Chapter 14
Because Fred is mild-mannered and soft-spoken, people usually don't notice how big he is. But actually he stands about six feet one and must weigh one-eighty or one-ninety, and he's a pretty solidly put together sort of guy. When he came bursting into the room, he looked a lot bigger than he really is, because he was so angry.
Everyone was too stupefied to move. Fred stopped short at the entrance to the big room, and looked quickly around, twitching his neck from side to side and taking in the startling sight of more than two dozen people of both sexes in a state of nudity (or, in a few cases, near-nudity.)
That first look must have shaken him, but what he saw on the second look really touched him off. Because now he looked in the middle of the floor, and saw Carol stretched out there, mother-naked, sitting up on one elbow with a silly smile on her face, and her knees invitingly up in the air. And Chuck Gordon was crouching over her.
"Get away from her!" Fred said in a thick, strangled voice. It was a terrible sound.
Chuck was so amazed that he stepped back.
Don Hammer said, "This is a private club, fella. You've got no right to come bursting in here and-"
"Don't talk to me about rights," Fred said. His voice had dropped at least an octave, his breath was coming fast, and his face was dark with anger. "What about him? Stealing my girl out from under my nose, taking her off and getting her drunk, filling her up with drugs-doing hell knows what to her-"
"I haven't done a thing to her!" Chuck said.
"Not yet! But-"
"How did you know where we were?" Chuck asked.
"One of your frat brothers told me. Told me the whole thing, how you had gotten this surefire drug, how you were taking this girl to a party somewhere in the Nineties, how you were going to seduce her-" He paused for breath. "I knew it was Carol. So I've been wandering up and down these streets, and then I found your Volks parked right outside, and I came up on the steps and I heard laughing, and your voice, and-and I rang the bell-and Carol-Carol-"
The sight of his beloved lying sprawled out shamelessly nude was too much for Fred. I detected all the signs of the slow burn-of the soft-spoken ninny who builds up a head of steam, and builds it up, and builds it up, going quietly crazy inside and keeping himself rigidly in check, and then all of a sudden explodes with a fury that just can't be contained.
I knew all the signs. And I saw it happened to Fred. And the next second, the explosion came.
"Blast you to hell, Chuck Gordon," he roared in a voice that could have been heard in New Jersey. Tears of rage and hysteria flooded down his face. There was a beer mug standing on a table just next to Fred, and he grabbed that mug up and flung it with all his might at Chuck's head.
If it had connected, Fred would have had to answer manslaughter charges. And Chuck didn't even have time to duck. But Fred threw the mug with such force that it went sailing over Chuck's head by some three or four feet, smashed through the front window, and landed with a crash on the street outside.
Livid with rage, Fred went charging forward like a maddened buffalo. His arms were outstretched, going for Chuck's throat. Carol may have been drugged, but she had enough sense to pull herself out of the way, or she would have been trampled.
The rest of us had been so stunned by Fred's arrival and by the sharp little interchange between him and Chuck that we had stood still as statues. But now all hell broke loose in that room.
One of the girls began to scream. Ted Felks started to shoulder his way toward Fred, holding an empty soda-bottle as a club.
I found myself standing next to the light switch. In a moment of confusion I turned the light off. The room was plunged into darkness.
And then into milling riot.
Fred was somewhere in the middle of it all, either holding Chuck Gordon or trying to get hold of him. Ted Felks and Ned Carter were attempting to grab Fred, but Fred's strength just then was as the strength of ten. I could see dimly people milling around in confusion. One of the girls-I think it was Bea Mannheim-set up a low, steady, hysterical moaning.
Furniture went crashing to the floor. Things broke. Fred and Chuck emerged from the melee, Chuck pounding at Fred in hopes of breaking his grip, and I heard Chuck yell, "For chrissake let go of me, you idiot! You're choking me-"
I stood where I was. I didn't know what was going to happen, but right then I was on Fred's side, and I knew that so long as the lights remained out Fred would be able to do some damage to Chuck, and right now that was what I wanted to happen. So I stuck to my post by the light switch.
