Liz McAllister was not obese, but she was big; and she was gawky. Her dishwater-blond hair was coarse and frizzy. Her features were regular but exaggerated. Her big face was round and flushed. The bikini provided her by the Malloys did not flatter her. She extended too much around the edges.
Tom went on. “Liz, meet Cole Jennings. He’s a New Jersey lawyer representing some investors who might want to buy into Sphere.”
She ran her hand through her hair to dispel water. “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Jennings,” she said, all ingenuous.
Liz McAllister had, apparently, no notion at all that her bikini was too small for her—or that she was too big for it. Cole’s initial judgment of her was that she was the plainest, squarest person he had ever met.
Before he could open a conversation with her, Tom introduced him to a woman maybe ten years younger: an extraordinarily attractive brunette with pale blue eyes dramatized by dark eye lining, a spectacular figure, and, like Betsy, obviously no intention of getting her hair or swimsuit wet.
“Laura Mason,” Tom said. “She’s an Oilers cheerleader. Betsy’s an alum. Laura’s active.” He pushed Cole aside and spoke softly in his ear. “Assigned to you. You want it, you got it.”
A gargantuan hunk of beef hung on a spit over a pit not far from the pool, dripping grease onto hot wood coals below and sending up a cloud of redolent smoke. It whetted the appetites of all the guests—some twenty by now—and they drank draft beer from oversized paper cups until they made a constant traffic to and from the bathrooms in a little building apart from both house and pool. The beef was cut and served on big paper plates, with dollops of baked beans and cole slaw. The beef was drowned in a barbecue sauce that Tom Malloy declared the specialty of the house.
Cole suspected by now that his visit was futile, but he could let that go as he enjoyed Texas hospitality, which was expansive and what he had expected of Texas.
Laura Mason stuck close to him, but he had resolved not to accept whatever favors she might be willing to extend.
After a couple of hours, Tom came to him. “Like Laura?” he asked.
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Let’s be specific. Let me be blunt. Do you want her to come to your hotel later?”
“I … I don’t think so, Tom. I appreciate the offer, but—”
“Understood. Not to worry.”
He placed a call to Emily before he left the party. It was after ten in Houston, after eleven in Wyckoff, and she would have begun to worry.
Two other guests, a doctor and his wife, were leaving at the same time, and they drove him to the Hyatt. The wife described Tom Malloy as the “muliest” man she knew, which he understood meant stubborn.
As Cole walked through the lobby of the hotel he spotted Liz McAllister sitting alone in the sunken cocktail lounge, looking a little forlorn as he judged. He had thought about stopping there for a drink before he went to his room, so he walked down the three steps and walked over to her. She was staring into her glass and did not notice him at first.
“Get beered out?” he asked, noticing that she was drinking a martini.
She looked up and was so obviously glad to see him that he was pleased that he had decided to approach her. She was not dressed for this chic watering hole: in a white golf shirt stretched by her exorbitant knockers, and tight, faded blue jeans.
“I was beered out when I graduated from college,” she said. “It was the gallons I drank then that ruined my figure. Have a seat.”
“Beer can do funny things to you. When I was eighteen, three friends and I killed a man. We were beered up and—God!—I haven’t spoken of that in years.”
“Hit him with a car?” she asked.
“Beat him to death with our fists.”
“Jesus! You go to jail?”
“No. We got away with it. Anyway, it’s a bad memory … I’m sorry I mentioned it. I just blurted it out. I come from a small town. Everybody knows about it. I don’t have to talk about it.”
She signaled for a waiter, and Cole ordered a Beefeater martini on the rocks with a twist. She ordered a refill.
“Do you really have an investor ready to put seventeen or eighteen million into Sphere?” she asked simply.
“More than that.”
“That’s what it will take to redesign the Sphere operating system to make it compatible with Windows,” she said.
“Is that what has to be done?”
“Minimally,” she said. “And it’s ironic that Tom Malloy doesn’t have that much.”
“He lives like he has it.”
Liz shrugged. “Family money,” she said. “The Malloys are into oil and cattle and are scornful of the black-sheep son and his technology business. They put up the seed money, but there won’t be any more.”
“And your company can—?”
“My company has cash out the gazoo. Made from selling sexy lingerie in sizes I can’t wear.”
When the waiter brought their drinks, he also brought a check, which she grabbed. “On me,” she said. “On my expense account.”
They sipped their martinis and watched the elevators going up and down.
“Cole …” she said tentatively. “It’s going to be a long, lonely night.”
It was a proposition. He didn’t know how to fend her off gently, but he could not imagine spending the night with this big, ungainly woman.
“Well, I …”
“I know …” she said quietly. “I know very well— better than you can imagine. Being me, I have to be better. You won’t forget me. You won’t forget a night with me.”
Since his marriage, he had never been with any woman but Emily. That was foremost in his mind when Liz put her hand on his and murmured, “Please …”
“All right,” he conceded. “Why not? Your room or mine?”
“Your choice.”
He chose his own room. As soon as the door was closed and chained, she stripped: quickly, efficiently. He had seen all but very little of her in the bikini provided her by the Malloys, but seeing her naked did arouse him.
