The Erection Set

On the wall, the old-fashioned windup clock ticked ominously. I looked at the family solicitor sitting there, knowing he was feeling for words he didn’t want to say, and just waited. It was an old story; I just wanted to hear it again to make sure nothing had changed.

Finally: “Nobody even wants to let you have that.”

“A small price to pay out of all those millions. Why rattle skeletons in the closet?”

“You ever read stock market reports, Dog?”

I shrugged again. “Sometimes. They fluctuate. I hate to gamble.”

“Barrin Industries is shaky.”

“Ten thousand bucks can break them?”

“Not exactly. The old man’s will had to conform to his father’s will and if you have a copy of your mother’s original wedding certificate you can take over as the first male heir.”

“It’s only a photographic copy made a long time ago. I guess you know the courthouse it was filed in burned down and the preacher and the witnesses are dead?”

“Yes, I know that. How did you find out?”

“I wanted to make sure.” I squeezed out the hot tip of the cigarette and dropped it in the ashtray on the desk. “No ten grand, then, I suppose?”

“No nothing, Dog. I’m sorry.”

I stood up and stretched. Outside it was a nice day and despite the smog I was going to enjoy myself. “Want to bet?” I asked him.

“Not with you,” he said. “Of all the family, you got your grandfather’s mouth, his hair, even the way he held his jaw.”

“Look at my eyes,” I said. “Whose are they?”

“I don’t know, Dog. They aren’t your mother’s.”

“They were my dad’s. That guy must have been a terror. Let’s go have a beer. You probably haven’t been in a saloon for ten years.”

“Make it fifteen and I’ll go with you,” Hunter told me.

She said her name was Charmaine, but only a Polack knows how to smell a kielbasa to make sure it’s real and slip it inside a hunk of doughbread she whipped up out of natural ingredients from a delicatessen at one o’clock in the morning, and when she came out of the bedroom wrapped in a bath towel, all peasant legs and cow-busted with a lovely people grin showing through teeth that tore the sandwich apart, I laughed and turned the Beethoven down on the record player and poured the rest of my beer in the glass.

“That old man’s pretty hot stuff,” Charmaine told me.

“Big?”

“Nope, just talented. Kind of like surprised me.” She tore the sandwich in half and paused a moment. “Hey, Dog, he ain’t ...”

“No relation,” I said. “It would be a hell of a thing for a kid to buy his old man a piece, wouldn’t it?”

“Guess so. Didn’t they used to do it the other way around?”

“That’s what I heard. They gave him a year to get some hair around his gizmo and the kid got treated to a whorehouse job on his birthday. Poor slob, he probably sweated, couldn’t get it up, tipped the dame a bundle to lie to his old man and went home bragging about the experience.”

“You do it that way?” she asked me.

“Sugar, I was an old pro by the time I was twenty.”

“How about twelve?”

“I was an old amateur,” I said. “Hunter treat you kindly?”

“A dream. I think maybe I’ll specialize in old men.” She bit into the sandwich and sat down opposite me, the towel falling open before she rearranged it. Then she leaned back and propped her feet on the glass-topped coffee table.

“Will you cross your legs or something,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She finished the sandwich and licked her fingers. “Do I embarrass you?”

“No, but you get me horny and I’m tired.”

“You got Marcia all pooped out. You like my room-mate?”

“Good kid.”

“A crazy kook. She was an acid head until I straightened her out. Always giving it away. Now she meets the right people. She thinks you’re out of sight. What’d you do to her?”

“She needed loving. Incidentally, I’m sending her to an old buddy of mine tomorrow. She’s going to get a job.”

“She told me. One-fifty a week taking dictation. What a way to ruin a good hooker.”

“Sorry about that.”

“I’m not. She graduated from Pembroke, y’know. Me, I barely made Erasmus High in Brooklyn. I wish somebody had done that for me.”

“Come on, Charmaine, you like it this way.”

“Only because I’m a nympho. I only know two other girls who really get their rocks off when they’re making it for pay with a guy. Maybe I’m the total professional. How’d you ever find me anyway?”

“Joe Allen in Belgium. Remember?”

“Ho, old Joe. He wanted me to get tattooed.” She smiled at me and looked for more crumbs on her palm to lick. “He ’told me about you too. I didn’t believe it.” Her eyes flicked toward the other closed door. “Marcia says old Joe was not lying, repeat, not lying.”

“I try harder,” I said.

“That’s what Marcia says. Why ring the old man in too?”

“Just to make sure he doesn’t have to lie when he kills me.”

“That’s about that ten grand, isn’t it?”

“Even great lawyers will tell a prostie anything, won’t they?”

“Look at Mata Hari,” she said.

“And look what happened to her. She got banged the real hard way.”

“You guys are nuts,” Charmaine said.

“All nuts,” I repeated.

“Balls,” she laughed.

“That’s what I said.”