A Man of Affairs Read online

  I was not braced for Mike in the flesh. He had a deep tan and he wore a straw coolie hat and an ankle-length pink sarong, professionally knotted at the waist and thoroughly rump-sprung. He was shorter than he had looked in his pictures; he stood about five-nine. There were hard shifting slabs of muscle in his back and shoulders and chest, and the sarong was knotted around a slightly protruding belly that looked hard as a rock. His eyes were a very pale gray-blue, and his chest hair was heavy and white. He had something of a Hawaiian look about him. He radiated intense energy, and a conspicuous charm. It was almost impossible to imagine him in any group he would not dominate merely on the basis of an animal magnetism. I sensed that this was a man who would commit himself one hundred and ten percent to anything he decided to do. I sensed that it would be a sorry situation to be standing in his way.

  Fletcher Bowman introduced us. Mike was, bewilderingly, a jolly and muscular elder brother to Puss, a courtly uncle to Louise, a drinking partner to Warren Dodge, a fellow sportsman to Tommy, all in the space of a minute and a half. When he released my hand he grinned shrewdly up at me and thumped me lightly in the ribs with a slow fist big as a burl of mahogany, and said in a voice the others could not hear, “We’ll make some talk when we get a chance, Big Sam.”

  And the hell of it was that it made me feel flattered and honored to be given this special attention, even though I knew it was only a part of his tactics. “I’m the uninvited guest,” I said.

  “Self-invited. And the only reason for that is because I didn’t think there was a chance you’d come. You fit right into this picture the way we want to set it up, Sam. Folks, you’ll need a drink before we make the rounds. No, Fletcher, I’ll take them around.”

  He motioned and one of the white-coated men came over and took our drink order. Mike was drinking steaming coffee from a pewter mug with a glass bottom. A small boy with a white jacket and great dignity came over to us and offered a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  Mike rapped him on the top of the crinkly skull and the boy grinned with quick pleasure and worship. “This is Skylark,” he said. “Romeo and Ruby’s youngest. Romeo and Ruby stay here on the island the year round and keep things in shape. When I move in with a crowd, they beef up the staff with their relatives and stock up on food and liquor.”

  Our drinks came and Mike took us on a circuit of the pool. I knew it would take quite a little while before I could fit names to the faces. But there was one that was easy. Bonny Carson. I had expected to find at least one person from the entertainment world there, but I would not have guessed it would be Bonny. She hit her peak in the late forties and early fifties when she starred in several hit musicals. Outside of infrequent guest spots on television, she had dropped out of sight. But the big-eyed clown face was unmistakable. She had strong gifts of comedy, and a brass voice with which she could lift the roof off the house when she belted out a song. But on a Wednesday evening, the tenth of May, on Dubloon Cay, she was solemnly and somewhat sullenly drunk, and she was showing her thirty-five-plus years. There was a little man hovering around her, name of Bundy. He had a sharp pale nervous face, more than his quota of nervous mannerisms: ear tugging, head scratching, lip pulling. His smile went off and on like a timed electric sign. In shorts he looked somewhat like the pictures you have seen of self-conscious chickens defeathered by a tornado. He had a fiercely protective attitude toward Bonny Carson.

  There was another woman who stood out, Amparo Blakely, Mike Dean’s indispensable secretary. She would have been noticed anywhere. She was big. She was nearly six feet tall, and she was big-boned and she was close to forty; but none of those attributes detracted from her look of being a completely feminine and forceful and desirable woman. I had seen her in photographs featuring Mike Dean. In those pictures she had usually been a few steps behind him. I had not realized how big she was, but I had a clear memory of her striking face. I knew that Amparo was a not unusual Spanish name and I had wondered if she was partly Spanish. But now, seeing her in the flesh, I suspected that she was half Mexican Indian. Though her eyes were pale, her face, tanned to a red-bronze, had that Aztecan look of humid passions hidden behind the Indio mask.

  I had heard the many legends of Mike Dean’s Amparo Blakely. It was said that she had become independently wealthy by riding along with Mike on his deals. She had been with him a long time. And now, with ease and assurance, she was acting as his hostess. I had heard it hinted that their relationship was more than professional. As I looked at her, at the mature, magnificent and superb body in a white and aqua dress, I did not see how any platonic relationship between Mike and this total woman would be possible. They both had a look of being more alive than the rest of us.

