"Is that all?"
"When I think of more, I'll let you know."
"I don't need a den mother. I can take my own risks. For my own reasons."
"Just like a grownup?"
"Oh shush. You don't do my vanity much good, McGee."
"Concentrate on your five-hundred-dollar bonus."
After long thought she gave a little shrug of acceptance. "So be it, den mother. What's your Saturday program?"
"Charlie Armister's sister-in-law. Terry Drummond. And hope to pick up some guide lines from her. Ready? Let's take that walk."
We walked a long amiable way on Fifth, making small jokes that seemed funnier than they probably were, and nightcapped with George at the Blue Bar at the Algonquin, and then taxied her home and held the cab.
"Coward," she whispered, and gave me a child's simple kiss, and started up the stairs with a great burlesque comic show of exaggerated hip-waving, turned and waved and grinned and hurried on up.
"What do you want to talk to me about?" she asked. She was tall and slender, and brown as a Navajo. She had dusty black hair pulled back into a careless bun. She wore tailored gray slacks, gold strap-sandals, a silk shirt with three-quarter sleeves in an unusual shade of gray-green which enhanced the vivid and astonishing green of unusually large eyes. Her figure, as advertised, was taut and trim, tender and tidy as a young girl's. Even the backs of her slender hands were young.
But the years had chopped her face. It was creased and withered and eroded into a simian brownness out of which the young green eyes stared. She had a deep drawling voice, barked rough by whisky arid smoking and living. She was smoking a cigarette, and her habits with it had a masculine look.
I glanced at King. She said, "Mr. King would like to know too."
Sometimes you have to take the risk very quickly, before you can scare yourself. "I want to know what's happening to Charlie Armister."
"Why, dear?"
"As a favor for a friend. And maybe, in all the confusion, some of that money will rub off on me."
"So you want to hustle him, dear?"
"Not to the exclusion of everything else, Mrs. Drummond."
She turned to King. "You can pop along now, sweetie."
"But I think I should… "
"Please."
"But in view of what he…"
She moved to him in a slow graceful stride, patted his cheek, took his shoulder and turned him toward the door. "I'll be in touch."
He went with an obvious reluctance. She went over and sat on a small desk, slim legs swinging. She gave me her monkey grin. "He's my lawyer. He's terribly protective. People get some terribly cute ideas, and I like to have him nearby when I make my little appraisal."
"Do I look that harmless?"
"No indeed, ducks. But old Connie Thatcher gave me a ring and said that if you should happen to come see me, you're a dear, and I should be nice. I was afraid you'd be one of those nice young men. I shouldn't underestimate Connie. She called you a brigand. Fix me a drink, dear. Two fingers of the Plymouth gin. One cube."
She watched me in silence as I fixed it and took it over to her. When I handed it to her, she caught me by the wrist with her free hand. Her fingers were thin and hot and strong. I automatically resisted her attempt to turn my wrist. She released me at once and grinned at me. I had the feeling I had won a claiming race, and before making her bid she had taken a look at my teeth.
"You're a powerful creature, Trav. Connie said people call you that. Please call me Terry. Aren't you drinking?"
"Not right now, thanks."
"I've offended you, haven't I?"
"Give me the blue ribbon and they can lead me back to my stall."
Her laugh was deep. "What would you expect of me, sweetie? Coyness, for God's sake? I'm a vulgar honest woman inspecting prime male. I don't see too many of your breed. They're either pretty boys or dull muscular oxen or aging flab. You move well, McGee. And I like deep-set gray eyes, hard stubborn jaws and sensuous mouths. Aren't you a girlwatcher?"
"Of course."
"I'm too old for you, sweetie. But not too old to think of taking you to bed." She stuck a finger in her drink and stirred it and licked her finger. "Didn't Connie tell you I'm notoriously crude?"
"You certainly work at it, Terry."
For an instant the vivid green eyes narrowed, and then she laughed. "I'm supposed to be keeping you off balance, sweetie. It isn't supposed to work the other way."
