The Erection Set

Forget it, little blonde girl. Coincidences do happen and it’s hard to remember anymore. That was all a long time ago and you’ve romanticized the image. You’ve held on to a stupid dream too long and now it’s starting to show. Like the time two years ago when he turned out to be a Brazilian engineer with ten kids. And the seaman on the Esso tanker with the same name. Only he was sixty-three and a grandfather. There is no real Dogeron Kelly. You left him there at the train station and now he’s dead. The whole family says so.

“So Dog’s your name, but what’s your game, Mr. Kelly? You look like a cop. Are you?”

He shook his head. “Hardly. I’m an individual entreprenuer. I do whatever is profitable and comes to hand. I’m a specialist in generalities and it would have been fun to watch you deball your friend.”

“You think I couldn’t?”

He gave a tight-lipped shrug and then grinned at her. “It’s not very hard. I’ve ticked off a few knotheads that way in my time too. It’s just that it’s an extreme penalty to pay.”

“For rape?” she asked quietly.

“Come on, nobody would have to rape you.”

“Now you’re on a sex kick too.”

“Kid, you brought the subject up. I wouldn’t bother raping you.”

“Oh? What would you do?”

He let out another strange, raspy laugh. “Hell, I like it better the other way around. I’m the lazy type myself. Prolific, imaginative, but lazy. Half the time the only thing I get into is a conversation.”

“And the other half?”

“That’s another story not fit for virginal ears,” he said.

She almost had an answer for him, but he winked and walked off, sipping at his beer. For some reason she felt annoyed. Raul Fucia had been right, of course. She had known what she was doing when she dressed for the party, instinctively aware of her potential, but it was not more than any of the others had known. No one was needed to tell her that she was beautiful and well constructed. They had, but the mirror was enough. Raul’s reaction was enough to satisfy her judgment, but then that damned Dog had to come along and shatter her illusions. He couldn’t have cared less.

She picked up her drink and tasted it, swirling the ice around in the glass, feeling a little smile pulling at the comers of her mouth. Hell, the dog, yes, small “d” dog, did it to her. He couldn’t have cared less. And she wasn’t too old, either. She was just right, absolutely prime, beautiful, knowledgeable, apt and exactly right.

The smile widened when she realized she had put her finger on it. She had been around just a little too long in the fast-moving world of show business where judgment had to be quick and correct if you wanted to survive not to miss it. She had put him in the forty-plus class, but the full head of short hair and only light touch of gray had fooled her. That and the strange lack of aging and the musculature. Heredity. Dog Kelly was a real, total predator.

And now he was stalking. She watched him across the room, his complete unconsciousness of what he was doing. The women’s eyes would drift and follow him, return blankly a moment to what they had been doing, then drift again. In the small groups he would join there was an un-comfortableness among the men, barely discernible because they were aware and the act they chose as a facade would cover them. Sharon knew they felt the same way she did. They wondered what he was doing there.

For some obscure reason a funny thought ran through her mind. She wondered if he were carrying a gun.

It was Darcy Taylor who took the initiative as always. A sweet thing on the screen, but a wild one when a man passed she wanted. She left Raul in midsentence and had her arm through Dog’s, taking the glass out of his hand to taste his drink with a mock shudder and steering him out of sight to the bar beyond the French windows. It just wasn’t Raul’s day at all. Sharon felt sorry for whoever he managed to go home with this night.

“Enjoying yourself, Sharon?”

She looked up, smiling, knowing the voice. “Hello Walt.”

Walter Gentry III was the prototype of any and every bachelor who ran his own private world with inherited millions that Hollywood had attempted to emulate. The major difference was that this, the last of the fabulous Gentry clan, had, by shrewd business acumen, more than doubled his inheritance, another factor he had inherited along with a natural aristocratic appearance and charming manner. He had been the target of women from monied families for the past twenty years, but somehow never bothered to become permanently attached to any of them.

“I see you met Dog,” Walt said.

“Yes, who is he?”

He tapped a long cigarette from a gold case and lit it, letting the stream of smoke drift from his lips. “We met in the Army. Quite a guy. He was one of the natural-born killers. He make an impression?”

“Unusual type,” Sharon told him noncommittally. “What’s he do?”