Bottom Line td-37

by Warren Murphy

  "I'm looking for him too," Ruby said.

  "He owe you money too?" asked Ernie.

  "No, but I've got some money for him."

  Ernie looked up from his beer glass filled with red wine. "Yeah?" He seemed suddenly interested. "How much?"

  "I don't actually have it on me. But it's five hundred dollars," Ruby said. "I've got to bring him to my boss to get it."

  "Five hundred, huh? That's enough."

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  "Enough for what?" "For him to pay up."

  "So you got any idea where I can find him?" Ruby asked.

  "If I knew, I woulda found him myself," said Ernie.

  "You know anybody who was his friend?" "Naaah, he got no friends." Ernie sipped his wine. "Wait a minute. Up on Twenty-second Street, there's . . ." He paused. "You find him, you see that I get three hundred out of that five hundred?" "You got it," Ruby said. "When I find him, I'll take him to my boss for the money, then I'll personally drive him back here."

  "All right. I guess I gotta trust you. There's this broad named Flossie. She hangs out on Twenty-second between Eighth and Ninth. In the saloons there. She used to be a hooker. Maybe she still is. Meadows hangs around with her. I think he lives with her sometimes." "Flossie?"

  "Yeah. You see her, you know her. She's like five hundred pounds. Watch out she don't sit on you."

  "Thanks, Ernie," Ruby said. "When I find him, I'll bring him back here."

  When Ruby went outside, a New York City tow truck operator was attaching a chain to the bumper of her white Lincoln Continental.

  "Hey, hold on," she yelled. "That's my car." The driver was a fat black man with a slicked-down hairdo that made him look hike a 1930s opening act at the Cotton Club.

  "Illegally parked, honey," he said.

  "How? Where?" Ruby said. "Where's the sign?"

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  "Down there." The driver pointed vaguely down the block. When Ruby strained her eyes, she was able to see some sort of sign on a utility pole.

  "What's that sign got to do with up here?" she said.

  "I ain't in charge of signs," the driver said. "I just tow away the cars." • "What's this gonna cost me?" she asked.

  "Seventy five dollars. Twenty five for the ticket. Fifty for the tow."

  "Let's try coexisting," Ruby said. "I'll give you fifty now, and you let the car down."

  The driver winked at her. "You give me eighty now and I'll let you down."

  "You know," Ruby said, "it ain't just that you're a turkey, you be greedy too."

  "Ninety," the driver said.

  "And you're ugly, to boot," Ruby said.

  "Up to a hundred," the driver said. He bent under Ruby's bumper to fasten the chain.

  Ruby walked to the front of the tow truck. She let the air out of the front left tire, then out of the right front tire. The heavy truck settled down onto its rims.

  The driver heard the hiss and came to the front of his truck, just as a cab was stopping to pick up Ruby.

  "Hey, you," the driver called. "What'm I gonna do now?"

  "Call a tow truck," Ruby said. "And then when I got your ass in front of the license board next week, you better call youself a lawyer." She looked to the cab driver. "Twenty-second Street," she said.

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Randall Lippincott was whistling when he got back to his office at 2:15 p.m., an act so abnormal that his two secretaries looked at each other in disbelief.

  "The next thing you know, he'll do a dance on the desk," one of the secretaries said.

  "Yeah, and I'll be elected the new Pope," said Janie, the senior of the two secretaries by six months.

  Being elected Pope might not have been as big a surprise for Janie as what happened when she answered the buzzer and walked into Lippincott's office at 2:30.

  The banker had loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar. He was still whistling.

  "Are you all right, sir?" she asked.

  "Never better. Feel like a new man," he said. "Send out and get me a bottle of beer, will you? That's a good girl."

  At 2:50, Lippincott was not so sure that he was feeling all that well. He took off his jacket and his tie. At 2:55, his shirt went and when Janie came back in with the beer, he was sitting behind his desk in a tee shirt. She almost dropped the beer when she sawihim.

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  He ignored her surprise and stood up to kick off his shoes. "I hate clothes," he said. "Just hate them. That my beer? Good."

