Death of a Flack Read online

  And then, three weeks before, sitting in an uptown saloon called The Toast, Jeff Clayton had been talking of the downtown saloon called Athena. “That’s where I met her,” he had said.

  “The poetess?” I had said.

  “Turned out to be no beatnik at all. Lori Gilmore. The name strike a bell?”

  “My bells are not attuned to saloon poets.”

  “Does Cobb Gilmore strike a bell?”

  “Bells and bells,” I had said. “Carillons. But what in hell does Cobb Gilmore have to do with this?”

  “Lori Gilmore. Cobb Gillmore. She’s his daughter.”

  Cartier, Tiffany, Van Cleef—Cobb Gilmore, Inc. was in that league—splendid, splendiforous house of jewels on Madison Avenue, except that Cobb Gilmore had more angles than a textbook on geometry, which had brought me, from time to time, within his grandiose ken.

  “Cobb Gilmore’s daughter recites poetry in a Greenwich Village saloon, no matter how hoity-toity the saloon?” I had asked. The best word is ludicrous. Cobb Gilmore was a millionaire, many times over. Cobb Gilmore was a multi-millionaire flaked within the top crusts of society. Cobb Gilmore was a widower of delicate health with a one-and-only daughter. Ludicrous is the only word to capture the vision of Cobb Gilmore’s daughter doing the beatnik bit in a village saloon.

  “I was as amazed as you,” Jeff Clayton had said, as he sadly sipped his bourbon and soda. “A period in her life, I’m sure. Gilmore has gone along with it. The girl has a lovely place of her own on MacDougal Street. Anyway, I’ve snapped my cap for that kid. I’m out of my mind.”

  “So?” I had asked. “Mr. Jefferson Clayton and Miss Lori Gilmore, Cobb Gilmore’s daughter. I can see them being pelted by flowers outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. If ever there was a natural bride and groom! Where’s the problem?”

  “Henry Martell.”

  “Henry Martell?”

  Henry Martell was a flack. A flack is a press agent before he becomes a public relations counselor. A public relations counselor is a press agent with a fancy office, important clients, and a rapturous line of con. Henry Martell was still in the stage of being a flack, but punching his way up. Henry Martell had made a career of living on the fringes of other careers. Before taking on a semblance of permanence as a flack, he had been an assistant cameraman in Hollywood, an assistant assistant-director for a musical comedy in New York, an assistant photographer for a scandal magazine, chief photographer for a nude-study group that had been dispersed by the postal authorities, assistant cameraman for pornographic films stupidly sent through the mails but discovered by the postal authorities and burned, with jail sentences going to certain of the principals but not to small-time Henry who had no principles. And at length Henry had become a flack. As a night club hanger-on and as sycophantic informer to major columnists, he could coerce them to write a line or two in their articles, which brought to him a small number of narcissistic clients who enjoyed reading their names in print along with bright sayings or jokes. His first major client, to my knowledge, had been Club Athena; his second major client, surprisingly, the staid house of Clayton & Clayton which needed his occasional but rather well-placed plugs as desperately as American vodka needs association with the Russian Soviet.

  But, kindly, let us not sell Henry Martell short. First off, Henry was handsome in the best sense of the word: he was handsome to women. He was tall and lean and slender and dark with the quiet, assured, casual manner of a man who knew countless erotic secrets (and, man, he did!). The most astonishing ladies fluttered down to Henry like leaves off trees in October. Henry was hip. Henry was round as opposed to square. Henry was a globe as opposed to a cube.

