The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “The thing I like about the deal is that it’s someone we know. It isn’t some anonymous outsider like Pepsi-Cola. It’s still like keeping it in the family. We all know Harry, and we know what we can expect from Harry, and we know his track record.”

  “Yes. You get to keep the company, and Alix gets to keep her dishy husband.”

  Eric clears his throat. “The thing I want to know from you, Aunt Jo, is—if you agree to go along with this, and I hope you will—will Lance go along as well?”

  She hesitates, very briefly. The tulip now is posed to her satisfaction, and she steps away from the flower arrangement, giving it one last look of critical appraisal. “Yes,” she says. “I think Lance will do whatever I suggest.”

  “Then,” he says, steepling his fingers, “with you and Lance and Harry behind me, we’d have fifty-five percent of the voting shares. Enough to pass the acquisition.”

  “And Sari would be—”

  “Out.”

  “Out,” she repeats. “Poor, darling Sari. How’s her health, Eric?”

  “She’s just fine. Oh, we could toss her some sort of bone—make her honorary board chairman, or something like that.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “No, probably not,” he says quickly, “but think of what you and I could do together, Aunt Jo. We could take Baronet in the direction we both believe it ought to go. We could take it in any direction we chose. We’d be a real team, at last—think of that. I think we should do it, Aunt Jo.”

  She moves across the room and takes a seat on the loveseat beside him, and immediately the air between them is suffused with the wild and heady scent of her perfume, which he knows from many Christmas-stocking presents in the past is always My Sin by Lanvin. With one hand, Joanna lifts the lid of a large silver cigarette box. Inside the box, her almost obsessive fetish for organization continues to reveal itself. Organized, in separate sandalwood compartments of the box, are various kinds and brands of cigarettes—filtered, unfiltered, mentholated, non-mentholated, long and short and extra-length. Each in its own designated cubicle. She selects a long, slender, filtered cigarette with an ivory tip, and lights it carefully with a silver table lighter. This action in itself is significant. Joanna LeBaron rarely smokes, and when she does it is an indication that she is disturbed, or angry, or that she has something very important on her mind. The lighter snaps shut, and Joanna exhales a stream of smoke.

  “You’re ready for another drink, darling,” she says. “You can’t fly on one wing, you know. And while you’re up, fix me one, too. I think I’m ready for something a little more serious than sherry. Make mine a neat Scotch this time.” She hands him her empty glass.

  Eric rises, and steps toward the bar, where all varieties of liquors are arrayed in matched Baccarat decanters, silver necklaces of labels slung about their necks, and the disembodied odor of My Sin follows him across her living room. Fixing their drinks, he cannot help but think how differently, in style, these two women—Joanna and his mother—go about getting what they want. In technique, Assaria LeBaron is all subtle plots and politics and under-the-counter payoffs—a bit of old-fashioned blackmail is never ruled out—a wily gambler with extra aces up her sleeve. Joanna, in contrast, is all softness and silkiness and sentimentality—breathy and feminine and flirtatious, and seductive, and … My Sin. Joanna is Irene Dunne, and his mother is … a three-card-monte player. And yet both these women are after the same thing, the name of which is: Power. He returns with their freshened drinks.

  “Ah, that looks divine, darling,” she says, accepting her glass. Then, plucking an invisible speck of lint from the skirt of her Adolfo gown, she says, “I’m thinking … thinking.”

  “A penny for your thoughts, then.”

  “It’s very tempting, isn’t it,” she says at last. “Tempting for you, and also tempting, I must admit, for me. What about Peeper?”

  “Mother’s been doing a lot of sucking up to Peeper lately. I expect she’s got him on her side.”

  “And … Melissa?”

  “I had breakfast with Melissa this morning,” he says, “and went over with her very roughly what I have in mind. Of course, sooner or later, I intend to bring everyone in on this.”

  “What did Melissa say?”

  “She seemed—well, interested. But preoccupied a little. I got the impression this morning that Melissa’s mind was miles and miles away. You know Melissa.”

  “Miles and miles away. In Switzerland, perhaps.”

  “Huh? But the point is, we don’t need Peeper and we don’t need Melissa. We have enough share votes without them.”

  “Darling, I wish it were as simple as that.”

  “Why isn’t it?”