"So let's call it a draw. I'm an acceptable stud, and from the neck down you're Miss Universe. And if there was ever any reason to go to bed, we'd probably find each other reasonably competent. But I came here to talk about Charlie."
"You are a bold bastard, aren't you?"
"Sure. And we're both emotional cripples, Terry. I've never married and you can't stay married, so perhaps all we've got is competence. And that makes a hell of a dry diet. Now how about Charlie?"
She sprang down from the desk, gave me a tearful savage glare, and ran into the bedroom and slammed the door as hard as she could.
I wandered over to the bar table and fixed myself a weak drink. I took it to the window and stood and watched the Saturday people strolling on the park walks. I picked through the magazines on the coffee table, and sat and leafed through one.
There were some excellent color reproductions of three recent paintings by Tapies, work that had the burned, parched, textured, solemn, heartbreak look of his native Spain. I lusted to own one. I told myself I could bundle monkey-face into the sack and use her up, and she'd buy me one as a party favor. And she could buy all my clothes. In no time at all I too could look like a fag ski instructor. She could trundle me off to Athens. Teresa Howlan Gernhardt Delancy Drummond McGee.
I wondered how many hours a day it cost her to keep that figure in such superb condition. Diet, steam, massage, exercise, lotions, hormones, dynamic tension. And lotsa lovin', that most effective suppling agent of all. From the neck down she was Doriana Gray, dreading the magic moment when, over night, every excess would suddenly become visible.
In twenty minutes she opened the door cautiously and stared out at me, brown face slightly puffed. "Oh," she said.
"Should I have left?"
"Don't be an idiot."
"Two fingers and one cube?"
"Please." She sat in a wing chair by the windows. I took her the drink. She looked up at me with a wan smile. "You know, McGee, you are sort of a walking emetic. You are a big rude finger down my throat."
I smiled at her. "You wouldn't settle for a standoff. You had to keep prodding, Terry."
"Okay. Now you're the dominant male. Now you're in charge. But people just don't talk to me like that."
"Because you're rich. Everybody you meet gives a damn about that. The rich are an alien race."
"And you don't give a damn?"
"Of course I do. But I can't con you and lick your pretty sandals simultaneously, honey."
"My God, you really and truly make me feel like a young girl again, Trav."
"It should be a relief to you to be able to drop the act you put on."
"I guess it is. Sort of. But what do I do for defense?"
"You go all demure."
"Jesus!" She gave her barking laugh. "Okay. We're friends. And if I'm not good at it, it's because I don't have many, and the ones I have are women." She held her hand out. I shook it. I sat on the couch. "Now we can talk about Charlie," she said.
"It will be a different kind of talk than it would have been."
"You're that smart too, aren't you? I mean smart in that way. Son of a gun. Charles McKewn Armister, the Fourth. He and my sister Joanna are the same age. And sort of the same kind of sturdy quiet smiling people. Built solemn sand castles. When they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen, in that range, she crewed for him, and they took about every cup the club put up. In tennis doubles they were almost unbeatable. Everybody knew they would be married and have healthy beautiful children, and everybody was right. I was a slimy child, two years older. When he was sixteen and I was eighteen, I tried to seduce him. I didn't really want him. It was just mischief. He always seemed sort of sexless to me. Maybe I was just curious. It took Charlie a hell of a long time to figure out what I was trying to do, and when the light dawned, he was aghast. He panicked. He fled. I thought I was terribly wicked that summer. I was merely silly and unhappy and reckless. And notorious. I had to buy an abortion in Boston, and got septic, and damn near died, so I wonder who that baby would have been, and who the others would have been if I could have had them. But this isn't about Charlie, is it?
