The Starshine Connection

by Buck Sanders

  The boy threw what he thought was a solid right cross, holding his fist too tight and attempting, at the last second, to put his entire body into the punch. Slayton did not move, flinch, or blink.

  Like a striking snake, Slayton’s right arm flew up and caught the boy’s arm by the wrist, stopping the punch dead in the air two inches from his nose. Reflexively, some of the observers had already turned their heads away, and one of the girls had cried out at the splat of flesh that never came.

  The boy’s eyes widened even further. He tried to pull his fist back, and Slayton held it totally immobile. It was like being caught in the grip of a statue.

  “Voila!” said Slayton, releasing the boy’s arm.

  The puppy he had whipped massaged his wrist, gritting his teeth and reddening under the realization that he now looked, to his buddies, like the biggest jerk in the world.

  Sometimes, though, Slayton thought, with humiliation comes maturity. The boy had apparently gained some small portion of the latter, since he withdrew from the group, retreating as expected—but without a parting epithet or cheap shot to use as a last-minute grab at saving face.

  Like a carny emcee, Slayton held his hands up, open-palmed. “And now, children, Uncle Ben is headed for the bar. Please feel free to do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Slayton milled his way wordlessly toward the wet bar. The gathering was just beginning to cook at one in the morning. He cadged for himself a raw scotch, sipped tentatively, and ordered another. He dumped the contents of the second glass into the first before the barman’s eyes. The man shrugged.

  “Tell me, Uncle Ben,” came a voice from behind him. “Is flexing your muscles the only way you have to impress little girls?”

  Without turning, Slayton knew it was the girl who had, up until his display, been Sylvia’s replacement for the night. She had shucked her knight-errant and come gunning for him. Cleaved away from the homogeneous group, she was much more interesting.

  “Little girls, yes. That’s about all they go for—it comes from watching too much television, you know. Now women, that’s a different matter altogether. Women usually have brains. Little girls are victims of their own raging adrenals, wouldn’t you say?”

  She pursed her lips in mock thought. “Well, which would you say I qualify as?”

  Slayton stepped back theatrically and looked once up, once down, like inspecting a used car. “Not sure,” he said. “Could be the consciousness of a girl inside that voluptuous shell. Tell me, do you think the excesses of. Renaissance sculptors were mere compensations for latent homosexuality? What is the absolute artistic worth of what Eno called ‘ambient music’ versus mechnical tonalities? Is either true music at all? How about politics? Why do you think the government has been holding back on hydro-genization to meet our fuel needs now that it’s cost-effective? Is the timing of the essence of feminine orgasm really only 3.5 seconds? You’re laughing and trying to cover up your mouth—does this indicate that you’re actually attempting to pick me up?” He took two steps back and leaned on the wet bar. “Correction: pick me up at a bar?”

  She was totally caught up in it, having a hell of a time. Slayton sipped and watched her as she laughed herself out. Then he said, “What happened to your boyfriend Jake?”

  “Jake?” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “Right, Jake LaMotta.”

  “Huh?” Slayton watched it blow right past her.

  “Never mind. Poor joke.”

  “Rodney was a drag anyway,” she said. “To hell with him. Look, my name’s Roxanne. Roxy.”

  “Very stylish,” said Slayton, eyes drifting past her to the far walls of the room. “And what drugs are you into?”

  “Come on,” she said, her smile fading. Her wide and perfect mouth somehow did not look normal without a smile on it. “Not all of us are as stupid as you seem to think we are. And not all of us are collegiate dunderheads, either.”

  Roxy certainly had better taste in clothing than her ex-escort, Slayton thought. She was sheathed in robin’s-egg blue satin. Had it been contoured and split more outrageously, she would have looked like a hooker, but with that uncanny intuition all conscientious dressers possess, she had run right up to, but not past, the razoredge that divided sensuous respectability from vulgarity. Her earrings were modest hoops of solid 24K; her lips were invitingly wet with gloss. A little tennis-ball of heat formed in Slayton’s stomach—he blamed it on the scotch.

