"Did you lose the lawsuit?"
"Not yet, just the first round. But we don't stand a chance."
"She's going to boil you alive in oil, Daddy?"
"No, honey, someone I love."
"Good-bye, Daddy. Don't phone until it's over. They can trace phone calls."
"Good-bye, honey," said Barry Glidden, who despite his sense of terror was not too terrified to do some good business before he saw the Dolomos. He brought two more investors into the city complex he had planned for the Dolomo estate. Then he went out to see Beatrice and her husband. Gingerly he drove over one of her moats. He wondered if there were alligators in there. He wondered if she would throw him in before he got the chance to fit two hundred duplex units on the south lawn.
Glidden knew Beatrice was on a rampage because Rubin was hiding. He stood in the middle of the pink marble foyer and looked for clues as to Rubin's whereabouts. From the rear of the house echoed a sound-a gurgling, happy sound. He knew that couldn't be Rubin, but the sounds intrigued him. Glidden would investigate. He walked past a few of the bodyguards the Dolomos had stationed strategically around the estate since the parents of a Powie attempted to kill them for stealing their daughter.
Of course, they hadn't really stolen the daughter. They had only sold her some courses. She was working in Australia for the rest of her life to pay them off.
Glidden saw a row of doors with glass windows. The gurgling came from one of them. He peeked in. What he saw was grown people in diapers. First he wondered if it were a new form of California sex, but no one was touching except for occasional hair pulls. He looked into the next door. There were grown-ups playing with trains. Well, some grown-ups played with trains. But he had never seen them make the sounds of the whistles, at least, not with such abandon. In the next room a woman with grotesquely dyed hair pummeled a video machine. And in the final room was a bar with an available lady hanging around.
Barry let her give him a drink. Barry let her put a hand on his neck. Barry removed his own hands from his lap in case there was something she wanted to get to. She did.
He did not resist. He wondered if there was a little room around, some private place.
"Nobody comes in here," said the woman. He could smell her perfume, a foul cheap nostril-wrenching odor. However, when it came with an absolutely bare body, a beautiful body, a full body, a body waiting for him, Barry Glidden couldn't care less about the welfare of his nostrils.
A moment later, a roller-coaster would have been private enough for Barry Glidden.
Just before his moment of glory, Barry Glidden felt a shoe heel in his back.
"Barry. Where's Rubin? I'm looking for Rubin."
"In a moment, Beatrice," said her lawyer. "Just a moment."
"I don't have a moment," said Beatrice.
"Just one. Just one."
"Do you have to do that in here?"
"Yes. Oh, yes. I have to do it and I'm doing it."
"Well, where's Rubin? I want Rubin. Do you hear? I want Rubin. You two stop that."
Barry didn't want to stop. If a gun were pointed at his head at this moment he would have wondered if he could finish before he was dead.
He heard Beatrice doing something at the bar, and then with an earthquake size shock he felt the splash of a pail of cold water on his back.
"C'mon upstairs," said Beatrice. "We have work to do."
"Rubin says she's very forceful," said the woman.
"Yeah," said Barry. Sometimes a thousand condo units wasn't worth the price of working for the Dolomos.
In the large south meeting room where the Dolomos often planned strategy with franchise owners, Beatrice seemed almost happy.
Barry blotted himself with paper towels.
"I want the truth now. On a scale of one to ten, what are our chances of winning an appeal?"
"We can still cop a plea on the charges of mail fraud."
"I didn't ask for that."
"No chance."
"Then," said Beatrice Dolomo, "we are going to start playing dirty."
"What are alligators in pools and threats to the President? Playing clean?"
"I mean we're going to play hardball, Barry."
"They put people in gas chambers for that sort of hardball, Beatrice. Why not cut your losses and run? You'll still have plenty of money, especially if you sell this estate you won't be needing. Considering the appreciation of your money-if you sell the estate you'll come out of jail set for life. No more cult business, just beautiful peaceful wealthy retirement."
"For the two to three years we would have left to live, Barry? No deal. I didn't crawl up from a stinking attic dragging Rubin with me because I am a quitter. You think Rubin is some great genius? He was just another hack science-fiction writer. He believed Poweressence. He was trying to help people when it began. Do you realize that? He actually believed people could cure headaches by finding the moment in their lives they couldn't let go of. I had to stop him from treating cancer patients before they sued us into penury. No, Mr. Glidden, I am not copping a plea."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Escalate."
"You already tried to kill one columnist and have threatened the President. Where do you go from there?"
"If you don't make good on your threats, no one will believe you," said Beatrice. Today she wore purple lipstick with purple eyeshadow. She wore a white peasant blouse embroidered with flowers. She looked like a middle-age woman who had lost her own clothes and was borrowing those of a twelve-year-old daughter.
It was obvious to Barry why Beatrice always seemed to dress so inappropriately. There was no one brave enough to tell her she did not look good.
Beatrice glanced at her watch.
"We can't wait forever," she said. She went to the door and screamed out into the hallway.
"Get Rubin. We're tired of looking for Rubin."
"He's writing the founder's day speech for the faithful," came a man's voice. It was one of her bodyguards.
"Use last year's. Tell him to use last year's," yelled back Mrs. Dolomo.
"He says he can't. It's a new speech about the persecution of the righteous."
"Persecute his duff up here to the south meeting room," screamed Mrs. Dolomo, and then she returned to the table where Barry Glidden was desperately figuring out ways to sever relations with this client. He knew what was coming.