Free The Demolishers by Donald Hamilton Page A

doesn’t seem quite fair to my mother’s family; that half of me is quite respectable. But they act as if my disreputable daddy managed to produce me all by himself. To them, I’m all nasty Varek. Untouchable.” She grimaced. “Oh, well, I guess it’s good for the character to learn what it’s like being a despised minority, or is it?” After a while, as the car slowed, she said, “Here we are, the entrance to the old ancestral mansion.”
    I looked at the tall gates and whistled. “Not bad for a despised minority.”
    “It was built by my maternal grandpa, Homer Ganson, back in the gaudy old days when the Palm Beach ricos were all trying to outglamour each other .... As you can see, we’ve got security coming out our ears. Don’t try to pet these dogs; they hunt people, not ducks.”
    The ornate old iron gates had been wired for electricity; they opened without anybody pushing at them. There was a gatehouse with a guard, presumably the man who’d pressed the button to let us in. Another husky gent stood by with a Doberman pinscher on a short, quick-release lead. The dog was lean and glossy and handsome, brown on black, a good specimen of its breed. It watched us pass but expressed no opinion; it hadn’t been told to hate us, yet.
    We drove on into the grounds. The drive wound its way through a jungle of flowering trees and blooming shrubs; it was hard for me to remember that this was autumn and the duck season was already open in Texas.
    I noted that the planting wasn’t quite as dense as it looked; there were clever little camouflaged paths to let the guards and dogs slip up on any intruder who breached the perimeter defenses. Then we broke out into the open to see a wide green lawn, a monstrous house, and the Atlantic Ocean.
    “Not much protection from seaward,” I said.
    “More than meets the eye. You wouldn’t want to land a boat down there unless you were invited,” Sandra said. “What do you think of our little beach shack?”
    “You didn’t need a wedding cake. All you had to do was cut a slice of that.”
    “Isn’t it awful?” she said. “But I’ve become very fond of it lately, after all my years of sneering at it. It’s got character, unlike the glass boxes people are putting up nowadays .... There’s Daddy now, and my current stepmother. Number Four, I think, but I could have missed one or two over the years. You’ll have to admit he picks them decorative.”
    The car made a wide sweep, following the paved drive bordered by flowerbeds. It pulled up before the couple waiting in front of the house. The woman was spectacular, dark and slender and moderately tall; but I put off further appraisal for the moment. The man was my immediate concern. He was no taller than the woman: a blocky, middle-aged gent with a deeply tanned face and a head full of white, wiry, tightly curling hair that looked strangely innocent as a frame for his heavy features. I mean, it’s hard to accept a racketeer and drug smuggler, even retired, with sweet, white, curly locks. He stepped forward to greet his daughter as the driver opened the door to let her out. There was no kissing or hugging. They faced each other like ancient enemies.
    “Are you okay, Sis?”
    “Thanks to Mr. Helm I am,” Sandra said.
    “Well, you don’t look it. Go wash your face and put on a clean dress.”
    The girl’s voice was sharp. “If you don’t like the way I look, don’t look at me. All I need is a couple of Band-Aids and a stiff drink. I think my father-in-law, here, might also accept a drink if you asked him nicely. . . . Daddy, Mr. Helm. Mr. Helm, Daddy.”
    Alexander Varek hesitated, and decided not to lose his temper. There was a hint of challenge in the way he held out his hand to me. I suppose he’d met occasional moral citizens who’d refused to shake the dirty hand of the notorious Sonny Varek; and I was a government employee from whom such corny signs of disapproval could be expected. To hell with him. Going