A Long Walk Up the Waterslide Read Online Free PDF Page A

evidence would seem to indicate that he might have.”
    Charles watched helplessly as Mrs. Landis lowered her eyes, looked down at the desk, and nodded. He felt even worse when she looked back up, her eyes moist.
    “And do you know where she is?” she asked.
    “We’re close to ascertaining her location, ma’am.”
    Candy nodded again, then went back to perusing her data.
    Somehow, she thought, I have failed, failed to keep the passion alive. And Jackson found his way to Polly Paget.
    “Get me Polly Paget,” Ron Scarpelli said.
    Scarpelli thought this kind of simple, impossible command gave him an authoritative voice. He’d learned that at a seminar on personal power: Speak in an authoritative voice.
    Walter Withers hadn’t attended the seminar but recognized the brisk 80’s tone. Here I am, he thought, sitting on a pornographer’s black leather sofa with my knees up to my chin, sipping on his chichi designer water, trying not to stare at the legs of the six-foot-tall woman in a black dress who’s his “personal assistant,” and he’s attempting to employ personal power techniques. It’s superfluous, Mr. Scarpelli. It’s your penthouse office, your view of Central Park, your magazine, and your nickel. You don’t need to speak in an authoritative voice.
    Withers didn’t say that, though. He was fifty-six years old, five—okay, twenty pounds overweight, and owed Sammy Black ten thousand big ones plus the vig, which was growing every day. But for the first time in a long time the ball had stopped at Walter’s number and he wasn’t about to walk away from the table.
    So he said, “Everyone in the country wants Polly Paget, Mr. Scarpelli.”
    “But I’m not everybody,” Ron Scarpelli assured him. He looked to the personal assistant for confirmation. She formed her dark red lips into a dazzling smile.
    And why not? Withers thought. He wondered how much she pulled down a year as a personal assistant.
    “I don’t touch her,” Ron Scarpelli said, misreading Withers’s thoughts. “She’s married. Isn’t she beautiful?”
    “Yes, she is.”
    She looked like money. From the gloss of her black hair pulled tightly back to the perfect pale skin, the health-club figure, the clothes.
    “Recognize her?” Scarpelli asked.
    “Certainly,” Withers said, flipping through his mental index cards for the name. “She’s Ms. Haber, your personal assistant. She escorted me in, offered me water …”
    Walter thought wistfully of the days when one would be offered a civilized martini at any decent office in midtown.
    Scarpelli beamed. “August 1980.”
    I can’t seem to recall last Thursday and he’s playing memory games from two years ago.
    Withers held his palms up.
    “Miss August 1980,” Scarpelli urged. “The centerfold!”
    She’s smiling at me, Withers thought, as if she isn’t the least bit embarrassed that her boss just asked me to summon up the image of her on her back displaying herself.
    Withers didn’t want to tell them that he had seen Top Drawer magazine maybe twice and it had just depressed him. It had been twenty years since he had gone to bed with a woman who looked anything like Ms. Haber and he knew he wasn’t going to have that pleasure if he lived another twenty, which was unlikely. So looking at the pictures was like being broke and hungry and standing outside the Carnegie Deli with one’s nose pressed to the window.
    “Certainly,” Withers said. He vaguely recalled some punch line about “not recognizing you with your clothes on” but didn’t chance it.
    “I want Polly Paget in my magazine,” Scarpelli said, getting back to business.
    “Well, that’s what I thought.”
    “Nude.”
    As if he invented sex, Withers thought. Walter himself followed the school of thought that women were more alluring with their clothes on, given the right clothes. Half the erotic pleasure of romance, if memory served, was in the gradual baring of secrets, the delicate interplay of fabric and