  Her hair was dark when she was in the shade, but the sun brought out coppery glints in it. She wore crude gold earrings in a barbaric design. And as she moved among the guests she had that inimitable look of being utterly at home in her world and within herself.

  I looked around and I knew there were one hell of a lot more people on the island than I had expected, and I knew I should get them all sorted out as quickly as possible. I wanted to know who was working for and with Mike Dean, directly and indirectly. You can tell a lot about a man by the attitude of the people who work for him. Fletcher Bowman was a younger, more suave, less forceful edition of Mike Dean. But he was so obscured behind all his masks of mannerisms I could not detect his actual attitude toward his boss man.

  I wanted information and so I looked around and detected what I thought might be the most pleasant way of acquiring it. The blond cutie I had seen on the veranda was back at the pool, and she had changed to a blue blouse and a white skirt. She sat on a couch built like a trampoline, a yellow canvas cover spring-fastened to a tubular bronze frame. She had a new drink and she was humming her little song and half-smiling into the middle distance and tapping a slender foot in a tall blue shoe as she sat facing a dull fireball of a sun that was sliding down into a sea that had turned to oiled slate.

  I stood over her and said, “On the first go-round I got it that you’re called Murphy, but I didn’t get the rest of it. And I’m lousy on names and so I need maybe a briefing on you and the rest of the throng.”

  She came back out of her middle distance and focused on me, warm and friendly as a pup.

  “In my file folder it says here that you’re the biggest thing on the island and your name is Sam Something.”

  “Glidden.”

  “Have it your way. And I am a shade drunk from drinking, and you may sit down and be briefed.” She patted the yellow canvas beside her and I sat down. “About this Murphy,” she said, “I am Bridget Hallowell and I used to be called Bridey until that damn book came out and then it became Murphy. I am starting an international movement to get it back to Bridget where it belongs.”

  “Bridget it will be. And on the briefing, start with you.”

  “After I get you lined away. First I want the measurements. Men shouldn’t be so big. I do not mind being made to feel dainty and fragile, but not this dainty and fragile.”

  It is something I have had to get used to. “Six feet four and a quarter, Bridget. Two hundred and eighteen pounds. And I will be thirty-one on the twenty-fourth of next July. I am vice-president of the Harrison Corporation.”

  “And unmarried.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well, it shows a little. Sort of. Anyway, dear Fletcher told me you were when he told me to be nice to you on account of you are not matched up with any female and social situations seem to go better by twos, so I am your girl, sort of. So you better chide me for being a little drunk, and maybe give me a hurt look. You know you look more like thirty-five.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  “I expect it’s from being so big. Now about me, I am now leading this here mad gay life I dreamed about. It is like this. Long, long ago when I was a mere child of sorts, I won a short story contest and so, natch, I wrote a novel. But it was stinky. And then I sold some nauseati
ng gloop to the love magazines, and then I packed up, I did, and I went to New York, I did, and freelancing was too too rough so I went on a magazine and I wrote how-to things. How to keep mealy bugs out of your screened terrace. What to do about adolescent acne. And then I got married and I should have researched something called how to stay married because it was going terribly sour after only five months and then he resolved it on the Sawmill River Parkway by slewing off it into a big maple tree; and that was November last year, and now I am a fledgling with Brainerd Associates, which is a small and very rich and very discreet public relations firm. Over there, talking to Fletcher Bowman, you will see a terribly sincere man named Guy Brainerd. The one with the bald head and all the chin. He is my boss man. Mike Dean pays the firm a fabulous sum every year to make Mike Dean a wholesome household word, and I have been assigned to the Dean account, and so I was brang down on the airplane like one of the brass.” She turned and gave me an odd look and said, “Don’t get things mixed up, Samuel. I am pretty damn good at what I am doing.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “This empty-looking head is not that empty. I don’t know why you make me feel I should explain myself. Anyhow, look over there at the end of the pool, at the gal with the sleek blond hairdo and the sleek blond manners and all the jangle bracelets and the poison green shorts tailored to that saucy little rump. That is Elda Garry and she is a lady editor on Blend, and we have her almost talked into running a great big warm feature on Mike Dean, his philosophies and philanthropies. Elda and my boss are having a thing, and it has been going on for some little time now, and it is very handy for them to come down here, and I suspect I was brought along to make it look a little better, maybe. Guy’s wife is pure undiluted bitch, and isn’t it funny that in getting away from her, he’ll run right to more of the same? Golly, I bet you didn’t know you’d get briefed this good.”