  Henry had a deep, low, confidential voice. Henry dropped names as a wrestler drops sweat. Henry could tell you who of the great names was a homosexual, who of the great names took dope, who of the great names had a Chinese lover, and who of the great names was in danger of his life because of debts to loan sharks. And Henry made it stick—although most often he was conspicuously incorrect—because he had a “hello” acquaintance with all of these great names and if you were in his company you would be impressed when a great name flipped him off with a “Hello, how are you, Henry.” Secondly, Henry was one of the best-dressed men of the world: he actually had taste in the matter of dress. His underwear was custom-made, his shoes were custom-made, his shirts were custom-made, his narrow ties were custom-made, his suits and coats and hats were custom-made. Thirdly, the best and most important greeters of the town greeted Henry with a great display of effusion: as his lady-companion of the evening, you were escorted to the best table, you were served with obsequious care and alacrity, and you were hovered over as though you were royalty. Henry had garnered sufficient succulent tidbits about the off-life of these night creatures to assure him of the most toothsomely cloying (if bitterly disposed) attentions. And fourthly, Henry was a confident conversationalist of hypnotic proportions: his tone ranged deep and throaty and his hands put pressure on likely anatomical sections at precisely likely moments. He name-dropped just enough to pique the curiosity; he delivered the shafts of appropriate compliments like harpoons when there was a flash of underbelly, and the chatter purred with the spurious strength of an elderly deballed detoothed but wavy-maned lion, until the lady was slid into the confines of his apartment where, the scuttlebutt had it, Henry performed with the puissance of an un-deballed sex-starved lion miraculously granted the techniques of Casanova and the experience of Don Juan. Once locked within the apartment, the physical experience of Henry, if you were a female, was unforgetable. You might drop him as one might drop a perfumed flower from whence a loathesome spider suddenly emerged; you might drop him for a myriad of reasons, but not one of these reasons would be physical insufficiency. So rumor had it. Henry had shot down many of the swell-lettered belles of the town: why not Cobb Gilmore’s daughter?

  “She’ll kill him once she gets wise to him,” had said Jeff Clayton, blotting up bourbon. “She’s a wild young chick, that gal.”

  “What are you doing to prevent it?” I had inquired.

  “Striking out,” he had said. “Martell is playing this for marriage.”

  “Marriage? Martell?”

  “So he says. He’s asked her.”

  “How long do they know each other?”

  “About four months. She’s all the way gone.”

  “And Cobb Gilmore?”

  “You know Cobb Gilmore. He plays it along neat. He’s a wise old bird. He doesn’t fight his daughter. I’ll say he’s encouraged me, but I won’t say he’s actually discouraged Martell. The girl is hooked—but hooked.” He came up from the bourbon. “Look, you want to meet her? Come on. Come on downtown. Come on, huh? Move your ass. Come on, huh?”

  I had paid the bill on the expense account and had said: “Marriage? Why not? With Cobb Gilmore’s daughter, can a Henry Martell do better?”

  “I want you to meet her. I really do. Move the ass.”

  And so we had gone down to the Club Athena and I had met the poetry-spouting Lori Gilmore, and my interest was niggard because she is not my type plus I am not the marriage type, but when I had met Sherry Greco, sitting with us at table, my interest had soared like a missile off Cape Canaveral, because Sherry Greco had presented a hard, wise, green-eyed challenge, and challenge is a spur to my libido. This was not love, it was hardly lust; it was pure challenge, and challenge can be enjoyed.

  So had started my three-week quest amid the rival heavings of Martell and Clayton—which brings us back, once again, to the ballet at the Metropolitan on a May-soft evening.

  We had had dinner at Club Athena—Clayton, Martell, Lori, Sherry, and I—and we had met Cobb Gillmore and lady in the lobby of the Met. The lady had been a ravishing surprise. I had expected Cobb Gilmore. I had not expected a lady. One look at the lady and I had looked away and had remained carefully looking away. The lady was right up my alley but I was not one to drop my pins for a lady in the company of Cobb Gilmore. If I b
owled a ball and the English was wrong, I would miss the lady and lose Cobb Gilmore, and Cobb Gilmore was too valuable a client to risk losing on the off-chance of winning a lady. Jeff Clayton had whispered: “Gilmore’s latest flame. The old boy sure picks them, what?” And that had settled it—I thought.

  During the second intermission, the ladies went off to the powder room, Martell to a booth for a phone call, and Clayton to the bar for a lonely bourbon and a solitary sulk. I went out into the air for a smoke and there in the street I was joined by Cobb Gilmore who looked up at the clouded sky and said: “Looks like we’re in for some rain tomorrow.”

