I cut my lawyer right the fuck off. “Let me fucking tell you something, Andy: You have no fucking idea how little of a shit I give about the SE fucking C and the NAS fucking D.” I opened the bag and grabbed a playing card off my desk, then dipped deep into the powder, scooping out enough cocaine to give a blue whale a heart attack. I dumped it onto the desktop. Then I bent over and stuck my face in it and started snorting. “And furthermore,” I added, my face now covered in cocaine, “I couldn’t give two shits about that Coleman motherfucker either. He’s been chasing my ass around for four fucking years, and he still ain’t got shit on me.” I shook my head a few times, to try to get hold of the rush that was rapidly overtaking me. “And there ain’t no fucking way I’m getting indicted over that agreement. It would be too anticlimactic for Coleman. He’s a man of honor, and he wants to get me on something real. That would be like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. So fuck Coleman where he breathes!”
“Understood,” said Wigwam, “but I need a favor from you.”
“What?”
“I’m running short of money,” said my shyster lawyer, pausing for effect. “You know, Danny really fucked things up for me by not cockroaching it. I’m still waiting for my brokerage license to come through. Could you help me out in the interim?”
Unbelievable! I thought. My own fucking escrow agent was holding me up for money. That toupeed motherfucker!I should kill him too! “How much you need?”
“I don’t know,” he replied weakly, “maybe a couple hundred thousand?”
“Fine!” I snapped. “I’ll give you a quarter million, now go call fucking Madden right fucking now and call me back and let me know what he said.” I slammed the phone down without saying good-bye. Then I bent over and stuck my face back in the coke.
Ten minutes later the phone rang. “What did the motherfucker say?” I asked.
“You’re not gonna like it,” warned Wigwam. “He denies the existence of the escrow agreement. He says it’s an illegal agreement and he knows you won’t make it public.”
I took a deep breath, trying to maintain control. “So he thinks I’m bluffing, huh?”
“Pretty much,” said Wigwam, “but he said he wants to resolve things amicably. He’s offering you two dollars a share.”
I rolled my neck slowly in a great circle as I did the calculations. At two dollars a share he would be stealing more than $13 million from me, and that was just on the stock; he was also holding a million of my options, which had an exercise price of seven dollars. Today’s market price—thirteen dollars—put them six dollars in the money. So that was another $4.5 million. All told, he was trying to steal $17.5 million from me. Ironically, I wasn’t even that angry about it. After all, I had known it all along, from that very day in my office all those years ago, when I’d explained to Danny that his friend couldn’t be trusted. It was for that very reason, in fact, why I had made Steve sign the escrow agreement and hand over the stock certificate.
So why should I be angry? I’d been forced down a foolish path by the bozos at NASDAQ; I had been given no choice but to divest my stock to Steve, and I had taken all necessary precautions—preparing myself for this very eventuality. I ran the entire history of the relationship through my mind, and I couldn’t find one mistake I’d made. And while there was no denying that showing up at the office stoned hadn’t been good business on my part, it had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on here. He would have tried to fuck me either way; all the drugs had done was bring it to the surface quicker.
“All right,” I said calmly. “I have to head out to the Hamptons now, so we’ll take care of this first thing Monday morning. Don’t even bother calling Steve back. Just get all the paperwork together for the stock purchase. It’s time to go to war.”
Southampton! WASP-Hampton! Yes, that was where my new beach house was. The time had come to grow up, and Westhampton was just a bit too pedestrianfor the Duchess’s discerning tastes. Besides, Westhampton was full of Jews, and I was sick and tired of Jews, despite being one. Donna Karan (a higher class of Jew) had a house just to the west; Henry Kravis (also a higher class of Jew) had a house just to the east. And for the bargain price of $5.5 million, I now owned a ten-thousand-square-foot gray and white postmodern contemporary mansion on the fabulous Meadow Lane, the most exclusive road on the entire planet. The front of the house looked out over Shinnecock Bay; the rear of the house looked out over the Atlantic Ocean; and the sunrises and sunsets exploded with a nearly indescribable palette of oranges and reds and yellows and blues. It was truly glorious, a vista worthy of the Wild Wolf.
As I passed through the wrought-iron gates at the front of the property, I couldn’t help but feel proud. Here I was, behind the wheel of a brand-new royal-blue $300,000 Bentley turbo. And, of course, I had enough cocaine in the glove compartment to keep the entire town of Southampton dancing the Watusi from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
I had been to this house only once, a little over a month ago, when there was still no furniture. I’d brought a business associate named David Davidson here. Naming him that had been a cruel joke, although I found myself spending more time watching him blink his right eye than focusing on his name. Yes, he was a blinker, but only a one-sided blinker, which made it that much more disconcerting. Anyway, the Uniblinker owned a brokerage firm named DL Cromwell, which employed a bunch of ex-Strattonites; we were doing business together, making nothing but money. Yet the Uniblinker’s most desirable trait—what I liked most about him—was that he was a coke addict, and on the very night I’d brought him to the house, we had first stopped at Grand Union and bought fifty cans of Reddi Wip. Then we sat on the bleached-wood floor and held the cans upright, pushed the nozzles to the side, and sucked out all the nitrous oxide. It was a helluva buzz, especially when we alternated each hit with two blasts of cocaine, one up either nostril.
It had been a banner evening, but nothing compared to what was in store for tonight. The Duchess had furnished the house—to the tune of $2 million of my not-so-hard-earned money. She was so very excited about it that she’d been spewing her aspiring-decorator bullshit ad nauseam, and all the while she never missed an opportunity to bust my balls for being a coke addict.
And fuck her for that! Who the hell was she to tell me what to do, especially when I’d become a coke addict for her benefit! After all, she had been threatening to leave me if I didn’t stop falling asleep in restaurants. So that was why I’d switched to coke in the first place. And now she was saying things like: “You’re sick. You’ve haven’t slept in a month. You won’t even make love to me anymore! And you only weigh a hundred thirty pounds. All you eat are Froot Loops. And your skin is green!” To have given the Duchess the Life and have her turn on me at the last second! Well, fuck her too! It was easy for her to love me when I was sick. All those nights when I was in chronic pain, she would come in and try to comfort me and tell me that she loved me no matter what. And now it turned out that it was all a clever plot. She could no longer be trusted. Fine. Good. Let her go her own way. I didn’t need her. In fact, I didn’t need anybody.
All these thoughts were roaring through my brain as I walked up the mahogany stairs and opened the front door to my latest mansion. “Hello,” I said, in a very loud voice, stepping through the front door. The entire rear wall was glass, and I was looking at a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean. At seven p.m. at this time of spring, the sun was just setting behind me, on the bay side, and the water looked an interesting shade of Prince purple. Meanwhile, the house looked gorgeous. Yes, there was no denying that in spite of the Duchess being a world-class pain in the ass—a henpecking killjoy of biblical proportions—she had a flair for decorating. The entryway led to a vast living room. It was a wide-open space with soaring ceilings. There was so much furniture crammed into this place it was fucking mind-boggling. Overstuffed sofas and love seats and club chairs and wing chairs and ottomans were scattered this way and that, each one a separate seating area. All of this fabulous fucking furniture was white and taupe, very beachy, very shabby chic.