Read Online Fridays at Enrico's by Don Carpenter - Free Book Online Page A

minds.”
    â€œYes,” said Charlie. It was too late to kill him.
    Wilner stood up abruptly. “Well, time to go,” he said. The oral lasted forty minutes, from the time he walked into the tiny office where Clark and West stood grinning and shook his hand until the point when he walked out of the room, his knees weak, his stomach tense, his buttocks still clenched. He had no idea how he had done. He leaned against the wall and waited for Wilner to come out. He’d chosen to speak on Moby Dick , even though he had been warned that Moby Dick was a very demanding subject, and perhaps larger than he needed. But he loved the book and knew it better than any other, and so he opened his mouth and started blathering, word tumbling after word, no sense being made, until he didn’t have any words left in him and shut up.
    Wilner came out and silently they walked down the long empty corridor toward Wilner’s office. At the door he turned and shook Charlie’s hand.
    â€œCall me Herb,” he said. He had a nice strong handshake. Charlie was a Master of the Arts. All but for the formality of his last final, four days away. And then the application to Iowa.
    â€œHoney bear,” he said to Jaime over the phone. “I gotta get out of town. Let’s drive up to the mountains, just overnight or so, get some air, do a little gambling, get drunk, have fun, and then come back for our finals.”
    â€œYou’re the boss,” she said. Charlie had to laugh.

12.
    The Portland group formed itself around Dick Dubonet, after he sold a short story to Playboy for three thousand dollars. Playboy usually paid fifteen hundred for a story, but, Dick discovered, if they wanted to run your story in the front of the magazine they paid double. Dick’s rent was thirty dollars a month and he spent about the same for food. Utilities ran about four dollars, telephone another four. By far his largest monthly outlays were for his car, beer, and cigarettes, with an occasional wildcat expenditure for coffee at the Caffe Espresso. Dick was a bachelor and needed these apparently needless expenses in order to catch girls. Since he was not willing to really spend money on them.
    He was in fact in bed with a girl when his agent called to tell him the news. A beautiful creature he’d met at a tavern near the college. She’d come home with him because he already had a reputation as one of the few successful writers in Portland, or in the whole state of Oregon, so far as he knew. He had been publishing short stories for two years, in magazines like Nugget , Caper , and Fantasy & Science Fiction . At twenty-five he had sold his first story for eighty dollars to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , about a writer who gets revenge on editors by poisoning the flap glue on his return envelopes. Which were of course returned to him, leaving no evidence. It was a cute little story, and the editor wrote him a nice letter as well as the eighty-dollar check. A few months later the editor, Robert P. Mills, wrote to Dick that he was resigning to become an independent agent. Would Dick like to be his firstclient? Getting an agent was half the battle. Since then Bob Mills had been selling a story a month for Dick, and his career was launched.
    â€œWho was that?” the girl asked. She looked at him slyly from under his covers. He didn’t mind her looking at him naked except for jockey shorts. He had a good although small and wiry body, and a pretty good tan. His skin was dark to begin with, his eyes almost black, his hair curly and dark. He knew he was good-looking but it didn’t make him conceited.
    â€œJust business,” he said coolly. He tried to remember her name. He thought about getting back into the warm bed and making love to her again. They’d done it twice during the night. This would make it three times, just about the minimum if he wanted her to think of him as a lover. Did he? She was cute, but