Bottom Line td-37

by Warren Murphy

  "When?" Ruby asked.

  "As soon as possible."

  "Okay. Tonight," she said.

  "It'll never be tonight," Smith said.

  "Why not?" asked Ruby.

  "Remo likes more notice than that. He won't show up."

  "He'll be there," Ruby said. "You can bank on it."

  At the door, she turned back. "You putting him on this too?" she asked.

  Smith nodded.

  "Tell that turkey I said I'll find out what it's about before he does."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Remo glared at Smith.

  "You want us to do what?"

  Chiun said, "He just told you he wants us to guard the Lippincott family."

  "I heard him," Remo growled.

  "Then why did you ask him to repeat himself?"

  "Because I wanted him to say it again is all," Remo said.

  "I see," Chiun said. "That makes it all clear." He rolled his eyes upward in his head and turned toward the window in the fourteenth floor suite in the Meadowlands Hilton. Across the narrow strip of the Hackensack River and a buffer zone of New Jersey meadowlands, he could see darkened Giants Stadium where other teams came in and did football to the Giants. Next to it was the brightly-lighted Meadowlands racetrack, its lights glowing in the dim foggy night like the radium smear in Madame Curie's saucer.

  "Why?" Remo asked Smith. "If the Lippincotts need guarding, they got enough money to hire the Pinkertons. All the Pinkertons. Throw in the FBI too, for good measure."

  Smith shook his head. He was used to these complaints. "We don't know that, Remo," he said.

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  "Why not?"

  "Because we don't know who is behind this attempt to kill the Lippincotts. If there is one."

  "You better start at the top," Remo said. "You're confusing me more than you usually do." "I find it perfectly clear," Chiun said. Smith said, "One of the Lippincotts dove out a window in Tokyo. Nobody knows it but he was there on a special trade mission for the President. The President got word that someone was going to kill all the Lippincotts, using animals somehow. We don't know what that was about." "You know a lot," Remo said. Smith continued. "It's just possible that a foreign government may be trying to do in the Lippincott family so they can't perform this special mission for the President. We don't know but we can't take chances. That's why we need you."

  "What's this big special mission the Lippincotts were on?" Remo asked.

  "It has to do with currency and the dollar abroad," Smith said.

  "No more," Remo said. "I hate economics." ' "I find it very interesting," said Chiun, turning back to the room. "You may tell me."

  "You would find it interesting," Remo said. Smith nodded and began explaining to Chiun about the declining value of the dollar and how it raised the prices Americans paid for imports and how these higher prices brought about higher prices on American goods. These higher prices brought about higher wages, with no increase in productivity, and this caused inflation and inflation, through a se-

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  ries of steps, caused joblessness and joblessness threatened to cause depression.

  As he spoke, Remo sat down on the edge of the couch and with his hands, spun the cylinder of an imaginary revolver, opened it, inserted an imaginary bullet, closed the cylinder, spun it again, put the imaginary gun to his head, cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger, blowing his imaginary brains out. His head slumped off to one side. Smith stared at him.

  Chiun said to Smith, "Ignore him. He was not allowed outside for recess today."

  Remo sat there, his head lolling to one side like a dead man, until Smith had finished.

  "I see," said Chiun. "We will guard the Lippincotts because this is very important." Remo sat upright. "We will, huh? Who says so?" "Ruby Gonzalez said you'd be glad to take the assignment," Smith said.

  "Well, Ruby's playing with a half a deck," Remo said. "I'm not afraid of her anymore." He reached into his pocket and brought out two little cones of soft surgical rubber. "See these? Earplugs. The next time I see her, I'm just going to slip them in and she can yell all she wants for all I care and it won't do her any good. Where is Ruby anyway?"

  "She's working on this same case," Smith said. "She's trying to track down the person who wrote that letter to the President about the Lippincotts." "But where?" asked Remo.

  "In New York," Smith said. He waved in the general direction of New York City, only four miles away from the hotel where they sat.

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  Remo opened a side window and stuck his head out.

