A Long Walk Up the Waterslide (4 page)

“Yes, Mrs. Landis?”

“He had sex with her, didn’t he, Chuck?”

Charles felt dizzy. He took a deep breath and answered, “Yes ma’am. The evidence would seem to indicate that he might have.”

Charles watched helplessly as Mrs. Landis lowered her eyes, looked down at the desk, and nodded. He felt even worse when she looked back up, her eyes moist.

“And do you know where she is?” she asked.

“We’re close to ascertaining her location, ma’am.”

Candy nodded again, then went back to perusing her data.

Somehow, she thought, I have failed, failed to keep the passion alive. And Jackson found his way to Polly Paget.

“Get me Polly Paget,” Ron Scarpelli said.

Scarpelli thought this kind of simple, impossible command gave him an authoritative voice. He’d learned that at a seminar on personal power: Speak in an authoritative voice.

Walter Withers hadn’t attended the seminar but recognized the brisk 80’s tone. Here I am, he thought, sitting on a pornographer’s black leather sofa with my knees up to my chin, sipping on his chichi designer water, trying not to stare at the legs of the six-foot-tall woman in a black dress who’s his “personal assistant,” and he’s attempting to employ personal power techniques. It’s superfluous, Mr. Scarpelli. It’s your penthouse office, your view of Central Park, your magazine, and your nickel. You don’t need to speak in an authoritative voice.

Withers didn’t say that, though. He was fifty-six years old, five—okay, twenty pounds overweight, and owed Sammy Black ten thousand big ones plus the vig, which was growing every day. But for the first time in a long time the ball had stopped at Walter’s number and he wasn’t about to walk away from the table.

So he said, “Everyone in the country wants Polly Paget, Mr. Scarpelli.”

“But I’m not everybody,” Ron Scarpelli assured him. He looked to the personal assistant for confirmation. She formed her dark red lips into a dazzling smile.

And why not? Withers thought. He wondered how much she pulled down a year as a personal assistant.

“I don’t touch her,” Ron Scarpelli said, misreading Withers’s thoughts. “She’s married. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Yes, she is.”

She looked like money. From the gloss of her black hair pulled tightly back to the perfect pale skin, the health-club figure, the clothes.

“Recognize her?” Scarpelli asked.

“Certainly,” Withers said, flipping through his mental index cards for the name. “She’s Ms. Haber, your personal assistant. She escorted me in, offered me water …”

Walter thought wistfully of the days when one would be offered a civilized martini at any decent office in midtown.

Scarpelli beamed. “August 1980.”

I can’t seem to recall last Thursday and he’s playing memory games from two years ago.

Withers held his palms up.

“Miss August 1980,” Scarpelli urged. “The centerfold!”

She’s smiling at me, Withers thought, as if she isn’t the least bit embarrassed that her boss just asked me to summon up the image of her on her back displaying herself.

Withers didn’t want to tell them that he had seen
Top Drawer
magazine maybe twice and it had just
depressed
him. It had been twenty years since he had gone to bed with a woman who looked anything like Ms. Haber and he knew he wasn’t going to have that pleasure if he lived another twenty, which was unlikely. So looking at the pictures was like being broke and hungry and standing outside the Carnegie Deli with one’s nose pressed to the window.

“Certainly,” Withers said. He vaguely recalled some punch line about “not recognizing you with your clothes on” but didn’t chance it.

“I want Polly Paget in my magazine,” Scarpelli said, getting back to business.

“Well, that’s what I thought.”

“Nude.”

As if he invented sex, Withers thought. Walter himself followed the school of thought that women were more alluring with their clothes on, given the right clothes. Half the erotic pleasure of romance, if memory served, was in the gradual baring of secrets, the delicate interplay of fabric and flesh, the—

“Full frontal, if possible,” Ms. Haber chimed in.

“Why don’t I locate the entire Ms. Paget?” Withers asked, “and let you take it from there?”

“That’s funny, Walt. I like that,” Scarpelli said, not laughing. Then he asked, “But what makes you think you can find her? Why should I hire you when I can buy the best private investigators in the world? Which—no offense—by the look of you, you ain’t.”

This is true, Withers thought. Needlessly offensive, but true. My suit is shiny and my eyes aren’t, I have those little broken blood vessels in my nose, and my tie is old. But it’s a tie, not a gold chain, you jumped-up little porno prince, and I bought it at Saks.

