Spider Kiss (9 page)
"We gave him love, and we gave him our home to live in, and we found work for him, and singing jobs for him, and you'd just stand there, Asa Kemp, and let them take him away, prob'ly make a fortune with him, while we smile and say, 'It's all the best for little Luther.' Well, you've done it too many times in the past, Asa, and it's not going to happen
this
time.
"If they want to have Luther, they got to pay us for our share of his contract, or we don't have to —"
Luther's voice was as soft as a chloroformed rag: "We don't have no contract, Miz Kemp."
There was abrupt, smothering silence in the bicycle shop.
Everyone realized what the boy had done. He had left the bag open purposely, and the alley cat had crawled out to be smelled by everyone. Silence would have meant perhaps a little more dickering, and the remote possibility that Freeport and Morgenstern would cool on taking Luther with them — but it would have meant money to the Kemps. He had denied them their stranglehold, showed they were screaming into the wind, and had insured his position with Colonel Freeport.
It was the calculated move of a very smart operator.
It smelled bad, even to Shelly, so anxious to see this woman with her inadvertent prejudice stomped into the linoleum. It smelled very bad.
Ruth Kemp's face disintegrated. She sobbed once, lightly, and turned away. What she had counted on as an ally had turned out to be the enemy who had destroyed her; she vanished behind the curtains.
Asa Kemp stared with empty eyes. He was suddenly a very old man.
"Well, I feel you people are entitled to something for all the time and good will you've spent on Luther," Jack Freeport said. He reached into his inner jacket pocket for his checkbook.
Luther's hand stopped him. "You don't owe them nothin'," he said flatly. His voice was very even, much lower than his singing voice, almost unreal. "They did what they wanted to, and they wouldn't of, if they hadn't wanted to. So I'm all squared with them. They had from me, an' I had from them. That finishes it." He turned to go.
Shelly and Freeport stood rooted for a long moment, then turned to follow. As the tinkle of the little brass bell over the door filled the bicycle shop, Asa Kemp's voice stopped Luther in the doorway.
"Ah hope you'll be happy, Luther." There was no veiled meaning in his voice. He said what he meant.
The boy turned and walked out onto the street. Shelly was the last to leave; he looked around the shop. Something had happened here. Something important. What it was, he was not quite sure; but something dreadfully important had occurred, and he knew he would think about it.
When the plane climbed above the clouds, Shelly saw that Luther was staring intently out the window, across the wing and down into the massed cotton candy of the banks. He watched the boy for a while, then turned to snub out the cigarette in the armrest ashtray. He heard the vague murmur of words beside him, and turned back to the boy.
Luther's hand was pressed against the Plexiglas. His face was close to the port.
He was saying, over and over, very softly, but very distinctly, "Goodbye, you sonofabitch poor, goodbye."
Shelly wondered if something hadn't happened to the air conditioning.
He was, all at once, quite cold.
Athena sprang full-blown from the forehead of Zeus, and it was later said that Stag Preston had sprung in a like manner from the forehead of Colonel Jack Freeport. It wasn't exactly like that, but close enough not to matter. Stag Preston emerged full-grown from the cast-off eighteen-year-old shell of Luther Sellers.
Once in New York, Freeport began molding the raw material he had acquired into a marketable commodity. First came the contracts, many contracts, all sized and planed and pruned and riveted at the loopholes. Freeport owned thirty percent of the boy, Shelly owned thirty percent and — much to everyone's surprise — Luther owned forty percent. How had it happened? Well:
Luther's face at sight of the massed grayness that was Manhattan might easily have been done by Rockwell for the front cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
. It was tanned, upturned, astounded. Shelly had thought it impossible in an age when any large city — Louisville included — was a small surrogate for New York, but Luther goggled and boggled and swept his head around in wide circles of enjoyment.
"
Jeezus
, willya look at
that
!" Luther cried as they swept over the Pulaski Skyway. The rented Cadillac convertible had seemed an unnecessary bit of vulgar ostentation to Shelly when they had found it waiting at Newark Airport. But now, as they sped across the hanging panorama of the city, Morgenstern realized it had been a calculated bit of Freeportian showmanship. Impress the kid, sway the kid, let him know there were larger gods; dealings were always simpler with someone off-balance.