  What a guy! Casual, always casual. Shows up at the ballet with a beauty more beautiful than any of the performers—a lady at least thirty years his junior—and the best he can offer is a remark about the weather. Shows up at the ballet between two swains battling for the hand of his daughter, and his comment is about rain for tomorrow. But I knew Cobb Gilmore. Cobb Gilmore was about as simple as a foreign-language road map. Cobb Gilmore was all smiling, gracious, pink-faced, cherubic facade, but Cobb Gilmore was boss-man of a complex operation called Cobb Gilmore, Inc., which catered to the most select of clients and the most select of thieves.

  There are fences and fences and Cobb Gilmore was the highest picket of them all. Actually, the firm of Cobb Gilmore, Inc. transacted an eclectic, legitimate business that ran to a gross value of millions per year, with excellent, normal, legitimate profits accruing to Cobb Gilmore, Inc.—but behind the chic front of Cobb Gilmore, Inc. churned a second front, no less chic, of illegitimate business with abnormal illegitimate profits going to the noncorporate Cobb Gilmore, in person, in cash, tax free. Cobb Gilmore was not a thief, in the ordinary sense of the word, nor did he encourage thieves, in the ordinary sense of the word. Cobb Gilmore was an expert of forty years’ standing, a specialist in a most specialized field—that of precious stones. In the time of those years he had been called upon to scrutinize and appraise gems of questionable ownership. He had been asked if perhaps one of his affluent clients would care to own such a stone without benefit of bill of sale, and had, in his very early youth, resisted such importunities. But conscience, as we all know, is unyielding in inverse proportion to the press of temptation. Upon occasion, Cobb Gilmore bent to temptation. Who are we to criticize? Who among us has not yielded to temptation, especially when there is no risk of possible apprehension? On the one hand, Cobb Gilmore had aristocratic clients of untold wealth who were avid for the peculiar delight of ownership of a stigmatic objet d’art—and on the other hand, such deliciously tainted objets d’art found their way through devious channels, surreptitiously, to Cobb Gilmore. Upon rare occasion, at the beginning, Cobb Gilmore hesitantly served as middleman, to the delight of the purchaser, the gratitude of the vendor, and the huge profit (a commission from each) to himself.

  As the years piled on and the fastidious Cobb grew plump, conscience was tempered to its new contour and was quite as inflexible as the conscience of old. Cobb Gilmore would have been truly and sorely affronted and would promptly have called the police in honest outrage had he been approached by some uncouth hoodlum bearing the expensive spoils of an indelicate heist (the victim, very possibly, might have been one of Gilmore’s very own clients). The police, in point of fact, although they probably had knowledge, had a paucity of interest in the backroom activities of the staid and respectable Cobb Gilmore. Police, perforce, must be pragmatic: the picadillos of powerful politicians are not for their unsolicited attentions; the jewel on the too-ample bosom of the wife of a vice-president of General Motors is not for their inspection; the under-age chick being kept by one of the aides of the president is not for their solicitations; the stag party on the moored yacht of an international tycoon is not for their raid; the crap game in the thirty-room Kings Point mansion of one of the top members of the Mafia is not for their molestation. Ah, me (deep sigh), the heritage of Don Quixote is for the very young, the very foolish, the callow still fallow, the tilters at papier-mâché windmills. This, dear friends and fellow critics, is not cynicism: it is plain (as they say), simple (as they say), unvarnished, implacable, insufferable truth. (Damn! But go do something! Youth, bright with hope, gallantly, winsomely, and, in retrospect, sadly, gathers his banners, clenches his fist, and rails—but maturity begets practicality which begets acceptance, and the fist loosens and grows flaccid, and the dear banners lie limply furled in the dusty… .)

  Cobb Gilmore was sixty years of age, round and fat and plumply jowled, with a monklike halo of white hair surrounding a pink pate, and twinkling blue eyes as innocent as a mother’s kiss (to her baby—not her lover). Cobb Gilmore had insisted upon keeping the conversation, such as it was, on the bland topic of weather. “Rain in May in New York,” he had said, “is not as unusual as people think. Somehow, they associate rain with April.”

  “Just as they associate marriage with June. Are you going to invite me to the wedding, Cobb?”

