The Stallion (1996) (11 page)

“Loren, that car Perino is developing is a piece of shit. It’s gonna look like a fuckin’ strawberry box. It’s gonna look like a Model A. Maybe it’ll run okay; I keep reading about how good the Jap engines are. But it won’t sell because it won’t have a modern look. Remember this—you can’t buy a Studebaker or a Packard or a Hudson anymore, but you can buy a
Sundancer.
That’s because I’ve always kept some of the smart young boys in line. I was building cars before Periao’s
father
was born.

“Roberta, you make sure Loren keeps his backbone stiff. I know you keep his other bone stiff, but I’m talking about his backbone.

“Betsy, I have something to say to you, but I want to say it in private. You give the nurse fifteen minutes to get me into bed, then come up. I want to talk to you.”

Loren watched the nurse wheel Number One out of the room, then turned and spoke to Betsy. “He’s gonna give you shit.”

Betsy reached for the brandy. “Maybe not.

Number One sat propped up against four big pillows. He wore blue-and-white striped flannel pajamas. Betsy could see now why he wore the panama hat. Only a sparse fringe of white hair circled his liver-spotted pate, which made him look older and frailer even than his hundred years.

Her short white tennis skirt and her tennis shoes were entirely out of place in what was conspicuously the old man’s deathbed room. But she squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath and planted her hands on her hips.

Number One pointed at a machine that sat on a table beside his television set. “You think you can make that thing run?” he asked.

Betsy looked at the machine. She had seen two or three of them before. It was a machine that could tape television shows and play them back. She studied the controls for a moment, then said she thought she could run it.

“Good. Pull that big dictionary out of the shelf over there.”

She did. Behind the dictionary was a tape cartridge.

“Play it,” he said.

She mounted the cartridge on the spindles on top of the big, heavy machine and shoved forward the switch marked
PLAY
.

A picture appeared on the television screen. It was of an empty bed. Voices began to sound—

“Goddamnit, you shouldn’t have come here! You
know
you shouldn’t have come here.” Angelo’s voice.

“Why not? The old fart’s asleep. My father is sleeping one off. So’s Roberta. Anyway, I
want
you. You can’t believe how much I want you.” Her own voice.

They came into the view of the camera, she busily pulling off her clothes. The light was dim, and the focus was not precise, but no one could have doubted who they were and what they were doing. She threw herself on the bed and spread her legs. Angelo pulled down his slingshot underpants but did not take off his white T-shirt and he mounted her.

“Four years ago, that was. I’ve watched the tape a good many times,” muttered Number One. “You are a true slut, Betsy! I wish I’d known you fifty years ago.”

“Was Sally any better?” she asked.

“Sally—your grandmother—was a lady.”

“And you were a gentleman…”

The old man shook his head and grimaced. “Angelo Perino,” he grumbled.

“You and I are perfect together,” whispered Betsy’s image on the screen—whispered hoarsely enough for a hidden microphone to capture. She drank brandy and handed the snifter to Angelo. “There’s got to be more to it than this—more, I mean, than sneaking a night in this house. Oh, God! Leave her, Angelo! Give her a nice settlement and come to me.”

“The best is yet to come,” Number One interjected.

It was. After another minute or so of urgent, whispered conversation, Angelo rose on his hands and knees and presented his backside. Betsy buried her face in it and—though the camera had seen only the back of her head—it was obvious enough that her tongue was as deep in his anus as she could push it. Their grunts were further evidence of what she was doing.

“you can turn it off. That was the most interesting part. I do wish I’d known a woman of your ilk even forty years ago. No woman ever did that for me.”

“I can’t
believe
—”

“Would you like to see your father with Roberta?” asked Number One. “Would you like to see her tan his backside with his belt? She puts welts on his ass. Would you like to hear him tell her how great it is and beg for more? Surely
you don’t believe, child, that I would allow people to plot and scheme and fuck and lick ass in my house and not make a record of it? Is that like me? How do you think I managed to live a hundred fuckin’ years and fuck every son of a bitch that—”

“I was going to call you an evil old man,” said Betsy. “You were evil before you became an old man. When did you become evil, Great-grandfather? Was it when you fucked my grandfather’s wife and fathered Anne? Or earlier?”