  He drank from the can, then put it on the desk, and peeled off his tee shirt.

  The secretary noticed that his skin was pale with reddish blotches, the kind of skin she would have expected an out-of-shape, overweight, forty-five-year-old to have.

  She stood fascinated, watching, unmoving, but when Lippincott opened his belt and began to unzip his trouser fly, she turned and walked quickly from the office.

  At her desk, she consulted her appointment book and had a problem. A vice president of Chase Manhattan bank was due for a meeting at 3:15. How could she make sure that her boss was wearing clothes for the meeting?

  She thought about it until 3:10, then took a deep breath, summoned up her courage and walked back into his office. She stopped in disbelief inside the door. Lippincott was lying on the couch, naked, squirming as if the smooth polished fabric of the sofa irritated his skin.

  He saw her in the doorway.

  "Hi," he said with a wave. "Come on in."

  She stood resolutely still, averting her eyes. "Mr. Lippincott, you've got a meeting with Chase Manhattan in five minutes."

  "Good. I'm here."

  "Err, I don't think you can hold that meeting without clothes, Mr. Lippincott."

  He looked down at his naked body as if noticing it for the first time. "Suppose you're right," he said.

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  "God, I hate clothes. Maybe I could wear a sheet. Tell them I just came from a toga party. Think that'll work? Can you find me a sheet?"

  He looked at her hopefully. She shook her head no. He sighed in resignation.

  "No, I suppose you're right. Okay. I'll get dressed."

  When the man from Chase Manhattan arrived a few minutes later, she called Lippincott from the outside office and asked him pointedly, "Are you ready for the meeting, sir?"

  "Of course," he said. "Oh. Oh. I see. You mean, do I have my clothes on? Sure, I do. Send him in."

  The secretary escorted the guest inside.

  Lippincott was sitting behind his desk. He was in his shirt sleeves and not wearing a tie. Normally over-polite, this time Lippincott did not rise to greet his guest, but merely waved him to a chair. With a sinking horror, Janie glanced over to a corner of the office. On the floor there, she saw Lippincott's jacket and tie, his tee shirt and undershorts, his shoes and socks. He was sitting behind his desk wearing only shirt and trousers. In bare feet. She wanted to scream.

  "Will there be anything else, sir?" she forced herself to ask.

  "No, no, Janie. Everything's okay," Lippincott said. As she left the office, he called after her. "Don't go home without talking to me first," he said.

  The meeting lasted for two hours, because there was a shopping list of business to be concluded between the two banking empires. The man from Chase Manhattan knew he had to ignore the way the usually-impeccable Lippincott was dressed and re-

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  mind himself he was in a cage with a financial tiger.

  But he soon realized that on this day Lippincott was a toothless tiger. He seemed agreeable to anything Chase Manhattan wanted.

  "Would you steer me wrong?" he kept asking, with an insouciant smile and the man, who would steer his mother into crystal radio stocks, was forced to shake his head. "No, no. Not me." It was like taking candy from a baby.

  Randall Lippincott kept checking his watch, which he had taken off and placed in front of him on his brown desk blotter. He rubbed his bare wrist as if the feeling of the watch pained him.

  The man from Chase Manhatta
n left.

  In the outer office, Janie Wanamaker had been sitting quietly since 4:30, ready to leave. The other secretary had already gone for the night with a look of compassionate condolence at the one who had to stay. Janie fixed her lipstick for the fourth time and her eye shadow for the third.

  It wasn't like Randall Lippincott to work late or to ask his secretary to work late. In fact, he was so undemanding on his secretaries that Janie had thought she had been hired for her bustline or her long legs, but when six months had gone by without Lippin-cott's making a pass at her, she decided she was wrong.

  As the man from Chase Manhattan left, he told Janie: "Mr. Lippincott wants to see you now."

  She went inside fearing the worst. Perhaps he had stripped naked again. There was his brother's suicide in Tokyo. Maybe the Lippincotts had a streak of family insanity running through all of them that manifested itself all at once in midlif e.

