“This is more like it,” he said, licking his lips. “A man could forget his troubles for sure at a gathering like this.”
For Charlotte, the noise and the activity was more than she had bargained for. Combined with the booze she had already consumed it made her feel wobbly, dizzy and even a bit nauseated. She continued to hesitate.
“C’mon,” Manny said again, tugging her forward. He pressed between two dancing couples and pulled her along behind him. She stumbled over something and looked down at a naked man crawling along the floor laughing hysterically. No one paid any attention.
“Wait,” she started to say, but Manny’s grip was as fierce as his desire. They stopped in the middle of the crowd, just to the right of the woman doing her imitation. Manny stared up at her and studied her body with religious fascination.
“I want to get out of here,” Charlotte said. The sweet rum and Cokes were beginning to get to her. She swallowed hard to keep the syrupy liquid down but the combined odor of cigarettes, sweat and pungent whiskeys was devastating. The acidlike liquid moved up into her mouth and burned her tongue. She began to choke on it but there was so much noise no one even noticed, least of all the hypnotized Manny.
The woman on the chair stopped her dance. Immediately one of the worshippers at her feet stood up, scooped her in his arms and carried her deeper into the suite toward Melinda’s bedroom. As Manny’s gaze followed, he saw a familiar dress, a familiar pair of legs and hips barely visible between some strangers. He looked harder toward the corner of the room and spotted her.
Flo was seated on the floor beside the lifeguard, his head planted comfortably between her breasts. Her slip was up well over her knees and the lifeguard had his right hand placed temptingly between her thighs. Flo’s eyes were closed but the lifeguard’s were concentrated on his fingers.
Manny dropped Charlotte’s hand abruptly and pushed his way roughly through the crowd. Some people complained and one man even kicked him in the rear, but he was so obsessed he didn’t notice or feel it. He pushed three people out of his path and finally stood just above Flo and the lifeguard. Fury overwhelmed him. The New York money problems, the frustration and embarrassment of his aborted escape and now this. The fucking, slut bitch, screwing around with a younger guy in front of all these people as if her husband—as if Manny Goldberg—didn’t even exist. The fact that he was there for the same reason didn’t make any difference.
His anger got the better of him. He kicked out and caught the lifeguard in the forehead, grazing it. The lifeguard jumped up in shock, for a second not realizing what was happening. Flo opened her eyes and looked up with a dazed expression.
“Get the fuck up,” Manny screamed. His mouth strained at the corners, pulling his nostrils wide. All the veins in his temples were visibly outlined under the skin. His fists were clenched; his teeth bared.
“What the …” The lifeguard felt his forehead and looked for blood.
“YOU BASTARD!” Flo screamed.
Manny reached down and took a handful of her hair. He began pulling her to her feet. The lifeguard, his senses regained, grabbed Manny’s wrist.
“Let her go.”
“Bug off, schmuck.”
The lifeguard responded with a well-aimed hard and fast swinging right. His fist crashed into the side of Manny’s head, catching him in the left temple. His head practically spun around but he still didn’t release his grip on Flo’s hair. She screamed with the pain and bit into his wrist. Despite all the chaos, no one tried to break the fight up—they were too caught up in their own sexual pyrotechnics. Flo suddenly kicked her foot up and caught Manny’s groin with her heel. He bellowed and released her, and the lifeguard took advantage of his pain and landed a fist in his kidney. “I’ll teach you who to call ‘schmuck.’ “ Manny toppled over to his right into a crowd of dancers, who immediately moved out of his way.
The fight was quick, but Charlotte had been close enough to catch it all. A very slight, thin line of blood had formed on the lifeguard’s forehead and the sight of it plus Manny’s rolling in agony on the floor finished off all her resistance. What remained of her rum and cokes came charging up and out. A woman standing nearby felt the wetness on the back of her stockings and turned in time to see Charlotte deliver another heave. The woman screamed and put her hands to her ears. Her action caught the attention of people nearby. Charlotte heaved a third time and the crowd began pulling back.
