Vital Parts Read Free Page B

preseason special, virtually a giveaway, a “loss leader” with which to lure customers to blow their wads on other items. Reinhart was painfully familiar with this tactic, having once given it a fling at a gas station he owned.
    A husky clerk, good-natured mesomorphic type with melon-dumped biceps, toted a color-TV set from a nearby appliance shop to the purchaser’s station wagon, capacious as a city bus of yore. Farther along, another store enjoyed a run on air-conditioners, stereo hi-fi’s, bathing suits, and whole salamis, to judge from the huge signs which obscured their show windows and the overburdened clients who staggered out the self-opening doors.
    Sweet said cryptically: “He’ll be here in a minute.” He nodded his head generally at the mass of consumers and their goods. “Look at that, Carl. That’s money in motion, where we used to play cowboys and Indians.” Sweet replaced his glasses with sun lenses in the same type of frame. A slight balding could be taken, on the other hand, as a high, powerful forehead; each temple wore a splash of gray.
    A young mother, plodding along in self-righteous oblivion with two grocery bags and two small children, the type who invariably plowed Reinhart down, yet respectfully circumvented Sweet, dropping a few oranges in the shift of line. Reinhart retrieved them, and the woman thanked Sweet, who had not even noticed the incident.
    Reinhart panted from the effort of bending, and momentarily he seemed to be looking through the dark portion of a photographic negative.
    Sweet asked impatiently: “Is there a helicopter service out here?”
    â€œI don’t think so,” Reinhart said. “That is just a little private airport.”
    Sweet clapped Reinhart’s shoulder. “Call ’em up for me, will you? Somebody should have a chopper he can send over here. I must get to New York without delay.”
    Reinhart might have acted on the request, even braving Gino’s again, for the thrilling extravagance of it, the whirlybird clattering down on the blacktop like a deus ex machina to carry off his friend to a financial Olympus, while he, the faithful retainer, stood earthbound in a storm of flying candy wrappers and supermarket checkout slips.
    Instead, a silver-gray limousine, with deep maroon fenders, chose that moment to glide through the vulgarity and stop silently before them.
    â€œGood God,” Reinhart blurted. His snobbish anticipation had been tuned too low, to Caddie or Continental or Imperial. “Is that a Rolls?”
    â€œBentley,” Sweet answered curtly while stiff-arming Reinhart’s attempt to open the door for him. The reason for this appeared when the uniformed chauffeur, an elderly man who was none too spry, came anxiously around the trunk to furnish the service.
    In the air-cooled back seat Sweet explained: “You can’t get a young man or Negro to drive for you nowadays. And just as well. Allison is too old to run around in the car while I’m away, and he doesn’t try to drag at lights.”
    His buttocks deep in luxury, smelling the bouquet of glove leather, Reinhart sought to compensate for the instinctive slavishness with which he had grasped the door handle. “Yes,” said he, “you can’t get any kind of personal service these days. Everybody thinks he’s too good for it—any kind of punk or moron.”
    â€œThat’s all right,” Sweet said forcefully. “I don’t knock it when I think it’s the same state of affairs in which I have prospered. You have to be elastic. You can’t get a kid to cut your lawn, so you buy a power mower and do the job yourself. OK, take that one step further: you retail mowers in a seller’s market. Everybody needs one.”
    â€œI see,” said Reinhart.
    â€œJust one example,” said Sweet. There was a glass partition between them and the chauffeur, and below that a polished