The High Notes: A Novel(35)
The maids were gathering in the hallway by then. They had heard her scream and called security immediately. The two suites had gone silent again, and security was there in less than three minutes, unlocked the outer doors to the suites and saw the carnage inside. The two security men each grabbed one of the stunned assailants. They hadn’t expected to get caught. That had never happened to them before. The hotel security guards handcuffed them, and called 911 for the police, and an ambulance for Boy, who was unconscious on the floor.
Iris was kneeling beside him, trying to wipe the blood from his face with a towel one of the maids had come in and handed her. Security had told her not to move him. His nose looked crushed, and the cut on his forehead was still gushing blood into his eyes. The two security men were holding their attackers pinned down in the hall, waiting for the police, and half a dozen more hotel security men had appeared, along with the head of security.
“Do you know the men who attacked you?” one of the security men asked Iris, and she shook her head, crying as she tended to Boy. She could hardly breathe. She was in pain. Her shoes had flown off her feet, and she had blood smeared all over her own body and Boy’s. They had cut her cheek when they slapped her, and blood oozed from her nose. “Did they try to rob you?” the head of security asked.
“No, I don’t think so. I heard noise so I came into the room. I thought it was the TV, but they were beating him up, and then one of them hit me and kicked me.” She wasn’t concerned about herself, only Boy.
The two men they were holding handcuffed for the police weren’t talking. They hadn’t expected it to end this way, with the hallway swarming with security. The police arrived in force a few minutes later, with the paramedics for Boy. They took his vital signs as he lay on the floor.
“Possible head injury,” one reported to the other, “get the spinal board. Broken nose.” He was trying to assess Boy where he lay, and a third paramedic wanted to check Iris out. The hotel security cleared the room, so they could examine her, and the police took the two thugs away. They were covered in Boy’s blood too. It was all over their hands. They looked dangerous even in handcuffs, with two officers with a firm grip on each of them.
As they put Boy on the spinal board, he stirred and groaned, opened his eyes for a minute, and they fluttered closed again. He had looked straight at Iris and asked if she was okay. When she said yes, he closed his eyes again and groaned in pain.
In a moment’s lull, Iris called Clay on the cellphone that was still in her pocket, even though she had flown all over the room when she was attacked.
“What?…What?…Iris…talk to me…” She was crying and what she said made no sense.
“Two men came into our suites at the hotel. They beat Boy up, and slapped me and kicked me too. The police are here. They’re taking Boy to the hospital. They want me to go too. I’ll go with him.”
“I’ll come as fast as I can.” He was in a meeting with one of his famous artists, planning his tour, excused himself, grabbed his jacket, and dashed out of the room. He called the head of security at the hotel, who said the police were taking them to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital by ambulance, and Clay said he’d meet them at the emergency room. He was already there when the ambulance arrived. Boy was conscious by then and he looked terrible, covered with blood. Iris looked dazed with blood all over her clothes and smeared on her face and around her nose.
Clay never left her for a minute, while they took Boy for a number of scans and an MRI to assess the damage. He didn’t have a head injury, but he had a broken nose, a fractured cheekbone, four cracked ribs, and trauma to a kidney, and needed stitches for the cut on his forehead. Clay called a plastic surgeon, who came immediately to perform surgery on his nose, and the cut on his forehead. Iris had two bruised ribs, and assorted bumps and bruises. She had a cut on her lip, and her nose had been badly bumped so it had bled but it wasn’t broken. Clay was horrified. Who would do such a thing?
A police detective came to talk to them while they waited for Boy to come out of surgery for his nose. There was nothing they could do about their ribs, they would take time to heal. Before he left for surgery, Boy had said he was just glad that Iris hadn’t been more severely injured, and she had kissed him on the cheek.
The detective explained that they were pressing charges against the two men who had attacked them. One was on parole, and would be sent straight back to prison, and the other one had a police record an arm long. They had been working for a gangster the police knew, who was recently out of prison and also on parole. The police had already been to see him, and he said that the request had come from someone he barely knew in Las Vegas who had wanted them to “frighten” her, and the two men had gotten carried away. He didn’t want to go back to prison to cover for the man in Vegas who’d hired him, so he talked willingly to the police and cooperated with them. They were supposed to just “scare them a little,” he said, not beat them to a pulp. The man was being held on charges of assault too, and being an accomplice to the other two causing great bodily harm. The two thugs did what they knew best.
Clay had his suspicions, which he shared with the police. In exchange for charges reduced to a misdemeanor and no parole violation, the gangster who had sent them admitted that he had been contacted by Glen Hendrix, who had paid five hundred dollars for “a little scare” for Iris and what he assumed was her boyfriend. Clay was irate when he heard it, and called Glen himself.