The Erection Set

XV

I changed rental cars twice before I reached Linton, threading my way over a prearranged route I had picked out on the map, driving at night so it would be easier to spot a tail and easier to lose if I had one. Before the first switch I thought somebody had picked me up, but I got off the main road and the other car went by, its headlights out of focus and didn’t show again.

Now the early glow of dawn was winking off the buildings up ahead and I pulled into a diner just outside of town, found a booth in the back and ordered breakfast. Traffic hadn’t gotten started yet and outside of a lone trucker at the counter I had the place to myself.

Back in the city, Hobis and The Chopper were staked out where I wanted them, two others ready to stay in close on Lee and Sharon, all the little wheels were put in motion and I was wound up so tight I could hardly eat.

I was back in the game again. Hell, I didn’t want it that way. They could have laid off me and the whole stinking mess would have stayed in the usual state of ferment. Now it was getting ready to explode. And that was the trouble with an explosion... it took everything with it, the good, the bad and the neutral. All that was left was ruins until somebody else built on the rubble and let that ferment into an explosion too. For twenty years the crashing thunder of the blast had been all around me and I was tired of it, the kind of tired that makes your bones ache and your mind want to get off into a lonely space and just sit and sit and sit forever.

Home. There never was any such place. It was just something you thought you had and something you thought you wanted, but when you went to find it, it wasn’t there at all. I was playing kid games with myself, using a penny ante inheritance for a ticket to find home again.

My ticket had been punched a long time ago.

Home wasn’t any place on the line.

I reached for a cigarette and pulled Lee’s note out with the pack. He had left it on my dresser and I had stuck it in my pocket without reading it. I unfolded it and laid it on the table.

Across the top Lee’s scrawl read, “Doorman gave me this.” The rest of the note was only two words and a number printed carefully in pencil with an odd flourish to the letters. “Dog. Ferris. 655.” It didn’t make sense at all. I turned it over, but the other side was blank and I looked at the message again. The paper was cheap, but water-marked and seemed to be the bottom half of the small stationery sheets you find in hotels. There was some odd familiarity about the whole thing, but nothing that wanted to come out of my memory.

Yet somebody knew where I was. Somebody delivered it and somebody expected me to understand the cryptic message. Had it been from any of the old bunch it would have been coded so that I could decipher it. Of all the shiny new faces I had met since I got off the plane, I couldn’t pick one who’d bother corresponding this way. And it wouldn’t be the hunters. They didn’t write notes. They just tracked you down and killed, picking their own time and place.

When the details of each letter and numeral were clear in my mind I touched a match to the note and let it burn in the ashtray on the table. The counterman looked over at me curiously, then shrugged and turned away. The trucker finished his coffee, paid his bill and left. Outside, the sun had pushed up over the horizon and Linton had started to come alive. I picked up my check, handed the guy at the register a five, took my change and left.

At the comer of Bergan and High, cars flanked both sides of the street outside Tod’s and men in working clothes were drifting inside in groups of twos and threes. I parked at the end of the line, cut across the street and went in with a couple of men in their fifties who looked at me curiously.

One said, “You with the union?”

“Nope. Just a visitor. Used to live here.”

“Come back for a job?”

I grinned at him and shook my head. “I’m in a different business. I know Tod, that’s all. What’s going on?”

“Barrin’s taking on more men,” the one guy told me. He gave me a wink over his glasses. “They won’t have much to work with. They could use some young blood like you.”

“You flatter me, friend, I’m one of the oldies too.”

“Not like us, son, not like us.”

Tod had given up in exasperation and put three girls behind the bar. A couple more were hustling coffee in the next room where all the noise was coming from and Tod was sitting it out at a back table with a schooner of beer in front of him and his ear glued to a portable radio. When he saw me his eyebrows went up and he pointed to the chair beside him.

“Hi, kid. I shoulda known something would happen. You’re like your old man, always action when he was around. A good fight, maybe, plenty of singing, lots of action.”

