Seal considered. “I’m not sure what could be done, Miss Pritchett, unless you’d choose to have him declared incompetent, get a power of attorney and an injunction against those people coming here.”
“But he’s not incompetent. Left alone he makes perfect sense. No, I wouldn’t do that if I could.”
“You’ve talked to his attorneys?”
“Until my head aches. They suggest I hire some strong fellow who’d throw them right out of here. But that’s just like calling the police, and he’d rebel.”
He tried to think of something. “It’s not as if he’s completely taken in by them and, say, giving away large chunks of money.”
“No, they’ve tried that. He knows better. I’m sure this is what makes them furious, inspires all that meanness and humiliation. If you could see them taunting and cajoling him until he gets out on that balcony there and does those inept embarrassing imitations of Mussolini or Hitler or Juliet before a lot of parasites and strangers, and down there they’re snickering while they clean out the food and the liquor and wander through the house. All those millions of dollars — so near and yet so far.”
From the shadow Seal watched the cigarette beneath the ebony tree below. It arched out and into the pool. “I wish I could do something, Miss Pritchett. It’s more a legal matter.”
“Might I ask you then, since he knows you, could you, say, drop by for lunch someday this week and be company to him? Try to find out anything I might not know?”
“I’d be happy to,” he said. “Were you aware, Miss Pritchett, that there’s still someone down there by the pool?”
“Oh, yes, I knew it. That’s Amanda, the last of his wives.”
“Two years ago, wasn’t she?”
“Yes. Married him, stayed a week, picked up her money, and ran to Tijuana. Somebody in Las Vegas took her for every dime.”
“What’s her problem now?”
“The same game they’re all playing — Anything Times Six, whatever it means. They’re all deadly suspicious of each other, those six. They’re terrified that one of them is going to slip in here some night, get him juiced up and before a Justice of the Peace for a remarriage. That’s why they usually come together. They watch each other like cobras.”
“Any danger of such a remarriage?”
She laughed harshly. “Lord, no! He despises them the same way they laugh at him. They’re just too dumb to know it. Sometimes I think that might be the heart of it. He enjoys watching them being the kind of damned fool he used to be.”
“So Amanda’s on guard at the gate.”
“Or toying with the idea of slipping up here later and scoring a few points. Or walking off with the color TV. No way. I’ll lock her little fanny out. I sleep in the next room and I hear everything.”
Seal left her getting out Quentin’s pajamas. He went down the staircase. In his pocket was the $6,200 in one-hundred dollar bills he had realized from the sale of the bulls. As he came out and skirted the pool he had these bills in his hand. He counted them conspicuously. Peripherally he saw the white minidress and the tanned thighs as he counted. When she spoke he feigned surprise.
“Payday?” she said. The voice was hard and toneless. He saw an attractive blonde woman of 35, her hair in a becoming bun; she wore large round gray-tinted glasses.
“Didn’t see you.” He finished with and pocketed the money.
“Nice night,” she said.
“Place looks like a hog wallow.”
“He’s got servants,” she said. “You seem to be doing all right.”
“Old friend of mine, Daddy.”
“Yeah, I saw the Rolls. What’s your secret?”
“My secret? That everyone’s got a secret.”
“And you know one of his.”
He smiled.
“I’m Amanda Armitage,” she said. “Cool your loafers.”
Seal took a chair near her. “I saw you on television. Cute.”
“I never got your name.”
“Quo Vadis,” he said with a straight face.
“What’s that, Italian?”
“Sicilian.”
“Well, well,” she said. “What part?”
“The central highlands.”
“I don’t think I know anyone there.”
“They’re hard to get to know.”
“I never heard him mention you.”
“You probably didn’t stick around long enough.”
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “A week after that Mexican divorce he hit the ground like a watermelon.”
“There you go. Haste makes waste, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what I need, all righty. A Bible reading.”
“Take it out on yourself, sugar. You got yours. What you did with it is your problem.”
“Yeah, I guess I lack your business head, or your angle. How’d you get it while he was passed out? Pritchett? She never gave anything away.”
Seal smiled again.
“Well. Congratulations, I guess,” she said. “I guess there’s enough for everybody.”
“Not if you people keep this stuff up. You’re just about to be short one golden goose.”
“Tragic loss. The only time he’ll sign a checkbook is when he’s three-quarters loaded. Nickel and diming around here for what we do. He likes young naked women. So we swim naked in his pool while he watches. Watching is about all he could ever do.”
“You kill him you won’t even have a pool.”
“Don’t kid a kidder. There’s a hundred grand in an insurance policy for Amanda. And I’ve got a New York lawyer and a million-dollar spinal defect with traumatic complications dating to that marriage.”
“What’d he do, stone you on the way out with a vitamin pill? What about the others, all spinal?”
“That would be a little corny, wouldn’t it? Charleyne has psychiatric damage. Dawne’s got a baby she forgot about. Cherrye’s got some mysterious papers he’s supposed to have signed. The others aren’t talking.”
He sat a while. “Well.”
“Well what?”
“I’d lay off this strongarm business if I were you. Kill him, there could be bad feeling everywhere.”
“Yeah, well you go back and tell The Godfather to take it up with A. A. Daddy Quent was bombed twenty years before I was born and there’s nobody holding his mouth open and pouring it down him.”
“Suit yourself,” Seal said, standing. “Don’t let the mosquitoes get you.”
“Thanks millions,” she said.
“Ciao.”
“Delectable,” Malcolm said. “Except that I can’t see but what he’s getting just what he spent forty years asking for.”
“It could be you’re too much with Henry James and Edwardian greenery mid the blueblooded, dignified, royalty-loving Armitages Senior. Who did not give one damn about Quentin. Hire him a nanny. Do something with him — we’ll be in Greece. And here comes Cordelia, this empty-headed, self-centered actress, testing her subtle skills on his confusion. What else did these people wire him for but disaster?
“You see Quentin, the be-crazed satyr, lunging around the continent with his checkbook, taking a beauty queen, losing her; buying a yacht, wrecking it; standing drunk on the platform of a private railroad car or insulting the honored Duke of Bulgaria. But like Henry James you deny him a hangover.
“You give him no deep feelings. You permit Doveton to go decorously askew after Cordelia’s defection but refuse Quentin — who experienced this tenfold — the same privilege. I learn that he was leveled, devastated, increasingly embittered each time one of those hookers walked out on him in the middle of the night and ran singing her sad song to the tabloids. The first one who left him, he spent sixteen hours in a bar on the Riviera and then walked out into the Mediterranean fully clothed and would have kept on to Corsica if someone hadn’t pulled him out. It was Pritchett, the hired help, who assumed the whole parental function, whether as babysitter, governess, night nurse, mother confessor, getter-out-of-jail, financial manager, whatever.”