  “And as for these dreary things”—she swept her hand to indicate the room, and, therefore, the party in progress—“occasionally they’re worthwhile. Occasionally I get to meet somebody like you at one of them, somebody who decided not to become jaded at sixteen. Which brings me to a more intriguing question.”

  “You mean, what on earth is someone as wonderful as me doing someplace as dreary as this?”

  “Something like that. Yeah, that’ll do. Can I have a vodka martini, please?”

  “Would you believe me if I said it’s partially business, partially pleasure?” Slayton hedged, warning himself to be careful. He could smell impending results. “Onion or olive?”

  “Yucch, neither,” she said, scooping up the flared glass. “You want to see my ID or something?”

  “No. If they let you through the door at one of these things, you’re old enough to drink whether you’re old enough or not. And so it goes.”

  “Vonnegut,” she said immediately.

  “Good,” said Slayton. “See that muckety-muck over there?” He indicated a grizzled man to whom a group of lesser politicos paid polite attention as he gave his own version of the fireside chat. The man was broad-shouldered, gesticulating, intense. He held the group as easily as Slayton had cheap-thrilled the latter-day Mods a moment ago.

  “Looks incredibly dreary,” said Roxy, smiling again.

  “That’s Senator Reed. Franklin Oliver Reed, a Republican worthy from Georgia. Or Alabama. One of those places. All of those places…”

  Roxy giggled.

  “One ‘o them Suthrin states. Anyway, they call him the Filibuster King. A particular filibuster he fomented is delaying legislation that would be particularly beneficial to my corporation.”

  “What corporation do you work for?”

  “Avatar Limited. And 1 don’t work for it—I own it.”

  Slayton realized he had laid it on a bit thick, but admired how she absorbed it without even blinking. She had been around Washington long enough to be discriminate in the ways she was impressed. Which made Slayton wonder how she had ever wound up pairing with a deadbeat like Rodney.

  “Never heard of it,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Chemicals, concentrates, industrial stuff. All of it dreary. Do you need to know more?”

  “Only this—is Avatar Limited all you do?”

  “If it was all I did, I’d do something direct, like approach our Mr. Reed with a bribe.”

  “Instead of—” Her eyes were sparkling now, a lucid and penetrating gray.

  “Instead of watching him. Look at the way he holds those people in the palm of his hand—if I can just feel him out a bit, I’ll be able to calculate what approach would work best. I have time. My company won’t expire if he flounces around delaying things for another week or month. You do know what a filibuster is, don’t you?”

  “A grand process of government whereby our elected representatives attempt to bore each other into submission. Eventually everyone gets so sick of wasting time they pass a law or bill just to get rid of the guy, get him out of everyone’s hair. Isn’t democracy wonderful?”

  This time Slayton smiled.

  “I have time to make my play for him the right one. He’s the only reason I’m here.” It seemed to satisfy her.

  “And what about my play for you?” she said.

  “How’s that again?” Slayton said with overdone innocence.

  “Well, presumably, Uncle Ben,” she said with a gilding of sarcasm, “the net result of this dynamic conversation will be you and
I winding up together in a bed somewhere. -At least, I hope that’s the net.”

  “How about the gross?” Slayton was enjoying the game.

  “Oh, wow,” she said. “Hey, that has nothing to do with it. Look, see that man over there?” She pointed to a man in a European-cut business suit. He was dark, with authoritative bearing, and stood out like a Ferrari in a lot full of Volkswagen bugs. “Pavel Drake II. That’s my father.”

  Slayton recognized the name of the import tycoon and realized Roxy was probably the only younger woman present who was not cruising for dollars.

  “He’s the reason I wound up here with Rodney.” She gave a shrug of capitulation. “Social imperative. I owed a favor; Rodney was it. Son of one of his friends. Daddy and sonny, both dreary as hell.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to my daughter if she looked like you.”

  “And what would you do to his daughter?” She ran a pink tongue lightly across her upper row of teeth.