  “It’s thorough,” I said.

  “Let us continue. The guy Elda is talking to is Cam Duncan. He’s a lawyer and he works for Mike.” I had noticed Duncan when we were introduced. He was in his thirties, a tall, shambling, frail-looking man with mouse-colored hair and an engagingly ugly face and a crooked and charming grin. “He’s a honey bug,” said Bridget.

  “How about the ageing ranch hand?” I asked. “The one talking to Mrs. McGann.” He was a faded man in weary khakis and a big pale sombrero, with a cud in his cheek. I hadn’t quite caught his name when we were taken around but Puss had caught it and given a little squeal of delight and the man had told her he hadn’t seen her, by God, since she was so little she had to climb the corral fence to get on a horse.

  “Puhleeze!” Bridget said. “You are referring to Porter Crown of Crown Ranch, Tex-Crown Oil Crown-Arabian Oil, Crown-Dean Aviation Devices, et cetera.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Personally I think he is an old floopph. The harem job on his left is his third wife, Tessy. She’s got an accent a hatchet would bounce off. Hungarian, I think.” Mrs. Crown, in Italian beach wear, was an abundant redhead who seemed to be constantly in a half doze, pearly and sexual. “That fifty-foot hunk of brass and mahogany at the dock, the Portess, is theirs. Port calls it their little boat.’ He keeps it and the big boat at Padre Island. There’s a crew of two who sleep aboard. The big chunk of muscles who just started talking to Bonny Carson is named Jack Buck. He has the strong impression he’s irresistible. He crews the Portess. Port is democratic, so Jack Buck gets to eat and swim and drink with the folks. But the democracy does not extend to Fidelio. He’s the little Mexican chef and steward on the boat. They brought the Portess across the Gulf and around the Keys and up here to the Bahamas. Port and Tessy and Port’s daughter.”

  “Which one is she?”

  “You’ll meet her later. She’s about nineteen and she looks like a gypsy and I hear tell she’s just about as wild as one. This little cruise is to get her mind off somebody old Port didn’t approve of. She’s the only child of his second marriage. I think she’s a brat. Her name is Lolly, from Laura, and old Port calls her Lollypop. She drank hard and folded early. Now where am I?”

  “Who is the Bundy character with Bonny Carson?”

  “Some kind of a manager. He’s trying to swing something with Mike. God only knows what. Turn-about is fair play, Sam’l. All I know about your group is that some of them are named McGann and some are named Dodge, and they have big chunks of stock in this Harrison thing Mike is interested in. Who belongs to whom?”

  “The dark girl is Louise Dodge, and the beefy one over there is Warren Dodge.”

  “She doesn’t look very happy. So the other two are McGanns. The male McGann is kinda cute.”

  “He’s Louise Dodge’s brother.”

  One of the white-coated Bahamians came to us for a drink order. “More of the same, please, John,” she said, and put her empty glass on his tray. I asked for another, also. When he went away I said, “How big a staff is there?”

  “Seven, if you count that adorable little Skylark.”

  “Are there any missing guests, besides Lolly Crown?”

  She made a count of the group. “Nope. Seventeen counting everybody. Then, with Fidelio, there are twenty-five on Dubloon Cay. What they call a mixed group. Maybe a mixed-up group.” She turned on the poolside cot and tucked her knees under her and looked directly at me and said, “Are you here to try to knock a couple of spokes out of Mike’s big wheel?”

  “What gives you that idea, Bridget?”

  “I heard them wondering about you on the airplane, Fletcher Bowman and Cam Duncan. I was supposed to be asleep but I wasn’t, quite.”

  “They say anything I should know?” I asked easily.