  "Ruby," he shouted hito the night. "I'm not afraid of you anymore."

  He cocked his head, as if listening, then came back into the room.

  "She said she didn't find out anything yet."

  "I didn't hear anything," Smith said.

  "It's only four miles," Remo said. "Ruby's whisper can carry four miles."

  "But she is a nice lady," Chiun said. "She will give you wonderful children."

  "Not on your life, Chiun," said Remo.

  "That's true," Chiun said. He confided to Smith in a stage whisper, "Ruby will not have him. She has told me many times ¿at she considers Remo too ugly to father her child."

  "Yeah?" said Remo.

  "Ruby said something else," said Smith. "Let me get this just right. She said to tell the turkey that she would find out what this is all about before he did."

  "She did, huh?" demanded Remo. Smith nodded. "Elmer Lippincott Sr. is at his estate in White Plains. He is expecting you. He has been told that you are consultants with the government and are setting up new security procedures for the family. And if you keep in touch, I'll let you know what Ruby finds out."

  "We won't need that," Remo said. "We'll have this cleaned up before she finds a place to park her car."

  After Smith had left, Remo said to Chiun "I still think it's stupid, Little Father. Guarding the Lippia-

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  cotts. We're not bodyguards. Let them hire their own."

  "You're absolutely right," Chiun said.

  "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Say that again," Remo said.

  "You're absolutely right. Why say it again?"

  "I wanted to savor it," said Remo. "If I'm absolutely right, why are we doing this?"

  "It's very simple," Chiun said. "You heard Emperor Smith. If we do this, it will save America a lot of dollars. It seems only correct that if we save America many dollars, some of them should come to us."

  "That's not what Smith meant when he was talking about saving the dollar," Remo said.

  "It's not?" asked Chiun.

  "No."

  "Oh, the duplicity of the man," said Chiun. "Remo, through the course of history, the House of Sinanju has worked for many emperors, but this is the only one who never says what he means, and always means something different from what he says."

  "You're right," said Remo. "But we're going to do it anyway."

  "Why?"

  "To teach Ruby a lesson," Remo said. He went back to the open window and leaned out.

  "Ruby," he shouted. "You hear me? We're coming."

  A voice from six stories down answered back. "Hey, fella, shut up. We got a game this week." It was a deep Texas voice.

  "Get lost," Remo said.

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  "What's that, feUa? What's that?"

  "Are you as deaf as you are dumb?" Remo asked. "I said, get lost."

  "What room you in, fella?"

  "And your cheerleaders are ugly," Remo said.

  "What room?" the man" shouted.

  "Room fourteen-twenty-two. Bring your friends," Remo said.

  And so it was that the stage was set for the football Giants to win their first game of the year when the entire starting defensive team of the Dallas Cowboys came down with a serious illness two days before the game. The ton-and-a-half of players decided to tell the coach they were sick, rather than try to get him to believe the truth, which was that they accosted an ancient Oriental and a s
kinny white man in the fourteenth floor hallway of the Meadowlands Hilton, and were tossed around the hallway like bowling pins. The Giants, given the privilege of playing against Dallas's defensive second string, ran wild, managed to score nine points on three field goals and won 9-8, surrendering the eight points when their own quarterbacks were tackled four times in the Giant's end zone while trying off-tackle plays on third and twenty.

  Remo and Chiun did not see the game. They were in New York.

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  CHAPTER FIVE

  Elmer Lippincott Sr. slid quietly out of his giant king-sized bed, moving slowly so he would not wake his wife Gloria who slept next to him. Lippincott was eighty years old, a tall spare man with a face that had been weathered and hardened by an early life spent in the search for oil in the deserts of the world, in Texas, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and in the steaming jungles of South America.

  He moved with a smooth vigor that belied his years. His face was perpetually ruddy and his hair a shock of thick white wool. If his blue eyes had had more twinkle, he might have looked like an Irish saloon keeper who had gone on the wagon twenty years earlier. But Elmer Lippincott's eyes were flint hard and piercing. They softened now, however, as he stood next to the bed and looked down at his wife who slept on undisturbed. Gloria Lippincott was a young blonde woman, in her mid-twenties, and her skin was as soft and creamy as Lippincott's was tough and leathery.

