The Hunting Trip (2 page)

MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc., was a fairly recent addition to the industrial base of Muddiebay, but its predecessor company, the
Muddiebay Ship Building & Dry Dock Company, Inc. (MSB&DDC, Inc.) dated back to the First World War, and its predecessor company, the Muddiebay Ship Building Company (MSB), traced its history back to the War for Southern Independence, sometimes called The Civil War.

MSB&DDC, Inc., had gone belly-up twenty-five years ago, at which time it had fallen into the hands of RCB Holdings, Inc., which bought out the stockholders for peanuts. RCB Holdings, in turn, had sold the stock to Mr. Randolph C. Bruce for peanut shells, permitting RCB Holdings, which was wholly owned by Mr. Bruce, to take a very nice tax loss.

Mr. Bruce was not at all interested in shipbuilding or, truth to tell, that much interested in legally questionable tax dodges, but rather in the several hundred acres of tidal lands surrounding the shipyard that had been in the hands of the company since the days of the MSB Company.

They were absolutely useless for any commercial purpose, consisting as they did of hundreds of tiny islands that the waters of Muddiebay Bay inundated twice daily with the tides.

The one thing the tiny islands were good for was as construction sites for duck blinds, which is why Mr. Bruce had bought MSB&DDC, Inc.

He proceeded to build blinds and make other improvements, which gave him the largest private duck-shooting area in North America.

He thought that eventually some innocent soul would come along onto whom he could unload MSB&DDC, Inc.—less the tidewater acreage—and recoup his initial investment. Whatever could be said about Mr. Bruce, and a good deal was, no one ever suggested that ol' Randy didn't know how to turn a buck.

Four years previous to the events to be chronicled in this romance novel, he thought such an innocent soul had indeed come.

Señor Pancho Gonzales of Miami contacted him and said that if the price was right, he might be induced to take the ruins of what had been the physical plant of MSB&DDC, Inc., off Mr. Bruce's hands.

No one ever justly accused ol' Randy of ever being asleep at the switch, either. Randy had the greatest admiration for the ethnic minority—of which he suspected Pancho was a member—which now owned eighty percent of Florida from Key West to Palm Beach—the Miami-Cubans who had escaped their Communist homeland with nothing but five-dollar bills and the shirts on their backs.

Randy put Tancey, Castleberry, Porter & Lipshutz to work finding out just who Pancho was.

A week later, Moses Lipshutz bought Randy lunch at the Muddiebay International Trade Club and announced that in exchange for a check in an amount that made Randy wince, he would tell him what he had learned about Señor Gonzales.

Randy promptly wrote the check. Moses's advice had always been more than worth the money Randy had paid for it in the past.

“Don't look so unhappy, Randy,” Moses said. “When I do your income taxes this year, my fees will appear thereon as a fully deductible business expense.”

Moses then told Randy that he had learned that Señor Gonzales had indeed escaped Castro with nothing but a five-dollar bill and the shirt on his back. And that he now owned a shipyard in Miami, engaged almost entirely in the maintenance, repair, and fumigation of the armada of cruise ships now plying the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

The enterprise was profitable, Moses reported, but not as profitable as Mr. Gonzales thought it could be if he could move the operation elsewhere, and get out from under the taxes of the City of Miami, Broward County, and the Sovereign State of Florida. Not to mention the outrageous wages he had to pay his unionized workers for
standing around with their thumbs inserted in their ears, noses, and other bodily orifices.

Due diligence on Mr. Gonzales's part had revealed there was a derelict shipyard perfectly suited for his needs in Muddiebay, Mississippi, which he could probably steal, as its owner would most likely be some ignorant Mississippi shit-kicker.

“Moses, why don't you and Rachel take a few days' vacation in Palm Beach? As my guests. And while you're there have a chat with Pancho. I'll go along with anything you come up with so long as I get to keep my duck blinds. And if you can make a deal, take ten percent from my end for your trouble.”

“Fifteen percent, and I'll take care of incidentals.”

“Done.”

—

The result of
that luncheon meeting was the Muddiebay Ship Building & Dry Dock & Cruise Ship Repair & Fumigation Company, Inc., Pancho Gonzales, president and chief executive officer, Randolph C. Bruce, treasurer, and Moses Lipshutz, vice president and general counsel.

The dry details of who now owned how much of this new enterprise would little interest those who purchased this tome for its romance, so they will not be chronicled here.

