'I knew you'd be a tough audience and all. I remember Kate telling me that you directed a lot of TV commercials.'
'God, you really had me going. I thought she was the most disgusting woman I'd ever seen.'
'You like that ''Hog Face' name I gave the guy?'
Jill laughed. 'Not to mention 'slipping the salami'. There's an elegant turn of phrase.'
'Well, now I can be confident that if I ever need to infiltrate a biker gang, I'm ready.' She effected the loud crude voice of Biker Mama. 'C'mon, Hog Face, slip me the salami real quick. I'm just a horny Mama tonight.'
'And they say romance is dead.'
'I've had a few dates who weren't all that far from being Hog Face,' Marcy said as she led them to the inner office.
'So've I, unfortunately.'
The inner office was much like the outer office except that two legs of this desk were held up by books, and the window was cracked and covered with masking tape along the fissure line.
Marcy said, 'This place is kind of a pit but it's all I can afford right now.' When Jill didn't respond Marcy said, 'Now you're supposed to tell me that this place isn't so bad at all.'
'Oh. Right. This place isn't so bad at all.'
Marcy smiled her smile again. 'If we were in acting class, I'd give you a D for that last line. It wasn't convincing.'
CHAPTER 7
Rick Corday did more than burn it.
After the note was charred black gossamer wings, he dumped them in the toilet and flushed them down.
Bastard. Unfaithful bastard.
He went back to the bed where he'd been propped up against the headboard reading the latest Tom Clancy novel. This time, instead of the novel, he picked up a manilla envelope from which he shook out two black-and- white photographs.
Everything about the man bespoke the kind of sleek ego that seemed endemic to the world of advertising. There was something silly and hollow and theatrical about these peoplemen and women alikebut they didn't seem to be aware of it.
This one, for instance.
Standing on the dock next to his yacht, wearing the whites and blue blazer of a man who had conquered several nations and would conquer several more before his time was finished on this world.
Eric Brooks.
Hardly to the manor born, despite an official bio that got more creative each year.
Father a worker at the Caterpillar heavy equipment plant in Peoria. (Is this the same father you would later list as an astronomer, Mr Brooks?)
2.8 college average at the state university.
Three failed marriages, two paternity suits, and the loss of a major client because Brooks kept plugging the client's wife on the side.
Now sole owner of the only Chicago agency to ever win six Clios in one year.
Now sole owner of a Maserati, a Cessna that sat eight and a hunting cabin in Idaho that Ernest Hemingway had owned briefly back in the forties.
Corday looked at the second photo now.
Mr Brooks all gussied up in his handball T-shirt and his handball shorts and his handball scowl. Sweaty, gritty black-and-white, this photo, and how the macho Mr Brooks must love gazing upon it.
That's one tough hombre, that Mr Brooks.
Corday smiled.
He was going to ruin Mr Brooks' life and there wasn't a thing Mr Brooks could do about it.
Not a single solitary thing.
But first Rick had to stop by Jill Coffey's place…
CHAPTER 8
'He wouldn't take a shower?'
'Not unless I refused to have sex with him.'
'You're kidding.'
'Uh-huh,' Jill said.
'Why wouldn't he take a shower?'
'He said taking a shower was just another example of how our totalitarian government had brainwashed us into being robots.'
'Wow.'
'So, anyway, that's how I met Peter. I just got so mad at Donald one night I couldn't take it anymore, and I put on my best dress and stockings and a garter belt, and I went out looking for a good time.'
So many years ago now, it seemed, Jill's college days.
She'd entered the state university just as the Flower Power movement was ending. Unfortunately, the boy she fell in love with, one Donald Franklin Spangler, had taken the considerable college fund his millionaire father had set aside for him, and recreated himself as a snarling student radical.
The first year wasn't so bad because Donald, for all his crazed rants against capitalism, was great in the hay and allowed himself to be dragged to various movies and rock concerts, even though he saw them as more evidence of how 'decadent' our system had become. Jill always wanted to point out the irony of a Marxist who drove around in a brand-new van his daddy had bought him and who owned many thousands of dollars' worth of stereo equipment, but why spoil his self-delusions? Hadn't Eugene O'Neill said that none of us could survive without them?
Her worst embarrassment that first year had been at an SDA rally in a small auditorium, where Donald had insisted on reading a poem to the assembly. He stood before them and said, 'The name of my poem is Screw America.' Jill started sinking down into her seat, hoping that nobody would notice her. This was going to be humiliating. Everybody would see Donald for the pretentious twit he sometimes was.
Screw America
Screw America, I say
Red White and Blue
Screw America, I say
Richard Nixon screw you.
Screw America, I say
So loud and mean
Screw America, I say
Robbing our planet of everything that's green.
Screw America, I say
Killing the Red
Man so proud and tall
Screw America, I say
