Don Winslow - A Long Walk Up the Waterslide

And the clothes: Today she was dressed entirely in brand-new denim that made it look as if she’d gone shopping for her trip to the West. Lots of silver and turquoise jewelry, and bright red fingernails that were so long, she couldn’t possibly type even if she wanted to.

“You got any losh?” she asked as she came out of the bathroom. “So my hands don’t dry? I’ve got the worst problem with dry hands. They crack if I don’t use enough losh. I have some in one of the other bags, but it’s out in the car.”

Neal winced. Polly didn’t say the or they; she said de and dey, and she seemed to have a little ventriloquist hidden in her throat that made her words sound as if they were coming out of her nose. And she didn’t say car; she said caw.

Karen said, “I think I have some lotion in the bedroom. I’ll go get it.”

“I’ll go get it with you,” Neal said.

In the bedroom, Karen found a plastic bottle of lotion while Neal rummaged through the chest of drawers.

“What are you looking for?” Karen asked.

“A revolver,” answered Neal. “One bullet or two?”

Karen smiled and grabbed Neal’s shoulders.

“Her hair is so big!” she whispered. “I’ve always wanted to meet a woman with big hair like that.”

“But do you want her staying here for a month or more?”

Karen looked at him sharply.

“Neal, the woman was raped!”

“The woman says she was raped.”

Karen’s blue eyes got serious as she tightened her grip on his shoulders.

“Neal Carey,” she said, “if a woman says she was raped, then she was raped.”

Not necessarily, Neal thought.

It was a little early for a beer, but it was also a little early to be taking on a new case, so Neal popped the cap with only a trace of guilt. Brezhnev, an enormous black dog of indeterminate breed, raised his head an inch off the floor and growled until Neal left a dollar on the counter. Brogan, the owner and namesake of the grubby saloon, snored away behind the bar in the old BarcaLounger he had rescued from the county dump. Neal hadn’t seen Brogan get out of that chair except to go to the john, and there were people in Austin prepared to swear, based on olfactory evidence, that he didn’t always get up for that.

Brogan started snoring. His head was tilted back and something kind of yellow dribbled from the edge of his mouth.

“Is he asleep or faking it?” Graham asked.

Neal looked over at Brezhnev, who kept one narrow eye on him.

“He’s asleep. They take turns when someone is in the bar. The dog won’t go to sleep unless Brogan is awake.”

“He can’t fake out the dog?”

“Nobody can fake out that dog.”

Neal opened a second bottle, hopped back over the bar, and sat down at a table next to Graham, who was busily wiping the greasy tabletop with a handkerchief.

“Isn’t there a clean place in this town?” Graham complained.

“It doesn’t open until dinner,” Neal answered. “So what does the bank have to do with Polly Paget?”

Karen had thrown them out of the house for a while so she could “get Polly settled.” Which, Neal figured, meant putting away her underwear, finding a place for her cosmetics, and pumping her for information.

“Can I have a glass?” Graham asked.

“Brogan probably has one somewhere, but I don’t think you want to see it,” Neal answered. You could pull fifteen years of fingerprints off one of Brogan’s beer glasses.

Graham took a fresh handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped the mouth of the beer bottle. He took a tentative sip and said, “Jack Landis is the majority owner of the FCN network. The bank’s client, Peter Hathaway, is the largest minority owner. The minority owner wants to be the majority owner. Hathaway is pissed off because he thinks that Jack is overextending. And then there’s Candyland.”

“Candyland.” Neal chuckled. He’d heard about Candyland on “The Jack and Candy Family Hour.”

Candyland was going to be an enormous “family vacation resort” on the outskirts of San Antonio-as soon as it was finished, of course. They were still several million dollars short, so Jack and Candy were selling shares to their faithful viewers. Just send in five hundred bucks for your time-share condo. Jack and Candy made this offer about every twelve seconds. They were like vice cops in a strip joint when it came to hitting you up for Candyland money.

“It’s a disaster,” Graham said. “They’re way over budget in every category and they’re running out of cash.”

“Are they really going to build it?”

Graham shrugged.

“Let me guess,” Neal said. “The bank has a loan on it.”

“But of course,” Graham answered. “And the minority owner wants to work with the bank and get it straightened out. But how do you fire the most popular couple in America?”

“Tough one,” Neal answered. “Maybe if he raped his secretary…”

“Bingo,” Graham said.

“So is Polly telling the truth?” Neal asked.

“I dunno,” Graham answered.

“The cops didn’t believe he raped me,” Polly said to Karen. “I mean, I was balling the guy for a year, right, and then I cry rape. But honest to God, the last time it was.”

Karen was helping Polly put her underwear away in the small guest room. This was no easy task. Polly had a lot of underclothes.

“Jack is no great shakes in the sack anyway, to tell you the truth,” Polly continued, “but who would be married to ‘Canned-Ice’-that’s what he used to call his wife. I mean, where would he get the practice, right? So he needed somebody, okay, and he was, like, nice to me? So every time he came to New York, we’d go back to my place and do it… and do it and do it and do it… but I got feeling bad about myself. I mean, this thing was going nowhere and there was his wife on the TV talking about how they had tried to have kids but couldn’t and I’m in bed with the guy watching this. He used to like to do it while they were on the TV together, which got really creepy. I mean, there they were together all sweet and lovey-dovey and there we were in bed doing it. Don’t you think that’s kind of creepy?”

“Definitely creepy,” Karen said.

“Even my best friend, Gloria, thinks it’s creepy, and she’s looser than I am. So anyway, after a while I said, ‘Jack, I’m not doing it anymore while “The Jack and Candy Family Hour” is on,’ and he got mad and we broke up, but then he came back and was really sweet and everything and so I took him back and we started doing it again, but not during ‘The Jack and Candy Family Hour.’ That’s on tape, not live, you know.”

“I kind of figured that out,” Karen said. She handed Polly a bra that looked like a postdoctoral project at MIT.

Polly held it up and said, “One of the things I’m going to do with the money is have my boobs done, because I’m thinking about trying Hollywood, and you need boobs. I mean, I have boobs, of course, but not boobs.”

She held her hands out to demonstrate what she had in mind.

Karen winced.

“I think you look great,” she said.

“Do you? Awwww,” Polly said. “Sometimes I think I look like a cheap tramp. I think that’s what the cops thought, like ‘She was asking for it,’ you know, but I wasn’t. I told Jack it was over. I was through with him and he asked for one last time and I told him no, but he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and the son of a bitch held me down and did it and I think that’s rape, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“So do I, but try telling that to the cops. They look at you like you’re nuts or something, but we’ll see who’s nuts.”

Probably Neal after a month of this, Karen thought.