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  But Lippincott was still sitting behind his desk hi his shirt sleeves.

  He smiled at Janie when she came in and the smile was so broad that she tilted a little more toward the insanity theory.

  "Janie," Lippincott said, then paused. "I don't quite know how to say this."

  Janie didn't quite know how to respond so she waited silently for Lippincott to continue.

  "Errr," he said, "are you doing anything tonight? Before you say anything, I just want you to know that I'm not making a pass or anything but I just feel like going out and I'd like somebody to go out with."

  He looked at her hopefully.

  "Well, I . . ."

  "Anyplace you'd like to go," he said. "Dinner. Dancing. Disco duck dancing, is that what they call it? That's where I'd like to go."

  The truth was that Janie Wanamaker had no date that night and an evening out with Randall Lippincott didn't sound half bad.

  "Well, I . . ." she started again.

  "Good," he said. "What place would you like to go?"

  She thought immediately of the latest New York in disco, a place whose management was so rude that its attraction for New Yorkers was total. Each night, the disco attracted hundreds more people than it could hold, but there were some reservations that they had to honor. Randall Lippincott was one.

  "I'll go out to my desk and make reservations," Janie said. "Meanwhile, perhaps you can get your clothes on?" she asked hopefully. She telephoned and felt the exhilarating glow of

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  power as she made reservations for Randall Lippin-cott and Miss Janie Wanamaker. Six times she had stood outside that same disco on cold nights hoping to be chosen for admittance and six times she had been ignored. Tonight would.be different. Tonight was her turn to be haughty and patronizing.

  She waited in her office. Lippincott came out five minutes later, fully-dressed but with his tie still loose around his neck and looking uncomfortable, wearing his shirt and jacket again.

  They ate dinner at a restaurant near the bank and Lippincott itched all through the meal, even as he told her of his ambition to go to a South Seas island and live like a native, walking the beaches and eating clams. ;

  "A life-long dream?" Janie asked.

  "No. Actually, it just came on me this afternoon," Lippincott said. "But some things are so right that you don't bother to question them, no matter when they come."

  She was glad he hadn't asked her to feed him at her apartment. Like all singl&New York women, her apartment was a mess and to get it ready for a dinner guest she would have had to take ten days off from her job.

  They lingered a long time over drinks. Randall Lippincott, she decided, was a nice and gentle man and she had the feeling that if it had not been for the backing of the rest of his family, he was too soft a man to have become a multi-millionaire on his own. His character, like his face and body, seemed to have no bone in it, no central core of hardness that Janie felt acquiring riches required.

  But she found him charming in a silly kind of way.

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  He talked about the small pleasures of life, walking on the sand, swimming naked on a private beach near Hawaii, running through the woods after his prize pair of Gordon Setters, looking at planets through a high-powered telescope. The high point of his life seemed to have been riding over the Los Angeles Coliseum in the Goodyear Blimp.

  After many drinks and four cups of coffee, they were ready to leave and Lippincott seemed calmly looking forward to the evening. Despite the disparity in their ages, Janie began to wonder if perhaps Randall Lippincott was on the verge of busting up his marriage, and suppose he were, and even though she was just his secretary, who knew what could happen? Stranger things had happened. She resolved that if he wanted to spend the night at her apartment, she would allow it. She would make him wait in the hallway for ten minutes under some sort of pretext, while she raced around inside putting the piles into piles.

  It was after nine o'clock when they got to the disco. Lippincott had taken his tie off in the cab and gave it to the driver. Already a crowd of twenty persons stood around outside the building, hoping that tonight they would be among the anointed ones allowed in.

  Janie led Lippincott from the taxicab to the man guarding the door. His look was surly, the kind of look favored by the incompetent given power over the inconsequential.

  "Mr. Lippincott and Miss Wanamaker," said Janie officiously. The door guard looked past her, saw and recognized Lippincott, and his face changed into an unaccustomed smile.

  "Of course," he said. "Go right in."