  “It—isn’t. Not quite. We need Melissa. Or at least we might, depending …”

  “Why? With you, with Lance, with me, and—”

  “No, Eric. Melissa could be very important. Melissa could be pivotal.”

  “But why, Aunt Jo? I don’t see why.”

  Quickly, she stubs out her mostly unsmoked cigarette in an ashtray and, in the same deft motion, empties the ashtray into a silent butler. With Joanna, even her cigarette ends must be organized, each deposited in its proper place. She takes a quick swallow of her drink.

  “Eric,” she says, “there is something you should know about Melissa …”

  In California, it is still daylight.

  In Gabe Pollack’s office at the Peninsula Gazette in Palo Alto, a piece of unedited copy has just come across his desk. It is rough-typed on yellow foolscap, and Gabe picks it up and reads:

  HEIRESS TO PAY FOR CONTROVERSIAL ROCK PERFORMANCE

  San Francisco heiress Melissa LeBaron has let it be known that she will personally pay the full performance fees for The Dildos, the controversial rock group whose appearance at the Odeon Theatre last Thursday night was disrupted by a bizarre outbreak of violence.

  Previously, the 11-member board of directors of the Odeon had voted 10 to one to withhold the group’s concert fee on the grounds that the concert had included material that was offensive to the public taste, in breach of the group’s contract with the board. Miss LeBaron’s was the single dissenting vote, it was learned from a source close to the situation today.

  At Thursday’s concert, pandemonium erupted when, in a solo number, the group’s lead singer, Maurice Littlefield, 23, was bitten in the arm by a seven-foot rock python which Littlefield was using as a part of his act. Littlefield, who bills himself as Luscious Lucius, then proceeded to beat the huge snake to death on the Odeon’s stage in front of the horrified audience.

  Today the Gazette learned that Miss LeBaron has decided to pay the group’s fees out of personal funds. Their fees are said to amount to something in the neighborhood of $5000. “I feel responsible, morally responsible,” Miss LeBaron is quoted as having said. “It was all my idea.” It was Miss LeBaron who first proposed the group’s concert to the Odeon’s board last October.

  Melissa LeBaron is the daughter of Mrs. Assaria Latham LeBaron and the late Peter Powell LeBaron of San Francisco. The LeBaron family owns and operates Baronet Vineyards, Inc., and other enterprises in the Bay Area. Miss LeBaron’s mother was the principal benefactress of the Odeon Theatre’s $3 million restoration last year, though Mrs. LeBaron is not a member of the theatre’s board.

  Gabe pushes a button on his desk, and speaks into the intercom. “Archie, would you step in here for a minute?”

  Archie McPherson appears, and Gabe waves the sheets of yellow paper at him. “Yours, I presume?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very interesting. Now would you mind telling me just who this ‘source close to the situation’ might be?”

  “Sorry, sir. But my source insisted on absolute confidentiality. I couldn’t get the story without promising that.”

  “I see.”

  “But I assure you, sir, the source is excellent. Every word of the story is true.”

  “I see,” Gabe says, looking
back at the sheet of copy. “The way you’ve worded this—‘Melissa LeBaron has let it be known … Miss LeBaron is quoted as having said’—you don’t quote her directly, and yet you quote her. So you are quoting what your source said she said—correct? So I am assuming that your source is not Miss LeBaron herself.”

  “Correct, sir.”

  “Let me just ask you one question, then,” Gabe says. “All I want you to answer is yes or no. Was her mother your source?”

  “Sir, I can’t—”

  “I said yes or no.”

  Archie looks at his feet and grins sheepishly. “Yes,” he says.

  “Fine. That’s all,” and Gabe waves him out of the office with a motion of his hand.

  Now Gabe Pollack is mad as hell. This time he is not going to sit like a schoolboy, hat in hand, in an uncomfortable chair in her stuffy south sitting room, waiting for her to arrive and give him a dressing-down—waiting, not even offered coffee or a sweet roll, not offered anything at all while she treats him to the sharp side of her tongue. This time he will beard the lioness in her den himself, and tell her exactly what he thinks of her machinations. Quickly, he dials her private number at the house, and when Thomas answers and, at first, hesitates, Gabe says, “Tell her that this is extremely urgent.”

  Presently her voice comes on the phone. “What’s up?” she says cheerfully.

  “Sari,” he says very slowly and carefully, “I would like to know what the hell you are trying to do, feeding stories to my reporters behind my back.”

