A Long Walk Up the Waterslide

3

Where is she?”

Candy Landis asked this question as if she actually expected an answer.

Her husband, Jack, stood against the big floor-to-ceiling corner window she had specially built to give him views of both the River Walk and the Alamo. She thought he looked handsome standing there, his full head of hair still black, his back straight, his tummy hanging just slightly over his belt.

Charles Whiting cleared his throat and started again. “She left her New York apartment in the company of a tall, heavyset male Caucasian and entered the back of a black limousine with opaque windows.”

“Opaque? What’s opaque?” Jack asked.

“You can’t see through them, dear,” Candy Landis said.

“Opaque,” Jack Landis repeated to himself. “Go ahead.”

“The limousine proceeded to La Guardia Airport, where Miss Paget exited the vehicle in the company of the same male Caucasian. The subject then proceeded to a first-class counter at American Airlines-”

“What subject?”

“Miss Paget.”

“So what’s the subject?” Jack Landis asked. “Geometry… history? Are we back in junior high or something?”

“That’s an FBI phrase,” Candy explained. “Isn’t that an FBI phrase, Chuck?”

“It’s a general law-enforcement term, Mrs. Landis.”

“So then what did the subject do?” Jack Landis asked as he watched a young lady with legs longer than a deer’s stroll along the sidewalk.

Charles Whiting cleared his throat again. In his years with the bureau, he’d had occasion to brief the director several times and hadn’t been interrupted like this. But then again, Charles cut a distinguished figure. At fifty-four, his six foot three inches were still taut and ramrod-straight. Even under his gray suit, his shoulders showed the effects of his fifty daily push-ups. There was just enough gray on his temples to give him an air of experience, and his blue eyes were clear and firm.

“The subject boarded a flight for Los Angeles,” Charles said. “Then…” Whiting paused.

“Go ahead, Chuck,” Candy Landis said.

“Well… that’s when we lost her, ma’am.”

“Lost her? Lost her!” Jack Landis yelled. “What did she do, parachute or something!”

“She was a… uh… different woman when she got off the plane, sir.”

“I’ve felt that way after a long flight myself,” Candy said.

Jack gave her a look that was meant to be withering. It wasn’t.

To his disappointment, Candy looked as composed as she always did. Her heart-shaped face was freshly made up, her lipstick was perfectly painted on her thin, tight lips, and every single one of her blond hairs was in place and then sprayed into a perfect halo of shining marble. She was wearing her usual business suit: tailored jacket, mid calf skirt, a white blouse with a rounded collar and a little red bow.

She’s a goddamn pretty woman, Jack thought, but she looks like a painted statue, and about as soft.

Charles Whiting jumped into the awkward silence. “When she exited the aircraft, she was not Polly Paget.”

“Was she in the company of the aforementioned male Caucasian?” Landis asked acidly.

“Yes, sir.”

“So they pulled a switch in this opaque limo, huh?”

“That’s what we think, sir.”

“Too bad we didn’t think that before she disappeared, huh, Chuck?”

Chuck assumed that Landis meant this to be a rhetorical question and didn’t answer. He’d become familiar with rhetorical questions at the bureau. The director liked them.

The next question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Who’s behind all this?” Candy asked.

Jack Landis turned around slowly, his hands spread out and his jaw open in mock disbelief.

“Oh, come on, boys and girls,” Jack said. “We know who’s behind all this, don’t we? I mean, shit, it don’t take Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., to figure out that Peter Hathaway tried to use this lying bimbo to get my television stations from me. She couldn’t go through with it and now he’s whisked her away before people find out he’s behind it. Believe you me, Pollygate is over with.”

“But it isn’t over with, Jackson,” Candy said patiently. “Restaurant receipts are down, franchise offers are down, and contributions to Candyland have just about dried up.”

Jack chuckled. “Okay, but I’ll bet the ratings on the show are way up, so we’re making up in advertising dollars whatever we’re losing on the other end.”

And, Sam Houston, will you look at the bumpers on that one.

“Not even close,” Candy said. She’d spent three days reviewing the figures with the comptroller. “Ratings are up, but most of our advertisers are family-oriented businesses, and they’re nervous about being associated with a scandal.”

“Get new advertisers, then,” Jack snapped. “Get some with some cojones.

Whiting winced at the vulgarity. Candy didn’t blink a perfect eyelash.

“Well, hell, the woman disappeared, didn’t she?” Jack asked. “Don’t that just prove what I been saying all along, that she made this whole thing up?”

Candy answered, “As a matter of fact, the polls show that her credibility rating has gone up six points since she disappeared from public view.”

“Up?” Jack yelled.

“Up,” Candy answered. “Sixty-three percent of respondents think that it is ‘more likely than not’ that you slept with her-”

“I didn’t.”

“And twenty-four percent believe that you raped her. Consider this for a moment, dear: If these numbers reflect the opinions of the board members-”

“I’m the chairman of the damn board!”

“Perhaps not for long, dear,” Candy said calmly. “If these numbers don’t turn around, Peter Hathaway might be chairman of the board soon. He’s already bought up forty-three per-”

“I know, I know!” Jack yelled. “What are you, Miss Percentage today? So what are we supposed to do?”

Candy answered, “What we really need is for Miss Paget to come forward and publicly admit that she lied.”

“Maybe you want to bring her on the show,” Jack said.

“If that’s what it takes,” Candy said, then added, “dear.”

Jack Landis stared down at the Alamo. Christ, he thought, I know how those poor bastards must have felt. And what if it ain’t Hathaway who has Polly? What if it’s the Justice Department? Or worse, “60 Minutes.” Goddamn, that ancient capon Mike Wallace would just love to spend a few of those sixty minutes with Polly Paget.