Hal Sharp came up to me in the dark and said, "Where's the switch? Turn on the light!"
I put my hand over the switch. Hal groped for it and said, "That you with your hand on the switch, Burnside?"
"The switch is on the other side of the room," I said. I took him and grabbed him by the shoulders and propelled him into the tangle. I saw him collide with someone bulky, most likely Dave Rees, and the two of them started slugging, each one probably thinking the other one was Fred.
With the light out, nobody knew who anybody else was, and everybody moved too fast to figure anything out. Standing as I was in the corner, not moving, my eyes got accustomed to the dark and I had a pretty good idea of the action. The girls were running all over the place, trying to break things up, and some of them were getting belted too. I wondered if Helene, that masochist, had managed to work herself right into the middle, where she was likely to get pummeled and knocked around in the way that most delighted her.
I saw Carol sitting leaned against the wall like a dummy, right near the main scene of all the fighting. I was afraid she was likely to get hurt, so I left my post at the light switch, ducked around behind the couch, and picked her up. Her naked body was soft and light, and her skin was warm against my own. Her head lolled drunkenly against my chest.
I carted her out of the living room and propped her up at the foot of the stairs, where she was out of harm's way. Then I returned to the living room. By this time the brawl had spilled over into the adjoining library. Fred had all the furies of hell possessing him, and he was simply unstoppable. He was taking advantage of the confusion to do as much damage as he could, both to Chuck and to the place in general. Smashed liquor glasses were lying all over the place and I was sure somebody was going to get cut to pieces on them, naked the way all of them were.
Two people emerged from the thick of it, Fred and someone else, maybe Lome Byris. Byris took a swing at Fred, who ducked, grabbed the slim Byris by the waist, and tossed him against the wall. Byris sagged and flopped down. Then Fred turned around and plunged right back into the middle of the fight.
It was the damndest thing, all the pandemonium of thirty naked people milling around in one big room, most of them trying unsuccessfuly to collar one angry male who was intent on mayhem. Fred was out of his head, absolutely buggy.
I knew there wasn't much chance that it could go on very long. Fred wasn't a superman, and pretty soon someone would catch hold of him and drag him down, and that would be the end of the fight. It was what would happen afterward that was so hard to think about. They couldn't very well just murder Fred, but it was certain they'd have to do something to keep him from spilling all this to the college authorities.
Or maybe they would murder him. I felt a chill run up and down my back. Some of these boys were pretty big wheels, Burchard and Haberman and Hammer particularly. They came from important families with long careers as Metropolitan men, and they were seniors with law school or medicine ahead of them. Expulsion would smash up their lives for good. They couldn't risk it. Maybe to save their skins they would even do away with Fred. It was a hell of a thing to think about. But there had been murders at colleges before. It was just that I had never been so close to a situation where people had motive to kill, before.
It occurred to me too that it couldn't be long before somebody in the neighborhood would call the police. We weren't exactly being quiet about things, and between the grunting of the fighting males, Fred's bellows of hatred, and the various feminine screams-not to mention the periodic crashes of breaking furniture and the occasional heaving of an object through the already shattered front windows-we could probably be heard blocks away, and it would sound like mass murder was being committed in here. And if the police arrived-
Evidently someone else got the same idea about the police just about when I did. Because I clearly saw a short figure detach himself from the struggling mass and run past me, out of the living room, past the uncomprehending form of Carol, and upstairs to the bedrooms where the clothes had been left. I figured this was one of the seniors running upstairs to get dressed and clear out before the law arrived, and it turned out later that I was right-it was Don Hammer, always a quick thinker, scramming while the scramming was good.
Dumbhead that I am, I was starting to figure that maybe I ought to get going too, since I wasn't mixed up in the fight and could get away without any trouble. But even though the thought definitely passed through my mind, I didn't do a thing about it. I kept thinking that my old friend Fred might need me, and besides there was Carol lying there all naked and drugged and nobody thinking about her except me, and what with one thing and the other I couldn't bring myself to do the simple little thing of running up the stairs, putting my clothes on, and leaving.
Then someone warm and soft pressed herself up against me. Even without looking, I could tell by the cuddly feel of her that it was Helene. She was quivering and panting like a madwoman.
