The Myron Bolitar Series 7-Book Bundle: Deal Breaker, Drop Shot, Fade Away, Back Spin, One False Move, The Final Detail, Darkest Fear
Author: Harlan Coben
Date: 2013-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Fiction
Description: Hotheaded, tenderhearted sports agent Myron Bolitar is no rookie in the world of suspense fiction. The complex, fascinating brainchild of Edgar Award–winning storyteller Harlan Coben, Bolitar has faced off against ruthlessly competitive superstars, desperate gamblers and groupies, and, on more than one occasion, even the mob. Now the first seven novels of Harlan Coben’s acclaimed series are teamed up in this convenient eBook bundle, including: DEAL BREAKERDROP SHOTFADE AWAYBACK SPINONE FALSE MOVETHE FINAL DETAILDARKEST FEAR Praise for Harlan Coben and his Myron Bolitar novels “The modern maste
Publisher: Dell
Rights: Copyright © 2013 by Harlan Coben

Deal Breaker, Drop Shot, Fade Away, Back Spin, One False Move, The Final Detail, and Darkest Fear are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Bantam Dell eBook Edition

Deal Breaker copyright © 1995 by Harlan Coben
Drop Shot copyright © 1996 by Harlan Coben
Fade Away copyright © 1996 by Harlan Coben
Back Spin copyright © 1997 by Harlan Coben
One False Move copyright © 1998 by Harlan Coben
The Final Detail copyright © 1999 by Harlan Coben
Darkest Fear copyright © 2000 by Harlan Coben

All Rights Reserved.

Published in the United States by Dell, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Dell and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1995, 1996, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-54455-1
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Deal Breaker
Drop Shot
Fade Away
Back Spin
One False Move
The Final Detail
Darkest Fear

Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.

Copyright © 1995 by Harlan Coben

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

The trademark Dell® is registered in the U S Patent and Trademark Office.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48363-8

v3.0_r1

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Deal Breaker

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Dedication

Chapter 1

Otto Burke, the Wizard of Schmooze, raised his game another level.

“Come on, Myron,” he urged with neoreligious fervor. “I’m sure we can come to an understanding here. You give a little. We give a little. The Titans are a team. In some larger sense I would like all of us to be a team. You included. Let’s be a real team, Myron. What do you say?”

Myron Bolitar steepled his fingers. He had read somewhere that steepled fingers made you look like a thoughtful person. He felt foolish.

“I’d like nothing more, Otto,” he said, returning the pointless volley for the umpteenth time. “Really I would. But we’ve given as much as we can. It’s your turn now.”

Otto nodded vigorously, as if he had just heard some philosophical whimsy that put Socrates to shame. He tilted his head, angling the painted-on smile toward his team’s general manager. “Larry, what do you think?”

Taking his cue, Larry Hanson pounded the conference table with a fist hairy enough to be a gerbil. “Bolitar can go to hell!” he shouted, playing enraged to the hilt. “You hear me, Bolitar? You understand what I’m telling you? Go to hell.”

“Go to hell,” Myron repeated with a nod. “Got it.”

“You being a wiseass with me? Huh? Answer me, dammit! You being a wiseass?”

Myron looked at him. “You have a poppy seed stuck in your teeth.”

“Goddamn wiseass.”

“And you’re beautiful when you’re angry. Your whole face lights up.”

Larry Hanson’s eyes widened. He swung his line of vision toward his boss, then back to Myron. “You’re out of your league here, Bolitar. And you fucking know it.”

Myron said nothing. The truth of the matter was, Larry Hanson was partially right. Myron was out of his league. He had been in sports representation for only two years now. Most of his clients were borderline cases—guys who were lucky to make the cut and grabbed the league’s minimum. And football was far from his specialty. He had only three NFL players, only one of whom was a starter. Now Myron sat across from thirty-one-year-old wunderkind Otto Burke, the youngest owner in the NFL, and Larry Hanson, former-football-legend-turned-exec, negotiating a contract that even in his inexperienced hands would be the biggest rookie contract in NFL history.

Yes, he—Myron Bolitar—had landed Christian “Hot Prop” Steele. Two-time Heisman trophy—winning quarterback. Three straight AP and UPI number-one rankings. All-American four years in a row. If that wasn’t enough, the kid was an endorsement wet dream. An A student, good-looking, articulate, polite, and white (hey, it mattered).

Best of all, he was Myron’s.

“The offer is on the table, gentlemen,” Myron continued. “We think it’s more than fair.”

Otto Burke shook his head.

“It’s a load of crap!” Larry Hanson shouted. “You’re a goddamn idiot, Bolitar. You’re going to flush this kid’s career down the toilet.”

Myron spread his arms. “How about a group hug?”

Larry was about to offer up another expletive, but Otto stopped him with a raised hand. In Larry’s playing days Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke couldn’t stop him with body blows. Now this one-hundred-fifty-pound Harvard grad could silence him with but a wave.

Otto Burke leaned forward. He hadn’t stopped smiling, hadn’t stopped the hand gestures, hadn’t stopped the eye contact—like an Anthony Robbins Personal Power infomercial come to life. Disconcerting as all hell. Otto was a small, fragile-looking man with the tiniest fingers Myron had ever seen. His hair was dark and heavy-metal long, flowing to his shoulders. He was baby-faced with a silly goatee that looked as if it’d been sketched on in pencil. He smoked a very long cigarette, or maybe it just appeared long against his tiny fingers.

“Now, Myron,” Otto said, “let’s speak rationally here, okay?”

“Rationally. Let’s.”

“Great, Myron, that’ll be helpful. The truth is, Christian Steele is an unknown, untested quantity. He hasn’t even put on a pro uniform yet. He may be the bust of the century.”

Larry snorted. “You should know something about that, Bolitar—about players who amount to nothing. Who crap out.”

Myron ignored him. He had heard the insult before. It no longer bothered him. Sticks and stones and all that. “We are talking about perhaps the greatest quarterback prospect in history,” he replied steadily. “You made three trades and gave up six players to get his rights. You didn’t do all that if you didn’t believe he has what it takes.”

“But this proposal”—Otto stopped, looked up as though searching the ceiling tiles for the right word—“it’s not sound.”

“Crap is more like it,” Larry added.

“It’s final,” Myron said.

Otto shook his head, the smile unfazed. “Let’s talk this through, okay? Let’s look at it from every conceivable angle. “You’re new at this, Myron—an ex-jock reaching for the executive brass ring. I respect that. You’re a young guy trying to give it a go. Heck, I admire that. Really.”

Myron bit down. He could have pointed out that he and Otto were the same age, but he so loved being patronized. Didn’t everybody?

“If you make a mistake on this,” Otto continued, “it could be the sort of thing that destroys your career. Do you know what I mean? Plenty of people already feel that you’re not up to this—to handling such a high-profile client. Not me, of course. I think you’re a very bright guy. Shrewd. But the way you’re acting …” He shook his head like a teacher disenchanted with a favorite pupil.

Larry stood, glowering down at Myron. “Why don’t you give the kid some good advice?” he said. “Tell him to get a real agent.”

Myron had expected this whole good-cop, bad-cop routine. He had, in fact, expected worse; Larry Hanson had not yet attacked the sexual appetites of anyone’s mother. Still, Myron preferred the bad cop to the good cop. Larry Hanson was a frontal assault, easily spotted and handled. Otto Burke was the snake-infested high grass with buried land mines.

“Then I guess we have nothing more to discuss,” Myron said.

“I believe a holdout would be unwise, Myron,” Otto said. “It might soil Christian’s squeaky-clean image. Hurt his endorsements. Cost you both a great deal of money. You don’t want to lose money, Myron.”

Myron looked at him. “I don’t?”

“No, you don’t.”

“Can I jot that down?” He picked up a pencil and began scribbling. “Don’t … want … to … lose … money.” He grinned at both men. “Am I picking up pointers today or what?”

Larry mumbled, “Goddamn wiseass.”

Otto’s smile remained locked on autopilot. “If I may be so bold,” he continued, “I would think Christian would want to collect quickly.”

“Oh?”

“There are those who have serious reservations about Christian Steele’s future. There are those”—Otto drew deeply on his cigarette—“who believe he may have had something to do with that girl’s disappearance.”

“Ah,” Myron said, “that’s more like it.”

“More like what?”

“You’re starting to fling mud. For a second there I thought I wasn’t asking for enough.”

Larry Hanson stuck a thumb in Myron’s direction. “Do you believe this fucking sliver of pond film we’re sitting with? You raise a legitimate issue about Christian’s ex-bimbo, one that goes to the heart of his value as a public relations commodity—”

“Pitiful rumors,” Myron interrupted. “No one believed them. If anything, they made the public more sympathetic to Christian’s tragedy. And don’t call Kathy Culver a bimbo.”

Larry raised an eyebrow. “Well, well, aren’t we touchy,” he said, “for a low-life pissant.”

Myron’s expression did not change. He had met Kathy Culver five years ago when she was a sophomore in high school, already a budding beauty. Like her sister Jessica. Eighteen months ago Kathy had mysteriously vanished from the campus of Reston University. To this day no one knew where she was or what had happened to her. The story had all the media’s favorite tasty morsels—a gorgeous co-ed, the fiancée of football star Christian Steele, the sister of novelist Jessica Culver, a strong hint of sexual assault for extra seasoning. The press could not help themselves. They attacked like ravenous relatives around a buffet table.

But just recently a second tragedy had befallen the Culver family. Adam Culver, Kathy’s father, had been murdered three nights earlier in what police were calling a “botched robbery.” Myron wanted very much to contact the family, to do more than merely offer simple condolences, but he had decided to stay away, not knowing if he was welcome, fairly certain he wasn’t.

“Now if—”

There was a knock on the door. It opened a crack, and Esperanza stuck her head in. “Call for you, Myron,” she said.

“Take a message.”

“I think you’ll want to take it.”

Esperanza stayed in the doorway. Her dark eyes gave away nothing, but he understood.

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

She slipped back through the door.

Larry Hanson gave an appreciative whistle. “She’s a babe, Bolitar.”

“Gee, thanks, Larry. That means a lot coming from you.” He rose. “I’ll be right back.”

“We don’t have all goddamn day to jerk off here.”

“I’m sure you don’t.”

He left the conference room and met up with Esperanza at her desk.

“The Meal Ticket,” she told him. “He said it was urgent.”

Christian Steele.

From her petite frame most would not guess that Esperanza used to be a professional wrestler. For three years she had been known on the circuit as Little Pocahontas. The fact that Esperanza Diaz was Latina, without a trace of American Indian blood, did not seem to bother the FLOW (Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling) organization. A minor detail, they said. Latino, Indian, what’s the difference?

At the height of her pro wrestling career, the same script was played out every week in arenas all over the U.S. of A. Esperanza (“Pocahontas”) would enter the ring wearing moccasins, a suede-fringed dress, and a headband that lassoed her long black hair away from her dark face. The suede dress came off before the fight, leaving a somewhat flimsier and less traditional Native American garb in its stead.

Professional wrestling has a pretty simple plot with painfully few variations. Some wrestlers are bad. Some are good. Pocahontas was good, a crowd favorite. She was cute and small and quick and had a tight little body. Everyone loved her. She would always be winning the fight on skill when her opponent would do something illegal—throw sand in her eyes, use a dreaded foreign object that everyone in the free world except the referee could see—to turn the tide. Then the bad wrestler would bring in a couple of extra cronies, ganging up three against one on poor Pocahontas, pounding mercilessly on the brave beauty to the unequivocal shock and chagrin of the announcers, who had seen the same thing happen last week and the week before.

Just when it seemed there was no hope, Big Chief Mama, a mammoth creature, charged out of the locker room and threw the beasts off the defenseless Pocahontas. Then together Big Chief Mama and Little Pocahontas would defeat the forces of evil.

Massively entertaining.

“I’ll take it in my office,” Myron said.

As he entered he saw the nameplate on his desk, a gift from his parents.

MYRON BOLITAR
SPORTS AGENT

He shook his head. Myron Bolitar. He still couldn’t believe someone would name a kid Myron. When his family first moved to New Jersey, he had told everyone in his new high school that his name was Mike. Nope, no dice. Then he tried to nickname himself Mickey. Unhunh. Everyone reverted to Myron; the name was like a horror-movie monster that would not die.

To answer the obvious question: No, he never forgave his parents.

He picked up the phone. “Christian?”

“Mr. Bolitar? Is that you?”

“Yes. And please call me … Myron.” Acceptance of the inevitable, a sign of a wise man.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you. I know how busy you are.”

“I’m busy negotiating your contract. I have Otto Burke and Larry Hanson in the next room.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Bolitar, but this is very important.” His voice was trembling. “I have to see you right away.”

He switched hands. “Something wrong, Christian?” Mr. Perceptive.

“I—I’d rather not discuss it over the phone. Would you be able to meet me at my room on campus?”

“Sure, no problem. What time?”

“Now, please. I—I don’t know what to make of this. I want you to see it.”

Myron took a deep breath. “No problem. I’ll throw Otto and Larry out. It’ll be good for the negotiations. I’ll be there in an hour.”

It took a lot longer.

Myron entered the Kinney garage on Forty-sixth Street, not too far from his Park Avenue office. He nodded to Mario, the garage attendant, walked past the pricing sheet, which had a small disclaimer on the bottom that read “not including 97% tax,” and headed to his car on the lower level. A Ford Taurus. Your basic Babe Magnet.

He was about to unlock the door when he heard a hissing sound. Like a snake. Or more likely, air escaping from a tire. The sound emanated from his back right tire. A quick examination told Myron that it had been slashed.

“Hi, Myron.”

He spun around. Two men grinned at him. One was the size of a small Third World nation. Myron was big—nearly six-four and two hundred twenty pounds—but he guessed that this guy must have been six-six and closing in on three hundred. A heavy-duty weight lifter, his whole body was puffed up as if he were wearing inflatable life vests under his clothes. The second man was of average build. He wore a fedora.

The big man lumbered toward Myron’s car. His arms swung stiffly at his sides. He kept tilting his head, cracking the part of the anatomy that on a normal human being might be called a neck.

“Having some car trouble?” he asked with a chuckle.

“Flat tire,” Myron said. “There’s a spare in the trunk. Change it.”

“I don’t think so, Bolitar. This was just a little warning.”

“Oh?”

The human edifice grabbed the lapels of Myron’s jacket. “Stay away from Chaz Landreaux. He’s already signed.”

“First change my tire.”

The grin increased. It was a stupid, cruel grin. “Next time I won’t be so nice.” He grabbed a little tighter, bunching up the suit and tie. “Understand?”

“You are aware, of course, that steroids make your balls shrink.”

The man’s face reddened. “Oh, yeah? Maybe I oughta smash your face in, huh? Maybe I oughta pulverize you into oatmeal.”

“Oatmeal?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice image, really.”

“Fuck you.”

Myron sighed. Then his whole body seemed to snap into motion at the same time. He started with a head-butt that landed square on the big man’s nose. There was a squelching noise like beetles being stepped on. Blood gushed from the nose.

“Son of a—”

Myron cradled the back of the big man’s head for leverage and smashed his elbow into the sweet of the Adam’s apple, nearly caving the windpipe all the way in. There was a painful, gurgling choke. Then silence. Myron followed up with a knife-hand strike to the back of the neck below the skull.

The big man slid to the ground like wet sand.

“Okay, that’s enough!”

The man with the fedora stepped closer, a gun drawn and pointed at Myron’s chest.

“Back away from him. Now!”

Myron squinted at him. “Is that really a fedora?”

“I said, back off!”

“Okay, okay, I’m backing.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” the smaller man said with almost childlike hurt. “He was just doing his job.”

“A misunderstood youth,” Myron added. “Now I feel terrible.”

“Just stay away from Chaz Landreaux, okay?”

“Not okay. Tell Roy O’Connor I said it’s not okay.”

“Hey, I ain’t hired to get no answer. I’m just delivering.”

Without another word the man with the fedora helped his fallen colleague to his feet. The big man stumbled to their car, one hand on his nose, the other massaging his windpipe. His nose was busted, but his throat would hurt even worse, especially when he swallowed.

They got in and quickly drove away. They did not stop to change Myron’s tire.

Chapter 2

Myron dialed Chaz Landreaux’s number on his car phone.

Not being what one would call mechanically inclined, it had taken Myron half an hour to change the tire. He rode slowly for the first few miles, fearing his handiwork would encourage the tire to slip off and flee. When he felt more confident, he accelerated and started back on the road to Christian’s.

When Chaz answered, Myron quickly explained what happened.

“They was already here,” Chaz told him. Lots of noise in the background. An infant cried. Something fell and broke. Children laughed. Chaz shouted for quiet.

“When?” Myron asked.

“Hour ago. Three men.”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Nah. Just held me down and made threats. Said they was going to break my legs if I didn’t honor my contract.”

Breaking legs, Myron thought. How original.

Chaz Landreaux was a senior basketball player at Georgia State and a probable first-round NBA pick. He was a poor kid from the streets of Philadelphia. He had six brothers, two sisters, no father. The ten of them lived in an area that—if daringly improved—might one day be charitably dubbed “poor ghetto.”

During his freshman year, an underling of a big-time agent named Roy O’Connor had approached Chaz—four years before Chaz was eligible to talk to an agent. The man offered Chaz a five-thousand-dollar “retainer” up front, with monthly payments of $250, if he signed a contract making O’Connor his agent when he turned pro.

Chaz was confused. He knew that NCAA rules forbade him from signing a contract while he still had eligibility. The contract would be declared null and void. But Roy’s man assured him this would be no problem. They would simply postdate the contract to make it appear Chaz had signed on after his final year of eligibility. They’d keep the contract in a safety deposit box until the proper time arrived. No one would be the wiser.

Chaz was not sure. He knew it was illegal, but he also knew what that kind of money would mean to his mom and eight siblings living in a two-room hellhole. Roy O’Connor then entered the picture and pitched the final inducement: If Chaz changed his mind at some future date, he could repay the money and tear up the contract.

Four years later Chaz changed his mind. He promised to pay back every cent. No way, said Roy O’Connor. You have a contract with us. You’ll stick with it.

This was not an uncommon setup. Dozens of agents did it. Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom, two of the country’s biggest agents, had been arrested for it. Threats too were not uncommon. But that was where it usually ended: with threats. No agent wanted to risk being exposed. If a kid stood firm, the agent backed off.

But not Roy O’Connor. Roy O’Connor was using muscle. Myron was surprised.

“I want you out of town for a little while,” Myron continued. “You got someplace to lay low?”

“Yeah, I’ll crash with a friend in Washington. But what we going to do?”

“I’ll take care of it. Just stay out of sight.”

“Okay, yeah, I hear ya.” Then: “Oh, Myron, one other thing.”

“What?”

“One of the dudes who held me down said he knew you. A monster, man. I mean, huge. Slick-looking motherfucker.”

“Did he say his name?”

“Aaron. He said to tell you Aaron said hi.”

Myron’s shoulders slumped. Aaron. A name from his past. Not a good name either. Roy O’Connor not only had muscle behind him—he had serious muscle.

Three hours after leaving his office, Myron shook off all thoughts about the garage incident and knocked on Christian’s door. Despite the fact that he’d graduated two months earlier, Christian still lived in the same campus dorm he had occupied throughout his senior year, working as a counselor at Reston U’s football summer camp. The Titans minicamp, however, started in two days, and Christian would be there. Myron had no intention of having Christian hold out.

Christian opened the door immediately. Before Myron had a chance to explain his tardiness, Christian said, “Thanks for getting here so fast.”

“Uh, sure. No problem.”

Christian’s face was completely devoid of its usual healthy color. Gone were the rosy cheeks that dimpled when Christian smiled. Gone was the wide-open, aw-shucks smile that made the co-eds swoon. Even the famed steady hands were noticeably quaking.

“Come on in,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Christian’s room looked more like a 1950s sitcom set than a modern-day campus dorm room. For one thing, the place was neat. The bed was made, the shoes in a row beneath it. There were no socks on the floor, no underwear, no jock straps. On the walls were pennants. Actual pennants. Myron couldn’t believe it. No posters, no calendars with Claudia Schiffer or Cindy Crawford or the Barbi twins. Just old-fashioned pennants. Myron felt as if he’d just stepped into Wally Cleaver’s dormitory.

Christian didn’t say anything at first. They both stood there uncomfortably, like two strangers stuck together at some cocktail party with no drinks in their hands. Christian kept his eyes lowered to the floor like a scolded child. He hadn’t commented on the blood on Myron’s suit. He probably hadn’t noticed it.

Myron decided to try one of his patented silver-tongued ice-breakers. “What’s up?”

Christian began to pace—no easy accomplishment in a room slightly larger than the average armoire. Myron could see that Christian’s eyes were red. He’d been crying, his cheeks still showing small traces of the tear tracks.

“Did Mr. Burke get mad about canceling the meeting?” Christian asked.

Myron shrugged. “He had a major conniption, but he’ll survive. Means nothing, don’t worry about it.”

“Minicamp starts Thursday?”

Myron nodded. “Are you nervous?”

“A little, maybe.”

“Is that why you wanted to see me?”

Christian shook his head. He hesitated and then said, “I—I don’t understand it, Mr. Bolitar.”

Every time he called him mister, Myron looked for his father.

“Don’t understand what, Christian? What’s this all about?”

He hesitated again. “It’s …” He stopped, took a deep breath, started again. “It’s about Kathy.”

Myron thought he’d heard wrong. “Kathy Culver?”

“You knew her,” Christian said. Myron couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question.

“A long time ago,” Myron replied.

“When you were with Jessica.”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe you’ll understand. I miss Kathy. More than anyone can ever know. She was very special.”

Myron nodded, encouraging. Very Phil Donahue.

Christian took a step back, nearly banging his head into a bookshelf. “Everybody sensationalized what happened to her,” he began. “They put it in tabloids, had stories about the disappearance on A Current Affair. It was like a game to everyone. A TV show. They kept calling us ‘idyllic,’ the ‘idyllic couple.’ ” He made quote marks in the air with his fingers. “As if idyllic meant unreal. Unfeeling. Everyone kept saying I was young, I’d get over it quickly. Kathy was just a pretty blonde, millions more like her for a guy like me. I was expected to get on with my life. She was gone. It was over and done with.”

Christian’s boyish quality—something that Myron thought would help make him the future endorsement king—had suddenly taken on a new dimension. Instead of the shy, gee-whiz, modest little Kansas boy, Myron saw reality: a scared child huddled in a corner, a child whose parents were dead, who had no real family, probably no real friends, just hero-worshipers and those who wanted a piece of him (like Myron himself?).

Myron shook his head. No way. Other agents, yes, but not him. Myron wasn’t like that. But still something akin to guilt stayed there, poking a sharp finger into his ribs.

“I never really believed Kathy was dead,” Christian continued. “That was part of the problem, I guess. The not-knowing gets to you after a while. Part of me—part of me almost hoped they’d find her body already, anything to end it. Is that an awful thing to say, Mr. Bolitar?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

Christian looked at him solemnly. “I kept thinking about the panties. You know about that?”

Myron nodded. The lone clue in the mystery was Kathy’s ripped panties, found on top of a campus Dumpster. Rumor had it that they were covered with semen and blood. To the world at large, the panties had confirmed what had long been suspected: Kathy Culver was dead. It was a sad though not uncommon story. She had been raped and murdered by a random psychopath. Her body would probably never be found—or maybe some hunters would stumble across the skeletal remains in the woods one day, giving the press a great eleven o’clock commercial teaser, bringing the cameras back into the story with undying hopes of catching a grief-stricken relative on film.

“They made it seem like it was a dirty thing,” Christian continued. “ ‘Pink,’ they said. ‘Silk,’ they said. They never called them underwear or undergarments or even just plain panties. It was always pink silk panties. Like that was important. One TV station even interviewed a Victoria’s Secret model for her comment on them. Pink silk panties. Like that meant she was asking for it. Trashing Kathy like that …”

His voice sort of faded away then. Myron said nothing. Christian was working up to something. Myron only hoped it wasn’t a breakdown.

“I guess I should get to the point,” Christian finally said.

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I saw something today. I—” Christian stopped and swung his eyes toward Myron’s. They looked at him, pleading. “Kathy may still be alive.”

His words hit Myron like a wet slap. Whatever Myron had been preparing himself for, whatever he imagined Christian was leading up to, hearing Kathy Culver might still be alive was not a part of the equation.

“What?”

Christian reached behind him and opened his desk drawer. The desk too was something out of Leave It to Beaver. Completely uncluttered. Two cans, one with Bic pens, the other with sharpened number-two pencils. Gooseneck lamp. Desk blotter with calendar. Dictionary, thesaurus, and The Elements of Style all in a row between two globe bookends.

“This came in the mail today.”

He handed Myron a magazine. On the cover was a naked woman. Calling her well-endowed would be tantamount to calling World War II a skirmish. Most men are somewhat mammary obsessed, and Myron was not above having similar sentiments, but this was positively freakish. The woman’s face was far from pretty, kind of harsh looking. She was giving the camera a look that was supposed to be come-hither but looked more like constipation. Her tongue was licking her lips, her legs spread, her finger beckoning the reader to come closer.

Very subtle effect, Myron thought.

The magazine was called Nips. The lead story, according to the words emblazoned across her right breast: “How to Get Her to Shave Dat Thang.”

Myron looked up sharply. “What’s this all about?”

“The paper clip.”

“What?”

But Christian seemed too weak to repeat it. He just pointed. On the top of the magazine Myron spotted a glint of silver. A paper clip was being used as a bookmark.

“It came with that on there,” Christian said by way of explanation.

Myron fingered through the pages, catching quick glimpses of flesh, until he arrived at the page marked off by the paper clip. His eyes squinted in confusion. It was an ad page, though it had as many erotic photos as any other. The top of the page read:

Live Fantasy Phone—Pick Your Girl!

There were three rows, four girls in each row, all the way down the page. Myron’s eyes scanned down. He could not believe what he was seeing. “Oriental Girls Are Waiting!” “Wet and Juicy Lesbos!” “Spank Me, Please!” “Bitches in Heat!” “Tiny Titties!” (for those who didn’t like the cover shot, no doubt) “I Want You to Ride Me!” “Pick My Cherry!” “Make Me Beg for More!” “Wanted: Robocock.” “Mistress Savannah Demands You Call Now!” “Horny Housewife!” “Overweight Men Wanted.” Each with matching photo—provocative poses involving telephones.

There were some that were far more raunchy. Cross-dressers. Women with men’s equipment. There were some Myron could not even understand. Like unfathomable science experiments. The telephone numbers were what you’d expect. 1-800-888-SLUT. 1-900-46-TRAMP. 1-800-REAM-MEE. 1-900-BAD-GIRL.

Myron made a face. He wanted to wash his hands.

Then he saw it.

It was in the bottom row, second from the right. It read, “I’ll Do Anything!” The phone number was 1-900-344-LUST. $3.99 per minute. Discreetly billed to your telephone or charge card. Visa/MC accepted.

The woman in the picture was Kathy Culver.

Myron felt a coldness seep into him. He turned back to the cover and checked the date. It was the current issue.

“When did you get this?”

“It came in today’s mail,” Christian said, picking up an envelope. “In this.”

Myron’s head began to swim. He tried to fight the dizziness and get some kind of footing, but the picture of Kathy kept tipping him back over. The envelope was plain manila. There was no return address—that would have been too easy. It was not postmarked and had no stamps, merely reading:

CHRISTIAN STEELE
BOX 488

No city, no state. That meant it’d been mailed on campus. The address had been handwritten.

“You get lots of fan mail, right?” Myron asked.

Christian nodded. “But they go somewhere else. This was in my private box. The number is unlisted.”

Myron handled the envelope carefully, trying not to smudge any potential fingerprints. “It could be trick photography,” Myron added. “Someone might have superimposed her head on—”

Christian stopped him with a shake of his head. His eyes were back on the floor. “It’s not just her face, Mr. Bolitar,” he said, embarrassed.

“Oh,” Myron said, ever swift on the uptake. “I see.”

“Do you think we should give this to the police?” Christian asked.

“Perhaps.”

“I want to do the right thing,” Christian said, his hands balling into fists. “But I won’t let them drag Kathy through the mud again. You saw what they did when she was the victim. What will they do when they see this?”

“They’ll go animal,” he agreed.

Christian nodded.

“But it’s probably just a prank,” Myron continued. “I’ll check it out before we do anything else.”

“How?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“There’s one other thing,” Christian said. “The handwriting on the envelope.”

Myron glanced at it again. “What about it?”

“I can’t say for sure, but it looks a lot like Kathy’s.”

Chapter 3

Myron stopped short when he saw her.

He had just stumbled into the bar in something of a daydream, his mind like a movie camera that couldn’t stay in focus. He tried to sift through what he had just seen and learned from Christian, tried to compute the facts and form a solid, well-conceived conclusion.

He came up with nothing.

The magazine was jammed into the right pocket of his trench coat. Porn mag and trench coat, Myron thought. Jesus. The same questions echoed ad nauseam in his head: Could Kathy Culver still be alive? And if she was, what had happened to her? What could have led Kathy from the innocence of her dorm room to the back pages of Nips magazine?

That was when he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

She was sitting on a stool, her long legs crossed, sipping gently at her drink. She wore a white blouse opened at the throat, a short gray skirt, and black stockings. Everything clung just right. For a fleeting moment Myron thought she was just a by-product of his daydream, a dazzling vision to tantalize the senses. But the knot in his stomach made him quickly dismiss that notion. His throat went dry. Deep, dormant emotions crashed down upon him like a surprise wave at the beach.

He managed to swallow and commanded his legs to move forward. She was, quite simply, breathtaking. Everything else in the bar faded into the background, as though they were only stage props set for her.

Myron approached. “Come here often?” he asked.

She looked at him like he was an old man jogging in a Speedo. “Original line,” she said. “Very creative.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But what a delivery.” He smiled. Winningly, he thought.

“Glad you think so.” She turned back to her drink. “Please leave.”

“Playing hard to get?”

“Get lost.”

Myron grinned. “Stop it already. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“Pardon me.”

“It’s obvious to everyone in this bar.”

“Oh?” she remarked. “Do enlighten.”

“You want me. Bad.”

She almost smiled. “That obvious, huh?”

“Don’t blame yourself. I’m irresistible.”

“Uh-huh. Catch me if I swoon.”

“I’m right here, sweetcakes.”

She sighed deeply. She was as beautiful as ever, as beautiful as the day she had walked out on him. He hadn’t seen her in four years, but it still hurt to think about her. It hurt even more to look at her. Their weekend at Win’s house on Martha’s Vineyard came to him. He could still remember the way the ocean breeze blew her hair, the way she tilted her head when he spoke, the way she looked and felt in his old sweatshirt. Simple fragile bliss. The knot in his stomach tightened.

“Hello, Myron,” she said.

“Hello, Jessica. You’re looking well.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“My office is upstairs. I practically live here.”

She smiled. “Oh, that’s right. You represent athletes now, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Better than working all that undercover stuff?”

Myron did not bother answering. She glanced at him but did not hold the gaze.

“I’m waiting for someone,” Jessica said suddenly.

“A male someone?”

“Myron …”

“Sorry. Old reflex.” He looked at her left hand. His heart back-flipped when he saw no rings. “You never married what’s-his-name?” he asked.

“Doug.”

“That’s right. Doug. Or was it Dougie?”

“You’re making fun of someone’s name?”

Myron shrugged. She had a point. “So what happened to him?”

Her eyes studied a beer ring on the bar. “It wasn’t about him,” she said. “You know that.”

He opened his mouth and then closed it. Rehashing the bitter past was not going to do any good. “So what brings you back to the city?”

“I’m going to be teaching a semester at NYU.”

His heart sped up again. “You moved back to Manhattan?”

“Last month.”

“I’m really sorry about your father’s—”

“We got your flowers,” she interrupted.

“I wanted to do more.”

“Better you didn’t.” She finished her drink. “I have to go. It was nice seeing you.”

“I thought you were meeting someone.”

“My mistake, then.”

“I still love you, you know.”

She stood, nodded.

“Let’s try again,” he said.

“No.”

She walked away.

“Jess?”

“What?”

He considered telling her about her sister’s picture in the magazine. “Can we have lunch sometime?” he asked. “Just talk, okay?”

“No.”

Jessica turned and left him. Again.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III listened to Myron’s story with his fingers steepled. Steepling looked good on Win, a lot better than on Myron. When Myron finished, Win said nothing for a few moments, doing more of that steepled-hands-concentration thing. Finally he rested his hands on the desk.

“My, my, haven’t we had a special day?”

Myron rented his space from his old college roommate, Windsor Horne Lockwood III. People often said that Myron looked nothing like his name—an observation Myron took as high praise; Windsor Horne Lockwood III, however, looked exactly like his name. Blond hair, perfect length, parted on the right side. His features were classical patrician, almost too handsome, like something crafted in porcelain.

His attire was always thoroughbred prep—pink shirts, polo shirts, monogrammed shirts, khaki pants, golf (read, ugly) pants, white bucks (Memorial Day to Labor Day) or wing tips (Labor Day to Memorial Day) on his feet. Win even had that creepy accent, the one that did not originate from any particular geographical location as much as from certain prep schools like Andover and Exeter. (Win had gone to Exeter.) He played a mean game of golf. He had a three handicap and was the fifth-generation member of stuffy Merion Golf Club in Philadelphia and third-generation at equally stuffy Pine Valley in southern New Jersey. He had a perennial golf tan, one of those where the color could be found only on the arms (short-sleeve shirts) and a V-shape in the neck (open alligator shirt), though Win’s lily-white skin never tanned. It burned.

Win was full-fledged whitebread. He made star quarterback Christian Steele look like a Mediterranean houseboy.

Myron had hated Windsor on sight. Most people did. Win was used to it. People liked to form and keep an immediate impression. In Win’s case that impression was old money, elitist, arrogant—in a phrase, a flaming asshole. There was nothing Win could do about it. People who relied solely on first impressions meant little to him.

Win gestured to the magazine on his desk. “You chose not to tell Jessica about this?”

Myron stood, paced, and then sat back down. “What was I going to say? ‘Hi, I love you, come back to me, here’s a photo of your supposedly dead sister advertising a sex phone in a porno mag?’ ”

Win thought a moment. “I’d refine the wording a bit,” he said.

He flipped through the porno rag, his eyebrow arched as if to say Hmmm. Myron watched. He had decided not to tell Win about Chaz Landreaux or the incident in the garage. Not yet anyway. Win had a funny way of reacting when someone tried to hurt Myron. It wasn’t always pretty. Better to save it for later, when Myron would know exactly how he wanted to handle Roy O’Connor. And Aaron.

Win dropped the magazine on his desk. “Shall we begin?”

“Begin what?”

“Investigating. That is what you planned for us, correct?”

“You want to help?”

Win smiled. “But of course.” He turned his phone around so that it faced Myron. “Dial.”

“The number in the magazine?”

“Well, golly, Myron, I thought we’d call the White House,” Win said dryly. “See if we can get Hillary to talk dirty.”

Myron took hold of the phone. “You ever call one of these lines?”

“I?” Win feigned shock. “The Debutantes’ Darling? The Society Stud? Surely you jest.”

“Neither have I.”

“Perhaps you’d like to be alone, then,” Win said. “Loosen your belt, pull down your trousers, that kind of thing.”

“Very funny.”

Myron dialed the 900 number under Kathy’s photograph. He had made thousands of investigative calls, both during his years in the FBI and in his private work for team owners and commissioners. But this was the first time he’d felt self-conscious.

An awful beeping noise blasted his ear, followed by an operator: “We’re sorry. Your call is being blocked.”

Myron looked up. “The call won’t go through.”

Win nodded. “I forgot. We have a block on all 900 calls. Employees were calling them all the time and ringing up quite a bill—not just the sex phones but astrologers, sports lines, psychics, recipes, even dial-a-prayers.” He reached behind him and pulled out another phone. “Use this one. It’s my private line. No blocks.”

Myron redialed. The phone rang twice before being picked up. A woman’s voice on tape husked, “Hello, there. You’ve reached the fantasy phone line. If you’re under eighteen or do not wish to pay for this call, please hang up now.” Less than a second passed before she continued. “Welcome to the fantasy phone line, where you can talk to the sexiest, most willing, most beautiful, most desirous women in the world.”

Myron noticed that the taped voice was speaking far more slowly now, as if she were reading to a kindergarten class. Each word was its own sentence.

“Welcome. To. The. Fantasy …”

“In a moment you will talk directly to one of our wondrous, gorgeous, voluptuous, hot girls who are here to heighten your pleasure to new boundaries of ecstasy. One-on-one private conversation. Discreetly billed to your phone. You will talk live with your personal fantasy girl.” The voice droned on with its own form of iambic pentameter. Finally the tape gave instructions: “If you have a touch-tone phone, press one if you’d like to talk about the secret confessions of a naughty schoolteacher. Press two if …”

Myron looked up at Win. “How long have I been on?”

“Six minutes.”

“Twenty-four dollars already,” Myron said. “Does the term ‘total scam’ mean anything to you?”

Win nodded. “Talk about jerking off.”

Myron pressed a button, anything to get off this revolving tape. The phone rang ten times—Christ, they knew how to stretch the time—before he heard another female voice say, “Hi, there. How are you today?”

Her voice was exactly what Myron had expected. Low and husky.

“Uh, hi,” Myron fumbled. “Look, I’d like—”

“What’s your name, honey?” she asked.

“Myron.” He slapped his forehead and held back a profanity. Had he really been stupid enough to use his real name?

“Mmmmm, Myron,” she said as if testing it out. “I like that name. It’s so sexy.”

“Yeah, well, thanks—”

“My name is Tawny.”

Tawny. Sure.

“How did you get my number, Myron?”

“I saw it in a magazine.”

“What magazine, Myron?”

The constant use of his name was beginning to unnerve him. “Nips.”

“Oooo. I like that magazine. It makes me so, you know.”

A way with words. “Listen, uh, Tawny, I’d like to ask you about your ad.”

“Myron?”

“Yes.”

“I love your voice. You sound really hot. Do you want to know what I look like?”

“No, not real—”

“I have brown eyes. I have long brown hair, kinda wavy. I’m five-six. And I’m a 36-24-36. C cup. Sometimes a D.”

“You must be very proud but—”

“What do you like to do, Myron?”

“Do?”

“For fun.”

“Look, Tawny, you seem very nice, really, but can I talk to the girl in the ad?”

“I am the girl in the ad,” she said.

“No, I mean, the girl whose picture is in the magazine on top of this phone number.”

“That’s me, Myron. I’m that girl.”

“The girl in the photo is a blonde with blue eyes,” Myron said. “You said you had brown eyes and brown hair.”

Win gave him a thumbs-up, scoring one for the detailed eye of Myron Bolitar, ace investigator.

“Did I say that?” Tawny asked. “I meant blonde with blue eyes.”

“I need to talk to the girl in the ad. It’s very important.”

Her voice went down another octave. “I’m better, Myron. I’m the best.”

“I don’t doubt that, Tawny. You sound very professional. But right now I need to talk to the girl in the ad.”

“She’s not here, Myron.”

“When will she be back?”

“I’m not sure, Myron. But just sit back and relax. We’re going to have fun—”

“I don’t want to be rude, but I’m really not interested. Can I talk to your boss?”

“My boss?”

“Yes.”

Her tone was different now. More matter-of-fact. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No. I’m serious. Please put your boss on.”

“Okay, then,” she said. “Hold on a second.”

A minute passed. Then two. Win said, “She’s not coming back. She’s just going to see how long the chump will stay on the line and pour dollars down her pants.”

“I don’t think so,” Myron said. “She liked my voice, said I sounded hot.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize. Probably the first time she’s ever said that.”

“My thinking exactly.” A few minutes later Myron put the receiver back in its cradle. “How long was I on for?”

Win looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes.” He grabbed a calculator. “Twenty-three minutes times three ninety-nine per minute.” He punched in the numbers. “That call cost you ninety-one dollars and seventy-seven cents.”

“A rare bargain,” Myron said. “You want to hear something weird? She never said anything dirty.”

“What?”

“The girl on the phone. She never said anything dirty.”

“And you’re disappointed.”

“Don’t you find that a bit strange?”

Win shrugged, skimming through the magazine. “Have you looked through this at all?”

“No.”

“Half the pages are advertisements for sex phones. This is clearly big business.”

“Safe sex,” Myron said. “The safest.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Enter,” Win called out.

Esperanza opened the door. “Call for you. Otto Burke.”

“Tell him I’ll be right there.”

She nodded and left.

“I have some time on my hands,” Win said. “I’ll try to find out who placed the ad. We’ll also need a sample of Kathy Culver’s handwriting for comparison.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with.”

Win resteepled his hands, bouncing the fingertips gently against one another. “You do realize,” he began, “that this photograph probably means nothing. Chances are there is a very simple explanation for all this.”

“Maybe,” Myron agreed, rising from his chair. He had been telling himself the same thing for the past two hours. He no longer believed it.

“Myron?”

“What?”

“You don’t think it was a coincidence—Jessica being in the bar downstairs, I mean.”

“No,” Myron said. “I guess I don’t.”

Win nodded. “Be careful,” he said. “A word to the wise.”

Chapter 4

Damn him.

Jessica Culver sat in her family’s kitchen, in the very seat she had sat in innumerable times as a child.

She should have known better. She should have thought it through, should have come prepared for any occurrence. But what had she done instead? She had gotten nervous. She had hesitated. She had stopped for a drink in the bar below his office.

Stupid, stupid.

But that wasn’t all. He had surprised her, and she had panicked.

Why?