  “I’d tell her that her daddy has had a little too much to drink,” came a voice from behind Slayton. “And that she should stop dripping all over the floor long enough to drive her daddy back to the townhouse.” The voice was stern and humorless.

  Slayton turned around.

  He was confronted by a tall, awesome woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in a De la Cortero evening gown that must have cost a thousand dollars. Her eyes blazed their way through poor Roxy like amber coals; smoldering was ample to describe her entire demeanor. She seemed striking enough to be able to swing a compass needle off true north, and Slayton made the mental connection in admirable time.

  “Mrs. Drake, I presume?” he said.

  4

  Anna Lynn Converse-Drake, Pavel Drake II’s third wife and Roxanne’s second stepmother in nine years, waved her less-than-amused stepdaughter away with a regal bearing that Slayton found just a bit hard to take seriously. But Roxy split—she clearly disliked being in the same time zone with her so-called mother—leaving Slayton alone in the jaws of the tigress.

  Another facet immediately became clear to Slayton: Pavel Drake seemed to like them young. Mrs. Converse-Drake was perhaps ten years her daughter’s senior, on the outside. The party flowed into the hole Roxy cut through the crowd, and momentum obliterated anything that may have remained of an awkward moment.

  “That was a little fierce, wasn’t it?” Slayton said neutrally.

  “Never mind Roxanne,” the woman said. “She attempts to mate with everything in sight, indiscriminately. She’ll be hooked on some other young stud’s arm in a matter of minutes.”

  “Young stud?” Slayton could not believe his ears.

  “Metaphor. Generalization. Sorry.” She said it the way one might say excuse me to a total stranger.

  “So, this bitchy facade isn’t all true to form,” Slayton said under his breath, fully intending that she hear.

  “You wouldn’t have liked Roxy anyway,” she said. “Strictly bush-league. A man who looks like you clearly isn’t interested in bopping girls just out of their teens. You could have just about anyone at this little social jousting tournament.” She had obviously done this speech many times at many parties, and Slayton could feel what was coming next. “So the question remains, mister—”

  “Slayton. Ben.”

  “That makes your initials B.S., and I suppose that answers my question as to what prompted your real interest in Roxanne.”

  “She’s a very attractive girl.”

  She brushed a stray wisp of hair away from her crowning-glory coif and picked a menthol cigarette from a burnished holder on the bar. Slayton lit it before she could object. She continued in contemplative exhalations of gray smoke.

  “No. There are attractive girls all over Washington. But only one of them is Pavel Drake’s daughter. You can forget it, Mr. Slayton.”

  Slayton abruptly felt whirled around and disoriented. “You obviously didn’t hear my spiel about Avatar Limited.”

  “I heard it, and that’s bullshit, too. If there were a chemical products company that big, I would have heard about it. So we’re back to the original game.” She smiled a predator’s smile and added, “So far you’re not making it very interesting.”

  The realization smashed home in Slayton’s brain—this woman got a kick out of power-tripping over her stepdaughter! God only knew what kind of vicious infighting had produced such a strange brand of rivalry. She had been turned on by the prospect of snatching him away from Roxy.

  The game-plan after that was fairly easy. He replied, “Well, I’m in the wrong room, with the wrong lighting.”

  “That’s a boring cliche, Mr. Slayton.”

  He was ready for it, and instantly snapped, “And you’re gobbling it up like a death-camp survivor who’s just been introduced to a fried chicken dinner. Chicken is quite apt, don’t you think, missus Drake, considering the silly, minor-league sexual innuendos you’ve been broadcasting ever since we started—tell me, does it ever occur to you that you have about as much style as your stepdaughter when it comes to the art of a pickup?”

  Her eyes flashed an evil violet, and yellow anger shone quickly through at first, but as Slayton plowed on through his recitation she began to smile. By the time he was finished she was laughing. She had to put her drink down. Finally, she could not meet his eyes without laughing again, and Slayton didn’t give her a second to breathe.

  “Now, here’s how you go about it, missus Drake, you take my hand”—he took her hand—“and say, ‘golly-gee, Mister Slayton, sir, I covet your corpus so badly that I’m making my martini glass steam up.’ Now since that oxidizes the alcohol, that leaves us with only one thing to do!”

