Tail Spin

the counter. “No, Rachael, you stay put. My head feels fine, so does my leg. I make good coffee. It’s so good some say it’s a gift.”
    She laughed. “Okay, Quincy. He’s a clotheshorse, spends a couple months a year in Milan having new threads made for himself while he struts in and out of La Scala. He’s divorced, three times now, and from a snide comment Laurel made once, I gather his alimony payments could feed a small country for a week. He’s as self-centered and arrogant as Laurel, and wears a ridiculous toupee, like Donald Trump’s. One night it nearly slid onto his steak and mushrooms, and no one said a word.”
    “Old man Abbott wanted Laurel to run the empire. So Quincy’s notas smart as she is?”
    Rachael thought about that. “It’s not brains, really. They’re both smart, but he doesn’t have the force of will, the personality for it. He does what she tells him to do. With Quincy, I think he’d have trouble finding the jugular vein, whereas Laurel was born sucking blood from it.”
    Jack said, “So Quincy can do the war dance, but he can’t take the scalp?”
    “That’s it. Another thing: he’s extraordinarily sexist, and since being outsharked by his sister, Jimmy said he’d gotten more vicious toward women. I heard him say to Jimmy once that a woman is at her best on her knees with her mouth well occupied.”
    “Whoa,” Jack said.
    Gillette said, “Tell us more about Laurel.”
    “She knows where all the skeletons are buried, knows which buttons to push. She’s the real deal when it comes to getting what she wants. She’s a closer, no scruples at all. All of that’s according to Jimmy, of course.”
    Gillette said, “Doesn’t sound like there’s much affection there.”
    “No, there isn’t. I asked Jimmy about that, all the sniping beneath the civility, all the public pretense, and he said it had been like that for so long he couldn’t remember if it had ever been any different.”
    Gillette continued. “I read the other day in the Wall Street Journal that Abbott Enterprises, both international and domestic, has increased in wealth, prestige, and influence under her leadership.”
    “So Jimmy told me,” Rachael said. “You can bet that burns Quincy to his heels.” She sighed, ate a cracker, then twisted the bag closed. “Proof. Where am I going to find proof?”
    “We will,” Jack said with no hesitation at all.
    She gave him a grin. “Do you know Uncle Gillette’s a computer hound, maybe even as good as Agent Savich? You told me he was amazing, Jack.”
    Gillette did a double take. “Agent Savich? You mean FBI Special Agent Dillon Savich?”
    Jack nodded.
    “I’ve read about him, read several of the protocols he developed for the FBI. He adapted that facial recognition program from Scotland Yard. I’d really like to see it in action.”
    Jack laughed. “Do you happen to have a name for your computer, Gillette?”
    “A name? No, I hadn’t considered that. Hey, I’ve got three computers.”
    “It’s a question to ponder,” Jack said. “Savich has only the one laptop—MAX or MAXINE—it’s transgender, changes sex every six months or so.”
    Gillette laughed so hard he spilled coffee onto the floor. And what a floor it was, Jack thought, nicer than his, and that burned him since he’d selected the Italian tiles and laid them himself. He looked down at the various shades of gray with lines of milky white snaking through the marble squares.
    “I wonder why I never read anything about MAX,” Gillette said, hiccupped once, then leaned down to wipe the coffee off the floor. “Or MAXINE.”
    “I’ll have to see if I can get you and Savich together, at least in cyberspace. Your home is incredible. I was thinking maybe it’s about the right time to do some more work on mine.”
    “You already own a house? At your tender age?”
    “I’m not all that young,” Jack said, “nearly thirty-two.”
    “That’s thirty-one,” Gillette said. “That’s young.”
    “Young enough,” Rachael said as she blew on the coffee that Uncle Gillette had just poured in the big stone mug with her name on it. “You’ve only got thirty-six months on me.”
    “Thirty-six months and lots of years,” Jack said.
    Rachael sneered at him. “Oh yeah? You ever spend any quality time at the bottom of a lake with only a block of concrete for company?”
    “Okay, I spoke too fast, but you’ve got to admit, that little phrase sounded profound.”
    She couldn’t