She should have told Myron the truth. She should have told him in a plain unemotional voice the real reason she was there. But she hadn’t. She had been drinking unaware, and suddenly he had appeared, looking so handsome and yet so hurt and—

Oh shit, Jessie, you are one fucked-up chick.

She nodded to herself. Yup. Fucked-up. Self-destructive. And a few other hyphenated words she couldn’t come up with right now. Her publisher and agent did not see it that way, of course. They loved her “foibles” (their term—Jessie preferred “fuck-ups”), even encouraged them. They were what made Jessica Culver such an exceptional writer. They were what gave Jessica Culver’s writing that certain “edge” (again, their term).

Perhaps that was so. Jessie really couldn’t say. But one thing was certain: These foibling fuck-ups had turned her life to shit.

Oh, pity the suffering artist! Thy heart bleeds for such torment!

She dismissed the mocking tone with a shake of her head. She was unusually introspective today, but that was understandable. She had seen Myron, and that had led to a lot of “what if-ing”—a verifiable avalanche of useless “what if-ing” from every conceivable height and angle.

What if. She pondered it yet again.

In her typically self-centered way, she had seen the “what if-ing” only in terms of herself, not Myron. Now she wondered about him, about what his life had really been like since the world crumbled down upon him—not all at once—but in small, decaying bits. Four years. She had not seen him in four years. She had shoved Myron into some back closet in her mind and locked the door. She’d thought (hoped?) that would be the end of it, that the door could stand up to a little pressure without opening. But seeing him today, seeing the kind, handsome face high above those broad shoulders, seeing the still why-me stare in his eyes—the door had blown off its hinges like something in a gas explosion.

Jessica had been overwhelmed by her feelings. She wanted to be with him so badly that she knew she had to get out right away.

Makes sense, she thought, if you’re a total fuck-up.

Jessica glanced out the window. She was waiting for Paul’s arrival. Bergen County police Lieutenant Paul Duncan—Uncle Paul to her, since infancy—was two years away from retirement. He had been her father’s closest friend, the executor of Adam Culver’s will. They had both worked in law enforcement—Paul as a cop, Adam as the county medical examiner—for more than twenty-five years.

Paul was coming to finalize the details for her father’s memorial service. No funeral for Adam Culver. He wouldn’t hear of it. But Jessica wanted to talk to Paul about another matter. Alone. She did not like what was going on.

“Hi, honey.”

She turned to the voice. “Hi, Mom.”

Her mother came up through the basement. She was wearing an apron, her fingers fiddling with the large wooden cross around her neck. “I put his chair in storage,” she explained in a forced matter-of-fact tone. “Just cluttering space up here.”

For the first time Jessica realized that her father’s chair—the one her mother must have been referring to—was gone from the kitchen table. The simple unpadded four-legged chair her father had sat in for as long as Jessica could remember, the one closest to the refrigerator, so close that her father could turn around, open the door, and stretch for the milk on the top shelf without getting up, had been taken away, stored in some cob-webbed corner of the basement.

But not so Kathy’s.

Jessie’s gaze touched down on the chair to her immediate right. Kathy’s chair. It was still here. Her mother had not touched it. Her father, well, he was dead. But Kathy—who knew? Kathy could, in theory, walk through the back door right this very minute, banging it against the wall as she always did, smile brightly, and join them for dinner. The dead were dead. When you lived with a medical examiner, you understood just how useless the dead were. Dead and buried. The soul, well, that was another matter. Jessie’s mom was a devout Catholic, attending mass every morning, and during crises like these her religious tenacity paid off—like someone who spent time in a gym finally finding a use for their new muscles. She could believe without question in a divine and joyous afterlife. Such a comfort. Jessica wished she could do the same, but over the years her religious fervor had become a strict couch potato.

Except, of course, Kathy might not be dead. Ergo the chair—Mom’s lantern kept lit to guide her youngest back home.

Jessica awoke most mornings bolting upright in her bed, thinking about—no, inventing new possibilities for—her younger sister. Was Kathy lying dead in a pit somewhere? Buried under brush in the woods? A skeleton gnawed on by animals and inhabited by maggots? Was Kathy’s corpse stuck in some cement foundation? Was it weighed down in the bottom of some river like the little undersea man in the living-room aquarium? Had she died painlessly? Had she been tortured? Had her body been chopped into small bits, burned, broken down with acid …

Or was she still alive?

That eternal spring.

Had Kathy possibly been kidnapped? Was she living in white slavery under the thumb of some Middle East sheikh? Or was she living chained to a radiator on a farm in Wisconsin like something on Geraldo? Could she have banged her head, forgotten who she was, and was now living as a street person with amnesia? Or had she simply run away to a different world?

The possibilities were endless. Even those lacking creativity can come up with a million different horrors when their loved one suddenly vanishes—or more painfully, a million different hopes.

Jessica’s thoughts were chased away by the tired chugging of a car engine. A familiar Chevy Caprice blanketed with tiny dents pulled up. It looked like a retrieval car at a driving range. She stood and hurried out the front door.

Paul Duncan was a stocky man, compact, with salt-and-pepper hair now turning defiantly toward salt. He walked purposely, the way cops do. He greeted her on the front stoop with a big smile and kiss on the cheek. “Hey, beautiful! How are you?”

She hugged him. “I’m okay, Uncle Paul,” she said.

“You look great.”

“Thanks.”

Paul shaded his eyes from the sun. “Come on, let’s go inside. It’s hot as hell out here.”

“In a minute,” she said, putting a hand on his forearm. “I want to talk to you first.”

“What about?”

“My father’s case.”

“I’m not handling that, honey. I don’t do homicides anymore, you know that. Besides, it would be a conflict of interest—me being Adam’s friend and all.”

“But you have to know what’s going on.”

Paul Duncan nodded slowly. “I do.”

“Mom said the police think he was killed in a robbery attempt.”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Your father was robbed,” he said. “His wallet was gone. His watch. Even his rings. The guy stripped him clean.”

“To make it look like a robbery.”

Paul smiled then, gently—the way, she remembered, he had at her confirmation and Sweet Sixteen party and high school graduation. “What are you getting at, Jess?”

“You don’t find this whole thing odd?” she asked. “You don’t see a connection between this and Kathy?”

He stumbled a step back, as if her words had given him a gentle push. “What connection? Your sister vanished from her college campus. Your father was murdered by a robber a year and a half later. Where do you see a connection?”

“Do you really believe that they have nothing to do with each other?” she asked. “Do you honestly believe that lightning struck twice in the same place?”

He put his hands in his pockets. “If you mean do I think your family has been the victim of two separate awful tragedies, the answer is yes. It happens all the time, Jess. Life is rarely fair. God doesn’t go around divvying out the bad in equal doses. Some families go through life with nary a scratch. Some get too much. Like yours.”

“So it’s fate,” she said. “That’s your answer. Fate.”

He threw his hands up. “Fate, lightning striking twice—these are your phrases. You’re the writer here, not me. I just call it a tragedy. I just call it a tragic, somewhat bizarre coincidence. I’ve seen a lot stranger. So had your dad.”

The front door opened. Mom stood in the doorway. “What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing, Carol. We were just talking.”

Carol looked at her daughter. “Jessica?”

Her eyes stayed on Paul’s, probing. “Just talking, Mom.”

Jessica turned away and stepped back inside. Paul Duncan watched her, letting loose a silent breath. He had suspected she would be a problem—Jessica never accepted easy solutions to anything in life, even when the answer was simple. Yep, he had hoped it wouldn’t happen, but he had definitely foreseen this possibility.

He just wasn’t sure what he should do about it.

Midnight.

At ten P.M. Christian Steele had crawled under the blanket, read for ten minutes, and then switched off the light. Since then he had lain on his back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, not moving, not fooling himself into even hoping that sleep was imminent.

“Kathy,” he said out loud.

His mind floated about aimlessly, settling like a butterfly for only brief moments before moving on. Darkness surrounded him, but not silence. There was no such thing as silence at football camp. Christian heard kegs being thrown, loud music, laughter, singing, swearing. He could distinctly hear Charles and Eddie, his offensive tackles, in the next room. They were permanently set on loud, like a radio turned up before the knob was ripped out. Christian was not above partying too, having fun by consuming alcohol until he hugged the porcelain god and puked up his offering. But not tonight.

God, not tonight.

“Kathy,” he said again.

Was it possible? After all this time …

So many things were happening at once. School was over. The Titans’ minicamp began the day after tomorrow. The scrutiny of the press had grown more intense than ever. He liked the attention, liked being on the cover of Sports Illustrated, liked the awe in people’s faces when they spoke to him. Nice kid, they always said. Real nice. As though they expected him to be rude just because he could throw a pigskin with precision. As though he should somehow feel as though he belonged to a higher species, far above them, because he happened to be a good athlete.

Christian was excited. He was scared. He knew he had to think about the future. Myron had told him of the dangers and of how short-lived fame could be. Myron was, after all, a classic example. He had told Christian about the importance of cashing in now, that his career would at best last ten years. So much was at stake. So much. He was famous now, but there was a big difference between college famous and pro famous. Soon he’d have it all. Competition. Fame. Real money—not just the alumni secret handouts.…

But so what?

“Kathy …”

His phone rang.

Christian shot up, his heart beating like a rabbit’s. Fast reflexes. Sometimes they played against you. It was only the phone. Probably Charles or Eddie telling him, hey, it’s party time! They’d both gotten drafted too. Charles had gone in the second round to Dallas. Eddie in the fifth to the Rams.

He picked up the phone. “Hello?”

No response.

“Hello?” he said again.

Nothing. But the phone had not been hung up. Someone was there, silently holding the receiver to their ear.

“Who is this?”

Nothing.

Christian hung up. He began to lie back down when the phone rang again. He picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

Silence again. Christian tried to listen more closely. Nothing. Or—or was that breathing? Panic seized him. He couldn’t say why. It was just a prankster calling on his unlisted phone. It might even be Charles or Eddie playing some kind of joke. Nothing to get upset about.

Except he was upset.

He cleared his throat. “What do you want?”

Still nothing.

“If you call back again, I’ll call the cops.”

He slammed the phone down. His hand shook. He was just about to try to settle back down when he remembered something.

Star. Six. Nine.

The phone company had sent something in the mail today. There had been advertisements on the TV—a pregnant woman trying to get to the ringing phone, trudging across the room toward the phone, but when she arrived the caller had already hung up. Then what? She picked up the phone and the voice-over—Cliff Robertson’s or someone like that—said something like “You just missed the call. Was it important? Was it someone you wanted to talk to? There is only one way to find out. Press the star and then six and nine.” They demonstrated it on the screen now, in case anyone wasn’t sure how to use a phone. Then the voice-over continued. “You’ll be connected to your previous caller, even if the number is busy. We’ll keep dialing for you, leaving your phone line free to make or receive other calls.”

The pregnant woman listened to a phone ring and then spoke to her relieved husband, who was working on some drafting board at work.

Christian picked up the phone. Then he hit the star, the six, and the nine.

The phone rang.

He rubbed his chin. A moment later a robotic operator came on. “The number is currently busy. We will ring you back when the line is free. Thank you.”

Christian replaced the receiver. He sat up and waited. The partying was still going on. He could hear three or four distinct partying areas. Someone shouted, “Yahooo!” A window crashed. People cheered. His larger teammates were playing keg toss, a sort of discus throw involving beer kegs.

The phone rang.

He snatched the receiver as if it were a loose ball on the turf. The phone was ringing back the number—just like the pregnant lady’s on the television. After the fourth ring the phone was picked up.

An answering machine.

A voice said, “Hi. We’re not in right now. Please leave a message at the beep, and we’ll be sure to call you back. Thanks.”

The phone slipped from Christian’s grip. A chilly hand caressed the back of his neck. A sound—some kind of choking noise—escaped his lips. Christian tried to form words but he couldn’t.

The answering machine. The voice.

It was Kathy.

Chapter 5

Myron staggered into his office, punch-drunk from lack of sleep. He had not even bothered climbing into bed the night before. He tried to read, but the words swam in front of his eyes in meaningless waves. He put on the television. Nick at Nite, the cultural equivalent of aerosol cheese. Back-to-back episodes of F Troop for three hours. Larry Storch’s portrayal of Agarn was, in a phrase, pure thespian genius. Who knew that hitting someone repeatedly with a big hat could be so funny?

But not even such highbrow entertainment could stop his mind from going back to one thought: Jess was back. And like Win had said, it was no coincidence.

At midnight his mother had come down in her robe.

“Hon, you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“You seemed distracted all night.”

“It’s nothing. Just have a lot of work.”

She looked at him with her a-mother-is-psychic-and-knows look of disbelief. “Whatever you say.”

At the age of thirty-one Myron still lived at home. True, he had his own space, his own bedroom and bathroom in the basement. But there was no denying it. Myron still lived with Mommy and Daddy.

Five minutes after his mother had gone back to bed, Christian Steele called Myron on his private line, the one that rang softly in the basement so as not to wake up his parents, both of whom slept so lightly, Myron was sure they’d been some kind of ghetto lookouts in a previous life. He filled Myron in on the weird phone calls.

Myron was familiar with the star-six-nine, known as Return Call. The phone company charged on a “pay-per-use” basis—around seventy-five cents per use. The problem was, Return Call did not trace the number. It automatically redialed the number of the last incoming call received, not letting you know the number. Star-five-seven—Call Trace—would have done the job, though the number is merely reported to the local phone company, which gives it only to the proper authorities.

Still, Myron would call some of his old sources at the phone company, see what he could find out. He knew that star-six-nine worked only for certain local areas. That meant the call was not long distance. A start. Better than nothing. He would also put Caller ID or a trace on Christian’s phone. Taps were no longer like you saw on television, the hero anxiously trying to get the caller to stay on the line until it was completed. They were automatic. Caller ID actually showed you the incoming number before you picked up the phone.

But of course, none of that answered the larger questions:

Was it really Kathy’s voice Christian had heard? And if so, what did that mean?

Lots of preguntas. Not too many answers.

He approached Esperanza’s desk. “How’s it going?”

She pierced him with a glare, shook her head in disgust, and looked back down at her desk.

“Back on decaf?” he asked.

Another glare. Myron shrugged. “Any messages?”

A head shake. Esperanza muttered something. Myron thought he picked up the Spanish equivalent of “asswipe.”

“You want to tell me why you’re so upset?”

“Right,” she said bitingly. “Like you don’t know.”

“I don’t.”

The glare was back. Women had a talent for glares. Esperanza had a divine gift.

“Forget it,” he said. “Just get me Otto Burke on the phone.”

“Now?” Esperanza said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Won’t you be busy?”

“Just do it, please, okay? You’re starting to piss me off.”

“Oooo. I’m quaking.”

Myron shook his head. He had no time for her moods right now. He crossed the room and opened his office door. He stopped short.

“Hi.”

He cleared his throat and closed the door behind him. “Hello, Jessica.”

For most athletes, Jessica thought, the spotlight fades slowly. But for a tragic few, it vanishes as though from a sudden power failure, bathing the athlete in dazzling darkness.

Such was the case with Myron.

For most athletes the expectation game helps dim the light gradually. A high school star becomes a college bench warmer. The light dims. A college starter realizes he will not be the team’s high scorer. The light dims. The college superstar realizes he will never make it to the pros. The light dims. And then there are those very few, those who are one in a million, those with almost Wolfean “right stuff,” who become professional athletes.

For those, the light is blinding, forever damaging the vision of the ones who stare directly into it. That was what made the dimming so important. An athlete could get used to losing the light slowly. His career would peak before tapering off just slightly. He would brighten from the inexperienced rookie to the player in his prime, and then the light would begin to fade as he moved past seasoned vet.

For Myron that had not happened.

He had been one of those select few who basked in the most potent wattage imaginable, as if the spotlight shone on him and from inside of him. His basketball talent had first became apparent in the sixth grade. He had gone on to break every scoring and rebounding record in Essex County, New Jersey, a perennial basketball stronghold. Myron was short for a forward, a program six-six (really only six-four), but he was a physical brute, a bull, and a hell of a leaper for a white man. He was highly recruited, chose Duke, and won two NCAA titles in four years.

The Boston Celtics had drafted him in the first round, the eighth pick overall. Myron’s spotlight grew impossibly bright.

And then the fuse blew.

A freak injury, they called it. It was a preseason game against the Washington Bullets. Two players weighing a combined six hundred pounds sandwiched the rookie Myron Bolitar. The doctors threw all kind of terms at the man-child who had never been injured before, not even a twisted ankle. Multiple fractures, they said. Shattered kneecap. Casts. Wheelchair. Crutches. Cane.

Years.

Sixteen months later Myron could walk, though the limp lasted another two years. He never came back. His career was over. The only life he had ever known had been stripped from him. The press had done a story or two, but Myron was quickly forgotten.

Complete blackout.

Jessica frowned. Spotlight. Bad metaphor. Too cliché and inaccurate. She shook her head and looked up at him.

“That explains it,” Myron said.

“Explains what?”

“Esperanza’s mood.”

“Oh.” She smiled at him. “I told her we had an appointment. She didn’t seem pleased to see me.”

“No kidding.”

“She’d still kill me for a nickel, huh?”

“Or half that much,” he replied. “Want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

He picked up his phone. “Can you get me a black coffee? Thanks.” He put the receiver back in its cradle and looked up at her.

“How’s Win?” she asked.

“Good.”

“His family owns the building?”

“Yes.”

“I understand Win’s become quite a financial whiz—despite himself.”

Myron nodded, waited.

“So you’re still hanging around with Win,” she continued. “You still have Esperanza. Not a lot changes.”

“Plenty changes,” he said.

Esperanza appeared at the door, the scowl still on her face. “Otto Burke was in a meeting.”

“Try Larry Hanson.”

She handed the coffee to Jessica, smiled eerily, and left. Jessica studied the cup. “Think she spat in it?”

“Probably,” Myron replied.

She put it down. “I need to cut back anyway.”

Myron moved around his desk and sat down. The wall behind him was covered with theater posters. All musicals. His fingers drummed the desk.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she said. “I wanted to surprise you, catch you off guard. Not the other way around.”

“Still seeking the upper hand?”

“I guess so, yeah. Old habit.”

He shrugged but said nothing.

“I need your help,” she said.

He waited.

She took a breath and plunged. “The police say my father was killed in a robbery attempt. I don’t believe it.”

“What do you believe?” he asked.

“I think his murder has something to do with Kathy.”

Myron was not surprised. He leaned forward, his eyes never staying on hers for very long. “What makes you say that?”

“The police dismiss it as a coincidence,” she said simply. “I’m not big on coincidences.”

“What about your dad’s friend on the force, what’s-his-name?”

“Paul Duncan.”

“Right, him. Have you spoken to him?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

She began tapping her foot, an old, subconscious, annoying habit. She made herself stop. “Paul says it was a robbery too. He spews out all the facts about the crime scene, the missing wallet, the missing jewelry, that kind of thing. He is perfectly logical and objective, which is not his way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Paul Duncan is a passionate man. A hothead. Here his best friend has been murdered, and he seems almost blasé about it. It’s not like him.” She stopped, shifted in her chair. “Something isn’t right here, I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Myron rubbed his chin but kept quiet.

“Look, you know I was never very close to my father,” she continued. “He wasn’t an easy man to love. He was far better with his corpses than with breathing entities. He liked the idea of family, the concept—it was the actual execution he found wearisome. But I still have to find out the truth. For Kathy.”

“How did your father and Kathy get along?” Myron asked.

She thought about it a moment. “Better lately. When we were kids, they weren’t very close. Kathy was a mama’s girl, always hanging around my mom, wanting to be like her, the whole bit. But when she vanished, I’d venture to guess she was closer to my dad than my mom. He was crushed when she disappeared. He became obsessed. No, ‘obsessed’ isn’t strong enough. All of us were obsessed, of course. But not like my father. It consumed him entirely. Everything about him changed. He had always been the quiet county medical examiner, the man who made no waves. Now he was using his position to keep the pressure on twenty-four hours a day. He became paranoid, convinced the police weren’t doing all they could do to find her. He even started his own investigation.”

“Did he find anything?”

“No. Not that I know of.”

Myron looked away. At the far wall. A movie still of the Marx Brothers. A Night at the Opera. Groucho looked back but offered no answers.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing. Go on.”

“There isn’t much else. I can only tell you that my father was acting very strangely the past few weeks. He started calling me all the time when previously we’d only talked maybe three times a year, sounding a little teary. It was like he was play-acting the part of perfect Daddy with renewed vigor. I couldn’t tell if it was a serious change or just a phase.”

Myron nodded, looking off again. He said nothing. Jessica almost thought he’d completely drifted off when he finally spoke, his voice almost inaudibly soft. “What do you think happened to Kathy?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

“I—” She stopped. “I miss her. It’s … I don’t want to think she’s dead.”

He nodded again. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Look into it. Find out what’s going on.”

“Assuming something is going on.”

“Right.”

“Why me?”

She thought about it a moment. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I thought you’d believe me. I thought you’d help.”

“I’ll help,” he said. “But understand one thing: I have an important business interest in settling this whole thing.”

“Christian?”

“I’m his agent,” he continued. “I’m responsible for his well-being.”

“He still misses my sister,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Is he okay?”

Myron’s face remained set. “He’s fine.”

“He’s a good kid. I like him.”

Myron nodded.

Jessica rose and stepped toward the window. Myron averted his eyes. He did not like to look at her for too long at one time. She understood. It hurt her too. She looked down at Park Avenue, twelve stories below. A taxi driver with a turban was shaking his fist at an old woman with a cane. The old woman whacked him and ran. The driver fell. The turban did not even shift.

“Hiding your feelings from me has never been your forte,” she said, still staring out the window. “What don’t you want to tell me?”

He did not reply.

“Myron …”

Esperanza saved him, bursting through the door without knocking. “Larry Hanson is out of the office,” she said.

Win came in behind her. “I got something for us on that magazine.…” His voice died out when he saw Jessica.

“Hi, Win,” she said.

“Hello, Jessica Culver.” They embraced. “My goodness, you look utterly fantastic. I read an article on you the other day, calling you the Literary Sex Symbol.”

“You shouldn’t read such trash.”

“It was in my dentist’s waiting room. Honest.”

An uncomfortable pause followed. Esperanza broke it by pointing at Jessica, making a gagging motion by sticking her finger in her mouth, and then storming out.

“Ever the enchantress,” Jessica muttered.

Myron stood. “Where are you staying?”

“At my mom’s.”

“Same number?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll call you later. Right now I’ve got to go with Win.”

Jessica looked toward Win. He grinned at her. His face, as always, gave away nothing. “I have a meeting with my editor this afternoon,” she said. “But I’ll be home all night.”

“Fine. I’ll call you then.”

An awkward impasse. No one knew exactly how to say good-bye. A wave? A handshake? A kiss?

“We’ve got to go,” Myron said. He sprinted past her, never getting too close. Win shrugged at her in a what-can-you-do fashion and followed. She watched them disappear around the corner. Batman and Robin heading to the Bat-poles.

She left then. She had seen Myron twice now, and they had not yet touched—not even brushed up against one another.

It was an odd thing to wonder about.

Chapter 6

“What did you find out?” Myron asked.

Win whipped the wheel to the right. The Jag XJR responded with nary a squeal. They had been driving without speaking for the past ten minutes, Win’s CD player the only sound. Win favored show tunes. Man of La Mancha was on now. Don Quixote serenaded his beloved Dulcinea.

“Nips magazine is published by HDP,” Win answered.

“HDP?”

“Hot Desire Press.” Another Bat-turn. The Jag accelerated past eighty.

“Speed limits,” Myron said. “Heard of them?”

Win ignored him. “Their editorial office is located in Fort Lee, New Jersey.”

“Editorial office?”

“Whatever. We have an appointment with Mr. Fred Nickler, managing editor.”

“His mother must be proud.”

“Moralizing,” Win mused. “Nice.”

“What did you tell Mr. Nickler?” Myron asked.

“Nothing. I called and asked if we could see him. He said yes. Seemed like a very pleasant fellow.”

“I’m sure he’s a prince.” Myron looked out the window. Buildings blurred. They fell back into silence. “You’re probably wondering what Jessica was doing in my office.”

Win gave a halfhearted shrug. It was not his way to pry.

“It’s her father’s murder. The police say it was a robbery. She thinks otherwise.”

“How does she see it?”

“She thinks there’s a connection between his murder and Kathy.”

“So the plot thickens. Are we going to help her?”

“Yes.”

“Goodie. So do we think there is a connection?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Win agreed.

They pulled into the driveway of a building that could have been either a nice warehouse or low-rent office space. No elevator, but then again, only three levels. HDP, Inc., was on the second floor. When they entered the outer office, Myron was a bit surprised. He was not sure what he’d expected, but he had thought the dwellings of a sleaze merchant would not be so … nondescript. The walls were white with inexpensive but tastefully framed art posters—McKnight, Fanch, Behrens. Mostly scenery shots of beaches and sunset. Nothing with naked breasts. Surprise number one. Surprise number two was the unremarkable receptionist. She was strictly standard issue, not an overaged, bleach-blond, flabby ex-bunny/sexpot/porno starlet with a breathy giggle and seductive wink.

Myron was almost disappointed.

“May I help you?” the receptionist asked.

Win said, “We’re here to see Mr. Nickler.”

“Your names, please?”

“Windsor Lockwood and Myron Bolitar.”

She picked up the phone, buzzed in, and a moment later said, “Right through that door.”

Nickler greeted them with a firm handshake. He was dressed in a blue suit, red tie, white shirt—conservative as a Republican senatorial candidate. Surprise number three. Myron had expected gold chains or a Joey Buttafuoco earring or at the very least a pinkie ring. But Fred Nickler wore no jewelry, except for a plain wedding band. His hair was gray, his complexion a bit washed out.

Win whispered, “He looks like your uncle Sid.”

It was true. The publisher of Nips magazine looked like Sidney Griffin, popular suburban orthodontist.

“Please have a seat,” Nickler said, moving back behind his desk. He smiled at Myron. “I was at the Final Four when you guys beat Kansas. Twenty-seven points including the game winner. Hell of a performance. Incredible.”

“Thank you,” Myron said.

“Never seen anything like it. The way that final shot kissed the backboard.”

“Thank you.”

“Just incredible.” Nickler renewed his smile, shaking his head in awe at the memory. Then he sat back. “So, what can I do for you gentlemen?”

Myron said, “We have a couple of questions about an ad in one of your, uh, publications.”

“Which one?”

“Nips.” Saying the word felt grungy. Myron tried not to make a face.

“Interesting,” Nickler replied.

“What makes you say that?”

“Nips is a relatively new publication, and it’s doing poorly—far and away the worst of HDP’s monthlies. I’m going to give it another month or two, and then it’ll probably fold.”

“How many magazines do you publish?”

“Six.”

“Are they all like Nips?”

Nickler chuckled lightly. “They are all pornographic magazines, yes. And they are all completely legal.”

Myron handed him the magazine Christian had given him. “When was this printed?”

Fred Nickler barely glanced at it. “Four days ago.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s our most recent issue—they’ve barely hit the stands. I’m surprised you found one.”

Myron opened to the proper page. “We’d like to know who paid for this advertisement.”

Nickler put on a pair of half-moon glasses. “Which one?”

“Bottom row. The Lust Line.”

“Oh,” he said. “A sex phone.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No. But this ad wasn’t paid for.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s the nature of the business,” Nickler explained. “Someone calls me up to place an ad for a dial-a-porn line. I tell him it costs X amount. He says, wow, I’m just starting out, I can’t afford it. So if it looks like a good idea, I go in fifty-fifty with him. In other words, I take care of the marketing, if you will, while my partner takes care of the technical side—phones, cables, girls to work the phones, whatever else. Then we split it down the middle. It limits both of our risks.”

“Do you do this a lot?”

He nodded. “Ninety percent of my advertising comes for fantasy lines. I’d say I have a piece of the action in three-quarters of them.”

“Can you give us the name of your partner on this particular venture?”

Nickler studied the picture in the magazine. “You’re not with the police, are you?”

“No.”

“Private investigators?”

“No.”

He took off his glasses. “I’m fairly small-time,” he said. “I have my own little niche. It’s the way I like it. No one bothers me, and I don’t bother anybody else. I have no interest in a lot of publicity.”

Myron shot a glance at Win. Nickler had a family, probably a nice house in Tenafly, told the neighbors he was in publishing. Pressure could be applied. “I’ll be frank with you,” Myron said. “If you don’t help us out, it may blow up into something major. Newspapers, TV, the works.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Absolutely not.” Myron reached into his wallet and took out a fifty-dollar bill. He placed it on the desk. “We just want to know who put this ad in.”

Nickler pushed the bill back toward Myron, his expression suddenly irritated. “What is this, a movie? I don’t need a payoff. If the guy has done something wrong, I want no part of him. This business has enough problems as it is. I run a straight operation. No underage girls, nothing illegal in any way, shape, or form.”

Myron looked at Win. “Told you he was a prince.”

“Think what you want,” Nickler said in a voice that said he’d been down this road many times before. “This is a business like any other. I’m just an honest guy trying to make an honest buck.”

“Real American of you.”

He shrugged. “Look, I don’t defend everything about this business. But there are plenty of worse. IBM, Exxon, Union Carbide—these are the real monsters, the real exploiters. I don’t steal. I don’t lie. I satisfy a societal need.”

Myron had a quick comeback, but Win stopped him with a shake of his head. He was right. What was the point in antagonizing the guy?

“Could we have the name and address, please?” Myron asked.

Nickler opened a drawer behind him and pulled out a file. “Is he in some sort of trouble?”

“We just need to talk to him.”

“Can you tell me why?”

Win spoke to Nickler for the first time. “You don’t want to know.”

Fred Nickler hesitated, saw Win’s steady gaze, then nodded. “The company is called ABC. They have a p.o. box in Hoboken, number 785. The guy’s name is Jerry. I don’t know anything else about him.”

“Thanks,” Myron said, standing. “One more question if you don’t mind: Have you ever seen the girl in the ad?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“If you do or if you think of anything else, will you give me a call?” Myron handed him a card.

Nickler looked as if he wanted to ask a question, his gaze continually drifting back to Kathy’s photograph, but he settled for saying “Sure.”

Once outside, Win asked, “What do you think?”

“He’s lying,” Myron said.

Back in the car Myron asked, “Can I use the phone?”

Win nodded, his foot not slackening on the pedal. The speedometer was hovering at seventy-five. Myron watched it as if it were a taxi meter on a long ride, keeping his gaze averted from the blur of a street.

Myron dialed the office. Esperanza answered the phone after one ring.

“MB SportReps.”

MB SportReps. The M stood for Myron, the B for Bolitar. Myron had thought of the name himself, though he rarely bragged about it. “Did Otto Burke or Larry Hanson call?”

“No. But you have lots of messages.”

“Nothing from Burke or Hanson?”

“You deaf?”

“I’ll be back in a little while.”

Myron hung up. Otto and Larry should have called by now. They were avoiding him. The question was, why?

“Trouble?” Win asked.

“Maybe.”

“I believe we need a rejuvenation.”

Myron looked up. He recognized the street immediately. “Not now, Win.”

“Now.”

“I have to get back to the office.”

“It’ll keep. You need inner energy. You need focus. You need balance.”

“I hate it when you talk like that.”

Win smiled, pulling into the parking lot. “Come along now. I’d hate to kick your ass right here in the car.”

The sign read MASTER KWAN’S TAE KWON DO SCHOOL. Kwan was nearing seventy now and rarely conducted classes any longer, choosing instead to hire well-tutored underlings to handle that work. Master Kwan stayed in his high-tech office, surrounded by four television screens so he could monitor the classes. Occasionally he leaned forward and barked something into a microphone, scaring some poor student into attention. Like something out of The Wizard of Oz.

If Master Kwan’s English improved a bit, it might reach the level of pidgin. Win had brought him over from Korea fourteen years ago, when Win was only seventeen. It seemed to Myron that Master Kwan had spoken better English back then.

Win and Myron changed into their white uniforms called dobok. Both men wrapped black belts around their stomachs. Win was a sixth-degree black belt, about as high a ranking as anybody in the United States. He had been studying tae kwon do since the age of seven. Myron had picked it up in college, giving him a dozen years of studying and a third-degree black belt.

They approached Master Kwan’s door, paused in the doorway until he acknowledged their presence, then bowed at the waist. “Good afternoon, Master Kwan,” they said in unison.

Kwan smiled toothlessly. “You here early.”

“Yes, sir,” Win replied.

“Need help?”

“No, sir.”

Kwan dismissed them by spinning back to his television screens. Myron and Win bowed once more and moved into the private dojang for the upper-ranked black belts. They began with meditation, something Myron had never quite gotten the full grasp of. Win loved it. He did it for at least an hour a day. Win folded himself into a lotus position. Myron settled for sitting Indian style. Both men closed their eyes, placed their thumbs on the palm directly below the pinkie, and tilted their palms toward the ceiling. They rested their hands on their knees. Instructions echoed through Myron’s mind like a mantra. Back straight. Bottom of tongue curled up against the back of the upper teeth. He breathed in through his nose for six seconds, concentrating on pushing the air down into the pit of his gut, making sure that his chest did not move, that only his abdomen expanded. Then he held the air down deep, counting to himself to prevent his mind from wandering. After seven seconds he slowly released the air through the mouth for a ten count, making sure to empty completely his contracting gut. Then he waited four seconds before breathing in again.

Win did this painlessly. He did not count. His mind went blank. Myron always counted, needing it to keep his mind from wandering back to the problems of the day—especially on a day like today. But in spite of himself he began to relax, to feel the tension leave his body with every long exhalation. It almost tingled.

They meditated for ten minutes before Win opened his eyes and said, “Barro.” Korean for stop.

They performed deep stretching exercises for the next twenty minutes. Win had the flexibility of a ballet dancer, performing full splits effortlessly. Myron had gained a lot of flexibility since taking up tae kwon do. He believed it had helped him gain six inches on his vertical leap in college. He could almost do a full split, but he couldn’t hold it long.

In short Myron was flexible; Win was Gumby.

They went through their forms or poomse next, a complicated set of moves not unlike a violent dance step. What many exercised-crazed junkies never realized is that the martial arts are the ultimate aerobic workout. You are in constant motion—jumping, turning, spinning—propelling both arms and both legs nonstop for a half hour at a time. Low block and front kick, high block and punch, middle block and roundhouse kick. Inside blocks, outside blocks, knife-hand, fists, palm strikes, knees and elbows. It was an exhausting and exhilarating workout.

Win moved through his routine flawlessly—ever the contradiction and deception. See Win on the street, and people said arrogant Waspy wimp who couldn’t bruise a peach with his best punch. See him in a dojang, and he struck fear and awe. Tae kwon do is considered a martial art. Art. The word was not used by accident. Win was an artist, the best Myron had ever seen.

Myron remembered the first time he’d seen Win demonstrate his talent. They were freshmen in college. A group of large football players decided to shave Win’s blond locks because they didn’t like the way he looked. Five of them sneaked into Win’s room late at night—four to hold down his arms and legs and one to carry the razor and shaving cream.

Simply put, the football team had a poor season that year. Too many guys on the injured list.

Myron and Win finished up with light free sparring. Then they dropped to the mat and performed one hundred push-ups on their fists—Win counting out loud in Korean. That done, they sat again for meditation, this time lasting fifteen minutes.

“Barro,” Win said.

Both men opened their eyes.

“Feeling more focused?” Win asked. “Feeling the flow of energy? The balance?”

“Yes, Grasshopper. You want me to snatch the pebble from your hand now?”

Win moved from his lotus position into a full stance in one graceful, effortless move. “So,” he said, “have you reached any decisions?”

“Yes.” Myron struggled to stand in one motion, tipping from side to side as he ascended. “I’m going to tell Jessica everything.”

Chapter 7

Yellow stick-on phone messages swarmed Myron’s phone like locusts on a carcass. Myron peeled them away and shuffled through them. Nothing from Otto Burke or Larry Hanson or anyone in the Titans organization.

Not good.

He strapped on his headset telephone. He had resisted using one for a long time, figuring they were more suited for air traffic controllers than agents, but he quickly learned that an agent is but a fetus, his office a womb, his telephone an umbilical cord. It was easier with the headset. He could walk around; he could keep his hands free; he could forgo neck cramps from cradling a phone against his shoulder.

His first call was to the advertising director for BurgerCity, a new fast-food chain. They wanted to sign up Christian and were offering pretty good money, but Myron wasn’t sure about it. BurgerCity was only regional. A national chain might come up with a better offer. Sometimes the hardest part of the job was saying no. He’d discuss the pros and cons with Christian, let him make the final decision. In the end it was his name. His money.

Myron had already signed Christian to several very lucrative endorsement deals. Wheaties would have Christian’s likeness on cereal boxes starting in October. Diet Pepsi was coming up with some promotion involving Christian throwing a two-liter bottle on a perfect spiral to nubile women. Nike was developing a sweatsuit line and cleats known as the Steele Trap.

Christian stood to earn millions from endorsements, far more than he would make playing for the Titans, no matter how reasonable Otto Burke wanted to be. It was strange in a way. Fans grew agitated at the idea of a player trying to get the most out of his playing contract. They called him boorish, selfish, and egomaniacal when he demanded a great deal of money from a wealthy team owner—but they had no problem when he grabbed vault-loads from Pepsi or Nike or Wheaties for promoting products he’d probably never used or even liked. It made no sense. Christian would make more money for spending three days shooting a thirty-second hypocritical spot than he would for spending the season getting blindsided by drooling men with overactive pituitary glands—and that was how the fans wanted it.

No agent minded that setup. Most agents got between three and five percent of their players’ total negotiated salary (Myron took four percent), compared with twenty or twenty-five percent for all endorsement money. (Myron took fifteen percent—hey, he was new.) In other words, sign a million-dollar deal with a team, and the agent gets around forty grand. Sign him for a million-dollar commercial, and the agent can nab as much as a quarter mil.

Myron’s second call was to Ricky Lane, a running back for the New York Jets and a former college teammate of Christian’s. Ricky was one of his most important clients, and Myron was fairly certain it had been Ricky who’d convinced Christian to hire him in the first place.

“I have a kids’ camp appearance for you,” Myron began. “They’re paying five grand.”

“Sounds good,” Ricky said. “How long do I have to be there?”

“Couple hours. Do a little talk, sign a few autographs, that kind of thing.”

“When?”

“A week from Saturday.”

“What about that mall appearance?”

“That’s Sunday,” Myron said. “Livingston Mall. Morley’s Sporting Goods.” Ricky would get paid another five thousand dollars for sitting at a table for two hours and signing autographs.

“Cool.”

“You want me to send a limo to pick you up?”

“No, I’ll drive. You hear anything about next year’s contract yet?”

“We’re getting there, Ricky. Another week at the most. Listen, I want you to come in and see Win soon, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You in shape?”

“The best of my life,” Ricky said. “I want that starting job.”

“Keep working. And don’t forget to make that appointment with Win.”

“Will do. Later, Myron.”

“Yeah, later.”

The calls continued, one blurring into another. He returned calls from the press. They all wanted to know about a pending deal between the Titans and Christian. Myron politely no-commented. Occasionally it was good to use the media as leverage in negotiating, but not with Otto Burke. Matters were proceeding, he told them. An agreement could be expected at any time.

He then called Joe Norris, an old-time Yankee who appeared almost every weekend at a baseball card show. Joe made more in a month now than he had in an entire season in his heyday.

Next up was Linda Regal, a tennis pro who had just cracked the top ten. Linda was worried about aging, offended because a broadcaster had referred to her as a “familiar veteran.” Linda was almost twenty.

Eric Kramer, a UCLA senior and probable second round NFL draft pick, was in town. Myron managed to arrange a dinner with him. That meant Myron was a finalist—he and a zillion other agents. The competition was incredible. Example: There are twelve hundred NFL-authorized agents who court the two hundred college players who will be drafted in April. Something has to give. It’s usually ethics.

Myron called the New York Jets general manager, Sam Logan, to discuss Ricky Lane’s contract.

“The kid is in the best shape of his career,” Myron raved. He stood and paced. Myron had a large, fairly gorgeous office on Park Avenue between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets. It impressed people, and appearance was important in a business dominated by sleazeballs “I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m telling you, Sam, the kid is Gayle Sayers all over again. It’s amazing, really.”

“He’s too small,” Logan said.

“What are you talking about? Is Barry Sanders too small? Is Emmitt Smith too small? Ricky’s bigger than both of them. And he’s been lifting. I’m telling you, he’s going to be a great one.”

“Uh-huh. Look, Myron, he’s a nice kid. He works hard. But I can’t go any higher than …”

The number was still too low. But it was better.

The calls continued without a break. Sometime during the day Esperanza brought him a sandwich, which he inhaled.

At eight o’clock Myron placed his final office call of the day.

Jessica answered. “Hello?”

“I’ll be at your house in an hour,” Myron said. “We need to talk.”

Myron watched Jessica’s face for a reaction. She kept looking at the magazine as if it were just another issue of Newsweek, her expression frighteningly passive. Every once in a while she nodded, looked over the rest of the page, and glanced at the front and back covers of the magazine, always returning to the picture of Kathy. She was so nonchalant, Myron almost expected her to whistle.

Only her knuckles gave her away. They were bloodless white, the pages crinkling in her death grip.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice calm, almost soothing. “You said Christian got this in the mail?”

“Yes.”

“And you and Win spoke to the man who publishes this”—she hesitated, her face finally showing some signs of disgust—“this thing?”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “Did he give you the address of whoever put this ad in?”

“Just a p.o. box. I’m going to scout it out tomorrow, see who picks up the mail.”

She looked up for the first time. “I’ll go with you.”

He almost protested but stopped himself. He didn’t stand a chance. “Okay.”

