Highbinders Read Free

went to the door.
    Myron Greene stood there for a moment, eyeing me with the same faint disapproval that he probably eyed all grown men who answer their doors at four in the afternoon dressed only in terry-cloth bathrobe and denim apron.
    “Jesus Christ,” he said.
    “Not bad; how are you?”
    He came in and looked around the way that he always did, as though expecting to find a badly mismanaged seraglio. While he looked, I took the opportunity to examine what a bright New York attorney, who had just become a millionaire at thirty-eight, might wear on a nice warm May day.
    If he had been born about a century and a half earlier, Myron Greene probably would have been a disciple of Beau Brummell, a slightly plump disciple perhaps, but nevertheless a devoted one. As it was, he contented himself with dressing about six months behind the latest cry which, on that particular May afternoon, happened to be a half-hearted revival of the zoot suits of the wartime forties.
    Myron Greene was wearing a modified version of one, a powder blue number with a jacket that draped almost to his knees. High-waisted britches went halfway up his chest and were held there by two-inch-wide midnight blue suspenders. His brown, graying hair, still modishly long, glistened with what I suspected of being a pound or two of Vaseline.
    “My, you’re pretty,” I said.
    “Like it?” he said in a half-serious, half-hopeful tone.
    “What happened to the key chain?” I said. “You know, those three- or four-foot-long jobs that they used to wear?”
    Myron Greene glanced down. “I thought it might be just a bit much.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “Well, congratulations anyhow.”
    “On what?”
    “On the Centennial Group. I heard that it hit one twenty-one at two o’clock yesterday afternoon so that makes you a millionaire, if you exercised your options which, knowing you, you sure as hell did.”
    Myron Greene shrugged at my news about the stock of the conglomerate that he had helped put together nearly six months ago. “It’s all on paper,” he said.
    “Well, it must be fun to tot up the figures anyway.”
    He shrugged again, his eyes still wandering around the apartment. “That’s new,” he said, indicating the butcher block that stood before the Pullman kitchen.
    “Actually, it’s a hundred and nineteen years old.”
    “Where’d you get it?”
    “Brooklyn.”
    “How much?”
    “Fifty bucks—and another fifty to get it hauled up here.”
    “It’s still a good investment.”
    “Jesus, Myron, I didn’t buy it as an investment.”
    “Maybe you should’ve.”
    “Let’s have a drink first.”
    “First before what?”
    “Before the bad news that dragged you out of your office at four o’clock on the afternoon that you became a millionaire.”
    Myron Greene looked at his watch. “I’m thirty-eight.”
    “Is that what your watch says?”
    Myron Greene sighed and sat down in one of the chairs around the hexagonal poker table. “If it had happened when I was twenty-eight, it might have meant something. I don’t know what though.”
    “Here,” I said, setting a Scotch and water down in front of him. “It’s got the meaning of life in it.”
    Myron Greene took a swallow of the drink and then looked slowly around the room. “At least you’ve lived,” he said.
    It was really the reason that I was Myron Greene’s client. He was convinced that I led a spicy existence peopled with long-legged blondes, likeable adventurers, and fairly honest crooks and thieves, all of whom had hearts of gold. I was, in Myron Greene’s eyes, a tear-around with an enviable life-style designed almost exclusively for fun and frolic, but highlighted here and there with the occasional thrill of mild danger.
    In reality, I was turning into a recluse who spent too much time alone in museums, galleries, motion pictures, and at any parade that happened to come along. I also drank too much in bars in the company of minor thieves, con men, prospering cops,