“I’m a genuine private investigator, Mr. Scarpelli,” Withers answered. “I have a license, a gun, vast experience, as well as a certain je ne sais quoi. Now, certainly you can engage one of the big agencies. They have a lot of personnel and most of them look better than I do. But none of them know where Polly Paget is.

“And you do,” Scarpelli said.

Actually, I don’t. But I know someone who does.

Withers set his water down on the glass-topped table and stood up.

“Thank you for your time and the water,” he said. “I’ll take my offer elsewhere. I think Ms. Paget would be quite charming in bunny ears.”

Speaking of speaking in an authoritative voice.

“Wait,” Scarpelli said quickly. “Sit down, please.”

“Please,” Ms. Haber echoed.

Withers sat down. He pulled his old Dunhill cigarette case from his jacket pocket. Ms. Haber quickly produced a lighter and an ashtray.

“I’ll pay her half a million dollars,” Scarpelli said.

Withers held out the case. Scarpelli shook his head and Ms. Haber leaned forward to light his cigarette.

“I will require a ten percent finder’s fee,” Withers said. “Plus expenses.”

“Where is she?” Scarpelli asked.

As if I would tell you, Withers thought. As if I knew.

“And I will need some up-front cash for her,” Withers continued, ignoring the question.

“I’ll give you a cashier’s check.”

Withers shook his head.

“No?” Scarpelli asked.

“No,” Withers answered. “Women like Ms. Paget are childlike. They lack the patience for delayed gratification. They understand cash.”

As does Sammy Black. The last time I tried to give him a check, he made me eat it and tell him what rubber tasted like.

“Let me get this straight,” Scarpelli said. “You want me to give you a bundle of cash to carry around in case you find Polly Paget? Is that it?”

“That’s it. Fifty thousand would probably get her attention.”

Maybe thirty would, too. Minus the vig.

“Fifty thousand dollars in cash,” Scarpelli said. “What do I look like to you?”

Here it is, Withers thought. The job on the line, right here.

“A good businessman, Mr. Scarpelli,” he said.

Scarpelli smiled. Ms. Haber smiled. Withers smiled.

Scarpelli got up from behind his big glass top desk and opened the door to a walk-in closet that had about fifty suits hanging in it, twenty or thirty pairs of shoes—treed and on racks, and a few dozen shirts on wire-rack shelves. He pushed aside a gray silk double-breasted, flipped open a panel on the wall, and dialed the combination. A minute later, he came out with five packets of cash, which he tossed on Withers’s lap.

“Call me Ron,” Scarpelli said.

Call me a cab, Withers thought.

“Where is she?” Peter Hathaway asked with the air of a man about to be let in on a wonderful practical joke.

Ed Levine turned to Ethan Kitteredge, who almost imperceptibly shook his head.

“Do you really need to know?” Ed asked Hathaway.

Peter Hathaway kept the smile on his face but it tightened up a little. Peter Hathaway was used to getting answers, and they were usually the answers he wanted. That was one of the reasons he owned a significant portion of a television network at the age of thirty-seven. One of the other reasons was his family’s wealth, and their connections. All of which had helped to bring him to this very private office in the back of an old bank in Providence, Rhode Island.

Hathaway decided to use a metaphor to make himself clear. He’d learned about meta-level communication while getting his MBA at Brown and he used it successfully with his own colleagues and associates. Metalevel communications avoided the ugliness of head-on confrontation.

So Hathaway broadened his smile, looked around the wood-paneled office with its mahogany bookcases, wooden model sailing ships, and dingy nineteenth-century nautical paintings and said, “You know, Ethan, you could stand to get some light in this office.”

Ed saw Ethan Kitteredge wince at Hathaway’s use of his first name and wondered just what the hell this yuppie Hathaway was talking about. Sitting there in his preppy little black sports jacket and green cord trousers, with his shiny new Haliburton briefcase at his moccasined feet, wasting Kitteredge’s time when he should be out playing tennis or lacrosse or some other kid’s game.

Ethan Kitteredge sat back in his chair, touched the tips of his fingers together, and smiled at Hathaway.

“This is a bank, Mr. Hathaway,” Kitteredge said. “We handle people’s money. In this particular office in this bank, we handle people’s problems. There is nothing … light … about it.”