I took the beer the girl brought me and let it sit there. The suds wouldn’t go right on top of breakfast. “Don’t look at me, Tod. Whatever’s going on isn’t my bit.”

“Pig’s ass. Maybe you just stirred the soup.”

“What’s happening?”

Under the sweater the bony shoulders that used to be weighed with solid muscle gave a small shrug. “Barrin’s got new contracts, that’s what. They’re hiring again.”

“The labor pool looks a little sad,” I said.

“Good guys, but old-timers. Half of ’em have been on welfare for years. The fuckin’ union’s flipping. They can’t get anybody down here since McMillan’s paying higher than union wages and these old coots’ll do anything to get back on the job again. You know what this meeting is all about?”

“I just got here.”

“Barrin wants to go under union minimums and the labor leaders are screaming. This bunch is about to tell the unions to go frig themselves and cut out. All they want is work and they’re not going to let them city boys tell them they can’t.”

“What’s going to happen, Tod?”

“You ought to know, kid. They’ll picket, run goons up here and try to stop the contracts. Those city boys know all the cute tricks. Right now they’re meeting with some of the Washington boys and putting on the big squeeze.”

I wiped the sweat off the cold beer with my fingers and let out a laugh. “You got it wrong, Tod.”

“Come on, bucko.”

“Labor’s running scared on this one if you’re telling it right.”

“Oh hell!”

“Take a good look,” I said, “a dying town, impoverished workers who want off public welfare and an opportunity to get back on their feet, blocked by fat, rich, politically oriented organizations howling for dues money.”

“So what?”

“A newspaper’s dream story and a labor lobby nightmare.”

Tod watched me for a moment, then shut the radio off impatiently. He took a long pull of his beer and put the stein back down. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” he said. “You know, you may be right.”

“They won’t picket and they won’t run in any goons,” I said. “They’re a little too smart. They’ll let it go ahead. If it falls, then it falls. If it works, then they’ll wait until they have the power back again, then move in for a reorganization. By then all those old boys who are voting now will be smothered by the newer ones. The game never changes, Tod.”

“You said... ‘if it falls.’ ”

“Something looks pretty damn spooky to me.”

“Maybe you ought to know, kid.” His tone didn’t sound friendly anymore.

“I’m sure going to find out, Tod. There’s always a winner in every game.”

“Who wins in this one?”

“Right now there’s a couple leading the field.”

“Old Alfred and Dennison Barrin?”

“How can they lose?”

“That’s what I figured. The rich get richer.”

“Not in this case,” I said. “I think they’re trying to hold on to what they’d like to have.”

Tod finished his beer, got a refill and looked at me with a direct, earnest glance. “Tell me somethin’, kid. Are any of those old guys gonna get busted?”

Something funny crawled up my back and I had to take the top off my drink so he didn’t see what I was thinking. I put the glass down and looked back up at him. “Not if I can help it.”

“Will they get hurt?”

Now I could see him back the way he was behind the bar in the old days, ready to pick somebody up by his neck with one big, beefy hand and toss him into the wall. He was watching my face and whatever he saw put the assurance back into his expression, and when I said, “No,” Tod nodded slowly.

“Just like your old man,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Too bad you never met him.”

“I can look in the mirror, Tod.”

“Ah, that you can, that you can. You might even see your grandfather, the old bastard.”

“That’s my title, Tod.”

“It means something different the way I’m saying it. You know, he woulda liked it right now.”

“Hell, that’s the way he started.”

He put down the rest of his beer in a single big gulp. “And you’re going to finish it.”

I grinned at him.

“You haven’t changed either,” he said.

“Don’t fool yourself.”

“The only thing’s missing’s the pretty lady.”

“She’s working,” I told him. “Too much of me is no good.”

“Sheee-it.” One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. “The little lady is all yours, Kelly.” He ran the back of his arm across his mouth and let his eyes dance across the table. “I got to asking questions after you left.”