"Who are you?"
"Jeff."
"Make love to me, Jeff. Right now, while all this is going on. Make love to me!"
"Helene, don't be silly. You-"
"You refused me before. Don't do it again." She started to tug me down on the floor, gripping me insistently, her hands roving over my body in an attempt to awaken desire in me. I struggled to get loose. I didn't give a damn about her peculiarities, but I wasn't going to get myself entangled in a female's body while a bloody riot was going on all round me.
"Please, Jeff! Please!"
"Not now, Helene. We'll get trampled on."
She was like a crazy woman, desperate for loving. I figured someone must have hit her hard and touched off that pain-sex reflex she has. I was deciding that the smartest thing would be to try to get over to the other side of the room, where she might not be able to find me. If the cops did come busting in, it would look lousy to get caught in the act.
I started across. And then I heard it-everybody in the room heard it, coming clearly and unmistakably through the sound of the melee.
It was only a simple little sound-a car stopping, doors slamming, feet running. But it said the same thing to each of us.
Cops.
I ducked around the couch and peered through the broken glass of the window. The law, all right. The squad car was in the middle of the street, and two grim-looking bruisers were running up the steps of our brownstone.
"Kill it!" I yelled hoarsely. "Cops!"
"Cops!" someone else screamed, and the cry went through the room. The struggle was over in an instant. We heard the bell ringing, heavy pounding on the front door.
"Open up in there! Open up!"
There was a mad dash toward the stairs. I guess they all felt that if they got upstairs and got into their clothes, things wouldn't look so bad for them. The result was a king-size traffic jam on the staircase, and nobody getting anywhere.
And then the cops broke open the front door and came surging in.
The lights were turned on.
"Stay where you are, all of you!" a tough police voice snapped.
We stayed. The cops blinked, looking around. Their faces were purple with astonishment.
"Get a load of this, will you?" one of them said to the other one. "A pajama party without the pajamas!"
We must have made quite a spectacle. For one thing, the house was a shambles. For another, the battle had left some picturesque scars. I looked down at Helene and saw that she had the beginning of a black eye. No wonder she had been so heated up. Chuck was lying in a far corner, looking dazed and battered. Most of the others had various major or minor injuries. Fred was still standing, but he was a terrible mess, with one eye swollen closed and his shirt ripped pretty near half off him, and bruises and scratches all over him.
The cops were standing in the foyer, craning their necks back and forth with amazement. They let their gazes linger slowly on one bare body after another. Self-consciously, a few of the girls folded their arms to cover their breasts, while Bea Mannheim huddled down in a little heap, trying to keep front and rear hidden from the cops' eyes simultaneously, and not succeeding.
"They called us out because there was a fight going on here," the younger of the two cops said. "But nobody told us it was a damn orgy."
"Are you college kids?" the other cop asked.
A few of us nodded mutely.
"Wouldn't you have known it," he said. "Rutting season in the Ivy League."
The other cop said, "Go out to the car and radio for a wagon. There must be twenty or thirty of them."
"Right."
We were frozen like statues. Looking around, I noticed that Don Hammer was missing. As I had guessed, he was the lucky one who had slipped out in the dark. Everyone else was here, some of them on the staircase but most still in the foyer or living room. Carol lay where I had propped her, but she had opened her eyes an was looking from side to side with a puzzled air.
"Is this a fraternity house?" the cop demanded.
"A-a private party," Les Haberman stammered. He was seeing law school go sailing down the drain.
"A private party, huh?"
"That's right," Fred said. "They drugged that girl over there and they were just about to rape her, all of them, when I came in."
"And who the hell are you?"
"I'm not part of this bunch," Fred said loudly.
"I came here to get her-" He pointed to Carol. "That's when the fight started."
The other cop returned. "The wagon's on its way," he reported.
"Okay. All of you-where are your clothes? Get into them, and make it fast." The cop glanced at Fred. "You come with us too."
"But-"
"Well want to talk to you special. The rest of you, get into your clothes! Boy, are the papers going to eat this story up!"