He watched her light the cigarette, her deceptively aristocratic face bathed in the dim red glow of the lighter. She caught him staring, raised her slender eyebrows in a look of sexual challenge and promise. Jeff looked away, out at the lights of Miami across the still, clear water.
Sharla spent the next morning shopping on Lincoln Road, and Jeff was waiting for her in the suite at the Doral when she returned. She set her packages in the foyer, moved immediately to the nearest mirror to freshen her makeup. Her short white sundress set off her glorious tan, and her high-heeled sandals made her bare brown legs look even longer and slimmer than they were. Jeff ran his thumbs along the sharp edges of the thick brown envelope in his hand, and he came very close to changing his mind.
"What are you doing inside?" she asked, reaching back to unzip the breezy cotton dress. "Let’s get into our suits, grab some sun."
Jeff shook his head, motioned for her to sit in the chair across from him. She frowned, pulled the zipper closed over her tawny back, and sat where he indicated.
"What’s with you?" she asked. "Why the strange mood?"
He started to speak, but had decided hours ago that words would be inappropriate. They’d never really talked anyway, about anything; verbal communication had little to do with what passed between them. He handed her the envelope.
Sharla pursed her lips as she took it, tore it open. She stared at the six neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills for several moments. "How much?" she finally asked, in a calm, controlled voice.
"Two hundred thousand."
She peered back inside the envelope, extracted the single Panagra Airlines first-class ticket to Rio. "This is for tomorrow morning," she said, inspecting it. "What about my things in New York?"
"I’ll send them wherever you like."
She nodded. "I’ll need to buy some more things here, before I leave."
"Whatever you want. Charge it to the room."
Sharla nodded again, put the money and the ticket back in the envelope, which she set on the table beside her. She stood up, undid the dress, and let it fall to the floor around her feet.
"What the hell," she said, unhooking her bra, "for two hundred thousand you deserve one last go."
Jeff went back to New York alone, back to his investments.
Skirts, he knew, would be getting shorter for the next few years, creating an enormous demand for patterned stockings and panty hose. Jeff bought thirty thousand shares of Hanes. All those exposed thighs had to lead somewhere; he bought heavily in the pharmaceutical houses that manufactured birth-control pills.
Eighteen months after they’d moved into the Seagram Building, Future, Inc.'s holdings had risen to a paper value of thirty-seven million dollars. Jeff repaid Frank in full, and sent a long personal letter with the final check. He never received a reply.
Not everything worked exactly as Jeff planned, of course. He wanted to acquire a major portion of Comsat when it went public, but the stock was so wildly popular that the issue was limited to fifty shares per buyer. IBM, surprisingly, remained stagnant all the way through 1965, though it took off again the following year. Fast-food chains—Jeff chose Denny’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and McDonald’s—went through a big slump in 1967, before skyrocketing up an average five hundred percent one year later.
By 1968 his company’s assets were into the hundreds of millions, and he had approved an I. M. Pei design for a sixty-story corporate-headquarters building at Park and Fifty-third. Jeff also mandated the purchase of extensive parcels of land in choice commercial and residential areas of Houston, Denver, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The company bought close to half of the undeveloped property in L.A.'s new Century City project, at a price of five dollars per square foot. For his personal use, Jeff bought a three-hundred-acre estate in Dutchess County, two hours up the Hudson from Manhattan.
He went out with a variety of women, slept with some of them, hated the whole meaningless process. Drinks, dinners, plays and concerts and gallery openings … He grew to despise the rigid formality of dating, missed the easy familiarity of simply being with someone, sharing friendly silences and unforced laughter. Besides, most of the women he met were either too openly interested in his wealth or too studiedly blasé about it. Some even hated him for it, refused to go out with him because of it; immense personal fortunes were anathema to many young people in the late sixties, and on more than one occasion Jeff was made to feel directly responsible for all the world’s ills, from starvation in the inner cities to the manufacture of napalm.
He bided his time, focused his energies on work. June was coming, he reminded himself constantly. June 1968; that was when everything would change.
The twenty-fourth of June, to be precise.
Robert Kennedy was not quite three weeks dead, and Cassius Clay, now stripped of his title and reborn as Muhammad Ali, was appealing his conviction for draft evasion. In Vietnam the rockets from the north had been striking Saigon since early spring.
It had been midafternoon, Jeff recalled, on a Monday. He’d been working nights and weekends at a Top 40 station in West Palm Beach, playing the Beatles and the Stones and Aretha Franklin and learning the essentials of broadcast journalism on his own time, selling his interviews and stories to the station and occasionally to UPI audio on a per-piece basis. He remembered the date because it was the beginning of his Monday/Tuesday "weekend," and when he returned to work that Wednesday he’d somehow managed to arrange the first big interview of his career, a long and candid telephone conversation with retiring U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. He still didn’t know why Warren had consented to talk to him, a noncredentialed novice reporter from a small-time radio station in Florida; but somehow he’d managed to pull it off, and the great man’s pithy ruminations on his controversial tenure had been picked up by NBC for a healthy sum. Within a month, Jeff had been doing news full time at WIOD in Miami. He was off and running; his entire adult life, such as it had been, could be traced back to that summer week.
There’d been no reason for him to choose Boca Raton; no reason not to. Some Mondays he’d drive north, to Juno Beach; on others he might head down to Delray Beach or Lighthouse Point, any of a hundred interconnected strips of sand and civilization that lined the Atlantic coast from Melbourne to South Miami Beach. But on June twenty-fourth, 1968, he’d taken a blanket and a towel and a cooler full of beer to the beach off Boca Raton, and now here he was again in that same place on that same sunny day.
And there she was, lying on her back in a yellow crocheted bikini, her head propped on an inflatable beach pillow, reading a hardcover copy of Airport. Jeff stopped ten feet away and stood looking at her youthful body, the lemony streaks in her thick brown hair. The sand was hot against his feet; the surf echoed the pounding in his brain. For a moment he almost turned and walked away, but he didn’t.