  She had to stop to wipe her eyes. “Which is?”

  Slayton rolled his eyes like an exasperated gay man. “No, silly, besides that! Is mating all you can think about?”

  “Right now it is, Mister Bullshit.”

  “I mean we should go somewhere for a drink. Something I wish to share only with you.” Slayton was priming his hole card for use.

  “I say again, sir, which is—?”

  “And I say again, besides that.”

  “We have gallons of free alcohol of every variety right behind you. Or are you too inebriated to notice?”

  “Not this kind of drink. This is a private kind of drink.” In his hand he palmed a miniature version of the Starshine bottle he had seen in Winship’s office.

  Anna Drake’s eyes widened in recognition, and that was all Slayton needed to know. He had assessed her character flawlessly. He replaced the thin bottle within his jacket.

  She was quiet for a moment, and her eyes never went back to the now-insignificant martini. “Why do you offer this to me?” she said.

  “Because, if you’ll pardon the expression, you seem to be the only woman at this party with the guts and the balls to handle an experience like this.” Slayton’s sincerity was not entirely bogus; she did seem headstrong and recklessly brave.

  “So that’s what you’re doing here,” she whispered. “But Jesus Christ, you must realize who we get that stuff from already!”

  “I know,” Slayton lied. “You overheard the problem I described to Roxanne? It’s almost the same as that story.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Listen, I don’t want to talk about it so openly. I am interested in you as a customer, but right now I’m interested enough in other ways to suggest we both get the hell out of here if we’re going to talk about this thing any more. Okay?”

  Anna took a deep drag of her cigarette, and leaned back onto the bar. “I go to maybe a hundred of these damn things a year, at least. My husband and I have a little arrangement. I don’t do anything to scandalize him or hurt his business interests, and I’m the perfect wife. So he allows me to sleep with whom I wish. Pavel has a medical difficulty that won’t entertain either of us to discuss. I sleep with whom I wish. That’s why your sniffing around Roxanne attracted me… at first. Pavel understands.”

&n
bsp; Slayton resumed his neutral tone. “That’s why he always drinks enough at these things to leave before he has to see who you choose to spend the night with. I see.” It did not surprise—or offend—him in the least, and she seemed to sense it.

  “That little bitch, Roxanne,” she said. “She is not the perfect daughter. The people with whom she sleeps have a habit of perpetual detriment as regards my husband’s business.” Her eyes were focused away from Slayton’s.

  “Which is why you watchdog her,” he said.

  “When it’s feasible. Let’s get out of here. Do you have any plan as to where to go, Mister B.S.?”

  Slayton crooked his arm. “You lead, madame.”

  “I like to lead,” she said.

  Mrs. Drake’s escape route was well-planned. In practically no time she and Slayton were comfortably ensconced in a lavishly appointed but anonymous Washington hotel complex where, apparently, she maintained a suite. None of the appointments of the rooms gave themselves immediately away as being hotel-issue.

  The days he had wasted in near-fruitless Georgetown bashes washed away as Slayton anticipated exploiting his first lead. He was aware of the irony that his success as an agent would probably depend, tonight, on his prowess in the rack.

  “‘Things, they do have a way of coming ’round,’” he sang to himself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” His gaze remained on the decanter of Starshine he had brought up from the car. He was fully aware of the ruthlessness of what he was doing. The stuff had proven ill effects on “sensitives.” To get leads on Starshine, he was possibly writing off Anna Drake—who seemed like a nice person, nice in the way a woman in her position who could juggle money and power, overlord lives and chuck legions of parasites, or endure an impotent husband and a hateful stepdaughter could be termed “nice.” Or sane.

  She emerged from the connecting room wearing the sheerest gown Slayton had ever seen, one that cost a bundle as obviously as it displayed her pert and well-proportioned breasts to their best, teasing advantage. Knowing full well that the silhouette effect caused by light from the connecting room pleased Slayton, she remained by the door.