Number One smiled and shook his head. “I’ve fathered a brood, haven’t I? My son was a fairy and killed himself. My grandson … well, there’s hope for him. At least he’s devious and has the capacity to hate.”

“Why did you show me this?” she asked, nodding toward the tape machine.

“It will be handy as evidence against you if you try to break the new will my lawyers are drafting—which I’ll sign before the week is over. You’ve been calling your son Number Four. Dream on, you little slut. Your son will never so much as
share
in the control of Bethlehem Motors. I’m leaving everything I own to a trust. You and Anne will be trustees, but you’ll be outvoted by Loren and my other trustees.”

“You’ll have to fight Roberta.”

“I’ve made a deal with Roberta. I’ve already put a big chunk of cash in trust for her, and I’m getting rid of her. She manipulates Loren like a puppet master, and she’s gonna tell him he needs an heir and she can’t give him one. As soon as she can find the right girl for the purpose, she will divorce Loren, let him marry the girl, get her pregnant, and produce the
real
Number Four, who will be a Hardeman. When that happens, the trust pays out the money to Roberta.”

“Have it all figured out, don’t you, you old piece of shit?”

Number One grinned. “I take note that you begged Angelo four years ago to leave his wife and come to you. Since then he’s fathered two more children by her.”

“Got it all figured out…”

“I think so. The lawyers will be here with the new documents before the week is over.”

“You overlooked something, Great-grandfather,” said Betsy.

“Did I? What?”

“Me,” she said.

She jerked one of the pillows from under his head and jammed it down on his face. He struggled, but he was a weak hundred-year-old man, and she was twenty-six and strong enough to have played three sets of tennis that afternoon without getting winded.

Something good happened—good for her. She felt him stiffen and guessed he was having a coronary. Maybe he wouldn’t die of the pillow denying him breath. Maybe … She held the pillow in place, just the same, for five minutes. When she removed it, he was turning blue, and his eyes were staring lifelessly at the ceiling. To be certain he was gone, she sat beside him for another ten minutes, holding the pillow gently over his face so as not to bruise him.

She removed the tape cartridge from the VCR and wiped her fingerprints from the control switches.

He had not made this tape himself. Someone in the house, or someone elsewhere, had done it for him. It would not do for investigators to find missing only the tape showing her with Angelo. She began to move books. Sure enough, she found half a dozen more tape cartridges. She would have liked to see if one really showed Roberta beating her father’s naked ass, but she could not stay here and play tapes, and she could not risk keeping them.

She stepped onto the balcony outside Number One’s bedroom. The house was silent and mostly dark. She stood for a while, watching to see if anyone was outside. Detecting no one, she tossed all the tapes onto the lawn.

Outside, a few minutes later, she gathered them up. She walked to the edge of the beach. Then, inspired, she took off her tennis dress and panties and walked onto the sand stark naked, clutching the tape cartridges. If anyone saw her and wondered why she was moving so furtively, the explanation would be that she had decided to take a walk, nude, on the beach.

If she couldn’t find the remains of a fire, she would sit down and pull all the tape out of the cartridges. Then she would tear it to bits and scatter the bits in the surf.

But a hundred yards south she found what she had hoped she might find: the final glowing coals of someone’s fire. At the edge of the tide there were bits of driftwood, and palm frond. She gathered a little fuel. Keeping the fire low, she pulled the tape out of the cartridges—her own first—and laid it on the flames. The tape burned quickly, with a little more flare than she would have liked. When she had burned all the tapes, she let the heat melt the cartridges. She covered the melted mess with sand to cool it, and after a few minutes carried it out into the surf. She cast it out as far as she could, walked out of the water, and started back toward the house.

No one screamed. When she came downstairs in the morning, Roberta intercepted her before she reached the lanai and told her Number One had died in the night of a massive coronary.

“Well, he made his hundred years,” Betsy remarked. She had nothing more to say.

It was noon before the formalities were concluded. Even so, word had gone out over all the wires: Loren Hardeman the First was dead.