“When did Christian give this to you?”

“Yesterday.”

That got her attention. “You knew about this yesterday?”

He nodded.

“And you didn’t tell me?” she snapped. “I was pouring my heart out to you, feeling like some paranoid schizophrenic, and you knew about this the whole time?”

“I wasn’t sure how to tell you.”

“Anything else you haven’t told me?”

“Christian got a phone call last night. He thinks it was from Kathy.”

“What?”

He quickly told her about it. When he reached the part about Christian hearing Kathy’s voice, her face drained of all color.

“Has your friend at the phone company learned anything?” she asked.

“No. But we know Return Call only works for specific towns within the 201 area codes.”

“How many towns?”

“About three-quarters of them.”

“So you’re talking about three-quarters of the northern part of New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the U.S.? That limits it down to what, two, three million people?”

“It’s not a big help,” he admitted, “but it’s something.”

Her eyes settled back on the magazine. “I didn’t mean to jump all over you. It’s just—”

“Forget it.”

“You’re the best person I’ve ever known,” she said. “I mean that.”

“And you’re the biggest pain in the ass.”

“Tough to argue that one,” she said, but there was a hint of a smile.

“Do you want to tell the police about this?” he asked. “Or Paul Duncan?”

She thought a moment. “I’m not sure.”

“The press will eat it up,” he said. “They’ll drag Kathy through the mud.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what the press does.”

“I’m just telling you,” Myron said.

“They can call her a slut a million different ways. I don’t care.”

“What about your mom?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what she wants either. I just want Kathy found.”

“So you want to tell them,” Myron said.

“No.”

He looked at her, confused. “Care to elaborate?”

Her words came slow, measured, the ideas coming to her even as she spoke. “Kathy has been gone for more than a year now,” she began. “In all that time the cops and the press have come up with zip. Not one thing. She’s just vanished without a trace.”

“So?”

“But now we get this magazine. Someone sent it to Christian, which means someone—maybe Kathy, maybe not—is trying to make contact. Think about it. For the first time in over a year there is some form of communication. I don’t want that taken away. I don’t want a lot of attention scaring away whoever is out there. Kathy might disappear again. This”—she held up the magazine—“this thing is disgusting, but it’s also encouraging. It’s something. Don’t get me wrong. I’m shocked by this. But it’s a solid thread—a thread as confusing as all hell, but nonetheless a thread of hope. If the cops and the press are called in, whoever did this might get scared and vanish again. Permanently this time. I can’t risk that. We have to keep this to ourselves.”

Myron nodded. “Makes sense.”

“So what’s next?” she asked.

“We go to the post office in Hoboken. I’ll pick you up early. Say six.”

Chapter 8

Jessica smelled great.

They were at Uptown Station in Hoboken. She stood very close to him. Her hair had that freshly washed smell he had tried for four years to forget. Inhaling made him feel light-headed.

“So this is playing detective,” she said.

“Exciting, isn’t it?”

They had been trying to look inconspicuous—no easy task when a man is six-four and a woman is a total knee-knocker—for the better part of an hour, having arrived at the post office at six-thirty in the morning. No one had touched Box 785 yet.

Boredom set in quickly. Jessica looked over the prices of different mailing containers. Not very interesting. She read the wanted ads, all of them, found them a bit more interesting. Wanted posters in a post office. Like they wanted you to write the guy a letter.

“You sure know how to show a girl a good time,” she said.

“That’s why they call me Captain Fun.”

She laughed. The melodic sound twisted his stomach.

“Do you like being an agent, Captain Fun?”

“Very much.”

“I always thought of agents as a bunch of sleazeballs.”

“Thank you.”

“You know what I mean. Leeches. Vipers. Greedy, money-hungry, bloodsucking parasites, swindling naïve jocks, doing lunch at Le Cirque, destroying everything that’s good about sports—”

“The problems in the Middle East,” he interrupted. “That’s our fault too. And the budget deficit.”

“Right. But you’re not any of those things.”

“Not a leech, viper, or parasite. That’s quite a rave.”

“You know what I mean.”

He shrugged. “There are plenty of sleazy agents. There are also plenty of sleazy doctors, lawyers—” He stopped, the words sounding familiar. Hadn’t Fred Nickler used the same argument in justifying his magazines? “Agents are a necessary evil,” he continued. “Without them, athletes get taken advantage of.”

“By whom?”

“Owners, management. Agents have done some good for the athletes. They’ve helped raise their salaries, assure free agency, get them endorsement money.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Myron thought a moment. “Two things,” he said. “First of all, some agents are crooks. Plain and simple. They see a young, rich kid, and they take advantage. But as the athletes get more sophisticated, as more stories like what happened to Kareem Abdul-Jabar become known, most of the crooks will be weeded out.”

“And second?”

“Agents have to wear too many hats,” he said. “We’re negotiators, accountants, financial planners, hand-holders, travel agents, family counselors, marriage counselors, errand boys, lackeys—whatever it takes to get the business.”

“So how do you do it all?”

“I give two of the biggest hats to Win—accountant and financial planner. I’m the lawyer. He’s the MBA. Plus we have Esperanza, who can do almost anything. It works well. We all check and balance one another.”

“Just like the branches of the federal government.”

He nodded. “Jefferson and Madison would be proud.”

A hand reached out and opened Box 785.

“Show time,” Myron said.

Jessica snapped her head around to look. The man was slim. Everything about him was too long, eerily elongated, as if he had spent time on a medieval rack. Even his face seemed stretched like a cartoon imprint on Silly Putty.

“Recognize him?” Myron asked.

She hesitated. “Something about him … but I don’t think so.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here.”

They hurried down the steps and got in the car. Myron had parked illegally in front of the building, putting a police emergency sign in his front windshield. A gift from a friend on the force. The emergency sign came in handy—especially during sale days at the mall.

The slim man came out two minutes later. He got into a yellow Oldsmobile. New Jersey plates. Myron shifted into drive and followed. Slim took Route 3 to the Garden State Parkway north.

“We’ve been driving almost twenty minutes,” Jessica said. “Why would he go to a mailbox so far from his home?”

“Could be that he’s not going to his house. Maybe he’s going to work.”

“The dial-a-porn office?”

“Maybe,” Myron said. “Or it could be that he travels a long way so no one will see him.”

He got off at Exit 160, jumped on Route 208 heading north, and pulled off at Lincoln Avenue, Ridgewood.

Jessica sat up. “This is my exit,” she said.

“I know.”

“What the hell is going on here?”

The yellow Oldsmobile turned left at the end of the ramp. They were now within three miles of Jessica’s house. If he took Lincoln Avenue all the way to Godwin Road, they’d be …

Nope.

Mr. Slim turned on Kenmore Road, a half-mile before the Ridgewood border. They were still in the heart of suburbia—the suburb in question being Glen Rock, New Jersey. Glen Rock was so named because of a giant rock that sat on Rock Road. The key word here is rock.

The yellow Olds pulled into a driveway. 78 Kenmore Drive.

“Look casual,” he said. “Don’t stare.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer. He drove past the house without pausing, turned at the next street, and stopped the car behind some shrubs. He picked up the car phone and dialed the office. It was picked up midway through the first ring.

“MB SportReps,” Esperanza said.

“Get me all you can on 78 Kenmore Street, Glen Rock, New Jersey. Owner’s name, credit check, the works.”

“Got it.” Click.

He dialed another number. “My friend at the phone company,” he explained to Jessica. Then: “Lisa? It’s Myron. Look, I need a favor. Seventy-eight Kenmore Road, Glen Rock, New Jersey. I don’t know how many lines the guy has, but I need you to check them all. I want to know every number he calls for the next two hours. Right. Hey, what did you find out about that 900 number? What? Oh, okay, I understand. Thanks.”

He hung up.

“What did she say?”

“The 900 number isn’t operated by the phone company. Some small outfit out of South Carolina takes care of it. She can’t get anything on it.”

“So what do we do now?” she asked. “Just watch his house?”

“No. I go inside. You wait here.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“You were the one who didn’t want to scare anyone away,” he continued. “If this guy has something to do with your sister, how do you think he’ll react to seeing you?”

She folded her arms across her chest and fumed. She knew he was right, but that didn’t mean she had to be happy about it. “Go,” she said.

He got out of the car. It was one of those no-variety neighborhoods, each house cookie-cut from the same mold—split-levels on three-quarters of an acre. Sometimes the house was backward, the kitchen on the right instead of the left. Most had aluminum siding. The street reeked of middle class.

Myron knocked. The thin man opened the door.

“Jerry?”

Slim’s face registered confusion. Up close he was better looking, his face more brooding than freakish. Give him a cigarette and a black turtleneck, and he could be reading poetry in a village café. “May I help you?”

“Jerry, I’m—”

“You must have the wrong house. My name isn’t Jerry.”

“You look like Jerry.”

Something dark crossed his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, closing the door. “I really don’t have time right now.”

“Sure about that, Jer?”

“I already told you—”

“Do you know Kathy Culver?”

It was a sneak attack. And it drew blood. “Wha—what’s this all about?” he snapped.

“I think you know.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Myron Bolitar.”

“Am I supposed to know you?”

“Well, if you’re a big basketball fan … actually, no. But I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I have nothing to say.”

Ace of spades time. Myron pulled out the magazine. “Sure about that, Jerry?”

The whites of Slim’s eyes grew tenfold, looking like Wedgwood china on the elongated face. “You have me mixed up with someone else. Good-bye.”

He slammed the door.

Myron shrugged, headed back to the car.

“Well?” Jessica asked.

“We shook him,” Myron said. “Let’s see what falls out.”

The neighborhood newsstand.

Win remembered a time when the phrase conjured up nostalgia and Rockwellian images of real America. No more. Any street, any corner, any hickville town was the same. Candy, newspapers, greeting cards—and porno mags. Kids could pick up a Snickers bar and get an eyeful, all in one. Porno had become a staple of American life. Hardcore porn. The kind of porn that made Penthouse look like Highlights magazine.

Win approached the man behind the lottery ticket dispenser. “Pardon me,” Win said.

“Yeah?”

“Would you be able to tell me if you have the most recent issues of Climaxx, Jiz, Orgasm Today, Licks, Quim, and Nips?”

An elderly woman gasped and gave him an icy stare. Win smiled at her. “Let me guess,” he said. “Playmate of the Month, June 1926?”

She made a harumph noise and turned away.

“Check over there,” the man said. “Between the comic books and Disney videos.”

“Thank you.”

Win found three of them—Climaxx, Orgasm Today, and Quim. He tried three other newsstands and was able to pick up Lick, but there was no sign of Jiz or Nips. He finally found copies of them at a hardcore shop on Forty-second Street called King David’s Smut Palace. They had a big sign out front that said OPEN 24 HOURS. How very convenient. Win considered himself fairly worldly, but the items and photographs in the “palace” proved that both his life experiences and his imagination had at best been limited.

It was almost noon when he exited the palace. A productive and quasi-educational morning.

With a total of six magazines lodged under his arm, Win caught a taxi to midtown. He skimmed through a few in the backseat.

“So far so good,” he said out loud.

The driver glanced at him in the rearview mirror, shrugged, looked back to the road.

When Win arrived at his office, he spread the magazines across the vast breadth of his desk. He studied them closely, comparing them. Incredible. His suspicion had been sound. It was just as he thought.

Five minutes later, Win put the magazines in his desk drawer. Then he buzzed Esperanza.

“Kindly send Myron to my office as soon as he comes in.”

Chapter 9

“I have a confession,” Jessica said.

They were coming out of the Kinney garage on Fifty-second Street, the smell of fumes and urine dissipating as they hit the relatively fresh air on the sidewalk. They turned down Fifth Avenue. The line for passports stretched past the statue of Atlas. A black man with long dreadlocks sneezed repeatedly, his hair flapping about like dozens of snakes. A woman behind him tsk-tsked a complaint. Many of the people waiting faced St. Patrick’s across the street as though pleading for divine intervention, their faces lined with anguish. Japanese tourists took pictures of both the statue and the line.

“I’m listening,” Myron replied.

They kept walking. Jessica did not face him, her gaze fixed on nothing straight ahead. “We weren’t close anymore. In fact, Kathy and I barely spoke.”

Myron was surprised. “Since when?”

“The last three years or so.”

“What happened?”

She shook her head, but she still did not look at him. “I don’t know exactly. She changed. Or maybe she just grew up and I couldn’t handle it. We just drifted apart. When we saw each other, it was as if she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s no big thing. Except Kathy called me the night she disappeared. First time in I don’t know how long.”

“What did she want?”

“I don’t know. I was on my way out the door. I rushed her off.”

They fell into silence the rest of the way to Myron’s office.

When they got off the elevator, Esperanza handed him a sheet of paper and said, “Win wants to see you right away.” She glared at Jessica the way a linebacker might glare at a limping quarterback on a blindside blitz.

“Otto Burke or Larry Hanson call?” Myron asked.

She swerved her glare toward Myron. “No. Win wants to see you right away.”

“I heard you the first time. Tell him I’ll be up in five minutes.”

They moved into Myron’s office. He closed the door and skimmed over the sheet. Jessica sat in front of him. She crossed her legs the way few women could, turning an ordinary event into a moment of sexual intrigue. Myron tried not to stare. He also tried not to remember the luscious feel of those legs in bed. He was unsuccessful in both endeavors.

“What’s it say?” she asked.

He snapped to. “Our slim friend on Kenmore Street in Glen Rock is named Gary Grady.”

Jessica squinted. “The name sounds familiar.” She shook her head. “But I can’t place it.”

“He’s been married seven years, wife Allison. No kids. Has a $110,000 mortgage on that house, pays it on time. Nothing else yet. We should know more in a little while.” He put the paper on his desk. “I think we have to start attacking this on a few different fronts.”

“How?”

“We have to go back to the night your sister disappeared. Start with that, and move forward. The whole case needs to be reinvestigated. The same with your father’s murder. I’m not saying the cops weren’t thorough. They probably were. But we now know some things they don’t.”

“The magazine,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“How can I help?” she asked.

“Start finding out all you can about what she was up to when she disappeared. Talk to her friends, roommates, sorority sisters, fellow cheerleaders—anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Also get her school records. Let’s see if there’s anything there. I want to see what courses she was taking, what activities she was involved with, anything.”

Esperanza threw open the door. “Meal Ticket. Line two.”

Myron checked his watch. Christian should be in the middle of practice by now. He picked up the phone. “Christian?”

“Mr. Bolitar, I don’t understand what’s going on.”

Myron could barely hear him. It sounded as if he were standing in a wind tunnel. “Where are you?”

“A pay phone outside Titans Stadium.”

“What’s the matter?”

“They won’t let me in.”

Jessica stayed in the office to make a few calls. Myron rushed out. Fifty-seventh Street to the West Side Highway was unusually clear. He called Otto Burke and Larry Hanson from the car. Neither one was in. Myron was not astounded.

Then he dialed an unlisted phone in Washington. Few people had this particular number.

“Hello?” the voice answered politely.

“Hi, P.T.”

“Ah shit, Myron, what the fuck do you want?”

“I need a favor.”

“Perfect. I was just telling someone, gee, I wish Bolitar would call so I could do him a favor. Few things bring me such joy.”

P.T. worked for the FBI. FBI chiefs come and go. P.T was a constant. The press didn’t know about him, but every president since Nixon had had his number on their speed dial.

“The Kathy Culver case,” Myron said. “Who’s the best guy to talk to about it?”

“The local cop,” P.T. answered without hesitation.

“He’s an elected sheriff or something. Great guy, good friend of mine. I forget his name.”

“Can you get me an appointment?” Myron asked.

“Why not? Serving your needs gives my life a sense of purpose.”

“I owe you.”

“You already owe me. More than you can pay. I’ll call you when I have something.”

Myron hung up. The traffic was still clear. Amazing. He crossed the Washington Bridge and arrived at the Meadowlands in record time.

The Meadowlands Sports Authority was built on useless swampland off the New Jersey Turnpike in a place called East Rutherford. From west to east stood the Meadowlands Race Track, Titans Stadium, and the Brendan Byrne Arena, named for the former governor who was about as well liked as a whitehead on prom night. Angry protests equal to the French Revolution had erupted over the name, but to no avail. Mere revolutions are hardly worthy adversaries for a politician’s ego.

“Oh, Christ.”

Christian’s car—or he assumed it was Christian’s—was barely visible under the blanket of reporters. Myron had expected this. He had told Christian to lock himself in his car and not say a word. Driving away would have been useless. The press would have just followed, and Myron was not up for a car chase.

He parked nearby. The reporters turned toward him like lions smelling a wounded lamb.

“What’s going on, Myron?”

“Why isn’t Christian at practice?”

“You pulling a holdout or what?”

“What’s happening with his contract?”

Myron no-commented them, swimming through the sea of microphones, cameras, and flesh, squeezing his way into the car without allowing any of the slime to ooze in with him.

“Drive off,” Myron said.

Christian started the car and pulled out. The reporters parted grudgingly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bolitar.”

“What happened?”

“The guard wouldn’t let me in. He said he had orders to keep me out.”

“Son of a bitch,” Myron muttered. Otto Burke and his damn tactics. Little weasel. Myron should have been looking for something like this. But a lockout? That seemed a tad extreme, even by Otto Burke’s standards. Despite the posturing, they had been fairly close to signing. Burke had expressed strong interest in getting Christian to minicamp as soon as possible, to get him ready for the season.

So why would he lock Christian out?

Myron didn’t like it.

“Do you have a car phone?” he asked.

“No, sir.”

It didn’t matter. “Turn back around,” Myron said. “Park by Gate C.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just come with me.”

The guard tried to stop them, but Myron pushed Christian past him. “Hey, you’re not allowed in there!” he called after them. “Hey, stop!”

“Shoot us,” Myron said without stopping.

They strode onto the field. Players were hitting the tackle dummies hard. Very hard. No one was holding back. These were tryouts. Most of these guys were fighting for a spot on the team. Most had been high school and college superstars, accustomed to unadulterated greatness on the field. Most would get cut. Most would not allow the dream to end there, scrounging other teams’ rosters for a possible opening, holding on, slipping endlessly, dying slowly all the while.

A glamour profession.

The coaches blew whistles. The running backs practiced wind sprints. Kickers were knocking down field goals at the far goal post. Punters boomed slow lazy arcs high into the air. Several players turned and spotted Christian. A buzz developed. Myron ignored it. He had spotted his target, sitting in the first row on the fifty-yard line.

Otto Burke sat like Caesar at the Colosseum, that damn smile still plastered to his face, his arms spread over the seats on either side of him. Behind him sat Larry Hanson and a few other executives. Caesar’s senate. Occasionally Otto would lean back and award his entourage a comment that brought on aneurysm-like fits of laughter.

“Myron!” Otto called out pleasantly, waving one of those tiny hands. “Come on over. Have a seat.”

“Wait here,” Myron told Christian. He climbed the steps. The entourage, led by Larry Hanson, stood in unison and marched away.

Myron snapped a salute at them. “Hut two, three, four. Right face.” No one laughed. Big surprise.

“Sit down, Myron,” Otto said, beaming. “Let’s have a chat.”

“You haven’t been returning my calls,” Myron said.

“Did you call?” He shook his head. “I’ll have to get on my secretary about that.”

Myron let out a deep breath and sat. “Why was Christian locked out?”

“Well, Myron, it’s pretty simple, actually. Christian hasn’t signed his contract yet. The Titans don’t have time to invest in someone who may not be part of our future.” He nodded toward the field. “Do you see who’s here for a tryout? Neil Decker from Cincinnati. Fine quarterback.”

“Yeah, he’s great. He can almost throw a spiral.”

Otto chuckled. “That’s funny, Myron. You’re a very amusing man.”

“I’m so glad you think so. Mind telling me what’s going on?”

Otto Burke nodded. “That’s fair, Myron. So let’s talk frankly, shall we?”

“Rationally, frankly, whatever you want.”

“Great. We’d like to renegotiate your client’s contract,” he said. “Downward.”

“I see.”

“We feel your client’s value has depreciated.”

“Uh-huh.”

Burke studied him. “You don’t seem surprised, Myron.”

“So what is it this time?” Myron asked.

“What is what this time?”

“Well, let’s start with Benny Keleher. You invited him to your house, plied him with booze, then had a cop arrest him on his ride home for drunk driving.”

Otto looked properly shocked. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“Amazing how he signed the next day. And then there’s Eddie Smith. You had compromising photographs of him taken by a private eye and threatened to send them to his wife.”

“Another lie.”

“Fine, a lie. So let’s cut to the chase, then. What has caused this sudden devaluation?”

Otto sat back. He withdrew a cigarette from a gold case with a Titans emblem on the cover. “It’s something I saw in a rather lewd magazine,” he said. “Something that truly disheartened me.” He didn’t look disheartened. He looked rather pleased.

“A new low,” Myron said. “You should be proud.”

“Pardon me?”

“You set it up. The magazine.”

Otto smiled. “Ah, so you knew about it.”

“How did you get that picture?”

“What picture?”

“The one in the ad.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“Sure,” Myron said. “I guess you’re just a charter subscriber to Nips.”

“I had nothing to do with that ad, Myron. Honestly.”

“Then how did you get a hold of the magazine?”

“Someone pointed it out to me.”

“Who?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss it.”

“Very convenient.”

“I’m not sure I like your tone, Myron. And let me tell you something else: You’re the one who has done wrong in the case. If you knew about the magazine, you had an ethical responsibility to tell me.”

Myron looked up at the sky. “You used the word ethical. Lightning did not strike. There is no God.”

The smile flickered but stayed on. “Much as we’d like to, Myron, we can’t just wish this away. The magazine exists, and it must be dealt with. So let me tell you what I’ve come up with.”

“I’m all ears.”

“You’re going to take our current offer and knock it down by a third. If not, the picture of Ms. Culver goes public. Think about it. You have three days to decide.” Otto watched Neil Decker throw a pass. It looked like a duck with a broken wing, crashing well short of the receiver. He frowned, stroked his goatee. “Make that two days.”

Chapter 10

Dean of Students Harrison Gordon made sure the door to his office was locked. Double-locked, in fact. He was taking no chances. Not with this.

He sat back down and stared out his office window. Esteemed Reston University in all its glory. The view was a mesh of green grass and brick buildings. No ivy adorned these towers of learning, but it should have. The students were gone for summer break, but the commons still had a sprinkling of people on it—campers from the football and tennis camps, local people who used the campus as a park, the old throwback hippies who pilgrimage to liberal arts institutions like Moslems to Mecca. Lots of red bandannas and ponchos and granola-types. A bearded man tossed a Frisbee. A small boy caught it.

Harrison Gordon saw none of it. He had not spun his chair around to enjoy the view. He had done so to avert his gaze from the … thing on his desk. He wanted simply to destroy the damn thing and forget about it. But he couldn’t. Something held him back. And something kept drawing him toward it, toward that page near the back.…

Destroy it, you fool. If somebody finds it …

What?

He did not know. He spun his chair back around, keeping his eyes away from the magazine. The student file marked CULVER, KATHERINE lay to the right. He swallowed. With a shaking hand he sifted through the stacks of transcripts and recommendation letters. It was an impressive file, but Harrison had no time for that now.

The buzz of his intercom—a horrid noise—startled him upright.

“Dean Gordon?”

“Yes,” he said, nearly shouting. His heart was beating like a rabbit’s.

“I have someone here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment, but I thought you might want to see her.”

Edith’s voice was hushed, a church-whisper.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It’s Jessica Culver. She’s Kathy’s sister.”

Panic punctured his heart like an icicle.

“Dean Gordon?”

He clamped his hand over his mouth, afraid he might scream.

“Dean Gordon? Are you there?”

There were no true options. He would have to see her and find out what she wanted. To act in any other manner would raise suspicion.

He opened his bottom drawer and scooped the contents of his desk into it. He shut it, took out his key ring, and locked his desk. Better safe than sorry. Last, he unbolted his door.

“Send Ms. Culver in,” he said.

Jessica was at least as beautiful as her sister, which was saying something quite extraordinary. He debated on how to greet her and settled for funeral director mode—detached sympathy, warm professionalism.

He shook her hand with gentle firmness. “Miss Culver, I’m so sorry we have to meet under such circumstances. Our prayers are with your family during this difficult time.”

“Thank you for seeing me without an appointment.”

He waved his hand as if to scoff, It’s nothing. “Please have a seat. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, soda?”

“No, thank you.”

He moved back to his chair. He sat and folded his hands on the desk. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“I need my sister’s file,” Jessica replied.

Harrison felt his fingers bunch, but he kept his face steady. “Your sister’s school file?”

“Yes.”

“May I inquire as to why?”

“It involves her disappearance.”

“I see,” he said slowly. His voice, he was surprised to hear, remained calm. “I believe the police were very thorough with the file. They made copies of everything in it—”

“I understand that. I’d like to see the file for myself.”

“I see,” he said again.

Several seconds passed. Jessica shifted in her chair. “Is there a problem?” she asked.

“No, no. Well, perhaps. I’m afraid it may not be possible to give you the file.”

“What?”

“What I mean to say is, I’m not sure you have any legal right to it. Parents certainly do. But I’m not sure about siblings. I’ll need to check this with a university attorney.”

“I’ll wait,” Jessica said.

“Uh, fine. Would you mind waiting in the other room, please?”

She stood, turned, stopped. She looked back over her shoulder at him. “You knew my sister, didn’t you, Dean Gordon?”

He managed a smile. “Yes, I did. Wonderful young lady.”

“Kathy worked for you.”

“Filing, answering the phone, that sort of thing,” he said quickly. “She was a terrific worker. We all miss her very much.”

“Did she seem okay to you?”

“Okay?”

“Before she disappeared,” Jessica continued, her eyes boring into his. “Was she acting strangely?”

Beads of sweat popped onto his forehead, but he dared not wipe them away. “No, not that I could see. She seemed perfectly fine. Why do you ask?”

“Just checking. I’ll wait out front.”

“Thank you.”

She closed the door.

Harrison let loose a long breath. What now? He would have to give her the file; to do otherwise would do far more than merely raise suspicion. But he could not, of course, just pull the file out of his bottom drawer and hand it to Jessica. No, he would wait a few minutes, walk down to the filing room to handle her case “personally,” then return with the file.

Why, he wondered, did Jessica Culver need the file? Was there something he had missed?

No. He was sure of that.

Harrison had spent the last year hoping, praying, that it was over. But he should have known better. Matters like this never truly die. They hide, take root, grow stronger, prepare for a fresh onslaught.

Kathy Culver was not dead and buried. Like some gothic ghost, she had arisen, haunting him, crying out from some great beyond.

For vengeance.

Myron returned to the office.

“Win buzzed down twice,” Esperanza said. “He wants to see you. Now.”

“On my way.”

“Myron?”

“What?”

Esperanza’s lovely dark eyes were solemn. “Is she back? Jessica, I mean.”

“No. She’s just visiting.”

Her face registered doubt. Myron did not press it. He no longer knew what to think himself.

He ran up the stairs two at a time. Win was two floors above him, but he might as well have been in another dimension. As soon as he opened the big steel door, the tireless clamor swarmed in, attacking. The large open space was in perpetual motion. Two, maybe three hundred desks covered the huge floor like throw rugs. Every desk had at least two computer terminals on it. There were no partitions. Hundreds of men sat and stood at every angle, each wearing a white button-down shirt with tie and suspenders, suit jackets draped from the back of their chairs. There were painfully few women. The men were all on the phone, most covering the mouthpiece to scream at someone else. They all looked alike. They all sounded alike. They were all pretty much the same person.

Welcome to Lock-Horne Investments & Securities.

All six floors were exactly the same. In fact, Myron often suspected that Lock-Horne had only one floor and that the elevator was set to stop on the same floor no matter which number you hit from floor fourteen to floor nineteen, giving the illusion of a bigger company.

Office after office made up the compound’s perimeter. These were saved for the head honchos, the top dogs, the numero unos, or in securities talk, the Big Producers. The BPs all had windows and sunshine, unlike the peons on the inside, who sickened and paled from the unnatural light.

Win had a corner office with a view of both Forty-seventh Street and Park Avenue—a view that screamed major dinero. His office was decorated in Early American Wasp. Dark-paneled walls. Forest green carpet. Wing-back chairs. Paintings of a fox hunt on the wall. Like Win had ever seen a fox.

Win looked up from his massive oak desk when Myron entered. The desk weighed slightly less than a cement mixer. He’d been studying a computer print-out, one of those never-ending reams with green and white stripes. The desk was blanketed with them. They sort of matched the carpet.

“How did your morning rendezvous go with our friend Jerry the Phone-icator?” Win asked.

“Phone-icator?”

Win smiled. “I spent the whole morning working that one.”

“It was worth it,” Myron said.

He filled Win in on his encounter with Gary “Jerry” Grady. Win sat back and steepled. Myron then filled him in on his encounter with Otto Burke. Win leaned forward and unsteepled.

“Otto Burke,” Win said, his voice measured, “is a scoundrel. Perhaps I should pay him a private visit.” He looked up at Myron hopefully.

“No. Not yet Please.”

“Are you quite positive?”

“Yes. Promise me, Win. No visits.”

He was clearly disappointed. “Fine,” Win said, grudgingly.

“So what did you want to see me about?”

“Ah.” Win’s face lit up again. “Take a look at this.”

He lifted the reams of computer print-outs and unceremoniously dumped them on the floor. Underneath were a pile of magazines. The top one was called Climaxx. The subheadline read, “Double Xs for Double the Pleasure.” Nifty sales technique. Win fanned them out as if he were doing a card trick.

“Six magazines,” he said.

Myron read the titles. Climaxx, Licks, Jiz, Quim, Orgasm Today, and of course, Nips. “Nickler’s publications?”

“God, you are good,” Win said.

“Years of training. So what about them?”

“Take a look at the pages I have marked off.”

Myron started with Climaxx. The cover featured another freakishly endowed woman, this time licking her own nipple. Handy. Win had used leather bookmarks to mark the page. Leather bookmarks in porno magazines. Like cigarettes in an aerobics class.

The page marked off was already too familiar. Myron felt his stomach churn all over again.

Live Fantasy Phone—Pick Your Girl

There were still three rows, still four in each row. His eyes immediately moved down to the bottom row, second from the right. It still read, “I’ll Do Anything!” The phone number was still 1-900-344-LUST. Still $3.99 per minute. Still discreetly billed to your telephone or charge card, Visa and MasterCard accepted.

But the woman in the picture was not Kathy Culver.

He quickly scanned the rest of the page. Nothing else was different. The same Oriental girl was still waiting. The same buttock still craved a spanking. “Tiny Titties” had not pubesced.

“This same advertising page is in all six magazines,” Win explained. “But only Nips has Kathy Culver’s picture.”

“Interesting.” Myron thought a moment. “Nickler probably sells package deals to advertisers—buy space in six for the price of three, that kind of thing.”

“Precisely. I would venture to say that all six magazines have the exact same ads.”

“But someone stuck Kathy’s picture in Nips.” Myron was getting used to saying the name of the magazine. It no longer felt grimy on his lips, which in itself made him feel grimier.

Win said, “Do you remember Nickler telling us that Nips was doing poorly?”

Myron nodded.

“Well, I had a devil of a time locating it. Most of the other rags were fairly easy to find on corner newsstands. But I had to go to a hardcore porno palace on Forty-second Street to come up with Nips.”

“Yet,” Myron added, “Otto Burke was able to get a copy.”

“Precisely. I am sure you’ve considered the possibility that Mr. Burke is behind it.”

“The idea has crossed my mind.”

There was a knock on the door. Esperanza entered.

“Your handwriting expert is on the phone,” she said. “I put it on Win’s line.”

Win picked up the receiver and handed it to Myron.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Myron, it’s Swindler. I just went over the two samples you gave me.”

Myron had given Swindler the envelope Nips had come in as well as a letter in Kathy’s handwriting.

“Well?”

“They match. It’s her or a very professional forgery.

Myron felt his stomach dive. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Thanks for calling.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

Myron handed the receiver back to Win.

“A match?” Win asked.

“Yep.”

Win tilted back in his chair and smiled. “Yowzer.”

Chapter 11

Myron ran into Ricky Lane in the corridor. He hadn’t seen him in three months. Ricky looked a lot bigger. The Jets would be pleased.

“What are you doing here?” Myron asked.

“I made an appointment with Win,” Ricky said with a big grin. “Just like my agent advised.”

“Good to see you listen to your agent.”

“Always. The man is brilliant.”

“And he never argues with a client.”

Ricky laughed. “Say, I heard Christian got locked out of camp.”

News traveled fast. “Where did you hear that?”

“The FAN.”

WFAN was New York’s all-sports radio station. “Have you spoken to him lately?”

Ricky made a face. “Christian?”

“Yeah.”

“Not since my last college football game, what, year and a half ago.”

“I thought you were friends.” Myron had, in fact, assumed that Ricky had recommended his services to Christian.

“We were teammates,” Ricky replied steadily. “We were never friends.”

“You don’t like him?”

Ricky shrugged. “Not really. None of us did.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

“Guys on the team.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Long story, man. Not worth telling.”

“I’d be interested.”

“Put it like this,” Ricky said. “Christian was a little too perfect for most of us, okay?”

“An egomaniac?”

Ricky paused, considering. “Not really. I mean, to be straight, I guess a lot of it was jealousy. Christian wasn’t just good. Shit, he wasn’t even just great. He was incredible. Best I ever seen.”

“So?”

“So he expected the same from everyone else.”

“He got on people’s case when they made mistakes?”

Ricky paused again, shook his head. “No, that ain’t it either.”

“You’re being a tad obtuse, Ricky.”

Ricky Lane looked up, looked down, looked left, looked right, looked very uneasy. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “It’s going to sound like a lot of griping, but guys weren’t crazy about all the attention he was getting. I mean, we won two national championships, and the only guy they ever talked to was Christian.”

“I heard those interviews. He always gave his teammates all the credit.”

“Yeah, a real gentleman,” Ricky replied with more than a hint of sarcasm. “All that ‘it’s a team effort’ bullshit just made the press love him even more. Guys on the team thought he was a promo-hog, you know? His own best PR firm. They blamed him for being too popular.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Truth was, I just didn’t really like him. We had nothing in common except football. He’s a pure Midwest white-boy. I’m a city-slicking black man. It ain’t a winning combination.”

“That’s all it was?”

He gave a half-shrug. “I guess so. But man, this is all ancient history. I don’t know why I brought it up. It don’t matter no more. Christian just didn’t fit in, okay. He was a nice guy, I guess. He was always polite. But that don’t play so well in a locker room, you know?”

Myron knew. Juvenile, sexist, homophobic bantering—that was the stuff of locker-room popularity.

“I gotta go, man. Win will be wondering where I am.”

“Okay. I’ll see you around.”

Ricky had almost turned away when Myron thought of something else. “What can you tell me about Kathy Culver?”

Ricky’s face blanched. “What about her?”

“Did you know her?”

“A little, I guess. I mean, she was a cheerleader and dated the quarterback. But we never hung out or anything.” He looked very unhappy now. “Why you asking?”

“Was she popular? Or was she hated too?”

Ricky’s eyes darted about like birds trying to find a safe place to land. “Look, Myron, you always been straight with me, I always been straight with you, right?”

“Right.”

“I don’t want to say nothing else. She’s dead. Might as well let her be.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I just don’t like talking about her, okay. It’s kinda creepy. I’ll see you later.”

Ricky hurried down the corridor as if Reggie White were chasing him. Myron watched him. He debated following him but decided against it. Ricky would say no more today.

Chapter 12

Esperanza stuck her head in the door. “Someone—or something—is here to see you.”

Myron held up a silencing hand. The headset had been on since his return to his office. “Look, I have to go,” he said. “See if you can get him upgraded to first class. He’s a big guy. Thanks.” He took off the headset. “Who is it?”

She made a face. “Aaron. He didn’t give a last name.”

He didn’t have to. “Send him in.”

Seeing Aaron was like falling into a time warp. He was as big as Myron remembered, as big as the lummox in the garage. He was dressed in a freshly pressed white suit, but he wore no shirt with it, displaying plenty of tan pectoral cleavage. He wasn’t wearing socks either. Nifty haircut, the swept-back look à la Pat Riley. A saunter for a walk. Designer sunglasses. Designer cologne that smelled suspiciously like insect repellent. Aaron was the pure definition of “supersmooth”—just ask him, he’d tell you.

He smiled widely. “Nice to see you, Myron.”

They shook hands. Myron did not squeeze. He was far too mature. That, and Aaron could probably squeeze harder. “Have a seat.”

“Wonderful.” Aaron made a production of it, spreading out his arms as if he were wearing a cloak. He removed his sunglasses with an audible snap. “I like your office. It’s really great.”

“Thank you.”

“Great address. Great view.”

The password is great. “You looking to rent space?”

Aaron laughed as if that were the gem of gems. “No,” he said. “I don’t like being cooped in an office. It’s not my style. I like my freedom. I like being out on my own, on the road. I wouldn’t do well chained to a desk.”

“Wow, that’s fascinating, Aaron. Really.”

He laughed again. “Ah, Myron, you haven’t changed a bit. I’m glad to see it.”

They hadn’t seen each other since high school. Myron had gone to Livingston High School in New Jersey. Aaron had gone to his archenemy, West Orange High. The teams played each other twice a year, and it was rarely a pleasant encounter.

In those days Myron’s best friend was a huge ox named Todd Midron. Todd was a big, softhearted, simple kid with a lisp. He played Lenny to Myron’s George. He was also the toughest kid Myron had ever met.

Todd never lost a fight. Never. No one ever came close to him. He was just too powerful. During a game their senior year, Aaron undercut and nearly injured Myron. Todd took exception. He went after Aaron. Aaron destroyed him. Myron tried to help his friend, but Aaron shrugged Myron off like a dandruff flake. He continued to pulverize Todd, steadily, methodically, glaring at Myron the whole time, not even glancing at his limp victim. The beating was ferocious. By the time it ended, Todd’s face was an unrecognizable pulpy mess. Todd spent four months in a hospital. His jaw was wired shut for nearly a year.

“Hey,” Aaron said. He pointed to a movie still on the wall. “That’s Woody Allen and what’s-her-name.”

“Diane Keaton.”

“Right, Diane Keaton.”

“Is there something I can do for you?” Myron asked.

Aaron turned his whole body toward Myron. The glare from his shaved chest was nearly blinding. “I think there is, Myron. In fact, I think there’s something we can do for each other.”

“Oh?”

“I represent a competitor of yours. A certain dispute has arisen between the two of you. My client wishes to settle it peacefully.”

“Are you an attorney now, Aaron?”

He smiled. “Not likely.”

“Oh.”

“I am referring to a young man named Chaz Landreaux. He recently signed a contract with your company, MB SportReps.”

“I thought of the name myself.”

“Pardon me.”

“MB SportReps. I came up with the name by myself.”

Aaron renewed his smile. It was a good smile. Lots of teeth. “There is a problem with the contract.”

“Do tell.”

“You see, Mr. Landreaux has also signed a contract with Roy O’Connor at TruPro Enterprises, Incorporated. The contract predates yours. So you see the problem: Your contract is invalid.”

“Why don’t we let a court of law decide that?”

He sighed deeply. “My client feels it is in everyone’s best interest to avoid litigation.”

“Gee, what a surprise. So what does your client suggest?”

“Mr. O’Connor would be willing to pay you for your time.”

“Very generous of him.”

“Yes.”

“And if I say no?”

“We hope it won’t come to that.”

“But if it does?”

Aaron sighed, stood, leaned on Myron’s desk. “I’ll be forced to make you disappear.”

“Like in a magic trick?”

“Like in dead.”

Myron put his hand to his chest. “Gasp. Oh. Gasp.”

Aaron laughed again, this time without humor. “I know all about your tae kwon do display in the garage. But that guy was a stupid musclehead. I am not. I boxed professionally. I’m a black belt in jujitsu and a grand master in aikido. I’ve killed people.”

“I bet that looks good on a résumé,” Myron said.

“Let me put this in very simple terms for you, Myron: You fuck with us, I’ll kill you.”

“Shiver. Tremble.” Myron was not quite as confident as his sarcasm, but he knew better than to show fear. Guys like Aaron are like dogs. They smell fear, they pounce.

Aaron laughed again. He was laughing a lot today. He was either very amused or had been sniffing gas. He turned his back and walked to the door. “This is your final warning,” he said. “Landreaux honors his contract with Mr. O’Connor, or both of you end up worm food.”

Worm food. First oatmeal. Now worm food.

“I like you, Myron. I’d really hate to see something bad happen. But you understand.”

“Business is business.”

“Exactly.”

Esperanza appeared at the door.

Aaron gave her a sharklike smile. “Well, well,” he said. Then he followed up with his best big-guy wink. Esperanza managed to keep her clothes on. Amazing restraint.

“Pick up line two,” she said.

“Listen to this call closely, Myron,” Aaron added with a final grin. “Appreciate the gravity of the situation. And remember. Worm food.”

“Worm food. I’ll keep it in mind.”

Aaron winked at Esperanza again, blew her a kiss, and left.

“Charming,” she said.

“Who’s on the phone?”

“Chaz Landreaux.”

Myron picked up the headset. “Hello.”

“Motherfuckers were at my mom’s!” Chaz shouted. “They told her they were going to cut off my nuts and send them to her in a box! My mother, man! They said this to my mother!”

Myron felt his fingers tighten into fists. “I’ll take care of it,” he said slowly. “They won’t bother her again.”

Enough game playing. It was time to act.

It was time to tell Win about Roy O’Connor.

Win smiled like a kid on a snow day listening to the radio for a school closing. “Roy O’Connor,” he said.

