CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The first thing Laura did when she reached her apartment was to strip off her soiled and rumpled clothes and head for the shower. She paused to look in the mirror. She looked terrible. Her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with dark circles. Her cheeks were hollow. Even her breasts seemed to droop a little.

The brisk shower revived her to some degree. At least she was clean, now. Naked, she walked numbly through the apartment, with all its beautiful furniture and expensive carpeting, and threw herself down in a heap on her bed. Her eyes throbbed mercilessly. She felt sick, sick with pity for McDermott and Marilyn and herself, for all the hapless whores rounded up and bundled into the House of Detention, for everyone who schemed and suffered for filthy lust.

After a while she began to doze off. She had had virtually no sleep at all, and she was exhausted. She thought fleetingly of Spinelli, that octopus of crime. He had saved her, and she supposed she should be grateful for that. But she realized suddenly that she hated Spinelli and everything he stood for. The merchant of high-priced sex, of blue-chip nookie. Always ready to work the fix to cover something up. Always ready with the glib talk, the smooth sales pitch, the big money. He bought and sold souls with his money. He was a new kind of villain, she thought—not the mustache-twirling kind with an evil leer, but a new Madison Avenue kind of villain, an Ivy League kind of villain, soft-spoken, dressing in perfect taste, eating at the finest restaurants. Handsome, affable, cultured. But just as evil as the most raucous gangster. More dangerous, in fact, since he cloaked his malevolence behind smooth phrases.

She dropped off to sleep, finally, still thinking of Spinelli. The ringing of the telephone brought her up out of it. She woke, listening to the bell ring for a third time, a fourth, a fifth. Frowning at her own nakedness, she stretched across the bed and picked up the receiver. The clock on the nighttable told her it was four o'clock; she had been asleep for hours.

"Hello?"

"So you work for a fashion magazine, eh? And you had important work to do last night?" The voice, Laura realized in astonishment, was Dan's. But it sounded different—thick, as though he had been drinking, and shaky.

"Is that you, Dan?"

"Yeah, it's me. Sucker Dan. The biggest dope this side of the Mississippi. Fashion editor, you are. I could have had a free lay from you, if I'd known. Fashion editor!"

"Dan—" Her voice was edged with fright. "Dan, are you drunk?"

"Maybe. You stinking whore!"

"Dan!"

"Go on, deny it, why don't you?"

"I don't understand—"

"Maybe it was your twin sister. You got a twin sister, Laura? Because she looked just like you. Right down to the last, she looked just like you. I didn't know you had a twin, Laura."

"What are you talking about?"

"The picture in the paper, Laura. On the front page of the News. You mean you didn't see it?"

She began to shiver. "N-no."

"Well, I saw it, Laura. My sweet little fashion magazine editor. My sweet little hand-holding girlfriend who was too busy to see me most of the time. My sweet little whore. So long, Laura. It just goes to show you you can't trust anybody in this world ... not anybody...."

The phone clicked.

"Dan!" she cried.

The line was dead. With trembling hands, Laura replaced the receiver. She clung to the edge of the bed, racked with deep sobs. She was at the edge of hysteria. She fought for control.

After a moment she regained her inner balance. The first thing to do, she thought, was to get a copy of the newspaper and see just what sort of pictures they had used. She made her way into the kitchen and rang the house-phone several times, until the doorman answered.

"Howard," Laura said, "will you pick up a copy of today's Daily News and bring it up to my apartment as soon as you can?"

"Will do, Miss Haynes."

She waited. Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Laura started for it, realized she was still nude, and hastily grabbed up a robe and wrapped it around her. It was a thin, practically transparent robe, but there was no time to worry about that now.

The doorman, a young, massive West Indian, goggled in surprise at the immodesty of Laura's outfit as she answered the door. But he made no comment, merely smiled and handed her the paper. She took it from him without unfolding it, and gave him a dollar.

As soon as the door was closed, she spread the paper out on the bed.

A headline screamed up at her from the front page:

ARREST 100 IN VICE ROUNDUP

The entire lower half of the front page was given over to a single picture that had been taken from the doorway of the Detention building. It showed a file of women being shepherded into the building by policemen, with police wagons in the background.

