, one of them critically,
in a two-car crackup on the East River Drive. Martin Farber, 43,
and his wife Phyllis, 39, escaped with minor cuts and bruises when
their northbound car was struck from behind by a foreign car driven
by Daniel Bittner, 28, of Manhattan. Bittner was taken to Bellevue
Hospital with broken ribs, internal injuries, and a possible skull
fracture. Police said he was intoxicated while driving. At the hospital
just before entering sedation, Bittner said he had been despondent over
personal affairs and had let go of the wheel of his car in an attempt
at suicide. The Farber car, he said, had cut unexpectedly in front of
him after he had lost control of his own vehicle. He will face criminal
charges after his discharge from the hospital._"
"No," Laura whimpered. "Not Dan. Not Dan!"
It was an hallucination, she told herself. Her overstrained mind had
invented the news broadcast. Dan had not really done a thing like that.
But he had. At eight, Laura turned the dial to another station that
broadcast the news, and they carried the story too--with the additional
comment that Bittner was now in very critical condition, and doctors at
Bellevue were not sure he would pull through.
Laura was numb. Everyone she had come in contact with had, in some way,
met destruction. Perhaps it was not her fault that Marilyn had died,
or that McDermott's life had been wrecked. They had made their own
choices, and their roads had brought them to tragedy. But Dan--there
was no evading the self-condemnation there. She had known right from
the start that it was wrong to let him fall in love with her not
knowing the truth. Yet she had been unable to break away. And he had
done the expected, once the shocking truth about her had been revealed
to him.
Marilyn ... Bob McDermott ... Dan Bittner ... the only one who had
not found her a deadly jinx thus far was Spinelli. But the dark gods
protected Spinelli. He had nothing to fear from anyone.
For more than an hour Laura debated with herself about going to the
hospital. She wanted to; she wanted to throw herself at Dan's feet,
to apologize for having deceived him in this way, to plead with him
to find the strength to remain alive. Yet at the same time she feared
going to see him--feared his scorn, or, worse, his tears. She was
unworthy of him. Unworthy of loving him, unworthy of visiting him in
the hospital.
But finally she decided she had to go. It was past nine o'clock, now,
and half an hour more went by before the taxi dropped her off at
Bellevue.
In the lobby they told her inflexibly: "Visiting time ends at eight
p.m."
"I know, I know. But he may die by morning. Don't you make exceptions
for dying people?"