She knelt before him and struggled to open and pull down his pants. She seized his cock in both hands and shoved it into her mouth. As he stood there, before they even sat down, much less stretched out on the bed, she licked and sucked and drew him all the way in, down into her throat, then pulled him out and shoved him in, using her lips and tongue, until she brought him to deep, violent spasms of ecstasy.
She had been right that he would never forget the night. She begged him to plunge into her and encircled him with her legs to be sure he could not slip out. She squatted over him and took him woman-on-top, introducing his cock to depths it had never felt before. But more, she worked with her mouth, even shoving her tongue up into his anus.
Toward dawn they slept a little. He woke hearing her talking to room service. She ordered four gin Bloody Marys, with bacon and eggs.
TWELVE
I
JULY, 1990
“Feng shui,” said Leonard Cooper.
He was explaining to Dave the layout and decor of his office, in which the furniture was not parallel or at right angles to the walls but sat at eccentric angles. It explained too his large aquarium and the potted plants that grew in the room. Feng shui was a Chinese philosophy that held man could benefit by arranging homes and offices in harmony with nature—and parallel lines and right angles were not generally in harmony.
“Do I believe in it?” asked Leonard Cooper. “I suppose not, not really. But I will tell you, I feel more comfortable in this office than I did before.”
Leonard Cooper was twenty-nine years old, a graduate of Amherst and Yale, and a lawyer. He had succeeded his father Jerry as the chief operating officer of Gazelle, Incorporated, the cash-rich corporation based on the sale of bold lingerie and a line of related sexy items—not excluding sado-masochistic devices.
It was an odd way to make money, but Dave knew it did; he had checked it out. He had to admire the
way the Cooper family had turned a once-scorned enterprise into a billion-dollar empire. There could be no question of outbidding the Coopers if they wanted Sphere. The question was: Could he insert himself some way? Could he turn the relationship into a nice profit?
“I gather your problem is Tom Malloy’s ego,” said Dave. “I haven’t met him, but I sent a man to check him out and another man to look into his technology.”
“My consultants tell me his Sphere computer is a marvel,” said Len Cooper. “He won’t deal with anyone who won’t commit to keeping that computer alive and on the market.”
“I don’t know computer technology,” said Dave. “I hired a man who does.”
“So did I—a woman.”
“Are you sure you want to invest heavily in this deal?” Dave asked. “It can be arranged for other people’s money to be invested.”
“I have other investors,” said Len Cooper. “Mr. Shea—”
“Dave.”
“Sure. And Len. I have other investors. Chinese. That’s where the real money is these days. We keep an office in Hong Kong. You want to see money? Try a visit to Hong Kong. I’m going out there. That’s where money is.”
“I can bring money from this country,” said Dave. “I can get you American investors.”
“I’ll be glad to talk to you about it. In the meantime, I suggest you get to know Tom Malloy.”
II
Cole had given Dave a full report of his visit to Houston—excluding only his night with Liz—and Dave might have carried with him a pair of swimming trunks, to avoid having to appear on the Malloys’ pool deck in the kind of swim trunks that had embarrassed Cole. He didn’t, though. He rather looked forward to how monumentally he would stretch a pair of Speedos.
He didn’t stay in a hotel. The Malloys had invited him to stay in a guest room in their home. He had been invited to come on Friday, so they could see a rodeo on Saturday. He wondered if they would have a barbecue party on Friday night. It turned out that Tom and Betsy, and their friends—the other friend being Laura Mason—had been invited to a party at a neighbor’s house.
The party was a duplicate of the one Cole had described to him. The guests, some twenty of them, gathered around the pool. A side of beef dripped into a permanent barbecue pit. From time to time their host tossed mesquite onto the fire, to give the beef a special flavor.
The host was named Melvin Johnston, and he was a vice president of Harris County National Bank. A rotund man, he was older than most of the other men present, and he wore dark blue boxer trunks, in contrast to the vividly colored strips of stretched Lycra most of the younger men wore around their hips. Dave’s red Speedos were minuscule, as Cole had warned they might be; and Dave wondered if it were not a joke with Tom and Betsy to furnish their guests with such skimpy trunks. He might have thought so, except that Tom’s Speedos were no more modest, and Betsy would not have dared dive or swim strenuously in her iridescent yellow bikini.
He reached a quick and uncharitable opinion: that these Houston people were essentially bored out of their minds and looked to weekly parties for relief.
“What do you think of Laura?” Tom asked Dave not long after they arrived at the Johnstons’.
“Luscious.”
“She likes you, too.” They had sat together in the backseat of the Malloys’ car on the way to this party, and he’d had a moment, no more, to chat with her. He judged she was no more than nineteen. Betsy was an alum of the Oilers cheerleader squad. Laura was still active and would be working the games when the season began. “If you want her, she’ll slip into your room during the night,” said Tom.
“I’m for that.”
Tom Malloy grinned. “Figured you would be.”
Tom let Laura know that the deal was done, and after that she stayed close to Dave. Her white bikini was as brief as any at the pool. She did not get it wet. She was brash in conversation—
“Gawd, you’re hung,” she said, nodding at his Speedos, strained by his cock.
