Nothing Ventured

by Roderick Price

  “You are so bad. I had no idea you would talk dirty to a man like that.”

  “Well, I never had. I never cheated on Martin, either. After my final session, Todd and I were friends and we would chat from time to time, but we just kept it friendly. He even called me at home and asked me if I wanted to go out for lunch. Basically, I just told him that I thought that we had had some fun together, but I just couldn’t spend any more time with him or I would give in to my desires, and I wasn’t about to sleep with him when I was still married to Martin.”

  “But he called you at home.”

  “Well, he had called before, just to schedule workout times and stuff, so it wasn’t like he had to go dig out my number. But this was a couple of weeks after we stopped our training sessions, and I could tell he was pretty disappointed because he thought we were going to get together. Trust me, I was disappointed, too. Anyway, a couple of months later, I told Martin that “getting by wasn’t good enough any longer.” Todd didn’t have anything to do with us separating, but he did get me thinking about a lot of things.”

  “I know what you mean about thinking about things. Once I got thinking about not being married, it wasn’t very long before I got divorced.”

  “Well, I’ve got to go. I’ve still got to get one of the kid’s glasses fixed or I’ll be crucified at dinner for being a terrible Mom.”

  “Liz, it was really good talking to you. I also think your racquetball game is improving. I know how much you hate to lose, and that makes it even more fun for me.”

  “It’s not quite so bad losing on a closed court. Next time, we’ll play tennis and you can get some public humiliation from me.”

  “Sounds like a date. Take care.”

  CHAPTER 30

  It was only a twenty-minute drive back to Deep Lake Lodge. Larry was feeling pretty good about his day’s work. He decided to take the long way back, driving down Highway H south for almost ten miles to Delta, and then coming back up to Highway 2 on the backroads. It was another gray and dreary December day, and the cold drizzle on the windshield was slowly turning to slush as it collected around the wipers. Inside the car, though, it was warm and dry. Country 101 from Superior playing in the background. Larry was almost finished up. The only problem had been Melvin Baker, but there was always one. Newspaper article had read “Elderly Man Dies in Fire.” That had been the end of it.

  Larry found himself looking back. He and Hilton Sinclair had been friends for a long time. Well, they weren’t friends, but they had known each other and worked together off and on for a very long time. They had made some money together, and Hilton had bailed Larry out a

  few times when money got tight. Back in the early seventies, Hilton had run a startup exploration and production company. Oil had gone from about five dollars a barrel to thirty-five dollars, and every square inch of Texas and Louisiana was being leased up for oil drilling. Larry had started off as a landman with what used to be Gulf Oil before they were bought up by Chevron. It had taken him a couple of years to learn the ropes and know the right people before he had gone out on his own, kind of a “freelancer,” he had told people. Hilton’s company had focused a lot of their expertise around the Austin Chalk area, and Larry had gone to high school in Belleville of all places, basically right in the middle of The Chalk, as they called it. Larry had been scouting on his own and taking some of the prime tracts under lease in his own name when Hilton called him for the first time and wanted to have a meeting. They had started off at nine in the evening at one of the urban cowboy kind of bars and ended up closing down Allstar’s, one of finer gentlemen’s exotic entertainment establishments, also known as a strip joint.

  Larry found himself smiling now as he reached Delta and turned north for the drive back. The Delta Lodge, Store and Restaurant had burned down about seven or eight years ago and now there wasn’t even a building left standing, but there was still a sign that read, “Delta” and then underneath in real small letters: “Unincorporated.”

