Lawrence Block - Candy

If there was ever a speech less flawlessly designed to get a man in the mood …

But the gal knew what she was doing. Her hands were soft and she put them to good use. They were all over me, touching, caressing, squeezing, pinching, fondling, and doing all these diverse tasks with the utmost in competent professionalism.

Hand and lips, teeth and tongue.

Her mouth warm and demanding. Her hands quick and certain.

Her hungry mouth.

When I got home I took three showers and still felt dirty. I drained the bottle dry and collapsed in the chair and slept for six hours sitting bolt upright.

The Chinese restaurant, coyly called the Hoy Polloy, got rich on buck-a-plate lunches by cramming the tables close together, so close that you could gobble up somebody else’s chop suey if your own moo goo gai pan wasn’t to your liking. Les and I had a table in the back that we got to by air-lift. He ordered two dishes from number something and one from number something else and I drank a double rye with a little soda while we waited for our slop to come. The rye was good and I lapped it up like a camel after a long trek across the Sahara. Les stared balefully at the rye until it had all been transferred from the glass to my gullet, which is where it obviously belonged. Then he took the cigarettes that I offered him and lit them both with the lighter his wife gave him as a birthday present.

“Jeff,” he said. “I don’t know how to say this—”

I let him try again.

“Look, Jeff—Joe and Phil are right guys, wouldn’t you say?”

He meant our bosses, Joe Burns and Phil Delfy. “Yeah,” I agreed. “Thieves, too. Crooks, undoubtedly. Loan sharks, inevitably. But I’ll go along with the notion that they’re right guys.”

He pouted. “They always treated me decent.”

“Me too.”

“They aren’t tough to work for, Jeff. They don’t make a guy hit a time clock or work like a galley slave like some of the bastards in the business.”

“Hell,” I said. “We work on an incentive basis. A time clock would hurt them as much as it would aggravate us. It’s only to their own advantage—”

He held up a hand. “I know it,” he said, “but a lot of momsers wouldn’t see it that way. Joe and Phil give the pair of us a pretty straight deal.”

I nodded. I wanted to find out what he was getting at. “Jeff,” he said. “You’ve been with Beverley how long?”

“Four, five years. Something like that.”

“You figuring on going somewhere else soon?”

I just stared at him for a minute. It took me that long to make sure that he wasn’t kidding.

“No,” I said. “No, but—”

“I don’t like to be the one to say this,” he cut in, “but if you don’t straighten out soon you’re going to be out on your ear. If—”

“Hey, hang on a minute!”

He held up the hand again. “Jeff,” he said pleadingly, “it’s not my idea. Believe me, to me you’re a nice guy. I want you working in the same office with me forever. I mean it—it’s not that we know each other so closely because we don’t, but I like working with you and by me you’re all right. But the way you’ve been going at it lately—”

“Like how?”

“Like that,” he said, pointing to the rye. There were two more ounces in it now—I’d managed to catch the waiter’s eye while Les was talking. “You’ve been drinking like you heard rumors of another Prohibition.”

I swallowed the rye.

He looked hurt. “Jeff,” he said, “believe me, by me you could drink oceans and it wouldn’t bother me. But—”

“Phil and Joe?”

He nodded.

“Look,” I said. “Phil and Joe are hardly saints. You don’t find saints in the finance business. You rarely find saints in the respectable banking business, for that matter. And Beverley Finance is as far removed from the respectable banking business as—”

I had a good image cooked up but he cut me off. “Jeff,” he said, “let me say two things. First of all, no matter how crooked Phil and Joe may seem to you, their operations are strictly within the letter of the law. Our clients are not pulled off the streets and nobody makes them borrow. They come to us—remember that. They come to us because we fulfill a legitimate need.”

I shrugged. There was room for argument on that score. You might say we created the “legitimate need” with our coy little advertisements. But I let him finish what he was trying to say.

“Second,” he went on, “neither Phil nor Joe expects anybody working at the place to be a plaster saint. If a man beats his wife they don’t care. If a man takes dope they don’t care. But if it gets in the way of the business they do care , and for that who can blame them?”

I held up the empty glass and nodded at it. “Does this get in the way of the business?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

He looked unhappy. “You keep a bottle in your desk—twice yesterday you took a drink while there were clients in the office. You smelled of liquor and the clients can tell this. You slur your words from time to time—maybe you haven’t realized this but I’ve noticed it. You—”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly. You put through one application that it was lucky Miss Glaser caught because he was in the book as a deadbeat. All you had to do was look in the book and you would have known it, but you got careless.”

“Which one was that?”

“Harwell, Farwell, I forget.”

“Carwell,” I said. “Herbert Carwell. Hell, he seemed perfectly okay. I didn’t bother—”

“They always seem okay. Normally you would have checked the book, you always check the book before approving an application. This time you didn’t.”

“I—”

“Jeff,” he said, “I’m not trying to get on your back. I’m just trying to say that you’d better straighten out before you get fired, and I’m trying to say this as a friend. Is there something bothering you that maybe I can help you with? Is it money or anything like that?”

“No.”

It was a hundred thousand dollars that I didn’t have, two women whom I didn’t have, a whole life that I didn’t have. But I didn’t tell him this.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

I shook my head.

“Will you try to lay off the liquor? Look, it’s not just the job. My wife’s brother, he started drinking once five years ago and he hasn’t stopped yet. It can sneak up on you and all of a sudden you can’t stop or you don’t want to stop or I don’t know what. My wife’s brother, he’s a mess now. An alcoholic. A bum. Once a month he’s over to the house begging for a handout so he can buy a drink. What can I do? He’s my wife’s flesh and blood, I can’t turn him down. But before he started drinking he was a doctor with a practice that brought him in about thirty gees a year. A rich man, Jeff. Not rich like Rockefeller, but richer than either of us’ll ever be. Now he’s a bum. You see what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Try,” he said. “Just do me that favor. Favor—it’s a favor to yourself more than a favor to me. Just try to take it easy and cut down on the drinking.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

I don’t know whether I meant it or not. I was just sick of listening to him, sick of hearing about his goddamned wife’s brother, sick of the whole sermon and the whole do-gooder bit he was playing. There was no question about his sincerity, no question but that he was one hell of a good guy trying to help me out.

This didn’t make me one whit less sick of listening to him.

We let it lay there and we started to eat the slop on our plates. He was plainly embarrassed—the two of us never talked much and now he had given me a straight-from-the-shoulder bit and he was worried about it. I could understand that.