“What was it the doctor told the guy in Deep Throat?” he asked. “‘I can cut it down to any size you want.’”
“Jaysus! Don’t even think about it!”
Dave swam a few laps and came out of the pool, a little diminished by the cool water.
Their host, Johnston, came over and sat down beside him. “I understand you’re with Harcourt Barnham,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But you are not here on behalf of Harcourt Barnham.”
There was no point in lying. “No.”
“Ah, well. It’s none of my business. I did doubt that Harcourt would be interested in putting money into Sphere, Incorporated.”
“I know some people who might be,” Dave said.
“What do you know about the Coopers?”
“Only a little. Potentially, they will invest heavily in Sphere. Their company is glutted with cash.”
“And they’ll take control, whether Tom likes it or not. You should research the Coopers, if you haven’t already. They are not people to be gainsaid.”
As the sun set and the beef was nearly ready, women began to shed their tops. Dave knew this had not happened at the Malloys’ party. Cole would have mentioned it. When Laura dropped her bikini top and put it aside, he saw something he had never seen before. Her left nipple was pierced, and a shiny silver or platinum ring about the diameter of a quarter hung in it.
Later, when she was naked, she encouraged him to play with her nipple ring, to pull on it actually; and she didn’t wince. She laughed at his fascination with it and flipped it around to show him it was loose in the hole in her nipple.
“Some of them are fastened by threads in a little ball,” she told him. “A girl can take it out whenever she wants to. But not this’n. I had it soldered. Th’ only way Ah could git it off would be by cuttin’ it.”
“Didn’t that burn?” he asked. “I mean, the soldering.”
She shook her head. “They used what they called a heat sink. It was a pair of pliers lak, and the one woman held that tight on the ring while th’ other one soldered. Ah didn’t feel no burn at all. An’, know what? Ah’m thinkin’ of havin’ th’ other one done. What do you think? Would that be too much?”
She turned out to be a willing and vigorous lover—unimaginative but enthusiastic.
“Y’ know. Ah don’ think Ah ever seen a cock bigger’ n yours. Ah know Ah never had that big a one in me b’fore. Let’s do it agin! And t’morra nat, too, huh?”
III
They went to the rodeo the next afternoon, Dave escorting Laura on his arm. She and Betsy were dressed in the uniforms of Oilers cheerleaders, and before the rodeo began they and six others were called out into the ring to be introduced to a cheering crowd.
Momentarily alone in the stands, Tom raised a point. “My Cooper friends propose to chum tens of millions into my business. But they would change the entire nature of the enterprise.”
“In what respect, Tom?”
“Their Chinese associates want to make the components for microprocessors, which we would assemble and sell in the States. You know what that means?”
“Not exactly.”
Tom Malloy turned his head and glanced around, nodding and smiling at friends in the stands. “Microprocessors are little bitty computers designed to do specific jobs. Cars run on microprocessors. Sensors tell the microprocessors what the temperature of the air is, how much moisture it contains, and so on; and the microprocessor adjusts the fuel mixture and other factors to make the car run best. There’s no end to the possibilities. Within a few years, your home heating system, to use just one example, will be controlled by a microprocessor.”
“A great new business maybe,” Dave suggested.
“Yes. And Sphere gets eaten alive. My baby is going to be run by a marketer of women’s underwear! And what do they want? The name. The Sphere name is as good as Apple, almost as good as IBM.”
“Suppose we arrange a deal. Suppose the Sphere computer
component gets sloughed off as a separate, independent subsidiary. You take in the Chinese money, let the Cooper guys make microprocessors with the Sphere name, and your Sphere computer subsidiary goes its own way. If you want to, you can skim off some of the Chinese money and put it into the computer. I can arrange independent financing for Sphere, Incorporated.”
Tom Malloy nodded. “Idea,” he said. “Let’s work on it.”
Betsy and Laura returned to their seats, nodding and waving as they received applause from the rodeo fans.
Laura clasped Dave’s hand. “Y’ gonna lak this,” she said as a gate opened and a lunging bull charged out, angrily trying to throw its rider. So far as Dave was concerned, the bravest men in the rodeo were the clowns who rushed forward to distract a bull that had thrown a man and was about to gore him.
IV
In truth, Dave did not have the kind of money he was talking to Tom Malloy about—at least, he didn’t have it without committing all he had. He tried to avoid personal conversations with Axel Schnyder, but this time he flew to Zurich to meet with him.
“The point is,” he told the Swiss banker after he had described the whole situation, “that whoever owns the Sphere computer may become a major player in the field of personal computers, which is a big and growing business.”
“And one replete with powerful, money-rich competition,” said Schnyder calmly. “I believe I detect in you a quality that can be destructive.”
“Meaning?”
“Enthusiasm,” said Schnyder. “Once, ‘enthusiasm’ was a religious term. It meant too much moved by emotion.”
“You oppose the investment?”
“I oppose nothing. I neither endorse nor oppose investments. I analyze them. Have you analyzed this idea? Carefully?”
“I … I believe I have.”
“What part of your assets do you want to commit?”
Dave smiled. “I was thinking of committing other people’s assets.”
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