“So what’s new?”

“Fuck you, Kelly. Find out for yourself.”

“You’re a big help.”

“Sure I am.”

“Where’s your pay phone?”

“Outside in the hall.” He sat back and folded his hands across his stomach. “You gonna raise some more hell?”

“Just a little,” I said.

“Damn,” he told me, “you kids have all the fun.”

Nothing could perturb the butler. He was too coldly professional, too remote. In his own way he was a contract man too, ready to protect his own as long as the pay was right, but not quite ready to go beyond the bounds of his limitations when it came to Big Casino time. I said, “Hello, Harvey,” and Big Casino time was there and Harvey smiled with a facial expression that didn’t mean anything at all except to me and opened the door.

“Miss Pam and Miss Veda are inside, sir.”

“Where’s Lucella?”

“Drunk, sir. May I be so bold?”

“You may be so bold, Harvey. And my male cousins?”

“At a meeting, sir.”

“Great. I have arrived at the opportune time.”

“I would say so, sir.”

“And why would you say so, Harvey?”

There was no smile, no raising of the eyebrows, just the simple, unspoken acknowledgment of small dog to top dot and he said, “Because you have been the subject of countless discussions since your last visit, sir.”

“I hope they didn’t say anything good about me.”

“You can be sure of that, sir.”

“They’re afraid the plans of mice and men may get screwed up, I guess.”

Harvey almost smiled, but didn’t quite make it. “A rather awkward misquote, sir, but the inference is correct.”

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 am in here and like I said, stop the shit, both of you.” I dropped my feet off the desktop and pulled my chair up to the edge so I could prop my arms on it. I didn’t realize it until I saw their faces change, but that was exactly what the old man used to do when he was about to pull the cork.

“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.”

“Dog.” Veda was sitting back, studying me with callous eyes. “You didn’t have to come here to insult us.” I grinned again, and she knew what I was grinning at and waiting for, so nodded and added, “Or remind us of the truth.”

“That’s right.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was wondering when you’d ask.”

Both of them wanted to look at each other, hang on to lines of communication and get mutual support like they used to, but neither of them dared to.

I said, “Unless all of want to find what it’s like to be out on the street, you’ll do exactly what I want you to do.”

“What... will that be?” Pam managed to say.

“As far as Alfred and Dennie are concerned, you still have your stock. Condition one is, you’ll vote it the way I tell you to no matter what they say. You don’t have any choice, so it’s an easy condition. Be nice and I may drop some of those Barrin paper goodies back in your hands. Try any tricks and the shit hits the fan. I haven’t got a damn thing to lose, but your feminine dainties can get put up for auction. Clear?”

Neither of them was stupid. They didn’t have to look at each other for the answer. They knew I had it all in my hands and weren’t eager for any further clarification. The hard work of generations had slipped through the greasy fingers of avarice and they were beginning to find out that you don’t crap in a rose garden because human feces aren’t as adaptable to soil culture as animal dung and the stink is pretty damn distinctive. And even worse when you kicked the topsoil off and let them show.

Ladies. They sat there as if I were the liar, trying to compose themselves with all the Victorian demeanor of royalty looking down their noses at the hun upstart and I knew Veda would be the one to have to shed her wig.

She fell right into the trap. “And condition two?” she asked with that same ridiculous haughtiness.

The crunch. The tag line. She never should have asked it and suddenly she knew it. I lit another cigarette and put my feet back on the desk.

“Stand up,” I said. “Both of you.”

This time they got in that mutual glance, but they both stood up.

“Take off your clothes,” I told them.

Horror has to be seen to be enjoyed and I enjoyed it. Only seconds ticked by, but their faces went from indignation to anger, then a plea for pity, finally disintegrating into abject subservience when I gave them a narrow-eyed look to remind them of the delivery boys and the governess and the other things they didn’t realize I knew and they took off their clothes.