  That had been one helluva night. After they had been to the strip club for about fifteen minutes, Larry discovered that Hilton knew most of the girls, and Larry was asked at one point which one he liked the best. After some serious discussion, he and Hilton had agreed that the tall, leggy blond dancing over on one of the side stages was definitely one of the choicest women they had ever seen, although they were concerned that she might die at any moment from silicone poisoning. At the end of the dance, Hilton had gone over and talked to her and brought her back to the table. Before he knew it, Hilton had given her a thousand dollars and told her that her job was to keep Larry happy for the night. Hilton looked Larry straight in the eye and just explained that it was a business expense. And that was just his first meeting with Hilton. There was an oil boom down in Texas and money was flowing. About that same time, Larry was invited to Hilton’s annual “fishing trip” over in Destin. Hilton would fly in eight or ten of his best business associates from the last year, and then eight or ten “hostesses” from the strip clubs in Houston. They would all go out on the Gulf fishing for the weekend on a chartered yacht. Needless to say, fishing wasn’t the only recreational activity on the agenda. Years later, people would come up to Larry and ask him in quiet admiration what the “fishing trips” were like.

  Through it all, Hilton just seemed to get richer and richer. While Larry made some good money, he was always just the hired man. Even though Hilton always paid him the going rate for his time and took care of him, he never offered Larry equity in any of the deals and he never asked Larry’s advice on anything. He would just call him up, tell him what he needed and expect him to go do it. Sinclair was such a pretty boy, had everybody else do his dirty work for him. At first it was just getting leases almost anywhere he could in Austin Chalk. That had been pretty easy for Larry because he knew the area and many of the people. Once in a while, Hilton would ask Larry to put the lease in Hilton’s name, not the company’s name, and even though Larry knew it was trouble, he did it anyway. Things were moving so fast, in those days some of the investors didn’t even care if you were holding a little back for yourself, if that’s what it took to keep the money flowing in. There had been a few areas where they had made some pretty good oil discoveries and Hilton had really put the heat on him to pressure some reluctant landowners into signing up. Larry had grown up rough and tumble. After Vietnam, violence never meant much to him one way or another. It was just something people did when they wanted something that somebody else had, usually a woman or money, or in the case of Vietnam, some real estate. Larry had learned long ago that most of the time when you scare someone, or threaten to hurt them, they generally do what you want them to do.

  Fifteen years ago, there had been a new discovery south of Bastrop. Hilton had somehow found out that one of the other independent landmen had already signed up five big landowners on his own. Hilton had asked Larry to “go over and talk to the guy about it.” A couple of days later, the landman had signed over the leases to Hilton. Hilton was the type of man who would do anything to get something he wanted. Larry hadn’t even had to show a gun to the guy. He just followed the guy and waited outside a bar by the guy’s car. It was after midnight when the guy came out of the bar. Larry got him in a choke hold up against the car and he just told the guy he really needed to get those leases because he was concerned the guy or someone in his family might be in “an accident or something.” He told the guy to think it over and left him his phone number. The next afternoon the guy called him up matter-of-factly and told him he had some leases he wasn’t going to pursue and offered to sign them over. Hilton gave the guy ten thousand dollars in cash and gave Larry twenty-five thousand dollars for roughing the guy up. Then Hilton and his investors took more than two hundred thousand barrels off those leases over the next three years. Larry had done all the dirty work for them. And he got a pittance.

  That was a long time ago. In those days, there were almost five thousand drilling rigs running in the
US, and now there were only about six or seven hundred. Hilton’s exploration company had gone bust a long time ago too. Hilton wasn’t broke, but he had lost his big money. He had been divorced at least a couple of times too, so he had given away half of what he had left, a couple of times. Somehow Hilton had gotten into the trading business and seemed to be doing all right again. Hilton had been calling him, but Larry wasn’t picking up. If Larry pulled this off, if he had all the leases in his name, he was going to have to deal with Hilton and with Martin, too. Technically, Martin was the one who had hired him. One thing at a time, thought Larry. Things were coming along nicely. One thing at a time.

