Chapter 4
As it happened, of course, the opening through which Edgar Marvel hurled his impassioned body was not the door to his room but the open window. A careful examination of Marvel's psychology would certainly have indicated a life-long tendency to make disastrous mistakes about orifices and openings of various kinds, as his oversight concerning Mandy's posterior revealed, but in this case, the error of leaping out of a seventeenth-story window proved remarkably difficult to remedy. At least this was the discouraging conclusion drawn by a middle-aged couple in Room 1307 as they saw Marvel plummet past their window.
"Did you see that guy go by the window?" Mr. George Bellow of Winchester, Connecticut, commented to his wife Mabel, taking a hefty swig of the bottle of whiskey propped up between them on the bed.
"Ya mean the one with his cock out?" Mrs. Bellow did not normally employ words like "cock" but the fact of the matter was that the
Bellows were about halfway through a three-day bender. In the interest of their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Bellow did everything together, on the theory that the family that guzzles together, nuzzles together.
"Yeah, wonder what he was doin' goin' by our window with his cock wavin' in the breeze," George considered the matter as carefully as the Jevel of alcohol in his bloodstream would permit.
"One of them dirty exhibissssssionist fellows," Mabel slurred, removing the bottle from her husband's fist and drinking seven ounces of whiskey very quickly.
"Could be," responded George slowly. "But I'd say that was his last exhibisssssshion."
"Reckon so, George. He didn't have much of a cock anyway."
Actually, in the interests of strict scientific accuracy, it should be noted that Marvel did not fall seventeen straight stories to the street. Just after he provoked disapproving comment from Mr. and Mrs. Bellow by falling past their window with his private parts showing, Marvel hit a flag pole jutting out like an erected penis from the side of the Willowy Heights Hotel which cut off his right arm and his head, transforming him into three inanimate falling objects and a certain amount of messy blood instead of one live falling object. The head, wearing an expression of deep remorse, bounced onto the balcony of a room belonging to Mr. Ronald Gilmore of Salt Lake City, a Mormon gentleman of considerable piety, who looked out his window, saw Marvel's head looking at him disconsolately and promptly took the Lord's name in vain, as he called Room Service for a double Scotch. The remainder of Marvel's body continued its rapid downward descent, landing on the head of the Honorable Benjamin Worthington, a district court judge who was emerging from a cab in front of the hotel in order to attend the Sons of the Pioneers Annual Ball for which he was twenty minutes late. Had he been able to, Judge Worthington would have handed down a severe sentence to Marvel for falling into a public street with his parts showing, since he was known to be particularly unforgiving in sex offender cases. Unfortunately for the public decency, Judge Worthington was also killed instantly when Marvel's thigh-bone went approximately four inches into his skull. The cabbie removed the ten dollar bill still clutched in Judge Worthington's outstretched but lifeless hand and drove away rapidly, before anybody else dropped out of the sky and hit him on the head.
For about two minutes, Mandy sat nakedly on top of the rumpled bed, looking at the window through which Marvel had so recently disappeared, too shocked even to consider going into hysterics. What snapped her out of it was the police sirens. People who survive in difficult situations tend to do so by developing the habit of thinking about survival while other people are having hysterics. In Mandy's case, the police sirens reminded her that, as a woman, she was wanted in connection with the violent deaths of Mel Wilson, Tom Anders, Jeff Winters, and if Max had talked, perhaps even a truck driver named Ernie. As a young man, she was very soon to be involved in a discussion with the forces of law and order concerning the circumstances of Edgar Marvel's unusually rapid descent from the top floor of the Willowy Heights Hotel. All in all, it was an exceedingly appropriate time for a rapid change of scene.
She was halfway down the hall before she remembered that she was still naked. The girl paused, badly frightened, hearing the voices of excited people as a crowd raced up the staircase, realizing that her escape route was cut off.
