Penthouse C of the Foster Park Hotel consisted of a large sitting room opening onto a patio overlooking Fifty-ninth Street and Central Park. To the right and left were bedrooms, and there was a butler's pantry and a bar with four stools.
When he went directly to answer nature's call, McCoy found himself in the largest bathroom he had ever seen.
By the time he came out, there were two room service waiters and a bellboy in the room. The bellboy was arranging cut flowers in vases. One waiter was organizing on the rack behind the bar enough liquor bottles to stock a saloon, and the other was moving through the room filling silver bowls from a two-pound can of cashews.
Pick Pickering was sitting on a couch talking on the telephone. He saw McCoy and made a gesture indicating he was thirsty.
"Scotch," he called, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. By the time McCoy had crossed to the bar, the night resident manager had two drinks made.
"We're glad to have you with us, sir," the night resident manager said, as he put one drink in McCoy's hand and scurried across the room to deliver the other to Pickering.
When they were all finally gone and Pickering finished his telephone call, McCoy sat down beside him.
"What the hell is all this?" he asked.
Pickering leaned back against the couch and took a swallow of his drink.
"Christ, that tastes good," he said. "Incidentally, I have located the quarry."
"What quarry?"
"The females with liftable skirts," Pickering said. "There's a covey of them in a saloon called El Borracho… which, appropriately, means 'The Kiss,' I think."
"I asked you what's going on around here," McCoy said.
"We all have our dark secrets," Pickering said. "I, for example, know far more than I really want to about your lady missionary."
"Come on, Pick," McCoy said.
"This is the Foster Park Hotel," Pickering said. "Along with forty-one others, it is owned by a man named Andrew Foster. Andrew Foster has one child, a daughter. She married a man who owns ships. A lot of ships, Ken. They have one child. Me."
"Jesus Christ!" McCoy said.
"It is not the sort of thing I would wish our beloved Corporal Pleasant, or our sainted gunny, to know. So keep your fucking mouth shut about it, McCoy."
"Jesus Christ!" McCoy repeated.
"Yes?" Pickering asked, benignly, as befitting the Saviour. "What is it you wish, my son?"
(Two)
They did not get laid. All the girls at the first night club had escorts. They smiled, especially at Pick Pickering, but it proved impossible to separate them from the young men they were with. The candy-asses were worried about leaving their girls alone with Pickering, McCoy thought, approvingly. He was sure they had learned from painful experience that if they blinked their eyes, Pickering and their girls would be gone.
Most of the time McCoy didn't know what the hell anyone was talking about. Only one of the girls showed any interest at all in him. She asked him if he had been at Harvard with "Malcolm." When he said no, she asked him where he had gone to school. When he said "Saint Rose of Lima," she gave him a funny smile and ignored him thereafter.
In the second place, which was called the "21" Club, McCoy thought they probably could have gotten laid: There were enough women around, but the son of the proprietor fucked that up. He wanted to hear all about the Platoon Leader's Course because he'd joined the Corps and was about to report for active duty.
Pick kept him fascinated with tales of Corporal Pleasant and slurping food from trays and doing the duck walk. When they left, he insisted on paying for their drinks and told McCoy that he was welcome any time. But that didn't get them laid either.
The third place McCoy remembered hearing about somewhere. It was called the "Stork Club." When they got there, he didn't think they were going to get in because there was a line of people waiting on the sidewalk. But Pick just walked to the head of the line, and a bouncer or whatever lowered a rope and called Pick "Mr. Pickering," and they walked in.
There was a table against the wall with a "reserved" sign on it, but a headwaiter snatched that away and sat them down there. Moments later a waiter with a bottle of champagne showed up, soon followed by the proprietor of the Stork Club. The proprietor asked about "Mr. Foster" and told Pick to make sure he carried his best regards to his parents.
Like the guy at "21," he picked up the bill. That meant they got a decent load on without spending a dime.
"Tomorrow, Ken, we will get laid," Pickering said as they got in a cab to return to the hotel. "Look on tonight as reconnaissance. The key to a successful assault, you will recall, is a good reconnaissance."
As they were having breakfast the next morning, Pick had an idea.
He called the Harvard Club and had the steward put a notice on the bulletin board: "Mr. Malcolm Pickering will entertain his friends and acquaintances at post-Thanksgiving Dinner cocktails from 2:30 P.M., Penthouse C, the Foster Park Hotel. Friends and acquaintances are expected to bring two girls."
McCoy had a good time in the morning. He made some remark about what a nice hotel it was, and Pickering then took him on a tour. This was fascinating to McCoy; and it was a complete tour, kitchens, laundry, even the little building up above the penthouses where the elevator machinery was.
McCoy saw that there was more to the tour than showing him around. Pickering looked inside garbage cans, even went into rooms with open doors. He was inspecting the place, looking for things that weren't as they were supposed to be. The other side of that was that he knew how things were supposed to be. He might be rich as shit, but he understood the hotel business.
He wondered if Pickering had learned that in school, and asked him. Pick laughed and told him that the first job he'd had in a Foster hotel was as a twelve-year-rold busboy, cleaning tables.
"I can do anything in the hotel except French pastry," Pickering said. "I've never been able to handle egg white properly."
About one o'clock, as they sat in the sitting room in their shirts and trousers drinking Feigenspann XXX Ale from the necks of the bottles, the hotel started setting up for the cocktail party. There was an enormous turkey, and a whole ham, and a piece of roast beef. And all kinds of other stuff. Thinking of how much it was costing made McCoy uncomfortable. No matter how nice Pick was being, McCoy was beginning to feel like a mooch.
It got worse when the people started showing up for the party: It wasn't hard to figure that if all the guests weren't as rich as Pick, they were still rich. And he had nothing in common with them. The only thing he had in common with Pick was the Marine Corps. And then there was one particular girl. She really made him uncomfortable.
He had never seen a more beautiful girl in his life. She was fucking near-perfect. She had black hair, in a pageboy, with dark, glowing eyes that made her skin seem pure white.
She wasn't dressed as fancy as the others, just a sweater and a skirt, with a string of pearls hanging down around her neck.
His first thought was that he would happily swap his left nut to get her in the sack, and his second thought was that she wasn't that kind of female at all. She wasn't going to give any away until she had the gold ring on her finger-not because she was careful, but because that was the kind of woman she was. Once, when she caught him looking at her, she looked right back at him, as if she was asking, "What's a scumbag like you doing looking at me? I'm not like the rest of these people."
And for some reason, she kept him from putting the make on anybody else. Not all of Pick's "friends and acquaintances" had shown up with two girls, but a lot of them had. And a bunch of women had come by themselves. One of them, a sharp-featured woman with blond hair down to her shoulders, had even come on to him, smiling at him and touching his arm when she asked him if he was in the Marines with Pick.
But he saw the girl in the pageboy looking at them with her dark eyes and didn't do anything about the blonde. After a moment, she went away.