Perhaps a dozen girls were shown in the picture. The one closest to the camera was Laura. It was the photo that had been taken of her while she was unawares. There was no mistaking the likeness. It was quite clear. She was staring expressionlessly right into the camera, and a policeman stood at her side with his hands grasping her arm at the elbow.

The caption said, Vice squad man leads some of the more than a hundred prostitutes arrested last night into the women's house of detention. Story on page 3.

Quickly Laura opened to page three. There, under a page-wide headline, were two more pictures of girls struggling with policemen. The article began,

The city's vice squad swooped down last night in a lightning raid on New York City prostitutes. The carefully-planned operation covered everything from cheap B-Girl bars to flossy midtown hotels, and by midnight had netted more than a hundred tarts. Ten wagons were needed to convey all the chippies to the hoosegow.

According to a Vice squad spokesman, this is only the beginning of an intensive campaign against the play-for-pay girls. Similar blitzkrieg raids will take place from time to time, and there will be increased surveillance of bars, hotels, and traditional street-corners. Another—

Laura threw the paper down. She had to fight back a wild burst of panic.

The worst had happened, then. The picture was in the papers, and Dan had seen it. He had drawn the inevitable conclusion.

Oh, God, she thought, why did that photographer have to be there? Why did they have to take my picture? Why did Dan have to see the paper?

Why?

The why didn't matter any more. What mattered was that Dan had seen it. And, obviously shocked, perhaps drunk, he had called up to accuse her—rightfully—of having perpetrated a horrible deception on him. Her head drooped in shame. To become emotionally involved with someone, perhaps to come to the point of wanting to ask her to marry you, and then to see her picture in the paper in a group of common prostitutes arrested in a vice raid—what a shock that must have been to him, she thought! And there was nothing she could do now, no way of calling him and telling him that it was all a mistake, that they had arrested someone who looked very much like her, or that they had really arrested her but through some gigantic error of justice.

No. Dan knew the truth. No lie would help now.

Laura picked up the telephone and dialed Spinelli's number. On the fourth ring it was Skalkottis, Spinelli's secretary-bodyguard, who answered.

"Yes?"

"George, this is Laura Haynes. Is Phil around?"

Skalkottis hesitated. "He's pretty busy. Maybe he can call you back, huh?"

"I want to talk to him. It's important."

"Hold on," Skalkottis rumbled. "I'll tell him who's calling and we'll see."

A moment later Spinelli's voice came over crisply: "Laura?"

"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?"

The nurse on duty frowned. "Who is it you would like to see?"

"Bittner, Dan Bittner. He was in the auto accident on the East River Drive this afternoon. They said on the radio that he was in critical condition, that they weren't sure he'd last the night. I have to see him, don't you understand? This may be my—my last chance."

The nurse looked more sympathetic. "Are you a relative of Mr. Bittner?"

"I'm——I'm his fiancee," Laura said. "We were going to be married. But—" She stopped, forcing the tears to remain back. It was almost the truth, wasn't it? Why did this woman have to stand in her way, blocking her when Dan lay perhaps dying upstairs?

The nurse's expression softened further. "Let me check upstairs. It's irregular to have visitors admitted this late, but we do make exceptions in—in certain instances." She picked up a telephone receiver and asked for an extension. Laura listened eagerly as she spoke to a nurse upstairs. "Yes ... ask the doctor if Bittner can have a visitor."

There was a pause. Laura said, "Is he conscious?"

"Semi-conscious," the woman said. "He's been in a coma most of the afternoon, she said, but they told me he's out of it now. Oh." She listened for a moment. Then she said to Laura, "The doctor says he's in very shaky shape, but that any close relatives can be admitted for very brief spells. Could I have your name, please?"

"Haynes. Miss Laura Haynes."

"We'll have to check, of course," the nurse said. "I mean, all sorts of people try to get upstairs under false pretenses, and—"

Laura gasped in horror, but it was too late; the nurse at the desk was saying into the mouthpiece, "Her name is Laura Haynes. She's Mr. Bittner's fiancee."

There was another moment of hesitation. Then the desk nurse put the telephone down. When she looked up at Laura her expression was stony, bleakly hostile.

She said, "I'm sorry, Miss Haynes."

"But—"

"They checked with Mr. Bittner," the nurse said coldly. "Mr. Bittner said that he did not want to see you under any circumstances. I'm sorry, Miss Haynes. We can't admit you."