Returning to the room was impossible, or at least inadvisable. Making a quick decision, she dodged into a linen closet and cowered in the darkness as policemen and hotel attendents roared past into her room.
For a long time, she waited, making herself comfortable on a stack of bath towels, trying to make some sense out of the fragments of conversation she heard going by the door to her hiding place. Finally she recognized the voice of the house detective, talking very respectfully to someone who seemed to be in charge.
"Looks like murder, Sir."
"All right, let's get this straight. Who is this Mark guy anyway?"
"It was an oriental kid Mr. Marvel hired," explained the house dick. "Just about as queer as Marvel was if you ask me."
"Coupla queers, eh? Looks like they had a little argument to me ... " The voices drifted away from the door and then back again.
"... motive we can worry about later! Meanwhile we'll get an arrest warrant out for this Mark character. My boys will be watching all the exits if he tries to get away, and the charge is murder!"
Mandy waited. The police photographers and crime lab people came and went. People stood outside the linen closet and discussed Marvel's merits and demerits by the hour. Mandy changed position as silently as she could, wondering if it would be simpler merely to give herself up. Escape was obviously hopeless. She was reduced to the same state she had been in the night she fled from Mr. Wilson's diner, naked and penniless.
Trying not to make the slightest noise, the fugitive felt around her in the darkness searching for something she could use to cover her body. There were certain to be photographers and she did not feel much like being photographed in the nude as the policeman led her away. Her hand fell on a stack of silk sheets used whenever dignitaries checked into the hotel, and she wrapped one of them around her voluptuous young body, fashioning it into a kind of sarong.
The light in the hallway nearly blinded her as she emerged from the closet, but as it happened, there was no one in sight, although voices from her room warned her that she dared not go back for clothing or money. Feeling trapped and despondent, Mandy wandered to the elevator and got into the cage, carelessly punching the button for the gound floor, deciding to try to get out the same door she had come in several days before. If they caught her, then they caught her, she reasoned. What else could she do!
There was a mirror in the elevator and as she sank towards the ground, Mandy surrendered to her feminine instinct and took the trouble to adjust the silk sheet more carefully around the hills and valleys of her splendidly-formed young body. Twisting one corner of this improvised garment, she tied it carefully around her shoulder, and then spread it over her two ripely mature breasts before wrapping the enticingly soft material around her waist. By the time the elevator doors popped open at the ground floor just opposite the entrance to the ballroom, she had contrived a fairly' respectable sarong, even though the girl realized that an observer standing to her right or left would be able to see generous portions of her lust-inciting bosom, not to mention all of her right leg and most of her hip which the sheet stubbornly refused to cover.
She emerged from the elevator, expecting to be jumped upon immediately by a squad of state troopers, but the police were congregated around the door, watching for a homosexual oriental boy named Mark, not a gorgeous Asian woman wearing an extraordinarily daring sarong. Not feeling quite confident enough to walk by the police just yet, Mandy turned and strolled deliberately into the ballroom where the Sons (and Daughters) of the Pioneers were having their annual bash. If she stayed in the shadows and attracted no attention to herself, perhaps she could get something to eat at the buffet and maybe even pick up a purse with some money in it. Robbery was a terrible thing, but a girl wanted in connection with five murders could not afford to be moralistic . . .
"Hey, beautiful, where have you been all my life?" Mandy looked up into the shining handsome face of Dexter Fenlon-Smith, splendidly masculine-looking in his tuxedo with the self-confidence which comes from having a million dollars invested in tax-free municipal bonds, a Master's degree in business administration from Yale and a family tree which included two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Dexter wrapped one muscular arm around Mandy's supple waist and whirled her out onto the dance floor. Women did not customarily say no to Dexter Fenlon-Smith, and Mandy sensed that it would be wise to go where destiny was leading her. At the orphanage, she and the other girls had spent thousands of hours dancing with one another, preparing themselves to be ready for the moment when the handsome young millionaire of their dreams swept them out onto the dance floor.
