I gave him my coat and hat. “You know, Harvey, I’m beginning to like you.”
“Thank you, sir. This way, please. Shall I announce you?”
“Don’t bother.”
I could hear the two of them before I ever got near the library. Age had touched everything except their voices and to me they were still pigtailed brats laughing at me behind the curtains when I was catching hell, and sniveling slobs when they got caught with their hands in the sugar bowl.
Right now they were hissing at each other like snakes and never heard me come into the room until I said, “Why don’t you flush all that shit, ladies?”
Veda spun around with all that acquired arrogance ready to lash out at me with that venomous tongue of hers, then stopped in midsentence with a startled expression that was almost matched by Pam’s.
I said, “Sit down and shut up,” then walked over to the desk and picked a cigarette out of the cut-glass container. I lit it, gave the butt a disgusted look, then dropped it on the rug and squashed it out with my heel. My own brand tasted better and when it was fired up I turned back to my two cousins and smiled just enough so that they sat down fast without ever taking their eyes off me, their hatred filling the room like smoke.
It was a good scene. Hell, it was a beautiful scene. I leaned back against the desk and soaked it all in, letting them take their time to see what I was really like and when the tight lines in their faces started to droop into age wrinkles around their chins and the flab let loose under their arms I took another long drag of the butt then moved around the desk and sat in my grandfather’s old chair and leaned back nice and comfortable like he used to do and they were seeing him as well as me with scared little eyes and micey moving hands.
I said, “The last time was only for fun, girls.”
Veda tried the bluff. For a lifetime she had been pulling it and for a while it had worked, until she hit the tables at Vegas and Monte Carlo where the experts were better at the game. She started to say, “Dogeron, I will not have this...”
But I was holding the cards and stopped her. “Cut the crap, Veda, we’re not kids anymore, but I took enough cuts across my ass for you to keep those days in mind. You try playing cute and I’m going to hoist your white tail over the edge of that chair and whip the skin off it with my belt. You looked up my bleeding asshole for the last time and now it’s my turn.”
“Well!”
“The sight of it might make me sick, Veda, but I’m willing to try. Just open your big mouth.”
She seemed to push back into the chair, her hands tight on the arms. I looked at Pam.
“The same goes for you, only your ass gets kicked, not whipped.”
If Pam had had a gun she would have killed me. For some reason she couldn’t seem to get her mouth shut and I could see her mind working for something to say. When she finally found it she couldn’t get it out and I grinned at her.
“Where’s old Marvin?” I asked her. “Your husband,” I reminded her.
Every word was stiff and forced. “Out. He’s ... downtown.”
“I can’t blame him. If he’s lucky he’s screwing some bag in the back seat of the car. He sure never gets any from you.”
Pam arched with indignation and almost spoke again, but I added, “Cut it, baby, I remember you getting your first taste of love when you were fourteen and thought nobody was watching. And I mean taste. That delivery boy was a big stud, wasn’t he?”
My cousin damn near fainted. Her face got red to the roots of her dye job and she gave Veda a helpless glance that was returned with equal amazement, then she almost raised one hand for me to stop.
I wasn’t about to. “Don’t sweat, Pam. You liked it. You tried every guy who used the delivery entrance until one wanted it straight and stuck it in you. Lest you forget, gal, all that screaming you did you blamed on me for knocking you down the back porch and I got jumped for that one. Hell, all I did was walk into the laundry room to get a shirt at the wrong time. Incidentally, what ever happened to your bloody panties?”
I took another drag on the cigarette and watched Veda staring at her sister as though she were something from outer space. Then I had to tell her. You don’t miss opportunities like that. I said, “Veda baby, don’t get rough on her. There was you and the governess from the Forbes estate, you and the cute black-haired girl from school you brought home one holiday, you and that interior decorator the old man hired to do over the Mondo Beach place ... so don’t look at Pam. Hell, you only liked broads until you were seventeen. How you doing now?”
Both of them sat there like lumps, hands fidgeting nervously in their laps, trying to play the elegant matrons listening to some horrible diatribe, but each of them knowing it was true.
“In case you’re worried, Lucella isn’t any better. She’s just more honest. She was a straight-out fucker who always got caught and wound up marrying a nithead she had the good sense to divorce. Too bad. She’s still young enough to enjoy a good piece now and then. At least she can booze it up enough to lose all those sexual urges in a good sleep.”
My cigarette had burned down to the filter tip and I scraped it out on the jade ashtray. The old man used to do the same with his cigars. The ashtray was worth a cool ten grand, but the old man liked to live big. I looked at his picture over on the wall, the one with the scowl and the two pheasants in his hand, the unloaded and open shotgun crooked over his other arm. The pheasants looked stiff like they had been stuffed. They must have been, otherwise they would have stunk before the portrait was finished.
Old Cameron Barrin’s frown wasn’t as fierce as I had thought it was. As a matter of fact, now that I looked at it closely, it was a worried expression. I winked at the picture and mentally told him not to worry, the seed was still there and even if it was a bastard seed it still had some Cameron genes in it straight from the source of his own balls and not his stupid brother’s.
“Little old ladies,” I said, “you are impoverished.” Pam reacted first, coming out of her chair in a defensive gesture that almost looked real. Her voice was deliberately controlled as though she was taking care of an obstreperous bridge club member. “You are not about to come in here and ...”
“I
“Your stock is gone,” I told them. “Now look at me.”
Their attention was undivided. I didn’t have to tell them because they felt it coming, but I wanted to make it all very sure in their minds so once and for all it would end. They didn’t even suspect what the tag scene was going to be.
“I have it all. That and more. I’m about to control the Barrin Industries.”
Veda’s lips were white. Pam kept pulling at her sleeve.
“Alfie boy and Dennie don’t know about it yet, do they?”
Veda’s mouth was a thin, colorless line. Pam just sat there.
“You’ve been playing the game on empty pocketbooks, ladies. It’s a good thing the old man left everything free and clear. Barrin stock is down in the peanut class and the boys are still trying to ride a stallion. All you have is some property, antiquated factories and contracts that can be yanked and you’re all sitting on a lousy watersoaked log floating downstream with the vultures circling overhead.”
“Dogeron ...” Pam said.
I ignored her. “And do you know who the vultures are? You got me and McMillan and the Securities Exchange Commission who are going to move in pretty damn soon and if I don’t get it, or McMillan doesn’t get it, the SEC will chew you to pieces.”
“Dogeron ...”
“What?”
“How ... can you do this?”
“No trouble at all, Pam. Like I said, you looked at my bleeding asshole once too often. I’d like my turn at bat.”
“The family name ...”
“My name’s Kelly, or did you forget?”
“That was so long ago.”
“Look at the calendar and look at the clock. The time is now, kid. The game is over. You all lost it in the locker room.”