  “Stories? What stories?”

  “This story about Melissa paying for the rock concert, for one.”

  “Why, Gabe, I had nothing to do with—”

  “Don’t lie to me. You’ve been lying to me all along, haven’t you? Pretending to be angry at a story we ran, when it was a story you yourself helped engineer. I should have known. I know how you operate only too well, Sari.”

  “Now, Gabe—”

  “You,” he says, “can create as much discord and dissension as you want within your own family, and as much discord and dissension as you want within your own company. But when you try to create discord and dissension on my newspaper, you’re going too far, and I won’t stand for it.”

  “Gabe, please let me—”

  “Archie McPherson isn’t conducting a personal vendetta against Melissa. You’re conducting a personal vendetta against Melissa—don’t ask me why—and Archie is just your little tool. Well, leave my paper out of your little family fights and power battles, Sari—understand? Leave my paper and my reporters out of whatever the hell is going on at Baronet.”

  “There may be something big, Gabe. Something’s going on—I’ve got a hunch. When it happens, your paper will be the first to get the scoop.”

  “At this point, I don’t want any more of your goddamned scoops,” he says. “And may I ask why, when you want a story planted in my paper, you go around behind my back to Archie, and not directly to me? Let me take a quick guess at the answer to that one. For every story that Archie writes that shows Melissa, or one of her projects, in an embarrassing light, you can get me to write one about Assaria LeBaron and all her wonderful work in the city—restoring south of Market, or whatever it is you want that shows you in a good light—right? It’s always the same old story with you, isn’t it? Play one against the other. Why kill one bird with the stone, when you can kill two or three? Well, that little game is over, Sari.”

  “Dear Gabe,” she says. “Dear old Gabe, dear old Polly. You’re upset. Come for dinner tonight. We’ll have champagne, we’ll talk.”

  “Fat chance of that!” he says, and, the minute the words are out of his mouth, he realizes he is beginning to sound a little childish. “What’s up between you and Melissa, anyway? Not that it’s any of my business, and not that I really give a damn.”

  “I’m—just—trying—to bring Melissa under control!”

  “You’ve been trying that for fifty-seven years without success. What makes you think you can do it now?”

  “She’s a loose cannon, Gabe!”

  “So—what else is new?”

  “This is my last-ditch effort. I’ve never tried it this way before. And if I succeed—”

  “You’re going to bring Melissa under control by getting people to snicker about her latest escapade with a rock group and a snake? You’re full of bullshit, Sari.”

  “I’m trying to get her, for once in her life, to listen to me, Gabe. I’m trying to get her to trust my judgment, to listen to my advice, to follow my suggestions—to do what, in the long run, can only be the best thing for her. That’s all I want—what’s best for her! I can’t tell you too much about what’s going on at Baronet right now because I don’t know all the details myself. But I do know that, if there’s a showdown, I’m going to have to have Melissa on my side, following my instructions, trusting my judgments, and doing—for her own good—as I say. She’s got to see, in this business, that I’m wiser than she.”

  “Well, I still don’t see why newspaper stories like these are going to get her on your side.”

  There is a pause, and then she says, “Perhaps you will when I tell you that—if things come to a showdown, and they may—I may have to explain to Melissa that I am sitting on a story that, if it were ever made public, would ruin her forever, everywhere. Not just in San Francisco, everywhere. And a story that would ruin a few other people in the bargain.”

  “Well, I don’t intend to let you use my newspaper as an instrument for blackmailing your daughter.”

  “I’m not talking about the Peninsula Gazette. I’m talking about the networks, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times.”

  He says nothing.

  “Now,” she says, “are you beginning to get an inkling of the scope of my concern? Dear old Gabe, you are my oldest friend in all the world. Please believe me, trust me that I know what I’m doing.”

  “I thought at least we could be honest with each other, level with one another,” he says.

  “I’m being as honest with you now as I can possibly be,” she says. “Now come for dinner tonight. We’ll have dinner, just the two of us.”

  “I can’t tonight. Busy.”

  “Well, at least try to trust me,” she says. “And remember that you owe me a lot. After all, where would you be if it weren’t for me?”

  “And where would you be if it weren’t for me?”

  “That’s right. We owe each other. Tit for tat. More or less.”

  “Are you implying that I owe you more than you owe me?”

