Summer Lorensen was the prettiest, though.
She didn’t have that worn hooker look. Instead, she looked like your stereotypical corn-fed midwestern farm girl-blond, blue-eyed, peaches-and-cream complexion, the girl-next-door type thatPlayboy liked to use for the centerfold. Shespoke that way, too, with that sweet “oh shucks” manner, and she even called him “Mr. Machianno.” It was her first time in a limo and she was all excited about that. First time on a yacht, and she was all excited aboutthat, too.
The girls were all dressed to the nines and had clearly been chosen so that there was someone to suit every taste, although any man would have been more than happy to have any one of them.
Summer Lorensen, though, she was something else.
So Frank picked up one carload of girls, Mike picked up another, and they drove to the harbor. Saunders was there to meet them on the dock. He and Frank and Mike helped the girls in their high heels negotiate the step down onto the yacht; then Saunders said, “Now, look, what you see on the boat, who you see on the boat, stays on the boat. I’m counting on your absolute discretion.”
“Discretion is us,” Mike assured him, smiling at Frank. Like, We’ve seen things that would make this Yuppie fuck piss his pants, and we’ve kept them to ourselves. What do you have to show us?
Well, a lot.
It was almost comical at first, when the girls stepped down onto the deck and these bankers stopped talking and justgawked, almost drooled, like fat men at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Well, they weremostly bankers. You also had a couple of federal judges, three or four U.S. congressmen, one senator, and a few just general political types. Frank didn’t know who they were, but Mike did, and he stood there pointing them out by name.
“How do you know all this?” Frank asked.
“My business to know,” Mike said. “It could come in handy, a congressman in your pocket.”
“Tell me you’re not thinking of blackmailing one of these guys.”
Frank’s philosophy was, If the feds aren’t messing with you, don’t mess with them. Let sleeping dogs lie.
Mike didn’t answer because Garth himself got up to make a “welcome aboard” speech to his guests. The guy was actually wearing a captain’s uniform, with the blue jacket, white trousers, and the billed hat. He looked like a total doofus, but then again, he was a total doofus who owned his own bank.
Well, a savings and loan, anyway.
So Garth welcomed his guests, greeted the ladies, even used the “What you see on the boatstays on the boat” line. Got a good laugh when he said that, as a ship’s captain, he could even marry people, the unions being legal as long as they were at sea.
Which would be all night.
With that, they shoved off and headed out into the harbor.
Frank stood along the fore rail and watched as the men picked out their partners. It was remarkable, but even with the knowledge that these were working girls, the partiers seemed to feel the need to chat them up first, have a drink, and flirt. And the girls were pros-they laughed at the jokes, posed prettily, flirted back. It wasn’t long before they paired off and started to drift down into the cabins belowdecks.
Discretion, Frank thought.
But inhibitions went south when the coke came out.
Piles of it, served up by John Saunders, like he was a waiter. Pimp and waiter, Frank thinks now, that’s the career an M.B.A. got you in the coked-up, easy-money eighties. The straight businessmen and the pols and the hookers were snorting it up with one-hundred-dollar bills, more than one of which Frank saw fly off unnoticed into the night breeze.
The coke turned the party into a floating orgy, a maritime bacchanalia.
CaligulameetsCaptains Courageous.
It was an incredible scene. With the lights of San Diego as a backdrop, a real-life porn extravaganza was played out on the deck of Garth’s yacht. It seemed like the whole party was in on it.
Except Mike Pella.
And Frank.
And Summer Lorensen.
Because it was Frank’s job to keep her out of it. Saunders had come up to him earlier and said, “She’s not part of the pass-around pack. She’s for theafter -party party. The VIP A list, at Donald’s beach house. Keep the riffraff away from her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s bait,” Saunders said. “We have her slotted for a particular individual, and not yet.”
So Summer sat with Frank and Mike most of the evening, talking, laughing, pretending not to notice the scene that was evolving around them. She told them about her high school days, about going to college for a year but not really liking it and dropping out. Eventually, she told them about getting pregnant and having her daughter and how the boyfriend she’d thought loved her just took off.
And sure, guys came up to hit on her, but Frank or Mike would quietly say, “She’s not for you,” and there weren’t a lot of guys on this earth who would take on either Mike or Frank, never mind both of them, so it just wasn’t a problem.
There was one guy who ogled her from a distance. He was young, maybe in his late twenties, early thirties, with the boyish face of a perpetual frat rat. He never came close, but from time to time Frank would see him checking her out from ten, fifteen feet away. And he had this smarmy smile on his face-not bold enough to be a leer, but confident, like he had a secret and it was a good one.
Mike noticed Frank checking him out.
“You know who that is?” Mike asked.
“No.”
Mike smiled and whispered the answer.
“No kidding?” Frank said, taking another look at the senator’s son.
Sure, they already had one senator on the boat, but just like there were bosses and there werebosses, there were senators and there weresenators. Same as you had, say, bosses of Kansas City or Jersey or, for that matter, L.A., and you treated them with respect, even though they weren’t in the same league as bosses in Chicago, Philly, and New York.
So this guy’s daddy was asenator who chaired a key banking committee. Daddy might even be president someday, not of some bank, but of theUnited States, and even the one senator on the boat and a bunch of congressmen were treating junior with some deference, even letting him cut in on the line to blow some coke.
Frank and Mike were watching this action when Mike started to sing:
“Some folks are born to wave the flag,
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue.
And when the band plays ‘Hail to the Chief,’
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord…”
And Frank joined in with him on the chorus:
“It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son.”
So that was it-they dubbed the frat boy “Fortunate Son,” and Fortunate Son was checking Summer Lorensen out like something he thought he should own.
She’s bait. We have her slotted for a particular individual, and not yet.
And she was amazing, Frank remembers. Her colleagues were giving blow jobs and doing threesomes and foursomes just feet away from her, and she just kept chattering on about the girls’ basketball team at her high school, and how nice the yacht was, and how pretty the city lights were shining on the water.
CaligulameetsPollyanna.
She eventually fell asleep, sitting in that deck chair, breathing gently, her mouth just open, a thin sheen of perspiration glistening on the just-visible hairs above her upper lip.
The yacht came back toward the dock that morning like a plague ship, bodies strewn about the deck in various states of undress, moans emerging from unconscious mouths as the smell of stale sweat and sex cut through the salt air.
Forty minutes out, Frank and Mike helped Saunders rouse the partiers, get them dressed, and pour some coffee and orange juice down their throats. The guests left the boat happily exhausted and slunk into waiting cars and limousines.
The lucky few were invited back to Garth’s house-not the one in La Jolla, but his “weekend home” ten minutes away in Solana Beach. Frank drove Summer there. She slept most of the way and only woke up as they were pulling into Garth’s driveway.