The Carpetbaggers (2 page)

"O.K., you got it," I said quickly. It was a bargain. The last one cost me three fifty. I flipped my cigarette over the side of the car and started the motor. I pulled the car out into traffic and headed toward Malibu.

"Hey, where you going?" she asked.

I looked over at her. "To the beach house," I answered. "We might as well make the most of the situation."

She began to laugh and drew closer to me. She looked up into my face. "I wonder what Mother would say if she knew just how far I went to get you. She told me not to miss a trick."

I laughed. "You didn't."

She shook her head. "Poor Mother. She had the wedding all planned."

Poor Mother. Maybe if the old bitch had kept her mouth shut her daughter might have been alive today.

It was the night after that about eleven thirty, that my telephone began to ring. I had just about fogged off and I cursed, reaching for the phone.

Her voice came through in a scared whisper. "Joney, I'm bleeding."

The sleep shot out of my head like a bullet. "What's the matter?"

"I went down to Mexican Town this afternoon and now something's wrong. I haven't stopped bleeding and I'm frightened." I sat up in bed. "Where are you?"

"I checked into the Westwood Hotel this afternoon. Room nine-o-one."

"Get back into bed. I’ll be right down."

"Please hurry, Joney. Please."

The Westwood is a commercial hotel in downtown L.A. Nobody even looked twice when I went up in the elevator without announcing myself at the desk. I stopped in front of Room 901 and tried the door. It was unlocked. I went in.

I never saw so much blood in my life. It was all over the cheap carpeting on the floor, the chair in which she had sat when she called me, the white sheets on the bed.

She was lying on the bed and her face was as white as the pillow under her head. Her eyes had been closed but they flickered open when I came over. Her lips moved but no sound came out.

I bent over her. "Don't try to talk, baby. I’ll get a doctor. You're gonna be all right."

She closed her eyes and I went over to the phone. There was no use in just calling a doctor. My father wasn't going to be happy if I got our name into the papers again. I called McAllister. He was the attorney who handled the firm's business in California.

His butler called him to the phone. I tried to keep my voice calm. "I need a doctor and an ambulance quick."

In less than a moment, I understood why my father used Mac. He didn't waste any time on useless questions. Just where, when and who. No why. His voice was precise. "A doctor and an ambulance will be there in ten minutes. I advise you to leave now. There's no point in your getting any more involved than you are."

I thanked him and put down the phone. I glanced over at the bed. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be sleeping. I started for the door and her eyes opened.

"Don't go, Joney. I'm afraid."

I went back to the bed and sat down beside it. I took her hand and she closed her eyes again. The ambulance was there in ten minutes. And she didn't let go of my hand until we'd reached the hospital.

I WALKED INTO THE FACTORY AND THE NOISE and the smell closed in on me like a cocoon. I could feel the momentary stoppage of work as I walked by and I could hear the subdued murmur of voices following me.

"El hijo."

The son. That was how they knew me. They spoke of me with a fondness and a pride, as their ancestors had of the children of their
patrones
. It gave them a sense of identity and belonging that helped make up for the meager way in which they had to live.

I walked past the mixing vats, the presses and the molds and reached the back stairway to my father's office. I started up the steps and looked back at them. A hundred faces smiled up at me. I waved my hand and smiled back at them in the same way I had always done, ever since I first climbed those steps when I was a kid.

I went through the door at the top of the stairway and the noise was gone as soon as the door closed behind me. I walked down the short corridor and into my father's outer office.

Denby was sitting at his desk, scribbling a note in his usual fluttery fashion. A girl sat at a desk across from him, beating hell out of a typewriter. Two other persons were seated on the visitor's couch. A man and a woman.

The woman was dressed in black and she was twisting a small white handkerchief in her hands. She looked up at me as I stood in the doorway. I didn't have to be told who she was. The girl looked enough like her mother. I met her eyes and she turned her head away.

Denby got up nervously. "Your father's waiting."

I didn't answer. He opened the door to my father's office and I walked through. He closed the door behind me. I looked around the office.

