Микки Спиллейн - The Erection Set

“My treat. I always felt guilty about spying on you and old Dubro.” I laughed again. “How did you make out in the end?”

“A brush-off. I understand she married the gardener a year later. In those days a skinny-dip was a real orgy.”

“Man, have you got a lot to learn.”

“Unfortunately, no. I’ll get all my kicks from pornography collected during the censorship trials or wait for those rare, exotic visits from distant friends. Now let’s get back to you. I’m not quite stupid, you know.”

“I didn’t want you to have to lie, friend.”

“There are some lengths you don’t have to go to.”

“Why not?” I asked him.

“Because I could have told. You’re not the same Dog they used to kick around.”

I finished my coffee and picked up the bill. “Isn’t it going to be a ball when everybody finds that out?” I said.

This time Leyland Hunter wasn’t smiling. With a studied, serious look, he scanned my face and nodded solemnly. “I’m going to be afraid to look,” he said. “Do you hold still for advice these days?”

“Depends on the source. From you, yes. What pearls of wisdom have you got for me?”

Hunter took out a gold ball-point pen and fiddled idly with the calibrated rings that made it a slide rule. “Remember, Dog, I’ve been close to the Barrin family all my life. It was your great-grandfather that made sure my education was attended to and who established a business for me. All that because he and my father were friends, old prospecting buddies, and my father was killed before he ever saw me. Like it or not, I have a moral obligation to be of service.”

“You paid off any debt a long time ago, Counselor. It was your business acumen that saved the Barrin corporation during the Depression, your foresight that built them into millionaire war profiteers and your ingenuity that kept them rolling ever since.”

His fingers kept working at the dials, arranging them into precise figures. “That was while your grandfather was alive and active. Unfortunately, the generation gap isn’t a new thing at all. When Cameron Barrin began to decline, the family was quick to introduce a new regime... their own. I was one of the old guard and my opinions were merely tolerated, not accepted.”

“Then why sweat it, mighty Hunter? You’ve made it big on your own. Today you’re handling conglomerates that make Barrin Industries look like a toy. Oh, a damn big toy, but that’s all.”

“I told you,” he said. “I feel the obligation.”

“Good for you, but I’m still waiting for the advice.” I signaled the waitress for some more coffee. It looked like it was going to be a long lecture.

“Remember when your cousin Alfred had that accident with his new roadster?”

I let the sugar lumps drop in my coffee with soft plops. Somehow they had the faraway sounds of bones breaking. I said, “There was no accident. The little bastard ran me down deliberately. He got a roadster and I got a used bicycle. He went off the road to get me and if I hadn’t jumped for it there would have been more than a broken leg.”

“He said he lost control in the gravel drive.”

“Balls. You know better.” I stirred the coffee and tasted it. Now it was too sweet. “Funny, but I was more pissed off about my first bike being wrecked than getting the leg busted.”

“Remember what you did to Alfred when you got out of the hospital?”

My mouth was working to suppress a laugh. I had swiped a short-fused aerial bomb from the July Fourth fireworks display in town and rigged it under his car. It blew right through the seat of Alfred’s roadster and they picked star-dust out of his ass for a month. “How did you know about that?”

“Being of a legal, inquisitive mind, I surmised it, then made inquiries until I located a few witnesses. Tying in a boy with missing pyrotechnics wasn’t too difficult.”

“You could have burned my hide, buddy.”

“Why?” His eyes twinkled. “Frankly, I thought Alfred deserved it and it was an original form of revenge. I don’t think he ever molested you again, did he?”

“Not physically. There were other ways.”

“Except they never really bothered you.”

“What I didn’t have, he couldn’t steal. Alf had more to lose than I did.”

“That brings us up to Dennison.”

“He’s a prick,” I grinned. “I suppose you’re referring to the time that little town twist said she was knocked up and the old man paid off for an abortion?”

Hunter nodded and waited.

“She was an uninvited guest at the picnic. We were all playing in the same area out of sight. I never touched the dame. It was Dennie who took her into the bushes, but he blamed me for it and paid her a hundred bucks to point the finger my way.”

“I understand you were rather severely reprimanded, weren’t you?”

The laugh came out and I nodded. “With a stick. I was in bed for a week, all privileges revoked and before I was on my feet they had even disposed of the dog I had adopted.” I laughed again and sipped at my coffee.

Leyland Hunter frowned again, watching me curiously. “Was it all that funny?”

“In a way,” I told him. “Now it seems even funnier. You see, I was the only one who ever really knew the kid, being the only one who ever managed to slip out into town. She was a smart little slob, a whore at fifteen who used to make it on pay nights with the factory crowd. She was no more knocked up than you were, but she saw money in the deal and pulled the act on Dennie. It scared him shitless, especially since it was his first piece. The old lady everybody thought was her mother actually was Lucy Longstreet who ran a sleazy bordello on Third Street.”

“I still don’t see the humor in it, Dog.”

“Ah,” I said. “It’s there. Dennie boy got the damndest dose of gonorrhea you ever saw. I used to enjoy watching him hang from the overhead pipes in the garage toilet and scream while he tried to piss. His treatment was a closely guarded family secret. I used to take great pleasure in hiding his medication.”

Hunter’s slow smile turned into a silent guffaw. “You know, I wondered what that was all about. There were some dealings with the public health service when the doctor turned in his report. It took some doing to keep it quiet. Small Connecticut towns can make a big to-do about the scion of its leading family getting a dose from a local wench. I don’t suppose there was any attempt to mollify your indignity at having been made a patsy?”

“You’re slipping, Counselor. That’s when the old man made me a present of a new car and told me I could pick my own college. That trust fund didn’t come from the goodness of his heart.”

He picked up his coffee cup and held it in front of his mouth. Over the rim his eyes were birdlike, with a strange intensity. “I think maybe it did, now that I know the whole story. Your grandfather had his own peculiar code. You were the sucker, you could have blown the whistle on his scurrilous nephew and made the family a laughingstock and have been justified in doing so. On your own volition you chose not to. That was when he began to like you. I think it was a great misfortune that you saw little of him from that time on. Does anyone else know about this?”

“Sure. My mother before she died. She thought it was kind of funny. And there was the gardener your skinny-dipping Dubro finally married. You see, he knew me better. The real funny part was that at that time when Dennie was ripping off his first piece, I had been through a dozen women. I was far from a virgin. There wasn’t even a chance of me hitting that little twist because I knew damn well she had the clap. All I did was stand back, take my lumps and wait for the pee pains to hit Dennie. It was worth the wait.”