“I know, I know!” Jack yelled. “What are you, Miss Percentage today? So what are we supposed to do?”

Candy answered, “What we really need is for Miss Paget to come forward and publicly admit that she lied.”

“Maybe you want to bring her on the show,” Jack said.

“If that’s what it takes,” Candy said, then added, “dear.”

Jack Landis stared down at the Alamo. Christ, he thought, I know how those poor bastards must have felt. And what if it ain’t Hathaway who has Polly? What if it’s the Justice Department? Or worse, “60 Minutes.” Goddamn, that ancient capon Mike Wallace would just love to spend a few of those sixty minutes with Polly Paget.

And so would I, Jack thought. Speaking of low dogs, so would I.

He missed going to bed with Polly. Polly was wild in bed, just wild. She would do things… just do things without thought or calculation that just made him crazy. That red hair whipping around, and those crazy green eyes sparkling…

Not like Canned-Ice, who tried hard, Lord knows. But that was just it. Everything Candy ever did in the bedroom, you thought she read in some magazine or book or something. You could almost hear her thinking about “technique.” She brought all the spontaneity of a metronome into the bedroom.

Candice Hermione Landis looked at her husband and knew what he was thinking.

Jackson Hood Landis had grown up in poverty in East Texas and was scared to death of going back to either one. Candice herself had grown up in middle-class Beaumont, where her minister father made just enough money to send her to SMU before he died of a heart attack. Her mama thought that she was definitely marrying down when Candice took the vows with a salesman like Jack Landis, but Candice loved him, so that was that.

She and Jack saved and worked hard and bought a little restaurant in San Antonio, then another, and then another, and then Jackson heard the magic word: franchise. It didn’t seem like it was very long at all before there were Jack’s Family Diners (“A Lot of Good Food for a Little of Your Money”) all over the country, and suddenly Jack and Candice were rich-very rich, oil money-rich, so rich that they didn’t know what to do with the money.