“I don’t want him hurt. Promise me.”

Win’s eyes drifted dreamily. He might have nodded a yes, but Myron couldn’t say for sure.

Chapter 13

Baumgart’s on Palisades Avenue. Their old stomping grounds.

Peter Chin greeted them at the door, his eyes widening in delight and surprise when he spotted Jessica. “Miss Culver! How wonderful to see you again.”

“Nice to see you, Peter.”

“You look as lovely as ever. You beautify my restaurant.”

Myron said, “Hi, Peter.”

“Yeah, whatever.” He dismissed Myron with a hand wave. His full attention was on Jessica; a crocodile gnawing on his foot wouldn’t have changed that. “You look a little too thin, Miss Culver.”

“The food’s not as good in Washington.”

“Funny,” Myron said. “I was thinking she looked a little chunky.”

Jessica eyed him. “Dead man.”

Baumgart’s was an institution in Englewood, New Jersey. For fifty years it was an old Jewish deli and soda fountain, noted for its superb ice cream and desserts. When Peter Chin bought it eight years ago, he kept all of the tradition but added the best nouvelle Chinese cuisine in the state. The combination was a smash. The normal order might consist of Peking duck, sesame noodles, chocolate milk shake, french fries and a death-by-chocolate sundae for dessert. When Myron and Jessica had lived together, they ate at Baumgart’s at least once a week.

Myron still came once a week. Usually with Win or Esperanza. Sometimes alone. He never brought a date here.

Peter walked them past the soda fountain and put them in a booth under a huge painting. Modern art. It was a portrait of either Cher or Barbara Bush. Maybe both. Very esoteric.

Myron and Jessica sat across the table from each other, silently. The moment seemed weighed down, overwhelming. Being here together again—they had expected it to generate some light nostalgia. But the effect was more like a body blow.

“I’ve missed this place,” she said.

“Yes.”

She reached her hand across the table and took his. “I’ve missed you.”

Her face was aglow, the way it used to be when she looked at him as though he were the only person in the entire world. Myron felt something squeeze his heart, making it nearly impossible to breathe. The rest of the world broke apart, diffused. There were only the two of them.

“I’m not sure what to say.”

She smiled. “What? Myron Bolitar at a loss for words?”

“Ripley’s, huh?”

Peter came by. Without preamble, he said, “You’ll start with the crispy duck appetizer and squab package with pine nuts. For your main course you’ll have soft-shell crab in special sauce and the Baumgart lobster and shrimp.”

“Can we choose dessert?” Myron asked.

“No. Myron, you’ll have the pecan pie à la mode. And for Miss Culver.” He stopped, building suspense like a game-show host.

She smiled expectantly. “You don’t mean …”

Peter nodded. “Banana pudding cake with vanilla wafers. There’s only one piece left, but I put it away for you.”

“Bless you, Peter.”

“Each man does what he can. You didn’t bring wine?” Baumgart’s was BYO.

“We forgot,” Jessica said. She was dazzling Peter with her smile. Not fair. Jessica’s looks were like a Star Trek laser set on stun. Her smile, kill.

“I’ll send someone across the street to get a bottle. Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay?”

“You have a good memory,” she said.

“No. I just remember what is important.” Myron rolled his eyes. Peter bowed slightly and left.

She turned the smile back to Myron. He felt frightened and helpless and deliriously happy.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shook his head. He was afraid to open his mouth.

“I never meant—” She was unsure how to continue. “I made a lot of mistakes in my life,” she said. “I am dumb. I am self-destructive.”

“No,” Myron said. “You’re perfect.”

Her voice grew dramatic, her hand against her chest. “ ‘Take the blinders from your eyes and see me as I really am.’ ”

He thought a moment. “Dulcinea to Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha. And it’s ‘take the clouds,’ not blinders.”

“Very impressive.”

“Win was playing it in the car.” This was an old game of theirs. Guess the Quote.

She fiddled with her water glass, making little water circles and then inspecting them for clarity and definition. Eventually she created an aquatic Olympics logo. “I’m not sure what I’m trying to say to you,” she said at last. “I’m not sure what I want to happen here.” She looked up. “One last confession, okay?”

He nodded.

“I came to you because I thought you would help. That was true. But that wasn’t the only reason.”

“I know,” he said. “I try not to think about it too much. It terrifies me.”

“So what do we do now?”

His chance. He hoped there would be others. “Did you get your sister’s file?”

“Yes.”

“Have you gone through it yet?”

“No. I just picked it up.”

“Then why don’t we open it now?”

She nodded. The crispy duck and squab package with pine nuts appeared. Jessica took out a manila envelope and slit the seal. “Why don’t you look at it first?”

“Okay,” he said. “But save me some food.”

“Chance.”

He started sifting through the papers. The top page was Kathy’s high school transcript. After her junior year her ranking had been twelfth in a class of three hundred. Not bad. But by the end of senior year her ranking had slipped considerably—to fifty-eighth.

“Her grades dropped senior year of high school,” Myron said.

“Whose didn’t drop senior year?” Jess countered. “She was probably just goofing off.”

“Probably.” But usually that meant A students got B’s or C’s. Kathy had gotten one A, three D’s and an F in her final semester. Her clean record was also muddied with several detentions—all in her senior year. Strange. But probably meaningless.

“Do you want to fill me in on what happened today?” Jessica asked between bites.

She was even beautiful when pigging out. Amazing. He started by telling her about Win’s discovery in the six magazines.

“So what does it mean,” she asked, “her picture being only in that one rag?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you have an idea?”

He did. But it was too early to say anything. “Not yet.”

“Did you hear from your friend at the phone company?”

He nodded. “Gary Grady placed two calls after we left. One was to Fred Nickler’s office at Hot Desire Press. The other was someplace in the city. There was no answer when we called it. We got the information kind of late in the day.”

“And the handwriting analyst?”

Best to dive right in. “The handwriting matches. It’s either Kathy’s or a very good forger.”

That slowed her chopsticks. “My God.”

“Yes.”

“Then she’s alive?”

“It’s still just a possibility. Nothing more. That envelope could have been written before she died. Or like I said, it could be a clever forgery.”

“You’re reaching.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said. “If she’s alive, where is she? Why is she doing all this?”

“Maybe she’s been kidnapped. Maybe she’s being forced to.”

“Forced to address envelopes? Now who’s reaching?”

“Do you have a better explanation?” she asked.

“Not yet. But I’m working on it.” He started looking through the file again. “You ever hear of a guy named Otto Burke?”

“The big record company magnate who owns the Titans?”

“Right. He also knew about the magazine.” Myron quickly summarized his visit to Titans Stadium.

“So you think Otto Burke might be behind it?” she asked.

“Otto has a motive: knocking down Christian’s asking price. He certainly has the resources: lots of money. And it would also explain why Christian got a copy in the mail.”

“He was sending Christian a message,” she added.

“Right.”

“But how would Burke forge my sister’s handwriting?”

“He could have hired an expert.”

“Where did he get a writing sample?”

“Who knows? It can’t be that difficult.”

Her eyes glazed over. “So this was all a hoax? This was all some plot to gain leverage in a negotiation?”

“It’s possible. But I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Something just doesn’t mesh. Why would Burke go through all that trouble? He could have blackmailed us with just the photo. He didn’t have to put it in a magazine. The photo was enough.”

She grasped on to his hope as if it were a life preserver. “Good point,” she said.

“The question then becomes,” he continued, “how did Otto get a copy of the magazine?”

“Maybe someone in his organization picked up a copy at a newsstand.”

“Very unlikely. Nips”—the word felt grungy again, good—“has a very low circulation rate. The chances that someone in the Titans organization bought that particular magazine, had time to read it carefully, somehow spotted Kathy’s picture in the bottom row on a page of ads in the back—it’s fairly remote at best.”

Jessica snapped her fingers. “Someone mailed it to him too.”

He nodded. “Why should Christian have been the only one? For all we know, dozens of people were sent that magazine.”

“How do we find out?”

“I’m working on it.”

He managed to salvage a sliver of crispy duck before it was sucked into the black hole. It was delicious. He turned his attention back to Kathy’s files. Her bad grades continued during her first semester at Reston. By second semester, her grades had picked up considerably. He asked Jessica about this.

“She settled into college life, I guess,” she said. “She joined the drama group, became a cheerleader, started dating Christian. She went through culture shock in her first semester. It’s not uncommon.”

“No. I guess not.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

He shrugged. Myron Bolitar, Señor Skepticalo.

Kathy’s recommendation letters were next. Three of them. Her high school guidance counselor called her “unusually gifted.” Her tenth-grade history teacher said, “Her enthusiasm for life is contagious.” Her twelfth-grade English teacher said, “Kathy Culver is bright, witty, and fun-spirited. She will be a welcome addition to any institution of learning.” Nice comments. He scanned down to the bottom of the page.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

“What is it?”

He handed her the glowing recommendation letter from Kathy’s twelfth-grade English teacher at Ridgewood High School. A Mr. Grady.

A Mr. Gary, aka “Jerry” Grady.

Chapter 14

Myron was startled awake by the telephone. He’d been dreaming about Jessica. He tried to remember specifics, but the details disintegrated into small pieces and blew away, leaving behind only a few frustrating snippets. The clock on his nightstand read seven o’clock. Someone was calling him at home at seven o’clock in the morning. Myron had a pretty good idea who it was.

“Hello?”

“Good morning, Myron. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Myron recognized the voice. He smiled and asked, “Who is this?”

“It’s Roy O’Connor.”

“The Roy O’Connor?”

“Uh, yes, I guess so. Roy O’Connor, the agent.”

“The superagent,” Myron corrected. “To what do I owe this honor, Roy?”

“Would it be possible for us to meet this morning?” The voice had a discernible quake to it.

“Sure thing, Roy. My office, okay?”

“Uh, no.”

“Your office, Roy?”

“Uh, no.”

Myron sat up. “Should I keep guessing places and you can say hotter or colder?”

“You know Reilly’s Pub on Fourteenth Street?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be in the booth in the back right-hand corner. One o’clock. We’ll have lunch. If that’s okay with you.”

“Peachy, Roy. Want me to wear anything special?”

“Uh, no.”

Myron hung up, smiled. A night visit from Win, usually while sleeping soundly in your bedroom, your innermost sanctuary. Worked every time.

He got out of bed. He heard his mother in the kitchen above him, his father in the den watching television. Early morning at the Bolitar house. The basement door opened.

“Are you awake, Myron?” his mother shouted.

Myron. What a goddamn awful name. He hated it with a passion. The way he looked at it, he’d been born with all his fingers and toes, he didn’t have a harelip or a cauliflower ear or a limp of any kind—so to compensate for his lack of ill fortune, his parents had christened him Myron.

“I’m awake,” he answered.

“Daddy bought some fresh bagels. They’re on the table.”

“Thanks.”

He got out of bed and climbed the steps. With one hand he felt the rough beard he’d have to shave; with the other he picked the yellow sleep-buggers out of the corner of his eyes. His father was sprawled on the den couch like a wet sock, wearing an Adidas sweatsuit and eating a bagel oozing with whitefish spread. As he did every morning, Myron’s father was watching a videocassette of people exercising. Getting in shape through osmosis.

“Good morning, Myron. There’re some bagels on the table.”

“Uh, thanks.” It was like one parent never heard the other.

He entered the kitchen. His mom was nearly sixty, but she looked much younger. Say, forty-five. She acted much younger too. Say, sixteen.

“You came in late last night,” she said.

Myron made a grunting noise.

“What time did you finally get home?”

“Really late. It was almost ten.” Myron Bolitar, the late-night scream machine.

“So,” Mom began, struggling to look and sound casual, “who were you out with?” Mistress of the Subtle.

“Nobody,” he said.

“Nobody? You were out all night with nobody?”

Myron looked left and right. “When are you going to bring in the hot lights and jumper cables?”

“Fine, Myron. If you don’t want to tell me—”

“I don’t want to tell you.”

“Fine. Was it a girl?”

“Mom …”

“Okay, forget I asked.”

Myron reached for the phone and dialed Win’s number. After the eighth ring he began to hang up when a weak, distant voice coughed. “Hello?”

“Win?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Hello?”

“Win?”

“Yeah.”

“What took you so long to answer the phone?”

“Hello?”

“Win?”

“Who is this?”

“Myron.”

“Myron Bolitar?”

“How many Myrons do you know?”

“Myron Bolitar?”

“No, Myron Rockefeller.”

“Something’s wrong,” Win said.

“What?”

“Terribly wrong.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Some asshole is calling me at seven in the morning pretending to be my best friend.”

“Sorry, I forgot the time.” Win was not what one would call a morning person. During their years at Duke, Win was never out of bed before noon—even on the days he had a morning class. He was, in fact, the heaviest sleeper Myron had ever known or imagined. Myron’s parents, on the other hand, woke up when somebody in the Western hemisphere farted. Before Myron moved into the basement, the same scenario was played out nightly:

Around three in the morning, Myron would get out of bed to go to the bathroom. As he tiptoed past his parents’ bedroom, his father would stir ever so slowly, as though someone had dropped a Popsicle on his crotch.

“Who’s that?” his father would shout.

“Just me, Dad.”

“Is that you, Myron?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Are you okay, son?”

“Fine, Dad.”

“What are you doing up? You sick or something?”

“I’m just going to the bathroom, Dad. I’ve been going to the bathroom by myself since I was fourteen.”

During their sophomore year at Duke, Myron and Win lived in the smallest double on campus with a bunk bed that Win said “creaks slightly” and Myron said “sounds like a duck being run over by a back hoe.” One morning, when the bed was quiet and he and Win were asleep, a baseball crashed through their window. The noise was so deafening that their entire dorm jumped out of bed and rushed to see if Myron and Win had survived the wrath of whatever gigantic meteorite had fallen through the roof. Myron rushed to the window to yell obscenities. Dorm members stamped across the underwear-carpeted floor to join in the tirade. The ensuing reverberations were loud enough to disturb a diner waitress on her coffee break.

Win just lay asleep, a blanket of broken glass strewn over his blanket.

The next night, Myron called through the darkness of his bottom bunk. “Win?”

“Yes.”

“How do you sleep so soundly?” But Win didn’t answer because he’d fallen asleep.

On the phone Win asked, “What do you want?”

“Did all go well last night?”

“Mr. O’Connor hasn’t called you yet?”

“He has.” End of subject. Myron didn’t want details.

“I know,” Win continued, “that you did not awaken me to question my effectiveness.”

“Kathy Culver got only one A in her senior year at Ridgewood High. Guess who her teacher was.”

“Who?”

“Gary Grady.”

“Hmm. Dial-a-porn and high school English. Interesting vocational mix.”

“I was thinking we could go see Mr. Grady this morning.”

“At the school?”

“Sure. The two of us can pretend we’re concerned parents.”

“For the same kid?”

“Putting the rainbow curriculum to the test.”

Win laughed. “This is going to be fun.”

Chapter 15

“How do we find him?” Win asked.

They arrived at Ridgewood High School at nine-thirty. It was a warm June day, the kind of day where you stared at the window and daydreamed about the end of school. Not much movement around the building—as though the entire school, even the edifice, were coasting toward summer vacation.

Myron remembered how miserable such days were. It gave him an idea.

“Let’s pull the fire alarm,” he said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“We’ll get everyone outside. It’ll be easier to spot him.”

“Idiotically ingenious,” Win said.

“Besides, I always wanted to pull a fire alarm.”

“Walk on the wild side.”

No one noticed them when they entered the school. There were no guards, no locks on the door, no hall monitors of any kind. This was not an urban high school. Myron found a fire alarm not too far from the entrance.

“Kids, don’t try this at home,” Myron said. He pulled. Bells went off. Then cheers from the kids. Myron felt good about his deed. He thought about pulling alarms more often but decided some might construe the act as immature.

Win held the door open and pretended to be a fire marshal. “Single file,” he told the students. “And remember: Only you can prevent fires.”

Myron spotted Grady. “Bingo.”

“Where?”

“Turning the corner. On the left. Mr. Fashion.”

Gary Grady was wearing a yellow Century 21–like blazer with Keith Partridge orange-striped pants. Win looked visibly pained at the sight. They made their approach.

“Hi, Jerry.”

Grady’s head shot around. “That’s not my name.”

“Yeah, you told me. It’s your alias, right? When you do business with Fred Nickler. Your real name is Gary Grady.”

Nearby students stopped walking.

“Keep moving!” Gary snapped.

The students restarted their grudging trudge.

“Impatient teachers,” Myron said.

“Sad,” Win agreed.

Gary’s thin face seemed to stretch even further. He stepped closer so that no one could overhear.

“Perhaps we can continue this conversation later,” he whispered.

“I don’t think so, Gary.”

“I’m in the middle of a class.”

“Tough tittie,” Myron said.

Win arched an eyebrow. “Tough tittie?”

“Something about being back in high school,” Myron said. “Besides, I thought it appropriate considering the situation.”

Win considered for a moment. “Okay, I can accept that.”

Myron turned back to Gary. “The fire drill will last a little while. Then it will take a little while for the kids to file back in. Then they’ll want to goof around in the halls for a while. By then we’ll be all done.”

Gary crossed his arms over his chest. “No.”

“Option two, then.” Myron took out a copy of Nips. “We can play Show and Tell with the principal.”

Grady coughed into his fist. A loud fire whistle sounded. Sirens came closer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, taking a few more steps away from the kids.

“I followed you.”

“What?”

Myron sighed, gave him exasperation. “You were in Hoboken yesterday morning. You picked up the mail at an address used for advertising sex lines in porno rags. Then you went home to Glen Rock, saw me, panicked, and called Fred Nickler, the managing editor of said rags.”

“Amateur,” Win added with disgust.

“Now, we can discuss this with you or with the school board. Up to you.”

Gary glanced at his watch. “You have two minutes.”

“Fine.” Myron gestured to the right. “Why don’t we step into the teachers’ lavatory? I assume you have a key.”

“Yes.”

He opened the door. Myron had always wanted to see a teachers’ bathroom, see how the other half lives. It was unremarkable in every way.

“Okay, you have me here,” Gary said. “What do you want?”

“Tell me about this ad.”

Gary swallowed. His enlarged Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a boxer’s head avoiding jabs. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Myron and Win exchanged a glance.

“Can I stick his head in a toilet?” Win asked.

Gary straightened his back. “If you are trying to frighten me, it won’t work.”

Win’s voice was semipleading. “One quick dunk?”

“Not yet.” Myron turned his attention back to Gary. “I have no interest in busting you, Gary. You’re a perv, that’s your business. I want to know about your connection with Kathy Culver.”

Sweat appeared above Gary’s upper lip. “She was a student of mine.”

“I know. Why is her picture in Nips? In your ad?”

“I have no idea. I saw it for the first time yesterday.”

“But that’s your ad, right?”

He hesitated, giving silent half-shrugs to no one in particular. “Okay,” he said, “I admit it. I advertise in Mr. Nickler’s publications. No law against that. But I did not put that picture of Kathy in the ad.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you admit operating sex lines?”

“Yes. It’s harmless. I do it to make extra money. Nobody gets hurt.”

“Another prince,” Myron said. “How much extra money?”

“In the business’s heyday I was making twenty thousand dollars a month.”

Myron wasn’t sure he heard right. “Twenty thousand dollars a month from phone sex?”

“In the mid-eighties, yes. Before the government got involved and began to crack down on 900 lines. Now I’m lucky to clear eight grand a month.”

“Damn bureaucrats,” Myron said. “So how does Kathy Culver fit into all this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Gee, Gary, a naked picture of her is in your ad this month. Maybe that’s what I mean.”

“I already told you. I had nothing to do with that.”

“Then I guess it’s a coincidence, her being a student of yours and all.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t hold him under long,” Win promised. “Please.”

Myron shook his head. “You wrote her a glowing recommendation letter for college, correct?”

“Kathy was a wonderful student,” Gary replied.

“And what else?”

“If you are suggesting that my relationship with Kathy was something other than student-teacher—”

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

Once again he crossed his arms over his chest. “I will not dignify that with a response. And I am now terminating this conversation.”

Gary was addressing them in that way teachers do. Sometimes teachers forget that life is not a classroom.

“Dunk him,” Myron said.

“With pleasure.”

Gary probably had two inches on Win. He leaned up on his toes and gave Win his most withering glare.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Gary said.

“Mistake number one.”

Win moved with a speed that videocameras would not catch. He took hold of Gary’s hand, twisted it, and pulled down. Hapkido move. Gary dropped to the tile floor. Win pressed his knee against the point of Gary’s elbow. Gently. Not too much pain. Just enough to let him know who was in control.

“Damn,” Win said.

“What?”

“All the toilets are clean. I hate when that happens.”

“Anything to add before the dunk?” Myron asked.

Gary’s face was white. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone,” he managed.

“You’ll tell us the truth?”

“Yes. But you have to swear you won’t tell anyone. Not the principal, no one.”

“Okay.” Myron nodded to Win. Win let go. Gary took back his hand and caressed it as though it were an abused puppy.

“Kathy and I had an affair,” he said.

“When?”

“Her senior year. It lasted a few months, that’s all. I haven’t seen her since, I swear.”

“And that’s everything?”

He nodded. “I don’t know anything else. Somebody else put that picture in the ad.”

“If you’re lying, Gary—”

“I’m not. Hand to God.”

“Okay,” Myron said. “You can go.”

Gary rushed out. He had not even paused to check his hair in the mirror.

“Scum,” Myron said. “The man is pure unadulterated scum. Seduces his students, operates a dial-a-porn line.”

“But a snappy dresser,” Win said. “So what next?”

“We finish the investigation. Then we go to the school board. We tell them all about Mr. Grady’s extracurricular activities.”

“Didn’t you just promise him you weren’t going to tell?”

Myron shrugged. “I lied.”

Chapter 16

In something of a trance, Jessica thanked Myron and hung up the phone. She half-stumbled into the kitchen and sat down. Her mother and her younger brother Edward looked up.

“Honey,” Carol Culver began, “are you okay?”

“Fine,” she managed.

“Who was on the phone?”

“Myron.”

Silence.

“We were talking about Kathy,” she continued.

“What about her?” Edward asked.

Her brother had always been Edward, not Ed or Eddie or Ted. He was only a year out of college and already he owned a successful computer business, IMCS (Interactive Management Computer Systems), which developed software systems for several prestigious corporations. Edward wore only jeans, even in the office, and obnoxious T-shirts, the kind with chintzy iron-on decals that say stuff like “Keep on Truckin’.” He didn’t own a tie. He had a wide, almost-feminine face with delicate porcelain features. Women would kill for his eyelashes. Only the buzz-cut hair—and the pithy phrase on his T-shirt—hinted at what Edward was proud to be: COMPUTER WEENIES HAVE THE BEST HARDWARE.

Jessica took a deep breath. She could not be concerned with delicacies or feelings anymore. She opened her purse and pulled out a copy of Nips. “This magazine hit the stands a few days ago,” she said.

She tossed it on the table, cover up. A cross between puzzlement and disgust blanketed her mother’s face.

Edward remained stoic. “What the hell is this?” he asked.

Jessica flipped to the page in the back. “There,” she said simply, pointing to the picture of Kathy in the bottom row.

It took a few moments for them to comprehend what they were seeing, as though the information had been waylaid somewhere between the eye and brain. Then Carol Culver let out a groan. Her hand flew to her mouth, smothering a scream. Edward’s eyes narrowed into thin slits.

Jessica did not give her time to recover. “There’s more,” she said.

Her mother looked up at her with hollow, haunted eyes. There was no life behind them anymore, as though a final cold gust had put out a flickering flame.

“A handwriting expert checked the envelope it came in. The writing matches Kathy’s.”

Edward inhaled sharply. Carol’s legs finally gave out, folding at the knees. She landed hard in her chair and crossed herself. Tears came to her eyes.

“She’s alive?” Carol managed.

“I don’t know.”

“But there’s a chance?” Edward followed up.

Jessica nodded. “There’s always been a chance.”

Stunned silence.

“But I need some information,” Jessica continued. “I need to know what happened to Kathy. What made her change.”

Edward’s eyes narrowed again. “What do you mean?”

“Kathy had an affair with her high school English teacher. Senior year.”

More silence. Jessica was not so sure it was stunned.

“The teacher, a maggot named Gary Grady, has admitted it.”

“No,” her mother said weakly. She lowered her head, her crucifix dangling like a pendulum. She began to weep. “Sweet Jesus, not my baby …”

Edward stood. “That’s enough, Jess.”

“It’s not enough.”

Edward grabbed his jacket. “I’m out of here.”

“Wait. Where are you going?”

“Good-bye.”

“We need to talk this out.”

“The hell we do.”

“Edward—”

He ran out the back door, slamming it behind him.

Jessica turned back to her mother. Her sobs were gut-wrenching. Jessica watched for a minute or two. Then she turned and left the kitchen.

Roy O’Connor was already in the back booth when Myron arrived. His glass was empty, and he was sucking on an ice cube. He sounded like an aardvark near an anthill.

“Hey, Roy.”

O’Connor nodded to the seat across the table, not bothering to stand. He wore gold rings that disappeared under the folds of flesh in his chubby unstained hands. His fingernails were manicured. He was somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five years old, but it was impossible to tell where. He was balding, wearing the ever-desirable swept-over look, parting his hair just below the armpit.

“Nice place, Roy,” Myron said. “A table in the back, low lights, soft romantic music. If I didn’t know better—”

O’Connor shook his head. “Look, Bolitar, I know you think you’re a regular Buddy Hackett, but give it a rest, okay?”

“I guess flowers are out, then.” Pause. Then: “Buddy Hackett?”

“We need to talk.”

“I’m all ears.”

A waitress came over. “Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?”

“Another,” Roy said, pointing to his glass.

“And for you?”

“Do you have Yoo-Hoo?” Myron asked.

“I think so.”

“Great. I’ll have one.”

She left. Roy shook his head. “A fucking Yoo-Hoo,” he mumbled.

“Did you say something?”

“Your goon visited me last night.”

“Your goons visited me first,” Myron said.

“I had nothing to do with that.”

Myron gave him his best “come off it” look of pure skepticism. The waitress put down the drinks Roy scooped up his martini as if it held a life-saving antidote. Myron, by contrast, sipped his Yoo-Hoo daintily. Ever the gentleman.

“Look, Myron,” O’Connor continued, “it’s like this. I signed Landreaux. I gave him money up front. I gave him money every month. I kept my part of the bargain.”

“You signed him illegally.”

“I’m not the first guy to do it,” he said.

“Nor the last. What’s your point, Roy?”

“Look, you know me. You know how I operate.”

Myron nodded. “You’re a chicken-shitted crook.”

“I might have threatened the kid. Fine. I’ve done that before. But that’s it. I’d never really hurt anybody.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Word would get out to the athletes. I’d be ruined.”

“Damn shame that would be.”

“Bolitar, you’re not making this any easier.”

“I’m not trying to.”

O’Connor grabbed the drink again. He finished it and signaled to the waitress for another. “I’ve gotten involved with the wrong people,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I worked up some big-time gambling debts. Debts I couldn’t pay off.”

“So they took a piece of your business.”

Roy nodded. “They control me now. Your—your friend from last night.” A Geiger counter could have registered the quake in his voice when he mentioned Win. “I want to do just what he said, but I don’t have the power anymore.”

Myron took another sip of his Yoo-Hoo, hoping he wasn’t getting one of those chocolate mustaches. “My friend won’t be pleased to hear that.”

“You have to tell him it’s not me.”

“Then who is it?”

Roy sat back, shaking his head. “I can’t say. But I can tell you they play for keeps. And they don’t understand a thing about this business. They think they can just scare everyone into compliance. They want to make an example out of someone.”

“And Landreaux is the example?”

“Landreaux. And you. They want to hurt Landreaux. They want to kill you. They’re putting out a contract on your head.”

Another cool sip. Myron said nothing.

“You don’t seem very worried,” Roy said.

“I laugh in the face of death,” Myron replied. “Well, maybe not laugh. More like a snicker. A quiet snicker.”

“Jesus, you’re a lunatic.”

“And I wouldn’t do it directly in death’s face. So it’s more like a quiet snicker behind his back.”

“Bolitar, this isn’t funny.”

“No,” Myron agreed. “It’s not. I strongly suggest you call them off.”

“Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? I got no control here.”

“If something happens to me, my friend will be very upset. He’ll take it out on you.”

Roy swallowed. “But I’m powerless. You have to believe that.”

“Then tell me who’s calling the shots.”

“I can’t.”

Myron shrugged. “Maybe we can be buried next to one another. One of those romantic tragedy things.”

“They’ll kill me if I say anything.”

“What do you think my friend will do to you?”

Roy shuddered. He sucked on the ice again, trying to salvage the last remnants of the whiskey. “Where is that damn bimbo with my drink?”

“Who’s calling the shots, Roy?”

“You didn’t hear it from me, right?”

“Right.”

“You won’t tell them?”

“Mum’s the word.”

One more ice suck. Then Roy said, “Ache.”

“Herman Ache?” Myron asked, surprised. “Herman Ache is behind this?”

Roy shook his head. “His younger brother. Frank. He’s out of control. I don’t know what the psycho will do next.”

Frank Ache. It made sense. Herman Ache was one of New York’s leading mobsters, responsible for countless misery. But next to his younger brother Frank, Herman was an Alan Alda clone. Aaron would enjoy working for someone like Frank.

This was not good news. Myron toyed with the idea of dropping the snicker altogether. “Anything else you can tell me?”

“No. I just don’t want anyone hurt.”

“You’re some guy, Roy. So selfless.”

O’Connor stood. “I got nothing more to say.”

“I thought we were going to have lunch.”

“Have it by yourself,” O’Connor said. “It’s on my tab.”

“Won’t be the same without your company.”

“Yet somehow you’ll muddle through.”

Myron picked up the menu. “I’ll try.”

Chapter 17

Who else to call?

The answer, Jessica realized, was obvious.

Nancy Serat. Kathy’s roommate and closest friend.

Jessica sat at her father’s desk. The lights were turned off, the shades were pulled down, but the sunlight was still strong enough to sneak through and cast shadows.

Adam Culver had done everything he could to make his home office radically different from the cement, institutional, macabre feel of the county morgue. The results were mixed. The converted bedroom had bright yellow walls, plenty of windows, silk flowers, white Formica desk. Teddy bears encircled the room. William Shakesbear. Rhett Beartler with Scarlett O’Beara. Bear Ruth. Bearlock Holmes. Humphrey Beargart with Lauren Bearcall. The whole atmosphere was cheerful, albeit a forced cheerful, like a clown you laugh at but find a little scary.

She took her phone book from her purse. Nancy had sent the family a card a few weeks ago. She had won some fellowship and was staying on campus to work in admissions. Jessica looked up her number and dialed.

On the third ring the answering machine picked up. Jessica left a message and hung up. She was about to start going through the drawers when a voice stopped her.

“Jessica.”

She looked up. Her mother stood in the doorway. Her eyes were sunken, her face a skeletal death mask. Her body swayed as though she were about to topple over.

“What are you doing in here?” Carol asked.

“Just looking around,” she said.

Carol nodded, her head bobbing on the string that was her neck. “Find anything?”

“Not yet.”

Carol sat down. She stared straight ahead, her eyes unfocused. “She was always such a happy child,” she said slowly. Her fingers fiddled with prayer beads, her gaze still far off. “Kathy never stopped smiling. She had such a wonderful, happy smile. It lit up any room she entered. You and Edward, well, you were both more brooding. But Kathy—she had a smile for everyone and everything. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” Jessica said. “I remember.”

“Your father used to joke that she had the personality of a born-again cheerleader,” Carol added, chuckling at the memory. “Nothing ever brought her down.” She stopped, the chuckle fading away. “Except, I guess, me.”

“Kathy loved you, Mom.”

She sighed deeply, her chest heaving as though even a sigh took great effort. “I was a strict mother with you girls. Too strict, I guess. I was old-fashioned.”

Jessica did not reply.

“I just didn’t want you or your sister to …” She lowered her head.

“To what?”

She shook her head. Her fingers moved across the beads at a more fervid pace. For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Carol said, “You were right before, Jessica. Kathy changed.”

“When?”

“Her senior year.”

“What happened?”

Tears sprang to Carol’s eyes. Her mouth tried to form words, her hands moving in gestures of helplessness. “The smile,” she replied with something like a shrug. “One day it was gone.”

“Why?”

Her mother wiped her eyes. Her lower lip quivered. Jessica’s heart reached out to her, but for some reason the rest of her couldn’t. She sat and watched her suffering, strangely uninvolved, as if she were watching a late-night tearjerker on cable.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” Jessica said. “I just want to find Kathy.”

“I know, sweetheart.”

“I think,” Jessica continued, “that whatever changed Kathy is connected to her disappearance.”

Her mother’s shoulders sagged. “Merciful God.”

“I know it hurts,” Jessica said. “But if we can find Kathy, if we can find who killed Dad—”

Carol’s head shot up. “Your father was killed in a robbery.”

“I don’t think so. I think it’s all connected. Kathy’s disappearance, Dad’s murder, everything.”

“But—how?”

“I don’t know yet. Myron is helping me find out.”

The doorbell rang.

“That’ll be Uncle Paul,” her mother said, heading for the door.

“Mom?”

Carol stopped but did not turn around.

“What’s going on? What are you afraid to tell me?”

The doorbell rang again.

“I better get that,” Carol said. She hurried down the stairs.

“So,” Win began, “Frank Ache wants to kill you.”

Myron nodded. “Seems so.”

“A shame.”

“If he’d only get to know me. The real me.”

They sat in the front row at Titans Stadium. Out of the goodness of his heart, Otto had agreed to let Christian practice. That, and the fact that veteran quarterback Neil Decker was beyond horrendous.

The morning session had been a lot of wind sprints and walking through plays. The afternoon session, however, was a bit of a surprise. The players were in full gear, almost unheard of this early on in the year.

“Frank Ache is not a kind fellow,” Win said.

“He likes torturing animals.”

“Excuse me?”

“A friend of mine knew him growing up,” Myron explained. “Frank Ache’s favorite hobby was to chase down cats and dogs and bash in their heads with a baseball bat.”

“I bet that impressed the girls,” Win said.

Myron nodded.

“I assume, then, that you will be in need of my unique services.”

“For a few days, anyway,” Myron replied.

“Goodie. May I also assume that you have a plan?”

“I’m working on it. Feverishly.”

Christian jogged out on the field. He moved in that effortless way great athletes do. He got into the huddle, broke it, and approached the line of scrimmage.

“Full contact!” a coach yelled out.

Myron looked at Win. “I don’t like this.”

“What?”

“Full contact on the first day.”

Christian started calling out numbers. Then he gave a few hut-huts before the ball was snapped to him. He faded back to pass.

“Oh, shit,” Myron said.

Tommy Lawrence, the Titans’ All-Pro linebacker, charged forward unblocked. Christian saw him too late. Tommy placed his helmet into Christian’s sternum and slammed him to the ground—the kind of tackle that hurts like hell but doesn’t do any permanent damage. Two other defenders piled on.

Christian got up, wincing and holding his chest. Nobody helped him.

Myron stood.

Win stopped him with a shake of his head. “Sit down, Myron.”

Otto Burke came down the stairs, entourage in tow.

Myron glared at him. Otto smiled brightly. He made a tsk-tsk noise. “I traded a lot of popular veterans to get him,” he said. “It looks like some of the guys aren’t too thrilled.”

“Sit down, Myron,” Win repeated.

Myron hesitated, then complied.

Christian limped back to the huddle. He called the next play and again approached the line of scrimmage. He surveyed the defense, yelled out numbers and hut-huts, then took the snap from the center. He stepped back. Tommy Lawrence blitzed again over left guard, completely untouched. Christian froze. Tommy bore down on him. He leaped like a panther, his arms stretched out for a bone-crushing tackle. Christian moved at the very last moment. Not a big move. Just a slight shift, actually. Tommy flew by him and landed on the ground. Christian pumped and threw a bomb.

Complete pass.

Myron turned around, grinning. “Hey, Otto?”

“What?”

“Kiss my grits.”

Otto’s smile did not falter. Myron wondered how he did that, if his mouth was frozen that way, like the threat a little kid hears from his mom when he’s making faces. Otto nodded and walked away. His entourage followed in a row, like a family of mallard ducks.

Win looked at Myron “Kiss my grits?”

Shrug. “Paying homage to Flo on Alice.”

“You watch too much television.”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh?”

“About Gary Grady,” Myron said.

“What about him?”

“He has an affair with a student. She vanishes a year or so later. Time passes and her picture ends up in a porno ad he runs.”

“Your point being?”

“It’s crazy.”

“So is everything about this case.”

Myron shook his head. “Think about it. Grady admits having an affair with Kathy, right? So what would be the last thing he’d want to do?”

“Publicize it.”

“Yet her picture ends up in his ad.”

“Ah.” Win nodded. “You believe someone is setting him up.”

“Exactly.”

“Who?”

“Fred Nickler would be my bet,” Myron said.

“Hmm. He did hand over Grady’s p.o. box without much debate.”

“And he has the power to switch photos in his own magazine.”

“So what do you suggest?” Win asked.

“I’d like you to check out Mr. Fred Nickler very thoroughly Maybe talk to him again. Talk,” Myron repeated. “Not visit.”

On the field Christian was fading back again. For the third straight time Tommy Lawrence blitzed over left guard untouched. In fact, the left guard stood with his hands on his hips and watched.

“Christian’s own lineman is setting him up,” Myron said.

Christian side-stepped Tommy Lawrence, cocked his arms, and whipped the ball with unearthly velocity directly into his left guard’s groin. There was a short oomph sound. The left guard collapsed like a folding chair.

“Ouch,” Win said.

Myron almost clapped. “The Longest Yard revisited.”

The left guard was, of course, wearing a cup. But a cup was far from full protection against a speeding missile. He rolled on the ground, back curved fetal-like, eyes wide. Every man in the general vicinity gave a collective, sympathetic “Ooo.”

Christian walked over to his left guard—a man weighing in excess of 275 pounds—and offered him a hand. The left guard took it. He limped back to the huddle.

“Christian has balls,” Myron said.

Win nodded. “But can the same be said of the left guard?”

Chapter 18

As soon as Myron entered the Reston University campus, his car phone rang.

“Listen, putz, I got what you want,” P.T. said. “My friend’s name is Jake Courter. He’s the town sheriff.”

“Sheriff Jake,” Myron said. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Hey, don’t let the title fool you. Jake used to work homicide in Philly, Boston, and New York. Good man. He said he’d meet with you today at three.”

Myron checked his watch. It was one o’clock now. The station was five minutes away. “Thanks, P.T.”

“Can I ask you something, Myron?”

“Shoot.”

“Why you looking into this?”

“It’s a long story, P.T.”

“This have to do with her sister? That great piece of tail you used to nail?” He cackled.

“You’re all class, P.T.”

“Hey, Myron, I want to hear about it sometime. The whole story.”

“It’s a promise.”

Myron parked the car and headed into the old athletic center. The corridor was a bit more beaten up than Myron had expected. Three rows of framed photographs of past athletic teams—some from as far back as a hundred years ago—lined the walls. Myron approached a beaded-glass door that looked like something out of an old Sam Spade film. The word FOOTBALL was stenciled in black. He knocked.

The voice was like an old tire on an unpaved road. “What?”

Myron stuck his head. “Busy, Coach?”

Reston University football coach Danny Clarke looked up from his computer. “Who the hell are you?” he rasped.

“Fine, thanks. But let’s dispense with the pleasantries.”

“That supposed to be funny?”

Myron tilted his head. “You didn’t think so?”

“I’ll ask one more time: Who the hell are you?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

The coach’s scowl did not change. “Am I supposed to know you?”

It was a hot summer day, the campus was practically empty, and here sat the school’s legendary football coach wearing a suit and tie, watching videotapes of high school prospects. A suit and tie and no air conditioning. If the heat bothered Danny Clarke, it didn’t show. Everything about him was well groomed and tidy. He was shelling and eating peanuts, but no mess was visible. His jaw muscles bunched as he chewed, making little knobs appear and disappear near his ears. He had a prominent vein in his forehead.

“I’m a sports agent.”

He flicked his eyes away like a ruler dismissing an underling. “Get out of here. I’m busy.”

“We need to talk.”

“Out of here, asshole. Now.”

“I just—”

“Listen up, shithead.” He pointed a coach finger at Myron. “I don’t talk to bottom-feeders. Ever. I run a clean program with clean players. I don’t take payoffs from so-called agents or any of that bullshit. So if you got an envelope stuffed with green, you can go shove it up your ass.”

Myron clapped. “Beautiful. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.”

Danny Clarke looked up sharply. He wasn’t used to having his orders questioned, but part of him seemed almost amused by it. “Get the hell out of here,” he growled, but more gently now. He turned back to the television. On the screen a young quarterback threw a long, tight spiral. Caught. Touchdown.

Myron decided to disarm him with tact. “The kid looks pretty good,” he said.

“Yeah, well, it’s a good thing you’re a scum-sucking leech and not a scout. The kid can’t play a lick. Now take a hike.”

“I want to talk to you about Christian Steele.”

That got his attention. “What about him?”

“I’m his agent.”

“Oh,” Danny Clarke said. “Now I remember. You’re the old basketball player. The one who hurt his knee.”

“At your service,” Myron said.

“Is Christian okay?”

Myron tried to look noncommittal. “I understand he didn’t get along with his teammates.”

“So? You his social coordinator?”

“What was the problem?”

“I can’t see how it matters now,” he said.

“Then humor me.”

It took the coach some time to relax his glare. “It was a lot of things,” he said. “But I guess Horty was the main problem.”

“Horty?” Clever interrogation techniques. Pay attention.