  CHAPTER 31

  Martin had called Taylor and set up his dinner in Chicago. Officially, at the office, he was headed for the Chicago API Conference. It was pretty common for geologists and geophysicists to go to these conferences, so it hadn’t attracted any attention when he said he was going to be gone a couple of days. Many of his co-workers, and Martin himself, had presented papers at these conferences. Martin had also been on work groups in the industry, trying to solve common problems like blowout prevention, protecting the integrity of surface water while drilling, and any number of subjects around advanced horizontal drilling and down-hole production technology. Today it cost half of what it did just ten years ago to find and produce a barrel of oil in the United States, and most of the industry was pretty proud of that. These improvements also had enabled the US to significantly ramp up domestic oil and gas production. Fifteen years ago, everybody was worried the Arabs were going to freeze them to death. Now nobody in Washington or New York seemed to care about secure energy supplies anymore. If their heater or air conditioner was running, and they had gasoline to put into their cars, who cared where it came from or what might happen five or ten years from now.

  As usual, the plane to Chicago was late. They weren’t circling ,either, they were still sitting on the ground in Houston because, of all things, a malfunctioning altimeter. They didn’t keep spares at Hobby Airport, so someone was driving the part down from Intercontinental. Even on a good day the drive could easily take an hour. They didn’t want to let everyone off the plane either, because if they pulled back up to the gate, they would lose their place in line in the landing queue in Chicago. So, there they sat, waiting for the part to show up. When they finally pulled up to the terminal in Chicago it was nearly 8:30 p.m. and the flight was originally scheduled to arrive at 6:00 p.m. Taylor answered on the first ring and basically said she was just worried that something had happened to him. She didn’t know what airline he was flying so she couldn’t check flight delays, and the weather had been perfect, so she couldn’t see why he would be so late. After they talked for a few minutes, she started to relax, and he felt a lot better that she was worried about his welfare, not angry for being late. He still had to pick up his bags and get a taxi; it would be nearly ten o’clock before he would arrive. Dinner reservations had long since passed at the restaurant. It seemed very awkward, but after reviewing their options and joking about the scandal of it all, he finally agreed to come to her room and she would order room service for them. Not the kind of elegant dinner he had been looking forward to with her. But the thought of going to Taylor’s room for dinner at ten in the evening was tantalizing.

  Like most big cities, the old Midway airport was actually pretty close to downtown, but it seemed like there were a thousand stoplights getting to the lake shore. Coming in over the city at night he had always marveled at its size and order. A light orange hue, a grid that stretched off into infinity, and that long row of tall office buildings and condominiums along Lake Michigan. Chicago had become a pretty popular place, especially when you considered that the Indians had first called the place shi-kaa-kwa, meaning skunk, or smelly, after the garlic plants that used to line the Chicago River two hundred years ago. Even though he couldn’t wait to see Taylor, he needed the time in the taxi to get his thoughts together. He kept running scenes through his head and became totally confused with what to say first. There was a time, when they were students back in Madison, that he thought he might marry Taylor. She was three years older than him. He would always study in the third floor “cages” in Memorial Library. They were actually research rooms surrounded by wire mesh, where students working on their doctorates could have a little privacy and lock up all of their stuff. One night in March, during mid-term exams, he had fallen asleep over his books and a woman had come in at midnight to gently awaken him and politely ask him to move to one of the first two floors which were open all night. At the time, he was taking nineteen credits and working twenty-four hours a week for a local engineering company. He was always tired. He hadn’t actually seen her on that night. By the time he could wake up and get focused, she had gone, but her smell—her wonderful smell—still hung over the small little room. It wasn’t perfume either, it was her. It was the outdoors, and leather, and the smell of a woman’s hair. About a week later, in the same cage, at the same time, he had fallen asleep again. This time Taylor came over behind him and gently placed her hand on his shoulder to wake him up.

  “Hey big guy,” she had said quietly, “might be time to head home.” She kept her hand on his shoulder as he stirred, and when he turned, her face was close to his, smiling quietly. He smiled back sleepily. “Two nights in a row. I think you need some sleep.”

  That smell again from last night. She worked at the library and was a student, too. He had seen her downstairs back in the card section, filing books or setting up microfiche or doing something over a typewriter. Apparently, one of her jobs was also to go through the library at closing time and make sure they got everybody out before locking up. On most Saturdays, Martin’s routine was to get breakfast at McDonald’s shortly before the library opened up, and then stay until six in the evening when it would shut down.

