A chill ran through Hazel. That would be the end of Floyd’s career, no matter what he chose to do. While Hazel couldn’t care less who Floyd loved, as long as he was happy, no one in the industry would hire someone who’d been exposed as a homosexual. He’d be shunned, even worse than Hazel was. That the FBI would stoop to this level infuriated Hazel.
“That’s not acceptable,” she said. “We will not be railroaded. I’ve got your back, Floyd, and don’t you forget it.” Floyd wavered a tiny bit from side to side. Hazel glanced at the vodka bottle, which was two-thirds empty. Tonight was probably not the best time to figure out his plan B. “Look, you get a good night’s sleep and I’ll come by tomorrow and take you out for breakfast. In the light of day, it won’t seem so bad. We’ll find you a decent job, I promise.”
His eyelids drooped and stayed closed. She rose and gently extricated the glass from his hand, placing it on the bar next to hers. “For now, lie down and get some rest.”
“Thanks, Hazel.” He was awake again, his blue eyes shining. “Thank you for coming to the rescue.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been away for so long. I know how lonely it can be when you feel like you’ve been abandoned.”
“We’ve all been abandoned. I hear Maxine’s star is ascending rapidly, just as ours is falling.” He began to cry. “They say she talked. She told them whatever they wanted to hear. How could she have done that?”
She didn’t want to discuss Maxine. “We have each other.” Hazel leaned over Floyd and gave him an awkward hug. “Enough being maudlin. One day I’ll write a zany comedy about this year and you’ll do the costumes and everyone will love us once again.”
“We’ll do that, Hazel.”
When she left, she closed the room door behind her, quietly, in case Floyd had already fallen asleep.
Not for the first time, she wished she had Maxine—the old Maxine—by her side. She would have cajoled Floyd out of his funk, got him back on his feet. With her film earnings, she also would’ve been able to help out financially. But neither Hazel nor Floyd would ever touch a penny, knowing that her riches came right out of their own pockets. She got to work precisely because she’d thrown them and others like them to the wolves.
The elevator opened but Hazel hesitated. The elderly couple inside glared at her.
“Sorry, I forgot something,” she called out as the doors slid shut.
She hurried back down the hall. It didn’t feel right, leaving Floyd so fast; he shouldn’t be alone.
She pushed open the door, quietly, and saw the curtains flapping in the breeze. She walked in intending to close the window so he wouldn’t wake up in the morning with a cold, but stopped short.
The bed was empty, the door to the bathroom shut. She stood next to the door, listening for sounds of water running, of movement. Nothing.
“Floyd?” She knocked gently. “I came back. I wanted to make sure you’re really all right.”
Nothing.
She opened the door a crack, embarrassed to be doing so. Then farther. The bathroom was empty.
She glanced around the small room as her throat closed with panic. The closet door was ajar, he couldn’t be hiding in there. The bedclothes were rumpled. As she leaned over to check under the bed, because that’s the only other place he could possibly be, someone outside screamed.
Hazel straightened. The window was fully open. She hadn’t noticed it when she first came in the room, that it wasn’t just cracked like before. It was wide open. Wide enough for someone to put one leg over, then the other.
She rushed to it, horrified and certain she was wrong. Floyd had decided to go down to the bar. He’d taken the stairs and that’s why she couldn’t find him. That’s why he wasn’t here.
More screams.
She made herself look down, where his crumpled form lay ten stories below. He’d landed on his side, and lay there like he’d just fallen asleep, hands tucked under his cheek, the only sign of violence the red blood pooling around him.
ACT THREE
The ghosts of the Chelsea Hotel draw closer, eager to greet their latest member the moment the soul leaves the flesh. Over the years, the dust of the hotel’s many occupants has spread thinly over the walls, the floors, the mantels, and the hallways, though only a small number remain in spirit. The handrail on the stairs holds the residue of actors and poets, singers and dancers, passed from guest to guest. Great successes and bitter failures, or bitter successes and great failures? No matter.
The dust lingers in the air, and when the woman breathes it in, her lungs fill with the heady hope of the innocent. Breathe again and it’s the desolation of the lost. Close now, but she keeps breathing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Hazel
March 1967
The cloying scent of marijuana wafted across the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel as Hazel returned from her morning walk, the obvious culprits yet another group of long-haired musicians, judging from the mix of duffel bags and instrument cases scattered about. They looked like they’d been waiting for their rooms for a while, and had dug in for the long haul. One man was fast asleep on a low banquette, another slung a jean-clad leg over the arm of a chunky Victorian chair and strummed a guitar.
In the past several years, the hotel had attracted a different sort of artist than had come before: Beat poets and beaten ladies of the night, rumpled folk singers and vacant-looking pop artists. They scurried down the halls and stumbled down the stairway, making the place feel overwhelmed, congested, and unseemly. Even the walls of the lobby were chaotic, filled with a riot of paintings whose tight arrangement—less than an inch between frames in some cases—rendered any serious appraisal of the works impossible.
Hazel stepped over a guitar case and breezed forward, not wanting to appear like some fussy old lady—after all, she was only forty-seven—who remembered with great nostalgia the days when the Chelsea Hotel was, if not elegant, at least respectable. The place had acquired a dirty mystique in the past seventeen years.
The communists on the first floor had been usurped by languid, underdressed prostitutes and their pimps, but none of this seemed to bother the permanent residents, who had gotten used to the parade of new bohemians who made the hotel their home for days or years at a time, the hippies, the groupies, the international artists and novelists who came and went.
She’d just completed her daily, brisk walk up to Central Park and back down along Seventh Avenue, although she always crossed to the west side at Fifty-First Street, not wanting to pass the spot where Floyd’s broken body had landed.
Floyd’s funeral had fallen on the same day that Charlie had asked Hazel to meet him at the library. Hazel had decided it was a sign that she be done with all that, done with the fierce pain of fighting against a machine that was so much bigger than she was. Floyd’s death had closed her down, she had nothing left. On her way to the service that morning, she’d dropped off a letter with the information clerk at the library and asked her to give it to Charlie when he appeared. She told her to look for a dark-haired man with a dimpled chin who would show up around noon. She’d written him that she’d moved on, found someone new, and it was best they not see each other again. It was the only way she knew that she could force him out of her life completely.
“Hazel, Stanley wants to see you,” said the Chelsea’s day clerk.
When David Bard passed away three years earlier, his son Stanley took over his duties with the incompetent enthusiasm of a golden retriever. Not that David had been the most efficient hotel manager, but where the maids tended to blandly disregard David’s directives, they openly mocked Stanley, who often laughed along with them, as if he were in on the joke.