Everything they had was piled in a heap on the floor like I told them to do, then I made them turn around, then face me again. I dropped the stub of my cigarette in the old-fashioned inkwell and pushed the chair back.

I called out, “Harvey, bring my stuff in here.”

When the butler came in with my coat and hat he barely paused at the threshold, his eyes taking in the entire scene. I put my coat over my arm, put on my hat and looked at the two women. “Sloppy,” I said. “Pam, you ought to shave. You’re the hairiest broad I ever saw in my life” Harvey opened the door for me and this time he couldn’t quite hide his smile. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I don’t think so.”

“Very good, sir.”

Two steps down I heard his chuckle. Softly he said, “Very good, sir.”

The pale-blue pickup was behind me for the fourth time. I stopped at the post office and bought a folder of airmail stamps and looked at the driver of the truck who was mailing a package at the parcel post window. He was about sixty, dressed in faded blue denim pants and a torn sweater. The clerk was giving his receipt when I went back outside. I waited in my car until he came down the steps, drove off and turned right at the first intersection. He turned left and in the rearview mirror I saw him pull into a parking slot outside a small appliance store.

I was getting edgy again and even the thought of my naked cousins couldn’t take the bite out of things. I kept thinking, DOG. FERRIS. 655, wondering what the hell it meant.

He was young and had blond hair and didn’t have time to grab his helmet. He was a young, grinning kraut and he damn near took me out after he shot down Bertram and all I had was that one look at him and the name Helgurt under his canopy and the five insignias, three American and two British under that just back of the yellow spinner on his ME 109. He lifted his wing the same time I did and we slid together like lovers waiting to kiss in a monumental close-up of flame, but air pressures and engineering combined to keep those lips apart and we hauled back on the controls into tight, stall-vibrating turns that dragged the blood from our eyeballs and there he was coming into my reticule before I came into his and my fingers squeezed the trigger on the stick and six fifties went off converging into a cone of fire at four hundred feet that took his yellow spinner off with the prop and chewed a beautiful flying machine into a pile of junk within three seconds leaving the young, grinning blond-headed kraut without any helmet and without any head or body parts anybody could remember. He had five kills and I had a hell of a lot more, but I remembered them and his name, Helgurt, and his yellow spinner, so why couldn’t I remember DOG. FERRIS. 655?

Somebody had left the brochure on the desk, a four colored come-on with block-lettered Farnsworth Aviation, Inc. headlining the aerial photo of the sky over the mountains with the latest Farnsworth executive jet streaking by under a high band of striped cirrus clouds.

“Nice plane,” I said.

“Who may I say called, sir?” the receptionist asked me.

“Just a friend of the family,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”

She poised her pen over the lined pad and gave me an annoyed grimace. “Ill be very glad to...”

“I know you will, kitten, but I won’t,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you again.”

Behind me, the stout man in the pin-striped suit coughed behind his hand and I moved out of the way. He said his name was Meehan and he was expected at the conference. The receptionist pushed a button on her intercom, made the inquiry, then admitted him through the gate with a practiced smile. I went back to my car and drove away from the parking lot. On the other side of the building a double line of men were strung out for a good hundred yards. Two other men were taking down their information on clipboards, then admitting them into the main building.

The time was sixteen minutes after two in the afternoon and Barrin Industries looked for all the world like a thriving enterprise. I drove around the factory complex, took a side road through the old section up to a saloon, went in and had a beer and, halfway through, picked up my change and made a phone call from the booth at the back of the bar.

Sheila McMillan laughed when I told her who I was and dared me to come out for lunch. I told her to climb a tree and to meet me at Tod’s if she wanted to really know how her husband got that scar on his skull and when she said she would I hung up, finished my beer and drove down to Bergan and High, parked and went in where the moths were still gnawing at the stuffed dead heads of all those beautiful animals.