  Her long blonde hair displayed itself around her head on the pillow like a golden frame, and the old man's heart skipped a little as it always did when he absorbed her beauty when she was not watching. He

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  looked at the blonde hair, the perfect complexion, the long line of her throat, the faint swell below the collarbone. He let his eyes trail down her body and he smiled as he saw the large rounded mound of her stomach under the blue satín sheet. Her belly was big and ripe with his baby. Six months pregnant and, God, she was beautiful.

  He touched her belly once, gently, letting his hand linger for a few seconds but there was no answering kick from inside, and disappointed he withdrew his hand. Then he walked quietly from the bedroom into the large dressing room adjoining it.

  He spurned a valet.

  "I dressed myself all my life. Just because I found some oil don't mean I forgot how to button my own buttons," he had once told an interviewer.

  He glanced at his watch. It was exactly 6:30 A.M.

  He passed through the kitchen on his way to his downstairs office. Gertie, who had come to Mm as a young woman and was now in her sixties, stood before a frying pan at the range, and he slapped her roubstly on the butt.

  "Morning, Gert," he said loudly.

  "Morning, the First," she said without turning. "Your juice is on the tray. So's your coffee."

  "Where's my eggs?"

  "Hold your horses, they're coming." She flipped the eggs hard enough to break the yolks and while they cooked dry, she pulled two slices of toast from the toaster and spread them with corn oil margarine.

  "It's a great day, Gertie," said Lippincott as he drained his six ounces of orange juice in one long gulp.

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  "You oughta be ashamed of yourself. Lern barely in his grave and you say it's a great day."

  Lippincott was chastened. "All right," he said, "so it's not a great day for him. But we're alive and that's a great day. My wife is having my baby and that's a great day. And you're cooking me the finest pair of over dry eggs the world has ever seen and how could that make anything but a great day? A little sadness should never ruin a great day."

  "Missie Mary'd be spinning in her grave, she hear you carrying on that way, with Lem dead," said Gertie, disapprovingly, as she scooped the eggs from the skillet and slid them onto a plate, along with three sausage patties she had fried in a separate pan.

  "Yes, she probably would," Lippincott said, thinking for a long distasteful moment of Mary, the stern autocratic woman who had been his wife for thirty years and who had mothered the three sons who bore the Lippincott name. "But there are a lot of things that'd make her spin in her garve," he said.

  He scooped up his platter of eggs and patted Gertie on the butt again. He refused to lose his good mood. Balancing his coffee cup and plate in one hand, he walked from the kitchen, down the long hallway of the big old mansion and into his oak-panelled office at the far end of the building.

  Even though the family fortune was now measured in eleven digits, lifetime habits aren't easily broken and Lippincott still ate like a man who was afraid of the prospect that he might have to share his food with someone else. So he disposed of breakfast as quickly as possible, then put the plate aside, sipped on the coffee and began reading reports that were stacked neatly by his desk.

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  Lern was dead. He had been entrusted with the overseas deal to open up trading routes with Red China to help the dollar, but now he was dead.

  He shouldn't have died, Lippincott thought. That wasn't the plan.

  At 9 a.m., he had his first appointment of the day and as he peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve, Elmer Lippincott Sr. repeated that to his visitor.

  "It wasn't the plan that Lern should die," he said. Dr. Elena Gladstone nodded as she prepared a hypodermic syringe.

  "It was an unfortunate accident," she said. "That happens sometimes when you're dealing with experimental medicine."

  Dr. Gladstone wore a tailored tweed suit and a rust blouse that was open four buttons down from the neck. She carried a well-worn leather doctor's bag and from it she extracted a rubber-capped vial of a clear liquid.

  "Perhaps we should halt everything?" she said. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe." "It's all right," Dr. Gladstone said. "You can forgive and forget, no one will ever know."