A telegram arrived from New York—

SHOCKED AND DISTRESSED TO LEARN OF DEATH OF LOREN HARDEMAN I. MY PERSONAL SYMPATHY TO ALL MEMBERS OF HIS FAMILY AND ALL HIS MANY FRIENDS, AMONG WHICH I INCLUDE MYSELF. HE WAS A GIANT OF THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY, WHICH WILL NEVER BE THE SAME WITHOUT HIM.

ANGELO PERINO

Amanda Finch, who had painted her nude, drove Cindy down the sloping main street of Greenwich, Connecticut.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve kind of fallen in love with this town,” she said. “There are a lot of artistic people here. Some celebrities. Sports figures. Entertainment people. The town is laid-back, easy to get along in. I think you’d like it, too.”

Cindy had decided she and Angelo had to move out of New York. They loved their Manhattan apartment, but they agreed it was not where they wanted to raise their children. Little John was five years old now and needed more of the outdoors than walks in the city’s parks. Anna was three and restless. Morris was a loud and active toddler who showed signs that he would soon resent the confined space of an apartment. Cindy had looked at homes in Westchester County and in New Jersey. This was her first venture into Connecticut.

“You can buy anything here, from an apartment to a town house to a little frame house on a quarter of an acre to a million-dollar-and-up estate,” said Amanda.

She herself was living in a penthouse apartment atop a
five-story brick building situated on a shady street of Edwardian buildings. She drove Cindy there, and they went up in the elevator. The main room of the apartment was a greenhouse on the roof of the building. That served as Amanda’s studio. Besides that, there were two bedrooms, one of which she used as her living room, a kitchenette, and a bath. She started a pot of coffee and led Cindy into the studio and offered her a seat on a couch.

With a glass roof and glass walls on its east, north, and south, the studio afforded an artist ideal light. Amanda had installed sheer curtains on the east wall to prevent people in the taller building across the street from having a view of her models posing. From the other sides, no one could see in. Through the windows that faced south she had a view of Long Island Sound and the north shore of Long Island. The studio was cluttered with easels, palettes, brushes, boxes of squeezed tubes, cans of rags, magazines, newspapers, empty pizza boxes, and burger cartons.

Amanda offered herself to be kissed, and Cindy kissed her. “I do wish you’d move here, Cindy. I really do.”

Cindy stood and looked at the unfinished painting on the easel: an adolescent male nude in Amanda’s unsparingly realistic style.

“That’s Greg. He’ll be here any minute. He’s a student at Greenwich High School, and as soon as school’s out—”

“He looks awfully young,” said Cindy.

“He’s sixteen. His parents gave me written consent to paint him. His mother sometimes comes with him and sits here while I work. She prefers that he make his spending money as a model rather than by delivering newspapers or bagging groceries. He won’t pose for classes, though, and I doubt I want to do more than two or three pictures of him.”

Amanda moved behind Cindy, put her arms around her, and caressed her breasts. “If you lived here, you could model for me again. I could change your face a little, so no one would recognize you.”

The gallery had sold six more nudes that Amanda had done of herself. At the moment she was the world’s most famous artist’s model, more famous as a model than she was as an artist. A huge mirror stood on a big wooden easel in a corner of the studio.

“I’m not sure I want to take my clothes off in front of you again,” said Cindy. “You’re horny enough as it is.”

Amanda kissed the back of Cindy’s neck. “I love you,” she said simply.

They talked this way to each other, but Cindy was sure that Amanda didn’t really mean what she was saying. She did not believe Amanda was in love with her in the romantic sense, only that she was attracted to Cindy and considered her not just her benefactor but her best friend. She had allowed Amanda to kiss her breasts and her belly when she was posing for her, but she had never allowed her to put her tongue in her furrow—nor, for that matter, had Amanda tried to. When they had a moment alone, she returned Amanda’s kisses, including wet kisses on Amanda’s proffered nipples; but she had never done anything more.

The coffeepot coughed, and Amanda went to the kitchen and returned with steaming mugs of her favorite strong black coffee.