"Back to Charlie. I never saw much of Charlie and Joanna. In my cluttered lousy life they seemed to be a nice far-off focus of sanity. I was the wild Howlan sister and she was the tame one. So now she sits stunned out there in that ugly gray castle on the island, wondering if he's ever coming back. I go out there and get her drunk and make her talk it out. It always looked like such a terribly normal marriage. But it wasn't. I mean I would have thought Charlie would have been one of those bluff types, a cheerful clap on your haunch and seven minutes later they're snoring like a bison. I was married to one of those, God help me. He had about the same attitude toward sex as he had toward breakfast. He didn't particularly care what was served as long as he could have a healthy breakfast that didn't take too damned long. But my weepy drunken sister at last tells me that Charlie was hexed, probably by his cruel, romantic, cold son-of-a-bitch of a father, just as I was by mine, but in the opposite direction. Charlie is all tied up in psychopathic knots about sex. Impotent a lot of the time. Scared of being impotent. Able to manage it only when he's very tired or slightly drunk. And they are so good and so dear to each other in all other ways. And such a healthy outdoorsy pair.
"A year ago he had a genuine breakdown. It was kept pretty quiet. He went into a private rest home. When he got out, he just didn't go back to Joanna. She saw him a few times. He seemed perfectly cheery, and a little too loud, and he made silly jokes. He said he was taking another apartment in town. He told her the usual check would be deposited in her account every month, and she should keep on having all the bills sent to the office. But she couldn't pin him down. She couldn't really communicate with him."
"How long was he in the rest home?"
"Two months and a half."
"Did she go to see him there?"
"She was told it would be better if she stayed away. They said it was an acute anxiety neurosis. I've been trying to dig into this damn fool situation, and I've been here two weeks, and I still haven't been able to see him. He doesn't go to any of his clubs anymore. He's in a five-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-first. His personal attorney, Baynard Mulligan lives there with him. And his private secretary, Miss Bonita Hersch. They have a day-time maid, a live-in cook and a chauffeur. He spends a couple of hours every working day at the office. I've left a dozen messages for him to call me. Nothing." She got up and went to the bar table and fixed herself another gin and ice.
She brought it over and sat beside me, turned to face me. "Now I've made a damn fool of myself by telling a lot of very personal and private matters to an absolute stranger."
"But you stopped short."
"Did I?"
"Terry, you told the facts and left out the assumptions."
"Do I have to know how you fit into all this?"
"Not really."
She nodded. "Then you tell me what I'm assuming."
"You've thought it all over. You're reasonably shrewd. And you've known practically from birth that you are a target for every sharpie who comes along. So you develop an instinct. You know that something is wrong. It all adds up to one thing. Some people have managed to move in on Charlie Armister. They have gotten to him. They own him. Did you ever see a lamprey?"
"A what?"
"It's an eel. It hides in the weeds in the bottom of a lake. Sometimes it has to hide a long time. When a fat lake trout comes by, the eel shoots up and fastens its round mouth with a circle of teeth into the white belly of the fish. The fish struggles awhile, then goes on about its business, with eel in tow. It swims and feeds and lives for a long time, but it keeps getting thinner and weaker. When it dies, the eel leaves it and goes back into the weeds."
"Mulligan?"
"And Hersch and the necessary corps of assistants. It has to be a big and very delicate conspiracy. This isn't a hit-and-run operation. This is a symbiotic relationship."
"Do you think that is really happening?"
"First, they are now and have been for almost a year, liquidating profitable operations and making no new capital investments. Secondly, a very earnest young man who worked there and who was doggedly trying to find out what was going on, got himself mugged and killed in an alley two months ago."
She stared at me. "Are you insane?"
"The greater the profit, the greater the risk."
"But… but if they've got Charlie, we should go to the police at once!"
"Sure. What do we say?"
"We… we accuse Baynard Mulligan of conspiracy."
"And have him arrested?"
"Of course."
"And if we could force an audit somehow, we'd find the books in perfect balance. We'd find that every decision they've made can be justified. And Charlie would probably be furious. Mulligan would bring nine kinds of civil action against both of us. You see, whatever is happening, it probably isn't against Charlie's will. You can't safely control an unwilling man over a long period of time. They've hooked him on something and they've made him happy with it."
"Hooked him?"
"Maybe they've addicted him. For example, oral demerol. It's a synthetic hard drug and perhaps twice as addictive as heroin. It would keep him buzzing and happy as a clam and dependent on the only source he knows."