Flo and her lifeguard moved quickly to the exit. The bedlam caused by Charlotte’s vomiting was just what they needed to cover their escape. Manny struggled to his feet but a group around him, annoyed that he had created a disturbance, formed a circle with him in the center and every time he tried to get up, pushed him back flat on his ass. Very little of this traveled into the second bedroom where Melinda was still holding court.
By the time Manny had bulldozed his way out, someone had already helped Charlotte out of the room and Flo had disappeared. He cursed and swung out wildly, making a path for himself. By the time he got out in the corridor, there was no one in sight. For a moment he considered running down the hall and smashing his fist on every door until he found Flo and her lover and made them pay for his humiliation.
But after a few minutes the impulse subsided and his rage settled down. Some loud laughter caught his attention. Another woman was up on the chair and this time the people around her were encouraging her to play with herself. She slowly let her fingers crawl down from her belly and was greeted with cheers and jeers. Manny wiped the side of his head. It still hurt, but it wasn’t bad enough to take him out of the ball game. He looked back down the corridor, considered his options and turned back to the party.
He would take care of his bitch wife later, he thought, and worked to get a better position by the chair and the girl.
At first Nick didn’t quite understand what Melinda’s boy was doing crouched down like that. He was in the corner of the basement where all the stage flats and scenery were built and all the supplies stored. There was no one else around, the work on the staging for the July fourth weekend entertainment having already been completed. Various props and stage pieces were stacked and lined up near the wall. Shelves held cans of paint, dyes and rolls of crepe paper.
Grant squatted at the base of a cloth flat that had been painted and repainted many times. He held a lighted match to the material. The small flame seemed to leap off its tip as it quickly seized hold of the dry surface. Instantly a brown hole formed and began to expand. A steady stream of smoke rose up and Grant moved to another flat and repeated the maneuver. Although it, too, caught fire rather quickly, the flame was blocked once it worked its way from the material to the frame. Frustrated, Grant looked about frenetically for a way to satisfy his desire for a more demonstrable blaze; a way to symbolically send Sandi and his mother up in flames.
He spotted a rag in a dye pot and lifted it out. Holding it in his left hand, he lit it from the bottom. A blue-red flame rose so quickly it was as if the fire had been stored in the dirty rag itself, just waiting to be released. He was pleased with the way it looked and flung it into a cardboard wishing well a few feet away. It was at this point that Nick stepped out from behind the corner of the basement wall.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Grant jumped back.
“Nothin’.”
“Nothin’? You dumb little bastard. I’ve been standing right over here watching you. What the hell …” He stepped on the burning cinders that had resulted from the fire on the flats. “I think we better get you upstairs.”
“Don’t you touch me,” Grant said as Nick stepped forward. Nick stopped and smiled at him, hoping the smile would allay some of the boy’s anxiety. “I saw you. I saw you with that man upstairs.”
Very slowly, the smile left Nick’s face. Grant took another step back, his eyes fixed on Nick as though by magnetic force.
“What man?”
“The man in the penthouse. I was on the fire escape before and I looked in the window. I saw him and I saw you too. So you just keep away from me.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What is it exactly that you saw?” Grant didn’t respond. He simply continued to stare. “I think we’d better get you up to your mother. C’mon.” Nick took another step forward and Grant backed further away. He looked behind him and saw his path was blocked somewhat by props, stage furniture and more flats.
“NO,” Grant screamed. “If you touch me, I’ll tell people everything I know.”
Nick stopped again. He was beginning to get angry.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, kid. I was never up in any penthouse. All I know is you tried to start a fire down here.”
“You were, too, up in the penthouse. I saw you. There was a man in there sitting in the middle of the floor with blood on his shirt and he didn’t move the entire time I was peering in. And you were there wiping stuff off the doorknobs with a handkerchief.” Grant wasn’t completely sure what it all meant, but he instinctively knew that it was enough information to place Nick Martin in fear of him. Nick’s hesitation confirmed this. Grant began to be more confident. He relaxed somewhat and started to get cocky. “I coulda told the cop who caught me on the fire escape, but I didn’t. I didn’t tell nobody. Yet,” he added, almost smirking.
