Chapter 3

VIVA LAS VEGAS

On those very rare afternoons a decade ago (most often, Monday holidays on which the market was closed) when he could escape the ceaseless phone calls and the insane deal-making of Drexel's junk bond mill in Beverly Hills, he'd tuck himself into the buttery leather of Darth's cockpit and speed down to have lunch with Carly.

She worked as a secretary for an insurance company on Von Karman Boulevard in Newport Center. With only a half-hour (she could occasionally push it to forty-five minutes) permitted her for lunch, they'd grab a quick picnic lunch at a greenbelt table near her building.

It was his responsibility to bring the beverages (diet Coke for her, a canned martini cocktail for him); her responsibility to pack the food. Sometimes, it was cold fried chicken or pasta salad with ham and green peas.

Today, it was tunafish salad sandwiches--made with yogurt, instead of mayonnaise--on whole wheat bread, with dill pickle spears, black olives and cream cheese-stuffed celery on the side.

"Do you like it?" she asked, after he tried a bite.

"Sure."

She beamed. "That's good."

He took a stiff pull on his martini, sucking it down like a beer to flush the taste out of his mouth. Why was everything she cooked so cutesy?

"How's work?" he asked.

"Super." She carefully chewed her food and swallowed. Carly's brown eyes brightened. "Mr. Amburger is going to send me to a computer course to learn Excel. The company is going to pay for it." She told him all about it in the same tone she'd use had she suddenly inherited a million bucks from a long-lost aunt.

"Great," Royce said. He wished his own hot buttons were that easy to push. A course on spreadsheets, for Christ's sake. The company is going to pay for it, for Christ's sake.

"Sounds like a great opportunity, Carly."

"Yes."

He gobbled down a couple black olives, liking their fleshy feel on his teeth and tongue.

"I have to attend a seminar this weekend in San Francisco--on bond underwriting. You're more than welcome to come along. I don't know how exciting it would be for you. Probably pretty boring."

"Thanks, anyway. I should probably wrap a present for Susan's bridal shower."

He nodded. "Okay." He knew Carly could indeed spend all day wrapping a gift, making sure the paper matched the bow, and the bow was tied just right and decoratively curled with a pair of scissors.

"As long as you're not with that Cliff, I'll know you'll be okay. The way he wears those dark glasses all the time. Gives me the shivers."

"Oh no. Cliff has nothing to do with this. I just wish I didn't have to be gone most of the weekend."

Carly disliked Cliff. Most women, most decent women, did.

"I understand, Royce."

He knew she was telling the truth. One thing about Carly, she wasn't possessive like most of the ladies he had dated (he referred to them as "ladies" when, in fact, most of them were "bitches"). Even after sleeping with him for the first time, she put no hooks in him.

Still, he knew she was very fond of him, counted on marrying him one day. She wanted what most twenty-two-year-old girls with her type of blue-collar background wanted: the status (and security) of being part of a wedded couple.

And children too, he knew, from the mushy way she scoped out rug rats when they went mall hopping.

She consulted the Pulsar on her wrist and sealed the sandwich bag containing the remaining two celery pieces (for her "munchies" later), then carefully folded her sandwich wrap and tin foil and put it all neatly away in her tote bag. He handed over his own trash. That, too, went into her bag. A tidy lady, Carly was. Standing, she demurely smoothed her light summer dress.

He admired her long-stemmed beauty. Tall, and with dancer's legs, she might have been a model, save for her nose, a trifle pronounced. She possessed soft, brown eyes and cute freckles in various places. Not much of a bust to speak of, though, and he wished she'd stop dying her hair blonde and cutting it gamine short (she'd dreamed of being the stereotypical blue-eyed blonde). It made her look cheap. Her clothes were a little on the school girlish side. But she carried herself well, almost regally, although he knew for a fact she'd grown up an oil refinery worker's daughter in some horseshit town in Wyoming, was a tomboy in her teens, and could shoot a rifle better than many sportsmen. He'd seen an old photo of Carly in her scrapbook, posing with a deer she'd just dispatched. The freckle-faced girl had a sick smirk on her face. (Carly hated that picture, so Royce loved to tease her about it.)

