J. Kerley - The Broken Souls

“What’s the connection to the station?” I asked.

“The family’s one of the major investors in Clarity, part of the ownership consortium. Buck Kincannon’s my boss, Carson. Way up the ladder, but the guy who makes the big decisions.”

Clarity Broadcasting owned Channel 14 and a few dozen other TV and radio outlets, primarily in the South, but according to newspaper accounts they were pushing hard toward a national presence.

“Who’s the older woman?” I asked.

Dani’s voice subconsciously dropped to a whisper. “Maylene Kincannon. Queen Maylene, some people call her. But only from a distance. Like another continent. Buck’s the oldest of her kids, forty-one. Beside Buck is Racine Kincannon and his wife Lindy; Racine’s thirty-eight or so. The guy closest to Mama is Nelson Kincannon, thirty-four, I think.”

“Who are the others with them?”

“Congressman Whitfield to the right, beside him is Bertram Waddley, CEO of the biggest bank in the state, next to Waddley is –”

I held up my hand. “I get the picture.”

I turned from the hangers-on and scanned the brothers: Buck, Racine, Nelson. Though the angular faces weren’t feminine, the men seemed almost gorgeous, their eyes liquid and alert, their gestures practiced and fluid.

My eyes fell on the matriarch, lingered. Though her skin was pale and her hair was snow, nothing about her said frail. She looked like she could have wrestled Harry to a draw.

“What happened to Papa Kincannon?” I asked.

“Buck Senior? I haven’t heard much about him. He has some form of mental ailment, early onset Alzheimer’s or something similar, a disease of the brain. He’s alive, but has been out of the picture for years.”

“He started the fortune?”

“He had a mind for business. An instinct or whatever.”

“You know a lot about the family, Dani.”

She looked away. “I’m a reporter and they’re a major investor in my company.”

“Where’s Kincannon’s wife?”

“He’s single. Divorced years ago.”

“Have you ever met him?”

Dani studied her wineglass, drained it. “I met him at a charity event eighteen months back.”

“You talked to him since?”

She passed me her glass. “Could you get me another, please? While I climb back into these shoes.”

Rather than cross the center of the room, where I might re-meet someone I’d already forgotten, I moved to the shadowed edges and circled toward the nearest bar. My path took me behind the Clan Kincannon. The Buckster was still working the receiving line, his hand squeezed by men, cheeks pecked by women.

Mama Maylene was another matter: it seemed forbidden to touch her, and even the most hand-grabbing, hug-enwrapping, cheek-kissing folks stopped short of Mama, offering a few brief words before quickly slipping past.

When not engaged in long-distance greetings, Maylene Kincannon raked the crowd with emotionless eyes, black as cinders in the whiteness of her face. I watched in fascination as they gathered full measure of the room, every face, every gesture, every contact.

Perhaps she felt my gaze, for her eyes swung to mine. For a moment we stared at one another, until her eyes moved away, restless, scanning. I had the feeling of having been surveyed by a machine, deemed of zero value, dismissed.

There was a crowd at the bar and I got in one of the lines. My position faced me down a service hall to a kitchen door. Surprisingly – and delightfully – a woman’s derriere backed from the kitchen, wiggling as it retreated. The owner followed, throwing air kisses and whispering thanks. I suspected she was a late arrival not wishing to enter via the cascading steps and glare of lights.

I put her age in the early thirties, slender where she needed to be, ample where she didn’t, big lavender eyes augmented with too much shadow, perhaps trying to balance a succulent, lipstick-ad mouth. Her dress was cobalt blue, strapless, anchored by gravity-defying breasts whose origin was dubious.

“Whatcha need, sir?” the barkeep asked.

I reluctantly turned from the woman. “Tall bourbon and soda, light on the bourbon, and a white wine.”

“We have three whites tonight, sir. A Belden Farms Chardonnay, a B & G Vouvray, and a Chenin Blanc by Isenger.”

I knew wine as well as I knew Mandarin. I said uh several times.

“Go for the Vouvray, Slim,” a woman’s voice said. “The others are horse piss.”

I turned. The woman in cobalt leaned against the column at the end of the bar, a few feet distant. She winked. “Grab me a drink while you’re there, wouldya? Double scotch.” Her voice was a purr of command, cigarette husky, a voice with more years on it than the woman.

I turned, three drinks in hand. She snatched hers and spun away. I watched her circle behind the crowd, pause against another column, study the surroundings. She belted the scotch. Then she snapped her wrist twice, like flicking paint from a brush. She thought a moment, then repeated the odd motion, more exaggerated this time, like cracking a whip.

She flipped the empty glass into a trash can, snapped on a bright smile, and headed into the crowded room. My eyes kept following her derriere, but the room went dark.

Lucas arrived a half-hour after the Channel 14 soirée had started, parking outside the Shrine Temple, slipping the used Subaru into the anonymous dark between street lamps. He had been eating granola, spitting stale raisins out the window into the street. It had irritated him that a fucking health-food store would sell granola with stale raisins and he’d considered returning to the store, grabbing the slacker clerk by his Bruce Cockburn T-shirt, dragging him down here and making the bastard lick the raisins from the pavement.

“Those taste fresh to you? You little cocksucking son of a …”

He had caught himself. Taken several deep breaths, cleansing breaths. Listened to Dr Rudolnick conjure up clouds.

“Settle into the clouds, Lucas. Let your anger drift away …”

Nothing much had happened while he waited; not that he’d expected anything. But he’d read about this soirée in a newspaper column and decided to rub elbows with the swells, even if it was a distant rubbing.

Sometimes things were revealed in small motions. Like the black stretch limo parked in the lot down the block, engine idling, keeping the air conditioning at a precise seventy-eight degrees. Lucas had wanted to knock on the door of the limo, engage the driver in conversation. Maybe leave a warm ass-print in the leather seat, like a dog spraying its territory.

Common sense had prevailed. It wasn’t yet time to prod the Kincannons.

After he’d been sitting for several more minutes, calm again, a woman slipped from the doors of the Temple, a sexy woman in a blue dress, large breasts bobbing as she high-heeled down the sidewalk. She was weaving a bit, a sheet or two to the wind. She laughed, flicked her hand in the air in a strange and sudden motion, like a drummer tapping a cymbal. Then she hawked and spat onto the sidewalk, lit a cigarette, and crossed the street to climb into a battered red Corolla. It took two minutes of grinding the ignition before the engine kicked over and the car rattled away trailing a plume of blue exhaust.

The woman was suddenly more interesting to Lucas than a building he couldn’t safely enter, and his curiosity made him follow her, just for a lark.

As I crossed the ballroom in the dark, a drink in each hand, the podium turned white with spotlight, signaling the business side of the affair. I returned to the table as the general manager took the dais. He droned industry jargon for twenty minutes: ratings points, targeted growth analysis, revenue streams, optimized asset utilization, and so forth. He was followed by three heads of something-or-other. Finally the GM reclaimed the microphone, burbled a few more comments, then swept his hand toward the Kincannon suburb.