But it should be noted that Mr. Moses told his wife, in the privacy of their bedroom, that while it was true a Jew could outwit an Arab at the bargaining table, the Jew she was married to had all of his legal and negotiating skills taxed almost to the breaking point when he sat down with Randy's Miami-Cuban to play Let's Make a Deal!

It had immediately become apparent to the executives of MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc., that one of their first problems was going to be housing for the many employees of the shipyard and for the crews of
the cruise ships who could not stay aboard their vessels while they were being serviced, repaired, and/or fumigated.

The Bruce Construction Company almost immediately began construction of the enormous apartment complex built on land acquired by RCB Holdings from the Bruce Land & Timber Company, Incorporated.

The precise details of this similarly would be of little interest to those hoping to read of romance, and will not be recounted here.

But,
en passant
, the architect of the project prepared his plans by going to the nearest 8 Dollar Motel, which was thirty-seven miles distant from Muddiebay. He took careful measurements of the 8 Dollar Motel's “Luxury Suites” that rented for $10.95 per night. He reduced the room dimensions by twenty-five percent and used them for the plans of the apartment complex.

In doing so, he hadn't considered the ramifications of reducing the size of the bathrooms by twenty-five percent. The result of this oversight was that while the restrooms in the apartment complex did provide the necessary sanitary accommodations, they did so in a rather crowded environment like those of the unisex facilities on airliners.

The executives of MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc., on reviewing the plans, instructed the architect to make a few minor changes.

In order to explain this, the reader must think of the project as a three-story structure in the shape of the letter
E
lying on its side, the open side facing the waters of Muddiebay Bay. Three stories only because four or more stories would require elevators and elevators cost money.

The architect was instructed to merge the six suites on the third-floor bay side of each part of the
E
into one suite. In other words, where there had been eighteen “Bay Side Apartments” there would now be three. There were now to be elevators running from the basement garage to what were going to be the three Executive Apartments.
They would not stop at intermediate floors, but serve only the Executive Apartments.

One of these was assigned to Señor Gonzales, the second to Mr. Lipshutz, and the third to Mr. Bruce. They provided a place for the MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc., executives to discreetly entertain their guests. Señor Gonzales's and Mr. Bruce's guests were almost invariably of the gentle sex, while Mr. Lipshutz's guests were invariably gentlemen in their middle years who liked to get together for a few friendly hands of high-stakes poker and could see no good reason why they should have to give a cut of their pots to the
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Yankees and Cowboys who operated the casinos in Biloxi and Ocean Springs in order to do so.

The Executive Apartments were furnished on a “cost be damned” basis. In Señor Gonzales's case, this meant—in addition to other amenities—a mirror ceiling in the master bedroom. Mr. Lipshutz's apartment had a pool table. And Mr. Bruce's had an indoor range at which he could fire .22 caliber shot cartridges at moving duck targets.

On Carol-Anne's third visit to Mr. Bruce's apartment—the first two had been both brief and entirely devoted to the satisfaction of what the Book of Common Prayer terms “the sinful lusts of the flesh”—she asked Randy why the apartment complex was called The Warren.

“It fits,” he replied.

“I don't understand.”

Randy had exhaled audibly in resignation.

“Okay,” he said. “One day I was researching CuNi—”

Carol-Anne felt a tingle.

“Oh, you
wicked
boy, you!” she said, and stuck her tongue in his ear.

Carol-Anne thought that she understood what her lover was researching: instruction in the techniques of an absolutely wicked sexual practice that she would never have dreamed, before Randy, of
allowing anyone to practice on her body but now seemed a quite attractive activity.

She erred.

Randy was researching a supplier of piping with a certain percentage of copper and nickel in its makeup at a lesser price than he was now paying for it. Such piping, called CuNi in the construction business, resists the corrosive effects of seawater more effectively than non-CuNi piping.

“Control yourself,” Randy ordered. “You want me to answer your question or not?”

“I can hardly wait, my precious, imaginative lover!”

“And there it was, Cuniculture.”

“I don't know what that means, Precious, but from the way it sounds, I'm all for it,” Carol-Anne, now tingling all over, said. “Culture is my middle name.”

“It means commercial trade in rabbits,” Randy explained. “And you know what they call a place where a lot of rabbits live?”

Carol-Anne confessed her ignorance.

“A warren,” Randy said. “Get it?”