  “Sorry,” said Martin. “Pretty pathetic when I’m dozing off at 6:00 p.m.”

  Saturdays were always one of the heaviest student study days. A few years ago, they added a wealthy woman on the University Board of Regents. Her husband had passed away at a fairly young age after making a fortune in manufacturing plumbing supplies. After he died, she had gone off the deep end on religion. She had determined that since college kids weren’t going to church, they needed to close the libraries at 6:00 p.m. on Saturdays. So many kids had bitched about the library closing, that The Cardinal had run a story on it back in those days. It was a big profile piece on this wealthy woman, making her out to be a clueless, wealthy old capitalist who was trying to control the masses. In this case, they had been mostly right.

  The young woman standing over him—Martin still didn’t know her name—almost always worked on Saturdays. He hadn’t seen her on campus, so he didn’t know if she was a student doing work study or was simply an employee at the library. He’d also seen her riding a British ten-speed down State Street from the Capitol, so she must either live off Langdon, or East Johnson or maybe Mifflin.

  Martin packed up his stuff and headed outside. But instead of heading directly for his place, he hustled over to McDonald’s, got two small coffees, and hustled back to the bike rack. He wasn’t sure which one was her bike, or even if it was there, but when he got back, she was just getting it unlocked from the rack. Carefully he had handed her the coffee and thanked her for waking him the last two nights. Mid-terms were almost over. Turned out she was a second-year law student, the last thing he had imagined. They sat closely together on a small bench overlooking Lake Mendota to the north. That was a little over twenty years ago.

  Now Martin was nearing the hotel. He did have real business to discuss. It wouldn’t take long. If he didn’t bring it up right away, he might not get another chance. If he started to discuss it and she thought he was crazy, it would ruin the entire evening, and he did not want to ruin the evening. He collected his things and paid the fare. He had booked a room across the street at the Swiss Hotel. From his work back at Amoco he had learned it had a much bigger
fitness center, on the top floor of all things, overlooking the lake. It was awkward for him to skirt past the valet, and the doorman and the bellboys who all politely reached for his bags or asked for a room number as if he were checking in. Martin simply replied that he was “just stopping to see a friend.” He was sure that was not exactly believable at ten thirty in the evening. Bird’s eye maple paneling in the elevators—that might be new from the last time he had stayed here at The Fairmont. She was all the way at the end of the hall. The API rarely paid their speakers, but they got a lot of funding from the big oil companies and they flew you first class to the conference and got you a really nice room. As Martin tapped firmly on the door, he knew not what lay ahead, but he did know that if his plan were to work, he needed the full cooperation and the complete confidence of Taylor N. Thompson.

  CHAPTER 32

  It was Tuesday, and last Friday Hilton had said he might call for lunch, so Anita had set her alarm a half hour early to give her plenty of time to get ready. There was nothing like an extra hot shower and a slow leg shaving to get her in the right frame of mind. She had already gotten one of the other secretaries to cover her for a long lunch today, just assuming he did call. She told the girl if she hadn’t shaken her yeast infection, she was going to have to go see the doctor—a convenient fabrication. That way if he did call, she could easily take a couple of hours, or even the rest of the day. If he didn’t call, Anita would just eat in the office and tell the woman that things seemed to be clearing up.

  Somehow, if she knew in advance they might get together, she could go for days without hardly eating a thing. She wasn’t getting any younger and she needed every advantage. Besides, at the Oil Baron’s Ball, she had seen that Hilton’s wife was putting on a few pounds—maybe more. That wouldn’t do for Hilton, or any other man she had ever known. Most of them were smart enough to never say anything to a woman about her weight, but she had been at a few too many happy hours where the boys would joke about “wide-bodies.” The men could be roly-poly little bastards themselves, and still bitch that their wife just didn’t look like a twenty-one-year-old anymore.