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  “But not the kind of sweetening where Uncle comes back on me for fraud. No thanks. Taxwise, I am a very cowardly person.”

  “Fourteen waterfront acres? Let me see. That would bring a per-acre total to a hundred and sixty-two thousand. I can’t see that as excessive. In fact, I could mention the opportunity to a couple of large developers on the East Coast—incidentally, people with whom I have no business relationship at the present time—and I am quite sure they would make appropriate offers. In writing.”

  Martin Liss thought it over. “And of course I would take the offer from the company in which I own stock. But at an established fair-market value. Mmm. I would have to talk that over with my associates.”

  “All it means really is that we loan thirteen million instead of twelve, to cover your profit on selling your option to Marliss.”

  “Can’t you loan it to me as I need it?”

  “We have to have our money out and working,” said Sherman Grome.

  “So what’s your security?”

  “Oh, the certificates of deposit you’ll buy from Fred Hildebert. They can’t be cashed in without EMMS approval.”

  “So it’s my money but it’s your money?”

  “I look forward to a productive working relationship.”

  “How soon will all this happen?”

  “I’ll set it in motion when I get back from Houston tomorrow. You’ll be contacted. You can fly up with your attorneys, and all the requisite documents can be signed at our headquarters.”

  “I don’t like taking over Tropic Towers.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said I don’t like taking over Tropic Towers!”

  Sherman Grome stood up. He smiled. He did not offer his hand. “We’re through negotiating, Mr. Liss. And I am not very interested in your likes and dislikes.”

  “What’s the percentage in being snotty, Grome?”

  Grome smiled again. “It saves a lot of time, Mr. Liss.”

  • • •

  Martin Liss watched from the observation deck when the small white jet took off. It slanted up at a very steep angle, dwindled to a glittering speck and was soon invisible. If it doesn’t fall out of the sky, he thought, I pack away one million private and personal money. If it does fall out of the sky, I don’t have to worry about taking over that damned dog project Tropic Towers, and I don’t have to worry about most of the profit being skimmed off Harbour Pointe. So should it fall or shouldn’t it? He looks like some kind of cowboy. Those goddam blue glasses. He is making me old before my time.

  Martin had called Lew Traff and Benjie Wannover into his office and had told Drusilla no interruptions except for class A emergencies. At one point during the discussions Benjie made a call to a stockbroker whose opinions he respected.

  After he hung up he said, “The way the real estate investment trusts like Equity Mortgage Management Shares work, of course, is that they have to distribute almost all income quarterly to the shareholders or lose their tax status. EMMS has three and a half million shares of common stock outstanding. Last year they paid dividends of two dollars and forty cents, which was eight percent of the market value of the stock, which was thirty dollars. Management, meaning Sherman Grome, has predicted the same or better this year. But because all the REITs took a beating in the market, EMMS shares are down to twenty bucks, nineteen and five eighths as of today’s close. The first quarter they paid a dividend of sixty-two cents. That annualizes at close to two dollars and a half which would be … a return of twelve and a half percent. Now what we’ve got is, we’ve got this Grome character running around making funny deals to clean up his own books so he can hold the dividend rate high enough to keep the stock in some kind of reasonable range. I’d say that what he is doing is like a fellow taking timbers off his foundations to patch his leaky roof. After he takes away enough support, the whole thing comes down. He has a reputation for smart. So he knows what he is doing. If he is going to make himself look like a dummy, there has to be compensations. If he can give away a million dollars to you, Marty, then he has to have a way of giving a lot more than that to himself.”

  “How is it given away if it gets paid back?”

  “How can he be as sure as you are, as we are, that it can be paid back? The way the industry looks, any new project now is going to run into trouble. And right here let me say that I am not so damn sure it is going to be paid back. That is one hell of an interest load.”

  “Like always, Benjie, I value your advice. And yours too, Lew. But I want to go ahead with this.”

  “Regardless?” Lew Traff asked.

  “But I want to limit the risk.”

  “Oh?” said Lew.

  “It’s something Grome can’t object to. He was the one suggested a new corporation to take over Tropic Towers and try to sell it out and pay it off. So what I want to do is stuff the Harbour Pointe project into the new corporation too. We’ve got too many goodies tucked into the Marliss Corporation to take a chance of it going down the tube. How soon can you set one up?”

  Lew Traff scowled at the ceiling for a moment. “We’ve got a shell we can use. I was going to close it out and then I thought, What the hell, it might come in handy. It’s the one you had me set up three or four years ago on that fried chicken franchise that didn’t work out. The charter is broad enough. Let me see now. You’ve got five hundred and two shares, Marty, and Benjie and I’ve got two hundred and forty-nine each, and there’s a thousand unissued.”

  “Can we transfer all the rights and permissions we’ve acquired?”

  “Why not? They go with the parcel. Except for the building permit, and we haven’t gone after that yet.”

  “What’s the name of the shell?”

  “The Letra Corporation.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Marty, you’re hurting me. This one you said I could name after me. Like Marliss, Le from Lew, and Tra from Traff. Maybe that’s why I didn’t let it die.”

