"Well, that's one of the odd things. No one knows."
"What do you mean, no one knows?"
"I got on the phone to Mrs. Gregorian when I couldn't stand it anymore-you know, the nagging feeling that I knew the man-and she didn't even know anyone had moved in. There was no moving van. She told me that she could see their living room from her upstairs bedroom and there was practically no furniture."
"Maude!" Smith said reprovingly. "Snooping."
"I didn't snoop. It was Mrs. Gregorian. I just listened."
"To gossip," Smith said, but his lips thinned. Anything out of the ordinary was something that he, in his sensitive position, had to look into.
Probably the new neighbor was an ordinary person. But Smith knew that if there was a place he, as director of CURE, was vulnerable, it was not in his well-protected Folcroft office, it was in his modest Rye, New York, home.
And if there was a threat about to materialize against him, he must be prepared to move ruthlessly to eliminate everyone involved in it.
"Excuse me, please. There are some phone calls I must make," he said, dabbing his chin with a linen napkin.
"But you haven't finished your roast beef."
Smith looked at his plate. Two slices remained. He quickly wolfed them down, and drained the last of his ice water.
"Good," said Mrs. Smith, happy that her Harold had cleaned his plate. He always cleaned his plate. It was nice that tonight was no exception. She had worried that the roast beef was undercooked. She knew her Harold hated it rare. He so detested blood.
Chapter 6
If the truth were to be known, Shane Billiken would have been perfectly content to chuck it all. The filthy-rich dowager clients. The best-seller book contracts. And the radio and TV talk-show appearances.
He was, as he saw it, an artist. But the world had kept slapping him down, and exploiting its wealthier inhabitants' world was his way of making up for past disappointments.
He meditated on it again after he hustled the girl he had dubbed Princess Sinanchu into his waiting limousine. He ordered the driver to take them to Newark International Airport, where his chartered Learfan jet awaited. With any luck, they'd be in the air before the police got organized.
After that, Shane Billiken had no idea what he was going to do. True, he told himself, he was not culpable for what had happened on The Horton Droney III Show. The whole nation could attest to that. But the police were likely to arrest Princess Sinanchu-or whatever her actual name was-and Shane Billiken wasn't about to let his meal ticket languish in jail.
Better to make a break for the Coast, where celebrity misadventures were swept under the rug every week. Let the lawyers handle it. New York was just too damn unevolved.
The Learfan was in the air less than thirty minutes after they had bolted from the Manhattan studio. Shane Billiken breathed a sigh of relief. Princess Sinanchu sat in the rear of the plane, her tawny face angry, her eyes blazing like dark jewels as they stared out into the night sky.
No, this was not what Shane Billiken had wanted to do with his life. There was another way, a better way. And if only his life had gone in that direction, he'd be happier, and probably still have the same Malibu beachfront home, fat bank account, and a hell of a lot younger groupies than he had now.
If only Roy the Boy would just lie down and die.
As Shane Billiken saw it, only a rock-and-roll dinosaur stood between him and a full calendar of yearly concert bookings.
Long before Shane Billiken knew a tarot deck from macrobiotic onion, he had been lead singer in a band called the Rockabilly Rockets. They had a meteoric career at the beginning of 1963. They crashed to earth like a bollid.
The Rockabilly Rockets had everything going for them. A sound, described by Variety as doo-wop folk, trademark three-cornered hats, a hit single, and a record contract with a major label.
Then the Beatles hit New York and the Rockabilly Rockets' debut album, The Rockabilly Rockets Live at the Hootenanny, made recording history. It shipped tin. It went directly from the pressing room to the cut-out bins.
"What happened?" Shane Billiken had demanded of his personal manager. He kneaded his Paul Revere hat in nervous fingers.
"Look at it this way, Shane, baby, you made music history. Nobody's ever shipped tin before."
"You swore we'd go platinum overnight. I'd settle for gold. But tin!"
"Don't blame me, blame those shaggy-headed Brit pansies."
And Shane Billiken did. He held a bitter news conference, fired his band, and spent the early sixties bouncing around in restaurant dishwasher jobs. He was a poet with a broken heart.
It was in 1968 that Shane noticed the world was changing. The Beatles had gone psychedelic. Everyone was into astrology. And Zen. And higher consciousness. Especially the groupies. It was the Age of Aquarius.
Shane Billiken bought a stack of used books on mysticism at a head shop and decided that maybe he'd get in on the action. He worked carnivals and private parties in the beginning. It was a good life, and gradually he forgot his bitterness. Even the slump in the late seventies, when everyone suddenly decided the sixties were passe, was not so tough. Shane had put a lot of his money into stocks. He did well.
Then came the eighties. Suddenly the fifties and sixties were hot again. Old rockers were crawling out of the woodwork, working the nostalgia circuit. And Shane Billiken, energized from attending a Righteous Brothers reunion concert, returned to his Southern California home and dug out his old Ovation guitar.
Standing in front of the mirror, his ax hanging off one shoulder, and strumming an old I-VI-IV-V-I chord progression, he noticed that his pushing-fifty face had gotten puffy. He put on a pair of wraparound sunglasses to see if it would take the curse off him, and lo and behold, he made a wonderful discovery.
He looked almost exactly like the great Roy Orbison. Especially when he combed his hair into a kind of Julius Caesar pageboy-bang effect.
Shane experimented with a few bars of "Only the Lonely," and inspiration hit him. The woods were full of Elvis Presley impersonators living off the bones of the King. Hell, almost every overweight singer who could curl his lip was cashing in. Why not Shane Billiken?
He convinced the owner of an Agoura discotheque to book him for a weekend as Roy Orbit Sun. Both nights sold out in advance, and Shane Billiken knew he had found his way at last.
The night of his first set, he waited for the warm-up act to finish. He was sweating so had, even his Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses were beading up.
"Relax," said the club manager. "You're gonna be dynamite. You sound just like the guy."
"I haven't done this in a few years. Are my shades on straight?"
"You'll do fine. In fact, there are a couple of suits in the front row. Look like talent scouts to me. What are you gonna open with?"
" 'Running Scared,' " said Shane Billiken, his teeth chattering.
"Good choice," said the manager. "Fitting."
"Then I'm gonna seque into 'Blue Angel,' shift up to 'Ooby Dooby,' and then do 'Oh, Pretty Woman.' "
"If you hit, I'm gonna want you to play every weekend for the next three months."
"If I hit, you'll have to talk to my agent about that."
"You told me you didn't have an agent."
"If I hit, I'm getting one."
"Don't get too big for your britches, pal. Try not to forget I'm the guy who's giving you your big break." Shane Billiken was about to say something when the MC announced the world premiere of the hottest performer since the fifties, Roy Orbit Sun, and Shane Billiken clumped out on the stage.