Chapter 2

It soon became obvious to all of us that Ray had indeed found his true calling in business. Over the course of the next year he and I bought and sold several more properties, all for more than decent profits. It was at the end of this first year that I began telling Ray that he should go out on his own since he was finding all the deals and doing most of the work. All I contributed was the purchase money, and he didn't really need me for that anymore. I even told him that I'd help him with the financing of deals for simple interest, but he'd have none of it.

"Jackie, you're lucky. Whatever you touch seems to turn out good. If you come in on a deal with me, I'm always sure it will turn out to be profitable. Besides, it's a balancing thing for me. I know that you're going to examine everything carefully, so I make sure that I have done all my homework and that the deal is as good and as tight as I can make it. If I just had to run it past myself, who knows how careful I'd be. This thing is working out real good for both of us, why change anything?" My father told me the same thing more or less, not that I was a lucky charm or anything, but that Ray had greater self-confidence when I was in things with him. Ray tried many times to teach me what he looked for in a property, that intangible something that made one investment stand out over another. I caught on a little bit, but I never approached Ray's expertise in the field. He had an eye for values, and seemed to know exactly where the path of progress was heading.

One day in March of 1972, my father, Ray and I were driving over to look at a small farm outside of Norwich that had come onto the market. Ray had heard about it from one of his lady real estate friends. My father came with us just to give him something to do outside the house. He was apparently on the outs with my mother for something or other, and thought that getting out with "his boys" would soften my mother's heart again towards him. We visited the farm and took the whole tour from the listing agent. None of us were impressed with the deal being offered, so we decided to pass on it and started back towards home. We were all hungry so we decided to stop in at this little diner on the way back and get a bite to eat. It wasn't much of a diner, and the food was only just passable. What the diner did have though was two sexy waitresses that turned out to be the owner's daughters. The owner turned out to be a long lost 'special friend' of my father's.

We were all digging into the homemade Irish stew that our waitress had recommended to us. It wasn't very tasty, the meat being chewy and obviously something of a lesser cut. My father thought it might have been horse meat. The bread was homemade, and not bad at all with the thick slabs of butter that we all favored on it. They didn't serve any beer or alcohol, so we were all drinking cream sodas. Ray was flirting with our waitress rather shamelessly, and she seemed to be enjoying it too. Her name was Janet, and she was probably about twenty two years old. It might have all ended right there with us paying for our meal and leaving, if Lois Manning hadn't picked that time to come walking in the front door of the diner. My father almost spit out the food he was chewing on as soon as he saw her and recognized who it was.

"Spud, is it really you? I can't believe it, it really is!"

"Johnny, you big handsome bastard, how'd you ever find me again?" In half the time it takes to tell it, he was standing up, and she was pressing herself all over him. She was about forty five years old and had dark brown hair. She might have been a looker at one time, but that time had definitely passed by. She looked like a bar fly to me, one of those women who hang around bars during the daytime, waiting for some poor bastard to get drunk enough to start thinking they looked good to them. They were touching each other all over their faces and arms, I thought they were like a couple carnival hustlers trying to guess each others weight or something.

"Jackie, Ray, this is Spud Kennedy, an old friend from before the Korean War. Her brother and I flew back home together in 1952. Spud, how is Frankie? He still stringing wire for the phone company? Spud these are my two sons. They've grown a bit since the last time you saw them."

"John nobody calls me Spud anymore, not for years. And it isn't Kennedy either, not since I married Frenchy Manning when Janet and Cindy were still little girls. Hi boys, you don't remember me, I'm Lois. I've known your father since the two of you were in short pants. Janet, go get Cindy there's someone I want you to meet. John, Frankie's in a wheel chair. He took a real bad fall off a pole when his safety belt broke about eight years ago. I figured that you'd heard about it. He lost the use of both his legs. He'll be so tickled to see you again. Maybe the two of you can go out and really tie one on like you used to do in the old days."

Just as she finally wound down from her non stop talking, Janet got back with her sister, Cindy in tow. I can't say that Cindy was pretty or even that she was well built. She radiated sexual energy though. She could literally cause a guy to get an erection just by being in the same room with him. At least, that's the effect she had on me. That night, when we were finally driving back home, after visiting with my father's friend, Frank Kennedy, my father told me that Lois had had that ability too in her younger days.

"The minute I laid my eyes on her Yutch, I knew I was going to do whatever it took to get her into bed with me. I didn't even care about what it might take to get her. Frankie was a damn good friend of mine, and I was a married man with four kids myself. None of that mattered, and believe me when I tell you that it caused me a ton of problems with your mother. In fact, you make damn sure you never mention that woman's name in front of your mother. I'm not sure that she's gotten over any of that yet. Jesus, that woman could make a man forget himself. I'm pretty damn happy to see that she's lost whatever ability she once had to drive a man to rash behavior. I'd like to get my hands on her little girl though, that Cindy. I wonder what happened to that Janet, she sure doesn't have it like her sister does."