Carol-Anne had felt the tingling stop and quickly excused herself to go to the restroom. She was determined that Randy not see the tears of disappointment roll down her cheeks.

[ FOUR ]

C
arol-Anne had a dual mission at The Warren today.

After bouncing around on the waterbed with Randy for twenty-two exciting minutes, Carol-Anne turned to the second.

“All the arrangements for our trip to Scotland are in place, my precious.”

“It's about
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time,” Randy replied.

In truth, Carol-Anne was rather well-known for her skill in organizing things. This was in large measure due to her ability to get people who knew how to do things to do them for her, whereupon she would take the credit.

She explained to Randy that she had had a word with Mary-Louise Frathingham, whose husband, Amos, was proprietor of Muddiebay Exotic & Exciting Vacations Travel, Inc. Mary-Louise had long hungered to be asked to join the Ladies of The Tuesday Luncheon Club. Amos had long lusted after more business from both the First National Bank of Muddiebay and the MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc.

Carol-Anne did not have to remind Mary-Louise that she was president of The Tuesday Luncheon Club, or that her husband was president of First National, as she already knew.

But Carol-Anne did say that all three of the senior executives of MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc.—Mr. Moses Lipshutz, Señor Pancho Gonzales, and Mr. Randolph C. Bruce—would be going to Scotland. Mr. Lipshutz would be accompanied by his wife, Señor Gonzales by a niece, and Mr. Bruce by an unnamed friend, gender not specified, who was going to get the trip as a birthday present.

ME&EVT, Inc., rose to the challenge Carol-Anne gave them.

With the exception of arrangements for the actual pheasant and grouse shooting, which would take place on the property of friends of Mr. Bruce, ME&EVT, Inc., would handle every other detail of the jaunt from the moment the travelers arrived at Muddiebay International Airport until they went the other way through the airport doors on their return.

Although there would not actually be twenty persons on the trip, ME&EVT, Inc., had planned the trip as if there would be. Using a
trick known to the travel trade as a Twenty-Plus-Two, ME&EVT, Inc., would guarantee the purchase of twenty business-class seats on all airliners involved, ten double-occupancy rooms in the five-star Claridge's Hotel in London, ten double-occupancy rooms in the two-star Dungaress Royal Hotel in Dungaress, Scotland—the best available in Dungaress, Population 5,602—and two ten-passenger motor coaches to move everybody around wherever they were to high-class restaurants, stores, et cetera.

In exchange for throwing all this business at the airlines, hotels, high-class restaurants, stores, et cetera, two “travel professionals” would be permitted to get the same services at no charge, plus a finder's fee of ten percent of the purchase price on whatever the shoppers bought. This is what the Plus-Two meant.

Mary-Louise and Amos Frathingham were going to join the jaunt out of the goodness of their hearts, and at no cost to themselves.

II

ACTIVITY BEFORE THE TRIP

[ ONE ]

102 Country Club Road

Foggy Point Country Club

Foggy Point, Mississippi

9:30 a.m. Sunday, September 7, 1975

P
hil Williams—who was forty-five years old, weighed 185 pounds, was not quite six feet tall, and was a victim of early-stage male pattern baldness—was sitting at his computer with a six-inch-long light brown cigar clamped in his teeth when the telephone on the credenza behind his desk rang.

Phil said, “Oh, shit!” and reached for the receiver.

Williams was an author—the difference between a writer and an author is that the former is just about anyone with a typewriter and the latter someone who not only has actually published a book, or books, but manages to support himself with the proceeds therefrom—and really disliked being distracted when he was plying his trade.

Telephone calls are well-known for their ability to distract.
Knowing this, Williams had two telephone lines installed in his domicile at 102 Country Club Road. One had five extensions scattered around his three-bedroom, four-bath, pool-with-pool-house, three-car-garage, 3,100-square-foot home, and the second was installed only in his home office.

Moreover, the number of the instrument in his office was not only not published in the telephone book but was known to only a very few people. They included his son, Philip Wallingford Williams IV, known as “Little Phil,” who was, incredible as it might sound, the food critic for
The Dallas Afternoon Gazette
, the largest newspaper in Texas, and the fifth largest in the nation; Phil III's editor, Chauncey S. “Steel” Hymen, vice president, publisher, and editor in chief of J. K. Perkins & Brothers, Publishers since 1812; his literary legal counsel, the legendary Gustave “Rabbi” Warblerman; his literary agent Jennifer “Big Bad Jennie” Waldron; and a very few friends and acquaintances, including Bobby “Fender” Bender, proprietor of Foggy Point Garage & Good As New Used Parts, who maintained Phil's twenty-year-old Jaguar.