“Junior Horton,” he explained. “A defensive lineman. Good speed, good size, good talent. The brains of a citrus beverage.”

“So what does this Horty have to do with Christian?”

“They didn’t see eye to eye.”

“How come?”

Danny Clarke thought a moment. “I don’t know. Something to do with that girl who disappeared.”

“Kathy Culver?”

“Right. Her.”

“What about her?”

He turned back to the VCR and changed tapes. Then he typed something on his computer. “I think maybe she dated Horty before Christian. Something like that.”

“So what happened?”

“Horty was a bad apple from the get-go. In his senior year I found out he was pushing drugs to my players: cocaine, dope, Lord knows what else. So I bounced him. Later, I heard he’d been supplying the guys with steroids for three years.”

Later my ass, Myron thought. But for once he kept the thought to himself. “So what does this have to do with Christian?”

“Rumors started circulating that Christian had gotten Horty thrown off the team. Horty fueled them, you know, telling the guys that Christian was turning them all in for using steroids, stuff like that.”

“Was that true?”

“Nope. Two of my best players showed up game day so stoned, they could barely see. That’s when I took action. Christian had nothing to do with it. But you know how it is. They all figured Christian was the star. If he wanted his ass wiped, the coaches asked Charmin or Downy.”

“Did you tell your guys Christian had nothing to do with it?”

He made a face. “You think that would have helped? They would have thought I was covering for him, protecting him. They would have hated him even more. As long as it didn’t affect their play—and it didn’t—it was not my concern. I just let it be.”

“You’re a real character developer, Coach.”

He gave Myron his best intimidate-the-freshman glare. The forehead vein started pulsing. “You’re out of line, Bolitar.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I care about my boys.”

“Yeah, I can tell. You let Horty stay as long as he pumped your boys with dangerous albeit play-enhancing drugs. When he graduated to the big leagues—to the stuff that had a negative on-the-field impact—all of a sudden you became a righteous drug czar.”

“I don’t have to listen to this bullshit,” Danny Clarke ranted. “Especially from a no-good, bloodsucking vampire. Get the hell out of my office. Now.”

Myron said, “You want to catch a movie together sometime? Maybe a Broadway show?”

“Out!”

Myron left. Another day, another friend. Charm was the key.

He had plenty of time to kill before he visited Sheriff Jake, so he decided to take a stroll. The campus was like a ghost town, except no tumbleweeds were skittering along the ground. The students were gone for summer break. The buildings stood lifeless and sad. In the distance a stereo was playing Elvis Costello. Two girls appeared. Co-ed types wearing crotch-riding shorts and halter tops. They were walking a hairy, little dog—a Shih Tzu. It looked like Cousin It after one too many spins in the dryer. Myron smiled and nodded as the girls passed him. Neither one fainted or disrobed. Astonishing. The little dog, however, snarled at him. Cujo.

He was nearly at his car when he spotted the sign:

CAMPUS POST OFFICE

He stopped, looked around the grounds, saw nobody. Hmm. It was worth a try.

The inside of the post office was painted institutional green, the same color as the school bathroom. A long V-shaped corridor was wallpapered with p.o. boxes. He heard the distant sound of a radio. He couldn’t make out the song, just a strong, monotonous bass beat.

Myron approached the mail window. A kid sat with his feet up. The music was coming from the kid’s ears. He was listening to one of those Walkman clones with the minispeakers that bypass the ears and plug directly into the cerebrum. His black high-tops rested on a desk, his baseball hat tipped down like a sombrero at siesta time. There was a book on his lap. Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock.

“Good book,” Myron said.

The kid did not look up.

“Good book,” Myron said again, this time yelling.

The kid pulled the speakers out of his ears with a sucking pop. He was pale and red-haired. When he took off his hat, his hair was Afro-wild. Bernie from Room 222.

“What?”

“I said, good book.”

“You read it?”

Myron nodded. “Without moving my lips.”

The kid stood. He was tall and lanky.

“You play basketball?” Myron asked.

“Yeah,” the kid said. “Just finished my freshman year. Didn’t play much.”

“I’m Myron Bolitar.”

The kid looked at him blankly.

“I played ball for Duke.”

Blink, blink.

“No autographs, please.”

“How long ago did you play?” the kid asked.

“Graduated ten years ago.”

“Oh,” the kid replied, as though that explained everything. Myron did some quick math in his head. The kid had been seven or eight when Myron won the national title. He suddenly felt very old.

“We used peach baskets back then.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Can I ask you a few questions?”

The kid shrugged. “Go ahead.”

“How often are you on duty in the post office?”

“Five days a week in the summer, nine to five.”

“Is it always this quiet?”

“This time of year, yeah. No students, so there’s almost no mail.”

“Do you do the mail sorting?”

“Sure.”

“Do you do pick-ups?”

“Pick-ups?”

“Campus mail.”

“Yeah, but there’s only that slot by the front door.”

“That’s the only campus mailbox?”

“Um-hmm.”

“Been getting a lot of campus mail lately?”

“Next to none. Three, four letters a day.”

“Do you know Christian Steele?”

“Heard of him,” the kid said. “Who hasn’t?”

“He got a big manila envelope in his box a few days ago. There was no postmark, so it had to be mailed from campus.”

“Yeah, I remember. What about it?”

“Did you see who mailed it?” Myron asked.

“No,” the kid said. “But they were the only pieces of mail I got that whole day.”

Myron cocked his head. “They?”

“What?”

“You said ‘they.’ They were the only pieces.’ ”

“Right. Two big envelopes. Exact same except for the address.”

“Do you remember who the other one was addressed to?”

“Sure,” the kid said. “Harrison Gordon. He’s the dean of students.”

Chapter 19

Nancy Serat dropped her suitcase on the floor and rewound the answering machine. The tape raced back, shrieking all the way. She had spent the weekend in Cancún, a final vacation before starting her fellowship at Reston University, her alma mater.

The first message was from her mother.

“I don’t want to disturb you on vacation, dear. But I thought you’d want to know that Kathy Culver’s father died yesterday. He was stabbed by a mugger. Awful. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. Give us a call when you get back in. Your father and I want to take you out to dinner for your birthday.”

Nancy’s legs felt weak. She collapsed into the chair, barely hearing the next two messages—one from her dentist’s office reminding her of a teeth cleaning on Friday, the other from a friend planning a party.

Adam Culver was dead. She couldn’t believe it. Her mother had said it was a mugger. Nancy wondered. Was it really random? Or did it have something to do with his visit on …?

She calculated the days.

Kathy’s father had visited on the day he died.

A voice on the machine jarred her back to the present.

“Hello, Nancy. This is Jessica Culver, Kathy’s sister. When you get in, please give me a call. I need to talk to you as soon as possible. I’m staying with my mom. The number here is 555-1477. It’s kind of important. Thank you.”

Nancy suddenly felt very cold. She listened to the rest of the messages. Then she sat without moving for several minutes, debating her options. Kathy was dead—or so everyone believed. And now her father, hours after talking to Nancy, was dead too.

What did it mean?

She remained very still, the only sound her own breaths coming in short, hitching gasps. Then she picked up the phone and dialed Jessica’s number.

The dean’s office was closed, so Myron proceeded straight to his house. It was an old Victorian with cedar shingles on the west end of the campus. He rang the doorbell. A very attractive woman opened the door. She smiled solicitously.

“May I help you?”

She wore a tailored cream suit. She was not young, but she had a grace and beauty and sex appeal that made Myron’s mouth a little dry. In front of such a lady Myron wanted to remove his hat, except he wasn’t wearing one.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m looking for Dean Gordon. My name is Myron Bolitar, and—”

“The basketball player?” she interrupted. “Of course. I should have recognized you right away.”

To grace, beauty, and sex appeal, add knowledge of basketball.

“I remember watching you in the NCAAs,” she continued. “I cheered you all the way.”

“Thank you—”

“When you got hurt—” She stopped, shook the head attached to the Audrey Hepburn neck. “I cried. I felt like a part of me was hurt too.”

Grace, beauty, sex appeal, basketball knowledge, and alas, sensitivity. She was also long-legged and curvy. All in all, a nice package.

“That’s very kind of you, thank you.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Myron.”

Even his first name sounded good coming from those lips. “And you must be Dean Gordon’s wife. The lovely dean-nessa.”

She laughed at the Woody Allen rip-off. “Yes, I’m Madelaine Gordon. And no, my husband is not home at the moment.”

“Are you expecting him soon?”

She smiled as though the question were a double entendre. Then she gave him a look that flushed his cheeks. “No,” she said slowly. “He won’t be home for hours.”

Heavy accent on the word hours.

“Well then, I won’t bother you anymore.”

“It’s no bother.”

“I’ll come by another time,” he said.

Madelaine (he liked that name) nodded demurely. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“Nice meeting you.” With Myron, every line was a lady-slayer.

“Nice meeting you too,” she singsonged. “Good-bye, Myron.”

The door closed slowly, teasingly. He stood there for another moment, took a few deep breaths, and hurried back to his car. Whew.

He checked his watch. Time to meet Sheriff Jake.

Jake Courter was alone in the station, which looked like something out of Mayberry RFD. Except Jake was black. There were never any blacks in Mayberry. Or Green Acres. Or any of those places. No Jews, Latinos, Asians, ethnics of any kind. Would have been a nice touch. Maybe have a Greek diner or a guy named Abdul working for Sam Drucker at the grocery store.

Myron estimated Jake to be in his mid-fifties. He was in plainclothes, his jacket off, his tie loosened. A big gut spilled forward like something that belonged to someone else. Manila files were scattered across Jake’s desk, along with the remnants of what might be a sandwich and an apple core. Jake gave a tired shrug and wiped his nose with what looked like a dishrag.

“Got a call,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m supposed to help you out.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Myron said.

Jake leaned back and put his feet on the desk. “You played ball against my son. Gerard. Michigan State.”

“Sure,” Myron said, “I remember him. Tough kid. Monster on the boards. Defensive specialist.”

Jake nodded proudly. “That’s him. Couldn’t shoot worth a lick, but you always knew he was there.”

“An enforcer,” Myron added.

“Yep. He’s a cop now. In New York. Made detective second grade already. Good cop.”

“Like his old man.”

Jake smiled. “Yeah.”

“Give him my regards,” Myron said. “Better yet, give him an elbow to the rib cage. I still owe him a few.”

Jake threw back his head and laughed. “That’s Gerard. Finesse was never his forte.” He blew his nose into the dishrag. “But I’m sure you didn’t come all this way to talk basketball.”

“No, I guess not.”

“So why don’t you tell me what this is all about, Myron?”

“The Kathy Culver case,” he said. “I’m looking into it. Very surreptitiously.”

“Surreptitiously,” Jake repeated with a raised eyebrow. “Awfully big word, Myron.”

“I’ve been listening to self-improvement tapes in the car.”

“That right?” Jake blew his nose again. Sounded like a ewe’s mating call. “So what’s your interest in this—aside from the fact that you represent Christian Steele and you used to have a thing for Kathy’s sister.”

Myron said, “You’re thorough.”

He took a bite out of the half-eaten sandwich on his desk, smiled. “Man does love to be flattered.”

“It’s like you said. Christian Steele. He’s a client. I’m trying to help him out.”

Jake studied him, waiting again. It was an old trick. Stay silent long enough, and the witness would start talking again, elaborating. Myron did not bite.

After a full minute had passed Jake said, “So let me get this straight. Christian Steele signs on with you. One day you start chatting. He says, ‘You know, Myron, the way you been licking my lily-white ass and all, I’d like you to go play Dick Fuckin’ Tracy and find my old squeeze who’s been missing for the last year and a half and the cops and feds can’t find.’ That how it went, Myron?”

“Christian doesn’t curse,” Myron said.

“Okay, fine, you want to skip the dance? Let’s skip it. You want me to give, you have to give back.”

“That’s fair enough,” Myron said. “But I can’t. Not yet, anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“It could hurt a lot of people,” Myron said. “And it’s probably nothing.”

He made a face. “What do you mean, hurt?”

“I can’t elaborate.”

“Fuck you can’t.”

“I’m telling you, Jake. I can’t say anything.”

Jake studied him again. “Let me tell you something, Bolitar. I’m no glory hound. I’m like my son was on the court. Not flashy but a workhorse. I don’t look for clippings so I can climb up the ladder. I’m fifty-three years old. My ladder don’t go no higher. Now this may seem a bit old-fashioned to you, but I believe in justice. I like to see truth prevail. I’ve lived with Kathy Culver’s disappearance for eighteen months. I know her inside and out. And I have no idea what happened that night.”

“What do you think happened?” Myron asked.

Jake picked up a pencil and tapped it on the desk. “Best guess based on the evidence?”

Myron nodded.

“She’s a runaway.”

Myron was surprised. “What makes you say that?”

A slow smile spread across Jake’s face. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“P.T. said you would help.”

Jake shrugged and took another bite from yet another sandwich scrap. “What about Kathy’s sister? I understand you two were pretty heavy.”

“We’re friends now.”

Jake gave a low whistle. “I’ve seen her on TV,” he said. “Hard to be friends with a woman who looks like that.”

“You’re a real nineties guy, Jake.”

“Yeah, well, I forgot to renew my subscription to Cosmo.”

They stared at each other for a while. Jake settled back in his chair and examined his fingernails. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Myron said. “From the beginning.”

Jake folded his arms across his chest. He took a deep breath and let it loose slowly. “Campus security got a call from Kathy Culver’s roommate, Nancy Serat. Kathy and Nancy lived in the Psi Omega sorority house. Nice house. All pretty white girls with blond hair and white teeth. Kind that all look alike and sound alike. You get the picture.”

Myron nodded. He noticed that Jake was not reading or even consulting a file. This was coming from memory.

“Nancy Serat told the rent-a-cop that Kathy Culver hadn’t returned to her room for three days.”

“Why did Nancy wait so long to call?” Myron asked.

“Seems Kathy wasn’t spending too many nights in the sorority house anyhow. She slept in your client’s room most of the time. You know, the one who doesn’t like to curse.” Brief smile. “Anyhow, your boy and Nancy got to talking one day, both figuring Kathy had been spending all her time with the other. That’s when they realized she was missing and called campus security.

“Campus security told us about it, but no one got very excited at first. A co-ed missing for a few days is hardly an earth-shattering event. But then one of the rent-a-cops found the panties on top of a waste bin, and well, you know what happened then. The story spread like a grease stain on Elvis’s pillow.”

“I read there was blood on the panties,” Myron said.

“A media exaggeration. There was a bloodstain, dry, probably from a menstrual cycle. We typed it. B negative. Same type as Kathy Culver’s. But there was also semen. Enough antibodies for a DNA and blood test.”

“Did you have any suspects?”

“Only one,” Jake said. “Your boy, Christian Steele.”

“Why him?”

“Usual reasons. He was the boyfriend. She was on her way to see him when she vanished. Nothing very specific or damaging. But the DNA test on the semen cleared him.” He opened a small refrigerator behind him. “Want a Coke?”

“No, thanks.”

Jake grabbed a can and snapped it open. “Here’s what you probably read in the papers,” he continued. “Kathy is at a sorority cocktail party. She has a drink or two, nothing serious, leaves at ten P.M. to meet Christian, and disappears. End of story. But now let me fill it in a little.”

Myron leaned forward. Jake took a swig of Coke and wiped his mouth with a forearm the size of an oak trunk.

“According to several of her sorority sisters,” he said, “Kathy was distracted. Not herself. We also know she got a phone call a few minutes before she left the house. She told Nancy Serat the call was from Christian and she was going to meet him. Christian denies making the call. These were all intracampus calls, so there is no way for us to tell. But the roommate says Kathy sounded strained on the phone, not like she was talking to her true love, Mr. Clean-Mouth.

“Kathy hung up the phone and went back downstairs with Nancy. Then she posed for the now-famous last photograph before leaving for good.”

He opened his desk drawer and handed Myron the photograph. Myron had, of course, seen it countless times before. Every media outlet in the country had run the photograph with morbid fascination. A picture of twelve sorority sisters. Kathy stood second from the left. She wore a blue sweater and skirt. Pearls adorned her neck. Very preppy. According to Kathy’s sorority sisters, Kathy left the house alone immediately after the picture was taken. She never returned.

“Okay,” Jake said, “so she leaves the cocktail party. Only one person saw her for sure after that.”

“Who?” Myron asked.

“Team trainer. Guy named Tony Gardola. He saw her, strangely enough, entering the team’s locker room around quarter after ten. The locker room was supposed to be empty at that hour. Only reason Tony was there was that he forgot something. He asked her what she was doing there, and she said she was meeting Christian. Tony figured what the hell, kids today. Might be having a kinky locker-room encounter. Tony decided it was in his best interest not to ask too many questions.

“That’s our last firm report on her whereabouts. We have a possible sighting of her on the western edge of campus at around eleven P.M. Someone saw a blond woman wearing a blue sweater and skirt. It was too dark to make a positive ID. The witness said he wouldn’t have even noticed, except she seemed in a rush. Not running but doing one of those quick-walks.”

“Where on the western edge of campus?” Myron asked.

Jake opened a file and took out a map, still studying Myron’s face as though it held a clue. He spread the map out and pointed. “Here,” he said. “In front of Miliken Hall.”

“What’s Miliken Hall?” Myron asked.

“Math building. Locked tight by nine o’clock. But the witness said she was moving west.”

Myron’s eyes traced a path to the west. There were four other buildings labeled FACULTY HOUSING. Myron remembered the spot.

It was where Dean Gordon lived.

“What is it?” Jake asked.

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit, Bolitar. You see something.”

“It’s nothing.”

Jake’s eyebrows furrowed. “Fine. You want to play it that way? Then get the fuck out. I still got my ace in the hole, and I ain’t showing it.”

Myron had planned for this. Jake Courter would have to be given something. That was fine, as long as Myron could turn it to his advantage.

“It seems to me,” Myron said slowly, “that Kathy was walking in the general direction of the dean’s house.”

“So?”

Myron said nothing.

“She worked for him,” Jake said.

Myron nodded.

“What’s the connection?”

“Oh, I’m sure it’s completely innocent,” Myron said. “But you might want to ask him about it. You being so thorough and all.”

“Are you saying—”

“I’m not saying anything. I am merely making an observation.”

Again Jake studied him. Myron looked back coolly. A visit from Jake Courter would probably not crack Dean Gordon, but it should soften him a bit. “Now about that ace in the hole …?”

Jake hesitated. “Kathy Culver inherited money from her grandmother,” he said.

“Twenty-five grand,” Myron added. “All three kids got the same. They’re sitting in a trust account.”

“Not exactly,” Jake said. He stood, hitched his pants up. “You want to know why I said the evidence pointed to Kathy being a runaway?”

Myron nodded.

“The day Kathy Culver vanished, she visited the bank,” Jake continued. “She cleared out her inheritance. Every penny.”

Chapter 20

Myron started back toward New York. He flipped on the radio. Wham’s classic hit “Careless Whisper” was playing. George Michael was bemoaning the fact that he would never dance again because “guilty feet have got no rhythm.” Deep, Myron thought. Very deep.

He picked up the car phone and dialed Esperanza.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“You coming back to the office?”

“I’m on my way there now.”

“I wouldn’t make any stops,” she said.

“Why?”

“You have a surprise client waiting for you.”

“Who?”

“Chaz Landreaux.”

“He’s supposed to be hiding in Washington.”

“Well, he’s here. And he looks like shit.”

“Tell him to sit tight. I’m on my way.”

“It’s like this,” Chaz began. “I want to cancel our contract.”

He paced the office like an expectant father, and he did indeed look like shit. The cocky grin was nowhere to be seen. The swagger was more like a hunch. He kept licking his lips, darting his eyes, bunching and unbunching his fingers.

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Myron tried.

“Ain’t no beginning,” Chaz snapped. “I want out. You gonna fight me on it?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. I changed my mind, is all. I want to go with Roy O’Connor at TruPro now. They’re big-time. You’re a nice guy, Myron, but you don’t have their connections.”

“Uh-huh.”

Silence. More pacing.

“Can I have the contract or what?”

“How did they get to you, Chaz?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. How many times do I have to say it? I don’t want you, okay?” Chaz was on the edge and teetering. “I want TruPro.”

“It’s not that easy,” Myron said.

“You gonna fight me on this?” he asked again.

“They won’t stop with this, Chaz. You’re in over your head. You have to let me help you.”

He stopped. “Help me? You wanna help me? Then give me back my contract. And don’t pretend you give a shit about me. You just want your piece.”

“Do you really believe that?” Myron asked.

He shook his head. “You don’t get it, man. I don’t want you. I want to go with TruPro.”

“I get it. And like I said before, it’s not that easy. These guys got you by the balls. You think you can make them let go by doing what they say. But you can’t. Not for good anyway. Whenever they want something, they’ll just reach back into your pants and give another squeeze. They won’t stop, Chaz. Not until they’ve squeezed you for everything they can.”

“Man, you don’t know shit. I don’t have to explain nothing to you.” He approached the desk, but his eyes looked away. “I want that goddamn contract. I want it now.”

Myron picked up his phone. “Esperanza, bring me Chaz’s contract. The original.” He hung up. “It’ll just be a moment.”

Chaz said nothing.

“You don’t know what you’re mixed up in,” Myron continued.

“Fuck off, man. I know exactly what I’m mixed up in.”

“Let me help, Chaz.”

He snorted. “What can you do?”

“I can stop them.”

“Oh yeah, I can tell. You done a great job so far.”

“What happened?”

But he just shook his head.

Esperanza came in and handed Myron the contract. Myron in turn handed it to Chaz. He grabbed it and hurried to the door.

“Sorry, Myron. But this is business.”

“You can’t beat them, Chaz. Not on your own. They’ll suck you dry.”

“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

“I don’t think you can.”

“Just stay the fuck out. It ain’t your business no more.”

He took off without a backward glance. When he was gone, Win opened the door between the conference room and Myron’s office. “Interesting conversation,” Win said.

Myron nodded, thinking.

“We’ve lost a client,” Win said. “Too bad.”

“It’s not that simple, Win.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken,” Win replied steadily. “It’s just that simple. He dumped you for another agency. As he so eloquently put it, ‘It ain’t your business no more.’ ”

“Chaz is being pressured.”

“And you offered to help him. He refused.”

“He’s a scared kid.”

“He’s an adult who makes his own decisions. One of which was to tell you to fuck off.”

Myron looked up. “You know what they’ll do to him.”

“It’s a world of free will, Myron. Landreaux chose to take the money in college. And he chose to go back to them now.”

“Will you follow him?”

“Pardon?”

“Follow Chaz. See where he takes those contracts.”

“You complicate the simple, Myron. Just let it be.”

“I can’t. You know I can’t.”

Win nodded. “I guess I do.” He thought a moment. “I’ll do it for the sake of our business,” he said. “For the added revenue. If we get Landreaux back in our stable, it will be very profitable. You may enjoy playing superhero, but as far as I’m concerned, this is no moral crusade. I am doing this for the money. That is the only reason. The money.”

Myron nodded. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“Fine. As long as we are clear on that point. And I want you to take this.”

Win handed him a Smith & Wesson .38 and a shoulder holster. Myron put it on. Carrying a gun was incredibly uncomfortable, yet the weight felt good, like a reminder of some kind of protective bubble. Sometimes the sensation made you feel heady, invincible even.

That was usually when you got popped.

“Be extra careful,” Win said. “The word has hit the streets.”

“What word?”

“A price has officially been put on your head,” Win said, as if it were amusing cocktail conversation. “Thirty thousand dollars to the man who takes you out.”

Myron made a face. “Thirty thousand? Hell, I used to be a fed. I should be worth sixty, seventy grand minimum.”

“Bad economy. Times are tough.”

“I’m being discounted?”

“Appears so, yes.”

Myron opened the revolver and checked the bullets. Just as he suspected. Win had loaded the gun with dumdums—bullets with cross-hatched tips to expose the lead. Wasn’t enough to be using hollow-point Winchester Silvertip bullets. Win had to doctor them for that extra little crunch. “These are illegal.”

Win put his hand against his chest. “My. Oh. My. How. Awful.”

“And unnecessary.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.”

“They are effective.”

“I don’t want them,” Myron said.

“Fine” He handed Myron uncut bullets. “Be a wimp.”

Chapter 21

Jessica listened to the message on the answering machine.

“Hi, Jessica. It’s Nancy Serat. I’m so sorry to hear about your father. He was such a nice man. I can’t believe it. He was here the morning he died. So weird. He was so nostalgic that day. He told me all about that favorite yellow sweater he gave Kathy. Such a sweet story. I wish I could have been more helpful. I just can’t believe—well, I’m rambling, sorry. I do that when I’m nervous Anyway I’ll be out until ten o’clock tonight. You can come by then or give me a call. Bye.”

Jessica rewound the message and played it back. Then a third time. Nancy Serat had seen her father on the morning of his murder.

Another coincidence?

She thought not.

Myron called his mother. “I won’t be home for a few days.”

“What?”

“I’m going to stay with Win.”

“In the city?”

“Yes.”

“New York City?”

“No, Mom. Kuwait City.”

“Don’t be such a wise guy with your mother, save it for your friends,” she said. “So why are you staying in the city?”

Hmm. Should he tell her the truth? Because, Mom, a mobster has a contract out on my head and I don’t want to put you and Dad in danger. Nah. Might make her worry. “I’m going to be working late the next few nights.”

“You sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful, Myron. Don’t walk around alone at night.”

Esperanza opened the door. “Urgent call on line three,” she said, loud enough for Myron’s mother to hear.

“Mom, I gotta go. Urgent call.”

“Call us.”

“I will.” He hung up and looked up at Esperanza. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Is there anyone on the phone?”

She nodded. “Timmy Simpson again. I tried to handle it, but he says his problem needs your particular expertise.”

Timmy Simpson was a rookie shortstop for the Red Sox. A major-league pain in the ass.

“Hi, Timmy.”

“Hey, Myron, I’ve been waiting here two goddamn hours for your call.”

“I was out. What’s the problem?”

“I’m here in Toronto, okay, at the Hilton. And this hotel’s got no hot water.”

Myron waited. Then he said, “Did I hear you correctly, Timmy? Did you say—”

“Unfuckinbelievable, ain’t it?” Timmy shouted. “I go in the shower, right, wait five minutes, then ten minutes. The water’s fucking freezing, Myron. Ice cold. So finally I call down to the front desk, right? Some pissant manager tells me they’re having some kind of plumbing problem. Plumbing problem, Myron, like I’m staying in a fuckin’ trailer park or something. So I say, when’s it going to be fixed? He gives me this whole long spiel how he don’t know. Can you believe this shit?”

No, Myron thought. “Timmy, why exactly are you calling me?”

“Jesus Christ, Myron, I’m a pro, right? And I’m stuck in this hellhole with no hot water. I mean, isn’t there something in my contract about that?”

“A hot water clause, perhaps?” Myron tried.

“Or something. I mean, come on. Where do they get off? I need a shower before a game. A hot shower. Is that too much to expect? I mean, what am I going to do?”

Stick your head in the toilet and flush, Myron thought, massaging his temples with his fingertips. “I’ll see what I can do, Timmy.”

“Talk to the hotel manager, Myron. Make him understand the importance.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” Myron said, “those orphans in Eastern Europe are a minor annoyance in comparison to this. But if the hot water doesn’t come back on soon, check into another hotel. We’ll send the bill to the Red Sox.”

“Good idea. Thanks, Myron.”

Click.

Myron stared at the phone. Unbelievable. He leaned back and wondered how to handle his three big problems: Chaz Landreaux’s sudden departure, Kathy Culver’s possible re-emergence, and the Toronto Hilton’s plumbing. He decided to forgo the last. Only so much one man can do.

Problem 1: Chaz Landreaux was climbing into bed with Frank Ache. There was only one way out of that. Big brother Herman.

Myron picked up the phone and dialed. He still knew the number by heart. It was picked up on the first ring. “Clancy’s Tavern.”

“It’s Myron Bolitar. I’d like to see Herman.”

“Hold on.” Five minutes passed before the voice came back on. “Tomorrow. Two o’clock.”

Click. No need to wait for an answer. Whatever time Herman Ache agreed to see you, you were free.

Problem 2: Kathy Culver. Nips magazine had been mailed from a campus box. It had been mailed not only to Christian Steele but also to Dean Harrison Gordon. Why? Myron knew that Kathy had worked for the dean. Was there more to her job than just filing? An affair, perhaps? And what about the dean’s lovely wife? Did she wear underwear?

But Myron was digressing.

The catalyst of this whole thing was the ad in Nips. Gary Grady claimed he had nothing to do with it. Maybe. Maybe not. But either way the picture had to go through Fred Nickler. Good ol’ Freddy was at the center of this.

Myron looked up the number and dialed.

“HDP. May I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Fred Nickler.”

“Whom shall I say is calling?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

“Please hold.”

A minute passed. Then Fred Nickler came on. “Hello?”

“Mr. Nickler, this is Myron Bolitar.”

“Yes, Myron. What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to come by and ask you a few more questions about the ad.”

“I’m afraid I’m quite busy right now, Myron. Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow? Maybe we can set something up.”

Silence.

“Myron? You there?”

“Do you know who took that picture, Mr. Nickler?”

“Of course not.”

“Your friend Jerry denies any knowledge of it.”

“Myron, please. You’re a man of the world. What did you expect him to say?”

“He says he had nothing to do with putting that picture in the ad.”

“Well, that’s quite impossible. He was the advertiser. He submitted the photograph.”

“Then you have a copy of the photo?”

Pause. “It has to be in the file somewhere.”

“Maybe you can pull it out, and I’ll come pick it up.”

“Listen, Myron, I hate to be rude, but I’m really busy right now. It will just be the same photograph you already saw.”

“Kathy’s picture was only in Nips,” Myron said.

“Pardon me?”

“Her picture. It wasn’t in any of your other magazines. Only Nips.”

Pause. “So?” But his voice was suddenly tottery.

“So the same ad was in all six magazines. The same exact page with the same exact pictures. Except for one small change in Nips. Someone had changed just one photograph in the bottom row. Someone had switched pictures for just that one magazine and not the others. Why?”

Fred Nickler coughed. “I really don’t know, Myron. Tell you what: I’ll check on it and let you know. Gotta zillion calls waiting. Gotta run. Bye.”

Another click.

Myron sat back. Fred Nickler was starting to panic.

With a shaking hand Fred Nickler dialed the number. After three rings the phone was picked up.

“County police.”

Fred cleared his throat. “Paul Duncan, please.”

Chapter 22

Nine P. M.

Myron called Jessica. He filled her in on his dean discovery.

“Do you really think Kathy was having an affair with the dean?” Jessica asked.

“I don’t know. But after seeing his wife, I’d tend to doubt it.”

“Good-looking?”

“Very,” Myron said. “And she knows her basketball. She even cried when I got hurt.”

Jessica made a noise. “The perfect woman.”

“Do I detect a note of jealousy?”

“Dream on,” Jessica said. “The fact that a man is married to a beautiful woman does not preclude him from having affairs with pretty co-eds.”

“True enough. So the question is: How did Dean Gordon get his name on this infamous mailing list?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” she said. “But I too found out something interesting today. My father visited Nancy Serat, Kathy’s roommate, the morning he died.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know yet. Nancy just left a message on my machine. I’m meeting her in an hour.”

“Good. Call me if you hear anything else.”

“Where are you going to be?” she asked.

“I work nights at Chippendale’s,” Myron said. “Stage name Zorro.”

“Should be Tiny.”

“Ouch.”

An uncomfortable silence engulfed them. Jessica finally broke it. “Why don’t you come by the house tonight?” she asked, struggling to keep her tone level.

Myron’s heart pounded. “It’ll be late.”

“That’s okay. I’m not sleeping much. Just knock on my bedroom window. Zorro.”

She hung up. For the next five minutes Myron sat perfectly still and thought about Jessica. They had first started dating a month before his career ended. She stayed with him. She nursed him. She loved him. He pushed her away under some macho disguise of protecting her. But she wouldn’t leave. Not then, anyway.

Esperanza opened the door without knocking. She looked at him and snapped, “Stop it.”

“What?”

“You’re making that face again.”

“What face?”

She imitated him. “That repulsive lovesick-puppy face.”

“I wasn’t making any face.”

“Right. You disgust me, Myron.”

“Thank you.”

“You know what I think? I think you’re more interested in getting back in Jessica’s pants than you are in finding her sister.”

“Jesus, what the hell is with you?”

“I was there, remember? When she left.”

“Hey, I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself.”

Esperanza shook her head. “Déjà vu all over again.”

“What?”

“Take care of yourself. Bullshit. You sound just like Chaz Landreaux. Both of you have your head up your ass.”

Esperanza’s dark face reminded him of Spanish nights, golden sand, full moons against starless skies. There had been moments of temptation between them, but one or the other had always realized what it would mean and stopped it. Such temptations no longer came their way anymore. Aside from Win, Esperanza was his closest friend. Her concern, Myron knew, was genuine.

He changed subjects. “Was there a reason for your unannounced entrance?”

“I found something.”

“What?”

She read from a steno pad. Why she had a steno pad he could not say. She could not take dictation or type a lick. “I finally tracked down the other number Gary Grady called after your visit. It belongs to a photography studio called—get this—Global Globes Photos. Located off Tenth Avenue, near the tunnel.”

“Sleazy area.”

“The sleaziest,” she said. “I think the studio specializes in pornography.”

“Nice to have a specialty.” Myron checked his watch. “Any word from Win?”

“Not yet.”

“Leave the photographer’s address on his voice mail. Maybe he’ll finish in time to meet me.”

“You going tonight?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Esperanza closed the pad with a snap. “Mind if I tag along?”

“To the photography studio?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have class tonight?” Esperanza was getting her law degree from NYU at night.

“No. And I’ve done all my homework, Daddy. Really I have.”

“Shut up and come on.”

Chapter 23

Hookerville.

There were all kinds. White, Black, Asian, Latino—a verifiable United Nations of prostitutes. Most were young, very young, stumbling on too-high heels, like children playing dress-up, which in a real sense they were. Most were thin, dried-up, needle tracks covering their arms like dozens of tiny insects, their skin pulled tightly around cheekbones, giving their faces a haunted skull look. Their eyes were hollow and set deep, their hair lifeless and strawlike.

Myron muttered, “Don’t they know they’re making love to what’s already dead?”

Esperanza paused, thinking. “Don’t know that one.”

“Fontine in Les Misérables. The musical.”

“I can’t afford Broadway musicals. My boss is cheap.”

“But cute.”

He watched a blond girl in sixties hot-pants negotiate with a sleazeball in a Ford station wagon. He knew her story. He had seen girls (boys sometimes) just like her get off the bus at the Port Authority, a Greyhound bus that had originated in West Virginia or western Pennsylvania or that great, barren mono-expanse New Yorkers simply referred to as the Midwest. She had run away from home—maybe to avoid abuse, but more likely because she was bored and “belonged” in a big city. She had high-stepped off the bus with a wide smile, mesmerized, without a penny. Pimps would eye her and wait with the patience of a vulture. When the time was right, they would sweep down and claim their carcass. They’d introduce her to the Big Apple, get her a place to stay, some food, a hot shower, maybe a room with a Jacuzzi and dazzling lights and a cool CD player and cable TV with a remote. They’d promise to set her up with a photographer, get her a few modeling gigs. Then they’d teach her how to party, really party, not that candy-ass shit she’d done in Hicks Falls with some beer and a zit-infested senior pawing at her in the backseat of a pickup. They’d show her how to have a good time with the prime stuff, the numero-uno white powder.

But things would change. Someone would have to pay for all these good times. The modeling job would fall through, and she couldn’t just be a freeloader. Besides, the partying was more a need now than a luxury. Like food or breathing. She could no longer exist without a snort or a pinch from her favorite needle.

It didn’t take long to plummet and hit bottom. And once there she didn’t have the strength—not even the desire, really—to get up.

She ended up here.

Myron parked. He and Esperanza got out of the car silently. Myron felt his stomach churn. It was night, of course. Places like this existed only at night. They fled with the onslaught of sunlight.

Myron had never been with a whore, but he knew Win had engaged their services on plenty of occasions. Win liked the convenience. His favorite spot was an Asian whorehouse on Eighth Street called Noble House. Back in the mid-eighties, Win and a few friends would have what they called “Chinese night” in Win’s apartment—Hunan Garden would deliver food, Noble House women. The truth was, Win had no feelings for women. He didn’t trust them. Whores were what he wanted. It wasn’t just the lack of attachment. Win never let women attach. But prostitutes were throwaways. Disposable.

Myron didn’t think Win still partook in such events—not in this disease-ridden era—but he didn’t know for sure. They never talked about it.

“Pretty spot,” Myron said. “Scenic.”

Esperanza nodded.

They passed a nightclub of some sort. The music was loud enough to crack the sidewalk. A teen—Myron couldn’t say if it was male or female—with green spiked hair bumped into him. Looked like the Statue of Liberty. There were lots of motorcycles, ear and nipple rings, tattoos, chain jewelry. A constant whore chorus of “Hey, baby” pelted him from every conceivable angle, their faces blurring into one mass of human debris. The place was like a carnival freak show.

The sign above the door read CLUB F. U. The logo was a raised middle finger. Subtle. A chalkboard read the following:

HEAVY “MEDICAL” NIGHT!
LIVE BANDS!
Featuring the only local appearances by:
PAP SMEAR
and RECTAL THERMOMETER

Myron could see through the open door. People weren’t dancing. They were jumping up and down, heads lolling lifelessly as if their necks were rubber bands, their arms tucked against their sides. Myron focused in on one kid, maybe fifteen years old, lost in the violet bliss, sweat matting his long hair to his face. He wondered if the group onstage was Pap Smear or Rectal Thermometer. Didn’t matter. Sounded like someone had jammed a rutting pig into a Cuisinart.

The whole scene was like Dickens meets Blade Runner.

“The studio is next door,” Esperanza said.

The building was either a disastrous brownstone or a small warehouse. Whores hung out the windows like shreds of leftover Christmas decorations.

“This is it?” Myron asked.

“Third floor,” Esperanza answered. She did not seem intimidated by the surroundings in the least, but she had come from streets not much better than this. Her face remained a placid pool. Esperanza never showed weakness. Her temper flared often, but for all their times together, Myron had never seen her cry. She could not say the same of him.

Myron approached the stoop. An overweight whore stuffed into a bodysuit that doubled as sausage casing licked her lips and stepped in front of him.

“Hey, yo, want a blow job? Fifty bucks.”

Myron tried not to close his eyes. “No,” he said softly, lowering his head. He wanted to offer words of wisdom, words that could transform her, change her circumstances. But he just said, “I’m sorry,” and hurried past. The fat girl shrugged and moved on.

It was a walk-up. No surprise there. The stairwells were littered with people, most unconscious or maybe dead. Myron and Esperanza carefully climbed over them. A cacophony of music—everything from Neil Diamond to what might have been Pap Smear bellowed through the corridor. There were other sounds too Broken bottles, shouts, curses, crashing, a baby crying. An orchestra from hell.

When they reached the third floor, they saw a glassed-in office. No one was inside, but the pictures on the wall—not to mention the bullwhip and handcuffs—left little doubt that they had arrived at the right place Myron tried the knob. It turned.

“You stay out here,” he said.

“Okay.”

He moved in “Hello?”

No one answered him, but music was coming from the other room. Sounded like calypso music. He called out again and stepped into the studio.

Myron was struck by how professional the setup was. It was clean, brightly lit, with one of those big white umbrella things you always see in photo studios. There were half a dozen cameras set up on tripods, and overhead was a variety of different-colored lights.

Of course, the setting was not the first thing that struck him. Other things caught his eye first. The naked woman sitting on a motorbike, for example. To be accurate, she wasn’t fully naked—she had on a pair of black boots. Nothing else. Not a look every woman could pull off, but it seemed to work for her. She had not seen him yet, intensely studying the magazine in her hand. The National Sun. Headline: Boy 16 Becomes Grandmother. Hmm. He stepped closer. She was big-breasted, very Russ Meyer, but Myron could see scars under the large swellings. Implants, the fashion accessory of the eighties.

She looked up, startled.

Myron smiled warmly. “Hi.”

She screamed Piercingly. “Get the fuck out of here!” she shrieked, covering her chest. Modesty. So rare nowadays. It was nice to see.

Myron said, “My name—”

Another piercing scream. Myron heard a noise behind him and spun. A skinny kid wearing no shirt stood smiling. He popped open a switchblade, a maniacal grin plastered across his face. His Bruce Lee–like build shimmered in the light. He crouched low and beckoned Myron forward. Very West Side Story. If only the kid would snap his fingers.

Another door opened, and red light leaked out. A woman stepped into view. She had what looked like curly red hair, but Myron couldn’t be sure if that was her color or if it just appeared red because of the light from the darkroom.

“You’re trespassing,” she said to Myron. “Hector has the right to kill you where you stand.”

“I don’t know where you got your law degree,” Myron said, “but if Hector isn’t careful, I’m going to take away his toy and shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

Hector giggled. He began to toss the knife back and forth between his hands.

“Wow,” Myron said.

The topless model fled to the dressing room, which was cleverly marked UNDRESSING ROOM. The woman from the darkroom stepped fully into the studio and closed the darkroom door. Her hair was indeed red, more like burnt auburn actually. Her skin was what some might call peaches and cream. She was maybe thirty and looked, strange as it might sound, perky. The Katie Couric of the porno world.

“Are you the owner?” Myron asked.

“Hector is very good with a blade,” she replied coolly. “He could slice out a man’s heart and show it to him before he died.”

“That must liven a party.”

Hector stepped closer. Myron did not move.

