Chapter XIV (2)

    "Promoting me?" Cooper laughed hysterically. "You're an expert, aren't you? You've promoted yourself to hell."
    "Maybe I have, but I'm not quitting on the way down. Don't you quit on the way up." Lennox glared at him. "For Christ's sake, Sam! Do I have to fight for both of us? Don't you have any strength of your own?"
    Cooper started to his feet in horror.
    "Get that coat off." Lennox jerked the coat off, spun Cooper around and put him into the red and white blazer. He cocked the straw hat on his head, tapped it into a rakish tilt and shoved him out of the dressing room. Cooper trudged to the stairs like a sleepwalker. The stage manager below beckoned frantically and he increased his pace going down the stairs.
    Lennox nodded and picked Cooper's jacket up to hang it away. Three slips of paper had fallen out of the pocket in the tussle. He was about to return them; then he stopped short as his eye caught the familiar hysterical writing. He smoothed the slips out and examined them fearfully. His heart began to pound. There were fragments, phrases, names, numbers; all scrawled in that sick hand: SUIDI ... $$$ ... MOST ... MERRY XMAS ... AMPMAMPM ... ROX ... §§§3 ... ¶7 ... MY HEART & ... BLOOD. SWEAT. TEARS ... WHO WHO WHO WHO HE?
    Lennox went black with rage. He placed the slips in his pocket and burst out of the dressing room. Down on the main floor he left the stage, leaped down the short flight of steps to the empty green room and called Sergeant Fink on the pay phone.
    "Bob? Jake Lennox."
    "Yeah. Hello. We'll be over in time for the program."
    "Get over now. I've found out who's writing the letters."
    "You don't say?"
    "I do say. And I've got proof."
    Lennox hung up. He glanced at the green room monitor. Cooper and one of the dancers had started their duet. Lennox turned up the speaker volume and watched, his face drawn and savage. The spot started badly. Cooper and the dancer missed their cue, the orchestra had to wait for them, they came in off beat. Their singing was inaudible and ragged. Cooper moved like a St. Vitus dancer. Even on the monitor his shaking was obvious.
    "Varsity show talent," Lennox snarled.
    After two agonizing minutes, the voice of Avery Borden cut through the orchestra and singing with the clarity of exasperation: "No! No! No! This is impossible."
    Cooper and the dancer stopped and peered out into the theater.
    "Get them out of here!" Borden shouted. "What is this? Amateur Night?"
    "So they stink," Grabinett's voice came faintly from another part of the theater. "What can we do? We got three Almighty minutes to fill."
    "I'd rather fill three minutes with dead air than that no-talent. Sweep 'em off the stage."
    "This is a dress rehearsal!" Sachs roared on the P.A.
    "This is a goddam trappisty!" Grabinett answered.
    The dancer began to weep. Cooper left her and staggered off camera. Lennox ran up the steps from the green room to the stage and met him as he came into the wings. There was a confused uproar in the theater punctuated by Raeburn Sachs' repeated commands to the staff to stop their clocks. Lennox took Cooper by the scruff of the neck and dragged him back to the green room. He flung him into a chair and stood over him. Cooper shook and gasped for air.
    "You son of a bitch!" Lennox shouted.
    "Stand by me, Jake. I'm in a bad way."
    "You're going to be in a worse way, you bastard."
    "Please, Jake...."
    Lennox pulled the telephone slips out of his pocket and shook them in Cooper's face. "Look at these. Look at them, you filthy Judas."
    "Jake ... I need a drink. I'm in a bad way."
    Cooper tried to get out of the chair. Lennox backhanded him across the jaw. Then, in his fury, he yanked him up and cuffed his face. When he let him go, Cooper collapsed.
    "So it was you writing them," Lennox shouted. "What's inside you? What in God's name did you have against me? Why couldn't you come out into the open instead of sticking a knife in my back and twisting it?"
    "The ... letters?"
