They ate dinner at a restaurant near the bank and Lippincott itched all through the meal, even as he told her of his ambition to go to a South Seas island and live like a native, walking the beaches and eating clams. ;
"A life-long dream?" Janie asked.
"No. Actually, it just came on me this afternoon," Lippincott said. "But some things are so right that you don't bother to question them, no matter when they come."
She was glad he hadn't asked her to feed him at her apartment. Like all singl&New York women, her apartment was a mess and to get it ready for a dinner guest she would have had to take ten days off from her job.
They lingered a long time over drinks. Randall Lippincott, she decided, was a nice and gentle man and she had the feeling that if it had not been for the backing of the rest of his family, he was too soft a man to have become a multi-millionaire on his own. His character, like his face and body, seemed to have no bone in it, no central core of hardness that Janie felt acquiring riches required.
But she found him charming in a silly kind of way.
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He talked about the small pleasures of life, walking on the sand, swimming naked on a private beach near Hawaii, running through the woods after his prize pair of Gordon Setters, looking at planets through a high-powered telescope. The high point of his life seemed to have been riding over the Los Angeles Coliseum in the Goodyear Blimp.
After many drinks and four cups of coffee, they were ready to leave and Lippincott seemed calmly looking forward to the evening. Despite the disparity in their ages, Janie began to wonder if perhaps Randall Lippincott was on the verge of busting up his marriage, and suppose he were, and even though she was just his secretary, who knew what could happen? Stranger things had happened. She resolved that if he wanted to spend the night at her apartment, she would allow it. She would make him wait in the hallway for ten minutes under some sort of pretext, while she raced around inside putting the piles into piles.
It was after nine o'clock when they got to the disco. Lippincott had taken his tie off in the cab and gave it to the driver. Already a crowd of twenty persons stood around outside the building, hoping that tonight they would be among the anointed ones allowed in.
Janie led Lippincott from the taxicab to the man guarding the door. His look was surly, the kind of look favored by the incompetent given power over the inconsequential.
"Mr. Lippincott and Miss Wanamaker," said Janie officiously. The door guard looked past her, saw and recognized Lippincott, and his face changed into an unaccustomed smile.
"Of course," he said. "Go right in."
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Janie smiled and took Lippincott's arm. Who knows, she thought. Millionaires had married their /¦ secretaries before. Who was to say it couldn't happen again?
Inside, the lights were pulsating in time with the incessant 120 beats a minute of the recorded music. Couples crowded the small dance floor. They wore sequins, see-through plastic, opaque plastic, leather, furs, and feathers.
Lippincott looked around in surprise. "So this is what it's like," he said.
Janie felt a sense of satisfaction as she took his hand and was able to say "Yes. It's this way all the time."
They followed a waiter to a table and gave him an order for drinks.
Lippincott was thumping his hands heavily on the small round table. Suddenly he stood and took off his jacket. He sat back down in shirt sleeves. Janie didn't mind at all, even though if some other escort had done it, she would have been mortified. No one was about to tell Randall Lippincott to leave because he wasn't dressed right.
She looked around the place while Lippincott, with a spoon, happily banged out the rhythm on the side of a water glass. She saw two movie stars, a famous rock singer, and a well-known literary figure who had given up writing for talking on television shows.
Her night was made. She would have talking rights on this evening with her friends for years to come.
"Can't stand these clothes," Lippincott said. "Come on, want to dance?"
"Do you know how?" Janie asked. It would be
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awful to be embarrassed in front of all these people. Then she had another thought. How could someone be embarrassed by dancing with Randall Lippincott? No matter how badly he danced?
"No, but it looks easy," Lippincott said. He reached out for her hand and led her to the floor, just as the waiter arrived with their drinks.
On the floor, Janie slipped easily into the hip-swaying solo steps of her dance. Randall Lippincott was just as bad as she thought he would be. Perhaps even worse. He lumbered about the floor, waving his arms inconsequentially, and not even making a pretense of stomping in time to the music.
But he was laughing aloud, having a good time, and seemed uncaring of the eyes watching him. Every time he saw someone doing a step or a routine he liked, he tried it, and after only a few moments, Janie stopped being self-conscious about dancing with him and laughingly joined in his spirit of good fun.
Perhaps it was the first time in his life that Randall Lippincott had ever laughed, she thought. Really laughed.
It was certainly the last.
Three minutes into the dance, puffing and laughing, Lippincott had unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it onto an empty chair.
His tee shirt followed a minute later and then, as if the dam of inhibitions had finally surrendered, he sat on the floor to take off his trousers, his shoes and his socks. People by now had stopped to watch. Waiters were hovering at the edge of the floor, helplessly wondering what to do.
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He tossed all his clothes toward a chair. Most of them landed on the floor. "Please, Mr. Lippincott," Janie said. But he did not hear her. His eyes were closed as he galumphed up and down, back and forth, wearing only his boxer shorts, and then, as the record played of a disco singer doing the only hit song ever written about a cake in the rain, he hooked his thumbs into the elastic waistband of his shorts and shimmied them off.
Janie Wanamaker was horrified. It took another full minute for the staff to realize they should do something, and just as they came up to wrap a table cloth around Randall Lippincott's naked body, all the happy intensity seemed to ooze from him and he sat down on the floor shivering, trying to squirm out from under the. table cloth, and crying. Large tears.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
In the private East Side clinic to which Randall Lippincott had been taken, his doctor patted the man gently on the arm. Lippincott was lying in a bed, Ms arms locked down by restraint cuffs.
"How's my little naked disco dancer?" the doctor asked.
Lippincott was calm now and he looked up hopefully at his doctor who said, "Don't worry about a thing, Randall. Everything's going to be all right."
The doctor searched through a medical bag for a few moments, withdrawing a syringe and a vial of yellow liquid. The syringe was quickly filled and the doctor inserted it into the vein inside Lippincott's left elbow.
He winced at the small pinch of pain. The doctor withdrew the needle, and even though it was a disposable syringe, dropped it back into the medical bag.
The doctor patted his forehead. "Everything's going to be all right," she said, then Dr. Elena Gladstone snapped shut her medical bag and walked to the door. Lippincott's worried eyes followed her.
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At the door, she turned and said, "Goodbye, Randall. And I do mean goodbye."
She smiled for a moment. Lippincott's eyes showed his confusion and fright. Then she laughed aloud, throwing her head back and tossing her long red hair, before she walked from the room.
In the hallway, she glanced to her right. Standing in front of the nurse's desk, their backs to her, she saw the young white man and the old Oriental she had seen that morning at Elmer Lippincott's estate. She quickly walked across the hall and disappeared through an exit door.
She walked down two flights of stairs, and then into another patient area of the clinic. In the patient lounge, she found a pay phone and placed a thirty-five-cent call.