“I could demonstrate my skills in the martial arts,” Myron began. He quickly withdrew his gun and aimed it at Hector’s chest. “But I just showered.”

Hector’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Let this be a lesson to you, Blade Boy,” Myron continued. “Half the people in this building probably carry guns. You go around waving that toy, and someone without my tender heart will ace you.”

The redhead did not seem taken aback by the gun. “Get out of here,” she said to Myron “Now.”

“Are you the owner?” Myron tried again.

“You got a warrant?”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then get your ass out of here.” She undulated a lot when she talked. Her hips and legs in constant motion. She signaled to Hector, who closed up the switchblade. “You can go, Hector.”

“Not so fast, Hector,” Myron said. “Get in the darkroom. I don’t want you getting any ideas about coming back with a gun.”

Hector looked toward the redhead. She nodded, and he went.

“Close the door,” Myron said.

He closed it. Myron walked over and pulled the dead bolt.

The redhead put her hands on her hips. “Happy now?”

“Nearly ecstatic.”

“Now get out.”

“Listen,” Myron said with his melt-’em, warm smile, “I don’t want any trouble. I’m just here to buy some photographs. My name is Bernie Worley. I work for a new porno magazine.”

She made a face. “Do I really look that stupid? Bernie Worley, here to buy some photographs. Give me a fuckin’ break.”

There was a sudden noise. People. Lots of them. A commotion, even by this place’s standard. In the corridor. Right where he had left Esperanza. Alone.

Myron turned and ran, feeling his heart leap to his throat. If something had happened to her—

He threw open the door. Dozens of people surrounded Esperanza, most kneeling. She stood in the middle, smiling and—he couldn’t believe it—signing autographs.

“It’s Pocahontas!” someone shouted.

“Make mine out ‘With love to Manuel.’ ”

“You’re still my favorite!”

“I remember when you beat Queen Carimba. What a fight!”

“That Highway Hannah. Such a dirty fighter. When she threw salt in your eyes, I could have killed her.”

Esperanza caught Myron’s eye, shrugged, went back to signing old matchbooks and scraps of paper. The redhead followed him out the door. When she saw Esperanza, her entire being lit up. “Poca?”

Esperanza looked back up. “Lucy?”

They hugged. They stepped back into the studio, Myron following.

“Where you been, girl?” Lucy asked.

“Here, there.”

The two women kissed. On the lips. A little too long. Esperanza turned around. “Myron?”

“Huh?”

“Your eyes are bulging.”

“They are?”

“I don’t tell you everything.”

“Apparently not,” he said. “But at least I know why my startling good looks didn’t faze your friend.”

Both women found that laughable. “Lucy, this is Myron Bolitar.”

Lucy looked him up and down. “He your boyfriend?”

“No. Just a good friend. And my boss.”

“He looks like a guy I know, worked a kinky show at a club down the street. He had this act where he peed on different women.”

“It wasn’t me,” Myron assured her. “I have enough trouble peeing in a public urinal.”

Lucy turned her attention to Esperanza. “You look good, Poca.”

“Thanks.”

“Out of the wrestling game, huh?”

“Completely.”

“But you’re still working out?”

“As often as I can.”

“Nautilus?”

“Um-hmm.”

“It shows,” Lucy said with a wicked smile. “You really look hot.”

Myron cleared his throat. “Hey, how about those Knicks?”

The women ignored him. “You still taking pictures of the wrestlers?” Esperanza asked.

“Not much anymore. I’m mostly into this shit.”

Esperanza looked back at Myron. “Lucy—that isn’t her real name, we just call her that because of her hair—she used to do the promo photos of all the wrestlers.”

“So I gathered,” Myron said. “Do you think she can help us out?”

“What do you want to know?” Lucy asked.

Myron handed her the copy of Nips. He pointed to Kathy’s picture. “I want to know about this,” he said.

Lucy studied the photograph for a second. “He a cop?” she asked Esperanza.

“A sports agent.”

“Oh.” She did not ask for further elaboration. “Because this could get us in trouble.”

“How so?” Myron asked.

“The photograph. The girl is topless.”

“So?”

“So it’s illegal. Topless girls aren’t allowed in 900 ads. We’re going to get screwed if the government sees this.”

“We?” Myron repeated. Again the clever interrogation techniques.

“I’m one of the owners of these dial-a-porn companies. A lot of the lines work out of this building.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Myron said. “What do you mean, topless girls are illegal? Almost every girl in that magazine is naked.”

“Not in the ads for 900 lines,” Lucy corrected. “Couple years back a law was passed. Nine hundred lines had to go clean. Look here.” She turned a page and pointed at another ad. “The girl might look suggestive, but she can’t be naked. And look at the name of the lines. Stuff like ‘Secret Confessions’ or ‘Talk to Girls.’ Now look at the ones for the 800 lines. Hard core. ‘Cum Between My Tits,’ stuff like that.”

Myron remembered his conversation with Tawny on the 900 line. He had been struck by the fact that she said nothing dirty. “So you can only have phone sex on the other lines?”

“Right. You see, you need real permission for those. That’s how the government sees it. Any asshole can call a 900 line. The charges are automatic. They start almost immediately after your call is answered. But not with an 800 line or one of the other numbers. You have to use either your credit card or a callback. That’s the way you get billed.”

“So all that talk about 900 lines being dirty—”

“Is bullshit,” Lucy finished. “They’re cons. We can’t say one dirty thing on those lines. We use them as lures mostly, because they’re so easy to use. A guy just has to dial. No credit card. No callbacks. Most of the time we talk about skinny-dipping or massages—suggestive but not sexual. Get him excited, you know what I mean?”

“I think so, yes.”

“These guys call horny anyway. I mean, most are so hard up, they’ll stick it in a knothole to get relief. What we try to do is get him to say the first dirty word, which usually isn’t too difficult. Once he does, we say, ‘Oh, baby, I can’t talk dirty on this line, but you should call me back at X number with a credit card.’ The guys call it and get charged all over again.”

“Aren’t they afraid of how it’ll look on their credit card bill?” Myron asked.

Lucy shook her head. She was still undulating. It was a combination of irritating and erotic. “The company names are usually pretty discreet,” she explained. “We bill under names like Norwood Incorporate or Telemark—not Hot Lesbos or Sucking Starlet. You want to see it?”

“See what?”

“The operation upstairs. Where we answer some of the calls. Lots of people work out of their homes, but I got a crew of six or seven working the lines now.”

Myron shrugged “Yeah, sure.”

Lucy took them up one level. Some sort of sickening stench engulfed the stairwell. When they reached the landing, Lucy opened a door. They stepped through and quickly closed it behind them.

“This is Fantasies Forever Lines,” Lucy said. “Not to mention Dick-a-Lick, Hootersline, Telefun, and a dozen others.”

Myron could not believe what he was seeing. His mouth dropped open. He had expected ugly women or fat women or old women. But he had not expected this.

They were men. All but one of the workers were male.

“Gay lines?” Myron asked.

Lucy shook her head, smiling. “Very few gay calls come in. Maybe one in a hundred.”

“But … these are men.”

Myron Bolitar, the essence of keen observation.

He heard a man in a gruff, truck-driver voice say, “Yeah, big man, slide it all the way in. That’s it. Oh, yeah, that feels good.”

Lucy smiled at the man. The man rolled his eyes and continued, “Don’t stop, Stallion. Ride me.”

Esperanza, Myron was glad to see, looked equally confused. “What’s going on, Lucy?” she asked.

“It’s the times,” Lucy said. “In this economy men are a cheaper source of labor. Most of the girls are on the streets. These are brothers, cousins, street kids.”

“But their voices—”

“They use a voice changer. Sharper Image sells them, but I get them cheaper in the Village. You can make little girls sound like Barry White, or vice versa. These guys can become a husky woman, a teenage virgin, a little girl—whatever the line calls for.”

Myron was stunned. “Do the customers know this?”

“Of course not.” She turned to Esperanza. “Dumb. But he is kinda cute.”

Myron Bolitar, Lesbian Fantasy Man.

The room looked like any telemarketing office. The phones were high-tech. Dozens of lines lit up, each marked for what role was to be played. Horny Housewife. Dominatrix. Cross-dressers. Busty Babes. Even Foot Fetish. Each employee also had another phone for Visa and MasterCard verification.

“The lines with a C next to them got to be kept clean,” Lucy explained. “We also have another hundred or so people working phones from their homes. Most of those are women.”

“Horny housewives?”

“Some of them. Most are just plain housewives. Anyway, that’s why I found the ad strange. A 900 line shouldn’t have a topless girl.”

They left the room and walked back down to the studio. Myron almost tripped over a wino who chose the moment Myron was stepping over him to stand up.

“Is ABC one of the companies upstairs?” Myron asked.

“Yeah.”

“And we know Gary Grady called you yesterday. Can you tell us why?”

“Who?”

“Gary Grady.”

Lucy shook her head. “Don’t know him.”

“How about Jerry?”

“Oh yeah, him.” She gave a small laugh. “I figured that wasn’t his real name. He was always real secretive.”

“So what did he want?”

She nodded as though something had just occurred to her. “I get it now.”

“Get what?”

“He was asking me about a photograph I’d taken a couple years back.”

“This one?” Myron asked, pointing to Kathy’s picture again.

“Yeah. One of his girls.”

Myron and Esperanza exchanged a glance. “You mean there were others?”

“Few. Half dozen, maybe more.”

Myron felt the rage consume again. “Underage girls?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

“You didn’t ask?” Myron asked.

“Do I look like a cop? Look, man, if you’re here to hassle me—”

“He’s not,” Esperanza said. “You can trust him.”

“The fuck I can, Poca. He comes busting in here with a fucking gun, scares the piss out of my model.”

“We need your help,” Esperanza said. “I need your help.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Lucy,” Myron said. “I’m just interested in the girl in the picture.”

Lucy hesitated. “All right,” she said at last. “But back off.”

Myron gave a quick nod of agreement. “Jerry brought this girl to you?”

“Yeah, when I had my other studio a couple blocks away. Like I said, he brought in a few girls over the years. He wanted their photos for all kinds of stuff. Porno mags, smut film stills, that kind of thing. Most were a cut or two above the average hosebag who comes through the door. But he usually keeps the photos under wraps until they’re a little older. Legal age, I guess.”

The rage again. Myron’s hands tightened into fists. “So Jerry asked you about this picture yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he want to know?”

“If I sold any copies recently.”

“Have you?”

Pause. “Yeah. Couple months ago.”

“Who bought them?”

“You think I keep records?”

“A he or a she?”

“A he.”

“Do you remember what he looks like?”

She took out a cigarette, lit it, took a deep puff. “I’m not real good with faces.”

“Anything, Lucy,” Esperanza added. “Young, old, anything you can remember.”

Another puff. Then: “Old. Not ancient, but not a young guy. Might have been my father’s age. And he knew what he was doing.” She looked at Myron. “Not like you. Bernie Worley. Jesus.”

Myron pressed on. “What do you mean, he knew what he was doing?”

“The man paid me top dollar under one condition: I hand over every photo and negative in front of him right now. Smart. He wanted to make sure I didn’t have time to make any extra copies or an extra set of negatives.”

“How much did he pay you?”

“Sixty-five hundred altogether. In cash. Five grand for the photos and negatives. Plus another grand for Jerry’s phone number. Said he wanted to get in touch with the girl personally. Then he gave me another five hundred if I didn’t say anything to Jerry.”

In the background there was yet another bloodcurdling scream. It went ignored. “Would you know the man if you saw him again?” Myron asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t picture him now, but if we met up face to face … who knows?” There was a pounding noise from the darkroom. “Mind if I let Hector out now?”

“We were just leaving,” Myron said. He handed her a card. “If you remember anything else—”

“Yeah, I’ll call.” She looked over to Esperanza. “Don’t be a stranger, Poca.”

Esperanza nodded but said nothing. They were quiet the entire way down. When they stepped into the hot air, surrounded by the night street, she said, “Didn’t mean to shock you in there.”

“Not my business,” he said. “I was a little surprised, that’s all.”

“Lucy is a lesbian. I experimented with it a little. Long time ago.”

“You don’t have to explain,” he said. But he was glad she told him. Myron had no secrets from Esperanza. He didn’t like thinking she had some from him.

They were about to head back to the car when Myron felt the muzzle of a gun against his ribs.

A voice said, “Stay cool, Myron.”

It was the man with the fedora hat from the garage. He reached into Myron’s jacket and took out the 38. A second man, this one with a Gene Shalit–like mustache, grabbed Esperanza and pressed his gun against her temple.

“If Myron moves,” Fedora said to the other man, “blow the bitch’s brains all over the sidewalk.”

The man nodded, half-smiling.

“Come on,” Fedora said, nudging Myron forward with the gun. “Let’s take a little walk.”

Chapter 24

Jessica parked in front of the house Nancy Serat was renting for the semester. It was more a cottage really, located at the end of a dark street about a mile from the campus of Reston University. Even at night Jessica could see the house’s salmon-pink hue, which seemed to clash with the planet earth. The landscape looked like the trees had vomited—the front yard of The Munsters. A faded 118 ACRE STREET was stenciled on the weather-beaten sign. A blue Honda Accord with a Reston University bumper sticker sat in the driveway.

Jessica headed down the broken remnants of what must have once been a cement path. She rang the bell and immediately heard a scurrying sound. Several seconds passed. No one approached the door. She tried again. No scurrying sound this time. No sound at all.

“Nancy?” she called out. “It’s Jessica Culver.”

She hit the bell a few more times, though in a house this small there was not much chance she hadn’t been heard. Unless Nancy was in the shower. A possibility. The lights, she could see through the window shades, were on. The car was in the driveway. Jessica had heard movement.

Nancy had to be home.

Jessica reached out for the knob. Under normal conditions some filter in her mind would probably have stopped her from simply trying to open the door of a virtual stranger (she had only met Nancy once). But these conditions were hardly normal. She took hold of the knob and turned.

Locked.

Now what?

She stood at the door five more minutes ringing the bell. Still nothing. Jessica circled the house, using a distant streetlight and the house’s glow-in-the-dark properties to guide her. She stumbled over a tricycle that looked like something recovered from an archaeological dig. Her feet got tangled in the high grass, the prickly ends tickling her calves. As she circled, Jessica peeked through the small openings in the window shades. She could make out rooms and spotted an occasional piece of furniture or wall hanging, but no people.

In the backyard she saw the shades were not pulled down in the kitchen. The lights were off too. It was pitch black here, the pink not getting the illumination of the streetlight to cast its glow. She peered through the kitchen window, cupping her hands around her face to cut off the reflection. A sliver of light from the front room slashed across the room. On the table sat a purse. And a set of keys.

Someone was home.

A sound behind her made her jump. Jessica spun, but it was too dark to make out what it was. Her heart beat wildly in her chest. Crickets singsonged unceasingly. She pounded on the door with both fists.

“Nancy! Nancy!”

She heard the panic in her voice and scolded herself for it. Get a grip. You’re spooking yourself.

She stopped, took a few deep breaths, felt herself relax. She took another look through the window, pressing her face right up against the glass. She was watching the sliver of light when it happened.

Someone walked by.

Jessica jumped back. She hadn’t seen the person, hadn’t seen anything, except the sliver of light disappear for the briefest of seconds. She looked again. Nothing. But someone had gone past and blocked off the light. She put her hand on the kitchen doorknob.

This time the door was not locked. The knob turned easily.

Don’t just go in, dodo! Call the cops!

And say what? I knocked on a door and no one answered? That I then started peeking through windows and saw someone moving around?

That doesn’t sound so bad.

Sounds bad enough to me. Besides, I’d have to find a phone. By the time I do that, whatever is going on may be over. I may have lost my one opportunity.…

Opportunity for what?

She pushed the voice away. Then she opened the door. She waited for the door to squeak madly, but it slid open with remarkable silence. She stepped into the kitchen and left the door open. Better for the quick getaway.

“Nancy?

“Kathy?”

She clasped her hand over her mouth. She hadn’t meant that. Kathy wasn’t here. Jessica wished like hell she were, but that would be too easy. Kathy wasn’t here. And if she were, she certainly would not be afraid to open the door for her sister. Her baby sister. The sister with the bright smile. The sister whom she loved.…

The sister you let slip away. The sister you impatiently rushed off the line the night she vanished.

For several minutes Jessica just stayed in the kitchen. There were no sounds, except those maddening crickets. No running water. No shower. No scurrying. No footsteps. She opened the purse and extracted the wallet. Driver’s license and assorted credit cards—all in the name of Nancy Serat. She flipped to the back and stopped suddenly at a wallet-size photograph.

The picture. The sorority sisters picture. The last picture of Kathy.

She dropped the wallet as though it were something scaly and alive. Enough, Jessica said to herself. She moved toward the light. One foot slid out, the other followed. In a matter of seconds Jessica was at the door. It was open a crack, allowing the light to cast its sliver now unimpeded. She pushed through, crouching like a cop with a gun, preparing for the worst.

And the worst was what she got.

Jessica stumbled back. “Jesus Christ—”

Nancy lay flat on her back, her hands at her sides. Her eyes stuck out like two golf balls, staring at Jessica. Her face was a deep purplish-blue, like a giant bruise. Her mouth was wide and twisted in pure agony. The tongue lolled out like a dead fish. Nancy Serat’s entire expression was still frozen in a look that begged and screamed with its every cell for oxygen. A thin line of still-wet saliva clung to her chin.

A cord of some kind—no, a wire—was wrapped around Nancy’s neck, barely visible. Most of it had sliced clean through the skin and was embedded deep in the flesh. A circling lash of blood marked the spot where the wire had entered.

Jessica stared, lost. The world vanished for several moments, leaving behind only the horror. She forgot about the scurrying when she first rang the bell. She forgot the shadow that had cut off the sliver of light.

Jessica did not hear the approaching footsteps. Still staring at Nancy’s face, unable to tear her eyes away, she felt a sudden, sharp pain in her head. She saw white flashes. Her body folded at the waist and pitched forward. A tingling numbness followed.

Then nothing.

Chapter 25

Fedora Hat knew what he was doing.

“Stay a few steps behind me,” he barked at his new partner.

In the garage Fedora and Musclehead (who, Myron was happy to see, seemed to be out of commission) had underestimated Myron. Fedora would not make the same mistake twice. Not only had he always kept eyes and gun on Myron but he was making sure that his new partner (the Mustache) kept both himself and Esperanza a safe distance away.

Smart.

Myron had been tempted to make a move, but even his best move was useless in this circumstance. If he managed to get the gun away from Fedora, there was no way he’d be able to turn it on the Mustache before he’d shoot either him or Esperanza.

He would have to wait and watch. He knew what Fedora and Mustache intended to do. They hadn’t been hired to buy him ice cream or teach line dancing or even beat him up. Not this time.

“Let her go,” Myron said. “She has nothing to do with this.”

“Keep moving,” Fedora replied.

“You don’t need her.”

“Move.”

Mustache spoke for the first time. “I might want a little company later,” he sneered. Then he stopped and pressed the gun against Esperanza’s right cheek while he licked—actually licked—her left cheek with a wet cow-like tongue. Esperanza stiffened. Mustache looked at Myron. “You got a problem with that, pal?”

Myron knew words would be either superfluous or harmful at this stage. He kept his mouth shut.

They turned a corner. The stench of garbage was overwhelming. It was piled at least six feet high on both sides of the narrow alley. Fedora quickly scanned the area. It appeared to be abandoned.

“Go,” he said, giving Myron another poke with the gun. “End of the alley.”

Myron felt as if he were walking a plank. He tried to take it as slowly as possible.

“What are we going to do with the piece of ass?” Mustache asked.

Fedora’s eyes never left Myron. “She’s seen us,” he said. “She’s a witness.”

“But we weren’t hired to ace her,” Mustache whined.

“So?”

“So let’s not just waste a piece like this”—he smiled—“especially when we can fuck it first.”

Mustache laughed at his suggestion. Fedora did not. He stepped back, aiming the gun at Myron’s back. Myron turned to face him. They were separated by about six feet. Myron was against the back wall. There was no avenue of escape. The nearest window was at least twelve feet off the ground. No room to move at all.

Fedora raised the gun so that it stared Myron right in the face. Myron did not blink. He looked into Fedora’s eyes.

And then they were gone. Fedora’s eyes were gone. Along with half his head.

The bullet had ripped off the skull at the midway point, splitting Fedora’s head open like a coconut. He slid to the ground, the fedora floating down after him.

A dum-dum bullet.

Mustache cried out and dropped the gun. He held his hands up. “I surrender!”

Myron ran forward. “Don’t! He’s surren—”

But the gun exploded again. Mustache’s face disappeared in a spray of red mist. Myron stopped, closed his eyes. Mustache joined Fedora on the filthy cement. Esperanza came over and wrapped her arms around Myron. They both turned toward the alley’s entrance.

Win stepped into view, studying his handiwork as though it were a statue he wasn’t sure he liked. He was dressed in a gray suit, his red tie still in a perfect Windsor knot. His blond hair was neat, conservative, parted as always on the left. The .44 was in his right hand. His cheeks were rosy, and there was just a hint of a smile on his face.

“Good evening,” Win said.

“How long have you been here?” Myron asked. He hadn’t spotted. Win when they exited the photography studio. But he had known he was there. With Win you just knew. One of life’s constants.

“I arrived as you entered the dwelling of ill repute,” Win answered. He smiled. “But I wanted my appearance to have that flair of drama.”

Myron let go of Esperanza.

“We better get moving,” Win said. “Before the authorities arrive.”

They walked away from the corpses in silence. Esperanza was shaking. Myron did not feel so hot either. Only Win seemed completely unaffected by what had transpired. As they approached the car, the same fat young prostitute clad in sausage casing approached Win.

“Hey, yo, want a blow job? Fifty bucks.”

Win looked at her. “I would rather have my semen sucked out with a catheter.”

“Okay,” the girl said. “Forty bucks.”

Win laughed and walked away.

Chapter 26

“All units. One-eighteen Acre Street. All units One-eighteen Acre Street.”

Paul Duncan heard the call on his police scanner. He was only a few blocks from the scene, but this was not his district. Far from it. He could certainly not answer the call. That would only draw attention and questions. Questions like what was he doing here.

Pieces were starting to come together. Fred Nickler, the publisher of those sleazy rags, had called him earlier in the day. What he had told Paul explained a lot. Not everything. Not by a long shot. But he now understood Jessica’s behavior the other night. She had learned about Kathy’s picture. Myron Bolitar must have told her.

But how had Myron gotten a copy of it?

Not important. Not really. What was important was that Myron Bolitar was involved. He could not be underestimated. Jessica was a big enough pain in the ass on her own. But now she had Myron on her side and probably that Win Lockwood, Myron’s psychotic Tonto. Paul knew something about their past work for the feds. Not a lot. Myron and Win had answered only to top government officials. Their work was almost always classified. But Paul knew their reputations. That was enough.

A police car sped past Paul, sirens screaming. They were probably on their way to 118 Acre Street. Paul turned up his scanner. He wanted to hear every word that was said.

He debated calling Carol, but what could he tell her? She hadn’t been specific on the phone, just telling him about the phone message from Nancy to Jessica. So what did Jessica know? How had she found out?

And what would Carol ultimately be pressured into saying?

Two ambulances flew by him. They too had their sirens on full blast. Paul swallowed. He wanted to pull over, but he wanted more to drive as far away as possible.

Once again Paul Duncan thought of his friend Adam Culver. Dead. Murdered. With everything that had happened, there had been no time for Paul to mourn.

Yes, mourn.

That might sound strange—Paul Duncan mourning Adam Culver. Especially if anyone knew how Adam had spent the last precious hours of his life.

Win and Myron dropped Esperanza off at the apartment she shared with her sister and cousin in the east part of Greenwich Village. Myron escorted her to the door.

“You okay?”

She nodded. Her face was deathly pale. She had not spoken a word since the shooting. “Win—” She stopped, shook her head. It took her a full minute to pull herself together. “He saved us. I guess that’s what counts.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you in the morning.”

Myron returned to the car. He called Jessica. She wasn’t home yet, but Myron did manage to wake her mother. They drove to a twenty-four-hour diner on Sixth Avenue—one of those Greek diners with a menu the approximate length of a Tolstoy novel. Win was a vegetarian. He ordered a salad and french fries. Myron ordered a Diet Coke. He couldn’t eat.

After they were settled in, Myron asked, “What happened with Chaz?”

Win was picking at a basket of stale bread. His face registered displeasure, but he settled on a small packet of Saltines. “Mr Landreaux hurried straight from our esteemed offices to a building at 466 Fifth Avenue,” he began. “He took the elevator to the eighth floor, which is rented by Roy O’Connor and TruPro Enterprises. When Landreaux entered the elevator, he had your contract tightly clutched in his paw. When he exited, the contract was no longer visible. He had no pockets that could hold such a document. Conclusion: Mr Landreaux gave the contract to someone at TruPro Enterprises.”

“Your powers of deduction,” Myron said. “In a word: uncanny.”

Win smiled. “I assume you are feeling better.”

Myron shrugged.

“We are not the same, you and I,” Win added. “You call it execution, what I did to that vermin. I call it extermination.”

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

“I wanted to kill him,” Win said with flat inflection. “And I doubt any of us will mourn his death for very long.”

True enough, but the argument did not ease Myron’s mind. He wanted to drop the subject. “Where did Chaz go after he left TruPro?”

Win took a dainty bite out of the corner of the Saltine. “Before I get into that, I should point out that Mr. Landreaux was escorted from the building by a large man who fit the description of your friend Aaron. Large. Confident. Athletic. Suit with no shirt. Sunglasses, though the sun had already set.”

“Sounds like Aaron.”

“They split up on the street. Aaron got into a stretch limousine. Chaz Landreaux walked to the Omni Hotel.”

“Which Omni?” Myron asked. Manhattan had several.

“The one near Carnegie Hall. Landreaux met up with his mother in the lobby. Their reunion was rather moving. Mother and son embraced. Both were crying.”

“Hmm,” Myron said.

The waitress arrived with the food and drinks. She put them down, scratched her butt with a pencil, and returned to the kitchen.

“So where did they go after that?”

“Upstairs. They ordered room service.”

Myron thought a moment. “What is Chaz’s mother doing up from Philadelphia?”

“I would assume,” Win said, pulling a napkin out of the dispenser and spreading it on his lap, “based on their mutual anguish, that Frank Ache reached Chaz Landreaux through a family member.”

“A kidnapping?”

Win shrugged. “A possibility. Frank just sent two men to try to kill you. I highly doubt he is going to become squeamish over a ghetto abduction.”

Silence.

“We’re wading in some deep doo-doo,” Myron said.

“Indeed. Too deep.”

Chaz had a big family. If Frank really wanted to hit him where he lived, he’d take one of his siblings. “We’ll settle it tomorrow,” Myron said. “I scheduled a meeting with Herman Ache. Two o’clock. Usual place.”

“Should I attend?”

“Most definitely.”

Win ate his salad. “You do know that this won’t be easy.”

Myron nodded.

“Herman Ache does not like to intervene in his brother’s business.”

“I know.”

Win put down his fork. “If I may be so bold as to offer a suggestion.”

“I’m listening.”

“Frank Ache sent two professionals after you. Their untimely deaths will not dissuade him from trying again.”

“Uh-huh. So what’s your suggestion?”

“Cut your losses now. Make an exchange. You let them keep Landreaux. They call off the contract on your head.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can. You choose not to.”

“Semantics.”

“You don’t have to help him.”

“I want to help him,” Myron answered.

Win sighed. “A man must try to illuminate even those who prefer to sit in the darkness. Do you have a plan yet?”

“I’m still working on it.”

“Feverishly?”

Myron nodded.

“In the meantime,” Win said, “what did you learn from the photographer?”

Myron filled him in on the meeting with Lucy.

“So who bought the nude pictures?” Win asked.

“A name springs to mind,” Myron said.

“Who?”

“Adam Culver.”

“Kathy’s father?”

Myron nodded. “Think about it. The buyer was in his fifties. He wanted all copies and all negatives on the spot. He left nothing to chance.”

“The father protecting the daughter?”

“It makes sense,” Myron said.

“But Kathy was missing for over a year. How did Adam Culver suddenly learn about the photographs?”

“Maybe he knew about them all along.”

“Then why did he wait so long to buy them?”

Myron shrugged. “We’ll know more tomorrow. I’m going to send Esperanza over to the studio with a picture of Adam, see if Lucy recognizes him.”

Win took another bite of his salad. “It’s a rather strange development.”

“Yes.”

“But”—Win stopped to finish chewing—“here is something else you may not have considered: If Adam Culver purchased all the pictures and negatives in order to protect his daughter, how did her photograph end up in the magazine?”

Myron had considered that. He just didn’t have an answer.

The waitress put down the check. Myron picked up the tab for both of them. The total was $8.50. Mr. Magnanimous. They drove uptown. Win lived in the San Remo building overlooking Central Park West. Very fancy address. They were on Seventy-second Street when the car phone rang.

Myron looked at his multicolored Swatch. A gift from Esperanza.

Past midnight.

“Rather late for a call to your car,” Win noted.

Myron picked up the phone. “Hello?”

The voice came fast. “Bolitar, it’s Jake Courter. Get your ass down to St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston right away.”

“What happened?”

“Just get down here. Now.”

Chapter 27

“We got the call around eleven-thirty,” Jake said, ushering Myron through the lobby of St. Barnabas. Jake’s face was set, his eyes red and puffy. They hurried past the circular visitors’ desk and waited for an elevator.

“Is Jessica okay?” Myron asked.

“She is going to be fine,” he said. Then he added, “Wish I could say the same about Nancy Serat.”

“What happened?”

“She was garroted with a wire.” The elevator arrived. Jake pressed the button for the fifth floor. “When no one answered the door, Jessica let herself in through the back. The killer must have still been there. He knocked her over the head and ran. When she came to, she called us. I’d say she’s pretty lucky the perp didn’t waste her.”

The elevator opened with a ding. “What room is she in?” Myron asked.

“Five fifteen.”

Myron sprinted down the corridor. He turned the corner. Jessica was in the bed, her face ashen. A doctor stood next to her, preparing a needle. Jake came up behind Myron but stayed in the doorway.

Her voice was wobbly. “Myron?”

“I’m here,” he said, taking her hand. She looked small and frail and alone. “I won’t leave.”

The doctor pricked her with the needle. “You need your rest,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Jessica insisted weakly. “I want to get out of here.”

“We think it’s best if you stay overnight for observation.”

“But—”

“Listen to him, Jess,” Myron interrupted. “There’s nothing we can do tonight.”

The drug began to take effect. Her eyes fluttered back. “Nancy …”

“It’s okay,” Myron soothed.

“Her face was blue …”

“Shhh.”

Jessica slipped into unconsciousness. Myron looked up at the doctor. “Is she going to be okay?”

“She’ll be fine. I think the shock of what she saw was worse than the blow to her head.”

Jake put his hand on Myron’s shoulder. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

“I want to stay.”

“You can come back later. Right now we need to talk.”

Myron gazed down at Jessica. She was deep in sleep.

“She’ll be out for a while,” the doctor assured him.

They walked down the corridor silently and took the elevator back to the lobby. The place had that hospital smell—that unique combo of something antiseptic and the hospital food. Win had parked the car and was now sitting in the waiting area. He stood when he saw them.

“That your friend Win?” Jake asked, motioning with his chin. “The one P.T. told me about?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him to stay here. I want to talk to you alone.”

Myron signaled to Win. Win nodded, sat back down, picked up a newspaper, crossed his legs. Jake looked him over for a minute. “He as crazy as P.T. says?”

“Pretty much.”

“Come on.”

They grabbed coffee and found a table in the corner. “The crime scene unit is going over Nancy’s house now. They’ll beep me if they find anything.”

“So what do you know so far?” Myron asked.

“Not much. Nancy spent the last few days in Cancún—a graduation present from her parents.”

“Have they been told?”

He shook his head. “I’m going over there right after we talk.”

Silence. Jake broke it. “So how did Jessica get involved in this?”

“She wanted me to look into her father’s murder. She didn’t buy the fact that he was killed in a botched robbery.”

Jake nodded. “She thought her old man’s murder had something to do with her sister.”

“Yes.”

“I figured as much. I got the file in the car.”

Myron sat up. “Adam Culver’s homicide file?”

“Hey, I ain’t an idiot, Bolitar. You start investigating after eighteen months. Why? Had to be the father’s murder. You saw a connection. But I gotta be honest. I don’t see it. No connections in that file at all. A few inconsistencies maybe. But no connection.”

“What sort of inconsistencies?” Myron asked.

“Adam Culver was supposed to be in Denver when he was killed. At a medical examiners’ conference at the Hyatt Regency. But he never showed, missed his morning flight.”

“Does the file say why?”

“Adam didn’t feel well. A reasonable explanation.”

“Who told them that?”

“His wife.”

Pause. “What else?”

“Nothing else. The crime scene—a quiet street—was unremarkable. He was stabbed through the heart.”

“What was he doing out?”

“The wife said he went out to buy some groceries.”

Myron chewed that one over for a moment. “Odd thing to do,” he said, “when you’re not feeling well.”

“Yeah, that’s easy for us to say, sitting here like this. But the cops were concentrating on finding a mugger. No one really gave a shit about a missed flight or what it might mean.”

“Any witnesses to the murder?”

“None. The file is pretty bare-bone.” Jake leaned forward and tried to stare Myron down. Myron did not look away. “Now,” Jake said slowly, “you start talking to me. And don’t give me no ‘I don’t want no one hurt’ crap. Too late for that now. Why are you really involved in all this?”

“I told you Jessica.”

Jake leaned farther forward until their faces were only inches apart. “Stop jerking me around,” he spat out. “I ain’t blind. I can see Jessica Culver is great tail. But don’t start giving me this bullshit that you just decided to drop everything and help on a whim. You ain’t that hard up.”

“There was also Christian to consider,” Myron said.

“What about him?”

“He’s my top client. He was still upset about his fiancée’s disappearance.”

Jake made a snorting nose. “Yeah, I bet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Jake said, “that I’m not convinced Christian is completely innocent in all this.”

“But you said the DNA test on the semen—”

“I’m not saying he raped her.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“That he might be involved,” Jake replied. “Your client had no solid alibi for the time of the disappearance. He claims he was in bed at eleven o’clock, but no one can confirm it.”

“He has a single room,” Myron said. “Who’s going to confirm he was in bed when he lived alone?”

“It’s suspicious,” Jake replied.

“How? Kathy Culver was seen entering the team locker room after ten, right?”

Jake nodded.

“And you know Christian was meeting with the offensive coordinator until ten-thirty,” Myron continued. “That’s confirmed.”

“But that’s where his alibi ends.”

“He went to bed after that. Kathy was seen wandering around on the other side of the campus at eleven o’clock. I don’t see the connection.”

“Maybe there is none,” Jake said simply. “But he’s the boyfriend. The boyfriend is always a prime suspect. And there was something else.”

“What?”

“His teammates.”

“What about them?”

Jake finished his coffee. He tapped the cup to get the last few drops. “They were cooperative, I guess, but some of them seemed awfully vague. Nothing I could pin down, but some of them looked more nervous than they should. Like they were covering something up. Like maybe, just maybe, they were protecting their star quarterback before the big game.”

Except, Myron thought, nobody on the team liked Christian. His teammates would not have gone out of their way to protect him. Just the opposite, in fact.

So why were they nervous?

Jake settled back and smiled, marking a change in tactics. “Now, Myron, I’ve been awfully sweet, haven’t I? I’ve told you all I know, and you’re still holding back on me. That ain’t nice. Something else—something you haven’t shared with me yet—put a real hairy bug in your ass. Now I visited our friend Dean Gordon a few hours ago, just like you suggested. The man was cordial, friendly, not at all a pompous ass. Which ain’t like him. In fact, I think he was scared shitless. Now why’s that?”

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Oh, he was real helpful. Kathy was a wonderful girl, an honor student, a hard worker, blah, blah, blah. Oh, yeah. He also told me your ex upstairs paid him a visit. Seems Jessica wanted her sister’s file. Imagine that.”

“We were trying to gather as much info as possible.”

“Information on what?”

Myron eyed his coffee. It looked like sewer sludge. “On the morning Adam Culver was murdered, he visited Nancy Serat.”

Jake’s eyes widened a bit. “How do you know that?”

“Nancy left a message on Jessica’s phone to meet her at ten o’clock tonight. She also said that she’d seen Adam Culver on the morning of the murder.”

“Jesus Christ.” Jake crossed his arms, resting them on his belly. “So Adam Culver visits Nancy Serat in the morning. He finds something out. Something big. Something so big he cancels his trip.”

“Something so big,” Myron added, “it gets him killed.”

Jake nodded, thinking. “Then the killer has to get rid of the source.”

“Nancy Serat.”

“Right.” Jake stopped. “But I questioned that girl for hours. I asked her everything.” His voice faded off, and a shadow crossed his face. Myron knew what he was wondering. Any cop worth a damn would be asking the same questions. Did I fuck up? Did I miss something? Is a young girl dead because of me?

“If Nancy knew something that important,” Myron said, “the killer wouldn’t have waited eighteen months to silence her. I think it’s a little more complicated than our scenario. I think Adam Culver had already put most of it together. Nancy had the final piece, a piece that by itself meant nothing to anyone—except Adam Culver.”

“You trying to make me feel better?”

“No. It’s how I see it. If I thought you fucked up, I’d say so.”

“You didn’t see her body,” Jake said quietly. “Strangulation ain’t pretty. The damn wire nearly sliced her head off. Not a nice way to go, Myron.” He stopped, shook his head. “After seeing that, I know what Jessica is asking herself, because I keep asking myself the same thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Did Kathy meet a similar fate?”

Silence. They drank some coffee. Myron’s was already cold, but he didn’t complain. Cold, sludgelike coffee seemed to fit the occasion.

“P.T. told me all about you,” Jake said after a massive slurp. “Said you were smart, that I could trust you. He don’t say that about too many folks. Said you and that Win fella were as good as they come. A little too maverick, but right now I could use that. I’m a cop. I have to follow rules. You don’t. More power to you. But this is my territory, and I ain’t gonna sit around like some fucking movie extra.” He put his hands on the table. They were big and callused and had no rings. “So now I want you to tell me everything, Myron. Right now. Just you and me. It won’t get out, you have my word. Don’t hold anything back. You understand?”

Myron nodded.

“So start talking, boy. I’m all ears.”

Myron took out the magazine and handed it to Jake. “It all started with this.”

Chapter 28

The morning papers had no mention of Nancy Serat’s murder, but the radio was beginning to pick up early reports of a murdered woman. Just a question of time. Myron took Route 280 east to the New Jersey Turnpike north. Scenic road. Like driving through west Beirut on a good day. Problem was, people unfairly judged New Jersey by this road. It was like judging a woman’s beauty by the size of her feet.

Billy Joel was on the radio, singing, “I love you just the way you are.” Big talk, Myron mused, when you’ve been married to Christie Brinkley.

Exit 16W led him directly into the Meadowlands parking lot. Murder and intrigue were all well and good, but agenting paid the bills. He had a meeting with Otto Burke. Otto was expecting a response to his demand vis-à-vis Christian’s contract. Myron had prepared one for him.

He had spent the night in Jessica’s hospital room, trying to get comfortable in a chair that doubled as a medieval torture device. But he had not minded. He liked watching her sleep. It brought back memories. He’d always hoped they’d one day sleep together again, though last night was not precisely what he had had in mind.

Jess had woken up two hours ago. Belligerent. Testy. Demanding. In a word: herself. Before her brother Edward took her home, Myron had told her all he knew—especially about his visit to Lucy’s photo studio. She had given him a photograph of her father to show Lucy. Myron was surprised to see Jessica carried one in her wallet. But he was far more surprised to catch a fleeting glimpse of a picture from four summers ago—a picture she tried to skip past without his seeing. But he had seen it, and he remembered the precise moment it had been taken. Their last weekend in Martha’s Vineyard. Just the two of them. Tan, happy, relaxed. A barbecue at Win’s summer house. The pinnacle before the inevitable slide.

Myron had not had a chance to change clothes. He looked as if he’d spent the evening in the bottom of a laundry hamper.

Otto was waiting for him in the owner’s box on Titans Stadium mezzanine level. Larry Hanson was with him. Otto greeted Myron with a bony handshake and a wide smile. Mr. Sunshine Larry offered a quick wave. He did not meet Myron’s eye. It was no wonder. Larry Hanson was a tough guy, a loud brute even, but he tried to play fair. He didn’t like to cheat, and he did not like what Otto was doing now. He looked, in fact, as if he wanted to blend into the wall.

“Please, Myron,” Otto said, spreading his arms like Carol Merrill on Let’s Make a Deal, “sit wherever you like.”

“Always the perfect host, Otto.”

“I do try, Myron. Thank you for noticing.”

“Sarcasm, Otto. It’s called sarcasm.”

Otto kept the smile aglow. His goatee was exactly the same as always, never heavier or lighter. Must trim it every day, Myron thought. They sat in two seats facing the field. Fifty yard line. Fans would kill for these seats. Down below, players were scattered across the field. Myron spotted Christian walking toward the sideline. His helmet was off, his head held high. Christian didn’t know about Nancy Serat’s murder—her name had not yet been released—but the press would be all over him soon enough. Myron could protect him only so much, though he did entertain hopes that the news of Christian’s signing would deflect some attention away from the murder.

“So,” Otto said with a clap of his hands, “are you ready to sign?”

Down on the field Christian was being introduced to a bunch of long-haired men. Myron recognized the men from a video on MTV. They were Otto Records’ latest find. A group called StillLife. Good sound, but did they have the raw talent, of, say, Pap Smear?