Since then, she'd managed to polish her rough edges, all pretty much on her own, from what Royce could fathom. If she hadn't been a secretary, he would have figured her for a registered nurse or a social worker.

True, she could use more sensual skills, but sex with her was far from disappointing. Their coupling was loving, gentle. And it delighted Royce to introduce her to (and even shock her with) new lovemaking practices--more ambitious positions, the plundering of new erogenous zones.

"I do have to get back, Royce."

"Yeah, me too."

He planted a kiss on her left cheek.

"If I'm back early enough Sunday night, maybe we can barbecue or something."

"Okay."

She headed off towards her glass box and Royce strode quickly to his car. Time was money, especially in a racket where fortunes were made or lost in the time it took to go take a pee. He powered up the black Porsche Carrera and bolted out of the parking lot.

Seconds later, he was tooling north on the Pacific Coast Highway (radar detectors scanning fore and aft) with his car phone clinched tightly in his right hand, weaving in and out of traffic with an acute, egocentric aggression that garnered him plenty of screeching brakes and up-thrust fingers.

"Michael is furious," said Sheila, his administrative assistant. "He wants to know where the hell you are."

"And you told him what?"

"That you were getting a manicure."

Royce winced painfully. That Sheila. Proving he could handle the pressure with grace, he managed some bravado:

"Oh yes, mistress. I'm coming, my mistress. Don't whip me, my dominatrix."

"Screw that mistress crap. The Staley deal is leaking. Seems some companies don't want us to ream them. If you're not back here with some bright ideas pronto, it won't be me who flays your ass."

Royce swallowed, dry-mouthed. "Yeah, I know," he said soberly, envisioning Milken's malevolent, smarmy pus. "Any other calls?"

"That analyst from Merrill Lynch called to suck up again. What a whiner. The usual pencil dicks and numb nuts, of course, and that bloodsucker Cliff Wells again. Gives me the creeps. That boy needs to be weaned. You and he an item now? Have you given up on girls all together?"

"Sit on it and rotate, Sheila."

"Oh, yum."

In Long Beach, he caught I-405. Now he could really sail. The apprehension was building, making his guts feel as though they'd been stuffed with hot oatmeal. Visiting Carly had been a mistake, what with M.M. on the prod about the Staley Continental situation. The Chicago food producer's management wasn't going along with the buyout.

His cellular sounded off.

"Yeah?" he snapped.

"Cliff here, old buddy."

"Yeah, what can I do for you?"

"Hey, do I detect a little tension in your voice or what? You forgettin' to do your biofeedback?"

"Come on, Cliff. What do you want? I'm up to my ass in alligators."

"We still on for Vegas?"

"I may have a complication."

"May I remind you there will be three-thousand swingers there? Half of ‘em horny women just dying for an infusion of fresh beef?"

"Yeah, but I may have to go to Chicago. Put the fear of God into some human idiots."

"Go after," Cliff whined. "I got us a room in the Hacienda's tower, close to all the action. We're gonna be sore for days!"

"Okay, okay! I'll see what I can work out."

Royce jammed the phone down in its cradle. God, he hated it when Cliff whined. If it were true that people judged you by the company you kept, then Royce was in deep shit.

# # #

On the final approach into McCarran, Royce stared out the cabin windows at the jeweled lights of the Strip and wondered why he had ever gotten mixed up with Cliff Wells, the best reason for making abortions cheap and readily available Royce had ever encountered. A spoiled trust fund baby from Philly, Cliff was so repulsive his family paid him three thou a month (and set him up in a Marina Del Ray apartment) with the understanding that he could never set foot in Philadelphia again.

There Cliff--the cocky shrimp--was, up forward, putting the make on the pretty, fresh-faced blonde flight attendant who looked more like she should be swinging pompoms than food trays. This, after he had made a flaming ass of himself by refusing to eat the dinner of stuffed chicken breast and rice with the Danish almond paste cookie for dessert.

Now, he was glaring at the flight attendant with fevered, dissolute eyes--the same wanton glare Royce had witnessed when he first met Cliff two years ago in the Body Shop, an LA strip bar. Royce was there enjoying all the sophomoric high jinks of a bachelor party, and Cliff was recruiting girls for a new venture: adult "amateur" home videos.