The chauffeur threw the car ahead, and eventually they came down the spinning ramp into the Lincoln Tunnel. Luther's excitement was a contagious thing, and Shelly remembered the first time he had seen the city, from the window of a Greyhound bus. It was very nearly like that now, vicariously.
The bathroom-tiled tunnel echoed around them and Luther giggled with barely-restrained excitement. Hey!
Out of the tunnel at 41st Street, and rising around them was the jungle. Shelly despised clichés, but to him, since that day the Greyhound had pulled into the Port Authority Building, it had been just that. A jungle. Filled with eaters and eaten. Filled with walkers and the walked-upon. Filled with those who took, and the saggy-faced ones who constantly got tooken. It was, very much, a jungle. Where the claw and the fang were Max Factored and Brooks Brothered to look like the glib line and the quick smile. He had made it in this jungle, primarily because he was one of the hungrier of the hungry ones, and he had the underlying feeling, as he caught the fever of joy and wonder from Luther, that this kid was equipped with the biggest appetite Jungle York had ever seen.
"Shelly, get Phil Moore over to the office about four; and check with Needleman — no, not Needleman — better get hold of Joe Costanza, see who he feels can do a promotion job on our boy here." The Colonel threw a hand onto Luther's shoulder.
Luther ignored the hand, ignored the Colonel, continued to drink deeply of the cup of New York.
Shelly jotted the instructions on a scrap of paper from one pocket, nodded, and smiled to himself. The full treatment. Phil Moore was known in the trade as "The Doctor." An adept at forming and styling a performer's act, he was one of the most expensive behind-the-scenes talents going. Shelly's estimation of Freeport's estimation of their property changed, just by mention of Moore's name. Freeport was certain they had something.
Still Shelly wondered. The rock'n'roll craze seemed to have reached its peak, seemed to be going downhill. Since the payola scandals, the FCC clamping tighter restrictions on the industry, Presley's return from Germany toned-down slightly, but noticeably … was it a dying horse?
Or could Moore, as well as Costanza and his crack team of flak-merchants, merchandise Luther in a different manner? Did the boy have what Shelly (and apparently Freeport) had come to
think
he had? Shelly's memory of Luther at the talent contest returned. The faces of the women in the audience — he had … what? … reached them,
held
them. Yes, Luther could make it.
But first, conquer the flaws in the initial design.
A memory of Asa Kemp intruded. Flaws?
Yeah, those, too.
They pulled up in front of the Sheraton-Astor and the bellhops magically erupted from inside. Tourists with bags that overpowered them stood waiting while Freeport's entourage made its way up the steps, across the lobby and into an elevator waiting for them alone. The floor Jack Freeport had rented six years before now no longer had a number. It might have been between the 12th and 14th floors of the Sheraton-Astor … and it might not. It was unnumbered because it was very much foreign soil in the hotel's bosom. It was Freeportland.
"Shelly, tend to those items while I shower," Freeport ordered, heading through the amethyst- and cream-colored living room. Shelly turned to the bank of phones on the Italian marble-topped desk.
"Make yourself at home, Luther," Freeport said as he disappeared into the master bedroom. In a moment the sound of a shower filled the room. Then the bedroom door was closed. Luther took in the suite, let fly a low, meaningful (and to Shelly possessively contemplative) whistle, and threw himself onto the amethyst-tinted sofa. His feet left sliding black smudges.
"Whoooeee-
sheet
!" he exclaimed.
Shelly sniggered under his breath.
That's right, baby, be impressed. Contract time is here at last
.
"This whole joint belong to the Colonel?" Luther asked. Shelly nodded, crushing the latest cigarette into a fresh ashtray. "Every interiorly decorated inch of it, Luther." He dialed a number, waited, lit a fresh cigarette.
A querulous hello came from the other end; Shelly's face broke into a smile transmitted through the voice. Jolly. "Joe, baby! Shelly here, we is
back
, man …"
And that was the way it went for the next hour.
Eventually, he called Carlene.