“Sure,” Myron said. “We would like nothing more.”

“Great I have a pen.”

“How handy. I have a contract.” He handed it to Otto. Otto read it quickly. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes frowned. He passed it to Larry Hanson.

“I’m confused, Myron. This looks like your last offer.”

“Very perceptive, Otto.”

“I thought we had an agreement,” he said.

“We do. There it is.”

“I think you’re forgetting”—he paused, searching for the right word—“Christian’s sudden devaluation.”

“You make him sound like a foreign currency.”

Otto laughed. He looked over to Larry as if to say, laugh too. Larry could only muster a smile. “Okay, Myron, I’ll accept that. We are all, to some extent, commodities. Your client, however, is now trading at a lower rate against the U.S. dollar.”

“Thanks for keeping within the metaphor, Otto, but I don’t see it that way.” Myron looked at Larry Hanson. “How’s his play been, Larry?”

“Well, it’s very early,” Larry said, clearing his throat. “You really can’t tell too much after such a short time period.”

“But if you had to grade him so far?”

Another throat clear. “Let’s just say,” he replied, “that Christian’s play has not been a disappointment.”

“There you go,” Myron said, matching Otto’s smile. “His value has, if anything, increased with his recent on-the-field display. You have now had a tasty morsel of his potential. I don’t see how you could expect us to drop our asking price.”

Otto rose, nodding his head. He clasped his hands behind his back and walked to the bar. “Care for a drink, Myron?”

“Do you have any Yoo-Hoo?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Nothing, then.”

Otto poured himself a 7-Up. He did not ask Larry Hanson if he wanted anything. “I will admit,” Otto said, “that Christian’s play so far has been impressive, though I must caution you, Myron—and you too, Larry—that there is a big difference between practice and games. Between how an athlete performs in a scrimmage and how he performs in a pressure situation.”

Myron and Larry exchanged a glance. The glance said, Pretentious asshole.

“But let me also add,” Otto continued, “that our product is dependent on more than just performance. If, for example, our team were to win the Super Bowl but were also involved in a major drug or sex scandal, the overall value of the product may decline.”

“Can you demonstrate that with a graph?” Myron asked. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“It means,” Otto said, “that the photograph in that sleazy publication makes Christian worth less money to us.”

“But it’s not a picture of him.”

“It’s a picture of his fiancée.”

“Ex-fiancée.”

“His fiancée who vanished under mysterious circumstances.”

“Christian and I are willing to take the chance,” Myron said. “It was in a small publication. It hasn’t gotten out so far. We don’t think it will.”

Otto sipped his 7-Up. He seemed to enjoy it, even adding an “aaah” like he was taping a commercial. “But the press might find out.”

“I don’t think so,” Myron said. “I’ve discussed it with Christian. We both feel the same.”

“Then you are both fools.”

The facade had dropped open a crack.

“Now, Otto, that wasn’t very nice.”

The facade slid back up, smooth as an electric car window. “Let me remind you of our previous discussion on this very subject, Myron. See if you can follow this. You were to take our agreement and knock it down by a third. If not, the picture of the au naturel Ms. Culver goes public, thereby ruining your player’s endorsement career.”

“But he didn’t do anything, Otto. It’s only a picture of Kathy Culver.”

“It doesn’t matter. Advertisers do not like the smallest whiff of controversy. Remember this, Myron: In business, appearance is far more important than reality.”

“Appearance versus reality,” Myron said. “That I have to write down.”

Otto took out a contract of his own. “Sign it,” he said. “Now.”

Myron just smiled at him.

“Sign it, Myron. Or I’ll ruin you.”

“I don’t think so, Otto.”

Myron began to unbutton his shirt.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Don’t get excited, Otto. I’m stopping after the third button. Just enough to show you this.” He pointed to the small microphone on his chest.

“What the hell—?”

“It’s a wire, Otto. It leads to a tape recorder stuck in my belt. You can make the picture public, that’s up to you. It may damage Christian, it may not. I, in turn, will make this tape public. I will also sue your sorry ass for any damages Christian may have suffered because of your actions, and I will also see to it that you are arrested for extortion and blackmail.” Myron smiled. “I always wanted to own a record company. Chicks dig that, don’t they, Otto?”

Otto looked at him coolly. “Larry?”

“Yes, Mr. Burke.”

“Take the tape away from him. Forcibly, if necessary.”

Myron looked at Hanson “You’re a big guy, Larry,” Myron said. “And I know you were one of the toughest fullbacks ever to play this game. But if you get out of that chair, I’ll put you in a body cast.”

Larry Hanson merely nodded. Not afraid, but not moving either.

“There are two of us,” Otto urged. “I can call in security guards to help.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Burke.” Larry was almost smiling. “And I don’t think a few security guards are going to scare him very much. Are they, Myron?”

“Not likely.”

“I think we should sign his contract, Mr. Burke. I think it’s best for all.”

“I’ve even drawn up a press release,” Myron said. “Says how happy Christian is to be playing for such an outstanding and reputable organization as the Titans.”

Otto thought a moment. “If I sign,” he said, “you’ll hand over the tape?”

“Not likely.”

“Why not?”

“You keep the magazine and I keep the tape. Think of it as our own little balance of terror. A throwback to the cold war.”

“But you have my word—”

“Please, Otto, it hurts when I laugh.”

Otto thought a moment. He was shaken but calm. A guy his age doesn’t reach this level without learning to take a few knocks.

“Myron?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t tell you how thrilled the Titans are to have Christian Steele, the quarterback of the future, with us.”

“Just sign right here, Otto.”

“My pleasure, Myron.”

“No, Otto. Mine.”

Otto signed. Myron and Otto shook hands. The deal was done.

“Shall we meet the press jointly, Myron?”

“Sounds wondrous, Otto.”

“There’s a shower downstairs. I’ll make sure you’re provided with shaving equipment, if you like.”

“Very kind of you.”

Otto’s smile was back. The man was never down long. He picked up the phone. “Christian Steele has been signed,” Otto said. Then, looking back and winking at Myron, he added, “At the highest salary ever given to a rookie.”

Myron winked back and gave him the thumbs up. Lifelong chums. He checked his watch. There would be just enough time to shower and do the press conference before he would have to head back into the city for his meeting with Herman Ache.

He had no idea how he was going to handle the evil Ache brothers. But he was still working on it. Feverishly.

Chapter 29

Jessica arrived at the house in Ridgewood at ten o’clock. The doctor had wanted to run some more tests in the morning. Jessica refused. They finally reached a compromise whereby Jessica promised to visit him in his office sometime during the week. Edward had driven her home in silence.

When they arrived, Jessica noted that her mother’s car was not in the driveway. Good. Not in much of a mood to handle a hysterical mother on top of everything else, Jessica had insisted that no one tell her mother about last night’s incident. Mom had enough on her mind. No reason to get her unnecessarily upset.

Jessica headed straight for the study. Her father had been up to something, that much was clear. There were too many weird happenings for it to have been any other way. He had visited Nancy Serat on the morning of his death. He had skipped out on a medical examiners’ convention in Denver because he hadn’t felt well—something he would never do. He had possibly even purchased nude photographs of Kathy.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize something was amiss.

She flicked on the track lights, illuminating the room a bit too harshly for her taste. She used the dimmer. Downstairs, Edward was in the kitchen opening the refrigerator.

She began to rifle through her father’s drawers. She had no idea what she was looking for. Perhaps a small box with the words BIG CLUE scrawled across the top. That would be nice. She tried not to think about Nancy Serat, about her blue face frozen in terror, but the thought stayed anchored front and center. She thought of more pleasant things, like waking to see Myron folded up in that hospital chair like a contortionist from Le Cirque du Soleil. The image made her smile.

In the file drawer she found a folder marked CMA. Her father’s Merrill Lynch Cash Management Account. She pulled it out. The CMA statement is a financial instrument of great beauty. Everything in one statement—your stocks, bonds, other holdings, checks, Visa card transactions. Jessica had one of her own.

She checked the charges and checks cleared on the most recent statement. Nothing unusual. Problem was, the statement ended three weeks ago. She needed something more recent.

She flipped to the last page. On the bottom in small print it read “You have an alphabetic character in your Merrill Lynch account number. Please use nine-eight-two-three-three-four as your account access number for CMA-DATA.”

CMA-DATA. The 800 line. She had used it before with her own account, whenever she found a discrepancy. She dialed the number and immediately heard a taped voice say, “Welcome to the Merrill Lynch Financial Service Center. Enter your Merrill Lynch account number or your account access number.”

Jessica entered the number.

“Enter your selection. You may interrupt the dialogue at any time. For your current balance and purchasing power, enter one. For check clearing information, enter two. For most recent funds received, enter three. For most recent Visa transactions, enter six.”

She decided to start with the charges and then look at the checks. She pressed six.

The voice said, “Visa draft for $28.50 is on delay debit as of May twenty-eighth. Visa draft for $14.75 is on delay debit as of May twenty-eighth.”

The machine was not telling her where the charges were coming from. The same would be true for the checks. Knowing just the amounts would do her no good.

“Visa draft for $3,478.44 is on delay debit as of May twenty-seventh.”

She froze. Three thousand dollars? For what? She hung up, hit the redial button, and put in the account access number.

“Enter your selection.”

This time she pressed zero for a customer service representative.

“Good morning,” a pleasant-voiced woman singsonged. “May I help you?”

“Yes, there’s a Visa charge on my account for over three thousand dollars. I’d like to know where the charge came from.”

“Your account number, please?”

“Nine-eight-two-three-three-four.”

There was some keyboard clacking in the background. “And you are?” the rep asked.

Jessica checked the statement. A joint account, thank God. “Carol Culver,” she said.

“Hold one moment, Mrs. Culver.”

More clacking. “Yes, I have it here. $3,478.44. Eye-Spy Shop in Manhattan.”

Eye-Spy? What the hell was that all about?

“Thank you,” Jessica said.

“Anything else today, Mrs. Culver?”

“Yes. My husband and I have all our records on a personal computer, and I’m afraid the computer has had a disk failure. Can I ask you to give me the most recent checks that have been written against the account?”

“Certainly.”

More clacking. “Check one-nineteen for $295 to Volvo Finance, written on May twenty-fifth.”

Car payment.

“Check one-eighteen for $649 to Getaway Realty, also written on May twenty-fifth.”

Hold the phone. “Did you say Getaway Realty?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Does it say where they’re located?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have that information.”

They went through the rest of the month’s checks. Nothing unusual. Jessica thanked the woman and hung up.

$649 to Getaway Realty? $3,478.44 to Eye-Spy? More and more amiss.

Edward knocked on the door. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

He stepped into their father’s study, head lowered.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” Edward said. He blinked several times, his to-die-for eyelashes waving up and down. “About running out like that.”

“It’s okay.”

“You hit a raw nerve,” he said. “Asking all those questions and everything.”

“They need to be asked,” she replied. “I think everything is connected. What happened to Kathy. What happened to Dad. What made Kathy change.”

Edward flinched at the word change. Then he shook his head. His T-shirt of the day featured Beavis and Butthead. “You’re wrong,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to her.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Only way to find out is if you tell me.”

“I don’t feel comfortable about it. It’s painful.”

“I’m your sister. You can trust me.”

“We were never very close,” he said bluntly. “Not like you and Kathy.”

“Or you and Kathy,” Jessica said. “But I still love you.”

She waited.

“I don’t know where to begin exactly,” he said. “It started her senior year of high school. You had just moved to Washington. I was at Columbia. I was living off campus with my friend Matt. Remember him?”

“Of course. Kathy dated him for two years.”

“Almost three,” Edward corrected. “Matt and Kathy were like something out of another century. They were together three years, and he never got, well, below the neck. I mean, never. And it wasn’t just from a lack of trying. Matt was as straightlaced as any guy I knew, but that didn’t mean he didn’t push it now and again. But Kathy held him off.”

Jessica nodded, remembering. Kathy had still been confiding in her at that stage.

“Mom loved Matt,” Edward continued. “She thought he was the greatest. She used to invite him over for tea like something out of The Glass Menagerie. A gentleman caller sitting on the porch with the youngest daughter. Dad liked him too. Everything seemed to be going well. They planned on getting engaged in another year, married after he graduated, the whole Chevy-and-apple-pie love story. Then one day Kathy called him on the phone and just dumped him. No explanation.

“Matt was shocked. He tried to talk to her, but Kathy wouldn’t see him. I tried to talk to her too, but she just blew me off. Then I started hearing rumors.”

Jessica shifted in her chair. “What kind of rumors?” she asked.

“The kind,” Edward said slowly, “a brother doesn’t like to hear about his sister.”

“Oh.”

“Worse than oh. Guys were trashing her nonstop. Someone had finally found the key to Miss Prude’s chastity belt, they said, and now they couldn’t get it back closed. I even got into a fight. Got the shit beaten out of me protecting Kathy’s honor.” He spat out the word honor as though it had an offensive taste.

“She changed at home too. She never went to mass anymore. I thought Mom would have a stroke—you know how she gets about stuff like that.”

Jessica nodded. She knew only too well.

“But she never said a word. Kathy started staying out late. She went to college parties. Some nights she wouldn’t even come home.”

“Didn’t Mom stop her?” Jessica asked.

“She couldn’t, Jess. It was unbelievable. Kathy had spent her entire life in fear of the woman. Now it was like Kathy had found Kryptonite. Mom couldn’t touch her.”

“What about Dad?”

“He was never as strict as Mom, you know that. He wanted to be everyone’s buddy, not the bad guy. But strangely enough, Kathy grew closer to Dad during all this. He was thrilled by the sudden attention. I think he was afraid if he laid down the law, he’d push her away from him.”

Sounded like her father. “What did you do?” she asked.

“I confronted her.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing really. She wouldn’t deny it or admit it. She would just stand there and smile eerily. She said I didn’t understand, that I was ‘naïve.’ Naïve. Can you believe Kathy could call someone else naïve?”

Jessica thought a minute. “But none of that explains what started it, what made her change in the first place.”

Edward opened his mouth, stopped. He spread his hands, then dropped them back to his sides as though they were too heavy to hold up. His voice was barely audible “Something with Mom,” he said.

“What with Mom?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe Mom does. Kathy became withdrawn from you and me. But she still loved us. It was Mom who got the brunt of it.”

Jessica leaned back in her father’s chair, considering his last comment. “I knew Kathy had changed the last couple of years, but I had no idea …” Her voice sort of faded away.

“But it ended, Jess. You have to remember that.”

“What ended?” she asked.

“This stage Kathy went through. That’s why I don’t think it’s related to her disappearance. By the time she disappeared, it was all in the past.”

“What do you mean, in the past?”

“She changed back. Oh, I don’t mean she started going to mass every Sunday or became buddies with Mom. But whatever had twisted her out of shape had finally let go. She was regaining her old self. I think Christian had a lot to do with that. I think he helped bring her back from the edge. The slutty behavior certainly stopped. So did the drugs, the drinking, the partying. Other things too. The smile even came back a little.”

Jessica remembered Kathy’s school transcript. The terrible grades in her senior year and the beginning of college. Then the sudden turnabout back toward excellence that had started her second semester freshman year—when she met Christian. It added up with what Edward was saying.

So was the past irrelevant? Was this period of her life, as Edward had insisted, all behind her? Perhaps. But Jessica doubted it. If it were truly dead and buried, why was her picture now appearing in a pornographic magazine? And that of course led to the central question in all this:

What had made Kathy change in the first place?

Jessica still did not know. But she now had a pretty good idea who might.

Chapter 30

There were several things Myron enjoyed more than visiting Herman Ache. Having his eyeball removed with a grapefruit spoon, for example.

“I heard your press conference on the radio,” Win said. The top was down on Win’s racing-green Jaguar XJR. Myron was not big on having the top down. It was just a question of time before a bug got stuck in his teeth. “I trust that Christian was pleased with the deal.”

“Very.”

“The press still hasn’t picked up on Nancy Serat.”

“Jake hasn’t released her name yet. Once they do—”

“Party time.”

“Exactly.”

“Does Christian know?” Win asked.

“Not yet. He was so damn happy. I just wanted to let him enjoy it a little longer.”

“You should warn him.”

“I will. Jake promised to let me know the second it got out.”

“You seem to like this Jake fellow,” Win noted.

“He’s a good man. We can trust him.”

Win wiggled his fingers, regripped the wheel, accelerated. “I don’t trust officers of the law,” Win said. “It’s safer that way.”

The car was going very fast. The West Side Highway was not built for such speed—a four-lane highway with traffic lights every twenty yards. Plus the “ongoing” construction didn’t help. The construction had been going on for as long as anyone could remember. History books stated that Peter Minuit, the Dutchman who purchased Manhattan from the Indians in 1626, often complained about the delays around Fifty-seventh Street.

But none of that deterred Win’s hefty accelerator foot. The Javits Center was a blur. So was the Hudson River, for that matter.

Myron said, “Could you slow down a tad?”

“No need to worry. The car has a driver-side air bag.”

“Wonderful.”

They were getting closer to Ache’s office. Myron’s stomach knotted—not helped by the smog blasting into his face because the top was down. His nerves were as taut as a freshly strung tennis racket. Win, on the other hand, looked relaxed. Then again, Frank Ache didn’t have a contract out on his head.

Win’s car phone rang. He picked it up. “Hello?” He handed the phone to Myron. “It’s P.T.”

Myron took the receiver. “What’s up?”

“Hey, Myron, how you feeling today?”

“Can’t complain.”

“Glad to hear it. Say, you’ll never guess what happened last night.”

“What?”

“Two of New York’s finest hit men were found dead in an alley. Sad, ain’t it?”

“Tragic,” Myron agreed.

“They worked for Frank Ache.”

“That a fact?”

“Forty-four Magnum with dum-dum bullets were used. Blew their heads clean off.”

“Such a loss.”

“Yeah, I’m losing sleep over it too. Anyway, word out on the street is, this ain’t over. Corpses don’t exactly waylay the wants of a guy like Frank Ache. The contract is still out on whatever ugly slob pissed Frank off.”

Myron said, “Ugly?”

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Myron. Take care.”

“You too, P.T.”

Myron hung up.

“The contract is still in place?” Win asked.

“Yep.”

“They won’t hit you in Herman’s office,” Win said. “He would never allow it.”

Myron knew that was true. There was a certain code, even among men who have probably ordered the deaths of hundreds of people. Some idiots believed that these codes were based on some sort of ethics. Not even close. The codes were two things to mobsters: (1) a device to make them appear almost human, and (2) a way of protecting themselves and their position. Ethics are to a mobster what honesty is to a politician.

A construction site slowed them near Twelfth Street, but they still made it with time to spare. The air smelled of pizza—probably because they parked in front of a pizzeria called The First Original Ray’s Pizza of New York, Really, We’re Not Kidding, Honest, We’re It. A tall woman in a blue business suit and fancy sunglasses strolled purposefully down the sidewalk. Myron smiled at her, and she returned it. He would have preferred a faint or even a small swoon, but you can’t have everything.

At two in the afternoon Clancy’s Tavern was already in full swing. Myron stopped right outside the door, fixed his hair, turned left, smiled, turned right, smiled, looked up, smiled.

Win looked a question at him.

“The feds take pictures of everyone who comes in here,” Myron said. “I just wanted to look my best.”

“Now you tell me. I look like hell.”

Clancy’s patrons were all men. Not exactly a swinging pick-up joint. A jukebox played Bob Seger. The decor was Early American Beer. Lots of those neon signs, the ones that spell out company names. Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Lite, Schlitz. A clock courtesy of Michelob. A mirror from Coors. Coasters from Pabst. The mugs had Rolling Rock logos emblazoned across them.

Myron knew that there were probably a million FBI bugging devices in here. Herman Ache didn’t care. Anybody who said something truly damaging in the tavern itself was beyond stupid and deserved to get nailed. The real talk went on in the back rooms. Ache made sure they were swept for bugs every day.

Win drew a few curious glances when they entered. Prep was not exactly the “in” style of Clancy’s clientele. But no one stared too long. This was a bar where no one stared at anyone too long.

“Is that your friend Aaron?” Win asked.

Aaron was at the back of the bar wearing his customary white suit. This time he wore a shirt, albeit one of those pectoral-displaying sleeveless muscle T’s. It was as if Aaron’s wardrobe had entered some molecular transformer with issues of GQ and Pumping Iron. Aaron waved them to come forward with a hand the size of a manhole cover.

“Hello, Myron,” Aaron said. “A genuine pleasure to see you again.”

Myron Bolitar, Mr. Popularity. “Aaron, I’d like you to meet Win Lockwood.”

Aaron angled the smile at Win. “Pleasure, Win.” They shook hands with death stares, each sizing the other man up. Neither flinched.

“They’re waiting in the back,” Aaron said. “Come on.”

Aaron led them to a locked door with a one-way mirror. The door opened immediately. They entered. Two hoods stood stonefaced. In front of them was a long corridor. There was—and this was new—a metal detector, like at the airport.

Aaron shrugged, as if to say, A sign of the times. “Hand over your weapons, if you’d be so kind. Then step through.”

Myron took out his thirty-eight, Win a brand-new forty-four. Last night’s forty-four had no doubt been destroyed. They stepped through. The metal detector did not ding, but the two hoods still searched with one of those gizmos that looked suspiciously like a vibrator. Then they searched again, this time by hand.

“Very thorough,” Win said.

“Almost enjoyable,” Myron added. “I thought he was going to ask me to turn my head and cough.”

“Hey, funny man,” one of the hoods groused, “this way.”

The two hoods took over, escorting them down the corridor. Aaron stayed back and watched. Myron did not like that. The walls were white, the carpet office-orange. Lithographs of the French Riviera lined the walls. The front of Clancy’s Tavern looked like a dive; the back like a dentist’s office.

Two other men appeared at the other end of the corridor. They were both carrying guns.

Myron leaned toward Win’s ear. “Uh-oh.”

Win nodded.

The two men pointed their guns at Myron and Win. One barked, “Hey, you, Goldilocks. Get over here.”

Win looked at Myron. “Goldilocks?”

“I think he means you.”

“Oh. The blond hair. I get it now.”

“Yeah, Goldie, get your butt down here.”

“Later,” Win said. He moved down the corridor. The two hoods from the metal detector took out their guns. Four men, four guns. Lots of firepower. Not taking any chances after last night.

“Hands on your head. Let’s go.”

Win and Myron, separated by approximately ten feet, did as they were told. One of the hoods from the metal detector approached Myron. Without warning, he punched the butt of his gun against Myron’s kidney.

Myron dropped to his knees. Nausea swam through him. The man followed up with a kick to the ribs. Then another. Myron slid to the ground. The other man joined in. He stomped on Myron’s upper legs like they were small brushfires. One stomp landed on the already-sore kidney. Myron thought he was going to vomit.

In something of a haze Myron spotted Win. He had not moved, his face displaying something akin to noninterest. Win had sized up the situation and made a quick determination: There was nothing he could do to help. Worrying and fretting were worthless. Win was spending his time calmly studying the men. He didn’t like to forget a face.

The kicks came in a nonstop flurry. Myron curled into a fetal position and tried to ride it out. The kicks hurt like hell, but they were too rushed to do serious damage. One landed near his eye. He’d have a shiner for sure.

Then a voice shouted, “What the hell—Stop this moment!”

The kicks halted immediately.

“Get away from him!”

The men backed off. “Sorry, Mr. Ache.”

Myron rolled onto his back. With some effort he managed to sit up. Herman Ache stood by an open door. “Are you okay, Myron?”

Myron winced. “Never better, Herman.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Herman Ache said. Then glaring at his men. “But some people will be even sorrier.”

The men cowered away from the older man. Myron almost rolled his eyes. This was all an act. Herman Ache’s men did not beat up men in Herman’s corridor without permission. This had been a setup. Now Myron supposedly owed Herman, even before the negotiating started. Not to mention the fact that pain is a great fear-inducer, the perfect prenegotiation cocktail.

Aaron came down the hall. He helped Myron to his feet and sort of half-shrugged as if to say Cheap move, but what can you do?

“Come,” Herman beckoned. “Let’s talk in my office.”

Myron moved tentatively into the office. He had not been here in several years, but not much had changed. Golf was still the theme. LeRoy Neiman painting of some golf course on the main wall. Lots of those stupid cartoon/artworks of old-fashioned golfers. Aerial photographs of golf courses. In one corner of the office was a movie screen showing a shot of a fairway. In front of the screen was a golf tee. The player hits the ball against the screen. A computer then calculates where it would have landed and changes the image on the screen to match that. Then the player takes his second shot. Fun city.

“Nice office,” Win said.

Figures.

“Thank you, son.” Herman Ache smiled. Capped teeth. He was in his early sixties, tan, fit, wearing white pants and a yellow golf shirt with a Nicklaus golden bear where an alligator normally went—as if he were on his way to a gin tournament in Miami Beach. Herman Ache had gray hair. Not his own. A toupee or one of those Hair Club systems, a good one, one most people would probably not spot. He had liver spots on his hands. His face was wrinkle free, probably from collagen shots or a face-lift. The neck gave him away. The flesh was baggy and Reaganesque. Looked like a big scrotum.

“Please, gentlemen, have a seat.”

They did so. The door was closed behind them. Aaron, two new hoods, and Herman Ache. Nausea’s grip on Myron’s stomach began to slacken.

Herman picked up a golf club and sat on the edge of his desk. “I understand,” he said, “that you and Frank are having a misunderstanding, Myron.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Herman nodded. “Frank?”

The door opened. Frank entered. You could tell that they were brothers, both having almost identical facial features, but that was where the similarities ended. Frank had at least twenty pounds on his older brother. He was pear-shaped with small Paul Schaefer shoulders and a rubber tire that would be the envy of the Michelin Man. Frank was completely bald, forgoing the hair weave. His teeth were black with spaces between them. His face was permanently set on angry scowl.

Both brothers had grown up on the streets. Both had started out as small-time hoods and worked their way up. Both had seen their own children gunned down over the years. Both had gunned down plenty of other people’s children. Herman liked to pretend that he dwelled on a loftier plane than his coarse younger brother—a plane of fine books, the arts, golf. But the escape was not that easy. Two sides of the same coin. Frank gratingly reminded Herman of his origins and perhaps true nature. But Frank was comfortable and accepted in his world. Herman was not.

Frank was dressed in a powder blue sweat suit with neon yellow trim. The jacket was unzippered and—taking a fashion tip from Yves St. Aaron—he wore no shirt. His chest hairs were matted with either some type of oil or sweat. Quite a turn-on. The form-fitting pants were a few sizes too small, outlining a bulge in his crotch. Myron started feeling nauseous again.

Frank did not speak. He sat at his brother’s desk and waited.

“Now, Myron,” Herman continued, “I understand this is all about some black boy who plays basketball.”

“Chaz Landreaux,” Myron said. “And I’m not sure he’d be crazy about being called ‘boy.’ ”

“Pardon an old man who is not up on all the politically correct terms. I meant no disrespect.”

Win sat quietly, studying his surroundings.

“Let me tell you how I see it,” Herman continued. “And I’m trying to be objective here. Your Mr. Landreaux made a deal. He took the money. For four years he helped his family with that money. Then when it was time to pay up, he reneged.”

“That’s objective? Chaz Landreaux is just a kid—”

“Spare me the lecture,” Herman interrupted gently. “We’re not social workers here. You know that. We are businessmen. We made an investment in this young man. We risked several thousand dollars on him. The investment was finally about to pay dividends when you interfered.”

“I didn’t interfere. He came to me. He’s a scared kid. O’Connor got his hooks in him when he was eighteen. There are rules against approaching kids that young for a reason. Now the kid’s trying to get out before he slides in too deep.”

Herman looked skeptical. “Oh, come on now, Myron. Kids grow up fast nowadays. He knew exactly what he was doing. So it was against the rules—big deal. The kid knew the rules. He wanted the money anyway.”

“He’ll pay it back.”

Frank Ache spoke for the first time. “Fuck he will.”

Myron waved. “Hi, Frank. Boss threads.”

“And fuck you too, bug shit. Deal’s a deal.”

Myron turned to Win. “Bug shit?”

Win shrugged.

“The deal,” Myron continued, “was that Chaz could back out at any time and pay back the money. Roy O’Connor told him that.”

“I don’t give a fuck what O’Connor said.”

Herman said, “Please, Frank, we don’t need to get hostile.”

“Ah, fuck him, Herman. This asshole wants to fuck me over. He wants to steal food off my fucking table. Not just this Landreaux nigger. That’s just the start. We got dozens of prospects signed like this. We lose one, we lose them all. I say we let the other agents know we ain’t to be messed with. I say we waste Bolitar right now.”

Myron said, “I don’t like that idea.”

“Who the fuck asked you?”

“Just giving my opinion.”

“Please, Frank, this isn’t helping. You promised to let me handle this.”

“Handle what? Kill the son of a bitch. End of story.”

“Wait in the other room. I’ll take care of it, I promise.”

Frank glared at Myron. Myron did not bother glaring back. He knew this was part of the act. He knew that they were trying to intimidate him in much the same way Otto Burke and Larry Hanson had. But for some odd reason, the air of death gave the Mutt and Jeff routine a whole new dynamic.

Win, however, remained pensive.

“Come on, Aaron,” Frank growled. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He stood. “But the contract is still on.”

“Fine,” Herman said. “If you want to kill him, I won’t get in the way.”

“He’s as good as dead.”

Frank and Aaron left. Frank slammed the door. Overacting, Myron thought, but an effective cameo appearance.

Myron said, “He’s fun.”

Herman moved to the corner of the room. He took a slow practice swing with the club. “I wouldn’t mess with him, Myron. Frank is really angry. Me, I’ve always liked you. From the early days. But I’m not sure I can help you on this one.”

The “early days” had begun Myron’s sophomore year at Duke. It was not something he liked to remember. His father had been gambling. And losing. On the day before a game against Georgia State, Myron returned to his dorm to find his father and two of Herman Ache’s hoods. The two hoods told Myron that if Georgia State did not cover the twelve-point spread, his father would lose a finger. His father was crying, the first time Myron had ever seen his father cry. Myron made three turnovers in the last forty seconds to make sure Duke won by only ten.

Father and son never talked about it.

“Why is this kid, this Chaz Landreaux, so important to you, Myron?”

“I think he’s worth saving.”

“Saving from what?”

“He’s just a kid, Herman. Frank is putting the screws to him. I want it to stop.”

Herman smiled, changed clubs, took a few more swings. Then he picked up his putter. “Still a crusader, eh, Myron?”

“Hardly. I’m just trying to help the kid.”

“And yourself.”

“Fine. And myself.”

Myron realized that Herman Ache was wearing golf cleats. Jesus. To most people golf is an idiotic excuse for a sport. For others it’s a life-consuming obsession. There is no in between.

“I don’t think,” Herman said, reading the break in his carpet, “I can stop Frank. He’s very determined.”

“You run the show,” Myron said. “Everyone knows that.”

“But Frank is my brother. I don’t step on his toes unless it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t think that’s the case here.”

“What did Frank do to him?”

“Pardon?”

“How did he scare the kid?”

“Oh,” Herman said. Another club changed. This time he exchanged the putter for a wood. “He kidnapped his sister. Twin sister, I think.”

Myron felt his stomach dive anew. They’d been right. Not much satisfaction in that. “Is she okay?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” Herman said, as if that were a truly foolish question. “They won’t hurt her. Long as Landreaux continues to cooperate.”

“When are they going to let her go?”

“Two more days. Something about making sure the contract is official and Landreaux doesn’t have second thoughts.”

“What do you want, Herman? What’s it going to cost to get Frank off?”

He put on a golf glove and took a very deliberate swing, watching his hands. “I’m an old man, Myron. A rich old man. What could you possibly give me?”

Win sat forward, moving for the first time. “Your club is too far open on your swing, Mr. Ache. Try turning your wrists a little more. Shift your grip to the right a little.”

The sudden change in subject caught everyone by surprise. Herman looked at Win. “I’m sorry. I never caught the name.”

“Windsor Home Lockwood III.”

“Ah, so you are the immortal Win. Not exactly what I expected.” He tested the new grip. “Feels odd.”

“Give it a few weeks,” Win said. “Do you play often?”

“As often as I can. It’s more than just a game to me. It’s …”

“Sacred,” Win finished for him.

His eyes livened. “Exactly. You play, Mr. Lockwood?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing like it, is there?”

“Nothing,” Win agreed. “Where do you play?”

“Not easy for my kind to find good courses. I joined a club in Westchester. St. Anthony’s. You know it?”

“No.”

“It’s not much of a course. Eighteen holes, of course. Very rocky. You have to be half mountain goat.”

Golf stories. Myron loved them. Didn’t everyone?

“I don’t understand something,” Myron said, playing along. “With all your, uh, influence, why don’t you play anywhere you want?”

Herman and Win looked at him as though he were a naked infidel praying in the Vatican. “Excuse him,” Win said. “Myron does not understand golf. He thinks a nine iron is a vitamin supplement.”

Herman laughed. The hoods joined suit. Myron didn’t get it.

“I understand fine,” Myron said. “Golf is a bunch of silly-dressed men using massive tracts of real estate to play with a ball and stick.”

Myron laughed. No one joined suit. Golfers are not known for their sense of humor.

Herman put the club back in the bag. “A man does not force or buy or bully his way onto a golf course,” he explained. “I have too much respect for the game, for the traditions, to do anything so crass. It would be like putting a gun against a priest’s head to get the front pew.”

“Sacrilege,” Win said.

“Exactly. No real golfer would do it.”

“He has to be invited,” Win added.

“Right. And you don’t merely play a great course. You pay homage to it. I’d love to be invited to one of the world’s great courses. It would be my dream. But it is not meant to be.”

“How about being invited to two of them?” Win asked.

“Two—” Herman stopped. His eyes widened for a millisecond, then quickly dimmed as though afraid he was being teased. “What do you mean?”

Win pointed to a picture on the left wall. “Merion Golf Club,” he said. Then he pointed to a picture on the far wall. “And Pine Valley.”

“What about them?”

“I assume you’ve heard of them?”

“Heard of them?” Herman repeated. “They’re the top two courses on the East Coast, two of the best in the world. Name a hole. Go ahead, any hole, either course.”

“Sixth hole at Merion.”

Herman’s face glowed like a little kid’s on Christmas morning. “One of the most underrated holes anywhere. It sets up with a semiblind tee-shot to a fairway that favors a soft fade. Start your tee-shot at middle bunker, then cut back to the center, keeping clear of the boundary, which comes in on the right. Long-to-middle iron to the modestly elevated green, careful of the bunkers on the left and right.”

Win smiled. “Very impressive.”

Snore.

“Don’t tell me, Mr. Lockwood, that you’ve played Merion and Pine Valley.” Something well past awe resonated in Herman’s voice.

“I’m a member of both.”

Herman inhaled sharply. Myron half-expected him to cross himself. “A member,” he began incredulously, “of both?”

“I’m a three handicap at Merion,” Win continued. “A five handicap at Pine Valley. And I’d like you to be my guest at both for a weekend. We’ll try to get in seventy-two holes a day, thirty-six at each course. We’ll start at five A.M. Unless that’s too early.”

Herman shook his head. Myron thought his eyes looked teary. “Not too early,” he managed.

“Next weekend okay for you?” Win asked.

Herman picked up the phone. “Let the girl go,” he said. “And the contract is off. Anyone touches Myron Bolitar, they’re dead.”

Chapter 31

Win and Myron went back to the office. Myron felt sore from the beating, but nothing was broken. He would preserve. He was that kind of guy. Terribly brave.

Esperanza said, “You look like shit.”

“You’re so hung up on appearances.”

He tossed her the photograph of Adam Culver. “See if your friend Lucy recognizes him.”

She snapped a salute. “Jawohl, Kommandant.” Of all the old shows, Esperanza’s favorite was Hogan’s Heroes. Myron was not a big fan, though he always wished he could have been there when some young TV hotshot said, “Hey, I got an idea for a sitcom! Set it in a POW camp in Nazi Germany. Laughs galore.”

“How many calls?” he asked.

“About a million. Mostly the press wanting your comments on Christian’s signing.” She smiled. “Nice job on that one.”

“Thank you.”

“That Otto Burke,” she said, a pencil near her mouth. “Is he single?”

Myron looked at her, horrified. “Why would you want to know?”

“He’s kinda cute.”

The nausea was back. “You’re hitting me up for a raise, aren’t you? Please say yes.”

Esperanza smiled coyly but said nothing. He started for his office.

“Hold it,” she said. “A strange message just came in for you a few minutes ago.”

“From?”

“A woman named Madelaine. Wouldn’t give her last name. Sounded sultry.”

The dean-nessa. Hmm.

“She leave a number?”

Esperanza nodded, handed it to him. “Remember: The condom is your friend.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Speaking of which, your mother called twice, your father once. I think they’re worried about you.”

He entered his office. His little private sanctuary. He liked it in here. Myron held most of his negotiations and important meetings in the traditionally decorated conference room, freeing him up to make his office whatever he wanted it to be. He had, of course, his view of the Manhattan skyline to his left. On the wall behind his desk he had framed posters from Broadway musicals: Fiddler on the Roof, The Pajama Game, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Man of La Mancha, Les Misérables, La Cage aux Folles, A Chorus Line, West Side Story, Phantom.

Another wall had movie stills: Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam’s Rib. Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in A Night at the Opera. Adam West and Burt Ward in Batman, the TV show, the real Batman, the one where Burgess Meredith played the Penguin and Cesar Romero played the Joker. The Golden Age of Television.

The final wall had photographs of Myron’s clients. In a few days Christian Steele cloaked in Titan blue would join the group.

He dialed Madelaine Gordon’s number. The answering machine picked up. Her silky voice. Hearing it again made his throat dry. He hung up, not leaving a message. He checked the time on the far wall. The clock was shaped like a giant watch with a Boston Celtics insignia in the center.

Three-thirty.

Still time to get to the campus. Madelaine was not important, but Myron very much wanted to see the dean. And he wanted to show up unexpectedly.

At Esperanza’s desk he said, “I’m going out for a while. You can reach me in the car.”

“Are you limping?” she asked.

“A little. Ache’s men roughed me up.”

“Oh. See you later.”

“Hurts like hell, but I can take it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t make a scene.”

“Inside,” she said. “I’m dying.”

“Please see if you can reach Chaz Landreaux. Tell him we need to talk.”

“Okay.”

He left. He picked up his car in the garage. Win was into cars. He loved his racing-green Jag. Myron drove a blue Ford Taurus. He was not what one might call a car man. A car got him from point A to point B, that was all. It was not a status symbol. It was not a second home. It was not his baby.

The drive didn’t take long. Myron took the Lincoln Tunnel. He passed the famed York Motel. Long sign:

$11.99 PER HOUR
$95 PER WEEK
MIRRORED ROOMS
NOW FEATURING SHEETS!

He paid the toll on the Parkway. The woman in the booth was very friendly. She almost looked at him when she tossed him the change.

He called his mother on the car phone and reassured her he was okay. She told him to call his father, he was the worried one. Myron called his father and reassured him he was okay. He told him to call his mother, she was the worried one. Great communication. The secret to a happy marriage.

He thought about Kathy Culver. He thought about Adam Culver. He thought about Nancy Serat. He tried to draw little lines, connecting them. The lines were tenuous at best. He was sure Fred Nickler, Sir Sleaze Rag, was one line. That picture hadn’t sneaked into Nips by itself. Fred seemed to run a tight operation. He had to know more than he was saying. Win was digging into his background, seeing what he could unearth.

Half an hour later, Myron arrived at the campus. Extra-deserted today. No one on the commons. Very few cars. He parked near the dean’s house and knocked on the door. Madelaine (he still liked the name) answered. She smiled when she saw him, clearly pleased, tilting her head a little. “Well, hello, Myron.”

“Hi.” The Return of Mr. Smooth.

Madelaine Gordon was dressed for tennis. Short white skirt. Great legs. White shirt. He noticed that the shirt was see-through. Keen observation, the sign of a master investigator. Madelaine noticed him noticing. She did not seem particularly offended.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” Myron said.

“No intrusion,” she said. “I was just about to take a shower.”

Hmm. “Your husband’s not in, is he?”

She crossed her hands under her breasts. “Not for hours yet,” she said. “You got my message?”

He nodded.

“Would you care to come inside?”

Myron said, “ ‘Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?’ ”

“Pardon me?”

“The Graduate.”

“Oh.” Madelaine wet her lips. She had a very sexy mouth. People overlook the mouth. They talk about the nose, the chin, the eyes, the cheekbones. Myron was a mouth man. “I guess I should be offended,” she continued. “I mean, I’m not that much older than you, Myron.”

“Good point. Quote withdrawn.”

“So,” she said. “I’ll ask again. Would you like to come inside?”

Myron said, “Sure.” Bowling her over with quick wit. What chance did she have against such sparkling repartee?

She disappeared back into the house, creating an air vacuum that sucked Myron—against his will, of course—in after her. The inside was nice, the kind of house that obviously saw plenty of company. Big open room on the left. Tiffany lamps. Persian rugs. Busts of French guys with long, curly hair. Grandfather clock. Painted portraits of stern-faced men.

“Care to sit down?” she said.

“Thank you.”

Sultry. That had been the word Esperanza used. It fit. Not just Madelaine’s voice but her mannerisms, her walk, her eyes, her persona.

“How about a drink?” she asked.

He noticed she already had one made for herself. “Sure, whatever you’re having.”

“A vodka tonic.”

“Sounds good.” Myron hated vodka.

She mixed the drink. He sipped it, trying not to make a face. He wasn’t sure if he was successful. She sat down next to him. “I’ve never been this forward before,” she said.

“That a fact?”