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  Janie smiled and took Lippincott's arm. Who knows, she thought. Millionaires had married their /¦ secretaries before. Who was to say it couldn't happen again?

  Inside, the lights were pulsating in time with the incessant 120 beats a minute of the recorded music. Couples crowded the small dance floor. They wore sequins, see-through plastic, opaque plastic, leather, furs, and feathers.

  Lippincott looked around in surprise. "So this is what it's like," he said.

  Janie felt a sense of satisfaction as she took his hand and was able to say "Yes. It's this way all the time."

  They followed a waiter to a table and gave him an order for drinks.

  Lippincott was thumping his hands heavily on the small round table. Suddenly he stood and took off his jacket. He sat back down in shirt sleeves. Janie didn't mind at all, even though if some other escort had done it, she would have been mortified. No one was about to tell Randall Lippincott to leave because he wasn't dressed right.

  She looked around the place while Lippincott, with a spoon, happily banged out the rhythm on the side of a water glass. She saw two movie stars, a famous rock singer, and a well-known literary figure who had given up writing for talking on television shows.

  Her night was made. She would have talking rights on this evening with her friends for years to come.

  "Can't stand these clothes," Lippincott said. "Come on, want to dance?"

  "Do you know how?" Janie asked. It would be

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  awful to be embarrassed in front of all these people. Then she had another thought. How could someone be embarrassed by dancing with Randall Lippincott? No matter how badly he danced?

  "No, but it looks easy," Lippincott said. He reached out for her hand and led her to the floor, just as the waiter arrived with their drinks.

  On the floor, Janie slipped easily into the hip-swaying solo steps of her dance. Randall Lippincott was just as bad as she thought he would be. Perhaps even worse. He lumbered about the floor, waving his arms inconsequentially, and not even making a pretense of stomping in time to the music.

  But he was laughing aloud, having a good time, and seemed uncaring of the eyes watching him. Every time he saw someone doing a step or a routine he liked, he tried it, and after only a few moments, Janie stopped being self-conscious about dancing with him and laughingly joined in his spirit of good fun.

  Perhaps it was the first time in his life that Randall Lippincott had ever laughed, she thought.
Really laughed.

  It was certainly the last.

  Three minutes into the dance, puffing and laughing, Lippincott had unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it onto an empty chair.

  His tee shirt followed a minute later and then, as if the dam of inhibitions had finally surrendered, he sat on the floor to take off his trousers, his shoes and his socks. People by now had stopped to watch. Waiters were hovering at the edge of the floor, helplessly wondering what to do.

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  He tossed all his clothes toward a chair. Most of them landed on the floor. "Please, Mr. Lippincott," Janie said. But he did not hear her. His eyes were closed as he galumphed up and down, back and forth, wearing only his boxer shorts, and then, as the record played of a disco singer doing the only hit song ever written about a cake in the rain, he hooked his thumbs into the elastic waistband of his shorts and shimmied them off.

  Janie Wanamaker was horrified. It took another full minute for the staff to realize they should do something, and just as they came up to wrap a table cloth around Randall Lippincott's naked body, all the happy intensity seemed to ooze from him and he sat down on the floor shivering, trying to squirm out from under the. table cloth, and crying. Large tears.

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  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the private East Side clinic to which Randall Lippincott had been taken, his doctor patted the man gently on the arm. Lippincott was lying in a bed, Ms arms locked down by restraint cuffs.

  "How's my little naked disco dancer?" the doctor asked.

  Lippincott was calm now and he looked up hopefully at his doctor who said, "Don't worry about a thing, Randall. Everything's going to be all right."

  The doctor searched through a medical bag for a few moments, withdrawing a syringe and a vial of yellow liquid. The syringe was quickly filled and the doctor inserted it into the vein inside Lippincott's left elbow.

  He winced at the small pinch of pain. The doctor withdrew the needle, and even though it was a disposable syringe, dropped it back into the medical bag.

  The doctor patted his forehead. "Everything's going to be all right," she said, then Dr. Elena Gladstone snapped shut her medical bag and walked to the door. Lippincott's worried eyes followed her.

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