  She laughs softly. “Don’t worry. I’m not calling in any of my markers. Dear old Gabe, I’m glad you’re not upset with me anymore. Good-bye, dear Gabe. And—” she adds quickly, “print the story, Gabe.”

  After he has hung up the phone, he stares for a moment or two at the typewritten sheet of yellow foolscap. Then, very quickly, he initials it in the upper left-hand corner, and places the copy in his “Out” box.

  In room 315 of the airport Marriott, Melissa LeBaron and the young man named Maurice Littlefield are making love on one of the pair of queen-size beds. “Oh, fuck, baby … fuck … fuck … fuck …,” he is saying to her, clutching her roughly. “Oh, you fuck good, baby … like a fuckin’ bunny … ball me, baby … ball me …,” in a hoarse, insistent voice.

  But already Melissa is wondering, is wondering if this is what she wanted to have happen when she came out here this afternoon to discuss their compensation, if this is what she really planned, if she had secretly known, expected, that it could end up this way, making love with a young man less than half her age in a common motel room, in a motel full of transients and salesmen stranded by canceled flights. Had she expected this to happen, and somehow let him know that she expected it? And yet, when he had reached out and touched her, and whispered a coarse suggestion, she had been filled with such a yearning that she felt she must take him into her arms and into her body. He had seemed so sweet, so young and innocent, so lost and
in need of comforting, that she had immediately complied with his request, and so it is happening whether she expected it to or not.

  Now it is over, and he has pushed himself off her and lies on his side, with one elbow propped on a pillow, and Melissa turns herself slightly away from him, feeling disappointed and depressed. She had tried her best. But there had been no orgasm, no bursting rush of feeling, no charge or current through her body, nothing at all. Outside, the winter sun is going down, and there is again a light rain, which descends in drizzles across the windowpanes. In this light, the room itself looks grimy and unkempt, and even the bright chintz curtains, designer-chosen to make the room look cozy and inviting, now look dusty, faded. Outside, there is the slick hiss of tires on the wet pavement of the parking lot, and the sound of car doors slamming. I should be in Capri, she thinks, in Capri dancing with a Capriote. Behind her, she hears the sound of Littlefield lighting a cigarette, and a sharp exhale. His weight shifts slightly. His pale, skinny body and his narrow, bony, hairless chest are turned away from her, but they are still in her mind’s eye. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but what is in the eye that the beholder beholds? His arm is still bandaged, but the bandage is soiled now, and gray, and there is an odor—a stale, medicinal odor of this, and of his cigarette smoke, and the sick-sweet smell of sweat and spent semen—in the air. She should get up now, hop into the shower, towel herself dry, slip into her clothes again, make a little joke, and be on her way. But she does none of these things, and continues to lie there in the growing darkness, where even the sight of her own white, dieted body, the belly kept flat through exercise, her breasts tipped slightly to one side, and the inevitable stretch marks, manages only to fill her with despair. Behind her there is more motion, as Littlefield pulls on his discarded underpants, Jockey shorts, the kind that little boys wear. There is the snap of the elastic waistband against his stomach.

  Melissa’s almost visionary inspiration of barely an hour ago seems to have disappeared. On her way out to the motel, in a taxi, she had had this crazy idea. This group had talent, there was no question about that; their young audiences loved them; their sound was right, their sound was now, their beat was new, and their message was today. But they probably had no sense of organization, no sense of business whatsoever. Off the stage, no doubt, they squabbled and bickered with one another. She could become their manager. She could handle their publicity, book their dates, plan their tours, and teach them how to handle money. The name they had chosen for themselves was, of course, quite simply awful, but she could insist that they change that. She would change it to something upbeat, lively, provocative but on the sly side, something memorable like The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones. In the taxi, she had thought of several such names, but they escape her now. She was certain that the group did drugs—didn’t they all?—but when she became their manager she would change all that, too, for along that route did not lie the way to fortune and stardom, platinum record after platinum record. Oh, yes, that was one of the names she had thought of in the taxi. Call them The Platinums, and perhaps for a gimmick, have all their hair dyed platinum blond? Too much like David Bowie? Perhaps. Think young thoughts, she often told herself, keep up with what young people are talking about, doing, listening to—that is the way to stay young. The python was a tacky gimmick, as well as an unreliable one. Under her management of the group, there would be no more pythons. All this and more, she had thought of in the taxi, but all of it has lost its luster now.