“What?” Phil snapped into the telephone.

“Why don't we go to Scotland for ten days and shoot some pheasants with Bertie?” his caller responded.

Phil recognized his caller to be Randolph “Randy” Bruce, as much from the question as the sound of his voice.

Among things said about Mr. Bruce was that he owned half of downtown Muddiebay and that if one of God's creatures had fur or feathers, and wasn't a dog or a milk cow, ol' Randy hungered to shoot it. Muddiebay (population 260,000) was twenty miles distant across Muddiebay Bay from Foggy Point.

“When?”

“A week from tomorrow.”

Phil considered the proposal for ten seconds, and then said, “I'll have to ask the Angry Austrian.”

The Angry Austrian was Mrs. Brunhilde W. Williams, a native of Vienna, Austria, who had been Phil's wife for almost twenty-six years, which sometimes seemed longer. Much, much longer.

“So ask her.”

“I am never so foolish as to awaken the AA,” Phil replied. “When she does so herself, I will ask and get back to you.”

“Come by the house at one-thirty. Our plane leaves Muddiebay International at quarter to three,” Randy ordered, and hung up.

Randy was prone to give orders and to rudeness, both of which Phil understood and to a degree tolerated. Randy was not the first rich socialite he had known. There had been a plethora of them in his youth at the seven boarding schools Phil had attended, and then been sent home from.

[ TWO ]

S
hortly after ten, Phil thought that by now his wife would have arisen and be in the kitchen having her breakfast. He went there to see if that was the case.

It was.

Brunhilde was sitting at the kitchen table with “Miss Grace,” full name Mrs. Grace Hail, the septuagenarian African-American woman who had been in their employ since they had come to Foggy Point twenty-odd years before.

They had not lived on the grounds of the Foggy Point Country
Club then, but in a nice, much simpler home in the adjacent town of Goodhope, Mississippi, to which they had moved when Phil had been discharged from the United States Army Advanced Marksmanship Unit at Fort Benning, Georgia.

That house, on Creek Drive in Goodhope, had been purchased on a No Money Down thirty-year mortgage guaranteed by the Veterans Administration. It had three bedrooms, two baths, a one-car garage, and in the backyard, instead of a swimming pool, a shallow stream that flowed eventually into Muddiebay Bay, and thus the source of the street name.

“Good morning,” Phil said, when he walked into the kitchen of 102 Country Club Road, the French doors of which opened upon the swimming pool, the pool house, and the gazebo that sheltered the gas-flamed barbecue grill, and the fairways beyond of the Foggy Point Country Club.

“Good morning,” Miss Grace replied. “Can I fetch you a cup of coffee?”

Brunhilde said nothing.

Brunhilde was blond, five feet six, weighed 135 pounds, and was nine months older than her husband. There was a dancer's grace about her, which was not surprising, as she had begun the study of ballet when she was six years old, and given up the art only when she became pregnant with their first child, also named Brunhilde.

“No, thanks, Grace,” Phil said. “I'm already coffee'd-up.”

Phil looked at his wife.

She looked away.

“Randy wants me to go to Scotland for ten days with him next week to shoot pheasants with Bertie,” Phil said. “Is that all right with you?”

“I don't give a good
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
where you go,” Brunhilde said.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, talking to Mr. Phil like that,” Miss Grace said.

“
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
him,” Brunhilde said.

“I'll take that to mean I can go,” Phil said.

Brunhilde snorted.

Phil walked out of the kitchen.

Brunhilde had become increasingly difficult over the last several years or so, something Phil attributed primarily to two things. First, she had entered “the change of life.” As one of the corollaries of that, she had put on some weight, and that to a ballet dancer is akin to having leprosy.

Second, Brunhilde was suffering from Nearly Empty Nest Syndrome.

Brunhilde Williams, their oldest child, had eloped two years before to marry Robert Brown, whom she had met when he was the editor of
Mississippi Traveler
, the university newspaper, the day after he graduated.

