"Why?"
"To teach Ruby a lesson," Remo said. He went back to the open window and leaned out.
"Ruby," he shouted. "You hear me? We're coming."
A voice from six stories down answered back. "Hey, fella, shut up. We got a game this week." It was a deep Texas voice.
"Get lost," Remo said.
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"What's that, feUa? What's that?"
"Are you as deaf as you are dumb?" Remo asked. "I said, get lost."
"What room you in, fella?"
"And your cheerleaders are ugly," Remo said.
"What room?" the man" shouted.
"Room fourteen-twenty-two. Bring your friends," Remo said.
And so it was that the stage was set for the football Giants to win their first game of the year when the entire starting defensive team of the Dallas Cowboys came down with a serious illness two days before the game. The ton-and-a-half of players decided to tell the coach they were sick, rather than try to get him to believe the truth, which was that they accosted an ancient Oriental and a skinny white man in the fourteenth floor hallway of the Meadowlands Hilton, and were tossed around the hallway like bowling pins. The Giants, given the privilege of playing against Dallas's defensive second string, ran wild, managed to score nine points on three field goals and won 9-8, surrendering the eight points when their own quarterbacks were tackled four times in the Giant's end zone while trying off-tackle plays on third and twenty.
Remo and Chiun did not see the game. They were in New York.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Elmer Lippincott Sr. slid quietly out of his giant king-sized bed, moving slowly so he would not wake his wife Gloria who slept next to him. Lippincott was eighty years old, a tall spare man with a face that had been weathered and hardened by an early life spent in the search for oil in the deserts of the world, in Texas, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and in the steaming jungles of South America.
He moved with a smooth vigor that belied his years. His face was perpetually ruddy and his hair a shock of thick white wool. If his blue eyes had had more twinkle, he might have looked like an Irish saloon keeper who had gone on the wagon twenty years earlier. But Elmer Lippincott's eyes were flint hard and piercing. They softened now, however, as he stood next to the bed and looked down at his wife who slept on undisturbed. Gloria Lippincott was a young blonde woman, in her mid-twenties, and her skin was as soft and creamy as Lippincott's was tough and leathery.
Her long blonde hair displayed itself around her head on the pillow like a golden frame, and the old man's heart skipped a little as it always did when he absorbed her beauty when she was not watching. He
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looked at the blonde hair, the perfect complexion, the long line of her throat, the faint swell below the collarbone. He let his eyes trail down her body and he smiled as he saw the large rounded mound of her stomach under the blue satín sheet. Her belly was big and ripe with his baby. Six months pregnant and, God, she was beautiful.
He touched her belly once, gently, letting his hand linger for a few seconds but there was no answering kick from inside, and disappointed he withdrew his hand. Then he walked quietly from the bedroom into the large dressing room adjoining it.
He spurned a valet.
"I dressed myself all my life. Just because I found some oil don't mean I forgot how to button my own buttons," he had once told an interviewer.
He glanced at his watch. It was exactly 6:30 A.M.
He passed through the kitchen on his way to his downstairs office. Gertie, who had come to Mm as a young woman and was now in her sixties, stood before a frying pan at the range, and he slapped her roubstly on the butt.
"Morning, Gert," he said loudly.
"Morning, the First," she said without turning. "Your juice is on the tray. So's your coffee."
"Where's my eggs?"
"Hold your horses, they're coming." She flipped the eggs hard enough to break the yolks and while they cooked dry, she pulled two slices of toast from the toaster and spread them with corn oil margarine.
"It's a great day, Gertie," said Lippincott as he drained his six ounces of orange juice in one long gulp.
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"You oughta be ashamed of yourself. Lern barely in his grave and you say it's a great day."
Lippincott was chastened. "All right," he said, "so it's not a great day for him. But we're alive and that's a great day. My wife is having my baby and that's a great day. And you're cooking me the finest pair of over dry eggs the world has ever seen and how could that make anything but a great day? A little sadness should never ruin a great day."
"Missie Mary'd be spinning in her grave, she hear you carrying on that way, with Lem dead," said Gertie, disapprovingly, as she scooped the eggs from the skillet and slid them onto a plate, along with three sausage patties she had fried in a separate pan.
"Yes, she probably would," Lippincott said, thinking for a long distasteful moment of Mary, the stern autocratic woman who had been his wife for thirty years and who had mothered the three sons who bore the Lippincott name. "But there are a lot of things that'd make her spin in her garve," he said.
He scooped up his platter of eggs and patted Gertie on the butt again. He refused to lose his good mood. Balancing his coffee cup and plate in one hand, he walked from the kitchen, down the long hallway of the big old mansion and into his oak-panelled office at the far end of the building.
Even though the family fortune was now measured in eleven digits, lifetime habits aren't easily broken and Lippincott still ate like a man who was afraid of the prospect that he might have to share his food with someone else. So he disposed of breakfast as quickly as possible, then put the plate aside, sipped on the coffee and began reading reports that were stacked neatly by his desk.
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Lern was dead. He had been entrusted with the overseas deal to open up trading routes with Red China to help the dollar, but now he was dead.
He shouldn't have died, Lippincott thought. That wasn't the plan.
At 9 a.m., he had his first appointment of the day and as he peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve, Elmer Lippincott Sr. repeated that to his visitor.
"It wasn't the plan that Lern should die," he said. Dr. Elena Gladstone nodded as she prepared a hypodermic syringe.
"It was an unfortunate accident," she said. "That happens sometimes when you're dealing with experimental medicine."
Dr. Gladstone wore a tailored tweed suit and a rust blouse that was open four buttons down from the neck. She carried a well-worn leather doctor's bag and from it she extracted a rubber-capped vial of a clear liquid.
"Perhaps we should halt everything?" she said. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe." "It's all right," Dr. Gladstone said. "You can forgive and forget, no one will ever know."
"No, dammit," Lippincott growled. "I'll know. You just be more careful."
Dr. Gladstone nodded. Lippincott extended his arm toward her even as she was withdrawing the.vial from her doctor's bag.
She smiled at him. Her white teeth looked like pearls against her lightly-tanned skin and her bright red hair. "Not so anxious," she said. "I have to fill the syringe first. I gather everything is going along well."