Nevada was leaning against the left wall bookcase, his eyes half closed in that deceptive manner of alertness peculiar to him. McAllister was seated in a chair across from my father. He turned his head to look at me. My father sat behind the immense old oak desk and glared. Outside of that, the office was just as I remembered it.

The dark oak-paneled walls, the heavy leather chairs. The green velvet drapes on the windows and the picture of my father and President Wilson on the wall behind the desk. At my father's side was the telephone table with the three telephones and right next to it was the table with the ever present carafe of water, bottle of bourbon whisky and two glasses. The whisky bottle was about one-third filled. That made it about three o'clock. I checked my watch. It was ten after three. My father was a bottle-a-day man.

I crossed the office and stopped in front of him. I looked down and met his angry glare. "Hello, Father."

His ruddy face grew even redder. The cords on his neck stood out as he shouted, "Is that all you got to say after ruining a day's production and scaring the shit out of half the help with your crazy stunts?"

"Your message was to get down here in a hurry. I got here as quickly as I could, sir."

But there was no stopping him now. He was raging. My father had that kind of a temper. One moment he would be still and quiet, and the next, higher than a kite.

"Why the hell didn't you get out of that hotel room when McAllister told you? What did you go to the hospital for? Do you know what you've done? Left yourself wide open for criminal charges as an accomplice abetting an abortion."

I was angry now. I had every bit as much of a temper as my father. "What was I supposed to do? The girl was bleeding to death and afraid. Was I supposed to just walk out of there and leave her to die alone?"

"Yes. If you had any brains at all, that's just what you'd have done. The girl died, anyway, and your staying there didn't make any difference. Now those goddam bastards outside want twenty thousand dollars or they'll call for the police! You think I've got twenty thousand dollars for every bitch you plug? This is the third girl in a year you got caught with!"

It didn't make any difference to him that the girl had died. It was the twenty grand. But then I realized it wasn't the money, either. It went far deeper than that.

The bitterness that had crept into his voice was the tip-off. I looked at him with a sudden understanding. My father was getting old and it was eating out his gut. Rina must have been at him again. More than a year had passed since the big wedding in Reno and nothing had happened.

I turned and started for the door without speaking. Father yelled after me. "Where do you think you're going?"

I looked back at him. "Back to L.A. You don't need me to make up your mind. You're either going to pay them off or you're not. It doesn't make any difference to me. Besides, I got a date."

He came around the desk after me. "What for?" he shouted. "To knock up another girl?"

I faced him squarely. I had enough of his crap. "Stop complaining, old man. You ought to be glad that someone in your family still has balls. Otherwise, Rina might think there was something wrong with all of us!"

His face twisted with rage. He lifted both hands as if to strike me. His lips drew back tightly across his teeth in a snarl, the veins in his forehead stood out in red, angry welts. Then, suddenly, as an electric switch cuts off the light, all expression on his face vanished. He staggered and pitched forward against me.

By reflex, my arms came out and I caught him. For a brief moment, his eyes were clear, looking into mine. His lips moved. "Jonas — my son."

Then his eyes clouded and his full weight came on me and he slid to the floor. I looked down at him. I knew he was dead even before Nevada rolled him over and tore open his shirt.

Nevada was kneeling on the floor beside my father's body, McAllister was on the telephone calling for a doctor and I was picking up the bottle of Jack Daniel's when Denby came in through the door.

He shrank back against the door, the papers in his hand trembling. "My God, Junior," he said in a horrified voice. His eyes lifted from the floor to me. "Who's going to sign the German contracts?"

I glanced over at McAllister. He nodded imperceptibly. "I am," I answered.

Down on the floor, Nevada was closing my father's eyes. I put down the bottle of whisky unopened and looked back at Denby.

"And stop calling me Junior," I said.

BY THE TIME THE DOCTOR CAME, WE HAD LIFTED my father's body to the couch and covered it with a blanket. The doctor was a thin, sturdy man, bald, with thick glasses. He lifted the blanket and looked. He dropped the blanket. "He's dead, all right."