  "No, dammit," Lippincott growled. "I'll know. You just be more careful."

  Dr. Gladstone nodded. Lippincott extended his arm toward her even as she was withdrawing the.vial from her doctor's bag.

  She smiled at him. Her white teeth looked like pearls against her lightly-tanned skin and her bright red hair. "Not so anxious," she said. "I have to fill the syringe first. I gather everything is going along well."

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  Lippincott nodded. "My wife's fine and your associate, Dr. Beers, stays here all the time now to take care of her. It couldn't be better."

  "And you?" she asked.

  He reached mockingly for her breast. She leaned back and his hand closed on empty air.

  "Elena," he said. "I'm randy as a billy goat."

  "Not bad for a man your age," she said. She had filled the hypodermic with the clear liquid from the vial.

  "Not bad?" he said. "Good. Good for a man any age."

  She took his left arm, and wiped the inside of his elbow with a cotton pad saturated in alcohol. As she inserted the tip of the needle, she said:

  "Well, just remember, before you go spreading the joy around to every nubile woman in your employ, you're not shooting blanks anymore. Be careful or you'll have more Lippincotts running around than you know what to do with."

  "Just one," he said. "Just one will be fine."

  He smiled as the needle punctured his skin and he could imagine a glow of health and well-being as the clear liquid was injected into his veins.

  Dr. Elena Gladstone injected the fluid slowly, pulled the plunger back out to dilute the fluid with Lippincott's blood, then slowly injected the mixture back into his arm.

  "There you are," she said as she withdrew the needle. "Good for another two weeks."

  "You know, I just may outlive you," Lippincott said to the woman. He rolled down his sleeve, buttoned his cuff and put his jacket back on.

  "Maybe," she said.

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  He carefully buttoned all three buttons of his jacket. Elena Gladstone had nice breasts, he decided. Funny, he hadn't noticed before. And the swell of her hip and the long line of her thigh were something, well, they were something he could do something about. Without attempting to appear casual, he walke
d to his office door and locked it, once with the button lock, and twice by turning the key.

  When he turned back, Dr. Gladstone was smiling at him and she had a wide lovely mouth of beautiful teeth and a warm smile, and a man could do something with a smile like that and she seemed to sense it. She knew what he was thinking because she began to open her rust colored blouse, but before she could, Elmer Lippincott Sr. sped his eighty-year-old body across the room to her, lifted her roughly in his strong arms, and carried her to the blue suede leather couch in his office.

  Upstairs in Elmer Lippincott's bedroom, his wife Gloria stirred. She stretched languidly in her sleep, then slowly opened her eyes. She turned to her right, saw that her husband was not in bed, then checked the clock on the small marble table near her bed. She smiled and reached out her hand for a button on the table and pressed it.

  Twenty seconds later, a tall dark-haired man with light green eyes entered the bedroom through a side door. He was wearing a tee shirt and blue slacks.

  Gloria Lippincott looked at him with expectation.

  "Lock the doors," she said.

  He locked all the bedroom doors, and turned back to her.

  "I want an examination, Doctor," she said.

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  "That's why I'm here," said Dr. Jesse Beers with a broad smile.

  "An internal," Gloria Lippincott said.

  He nodded again.

  "As I said. That's why I'm here." As he walked toward her, he began opening his trousers.

  Back downstairs, Elmer Lippincott zipped up his trousers and put his jacket back on.

  "So that's how young you feel," Dr. Elena Gladstone said. "Mmmmmmimn."

  "Exactly," he said. "And I owe it all to clean living, good diet and . . ."

  "And a healthy dose of erotic juices from the Lifeline Laboratory," the redhead said. She stood up from the blue couch and smoothed her skirt around her hips.

  "I give my money away to every dipshit cause that anybody asks me to donate to," Lippincott said. "Your lab's the first one that ever did me any good."

  "Our pleasure," she said.

  The intercom buzzer rang on the phone on Lippincott's desk, and he walked quickly over to the receiver.

  "Yes," he said.