  “I just got the idea they think you’re pretty bright and it may take some selling to sell you on whatever they have in mind.”

  “They don’t have to sell me. They just have to sell the Dodges and the McGanns. I don’t own any stock in Harrison. I work for wages. I work for the owners.”

  The question she had put to me bothered me. One moment everything had seemed very casual, and then her question had made it look like a stage setting again. As though Mike Dean’s organization had planted all these people by the pool and cued them very carefully. It was like being with a small group of friends at a very big and very busy roulette table, and suddenly having a strong hunch that every other gambler at the table was a shill for the house.

  A lazy black mosquito landed on her arm, ready to feed. She slapped it and said, “The nightly visitors are beginning to move in. Look at that sun, Sam! Half gone, and not a cloud. It looks like a red-hot rivet in a steel plate. Let’s take our drinks and I’ll give you a short tour of inspection, like the one Elda Garry and I were given. Guy Brainerd has been here before.”

  She showed me the house, the main lounge, the game room, the gleaming kitchen with its hotel equipment and the servants fixing dinner. She knew them by name and introduced them and they seemed to like her. It was hard to believe she had been down only a little longer than one full day. Ruby, Romeo’s wife, was a massive woman. The only other female servant was named Booty. She seemed to be about eighteen or nineteen. She was Ruby’s niece. She was quite tall, and luxuriantly, splendidly constructed. She was the color of cocoa, and the skin of her face had an unbelievably fine texture. Her mouth was heavy and Negroid, her nose fine and slim, her eyes like the eyes in the ancient drawings of Egyptian women. She masked shyness with a dignified reserve; and when she walked she bent forward slightly from the waist and did not swing her arms, as though to hide from the world the new ripeness of breasts and belly.

  When we left the kitchen, Bridget told me that Booty was glad to have this extra work because she was soon to be married to a man who captained one of the charter boats that operated out of the Grand Bahama Club.

  We started down a path in the rear of the building, but the bugs were out in too much force. We hurried back and Bridget said, “Nothing too spectacular down there anyway. Just a big generator hou
se and the well house and the pumps and a big storage tank. Over there is where the servants live.”

  “Who owns the little float plane?”

  “Golly, I forgot all about them! Change the count to nineteen and twenty-seven total. It belongs to a man named Bert Buford. Mike is in on some big land syndicate deal in Broward County north of Miami, and Bert is the resident manager of one of the developments they’ve started. Bert flies over quite often with his wife, whether or not Mike is here. He comes for the fishing. The wife is named Margaret Mary. And you have to say the whole name. She’s a southrun type girl. They’ve been out in one of the skiffs and they should be back by now. And, by golly, there they come.”

  They had come from the east and turned into the bay. The outboard made a rackety sound in the fading day. We went down onto the dock, and Romeo came down to help and before the skiff had come up to the dock, Guy Brainerd and Elda Garry, and Tommy and Louise had joined us. Louise gave me a quick look of question and I knew she was wondering about this sudden friendship with the girl they called Murphy.

  Guy Brainerd said, “The others are too blasé to walk down to look at a fish. Just us greenhorns.”

  “I gave up fishing when I was terribly young,” Elda Garry said in her mid-Manhattan accent. “A boy expected me to put a perfectly horrible looking thing on my own hook. I think it was called a damnittohell or something like that.”

  “Hellgrammite,” Bridget said tersely. “Aquatic larva of the dobson.”

  “Really, darling, that little head of yours is positively stuffed with things. It should have been called a damnittohell, because when I tried, it bit me, and I haven’t been fishing since. My God, look at the size of that thing!”

  The man in the skiff had stood up and eased a big fish onto the dock. It was streaked with gorgeous shades of blue and green and gold. The man was knobbly and towheaded and he had the pinched untannable face of the cracker. He wore a baseball cap, a T-shirt and jeans sawed off at the knees. “There’s a right good albacore, Romeo,” he said. “Hi, folks. Hi, Murph. I’m Bert Buford and this here’s my wife, Margaret Mary.” She was dark and comfortable looking and she made me remember an object I hadn’t thought of in years. It had belonged to my mother. It was a plump little pincushion in the shape of a kitten.