All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [218]
I was going to be genteel rich, for I had inherited the fruits of the Judge’s crime, just as some day I would inherit from my mother the fruit of the Scholarly Attorney’s weakness, the money he had left with her when he learned the truth and just walked away. On the proceeds of the Judge’s old crime I would be able to go away and lead a nice, clean, blameless life in some place where you sit under a striped awning beside a marble-topped table and drink vermouth, cassis and soda and look out over the wimpling, dimpling, famous sunlit blue of the sea. But I didn’t go. True, since I had lost my fathers, I felt as though I could float effortless away like a balloon when the last cord is cut. But I would have to go on the money from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough a bond that held me there. To change the image, it was a long cable to an anchor, and the anchor flukes clung and bit way down there in the seaweed and ooze of a long time past. Perhaps I was a fool to feel that way about my little inheritance. Perhaps it was no different from any other inheritance anybody had. Perhaps the Emperor Vespasian was right when, jingling in his jeans the money which had been derived from a tax on urinals, he wittily remarked: “Pecunia non olet.”
I didn’t go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in my office or out at the University library and read books and monographs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work on: a tax bill. I knew so little of what was going on that it wasn’t until the arrangement was an accomplished fact that I knew anything about it.
I went up to the Mansion one night with my brief case full of notes and charts to have a session with the Boss. The Boss was not alone. Back there in the library with him were Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy, and, to my surprise, Gummy Larson. Sugar-Boy sat over in a corner, hunched in a chair and holding a glass between both hands, the way a child holds a glass. Out of the glass he would take little finicking sips, after each sip lifting his head up the way a chicken does when it drinks. Sugar-Boy wasn’t a drinker. He was afraid, he said, it might make him “n-n-n-n-ner-ner-vous.” It would have been awful if Sugar-Boy got so nervous he couldn’t bust jelly glasses every shot when you threw them up in the air for him or couldn’t wipe a mule’s nose with the rear fender of the black Cadillac. Duffy, of course, was a drinker, but he wasn’t drinking that night. He obviously was not in any mood for drinking, even if in fleeting glimpses one caught a glimmer of triumph mixed with the acute discomfort he was experiencing as he stood in the open space in front of the big leather couch. The discomfort was due, in part at least, to the fact that the Boss was, very definitely, drinking. For when the Boss really drank, what tender inhibitions ordinarily shackled up his tongue were absolutely removed. And now he was drinking all right. It looked like the first fine flush of a three-day blow and the barometer falling. He was cocked back on the leather couch with a pitcher of water, a bottle, and a bowl of ice on the floor beside his crumpled coat and empty shoes. When the Boss really got the works, he usually took off his shoes. He was sock-feet drunk now. The bottle was a long way down.
Mr. Larson stood back from the foot of the couch, a middle-sized, middle-aged, compact, gray-faced, gray-suited, unimaginative-looking man. He did not drink. He had once been a gambling-house operator and had found that it did not pay to drink. Gummy was strictly business and he didn’t do anything unless it paid.
As I entered and took in the layout, the Boss put his already red-rimmed gaze on me, but didn’t say a word until I approached the open space in front of the couch. Then he flung out an arm to indicate Tiny, who stood in the middle of that unprotected open space, with a wan smile on his tallow. “Look!