But the girls weren't biting that night, maybe because they suspected their first acting assignment would be to go down on Cliff, without benefit of appropriate financial compensation. So Cliff, gregarious to a fault, fell in with Royce's bunch. And when the video auteur discovered Royce was a Drexel investment banker, well, Cliff was all over him like a cheap suit.

Cliff was quite an idea man, and all of his money-making schemes were based on the premise that most folks were inherently corrupt, loathsome. There was, of course, Cliff's idea to put pornographic videos "of real people, really doing it" into every bedroom in America. Then, of course, in keeping with Cliff's own recreational habits, there was the plan to establish a national franchise of head shops named McMellow's.

While keeping one eye peeled for bouncing titty, Royce had listened to all this gibberish with some interest. Cliff, after all, was quite entertaining and made Royce feel smugly superior. For a mover and shaker of Royce's caliber, there was satisfaction in humoring an amateurish buffoon rooting around in the dung at the lowest level of the food chain.

"I do three, four, maybe five deals a week, each of ‘em bigger than anything you're talkin' about," Royce slurred proudly. He stopped short of telling Cliff that his projected net income this year, with bonus, was just short of 350K, and that he was only twenty-eight years old.

"I know, man. But that's where I need your expertise. I got the big ideas. You got the big financing. This Milken guy you work for, he's got the plan. I'd like to meet him sometime."

That would be a laugh, Royce thought. Michael Milken meeting Cliff Wells. Hell, they'd probably get along splendidly.

"Michael's really kinda shy," Royce said.

"That's okay," Cliff said, smiling. "I have a way of bringing people out of their shells."

They toasted their new friendship with several shots of Cuervo Gold (on Royce's tab), and later clinched the relationship with a couple of lines of toot back at Cliff's apartment. Cliff, Royce discovered, was a cokehead and a small-time dealer. When it came to the white powder, Royce always felt he could take it or leave it. That night he took it--a lot, for him.

They started to pal around together, boozing, drugging, wenching (lots of wenching) just for laughs. It was an unlikely pair, but each got what he needed out of it. For Cliff, it was a chance to stay close to the epicenter of incredible power and avarice. For Royce, well, he told himself he wasn't quite sure why he let the little fool hang around. Sometimes, he worried there was a character flaw in him that had allowed himself to be used by a fringe element like Cliff. Certainly, most of his friends didn't see what he saw in the guy.

Royce couldn't blame his friends for being judgmental about Cliff, especially when the little prick claimed to have been bitten by a female "bitchin' vampire" in a rat hole of a club on Sunset Boulevard, at the stroke of midnight on May 6, which happened to be some arcane holiday called St. George's Day. Cliff had gone on and on about the significance of the date while showing Royce where he'd been "fanged" on the neck. The marks only looked like skin indentions to Royce, and that really pissed off Cliff when Royce told him so.

Cliff thought he'd finally found his true identity, that of a modern-day vampire. From that day forward, he donned the dark glasses, shunned direct sunlight, and removed all the mirrors from his apartment. He even took to sucking the blood out of fresh meat packages at the grocery store.

"Only trouble is, it makes my crap black and smell like sulfur," Cliff would say, smacking his bloody lips.

What a lame-oh, Royce thought. But still he stuck it out with Cliff.

The senior flight attendant announced it was time to put the trays up and seats back in preparation for landing. A voracious leer on his face, Cliff made his way back to his seat. He grinned at Royce and said, "Lookee what I got," and deposited a wadded cocktail napkin in Royce's hands.

On the napkin a woman's name--Valerie--and phone number were scribbled.

Cliff winked. "Don't let Val's looks fool you. She's a pro. She's laying over in Vegas this weekend, and she's willing to let us lay into her for some generosity on our parts."

"Both of us? At the same time?"

"Sure. A three-way. A ménage a trois. If this swinger's convention fizzles, I say we give her a call. I'll even let you go first, Royce. Hell, I don't mind sloppy seconds."

Then it struck Royce why he spent time with Cliff.

With Cliff, there was always the nervy anticipation that something wonderful was going to happen.