And so would I, Jack thought. Speaking of low dogs, so would I.

He missed going to bed with Polly. Polly was wild in bed, just wild. She would do things… just do things without thought or calculation that just made him crazy. That red hair whipping around, and those crazy green eyes sparkling…

Not like Canned-Ice, who tried hard, Lord knows. But that was just it. Everything Candy ever did in the bedroom, you thought she read in some magazine or book or something. You could almost hear her thinking about “technique.” She brought all the spontaneity of a metronome into the bedroom.

Candice Hermione Landis looked at her husband and knew what he was thinking.

Jackson Hood Landis had grown up in poverty in East Texas and was scared to death of going back to either one. Candice herself had grown up in middle-class Beaumont, where her minister father made just enough money to send her to SMU before he died of a heart attack. Her mama thought that she was definitely marrying down when Candice took the vows with a salesman like Jack Landis, but Candice loved him, so that was that.

She and Jack saved and worked hard and bought a little restaurant in San Antonio, then another, and then another, and then Jackson heard the magic word: franchise. It didn’t seem like it was very long at all before there were Jack’s Family Diners (“A Lot of Good Food for a Little of Your Money”) all over the country, and suddenly Jack and Candice were rich-very rich, oil money-rich, so rich that they didn’t know what to do with the money.

So they bought the television station. (“Two things Americans are always going to do,” Jack said, “eat and watch TV.”) Of course, Jack wasn’t content with one little station in San Antonio. He had to franchise that, too, and pretty soon they had a network. And because Jack figured that since they were a family restaurant, they ought to be a family television network, too, that’s what they did. They started the Family Cable Network, television the whole family could watch.

They sold America good wholesome food and good wholesome entertainment. And then came that fateful day when they decided to host an on-the-air Christmas party to thank all the employees and the viewers. Jack and Candice appeared together and the viewing public just loved it.

Who would have thought it? All they did was host a little party together, just like they did at home. They had guests and made conversation, and Candy played “The Old Family Bible” on the piano and everyone sang, and then Jack carved the turkey and Candy served, and the letters came pouring in. So they did a Fourth of July on-the-air barbecue, and then Thanksgiving… and another Christmas, and they had advertisers lining up to buy airtime.

“The Jack and Candy Family Hour” was born. At first it appeared weekly, but by popular demand, it became a daily show-five afternoons a week, plus the holiday specials, constant reruns morning and night.

Jack was wonderful on the show. He was a great performer… so handsome… and the audiences loved him, but Candy had the brains; it became her life’s work.

She programmed the guests, bringing on good family entertainers, people with inspiring stories, and experts with some useful knowledge to share. (She really liked to find some good family entertainer who had an inspirational story or some expert knowledge. She had yet to find anyone who had all three.) She especially liked singers who had once been alcoholics and got cured by God, or comedians who’d had a gambling problem but got cured by God, or just plain folks who had had something horribly wrong with them and got cured by God. Not that the show was overtly religious; they were always very careful about not specifying which particular God did all this curing-it could be either a Christian or a Jewish God. She also liked to have women ex-convicts on the show-especially the ones who had had kids while in prison-and then have an expert on at the same time to teach them money management and how to stay within a budget instead of stealing things.

Candy planned the menus for the kitchen segment, making sure that each and every meal was both wholesome and economical, although she did splurge a little bit on her annual “Romantic Dinner for Two When the Kids Are Spending the Night at Grandma’s” segment. Mostly she specialized in “stretcher meals”-making that Sunday roast last through Tuesday, or the chili that you could eat as just chili, or chili over spaghetti, or chili on a baked potato-not, as Jack had once joked on the air, meals that you ate before you got carried out on a stretcher.

Candy gave makeup tips (she noticed that women ex-convicts either wore too much makeup, which was unattractive to men, or no makeup at all, which was also unattractive to men, although she suspected that some of these women weren’t interested in attracting men at all), and weight-loss tips (a can of Budweiser and a chocolate doughnut do not a breakfast make), and even tips on how to keep the passion alive in your marriage (a filmy negligee behind a locked door doesn’t necessarily make you a prostitute).

While Candy knew that some people-perhaps thousands of people-made fun of her, she also knew that her work did some good for thousands of others. There were people out there who had sought help because a show had set an example for them, there were families who had made it through the week on her tuna casserole, and there were marriages that were better off just for the fact of having sent the kids to Grandma’s for the night.

“You have to find her, Chuck,” Candy said. “Find Polly Paget and persuade her to come forward and tell the truth.”

Chuck Whiting met her eyes and saw the pain in them. Chuck Whiting, former FBI agent, dedicated Mormon, devoted husband and father of nine, was a true believer. He believed in God, country, family, and Jack and Candy-especially Candy. Looking at Candy’s blue eyes, at her firm jaw and silky skin, at the golden hair that shone like a temple, at the shimmering purity that was Candice Landis, Chuck Whiting-had he not been a true believer in God, country, and family-would have thought he was in love.

“I’ll find her, Mrs. Landis,” he said. He felt a lump in his throat.

“Well, you kids have a good time playing detective,” Jack said. “I got a meeting to go to.”

He nodded to Whiting, gave Candy a peck on the cheek, and walked out.

Charles Whiting could barely breathe. His chest was tight and he was afraid he was blushing, because Candy Landis was looking at him in a very personal way. Charles Whiting wasn’t comfortable with emotional intimacy and would have been the first person to tell you so.

“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.