in the morning, and when she came out of the bedroom wrapped in a bath towel, all peasant legs and cow-busted with a lovely people grin showing through teeth that tore the sandwich apart, I laughed and turned the Beethoven down on the record player and poured the rest of my beer in the glass.
“That old man’s pretty hot stuff,” Charmaine told me.
“Big?”
“Nope, just talented. Kind of like surprised me.” She tore the sandwich in half and paused a moment. “Hey, Dog, he ain’t ...”
“No relation,” I said. “It would be a hell of a thing for a kid to buy his old man a piece, wouldn’t it?”
“Guess so. Didn’t they used to do it the other way around?”
“That’s what I heard. They gave him a year to get some hair around his gizmo and the kid got treated to a whorehouse job on his birthday. Poor slob, he probably sweated, couldn’t get it up, tipped the dame a bundle to lie to his old man and went home bragging about the experience.”
“You do it that way?” she asked me.
“Sugar, I was an old pro by the time I was twenty.”
“How about twelve?”
“I was an old amateur,” I said. “Hunter treat you kindly?”
“A dream. I think maybe I’ll specialize in old men.” She bit into the sandwich and sat down opposite me, the towel falling open before she rearranged it. Then she leaned back and propped her feet on the glass-topped coffee table.
“Will you cross your legs or something,” I said.
“Uh-huh.” She finished the sandwich and licked her fingers. “Do I embarrass you?”
“No, but you get me horny and I’m tired.”
“You got Marcia all pooped out. You like my room-mate?”
“Good kid.”
“A crazy kook. She was an acid head until I straightened her out. Always giving it away. Now she meets the right people. She thinks you’re out of sight. What’d you do to her?”
“She needed loving. Incidentally, I’m sending her to an old buddy of mine tomorrow. She’s going to get a job.”
“She told me. One-fifty a week taking dictation. What a way to ruin a good hooker.”
“Sorry about that.”
“I’m not. She graduated from Pembroke, y’know. Me, I barely made Erasmus High in Brooklyn. I wish somebody had done that for me.”
“Come on, Charmaine, you like it this way.”
“Only because I’m a nympho. I only know two other girls who really get their rocks off when they’re making it for pay with a guy. Maybe I’m the total professional. How’d you ever find me anyway?”
“Joe Allen in Belgium. Remember?”
“Ho, old Joe. He wanted me to get tattooed.” She smiled at me and looked for more crumbs on her palm to lick. “He ’told me about you too. I didn’t believe it.” Her eyes flicked toward the other closed door. “Marcia says old Joe was not lying, repeat, not lying.”
“I try harder,” I said.
“That’s what Marcia says. Why ring the old man in too?”
“Just to make sure he doesn’t have to lie when he kills me.”
“That’s about that ten grand, isn’t it?”
“Even great lawyers will tell a prostie anything, won’t they?”
“Look at Mata Hari,” she said.
“And look what happened to her. She got banged the real hard way.”
“You guys are nuts,” Charmaine said.
“All nuts,” I repeated.
“Balls,” she laughed.
“That’s what I said.”
We sat in the Chock Full o’ Nuts mopping up the plate of eggs with crisp toast, two guys watching the early shift of New York go to work before seven in the morning. Leyland Hunter’s cauliflower ear was redder than the day he got it and his suit was a mess, but there was a James Cagney twitch in his shoulders that was a suppressed laugh at himself and me at the same time.
“You’re dead now, Dog. You proved your point,” he said.
“I just wanted you to be sure.”
He tucked the last piece of toast in his mouth and sat back, happy and satisfied. “I never thought an old fart like me could get laid anymore.”
“When was the last time?”
“I forget.”
“Charmaine thought you were pretty damn good.”
“Lovely of her. She’ll never be forgotten. Ah, the feel of silky flesh unmarred by wrinkles is something to be remembered. What annoys me is that I never thought of the alternative. Never again will I be so devoted to my work. By the way, I understand you footed the bill. What do I owe you?”
“My treat. I always felt guilty about spying on you and old Dubro.” I laughed again. “How did you make out in the end?”
“A brush-off. I understand she married the gardener a year later. In those days a skinny-dip was a real orgy.”
“Man, have you got a lot to learn.”
“Unfortunately, no. I’ll get all my kicks from pornography collected during the censorship trials or wait for those rare, exotic visits from distant friends. Now let’s get back to you. I’m not quite stupid, you know.”
“I didn’t want
“There are some lengths you don’t have to go to.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
“Because I could have told. You’re not the same Dog they used to kick around.”
I finished my coffee and picked up the bill. “Isn’t it going to be a ball when everybody finds that out?” I said.
This time Leyland Hunter wasn’t smiling. With a studied, serious look, he scanned my face and nodded solemnly. “I’m going to be afraid to look,” he said. “Do you hold still for advice these days?”
“Depends on the source. From you, yes. What pearls of wisdom have you got for me?”
Hunter took out a gold ball-point pen and fiddled idly with the calibrated rings that made it a slide rule. “Remember, Dog, I’ve been close to the Barrin family all my life. It was your great-grandfather that made sure my education was attended to and who established a business for me. All that because he and my father were friends, old prospecting buddies, and my father was killed before he ever saw me. Like it or not, I have a moral obligation to be of service.”
“You paid off any debt a long time ago, Counselor. It was your business acumen that saved the Barrin corporation during the Depression, your foresight that built them into millionaire war profiteers and your ingenuity that kept them rolling ever since.”
His fingers kept working at the dials, arranging them into precise figures. “That was while your grandfather was alive and active. Unfortunately, the generation gap isn’t a new thing at all. When Cameron Barrin began to decline, the family was quick to introduce a new regime ... their own. I was one of the old guard and my opinions were merely tolerated, not accepted.”
“Then why sweat it, mighty Hunter? You’ve made it big on your own. Today you’re handling conglomerates that make Barrin Industries look like a toy. Oh, a damn big toy, but that’s all.”
“I told you,” he said. “I feel the obligation.”
“Good for you, but I’m still waiting for the advice.” I signaled the waitress for some more coffee. It looked like it was going to be a long lecture.
“Remember when your cousin Alfred had that accident with his new roadster?”