Mandy was ready.
"Hey, what's your name, baby? You do speak English, don't you?" inquired Dexter Fenlon-Smith, wondering how this delightfully sensuous creature could conceivably have escaped his notice before. Dexter, by his own private count, had slept with six hundred and forty-seven girls, but all of them looked like tired old hags in comparison with the lush oriental beauty he now held in his arms.
"My name is Mandi," said Mandy, slightly altering the pronunciation of her name to give it a more exotic sound.
"Hey really? And what's your last name?" asked Dexter, now really intrigued.
"Oh, my last name is too hard for Americans to pronounce," the tan-skinned Asian girl laughed condescendingly, having been unable to come up with a suitable last name with so little advance warning. "I am the daughter of the Mahatma of Upper Bengal and you should have seen what the newspapers did to our last name. Of course, English does not have all the letters you need to write Bengali words."
"Golly! Where are you from, Mandi?"
"From Bangladesh," the girl answered simply, noticing that virtually everyone in the ballroom was watching them. For a moment she feared that her sheet had come undone and some important portion of her person was being revealed, but then she realized that it was merely the strangeness of her costume and the fact that she was dancing cheek-to-cheek with San Francisco's most eligible young bachelor. She could not explain to herself what had made her decide to pretend she was from Bangladesh, but now that she was into her act, it struck her as an enormously good idea. Having digested a fifteen page article on the country in Volume Three of the Universal Encyclopedia, she undoubtedly knew more about the Bengali people than anyone in the room. As she and Dexter swept around the floor, she allowed him to draw out of her the information that she was visiting the United States on a fund-raising trip with her father, and had stayed behind in San Francisco while her daddy had gone to Washington to confer with the Secretary of State concerning a billion dollar loan to alleviate starvation in Bangladesh. Dexter pulled her even closer, his slowly hardening cock rubbing against the flatness of her stomach.
"Hey, Mandi," he whispered. "Terrific, I mean really terrific dress you're wearing. Is that how the women dress in Bangladesh."
"Some of the women," the girl replied cautiously. "You see, my father and I -are members of the Marthusi sect, and this is the costume we wear in the presence of non-believers."
"Really, hey, forgive me for saying this, but from where I'm standing, I'd be prepared to swear you didn't have a stitch on underneath it."
"Of course not!" Mandy said primly, trying to work a little indignation into her voice. "We believe that all material possessions, even clothing, take us farther away from the pure heavenly spirit. In our own village, we do not wear clothing, but with non-believers, naturally, it is necessary to wear something, so we wear this. But underwear is the work of the Murtrap, which is Bengali for devil."
"Gee, I couldn't agree more," nodded Dexter enthusiastically. "I've always been against underwear!"
People began cutting in on Dexter Fenlon-Smith, but Mandy had already decided that he could be the bachelor millionaire they had told her about at the orphanage, the one she ought to be looking for, so even when she was dancing with one of Dexter's friends, she kept waving and winking at him. It was fun making up all of these stories about Bangladesh, and Mandy's imagination was so strong that she fell naturally into the role of a Bangladesh princess, inventing one incredible fable after another. It was difficult at the moment to see where all of this was going to lead her, but Dexter and the other Sons of the Pioneers seemed to accept every word as the gospel truth. By two a.m., when the ball was beginning to peter out, she had turned down a score of other invitations, having accepted Dexter's impassioned plea to return to the Fenlon-Smith mansion with him and a few intimate friends for a drink. The police at the door of the Willowy Heights Hotel hardly looked at the group of laughing socialites as they staggered out of the ballroom, through the lobby and into the street where Dexter's chauffeur-driven car awaited them.
Mandy stood for a moment on the street, breathing deeply with relief and offering a silent prayer of thanks for having escaped the police dragnet once again. Then she got into the limousine next to Dexter Fenlon-Smith and his friends, and the chauffeur drove them silently off into the night.