Feast of Murder(7)
“So,” Mickey was saying, “why don’t we go about this rationally? Why don’t we start from the beginning and go through the middle and get to the end. Maybe that way I’ll understand what you’re talking about.”
Tony Baird took a sip of his beer and sighed. Mickey was such a straightforward person, such a natural straight. He always did exactly the right thing at exactly the right time for exactly the right people, never even considering the possibility that the wrong thing might be more interesting. Even Mickey’s rebellions had been straight. He’d known he was supposed to have them. He had therefore had them, getting dutifully drunk in Concord and stoned in New Haven and laid enough times to catch crabs in New York. Now he was making his way cheerfully up the ladder at Kidder, Peabody and looking for a girl who had come out at the Grosvenor. He was only twenty-two years old, but in Tony’s estimation he might as well have been dead.
Tony had run his life in a very different fashion. He had been reasonably circumspect in prep school—although less circumspect than Mickey; a rabbit could have been that—but once he’d gotten to New Haven he’d started making a serious run at getting a little broadened experience. Now he was twenty-five years old, the owner of the most outrageous performance art gallery in Soho, and the next best thing to a celebrity in the world of New York art. He had spoken at a rally organized to defend the National Endowment for the Arts from Jesse Helms. He had been interviewed in Interview magazine. He had gone to bed with women without number, all of whom seemed to be named some variation of “Viveca.” He was also bored out of his skull and thinking of chucking it all right after Christmas, but that was beside the point.
He took another sip on his beer, considered Mickey’s proposal, and said, “I can’t do it that way, because it won’t work that way. I mean, if it wasn’t for the twelve and a half million dollars, it wouldn’t be anything at all.”
“Well,” Mickey told him, “I’ll agree that twelve and a half million dollars does tend to make something out of nothing if it wants to, but that’s not your end of it, is it? I mean, you have nothing to do with the twelve and a half million dollars, do you? Assuming the twelve and a half million dollars exists.”
“Oh, it exists all right. Dad told me about it last time I was up to see him at Danbury. Two weeks ago. I thought it was going to happen right away.”
“Maybe your Dad had second thoughts,” Mickey said. “Paying off Donald McAdam. Yuck.”
“Yuck on every possible level,” Tony said. “The guy’s a sleaze, let me tell you. I mean, not a sleaze sleaze. Not like one of those Arabian bankers that turned out to be running the BCCI scam and I kept telling Dad about and he wouldn’t listen to me—”
“Did he ever?” Mickey was curious. “I mean, when BCCI broke did you go to him and say I told you so and did he admit—”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Dad’s good with that. No ego in the ordinary sense and credit where credit’s due. But McAdam.” Tony shrugged. “You can feel it. Bent.”
“Bent,” Mickey repeated. “But he was a friend of your father’s, so—”
“I thought he was a friend of my father’s,” Tony said, “at the time, which was about a year and a half ago, maybe a little more. Before anyone knew he was talking to the Feds. He was still commuting back and forth to Philadelphia, or at least he said he was, and that was why he needed the stuff.”
“Strychnine,” Mickey said solemnly.
“Cocaine with strychnine in it,” Tony said. “Do you remember when people used to do that? You don’t hang around here very much. Maybe you don’t. Cissy Esterhaven bought it right in the middle of the dance floor at The Hang Out. Just started jerking around like she’d been electrocuted and ended up dead on the floor. It wasn’t a fad that lasted long, do you know what I mean? Too many people ended up dead.”
“I took cocaine once,” Mickey said. “It gave me a headache.”
“I took cocaine once, too. Exactly once. I took everything exactly once. I thought I was being smart. Then Len Bias died.” Tony shrugged again and looked back up into the tangle of pipes. The problem with going out to cram your life full of experiences was that it was like going out to cram your mouth full of chocolate. After a while it began to seem pointless. It didn’t even taste good. He held his bottle of beer up to the light and saw that it was empty. He thought about ordering another one and decided against it. Maybe after Mickey was finished nursing his whiskey sour they could go uptown and find a bar that was lighter and airier and full of more expensive people.