  Marty said, “Benjie, if it doesn’t work out, if Harbour Pointe doesn’t work out out, Letra files bankruptcy.”

  “There would be a stink.”

  “But we’d be out of reach. Right, Lew?”

  “Out of reach. Except it won’t be easy to get back into any size operation no matter what name you use, not for a while.”

  “Lew? Benjie? Let’s take a vote. If Harbour Pointe goes under, things are going to be so bad all over we don’t have to worry about new projects anyway. And I will make sure you two don’t get hurt in any way, no matter what. Affirmative? Good. And we are going to have a couple of months of work ahead like you’ve never seen before. So let’s—”

  “Martin?” Benjie said. “There’s something we shouldn’t overlook. This Sherman Grome is playing little games to hold up the quote on EMMS shares, like a man holding up a tent while he can crawl out under the flap. Maybe through some kind of dummy setup, or friends, or some fund, he is easing out of a position in EMMS, selling off from five hundred to two thousand shares a day whenever there’s a little strength in the stock market.”

  “So?” said Martin Liss, frowning.

  “So if it is a good bet the smart money is selling, then it is time to sell. We should sell short. It would cost six hundred thousand to take a thirty-thousand-share short position, if you can find a house that can borrow that size block under present conditions. If he goes sour all the way, which something tells me it might, it’s a nice double.”

  Marty looked at Lew Traff. “Is that insider information?”

  “Who is inside? Nothing is on paper. But if you’re going to do it, you ought to take the position in it before you become a borrower.”

  “Benjie, can your pal in Miami handle that size?”

  “Whyn’t I ask him how much he could swing and get back to you with a figure?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Sure. I think if I want to come in for some, or Lew does, it’s better we make our own arrangement elsewhere. It woul
d be smaller and not so hard to arrange.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to be paying us for.”

  After Traff and Wannover had left, he sat in silent thought for ten minutes and then punched out his home phone number on his private line. The maid answered and said that Miz Liss was in her baff. Martin said that he was certain his wife was the cleanest woman in Palm County and would she please take the phone in to her. The woman giggled and said yessa.

  “Marty? I’ve been expecting you any minute! You should be here, darling.”

  “That’s why I called. You go ahead, will you? And I’ll join you there later on.”

  “How much later on? I hate taking two cars.”

  “As soon as I get a few more details cleaned up, I’ll shower and change and go right to the party from here. I’ve got lots of good news to tell you.”

  “Just don’t be too damned late. And if this is one of those times when you never do show up, I swear, I’ll …”

  “See you there, honey. ’Bye.”

  Drusilla Bryne brought in two checks for his signature. She adjusted the thermostat, warming the large office to a temperature more comfortable for her. She sat naked on the black Naugahyde of his big judge’s chair. The round red sun was sitting on the rim of the gray sea, filling the office with furnace light when she straddled his lap, facing him, her long legs threaded through the opening of the padded arms of the big chair. The sun was gone when they had finished, the room full of shadows. When she stirred to leave him, he held her close and stroked her long back, silk-smooth and moist with her exertions. Her dark hair tickled his cheek and temple. He kissed the side of her throat and inhaled the scent of her. She was beginning to feel uncomfortably heavy. He stirred and she lifted away from him with easy agility.

  “You go ahead first,” she said. “You’re late enough already.”

  “Francie won’t be lonely. She always makes friends.”

  “And you’re always suspicious of the poor woman, now, aren’t you?”

  “With cause, Irish. With good cause.” He went off and took his shower. He shaved while she showered. She had laid out fresh clothing for him, suitable for an informal cocktail party. He was ready to leave when she finished her shower. He kissed her and patted her wet behind and told her to be sure to check the lock when she left.

  When she was dry she put her office clothes back on, brushed her hair, fixed her mouth and went in and turned on the office lights and sat in Mr. Liss’s chair and dialed a local number.

  When he answered she said, “Dean? Dean, darlin’, this is Dru here, who else? That nice little bit of money that you’ve been keeping at work for me there in the Tampa Electric stock, tomorrow I should like you to take me out of it and go short on Equity Mortgage Management Shares. Pardon? Oh, for as much as the sale will afford me. That’s a dear fellow. Forgive me for phoning you at home, love, but I might not have the chance in the morning. Give my best to your lovely Clara. What? Ah, don’t you remember our rules? No questions and no explanations. Yes, of course I have been lucky on these little things, and as I told you before, it does not matter to me at all if you decide to do as I do. Right. Good night, darlin’.”

  13

  THE HEAVYSET WOMAN was having her hair done at Connie Lee’s House of Hair by one of the older operators. The customer had long since been classified as BTLT (big talk, little tip) and thus did not have any steady operator but was assigned by Connie Lee, who out of a sense of fairness and good employee relations did not give Mrs. Cleveland too many times to the same girl.

  “All your life,” Mrs. Cleveland was saying, “you think about retirement and what it will be like, but it sure isn’t anything like I imagined. The first few months at Golden Sands were kind of fun, getting the apartment fixed up the way we want it. Of course we brought too much stuff down. You pay a fortune to have some slobby men smelling of beer throw your furniture around, but when it gets down here in the tropics, it doesn’t look the way it did in Warren, Ohio. The light is brighter, or something. It looks all shabby and tacky. We sold a lot of it. I don’t really know why I say sold, because we practically gave it away. When the man made that offer, I actually broke down and cried. But Jack said we better take it, so we took it. The new things were very costly, and they’re not made as well as the old things were, but I must say they look a lot nicer in the apartment.