He looked dehydrated by that time, but not from the heat. He looked like the wrinkled, sweating rubber shell of a balloon about to expire. Shirt open, hair faintly mussed, the cigarettes now pacing one after another from the corner of his mouth, he excused himself and went into one of the side sitting-rooms, where he dialed the number he knew best.
The phone rang three times and he knew she had to be out. Carlene was a woman who lived on the phone, whose sole line of communication with the outside world was the Princess phone, in coral, next to the bed. Where was she? He felt the same helpless rage, the same ineffectual trapped feeling he knew every time he rang her up and found her out. At times like that he wanted to lock all her clothes away, like the whacks in the bad jokes and the mystery stories — the big-time gangster shacking with the nympho, the guy who had to keep his broad naked with only high heels or she'll ball anyone in sight —
but the image was too weird and he put it away. He substituted a simple smash in the mouth.
It was at times like this that he felt he knew how junkies got hooked. He knew their feelings. He was hooked on her. On a girl whose body was a commodity, and he happened at the moment to be the biggest demand for her supply.
He hung up and ground out his cigarette, half-smoked, in the clean ashtray. He lit another and returned to the living room to continue the business calls.
Shelly set the wheels in motion.
The Colonel showered and lingered at his toilet.
Luther examined every corner and room of the suite.
And then, it was too soon time to talk contract. The evening was close, and the Colonel demanded his dinner. It always seemed that way to Shelly. Freeport would personally call room service, and order the dinner, but it never seemed to be ordering; it was always demanding.
And after the squab on Austrian toast, the potatoes au gratin, the bottle of Liebfraumilch 1957 (from Freeport's personal stock in the hotel's wine cellar), the baked Alaska, it was talktime.
"We'll need a stenographer," Freeport said, wiping his mouth, wiping his hands, dipping the end of the linen napkin in his water glass and touching the corners of his mouth.
"I'll get Jeanie Friedel," Shelly answered. He shoved away from the table, made another phone call, and returned to the table.
They stared at each other in expectant uneasiness. The animals were beginning to sniff each other; the hunting season had opened right on schedule. From where Shelly sat, the Colonel seemed to have the larger-bore weapon.
"More coffee?" Shelly asked.
Luther shook his head.
Freeport took a pill. He took a capsule. He took a pepsin tablet.
Shelly lit a cigarette. It tasted foul. He snubbed it, and almost immediately lit another.
Luther coughed self-consciously, covered it with another, a forced cough from deep in the throat.
Shelly dragged on the cigarette.
The elevator sighed open beyond the door, and the doorbell went off an instant later. They each started, and Shelly recovered first, pushing back his chair. "I'll get it. Must be Jeanie."
When he opened the door, the girl caught him with her eyes, and there was a glint of something quick, taunting, smoldering. She smiled, lowering her eyes coquettishly. "Hello, Sheldon," she said, whispering it; calculated sexuality couched in a tight challenge. One step out of reach. It was wholly incongruous: this was Shelly, or Shel or Shel-baby, but never, except by Mama Morgenstern, Sheldon.
He felt his face going tight; the bitch with the heart like a popsicle. She edged past him, her smile turned elsewhere, but somehow (Bast, you cat goddess!) still on Shelly. He watched her back as she moved across the room … the play of her legs, moving more than her body. She had a way of carrying herself that most tall girls had never learned. It was the movement they spoke about when they used the word statuesque.
Silkenly, gliding, coming off the balls of the feet in little, long strides that stretched the fabric of her slim skirt taut; strides that made strangely disturbing emotions run through the Colonel's right-hand man.
"Good evening, Colonel Freeport," she said, and though there was nothing in the tone, Shelly could detect a come-on as flagrant as any he'd ever encountered.
Jean Friedel was on the make.
Not for Shelly and his measly twenty grand a year, but for something bigger. Perhaps Freeport, perhaps anyone else who had wanted what she wanted. Did it really matter who?
This was the tempting shape of the hungry ones in Jungle York.
"Good evening, Jean." The Colonel smiled at her with the particular return-smile of a man who has known a woman, and further, knows what she is, who she is. Shelly found a spiteful pleasure in the knowledge that though Jean looked at Sheldon Morgenstern as small peanuts … still, she would never hook the Colonel. Freeport might make her, if she was offering it, but she was being conned. By an expert.