"No?" The boy laughed derisively, raising the belt. "Don't crap me, I can see."
For a fraction of a moment, Claude did not know what he meant, then he looked down at himself. A crazy thought went racing through his mind.
If Rina could only see him now, she would know he was a man.
The belt cut down across his back, sending a thin shiver of agony down his spine.
"That's enough!" he whimpered. "Please don't hit me any more!"
He raised himself wearily from the floor and looked out into the bedroom.
The boy was gone, taking with him all the money Claude had had with him.
Slowly he got into the shower again and turned on the hot water.
He felt his strength returning as the water soaked into his skin.
What a horrible thing to have happen, he thought, remembering all the indignities the young man had subjected him to.
A warm feeling of satisfaction came to him. If he had been the stronger, he would have shown him.
He felt the excitement begin to beat inside his chest as he thought how he would have torn the belt from the young man's hand and beaten him with it until he bled.
He felt the sudden surge of power to his loins.
It was precisely at that moment that the truth came to him.
"Oh, no!"
He cried aloud in shock at the realization. What everyone had said about him was true.
It was only he who had been blind to it until his own body betrayed him.
A dazed kind of anger came over him.
Leaving the water running, he stepped from the shower stall. He opened the medicine cabinet and took down the old-fashioned straight razor that he had used ever since he began to shave – the razor that had stood proudly for him as a symbol of his manhood.
A wild, crazy kind of anger rolled blindly over him as he slashed viciously at himself.
If he was not to be a man, at least he could turn himself into a woman.
Again and again, he slashed at himself. Until at last, his strength gone, he collapsed onto the floor.
"Damn you!" he cried. "Damn you, Mother!"
They were the last words he ever said.
20.
David Woolf stood in the doorway of the bathroom, nausea rising in the pit of his stomach.
There was blood everywhere, on the white-and-blue tiles of the floor and walls, along the sides of the white bathtub, sink and toilet bowl.
It was hard to believe that it was only thirty minutes ago that the door of his office had burst open to reveal his uncle, his face flushed and purple, as it always was whenever he was upset.
"Get right over to Rina Marlowe's house," Bernie Norman said. "One of the boys in publicity just got a tip from the Beverly Hills police station that Dunbar committed suicide."
David was already on his way to the door. "Make sure she's protected!" the old man called after him.
"Two million dollars in unreleased negatives we got on her!"
He picked up Harry Richards, chief of the studio guards, at the gate on the way out.
Richards, a former police sergeant, was in good with all the cops.
He took the short cut over the back roads through Coldwater Canyon to Sunset. He was at Rina's house in twenty minutes.
Now the two white-jacketed mortuary attendants were lifting Dunbar's somehow shrunken body into the small, basket-like stretcher and covering it with a white canvas sheet.
The attendants picked up the stretcher and David moved aside to let them pass.
He lit a cigarette as they carried the body through the bedroom and out into the corridor. The first acrid taste of smoke settled his stomach.
A faint screaming came from the downstairs foyer and he started hurriedly for the door, wondering if somehow Rina had got away from the doctor.
But when he got to the head of the staircase, he saw that it wasn't Rina at all. It was Dunbar's mother. She was struggling to free herself from the grasp of two red-faced policemen as the white-covered stretcher went by.
"My baby!" she screamed. "Let me see my baby!"
The attendants moved impassively past her and out the door.
David could see the crowd of reporters outside, pressing against the door as it opened and closed.
He started down the staircase, hearing the old woman begin to scream again.
She had pulled herself partly free of one of the policemen and with one hand she held onto the railing of the staircase.
"You murdered my son, you bitch!"
The high-pitched voice seemed to fill the whole house. "You killed him because you found out he was coming back to me!" The old woman had her other hand free now. She seemed to be trying to pull herself up the stairs.
"Get that crazy old woman out of here!" David turned, startled at the harsh voice that came from the top of the stairway behind him.
Ilene stood there, a wild, angry look on her face. "Get her out!" she hissed harshly. "The doctor's having enough trouble with Rina as it is, without her having to listen to that crazy old bitch!"
David caught Richards' eye and nodded to him.
Instantly, Richards walked over to one of the policemen and whispered to him.