“Brownie,” as he was called, had accepted a job as a reporter on the Jackson
Afternoon Gazette
and Brunhilde, who could not bear the thought of being separated from him, had married Brownie, even though she knew this would probably drive both of her parents up the wall.

Although the marriage seemed to be working well—Brownie had become assistant state editor, and Brunhilde was now assistant society editor—Brunhilde remained terribly unhappy about her daughter.

Little Phil was of course now in Dallas.

And only Franz Josef—named after Brunhilde's late father and also after the former head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—remained at home. “Franzel,” as Brunhilde called her baby, spent just about all of his time, depending on the season, on the tennis courts or at the swimming pool of Foggy Point's Grand Hotel.

One of Phil's unlikely friends was Professor James K. Strongmensch, who, although he had never graduated from college, had twenty-seven honorary doctorates. Strongmensch had published forty-odd books (the titles of most of which Phil didn't understand) and was simultaneously both professor of philosophy and professor of psychiatry at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Jim was aware of Brunhilde's problems, and had told Phil there wasn't much that could be done for her except to wait for nature to take its course. The alternative was for Brunhilde to take mind-altering drugs, which (a) probably wouldn't work and (b) were liable to be addictive.

So Phil waited for nature to take its course.

[ THREE ]

P
hil went from the kitchen to his office, and there photocopied what he had written so far on his current book in progress.

Twice before when he had been out of town, Brunhilde had, in innocent curiosity, turned on his Dictaphone to find out about his latest work and in the process had somehow erased it. Phil believed this was done innocently, of course, just as he believed in the good fairy and that the earth was flat, but he was determined it would not happen again.

He put one of the copies into his briefcase and took the other with him to the gun room, a concrete block structure with a steel door that he had built in the rear of the garage when he bought the house. Sometime after Brunhilde had begun to act strangely, he had replaced
the original door to the gun room with one that was both stronger and had a combination lock.

Phil didn't think that Brunhilde really would carry through with her threat to go into the gun room, get one of his
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
guns and use it to blow the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
off the next
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
golfer whose
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
ball crashed into the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
windows of the
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pool house.

But, as they say, better safe than sorry.

Professor Strongmensch had described the gun room as a “miniature arsenal” and his description was accurate. It was full of weapons. One wall held the “long guns,” mostly shotguns, but also a dozen rifles of different calibers. Another held more than twenty-five pistols of all shapes and sizes. Sturdy wooden worktables held rows of shotgun shell reloading machines, and across the room from them were the presses, tools, scales, and other equipment necessary to “reload the brass” of all the calibers of the rifles and handguns hanging on the walls.

This might suggest to some, especially readers of romance novels, such as this, that Phil was something of a “gun nut” who drooled and breathed deeply as he fondled his instruments of death, or that he was one of those rural boobs “who cling to their guns” for no good reason, to more or less quote a herein unnamed former instructor of constitutional law who later entered politics.

The truth is far less dramatic. His association with firearms began in his sixteenth year, on the day he was loaded aboard the New York City–bound train of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad by the Reverend James Ferneyhough Fitzhugh, D.D., who had just expelled him from St. Malachi's School.

“Philip Wallingford Williams the Third,” Dr. Fitzhugh had told him, “by stealing Miss Bridget O'Malley's intimate undergarments
and then hoisting them to the top of our flagpole and then cutting the rope, you have brought shame upon Saint Malachi's School, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the entire fraternity of Northeastern U.S. boarding schools named after saints. I am left with no alternative but to give you the boot.”

On the train, Phil had naturally wondered where his life would now take him.

He considered several possibilities, of course, but it never entered his mind that he would one day become a world-class rifle, pistol, and shotgun marksman. At sixteen, the only firearms he had ever fired in his life had been the .22 caliber rifles with which one could fire at movable little duck targets at Coney Island in the hope of shooting well enough to win a stuffed animal. (
Five shots for only a dollar!
the carnies barked.)

And, if this needs to be said, although even at that tender age he had quite an imagination, it never entered his mind that he would one day become a special agent of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, or marry a dancer of the Corps de Ballet of the Vienna State Opera, or become a
Wall
Street Journal
and
New York Times
best-selling novelist.

What he did on the train to Manhattan that day was consider his options for the immediate future. He decided they did not include going home to face the tearful wrath of his mother in South Orange, New Jersey. He literally shuddered at the thought of what would follow once his mother stopped weeping and screaming long enough to solicit the support of her husband in dealing with him.