Hathaway acknowledged the gaffe of calling Kitteredge by his first name but still felt some gratification that the bank president had picked up his metaphor. Once your co-communicator has picked up your metaphor, you have won the communication.

“That’s true, Mr. Kitteredge,” he said. “But you are keeping me in the dark.”

“Yes,” Kitteredge agreed.

Hathaway’s smile was sincere. He liked winning.

“So where is she?” he asked again.

“Safely in our hands,” Kitteredge answered.

Peter Hathaway dropped the metalevel.

“I’m the client, right?” he asked petulantly, brushing a shock of black hair from his forehead. “I want to know.”

Kitteredge looked to Ed.

“It’s like this,” Ed explained. “If you knew where Polly Paget was, you might inadvertently say or do something that might lead to her discovery.”

John Culver, sitting in the back of a van parked on the street outside, chuckled at the truth of this statement.

“I’m not a child! I’m not stupid!” Hathaway yelled.

Keep your voice down, Culver thought as he eased the headset away from his ears.

“Nobody said you were,” Ed said. We were just thinking it, he added to himself. “It’s just that you’re not a professional at this kind of thing, and we are, so why don’t you let us handle it?”

Kitteredge added, “We are continuing our investigation of Mr. Landis. When that inquiry has … matured … and Miss Paget has progressed to a point where we feel she can successfully negotiate the media and the legal process, we will contact you.

Hathaway sank back into his chair and sulked.

I’m a professional, he thought. All right, the rape was sheer luck, but I was professional enough to contact Paget, bring her into our orbit, create a media sensation … and now this nineteenth-century throwback and his pet bear refuse to tell me where she is!

“I gave her to you!” Hathaway argued.

“Would you like her back?” Kitteredge asked.

No, Hathaway admitted to himself. I wouldn’t know what to do with her. The slut is a disaster. If she opens her mouth in public one more time, Jack Landis will have the world thinking that she raped him.

“Excuse me,” Peter said. “I have to visit the little boys’ room.”

Please, Culver thought, leave the briefcase here. I didn’t go to all the trouble of breaking into your office and planting a bug in your new Haliburton for the dubious pleasure of listening to you urinate—at best.

Hathaway went into the lavatory to relieve himself and do a couple of lines. Cocaine gave him a competitive edge.

“Have you heard from Mr. Graham?” Kitteredge asked.

Ed nodded. “He got her safely to Austin, no problem.”

Now why, Culver pondered, would they take her to Austin, a mere sixty miles from San Antonio?

“And do we think Ms. Paget will remain willingly in the wilds of Nevada?” asked Kitteredge.

Nevada? Austin, Nevada, Culver thought. Is there such a place?

“Seems to be.”

Hathaway came back in a few moments later looking considerably refreshed.

“Where is she?” he asked simply, as if for the first time. As if he thought they’d tell him.

In Austin, Nevada, Culver thought.

4

Neal Carey watched Polly Paget eat dinner.

Neal had seen some real eating in his life. He’d seen horses eat and pigs eat. He’d seen Ed Levine eat. But he’d never seen any creature eat like Polly.

Polly ate like a hyperkinetic steam shovel in a gravel pit. She scooped slices of London broil and heaps of baked potato into her mouth and consumed them without seeming to chew or, for that matter, swallow. And as the putative digestion process continued, her hand whirled around on the plate for another go.

“More salad?” Karen asked.

“Mmmflckmmmff,” answered Polly.

“I think she’s asking you to pass the rolls,” Neal said.

Polly smiled and nodded. Small drops of sour cream oozed from the sides of her mouth.

Karen set a roll on her plate. Polly’s knife flicked out and covered it with butter.

“How do you keep your figure?” asked Karen.

“MMttbbllsmm.”

“Metabolism,” Neal translated.

“I got it,” said Karen.

I wish I got it, Neal thought.

He was in a vile mood. Graham had left cheerfully, sticking him with Polly Paget and what seemed an impossible task: Turn this bimbo into America’s sweetheart. Get her ready for a deposition, and a trial, and a trial by media. Teach her how to speak, how to answer questions, and how to not answer questions.

That last bit should be no problem, Neal thought, just get some food within reach. The big problem would be Graham’s final command: Make her get her story straight.

That made Neal think that maybe Friends had some doubts.