All the old men were gone now. The sun was on the other side of the room throwing a rosy glow through the dirt-streaked windows and the heavy tones of the Dante Symphony from Tod’s radio had quieted the three at the bar. I wouldn’t let Tod change stations and the mood had diminished the baseball talk, turning it into nostalgia and latrinograms of what might happen to the big smog mill on the riverbank and Tod didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

Hell, he knew Sheila even if nobody else did. He had known Cameron Barrin and he had known my old man. He remembered my mother and he knew Cross. Now he was knowing me and trying to put all the pieces together and all he could do was look at the two of us back in the comer sitting together and all he could imagine was the wires touching and the bomb going off with him in the middle and everybody else fat and happy minding their own business.

She didn’t have to turn up in those crazy hot pants under the leather skirt. She could have worn stockings instead of letting all the skin show. The fringed buckskin jacket didn’t have to be tied with a rawhide thong that let her breasts peek out almost to the nipples showing all that tanned flesh from the top of her navel to the jutting rise of her bosom. But it was.

“Why is Tod looking at me like that?” she asked me.

“You’re a walking orgasm, doll,” I said.

“To him or you?”

“Skin isn’t new to me, sugar.” I told Tod and he looked back at his customers. “You’re sure kicking him around.”

“Legs or tits?”

“All one big package, and he can only take a little bit at a time.”

“Which one first?”

“You mess with Tod and you’ll get your face splashed up.”

“So I’ll mess with you.”

“I can do worse.”

“Talk.”

“Look at me,” I said.

“I am.”

“Don’t you know yet?”

“You must be kidding.”

“Sorry, baby. It’s real. Watch it.”

Her smile came on so slowly it was like the sun rising. I watched her lift her drink and sip at it deliberately, with eyes so deeply blue it was incredible washing over me like a gentle, laughing waterfall.

“Tiger?”

“Of a sort. Just be careful. Even tigers can purr.”

“You’re a mean one.”

“Don’t go to too much trouble finding out,” I said.

“Somebody’s been telling you lies, Dog.”

“Don’t you think they’d waste their time trying that?”

“Would they?”

I nodded.

“How did Cross really get that crease on his head?”

“He probably told you the truth. I hit him with a rock. I was too young to do anything else. My baser instincts took over at the moment.”

“Oh, how he hates you.”

“Nuts. He hates the Barrins.”

“Only you’re not a Barrin.”

“But I’m the one with the rock, remember?”

Sheila held her glass up and looked at the sunlight coming through the ice and the liquid. A spectrum of color danced across her face for a moment, then she put the glass down. “You know what he’s going to do to you?”

“He’s going to try,” I said.

“All the way.”

“That won’t be enough,” I told her. I finished my drink and waved for Tod to bring me another. “Are you as pretty all the way naked as you are now?”

I watched her eyes change shape, then go back to their original oblongs and heard her laugh. “Prettier.”

“Hair color the same?”

“Identical.”

“Leggy?”

“All beautiful thighs right up to my whoosis, then down again.”

“Nipples sensitive?”

“See them pointing at you?” she smiled.

“Come fast?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Often?”

“Certainly.”

“Only when you’re doing it to yourself?”

She twisted the glass in her hand and held it up again. The sun had gone down and there weren’t any multicolored spectrums showing on her face now. “You really are a tiger, aren’t you?”

“Want to find out?”

“No.”

“Better to just talk about it?”

“By far,” she said.

“We have a lot of talking to do, haven’t we?”

Sheila finished her drink and set the glass down gently. Her eyes came up and smiled at me. “I think so,” she said.

“You know women pretty well, don’t you?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Can we go someplace and talk?”

I put a bill on the bar and helped her into her jacket. Tod was looking at me as if I were in a cage and shook his head, then threw a wave as if he were giving up all hope and took the curse off with the kind of grin only one man can give to another. I grinned back and Sheila walked out ahead of me. When we reached the car she got in, sat there looking straight ahead a second, then said, “Somebody’s got to lose.”

“Always,” I told her