  “The thing that is driving me out of my skull is having Jack around every living minute of the day. I am even coming here and getting my hair done oftener than I should because it is the only way I can get away from him, and even now I’m not really away from him because he is right out there roaming around in the parking lot, or roaming around in the drugstore or the hardware store, or he is sitting in the Buick rattling his fingernails on the horn ring. The thing about my husband, everybody knew him up in Warren. It isn’t really a very big place. Jack had the lumberyard his father started way back, and the building supply business. He was in the Rotary and the Kiwanis and the VFW. He was on the board of directors of Ohio Federal Savings and Loan, and he was chairman of the Community Chest a lot of times. And he was on the hospital committee. And he was on the house committee at the country club. He’d walk down the street, and about half the people he met would know him by name and he’d know their names. He isn’t used to people not knowing who he is.

  “But it’s more than that, I think. He had a lot of things going all the time. He had to keep track of an awful lot of things going on all the time, and make decisions and so on. It was the way he lived for years and years and years, and all of a sudden there isn’t enough going on to use up all that energy, so he is just about to drive me crazy. I could do the grocery shopping for the two of us in certainly no more than twenty minutes, but he comes along every time, and it takes an hour and a half, because he has one of those little electronic adding machines with the batteries, and he has to read the number of ounces on a package and get the price per ounce and compare with three or four other kinds and pick out the one that’s the best value. He makes lists and charts and so on. He keeps putting things in the shopping cart and taking them out until I don’t know where I am and I get so confused I get all shaky, I really do. He’s got another thing about the Buick that is driving me crazy too. He keeps track of every single mile, and he keeps getting the tank filled to the top every time we go by a gas station, so that he can figure out how many miles we are getting to a gallon. Two weeks ago he had the tires blown up to thirty-five pounds of air, and he says they will last longer and we are getting better mileage than before, but you can feel every little crack in the pavement and the car goes bang-bang-bang, hard enough to jar the fillings out of your teeth. He’s started keeping a chart on the temperature and the cost of the electric too. And if I touch the thermostat, he flies into a rage, yelling and cursing. I wish he could get some kind of a hobby. He doesn’t like fishing very much. He never cared for boats. And you know how it is with shelling. If a shell washes up anywhere on the beach there are five old ladies ready to pounce on it and run home with it.

  “At first Jack was willing to wear resort clothes, you know, bright pretty shirts and walking shorts and so on, but I think he’s decided that somehow he’ll get treated with more respect if he wears a suit and tie. Over a month ago we were over in downtown Athens because he was looking for a kind of clock thermostat you can set so that—oh, I don’t know what it does, but it is supposed to save money, and he said to the clerk that he used to have a building supply business and the clerk gave him a fisheye look for about three seconds and then said, ‘So?’ He needs to feel that he accounts for something in the world. He needs to be Jack Cleveland that people would go to when they had personal problems because they wanted his advice. He feels like he is absolutely nothing down here, and so he just fusses and fusses about everything under the sun. Now he is grumping around because when they were looking for people to be directors and officers of the Golden Sands Condominium Associ
ation, Jack said he was retired and he’d had enough of that stuff to last him forever, and now we understand the directors are going to make us all pay a lot more money every month, and more money to catch up on some kind of a deficit. Jack looked up the Florida law and it says that the administration of any condominium cannot have a meeting and decide anything unless they post a notice of the time and place of that meeting in some place where the owners will see it at least forty-eight hours before the meeting, so he is going to declare that the new assessment is not valid and nobody has to pay it until they do it right. Maybe if he makes enough fuss they will make him a director, and then he can spread himself out a little bit and drive a lot of other people crazy along with me.”

  Harlin Barker stood by the counter in the manager’s office waiting for Mrs. Higbee to notice him and come over. She was engaged in inaudible animated conversation with a tall dark-haired sturdy young woman who looked familiar to Barker. After a few moments he remembered where he had seen her. She had been on duty in the emergency room at the Athens Memorial Hospital when he had taken Connie Mae in at two in the morning a month ago with her coronary. He could remember everything so vividly from that night that he was able to close his eyes and visualize her in uniform and even read once again the gold and white name tag on her blouse. Roberta Fish, R.N. She had been very swift, competent and reassuring. He was tempted to interrupt, but there was an intensity about the muted conversation which made him reluctant. Mrs. Higbee’s eyes seemed to be glistening with tears. With an almost awkward abruptness the two young women embraced, and then the nurse left swiftly, head down, never glancing toward him. He had hoped for a chance to prove he remembered her.

  Mrs. Higbee blew her nose and came over to the counter. He could see that she was trying to remember who he was.

  “I’m Harlin Barker. Four-G.”

  “Oh sure, Mr. Barker. Can I help you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Connie Mae, my wife, had a heart attack a month ago and …”