Tycoon (4 page)

As he walked to the club, along streets paved with brick as old and worn as those of his house, some of them green and slippery with decades' accumulation of algae, lichens, and moss, he noticed he was not the only man on the street dressed in formal evening attire.

At the club he checked his hat, cape, and stick and mounted the broad carpeted stairway to the second floor.

With the coming of Prohibition, the bar had been moved to the second floor. In the event of a visit by Prohibition agents, someone downstairs would step on a button and sound an alarm in the bar. By the time the agents climbed the stairs, all of the drinks on the bar would have been poured into buckets and the buckets emptied into a sink. The agents would face the hostile glares of gentlemen sipping ginger ale or lemonade.

It had never happened. Prohibition might have altered the drinking habits of the common folk in the Midwest, but it had required only minor adjustments among the Boston Brahmins and the Boston Irish.

Harrison Wolcott was at the bar, an Old-Fashioned before him.

“Ah, Jack! Scotch?”

Jack nodded. The bartender saw the nod and took a bottle from the cabinet behind the bar.

“How's the little mother-to-be?”

“She's doing fine,” Jack said.

“When is it due, exactly?”

“The middle of April, we think.”

“She's not very big yet,” Harrison Wolcott observed.

“She's petite. She may not get very big. The doctor doesn't want her to gain any more weight than necessary.”

“Well, then . . .”

Harrison Wolcott was a comfortable and self-confident man—whose self-confidence had been reinforced when the Depression had hardly touched him. His company, Kettering Arms, Incorporated, had worked to capacity between 1914 and 1919 and had made huge profits. He had been prescient enough to retrench drastically in 1919 and 1920, and the company remained only big enough to supply its specialized market for high-quality hunting and target rifles. That market had diminished only slightly when the Depression came. Moguls and magnates still prized Kettering rifles and bought about as many of them in 1930 as they had bought in 1928.

What was mote, Harrison Wolcott had invested conservatively and diversely. His book value was no more than half of what it had been in 1929, but he was satisfied his investments were sound, and he kept them.

He was just fifty years old, but his hair had turned white. It
lay thick and smooth across his head. His complexion was ruddy, his eyes pale blue, his mouth wide, his chin square. He was, in short, a handsome man.

“How are the bridge lessons going? Kimberly tells me you have a real flair for it.”

Jack grinned. “I've learned not to trump my partner's ace.”

“Kimberly says you're better than that.”

“Kimberly has her enthusiasms.”

“I won't ask how things are going at WCHS. I'll rely on you to tell me when you want to tell me.”

“Actually,” said Jack, “things are going quite well, I think. I'm learning the business, but strangely enough the principles I learned studying business administration at Harvard seem to apply.”

“Adding that little girl has made your
Wheaterina Show
more popular.”

“Yes. Betty's an asset. She's a natural comic. It was her own idea to use malaprops.”

“I really broke down laughing when she said, ‘Oh, no! Alice couldn't be in the family way. She hasn't even got a
husband!'”

“We got a dozen letters and half a dozen calls complaining that was too risqué,” said Jack.

“I'm interested in your claim that WCHS has more loyal listeners than any other station in Boston. To get Langdon and Lebenthal to put their name on the survey that says so was a real coup. Your advertisers—”

“We fudged a little,” Jack said with a sly smile. “All we hired Langdon and Lebenthal to do was send out the canvassers. We didn't ask them to tabulate the results. We did that ourselves.”

“But you've invited your advertisers to stop in and look at the cards.”

“We tabulated the results and came in third. So we took about half the cards that favored other stations and stuffed them in the furnace. What remained favored us—and they're there to be inspected by anyone who wants to see them.”

“Langdon and Lebenthal . . . ?”

“Did what they were paid to do. Each canvasser was scrupulously honest and dumped a bag of cards on us at the end of
the day. So far no one has thought to ask who tabulated the results.”

Wolcott frowned. “You'd better be careful, my boy. That sort of thing can ruin you.”

Jack smiled. “What's the old saying: ‘faint heart ne'er won fair lady'? Well, faint heart never turned a profit in business, either. And neither did rigid rectitude. I did learn
something
from my father.”

“Be sure you keep the secret.”

“Only three people know,” said Jack. “You're the third.”

Harrison Wolcott grinned and signaled the bartender to refill their glasses. “I have a feeling you're going to be a successful businessman, Jack.”

“That's what I've got in mind.”

Wolcott glanced up and down the bar. “Jack . . . I want to raise a very personal matter with you.”

Jack nodded.

“Uh . . . Kimberly is a wonderful girl, I believe. She's also, as you have said, petite. I might say delicate. Her mother and I are concerned about her pregnancy. Petite girls sometimes—Well, you know what I mean. The two of you were married only a short while before she got pregnant. And that is fine. But I hope you realize a husband's marital rights sometimes have to be put in abeyance for a time, lest the girl be harmed.”

“I understand.”

Wolcott put his hand in his pocket and palmed a business card. He slipped it across the bar to Jack. “That's the telephone number of a girl you can count on to be discreet, should you want to engage her services. She has a very small clientele: a few businessmen. Expect to pay her generously.”

Jack put the card in his pocket without looking at it “I appreciate this,” he said. “But I doubt I'll call her.”

J
ACK AND
K
IMBERLY WERE HOME FROM DINNER BY HALF PAST
ten, having eaten rare roast beef in a speakeasy on the north bank of the Charles, where the proprietor had no qualms about serving his guests a genuine and excellent Burgundy. Kimberly had drunk a glass and a half of it, though she had generally given up alcohol until the baby was born. Before he joined her in bed, Jack turned the radio to WCHS, where music being played by the dance band at the Copley was being fed through a telephone line and onto the air.