I didn't speak. It was McAllister who asked the question while I swung to and fro in my father's chair. "Why?"

The doctor came toward the desk. "Encephalic embolism. Stroke. Blood clot hit the brain, from the looks of him." He looked at me. "You can be thankful it was quick. He didn't suffer."

It was certainly quick. One minute my father was alive, the next moment he was nothing, without even the power to brush off the curious fly that was crawling over the edge of the blanket onto his covered face. I didn't speak.

The doctor sat down heavily in the chair opposite me. He took out a pen and a sheet of paper. He laid the paper on the desk. Upside down, I could read the heading across the top in bold type. Death Certificate. The pen began to scratch across the paper. After a moment, he looked up. "O.K. if I put down embolism as the cause of death or do you want an autopsy?"

I shook my head. "Embolism's O.K. An autopsy wouldn't make any difference now."

The doctor wrote again. A moment later, he had finished and he pushed the certificate over to me. "Check it over and see if I got everything right."

I picked it up. He had everything right. Pretty good for a doctor who had never seen any of us before today. But everybody in Nevada knew everything about the Cords. Age 67. Survivors: Wife, Rina Marlowe Cord; Son, Jonas Cord, Jr. I slid it back across the desk to him. "It's all right."

He picked it up and got to his feet. "I'll file it and have my girl send you copies." He stood there hesitantly, as if trying to make up his mind as to whether he should offer some expression of sympathy. Evidently, he decided against it, for he went out the door without another word.

Then Denby came in again. "What about those people outside? Shall I send them away?"

I shook my head. They'd only come back again. "Send them in."

They came in the door, the girl's father and mother, their faces wearing a fixed expression that was a strange mixture of grief and sympathy.

Her father looked at me. "I'm sorry we couldn't meet under happier circumstances, Mr. Cord."

I looked at him. The man's face was honest. I believe he really meant it. "I am, too," I said.

His wife immediately broke into sobs. "It's terrible, terrible," she wailed, looking at my father's covered body on the couch.

I looked at her. Her daughter had resembled her but the resemblance stopped at the surface. The kid had had a refreshing honesty about her; this woman was a born harpy.

"What are you crying about?" I asked. "You never even knew him before today. And only then to ask him for money."

She stared at me in shock. Her voice grew shrill. "How can you say such a thing? Your own father lying there on the couch and after what you did to my daughter."

I got to my feet. The one thing I can't stand is a phony. "After what I did to your daughter?" I shouted. "I didn't do anything to your daughter that she didn't want me to. Maybe if you hadn't told her to stop at nothing to catch me, she'd be alive today. But no, you told her to get Jonas Cord, Jr, at any cost. She told me you were already planning the wedding!"

Her husband turned to her. His voice was trembling. "You mean to tell me you knew she was pregnant?"

She looked at him, frightened. "No, Henry, no. I didn't know. I only said to her it would be nice if she could marry him, that's all I said."

His lips tightened, and for a second I thought he was about to strike her. But he didn't. Instead, he turned back to me. "I'm sorry, Mr. Cord. We won't trouble you any more."

He started proudly for the door. His wife hurried after him. "But, Henry," she cried. "Henry."

"Shut up!" he snapped, opening the door and almost pushing her through it in front of him. "Haven't you said enough already?"

The door closed behind them and I turned to McAllister. "I'm not in the clear yet, am I?"

He shook his head.

I thought for a moment. "Better go down to see him tomorrow at his place of business. I think he'll give you a release now. He seems like an honest man."

McAllister smiled slowly. "And that's how you figure an honest man will act?"

"That's one thing I learned from my father." Involuntarily I glanced at the couch. "He used to say every man has his price. For some it's money, for some it's women, for others glory. But the honest man you don't have to buy — he winds up costing you nothing."

"Your father was a practical man," McAllister said.

I stared at the lawyer. "My father was a selfish, greedy son of a bitch who wanted to grab everything in the world," I said. "I only hope I'm man enough to fill his shoes."