Vickie was out on the street by that time. Something in her mind told her that Maggot was at the Hotel Carlton but she didn't know how she knew. Must have been an extra-good pill. The secret of all knowledge. Better living through chemistry.
Wobbly but decisive, she headed downtown, where she knew the Carlton was located.
Back at the studio, Big Bang reentered his dressing room and picked up the telephone. He gave the switchboard operator a number to dial and when it rang and was answered, he said: "This is the Banger. Let me talk to Maggot."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Calvin Cadwallader put the telephone down with a feeling of annoyance pervading his being, yeah, his inner being, right down to his innermost soul. That made him feel delighted. He promised himself that he would describe in great, glowing detail to his shrink the anger and annoyance he had felt, the curious theory being that after being annoyed, if one talked it out, the annoyance could be found not really to have existed.
But for now, there was annoyance. "If you see a red-haired groupie named Vickie Stoner, pick her up. It's important."
Things like that might be important to Big Bang Benton but Calvin Cadwallader knew better.
He touched his fingers to the sleeves of his brocade dressing gown, then ran his fingers lovingly through his freshly-curled blond hair, wiped them again on his sleeves and returned to the dining room of his eight room suite. The Watt Street Journal was open to the stock prices and Calvin Cadwallader, before he was interrupted, had been checking to see how he was doing.
He was doing very well indeed. That was one aspect in favor of being Maggot. But on the other hand, there were the headaches and the pressures and the feeling of lost identity. That was also because of being Maggot.
The psychiatrist had told him this was normal with someone who was leading two lives, and Calvin Cadwallader believed him because he was the only person in the whole world who loved Calvin Cadwallader for himself, and not just because seven nights a week and some days, Calvin Cadwallader donned terrible clothes and hideous makeup and festooned himself like a butcher shop to appear in public as Maggot, the leader of the Dead Meat Lice.
Maggot put on his white cotton gloves and then began again to run his finger down the columns of stock closing prices. Every so often, he would jot a number down on a light green ledger pad next to him, and then go into a flurry of high-speed calculations, the subject which he had been trained to excel in when he had gone to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That was also where he had first picked up a guitar and forced himself to learn to play it, hoping it would help him overcome the crushing shyness which had been his ever since he had first realized that his globe-trotting parents hated him and wished him dead.
Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice started as a joke, a parody, a one-song routine in an RPI variety show. But someone in the audience knew someone who knew someone else and before you could say "shattered eardrum," Maggot and the Dead Meat Lice had signed a recording contract.
Fame, fortune and schizophrenia followed. Now Calvin Cadwallader considered both Calvin Cadwallader and Maggot as two separate and distinct persons. He vastly preferred Calvin Cadwallader. Still at times, Maggot was nice to have around because his music had made him very wealthy and he didn't care what Calvin Cadwallader did with the money.
Cadwallader had invested it wisely and well, specializing in oil and mineral stocks, but specifically excluding the string of companies owned wholly or in part by his father. He hoped they all went under, and even though it would have cost him hundreds of thousands, he wrote frequent letters to Congress, urging the elimination of the oil-depletion allowance on which his father's fortune had been built.
Morning computations done, Maggot rose from the table and went to a small bar-type refrigerator in a corner of the room. He extracted six bottles of pills, opened them, and began to count them out on a clean saucer he took from a closet.
Six vitamin Es, eight Cs, two multi-vitamins, four capsules of B-12, an assortment of tablets of wheat germ and rose hips, and high protein pills.
He capped the bottles tightly and replaced them in the refrigerator. Then he peeled off his gloves, so he wouldn't get lint on any of the tablets and began to pop them down, one after another, without water, the ultimate mark of skill for a pill popper.
He was five-feet-eleven, weighed 155, and he credited his pills with giving him a resting pulse rate of fifty-eight. He neither smoked nor drank; he had never used a drug; and he went to the Episcopal Church every Sunday, a feat made simpler by the fact that without his Maggot makeup and fright wig, and without lamb chops hanging from his chest, no one was likely to recognize this tall thin WASP as the singer that Time magazine had labeled "a cesspool of decadence."
Maggot walked toward the front of the suite, where the three Dead Meat Lice shared rooms and were probably playing cards, when the door bell rang once, timidly.
He looked around for a servant, saw none, and because he could not stand ringing doorbells or telephones, he picked up his white gloves, put them back on and opened the door.
A lissome, red-haired girl stood there. She looked at him dreamily and spoke softly.
"You're Maggot, aren't you?"
"Yes, but don't touch," said Cadwallader, who believed in the truth above all.
"I don't want to touch," said Vickie Stoner. "Let's ball," she said, and fell, slumping onto the floor. Cadwallader who barely had a chance to recoil and get out of her way lest her falling body touch him, began to shout for the Lice to come and take care of her.
"Help. Strange woman. Help. Come quick." Maggot yelled the same words again, then turned and ran to the refrigerator to get calcium tablets, which he had been assured would be good for his nerves.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The land rover had been driven through the night, all the gas in the spare ten-gallon drum in the back had been used, and now when the vehicle crested a hill and the morning sun knifed into the eyes of the driver, he realized how tired he was.
Gunner Nilsson pulled off to the side of the narrow, rock-strewn dirt road. He hopped from the open rover and went to a nearby tree, where, using a handkerchief, he wiped morning dew from its low hanging leaves, and carefully washed his face and eyes. The cool feeling lasted only a few seconds before the handkerchief turned damp and hot and sweaty, but Nilsson redoused it again and washed his face again and then felt better.
It had taken a while for Lhasa to interest him in the project, but now Gunner Nilsson was fully committed to carrying out the million-dollar contract on the girl. A million dollars. It could build him a real hospital. It could buy him real medical supplies and surgical equipment, instead of the leftovers he now used. The million dollars could put meaning into his life and he was at the age when meaning was all that was left to his life.
He and Lhasa were the last of the Nilssons. There would be no more. No one to carry on the family name, or its sour tradition, but what better way for it to end than in a final act of assassination that would be a tribute to life, to humanity, to healing?
The end justified the means, at least in this case, just as the end had justified the means twelve years before, when he had operated on Lhasa for appendicitis and while the younger brother was out, had performed on him a vasectomy that would guarantee the extinction of the Nilsson killers.
As eldest, Gunner had been the keeper of the tradition, and he had determined that the tradition was not worth keeping. Except for this one contract. For all the good it could do.
Gunner Nilsson clambered back into the rover, no longer afraid of falling asleep at the wheel, and drove the steep three miles down the mountainside to the small waterfront village which had most of the necessities of life, including a telephone in the home of a British field officer.