He tossed his pajamas aside and lay down nude. Kimberly had not taken off her silk tap pants or her garter belt and stockings. They fondled and stimulated each other until she was flushed and her mouth was dry.

“Mmm . . . You want it, don't you?” she whispered, smiling fondly at his pulsing erection.

He took seriously what his father-in-law had said at the bar early in the evening. He hadn't told Harrison so, but for several weeks now he had not mounted Kimberly, had not penetrated her all the way. Her doctor said it was better not to. She was petite, and though it was unlikely they could injure the fetus, it was not impossible, if they were too vigorous. They had experimented with other ways, doggie-style for one, but had found less than complete satisfaction.

Jack nodded. He wanted it. “Baby. Would you be willing to commit the horrible and abominable crime against nature again? I suppose that doesn't do much for you, but it does
everything
for me.”

“A second time in one day?” she asked with a faint smile.

“That one was a quickie.”

“And tasted like garlic,” she said. “If I'm going to suck the juices out of you, you've got to leave off the garlic.”

“I swear I'll never touch garlic again. On the other hand, a little variation in flavor might—”

She shook her head petulantly. “Chocolate. Brandy. Beef and Burgundy. But not garlic!”

“It's a deal, then.”

“All right.”

She lowered her face into his lap and began to lick him. She had learned that taking him into her mouth and working up and down with tight lips would bring him fast. She also knew he didn't always like being brought fast.

“It's going to take all night,” she whispered, opening her eyes wide and shaking her head.

Jack arched his back and closed his eyes. “I don't have to go to the station in the morning,” he said.

She lowered her head more and began to lick his scrotum. “If somebody had told me two years ago that someday I'd put my face down in a man's crotch and lick his balls, I'd have called them insane.”

“If somebody had told me two years ago that the most beautiful Boston debutante of 1929 would be licking my balls in 1931, I'd have called them insanely optimistic.”

“Mommy and Daddy didn't bring me up to be a cocksucker.”

“I want an honest answer to an honest question, darling,” said Jack. “You do kind of like it, don't you? At least a little bit?”

She looked up and smiled. “Well . . . it's an acquired taste. When I first tried it, I thought I might throw up.”

“I remember.”

He remembered vividly. He had made the suggestion diffidently, apprehensive that he might offend her and even more apprehensive that she would think it was a suggestion that could be made only by a lubricous California Jew and never by the gentleman he was supposed to become.

At first she had kissed him tentatively, well down his shaft, then, more firmly, on his grayish-pink glans. She had looked up and smiled shyly, and he had whispered the suggestion that she lick. She did.

That first time she had clenched her lips tight against his ejaculate, certain its taste had to be nauseating. It had streamed over her mouth and chin and dripped on her breasts. Without his suggesting it, she had taken a drop on her finger and put it on her tongue. Then she had licked it off her lips and laughed.

She hadn't thrown up. She had never thrown up. She had gagged once, when she lowered her head too much and took him too deep down her throat. After that she knew how much she could take and where to stop.

The loveliest debutante of 1929. Her parents had not brought her out at the annual Debutante Cotillion but at a party of her own, for one hundred guests, in the same ballroom where the cotillion was held, at the Copley—an event that fascinated Boston but was, even so, judged as verging on ostentatious. That her escort that evening had been not a Bostonian but an unknown young man from California named Lear had caused much comment, not all of it favorable. It had been mildly scandalous. That he was a Harvard senior and was going to continue to a master's degree had suggested he might be the right sort, though.

That he had already taken Kimberly's virginity would have been conclusive evidence that he was not the right sort.

“Whatever are you thinking, husband?”

“I'm thinking about you,” he said. “Remembering when—”

“Well, you had better focus your mind on what I'm doing, or we
will
be at it all night.”

1932

T
HE STUDIOS AND TRANSMITTER OF
WCHS
WERE NOT ON THE
Charles River as its call letters suggested but in Southie. Jack Lear was not willing to commute to Southie every day, so his executive offices were located in a suite of rooms above a theater southeast of the Common.

“Executive offices” was actually too grand a term for the rooms from which the radio station did business. Its executive staff consisted of just two men: Jack himself and Herb Morrill, whose job was to sell advertising. Jack had inherited Herb, who had been employed by WCHS since 1928 and was thus a veteran not only of the station but of radio broadcasting. He sold advertising, but he was also the source of ideas.

It had been Herb's idea in fact, not Jack's, to do the survey. When the results came in and were not favorable, Jack decided to fake them and then tout the faked results so often and for so long that it became gospel that WCHS was Boston's favorite radio station, in spite of other stations' frenzied efforts to set the record straight

One morning in February, Herb brought to the office a singing trio, and Jack reluctantly auditioned them.

Herb Morrill was a man of infectious enthusiasm. The story told of him was that he had been a successful bootlegger but
had left that business because he foresaw the repeal of Prohibition. The truth was that, as a boy, he had developed a fascination with radio when he wiggled a wire whisker around on a quartz crystal and strained inside his earphones to hear the signal all the way from Pittsburgh—station KDKA. His father repaired shoes and apprenticed the boy to learn the trade. For a while, Herb re-soled and re-heeled shoes until he could hurry home, bolt down a meal, and don his earphones to hear stations as far west as Kansas City and Chicago. In 1928 he abandoned his trade to go to work for WCHS. He wanted to be an engineer but lacked the education for it. By default, he gravitated into selling advertising.