    "Yes, the letters. The threats. The filth." Lennox thrust the slips before Cooper's face again. "I found these in your pocket. It's the same writing. Your disguised hand, yes? What are they, practice sheets?"
    "No," Cooper said faintly. "I ... Jake, I've got to tell you. You're writing them. You're writing those letters yourself. Not me. You."
    Lennox burst out laughing.
    "It's true, Jake. Those times when you get drunk and black out.... That's when you write yourself those letters. So help me, Jake. I've been trying to keep it from you, but—"
    "I thought we were friends," Lennox broke in fiercely. "I thought we were working together ... standing by each other ... backing each other up. I thought we were two sane men bucking the rat-race and beating them at their own game. I believed in us. I'd have killed myself to keep it from being destroyed. I should have killed you before you destroyed it. You're not sane. You're like all the rest of them ... sick, vicious, living on hate and poison."
    "For God's sake, Jake! Will you listen to me?" Cooper struggled up out of the chair and put his arm around Jake's shoulders. "You're the sick one. You're the one who's destroying everything. You—"
    Lennox twisted away from Cooper and looked at him with hatred. "You can think of more vicious ways to knife a man in the back than a fag. Why didn't you dress under the stage with the other queens? That's where you belong!"
    "Mr. Lennox," the doorman called in his deaf voice. "Man here for you. Mr. Fink or such."
    "Be right out," Lennox answered. He showed his teeth to Cooper. "Wait here. I've got a surprise for you."
    He ran out to the stagedoor foyer. Fink was standing there with his swarthy colleague, Salerno.
    "He's in the green room," Lennox said. "This way."
    "Just a minute," Fink smiled. "Who's in this green room?"
    "Guy who was writing the letters. You were right, Bob. It was Cooper. Sam Cooper who lives with me. Look at this." Lennox waved the telephone slips. "I found them in his pocket. It's the same writing. You see? You see, Mr. Salerno? Come on."
    "Oh Jesus," Salerno grunted.
    "Come out to the car a minute," Fink said.
    "What for?"
    "To talk."
    "What about?"
    "Tell you when we get there. Come on."
    "What the hell is this?" Lennox looked from Fink to Salerno. "I tell you who's writing the letters and you want to talk. Go talk to him."
    Salerno slipped behind Lennox and caught his arm in a paralyzing grasp. "Come on out to the car," he said softly.
    "I will like hell come out to the car. What's the matter with you two?"
    "You want it tough?" Fink asked.
    Lennox was bewildered. In the background, the orchestra echoed brilliantly.
    "Tell him," Salerno said.
    "Now don't blow your top." Fink smiled. "We want to drive you down to City Hospital for a check-up."
    "Me? City Hospital?"
    "Just for a couple of days. Won't cost you a cent."
    "What are you talking about?"
    "Come on, Lennox. Don't make it tough."
    "I asked you what the hell you're talking about. City Hospital! Is this your idea of a funny?"
    "Tell him," Salerno repeated.
    "We know you're writing these letters," Fink said.
    "You know I'm writing—" Lennox was staggered. "You know I'm writing the letters? To myself?"
    Fink nodded.
    "You always smile at the wrong time," Lennox said slowly. "This is a joke-type joke at the wrong time. Yes?"
    "We'll talk it over down at the hospital."
    "What makes you think I'm writing the letters?"
    "Tell him," Salerno said impatiently. "Maybe he'll listen to reason."
    "Will you behave yourself if I show you?" Fink asked.
    Lennox nodded. There was a last fanfare off and then dead silence as the dress ended. Fink took a manila envelope out of his pocket and produced the poison pen letters. He unfolded one and pointed to the hysterical scrawl.
    "See? Five words to a line. In every letter. Five words to a line, no more, no less. That's an old telegrapher's habit, from counting ten word messages. We checked this program. You're the only ex-telegrapher working it. You're a professional telegrapher from twenty years back, when you were a kid in this town on Long Island."