“Well,” Nick said, seeming to relax. Reaching nonchalantly into his pocket and taking out a cigarette lighter and case he offered one to Grant, who turned him down. Grant eyed the space between Nick and the wall. He considered making a dash past him and then down the corridor to the elevators. Nick put a cigarette into his mouth and lit it, moving just slightly toward the wall as he did so. It was if he anticipated Grant’s idea. “You’re quite a guy, aren’t you? Quite the big shot.”
“Go to hell,” Grant said. Nick smiled and nodded.
“Okay then, let’s make a deal. You keep your mouth shut about what you saw upstairs and I’ll forget what you were trying to do down here. Whaddya say?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Okay,” Nick said. “You think about it.”
The rag Grant had tossed into the fake wishing well had set fire to its bottom by now and the sides began to snap as the flames built up from within. Both stared at it transfixed.
“We’d better do something about that, though,” Nick said. “See if there’s a water faucet in there,” he ordered, gesturing toward the boiler room a few feet away. Grant followed his gaze with his eyes but he didn’t move. “C’mon, move it, or we’ll get a load of people down here, and we’ll both have a lot of explaining to do.”
Reluctantly Grant moved toward the doorway of the room. He pushed the door open and looked inside. Nick moved so quickly and stealthily that when his forearm appeared under Grant’s chin and pressed against his Adam’s apple, the kid had no chance to react. In an instant, he was literally lifted off his feet.
The cutoff of air was immediate and complete, but it was the powerful and abrupt twist of the head that did the fatal damage. Grant’s neck snapped like a piece of brittle candy. Unsupported, his head fell forward, his tongue extended. His last image was a dazzling, sparkling prism filled with neon stars. Death shut it off abruptly. His body sagged, and Nick let it fall to the floor.
He looked around quickly. The paper wishing well nearby was nearly burned out, its frame collapsed into its foundation. Sparks from the fire flew into nearby stacks of flats but nothing more had ignited. Nick looked at Grant’s body and wondered what the hell the kid had been up to. He also considered the possibility that he had lied to him and maybe actually told someone else what he had seen in Jonathan’s room.
But there would be time to think about that later. His first concern now was what to do with the body. He thought about the fire once again. If he hadn’t come upon Grant, the kid might just have gotten a real blaze going. What if he had? That was a good question, and he repeated it to himself a couple of times before the answers began to come. He was pretty sure it wasn’t what Grant had in mind, but the fact was that if there was a big fire, it would require evacuation of the hotel and that meant he’d have a way of getting the hell out and back to the city. And there was something even more interesting. He began to calculate. The hotel had fire insurance and that presented a real possibility for him and his people to retrieve the money they’d invested. Granted, relatively speaking, it wasn’t a lot of cash but it added validity to their motto “We may not always win, but we try to never lose.”
He would claim credit for engineering this recap of funds and restore his credibility. Surely he would be rewarded for his initiative. He smiled as he looked back at Grant’s body. “Thanks, kid,” he muttered. He studied the basement—the studded ceiling, the piles of ignitable material. He noted the flammable paints and cleaning alcohol on the shelves. Then he looked inside the room where Grant’s body lay. There he saw the air and heat ducts that tunneled up through the ceiling leading to the very roof of the hotel. It was through these that the premises were heated or air conditioned. The metal surrounding the ducts was braced and framed by wood as old as the original building. The wood was matchstick dry. If he could get the flames to spurt high enough to reach the ducts in the ceiling …
He moved quickly, gathering the flammable liquids in both hands. Then he built a pile of flats, props and rags which he soaked with a can of makeshift starter fluid he found in the corner. He stepped back and listened. The basement remained eerily still—the day shift had long gone, the laundry room was closed because it was Saturday night and the stage crew was busy upstairs in the nightclub. Even most of the custodians had called it a night.
Without further hesitation, he moved the pile under the ducts, lit a rag soaked in paint thinner and threw the ball of fire onto his stack. Instantly, it ignited. He jumped back from the shock of heat that radiated outward. Flames flirted with the ceiling and the basement walls. He heaved on more material which caused the flames to flare even higher until they joined with the framework of the cooling and heating systems. There was a loud crack and then the fire shot up into the spine of the building. It followed the duct frames like an animal running a maze, a maze it knew by instinct, a maze it knew promised reward at the end.