  That was pure spite, mostly. I had known Cobb Gilmore for ten years. I knew, which most people did not, that he was a man of precarious health—a cardiac case. I knew that he took excellent care of himself. I knew—which most people did know—that he adored his daughter; that she was the apple, the peach, the berry, the cherry of his eye; that her mother had died at childbirth and that Cobb Gilmore had reared her as carefully as a prized hothouse flower. I had never met his daughter in the years that I knew him (which is patent proof of his adoration of her); very few of his business associates had come in contact with her. I knew also that Cobb Gilmore used every device, always, to fend off undue pressure on his vulnerable heart. I had been employed by him on inconsequential matters, for consequential stipend, for simply such purpose. Now his daughter was jammed, but, it appeared, that was too personal for consultation with his favorite private Richard. He was either handling it himself or letting it ride. I admit to curiosity. I also admit to the prick of pique. “Which of the gentlemen,” I said, “do you prefer as a son-in-law?”

  “Neither, dear Chambers,” he said. “Small choice. Martell is a bounder and Clayton is a rounder.” Innocence diminished, some of the twinkle vanished, and a touch of the steel of Cobb Gilmore showed in his eyes. “Charming that my daughter’s affairs of the heart have become common gossip. Charming, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t be corny, Cobb.” That brought no laugh. “Just because I know and you didn’t tell me doesn’t mean it’s common gossip. Just remember that I know both of the principals, and I have become acquainted with the sequestered Lori, although you never introduced me.”

  “Are you hurt, dear boy?”

  “To the quick, dear boy.”

  “Because I never introduced you?”

  “Because you don’t think enough of me to call me in when your kid is caught in the switches. It isn’t as though I were a stranger to the bit. You know damned well that I’m acquainted with both Martell and Clayton.”

  He took my arm and held it and his tone was almost fatherly. “I thought of you, Peter, but I didn’t think it would be necessary for either of us to interfere. That kid—poetry and all the rest of that nonsense—is as hardheaded as her dad and that, as you well know, is rather hardheaded. Young ladies have their stages—I was going to say periods but that term might be ambiguous—and I felt that I should let her run through this stage on her own. I was certain that she would come to her senses. I repeat, this is a hardheaded and practical young woman—sometimes, almost, to my despair. I was delighted with this new poetry thing, and, at the beginning, I was delighted that she had lost her head about so transparent a bounder as Martell. Can you understand that?”

  “Not quite,” I said, shaking free of his paternal grasp. “I’ve never been a father—acknowledged, that is.”

  “When a girl is too practical, you feel that perhaps you’ve brought her up wrong, that you’ve instilled the wrong principles. You know? You almost pray for them to do something wild, feminine, flighty.”

  “You got
it wild, feminine, and flighty, man. But good.”

  “Yes, that I did. First, the poetry. Then, an apartment of her own. Then the business with Martell. I was certain that would blow over soon enough, and I rather thought the experience would do her good.”

  “You harp on Martell. What about Clayton?”

  “Clayton is meaningless.”

  “Clayton? Meaningless? Don’t ever let him hear you say that.”

  “Why?”

  “That guy can rear up and be awfully nasty.”

  “I can handle him.”

  “I’m sure you can, Cobb.”

  “But it won’t come to any of that, dear Peter. Clayton is meaningless for the very logical reason that he’s meaningless to my daughter. Simply, she doesn’t care for him. She’s been using him as a further spur to Martell. But he’s meaningless. Period. New paragraph.”

  “The new paragraph—being Martell.”

  “And a weighty paragraph he’s become.”

  “How much does he weigh, Cobb?”

  “Practically his weight in gold.”

  “How much would that be?”

  “A hundred thousand dollars, I believe.” He said it without batting an eye but all the twinkles were gone. “He’s proposed marriage to my daughter and she has accepted him.”

  “And so finally you made your move.”

  “Precisely. We’ve entered—shall we say?—preliminary negotiations. All of it, of course, without any knowledge on the part of Lori. We have a date for our final discussion tonight, after the ballet, at Miss Greco’s party.”

  I got rid of my cigarette. “Cobb, for a smart guy, this is one you ran right into the ground.”

  “I admit it, sorrowfully but gracefully.” His twinkles were back. “When I make a mistake, as the man said, it’s a beaut. It’s going to cost me but perhaps I deserve it. I made my move too late.” He looked about. “Come on,” he said, “they’re going in.”