Harlan Ellison - Spider Kiss

Shelly snapped his fingers, disengaged himself from Stag and moved on to a floor lamp plugged in by the breakfront. He moved it near the French doors and laid the cord out on the rug as though it had been pulled from its socket.

“Now you get it? She chased you, tripped over the cord and went out through the French doors. The force of her fall threw her over. You’re desolate with sorrow that one of your fans should have such an accident. You’ll pay all funeral expenses and the family will never have to worry again. You got that?”

He nodded tightly. He was starting to come around.

The doorbell went off like a gunshot.

Had he been just another slob on the scene, just another faceless guy brought to official attention, it might have been an Inquisition, and downtown to the Tombs for questioning. But he wasn’t. He was Stag Preston. Had the Colonel been around (no one seemed to know just where he had gone) even the mild questioning they suffered might have been averted. One call by The Man to his contacts downtown, and like a stream being diverted, they would have talked to intermediaries, left Stag alone. But Shelly had been forced to handle this little performance, and he handled it well.

It didn’t take much talking at all, but what there was—was fast. Shelly caught them as they came through the door, juggling them like sterling silver globes. They spun madly, faster and faster, until the publicity man hurled them over to Stag.

Easily Academy Award quality. He acted the role of the half-crazy-with-torment star so well that at times Shelly had to stop to correct his thinking: He is acting. He isn’t actually sorry, or innocent, or in anguish. This is an act .

But what an act:

“We’re sorry to bother you, Mr. Preston, but the girl did fall from your balcony.” Heavy irony in their voices; an idol was an idol, and they knew their steps could only be so many, so far, so hard; but it didn’t preclude irony, heavily, in the voices. “Now what, Mr. Preston, exactly, happened?”

Shelly had told it, but it had to be told again.

Then again.

And a third time. (And still no sign of the Colonel.) But simply told it was simply told: Mr. Preston had seen the young lady—he didn’t even know her name—at the theatre. She had been making quite a spectacle of herself, apparently. Mr. Preston had invited her—under Mr. Morgenstern’s chaperoning—to stop by for a souvenir and an autograph. Mr.

Preston always takes special pains with his fans, because every fan is something special to him. Once in the suite, the girl had acted very badly, pawing and trying to kiss Mr. Preston—aw, hell, fellas, you can call me Stag—and had even clawed at him in an attempt to rip off a piece of his clothing as a memento. She had made embarrassing advances and Stag had tried to get away. In the scuffle she had tripped over a lamp cord and fallen through the French doors.

“The force of her fall must have just thrown her over,” Stag concluded, desolation and misery in his eyes, the timbre of his voice. “I—I didn’t know what, what to do … she was there one minute and the next…” He shuddered eloquently.

A sharp-eyed plainclothesman, who had been examining the nap of the rug, the placement of the lamp’s trailing cord and the way the French door had snapped open the flimsy lock, stood up, and made an, “Uh, Stag?” of attention.

The singer turned to him, and Shelly saw in that face of the law what he was hoping not to see. The man was not fooled; he knew the girl had been struggling ferociously, had not fallen as accidentally as Stag Preston told it. “Uh, Stag, where’s the piece of her blouse?”

The boy came through beautifully. There was a briefest flicker of the dark eyes, and a recovery so swift there might never have been a fumble. “What piece of her blouse?”

The detective’s jaw muscles bunched and he said very smoothly, “The girl’s blouse had been ripped down the front. We thought it might be here in the hotel somewhere.”

Shelly leaped in abruptly: “She must have, uh, she must have ripped it on her way down, or perhaps on the door handle here—” He stepped across theatrically, very much like a schoolteacher or a television announcer, pointing to the product, directing (or misdirecting) everyone’s eyes. He pointed to the door handle. The plainclothesman turned back to Stag. The man was no dummy.

“You didn’t see the blouse, is that it?”

Stag shrugged and spread his hands in all directions, turning. “No, you can look if you like.” They didn’t look.

“Perhaps one of her friends grabbed it up, those nutty teen-agers, you know,” Shelly said, interceding again, misdirecting. “She was with some fan club, a whole bunch of them … you know how they are … maybe one of them grabbed it up.”

“Perhaps,” the detective murmured, turning away; he knelt down again to study the patterns of ruffling on the carpet.

It went on for some time. Shelly managed to get away once and hit the phone in one of the bedrooms. “Hello … this is Shelly … let me talk to Joe.

“Joe? Shelly. Listen, we’ve got it and bad this time. The kid had a groupie up here…” He launched into a Reader’s Digest condensation of the episode, concluding, “…they’ve got us sewed-up here. I told them I was calling The Palace to cancel Stag’s performance. Do that, but get with the columnists. Every goddam busboy and maid in this joint has found some excuse to breeze past the door or the dumbwaiter while the fuzz’ve been here. It’s probably with every stringer in the city by now. Get with them and keep their mouths shut. I don’t care how you do it, just do it!”

When he reappeared, his face was a twist of sadness. “Captain,” he addressed the senior investigating officer, “this has been a helluva strain on the kid. He’s pretty much attached to his fans, you know. We’ve canceled the performance at the theatre, but I’d like to see him in bed for the day. Do you think you’ve got enough for now?”

The Captain, a man with over twenty years on the force, and a staunch believer in the old saw, You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours , a man who knew the Colonel and what he could or could not do, thought he very well might have enough for now. There would, of course, be more questioning later, and the coroner’s inquest, but he was sure everything was just as Mr. Morgenstern and Good Old Stag had it.

The girl must have had some kind of unbelievable strength to throw herself out a window like that, but hell, anyone could see Stag was really broken up about this thing, and yes, it’s terrible, and sure, we’ll refer the newsmen to you, Mr. Morgenstern, I guess you want to handle the way they talk about this thing … some of them got real nasty mouths on them, and sure, we understand, and you betcha we’ll pass along the Colonel’s regards to the Commissioner for his interest and his help. Thanks a lot, gang.

Then the door was opening and closing and people were leaving. If they had arrived and been juggled like silver globes, then their leaving could only be compared to fog. They left like fog.

Great gouts of them left at one time—harness bulls, the police photographers, the analysts, the reporters, the plainclothes detectives, the Captain. Then smaller wisps drifted away, unseen: the morbidly curious ones who had heard the terrible news and who wanted, for a few instants, to bathe in the glow of the famous, the notorious, the colorful. They were the gray ones, like fog itself, who drift and are never really seen. Who derive all their glamour vicariously, all their color by reflection and refraction, like the oil slick on asphalt after the rain. They disappeared, but only when they were certain nothing more was happening…