    "Islip," Lennox croaked. "Yes."
    "And we found your prints in the envelopes."
    "I handled the envelopes," Lennox said desperately. "When Grabinett showed me the letters."
    "I didn't say on the envelopes. I said in the envelopes. We found your prints inside, under the flap, but the envelopes were slit open at the end. The only one who could leave prints inside there is the one that put the letter in the envelope and sealed it. Now come on, Lennox. Don't make it tough."
    "For God's sake, Bob! How could I write them and not know about it? I was scared. I was out of my mind trying to find who it was. How could it be me?"
    "They'll tell you down at the hospital. Come on."
    "The lunatic ward?"
    "Don't get jumpy. You won't be in a strait jacket."
    "Yeah," Salerno said. "Nice down there. Pretty nurses."
    "But—"
    "Come on," Fink said, and for the first time a terrifying hardness manifested itself under the surface of his mildness.
    Lennox whirled and wrenched himself out of Salerno's grasp. He didn't so much hit him as catapult him back into Fink with a bull thrust. He ran through the arch into the orchestra, whipping the heavy curtain across the arch behind him for cover. He squirmed through an empty row of seats to the center aisle and yelled: "Gabby!"
    She turned. Everybody turned and stared through the gloom.
    "Out!" Lennox roared. "Out!"
    Behind him, Fink called sharply: "Lennox! You'll be sorry!"
    Lennox sprinted up the center aisle, knocking aside the vague figures that blundered into his path. He cut around the glass corner of the control booth and headed for the bronze doors that led out to the theater lobby. At that moment, the doors opened and the studio audience poured into the theater in a solid mass, fighting and elbowing for the best seats.
    Lennox was slammed back against the control booth. He lowered his head and tried to charge through that unyielding wave. He could hear Fink and Salerno struggling near him and shouting orders to the network pages, the house manager, the theater fireman. Lennox was carried back again and shunted to the right where the broad stairs led up to the balcony. He started up the stairs. The fireman appeared above him and came down after him. Lennox turned and ran around the foot of the stairs to the right aisle, searching for fire exits.
    He went down the steep slope of the aisle toward the stage. There were no exits he could reach through the crowd. Fink and Salerno were calling to each other. The studio audience was in an uproar. Lennox leaped up on the orchestra platform at the foot of the aisle, battered his way through musicians, stands and chairs, and vaulted onto the stage. Gabby began screaming.
    Lennox started across the stage to the right wings. He tripped on the No. 3 Camera cables, fell, rolled over and was on his feet again. Salerno appeared in the right wings. Lennox stopped short and turned downstage. Fink was coming at him up the No. 2 Camera dolly-track. Lennox turned to the left wings. The fireman was advancing on him from that side. He backed up, panting, trapped. As Fink came onto the stage, the curtains swept in from either side, narrowly missing him.
    Lennox looked around wildly, searching the stage for a loop-hole ... left, right, back, up. Suddenly he was transfixed. Still staring up into the flies, he screamed: "Sam! Sam!"
    Every eye on the stage looked up. Fifty feet overhead, a figure in a red and white blazer balanced precariously on the criss-cross bars of the iron grid. Cooper teetered and sat down on a bar, his feet dangling through the opening of the three foot square. Then he thrust himself off and came plummeting down, feet first, arms outstretched. There was a sharp crack and his body was jerked up in mid-flight. His shoes flew off and clattered down. The arms flailed, the body shuddered once as though the bones were trying to burst out of the skin; and then it was still, swinging gently, the feet just a yard above the edge of the teaser that masked the top of the stage from the audience.
    Lennox sank to his knees and began to sob. The appalled silence was jarred by a fanfare from the orchestra on the other side of the curtain. Oliver Stacy, in dinner jacket, paused long enough to vomit in the wings, then slipped through the curtain, white-faced and smiling. There was a burst of applause. His voice rang out in cheerful greeting, and the warm-up for the New Year's Day "Who He?" show began.