“But I’m very attracted to you. It’s one of the reasons I loved watching you play. You’re really very handsome. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing that.”

“Well, I don’t know if sick is the right word.”

Madelaine crossed her legs. It wasn’t Jessica’s leg cross, but it was still worth watching. “When you came to the door yesterday, I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity. I decided to throw caution to the wind and just go for it.”

Myron could not stop grinning. “I see.”

She stood and reached out her hand to him. “Now how about that shower?”

“Uh, can we talk first?”

Puzzlement shadowed her face. “Is there something wrong?”

Myron feigned embarrassment. “Aren’t you married?”

“And that bothers you?”

Not really. “Yes. I guess it does.”

“Admirable,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Stupid too.”

“Thank you.”

She laughed. “Actually, it’s sweet. But Dean Gordon and I have what we call a semi-open marriage.”

Hmm. “Could you elaborate a little?”

“Elaborate?”

“Just to make me feel more comfortable about all this.”

She sat back down. The white skirt might as well not have been there. Her legs could best be described as scrumptious. “I’ve never had to elaborate before,” she said.

“I realize that. But I’m interested.”

Arched eyebrow. “In?”

“Can we start with your definition of semi-open?”

She sighed. “My husband and I have been close friends since childhood. Our parents summered together in Hyannis Port. We were both from the ‘right families.’ ” She made little quote marks in the air when she said “right families.” “We thought that would be enough. But it wasn’t.”

“So why not divorce?”

She looked a question. “Why am I telling you this?”

“My honest blue eyes,” he said. “They’re hypnotic.”

“Maybe they are.”

Now Myron gave her aw-shucks modesty. Mr. Adaptable Face.

“My husband is politically connected. He was an ambassador. He’s next in line to be university president. If we get divorced—”

“That ends,” Myron finished.

“Yes. Even these days, the hint of scandal can destroy a career and a lifestyle. But more than that, Harrison and I are still dear friends. Best friends, really. It’s just that we need limited outside stimulation.”

“Limited?”

“Once every two months,” she said.

Yikes. “How did you come up with that number?” he asked. “Some kind of new algorithm, perhaps?”

She smiled. “Lots of discussions. Negotiations, really. Once a month seemed like too much. Once a semester too little.”

Myron nodded at her. Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

“And we always use a condom,” she added. “That’s part of the arrangement.”

“I see.”

“Do you have one?” she asked. “A condom.”

“On?”

She smiled. “I have some upstairs.”

“Can I ask one more thing?”

“If you must.”

“How do you and your husband know that the other has kept to their, er, limit?”

“Easy,” she said. “We tell each other. Everything. Helps spice things up a little.”

Madelaine was seriously strange, which only made her more attractive to Myron.

“Your husband. Does he ever fool around with co-eds?”

She leaned forward and put her hand on his thigh. Upper thigh. Upper, upper thigh. “That kind of thing turn you on?”

“Yeah.” He tried a rakish smile. But rakish was not him. He could see in her eyes that she wasn’t buying it.

Madelaine took back her hand. “What are you up to, Myron?” she asked.

“Up to?”

“I feel like I’m being used,” she said. “But not the way I had in mind.”

Man. “Just getting in the mood.”

“I don’t think so, Myron.” She studied him for moment. “Be honest for a second. Are we going to go to bed?”

“No,” he said. “We’re not.”

“I’ve never been turned down before.”

“And I’ve never turned down a proposition like this before,” Myron said. “Come to think of it, I’ve never had a proposition like this before.”

“Is it because I’m married?”

“No.”

“Are you involved with someone else?” she asked.

“Worse. I’m on the cusp of something that means a great deal to me. I don’t know which way I’m going to fall. I’m confused.”

“That’s sweet.”

Again he gave her aw-shucks.

“If it doesn’t work out …?” she said.

“I’ll be back.”

She kissed him then. Hard. It was a damn good kiss. He felt it in his toes.

“Just the overture,” she said.

He’d be dead before the second scene. “I really do have to talk to your husband. Do you know when he’ll be home?”

“Not for a while. But he’s at the office across campus. By himself. You’ll have to knock loudly for him to hear you.”

He rose. “Thanks.”

“Myron?”

“Yes?”

“We never use names when we discuss our affairs. I don’t know if Harrison fools around with co-eds. I would doubt it highly.”

“How about Kathy Culver?”

She visibly jumped. Her face stiffened. “I think you better leave now.”

“The honest blue eyes,” Myron said. “Watch the honest blue eyes.”

“Not this time. And when I watched you play, it wasn’t your eyes I looked at.”

“Oh?”

“Your ass,” she said. “It looked nice in those little shorts.”

Myron felt cheap. Or ecstatic. Probably ecstatic. “Were they having an affair?” he asked.

She said nothing.

“I’ll shake my ass if I have to.”

“They weren’t having an affair,” she said firmly. “That much I know.”

“So why did you get all bent out of shape?”

“You were asking if my husband had an illicit affair with a co-ed who was probably murdered. I was taken aback.”

“Did you know Kathy Culver?”

“No.”

“Did your husband ever talk about her?”

“Not really. I just know she worked in his office.” She looked at the grandfather clock, stood, and led him to the door. “Talk to my husband, Myron. He’s a good man. He’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

“Like?”

She shook her head. “Thanks for visiting.”

Madelaine was in shutdown mode. Probably hurt by his interrogation technique. Using his brawny body to get his way. Myron had never done that before. He liked it. Better than pistol-whipping a suspect, anyway.

He turned and left. Madelaine was probably watching his ass. He put a little wiggle in his step and hurried across campus.

Chapter 32

Jessica found Getaway Realty in the Bergen County Yellow Pages. Their office was a converted cottage next to a McDonald’s off Route 17 on the New Jersey side of the New York–New Jersey border. The drive was only twenty minutes, but it felt as if she’d arrived in the rural past. She actually saw a feed store.

Only one person was in the office.

“Well, hello there,” the man said with a too-wide smile. He was mid-fifties, bald, with a long, scraggly gray beard, like a college professor’s. He wore a flannel shirt, black tie, Levi’s jeans, and red Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers.

“I’m Tom Corbett, president of Getaway Realty.” He handed her a card. “What can I do for you today?”

“I’m Dr. Adam Culver’s daughter,” she said. “He wrote a check to your office on May twenty-fifth for $649.”

“Yeah, so?”

“He passed away recently. I’d like to know what it was for.”

Corbett took a step back. “I’m awfully sorry to hear that,” he said. “Nice man, your father.”

“Thank you. Can you tell me why he came to you?”

He thought a moment, shrugged. “Don’t see why not. He rented a cabin.”

“Near here?”

“Five, six miles. In the woods.”

“For how long?”

“A month. Starting May twenty-fifth. Still has it for a few more weeks, if you’d like to use it.”

“What kind of cabin?” she asked.

“What kind? Well, it’s pretty small. One bedroom, one bathroom with shower stall, living room, kitchenette.”

This made no sense. “Do you think you could give me the directions and a spare key?”

He thought that one over too, chewing on the inside of his mouth. “It’s a bit remote,” he said. “Kinda hard to find, darling.”

Aside from babe and honey-bun, there were few things Jessica enjoyed being called more than darling. But now was not the time to explain her sentiments. She bit her lip and held back.

“The cottage’s away from it all,” Tom continued. “Way away, if you know what I mean. A little hunting, a little fishing, but mostly just peace and quiet.” He picked up a key chain as heavy as a barbell. “I’ll drive you.”

“Thank you.”

He drove a Toyota LandCruiser and chatted the whole way, as though she were a client. “Here’s our local grocery store.”

It was an enormous A&P Superstore.

She was surprised when he turned onto an unpaved road. They were heading straight into the woods.

“Nice, ain’t it? Real pretty.”

“Uh-huh.”

Green foliage surrounded them. Jessica was not much of the outdoor sort. To her, the great outdoors meant bugs and humidity and dirt and no running water and no bathroom. Man had evolved for millions of years to escape the woods. Why rush back? But more important, her father had felt the same. He hated the woods.

Why would he rent a cabin out here?

Tom pointed to a gully up ahead. “Two years ago, guy got killed by a hunter over there. Accident. The hunter thought he was a deer, shot him in the head.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Couple of dead bodies been found in the woods. Three in the past two years, I think. Found one girl just a couple months back. Runaway, they guessed. Hard to tell ’cause she was all decayed and stuff.”

“You’re a hell of a salesman, Tom.”

He laughed. “Yeah, well, I can tell when someone ain’t a buyer.”

Jessica, of course, knew all about the bodies. The police hadn’t caught the killer, but the general consensus was that the psychopath had gotten hold of one more young girl, one that had not yet been found:

Kathy Culver.

Could Kathy’s fate have been that simple and that horrible? Had she been another victim of a random psychopath, just as everyone thought?

No, Jessica told herself. Too many holes.

“When I was a kid growing up around here,” Tom said, “these woods were filled with legends. Guy with a hook hand lived in here, the old-timers said, used to kidnap bad little boys and gut them with his hook.”

“Charming.”

“Sometimes I wonder if he moved on to young ladies.”

Jessica said nothing.

“Used to call him Dr. Hook,” he continued.

“What?”

“Dr. Hook. That’s what we all called him.”

“Isn’t that a singer?” she asked.

“A what?”

“Never mind.”

They drove another mile away from civilization. “That’s the house,” Tom said. “Up there behind the trees.”

It was a small wooden cabin with a big front porch.

“Rustic, ain’t it?”

Decrepit would have been a better adjective. Jessica checked the porch, but there were no toothless hillbillies playing dueling banjos.

“Did my father say why he wanted to rent this cabin?”

“Just said he needed someplace to get away from it all in these woods.”

It still made no sense. Dad was going to be gone at a medical examiners’ conference for a week out of the month, anyway. And Adam Culver was not the get-away-from-it-all type. He dealt with the dead. On vacations he wanted to be in Vegas or Atlantic City or someplace with lots of people and action. Now he was renting the Waltons’ cabin.

Tom used the key to unlock the door. He pushed it open and said, “After you.”

Jessica stepped into the living room. And stopped short.

Tom came in behind her. His voice was a whisper. “What the hell is this?” he asked.

Chapter 33

Dean Gordon’s office was in Compton Hall. The building was only three stories high but wide. Greek columns out front screamed House of Learning. Brick exterior. White double doors. Directly inside was a bulletin board filled with old notices. Meetings of the usual campus groups: the African American Change Committee, the Gay-Lesbian Alliance, the Liberators of Palestine, the Coalition to Stop the Domination of Womyn (never spelled women, for the sexism the name implies), the South African Freedom Fighters—all taking the summer off. College fun days.

There was no one inside the huge lobby. The motif was marble. Marble floors, banisters, columns. The walls were covered with huge portraits of men in graduation robes, most of whom would flip if they could read the bulletin board. All the lights were on. Myron’s footsteps clacked and reverberated in the still room. He wanted to shout “Echo,” but was far too adult.

The dean of students’ office suite was at the end of the left corridor. The door was locked. Myron knocked hard. “Dean Gordon?”

Shuffling behind the dark-paneled doors. Several seconds later, the door opened. Dean Gordon was wearing tortoiseshell glasses. He had wispy hair, conservatively cut, a handsome face with clear brown eyes. His features were gentle, as though the facial bones had been rounded off to soften his appearance. He looked kind, trustworthy. Myron hated that.

“I’m sorry,” the dean said. “The office is closed until tomorrow morning.”

“We need to talk.”

Confusion crossed his face. “Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not a student here.”

“Hardly.”

“May I ask who you are?”

Myron looked at him steadily. “You know who I am. And you know what I want to talk about.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea to what you are referring, but I am really quite busy—”

“Read any good magazines lately?”

Dean Gordon’s whole body twitched. “What did you say?”

“I guess I could come back when the office was crowded. Maybe bring some reading material for the school’s trustees, though I understand they only read the articles.”

No response.

Myron smiled—knowingly. At least, he hoped that was how it looked. Myron had no idea what part the dean played in this little mystery. He had to step tentatively here.

The dean coughed into his fist. Not a real cough or throat-clear. Just something to stall, give him a chance to think. Finally he said, “Please come in.”

He disappeared back into his office. No sucking vacuum this time, but Myron still followed. They passed a few chairs in the waiting room, a secretary’s desk. The typewriter was hidden by a khaki-colored dust cover. Camouflaged in the event of war.

Dean Gordon’s office was cookie-cut university executive. Lots of wood. Diplomas. Old sketches of the Reston University chapel. Lucite blocks with clippings or awards on the desk. Bookshelves with all nonfiction titles. The books hadn’t been touched. They were props, creating the mood of tradition, professionalism, competence. The prerequisite picture of the family. Madelaine and a girl who looked about twelve or thirteen years old. Myron picked up the photograph.

“Nice family,” he said. Nice wife.

“Thank you. Please have a seat.”

Myron sat. “Say, where did Kathy work?”

The dean stopped in midseat. “Pardon me?”

“Where was her desk?”

“Whose?”

“Kathy Culver’s.”

Dean Gordon lowered himself the rest of the way, slowly, as into a hot tub of water. “She shared a desk with another student in the room next door.”

Myron said, “Convenient.”

Dean Gordon’s eyebrows frowned. “I’m sorry. I missed your name.”

“Deluise. Dom Deluise.”

The dean allowed himself a small brittle smile. He looked tight enough to pop a wine cork with his butt. No doubt being sent the magazine had put the screws in. No doubt Jake’s visit yesterday had tightened them a little. “What, Mr. Deluise, can I do for you?”

“I think you know.” Again the knowing smile. Combined with the honest blue eyes. If Dean Gordon were female, he’d be naked by now.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea,” the dean said.

Myron continued the knowing smile. He felt like an idiot or a morning network weatherman, if there was a difference. This was an old trick he was trying. Pretend you know more than you do. Get him talking. Play it by ear. Impromptu.

The dean folded his hands and put them on his desk. Trying to look as if he were in control. “This whole conversation is very strange. Perhaps you could explain why you’re here.”

“I thought we should chat.”

“About?”

“Your English department, for starters. Do you still make students read Beowulf?”

“Please, whatever your name is, I don’t have time for games.”

“Neither do I.” Myron took out his copy of Nips and tossed it on the desk. The magazine was starting to look creased and worn from all the handling, as if it belonged to a hormonal adolescent.

The dean barely glanced at it. “What is this?”

“Now who’s playing games?”

Dean Gordon leaned back, his fingers fiddling with his chin. “Who are you?” he asked. “Really.”

“It’s not important. I am merely a messenger.”

“Messenger for who?”

“For whom,” Myron corrected. “Prepositional phrase. And you a college dean.”

“I don’t need any smart talk, young man.”

Myron looked at him. “Get real.”

The dean sucked in air as if he were about to plunge underwater. “What do you want?”

“Isn’t the pleasure of your company enough?”

“This is not a joking matter.”

“No, it’s not.”

“So kindly stop playing games. What do you want with me?”

Myron tried the knowing smile again. Dean Gordon looked puzzled for a brief moment but then returned the smile. It too was knowing.

“Or should I say,” the dean added, “how much?”

He seemed more in control now. He had dealt with the blow and was carrying on. A problem had arisen. But there was a solution. There always was in his world.

Money.

He took out a checkbook from his top drawer. “Well?”

“Not that simple,” Myron said.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you think someone should pay?”

He shrugged. “Let’s talk figures.”

“Don’t you think this is worth something more than just money?”

He looked bewildered, as though Myron had just denied the existence of gravity. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

“What about justice?” Myron asked. “Kathy is owed. Big-time.”

“I agree. And I am willing to pay. But what good is revenge going to do her now? You are the messenger, are you not?”

“I am.”

“Then go back and tell Kathy to take the money.”

Myron’s heart collapsed. This man, a man who was clearly involved in what had happened that night, believed Myron was a messenger for a living, breathing Kathy Culver. Tread gently, fair Myron. Ever gently.

But how to play this.

“Kathy is not happy with you,” he tried.

“I meant her no harm.”

Myron put his hand on his chest and lifted his head dramatically. “Be thy intents wicked or charitable, thou com’st in such a questionable shape.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Myron shrugged. “I like to work Shakespeare into conversations. Makes me sound smart, don’t you think?”

The dean made a face. “Can we return to the matter at hand?”

“Sure.”

“You say Kathy does not want money.”

“Yup.”

“What then does she want?”

Good question. “She wants the truth to come out.” Noncommittal, vague, open-ended.

“What truth?”

“Stop playing dumb,” Myron snapped, feigning annoyance. “You weren’t about to write a check to her favorite charity, were you?”

“But I didn’t do anything,” he half-whined. “Kathy took off that night. I haven’t seen her since. How was I supposed to know what to think or do?”

Myron gave him a skeptical look. He did that because he had no idea what else to do. He was now playing Jake’s game, the keep-silent-and-hope-he-ties-his-own-noose game. This worked especially well with political types. They’re born with a defective chromosome that will not allow for prolonged silence.

“She has to understand,” he continued. “I did my best. She disappeared. What was I supposed to do? Go to the police? Was that what she wanted? I didn’t know anymore. I was thinking of her. She might have changed her mind. I didn’t know. I was trying to consider her interests.”

The skeptical look came easier after that last sentence. Myron only wished he knew what the hell the dean was talking about. They sat there staring at one another. Then something happened to Dean Gordon’s face. Myron wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but his whole demeanor seemed to slump. His eyes grew twisted, pained. He shook his head.

“Enough,” he said in a quiet voice.

“What’s enough?”

He closed the checkbook. “I won’t pay,” he said. “Tell Kathy I’ll do whatever she wants. I’ll stand by her no matter what the cost. This has gone on long enough. I can’t live like this. I am not an evil man. She’s a sick girl. She needs help. I want to help.”

Myron had not expected this. “Do you mean that?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“You want to help your former lover?”

His head shot up. “What did you say?”

Myron had been skating blindly on thin ice. His last comment, it seemed, had been something of a blowtorch.

“Did you say ‘lover’?”

Uh-oh.

“Kathy didn’t send you,” he continued. “She has nothing to do with you, does she?”

Myron said nothing.

“Who are you? What is your real name?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

“Who?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

“Are you a police officer?”

“No.”

“Then what exactly are you?”

“A sports agent.”

“A what?”

“I represent athletes.”

“You—So what do you have to do with this?”

“I’m a friend,” Myron said. “I’m trying to find Kathy.”

“Is she alive?”

“I don’t know. But you seem to think so.”

Dean Gordon opened his bottom drawer, took out a cigarette, lit it.

“Bad for you,” Myron said.

“I quit smoking five years ago. Or so everyone thinks.”

“Another little secret?”

He smiled without humor. “So you were the one who sent me the magazine.”

Myron shook his head. “Nope.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure that out. But I know about it. And now I also know you’re hiding something about Kathy’s disappearance.”

He inhaled deeply and let loose a long stream of smoke. “I could deny it. I could deny everything we said here today.”

“You could,” Myron countered. “But of course I have the magazine. I have no reason to lie. And I also have a friend in Sheriff Jake Courter. But you’re right. In the end it would be my word against yours.”

Dean Gordon took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “No,” he said slowly, “it won’t come down to that. I meant what I said before. I want to help her. I need to help her.”

Myron was not sure what to think. The man looked in genuine pain, but Myron had seen performances that would put Olivier to shame. Was his guilt real? Was his sudden catharsis the result of having a conscience, or was it self-preservation? Myron didn’t know. He didn’t much care either, as long as he got to the truth.

“When was the last time you saw Kathy?” Myron asked.

“The night she vanished,” he said.

“She came to your house?”

He nodded. “It was late. I guess around eleven, eleven-thirty. I was in my study. My wife was upstairs in bed. The doorbell rang. Not once. Repeatedly, urgently. Interspersed with heavy door-pounding. It was Kathy.”

His voice was on autopilot, as if he were reading a fairy tale to a child. “She was crying. Or rather she was sobbing uncontrollably. So much so that she couldn’t speak. I brought her into my study. I poured her some brandy and wrapped an afghan around her shoulders. She looked”—he stopped, considered—“very small. Helpless. I sat down across from her and took her hand. She jerked it back. That was when the tears stopped. Not slowly, but all at once, as though a switch had been thrown. She became very still. Her face was completely blank, no emotion whatsoever. Then she started talking.”

He reached into the drawer for another cigarette. He put it in his mouth. The match lit on the fourth try.

“She started from the beginning,” he continued. “Her voice was remarkably steady. It never cracked or wavered—uncanny, when you consider the fact that she was hysterical just moments earlier. But her words belied her placid tone. She told me stories—” He stopped again, shook his head. “They were surprising, to say the least. I had known Kathy for almost a year. I considered her a thoughtful, sweet, proper young woman. I am not making moral judgments here. But she had always been what I considered old-fashioned. And here she was telling me stories that would make a sailor blush.

“She started by telling me that she used to be everything I always thought she was. The girl next door. Everyone’s favorite. But then she changed. She became, in her own words, ‘a free-wheeling slut.’ She started with some boys in her high school class. But she quickly moved onto bigger things. Adults, teachers, friends of her parents. Biracial, homosexual, two-on-ones, even orgies. She took pictures of her encounters. For posterity, she said with a sneer.”

“Did she mention any names?” Myron asked. “Of the teachers or adults or anyone?”

“No. No names.”

They fell into silence. Dean Gordon looked exhausted.

“What happened next?” Myron prompted.

He lifted his head slowly, as though it took great effort. “Her story began to change direction,” he said. “For the better. She said she realized that what she was doing was wrong and stupid. She began, she said, to work through her problems. That was when she met Christian and fell in love. She wanted to put it all behind her, but it wasn’t easy. The past wouldn’t just go away. She tried and tried, and then …” His voice trailed off.

“And then?” Myron prompted.

“Then Kathy just looked at me—I’ll never forget this—and she said, ‘I was raped tonight.’ Just like that. Out of nowhere. I was stunned, of course. There were six of them, she said. Or seven, she wasn’t sure. A gang-rape in the locker room. I asked her when. She told me it had started less than an hour ago. She had gone to the locker room to meet someone. A blackmailer, she said. A former, uh, suitor, who had threatened to reveal her past. She was going to pay for his silence.”

The big cash withdrawal from her trust account, Myron thought.

“But when she got to the locker room, the blackmailer wasn’t alone. Several of his teammates were with him, including another past suitor. They didn’t hit her, she said. They didn’t beat her. And she didn’t fight. There were too many of them, and they were too strong.” He closed his eyes, his voice a whisper. “They took turns with her.”

Silence.

“As I said before, Kathy told me all this in the most dispassionate tone I had ever heard her use. Her eyes were clear, determined. She told me there was only one way to bury her past. Once and for all. She would have to confront it head-on. She’d have to push it out into the bright sunshine where it would wither and die like a medieval vampire. She said she knew what she had to do.”

More silence.

“What?” Myron asked.

“Prosecute the boys who raped her. Face up to her past and then put it behind her. Otherwise it would follow her around for the rest of her life.”

“What did you say?”

Dean Gordon winced at the question. He stamped out the cigarette. He glanced down at the bottom drawer but didn’t reach for another. “I told her to calm down.” He laughed at the memory. “Calm down. By now, the girl was so unemotional, so detached, that she could have been reading a telephone directory. And I told her to calm down. Jesus.”

“What else?”

“I told her that I thought she was still in shock. I meant that too. I told her that she should consider everything, weigh all her options, not rush into a decision that would undoubtably affect the rest of her life. I told her to think about what it would mean to have her past dragged out—to her family, to her friends, to her fiancé, to herself.”

“In other words,” Myron said, “you tried to talk her out of pressing charges.”

“Perhaps. But I never said what I was really thinking: A self-described free-wheeling slut who had gotten involved in pornography and wild sex was going to claim she was raped by a group of college boys, two of whom she admitted having past liaisons with. I wanted her to think about all that before she did something rash.”

“Don’t be so easy on yourself,” Myron said. “You didn’t give a damn about her. She came to you for help, and you thought about everything but her. You thought about your precious institution. You thought about the scandal. You thought about the football team on the eve of a national championship. You thought about your own career, how it would come out that she worked for you, how she felt comfortable visiting your house late at night. You’d be tied in. People would investigate you closer, maybe unearth your unusual marital arrangement.”

That prodded him upright. “What about my marital arrangement?”

“Does the phrase ‘once every two months’ mean anything to you?”

His mouth dropped open. “How …?” He stopped, almost smiled. “You are a very well-informed young man.”

“All-knowing,” Myron corrected. “Godlike.”

“I won’t comment on my marriage, but I would be less than honest if I did not admit that those selfish considerations crossed my mind. But I was also concerned for Kathy. A mistake like this—”

“A rape, Dean. Not a mistake. Kathy was raped. She didn’t make a ‘mistake.’ She wasn’t the victim of an indiscretion. A bunch of football players pinned her down in a locker room and took turns with her against her will.”

“You’re simplifying the situation.”

“You’re the one who simplified the situation. You just put Kathy last.”

“That’s not true.”

Myron shook his head. No time for this now. “So what happened after you bestowed your stellar counsel upon Kathy?”

He tried to shrug but couldn’t pull it off. “She looked at me funny, as though I had betrayed her when all I was trying to do was help. Or maybe she saw in my words the same thing you did. I don’t know. She stood up then and said that she would be back tomorrow morning to press charges. Then she left. I never heard from her again until that magazine came in the mail. And the phone call a few nights ago.”

“What phone call?”

“A few nights ago, very late, I got a phone call. A female voice—maybe Kathy’s, maybe not—said, ‘Enjoy the magazine. Come and get me. I survived.’ ”

“ ‘Come and get me. I survived’?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“What did she mean?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“What did you think when you first heard about Kathy’s disappearance?”

“That she ran away. Decided it was all too much. I thought she’d come back when she was ready. The police thought that too, until they found her undergarments. Then they suspected violence. But I knew the undergarments were probably from the rape, not the disappearance. So in my mind I still considered her a runaway.”

“Didn’t the possibility that the rapists wanted to silence her cross your mind?”

“It crossed my mind, yes. But these boys weren’t capable of—”

“Rapists,” Myron corrected. “ ‘Boys’ who gang-raped a young girl who never did them any harm. You didn’t think they had the capability to commit murder?”

“If they wanted her dead, they would never have let her go,” the dean countered steadily. “That’s what I thought.”

“So you kept your mouth shut.”

He nodded. “That was a mistake. I know that now. I was hoping she had just run away for a few days to straighten herself out. When a week passed, I realized it was too late to say anything.”

“You chose to live with the lie.”

“Yes.”

“She was just a student, after all. She came to you for help during the hardest time of her life. And you turned her away.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he shouted. “Don’t you think this has been tearing me apart for the past year and a half?”

“Yeah, you’re a real humanitarian.”

“What the hell do you want from me, Bolitar?”

Myron stood. “Resign. Immediately.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll drag you down, and it’ll be uglier than you ever imagined. First thing tomorrow morning. Turn in your letter of resignation.”

He looked up, his fingers supporting his chin. Time passed. His face began to soften as though from a masseur’s touch. His eyes closed, and his shoulders slumped. Then he nodded slowly. “All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

“This isn’t penitence. You don’t get off that easy.”

“I understand.”

“One last thing: Did Kathy mention any names at all?”

“Names?”

“Of the rapists?”

He hesitated. “No.”

“But you have a guess?”

“It’s not based on anything concrete.”

“Go on.”

“A few days after she disappeared, I noticed a certain student was tossing around a lot of money. A troublemaker. He bought a new BMW convertible that came to my attention because he drove it across the commons. Ripped up a lot of grass.”

“Who?”

“An ex-football player. He was kicked off the team for selling drugs. His name was Junior Horton. They call him—”

“Horty.”

Myron left without another word, hurrying to get out of the building. It was a beautiful day. Warm but not humid, the sun weakening in the late afternoon but not quite ready to set. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and blooming cherry blossom trees. Myron wanted to spread out a blanket. He wanted to lie down and think about Kathy Culver.

No time.

The phone in his Ford Taurus was ringing when he unlocked the door. It was Esperanza.

“Dead end with Lucy,” she said. “Adam Culver wasn’t the guy who bought the pictures.”

Another theory blown to hell. He was about to start his car when he heard Jake Courter’s voice.

“Thought I might find you here.”

Myron looked out the open window. “What’s up, Jake?”

“We’re about to release Nancy Serat’s name to the press.”

Myron nodded. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

Myron did not like his tone.

“We also have a suspect,” Jake continued. “We’ve brought him in for questioning.”

“Who?”

“Your client,” Jake said. “Christian Steele.”

Chapter 34

“What about Christian?” Myron asked.

“Nancy Serat had just rented that house a week ago,” Jake replied, “a day or two before she left for Cancún. She hadn’t even unpacked yet.”

“So?”

“So how come Christian Steele’s fingerprints—clean, fresh prints—are all over the place? On the front doorknob. On a drinking glass. On the fireplace mantel.”

Myron tried not to looked stunned. “Come on, Jake. You can’t make an arrest on something like that. The press will eat him alive.”

“Like I give a flying shit.”

“You have nothing.”

“We can place him at the scene.”

“So what? You can place Jessica at the scene. Gonna arrest her too?”

Jake unbuttoned his jacket, allowing his belly to expand. He was wearing a brown suit, circa 1972. In a word: lapels. No slave to fashion, that Jake. “Okay, smart-boy,” he said, “you want to tell me what your client was doing at Nancy Serat’s house?”

“We’ll ask him. He’ll talk to you. Christian’s a good kid, Jake. Don’t ruin him on speculation.”

“Yeah. I’d hate to ruin your commissions.”

“Low blow, Jake.”

“You’re not objective, Bolitar. The kid’s your most valuable client, your ticket to the bigs. You don’t want him to be guilty.”

Myron looked at him but said nothing.

“Leave your car here,” Jake said. “I’ll drive you to the station.”

It was only a mile away. When they pulled into the lot, Jake said, “The new DA is here. Young hotshot named Roland.”

Uh-oh. “Cary Roland?” Myron asked. “Curly hair?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s a publicity hound,” Jake said. “Gets a hard-on watching himself on TV. He practically creamed when he heard Christian’s name.”

Myron could imagine. Old buddies, he and Cary Roland. This was not a good development. “Has he released Christian’s name?”

“Not yet,” Jake said. “Cary decided to put it off until eleven. Gets a live feed from all the networks that way.”

“And plenty of time to tighten the perm.”

“That too.”

Christian was sitting in a small room, no bigger than eight by eight. He sat in a chair behind a desk. No hot lights. No one else was in the room.

“Where’s Roland?” Myron asked.

“Behind the mirror.”

One-way glass, even in a rinky-dink station like this. Myron stepped into the room, looked in the mirror, adjusted his tie, and refrained from giving Roland the finger. Mr. Mature strikes again.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

Myron turned. Christian waved to him as if he’d spotted a familiar face in the stands.

“You okay?” Myron asked.

“I’m fine,” Christian said. “I just don’t understand what I’m doing here.”

A uniformed officer came in with a tape recorder. Myron turned to Jake. “Is he under arrest?”

Jake grinned. “I almost forgot, Bolitar. You’re a lawyer too. Nice to be dealing with a professional.”

“Is he under arrest?” Myron repeated.

“Not yet. We’d just like to ask him a few questions.”

The uniformed officer took care of the preliminaries. Then Jake started.

“My name is Sheriff Jake Courter, Mr. Steele. Do you remember me?”

“Yes, sir. You’re handling my fiancée’s disappearance.”

“That’s correct. Now, Mr. Steele, do you know a woman named Nancy Serat?”

“She was Kathy’s roommate at Reston.”

“Are you aware that Nancy Serat was murdered last night?”

Christian’s eyes widened. He turned to Myron. Myron nodded. “My God … no.”

“Were you friends with Nancy Serat?”

His voice was hollow. “Yes, sir.”

“Mr. Steele, can you tell us where you were last night?”

Myron interrupted. “What time last night?”

“From the time he left practice till he went to sleep.”

Myron hesitated. This was a trap. He could try to defuse it, or he could let Christian handle it on his own. Under most circumstances Myron would have stepped in and sounded a subtle warning of what the wrong answer might mean. But this time he sat back and watched.

“If you want to know if I was with Nancy Serat last night,” Christian said slowly, “the answer is yes.”

Myron breathed again. He looked back at the one-way mirror and stuck out his tongue. The demise of Mr. Mature.

“What time was that?” Jake asked.

“Around nine o’clock.”

“Where did you see her?”

“At her house.”

“The one at 118 Acre Street?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was the purpose of your visit?”

“Nancy returned from a trip that morning. She called and said she needed to talk to me.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“She said it had something to do with Kathy. She wouldn’t tell me anything else over the phone.”

“What happened when you arrived at the house at 118 Acre Street?”

“Nancy practically shoved me out the door. She said I had to leave right away.”

“Did she say why?”

“No, sir. I asked Nancy what was going on, but she was insistent. She promised to call me in a day or two and tell me everything, but for now I had to go.”

“What did you do?”

“I argued with her for a minute or two. She started getting upset and saying stuff that made no sense. I finally just gave up and left.”

“What sort of ‘stuff’ was she saying?”

“Something about sisters reuniting.”

Myron sat up.

Jake asked, “What about sisters reuniting?”

“I don’t remember exactly. Something like ‘Time for sisters to reunite.’ She really wasn’t making much sense, sir.”

Jake looked at Myron. Myron looked back.

“Do you remember anything else she said?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you go straight home after that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What time did you arrive home?”

“Ten-fifteen, I guess. Maybe a little later.”

“Is there anybody who can confirm the time?”

“I don’t think so. I just moved into a condominium in Englewood. Maybe a neighbor saw me, I don’t know.”

“Would you mind waiting here for a minute?”

Jake signaled for Myron to follow him. Myron nodded, leaned over to Christian. “Don’t say another word until I get back.”

Christian nodded.

They stepped into the other room. The other side of the mirror, so to speak. County District Attorney Cary Roland had gone to Harvard Law School with Myron. A bright guy. Law review. Clerk for a Supreme Court justice. Cary Roland had first shown signs of political ambition while exiting his mother’s womb.

He looked the same. Gray suit with vest (yes, he’d worn suits to class). Hook nose. Small, dark eyes. Loose curly hair, like a seventies Peter Frampton’s, only shorter.

Roland shook his head. Then he made a noise of disgusted belief. “Creative client, Bolitar.”

“Not as creative,” Myron said, “as your barber.”

Jake held back a laugh.

“I say we book him,” Roland continued. “We’ll announce it at the press conference.”

“Now I see it,” Myron said.

“See what?”

“The hard-on. When you said ‘press.’ ”

Snickers.

Roland fumed. “Still a comedian, eh, Bolitar? Well, your client is about to go down.”

“I don’t think so, Cary.”

“I don’t care what you think.”

Myron sighed. “Christian gave you a reasonable explanation for being at Nancy Serat’s house. You got nothing else, ergo you got nothing. Besides, imagine the headlines if Christian’s innocent. Young DA Makes Major Blunder. Tarnishes Name of Local Hero for Own Gain. Hurts Titans’ Chances for Superbowl. Becomes Most Hated Man in State.”

Roland swallowed. He hadn’t considered that. Blinded by the lights. The TV lights. “Sheriff Courter, what do you think?”

Backpedal time.

“We have no choice,” Jake said. “We have to let him go.”

“Do you believe his story?”

Jake shrugged. “Who the hell knows? But we don’t have enough to keep him.”

“Okay,” Roland said with a weighty nod. Important man. “He’s free to go. But he better not leave town.”

Myron looked at Jake. “Not leave town?” He laughed. Hard. “Did he just say not to leave town?”

Jake was trying to hold it in. But his lip was quivering pretty good.

Roland’s face turned red. “Infantile,” he spat out. “Sheriff, I want daily updates on this case.”

“Yes, sir.”

Roland gave everyone his most frightening glare. No one fell to their knees. He stormed out.

“Must be nonstop laughs,” Myron said, “working with him.”

“Gobs of fun.”

“Can Christian and I go now?”

Jake shook his head. “Not until I hear all about your visit with Dean Gordon.”

Chapter 35

Myron filled Jake in. Then he drove Christian home. On the way he filled Christian in too. On everything. Christian wanted to know. Myron wanted to spare him, but he knew he didn’t have the right to keep things from him.

Christian did not interrupt with questions. In fact, he said nothing. On the field he was famous for his composure under any situation. Right now, Christian had on his best game face.

When Myron finished, neither spoke for several minutes. Then Myron said, “Are you okay?”

Christian nodded. His face was pale. “Thank you for being up-front with me,” he said.

“Kathy loved you,” Myron said. “Very much. Don’t forget that.”

He nodded again. “We have to find her.”

“I’m trying.”

Christian shifted in the car seat so he could face Myron. “When I was being wooed by all these big agencies, the whole process felt—I don’t know—so impersonal. It was all about money. Still is, I know that. I’m not being naïve here, but you were different. I instinctively knew I could trust you. I guess what I’m trying to say is, you’ve become more than just an agent to me. I’m glad I chose you.”

“Me too,” Myron said. “This might not the best time to ask, but how did you hear about me in the first place?”

“Someone gave you a glowing recommendation.”

“Who?”

Christian smiled. “You don’t know?”

“A client?”

“No.”

Myron shook his head. “I have no idea.”

Christian settled back in his seat. “Jessica,” he said. “She told me your life history. About your playing days, your injury, what you went through, how you worked for the FBI, how you went back to school. She said you were the best person she knew.”

“Jessica doesn’t get out much.”

They fell back into silence. The New Jersey Turnpike had a center-lane closure, slowing them down to a crawl. Should have taken the western spur. Myron was about to change lanes when Christian said something that almost made him slam on the brakes.

“My mother once posed in the nude.”

Myron thought he’d heard wrong. “What?”

“When I was a little kid. I don’t know if they were ever printed in a magazine or anything. I doubt it. She wasn’t very attractive by then. She was twenty-five but looked sixty. She worked as a prostitute in New York. On the streets. I don’t know who my father was. She figured he was one of the guys at a bachelor party, but she had no idea which one.”

Myron sneaked a glance at him. Christian stared straight ahead. The game face was still on.

“I thought your mother and father raised you in Kansas,” Myron said carefully.

Christian shook his head. “Those were my grandparents. My mom died when I was seven. They legally adopted me. We had the same last name, so I just pretended they were my real parents.”

Myron said, “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. They were wonderful parents. I guess they made a lot of mistakes with my mom, the way she ended up and all. But they were kind and loving to me. I miss them a lot.”

The silence was heavier now. They drove past the Meadowlands. Myron paid the toll at the end of the turnpike and followed the signs to the George Washington Bridge. Christian had bought a place two miles before the bridge, six miles from Titans Stadium. A set of three hundred prefab condos loftily labeled Cross Creek Pointe, one of those New Jersey housing developments that looked like something out of Poltergeist.

As they cruised to a stop, the car phone rang. Myron picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

It was Jessica.

“In Englewood.”

“Take Route four west to seventeen north,” she said quickly. “I’ll meet you in the Pathmark parking lot in Ramsey.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just meet me there. Now.”

Chapter 36

The moment Myron saw Jessica standing in the dusky glow of the Pathmark fluorescent parking lights, looking achingly beautiful in a pair of hip-hugging blue jeans and a red blouse open at the throat, he knew there was trouble. Big trouble.

“Very bad?” he asked her.

She opened the car door and slid in next to him. “Worse.”

He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stop thinking of how beautiful she was. She looked a little pale, her eyes a bit too sunken. She did not have crow’s-feet quite yet, but new lines had etched their way into her face. Had they been there yesterday or the day she visited his office? He wasn’t sure. But he thought she had never looked so devastating. The imperfections, if you wanted to call them that, just made her more real and hence more desirable. Myron had thought Dean-nessa Madelaine was attractive, but she was nary a penlight next to Jessica’s blinding beacon.

“Want to tell me about it?”

She shook her head. “I’d rather just show you.” She started giving directions. When they reached a road appropriately called Red Dirt Path, she said, “My father rented a cabin out here.”

“In these woods?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago. He had it for the month. According to the realtor, he wanted some peace and quiet. A place to get away from it all.”

“Doesn’t sound much like your father,” Myron said.

“Not like him at all,” she agreed.

A few minutes later, they arrived at the cabin. Myron had a hard time believing that Adam Culver, a man he had gotten to know fairly well during his time with Jessica, would want to vacation out here. The man liked to gamble. He liked the ponies, the roulette wheel, the blackjack table. He liked action. His idea of a quiet time was a Tony Bennett concert at the Sands.

Jessica got out of the car. Myron followed. Her posture was arrow-perfect. So was the walk, something Myron had always loved to watch in the past. But there was an unmistakable teeter in her step, as though her legs were not sure they could sustain the lovely torso over the long haul.

Their footsteps creaked on the steps of the wooden porch. Myron spotted plenty of dry rot. Jessica unlocked the front door and pushed it open.

“Take a look,” she said.

He did. He said nothing. He could feel her eyes on him.

“I checked his charge card,” she said. “He spent over three thousand dollars at a place in the city called Eye-Spy.”

Myron knew the store. This was definitely their handiwork. Three videocameras were sprawled across the couch. Panasonic. All with mounting material, so they could be hung up somewhere. There were also three small television monitors. Also Panasonic. The kind you might see at a high-rise’s security station. Two VCRs. Toshiba. Lots of cables and wires and stuff like that.

But that stuff wasn’t the most bothersome thing he saw. Alone, those electronic goods could have meant one of several things. But two other items—items that drew Myron’s eye and held it like a baby near a shiny coin—changed everything. They were the added catalyst. They completed a mixture that was far too noxious to be ignored.

Propped against the wall was a rifle. And on the floor next to it, a set of handcuffs.

Jessica said, “What the hell was he doing?”

He knew what she was thinking. The dead girls found near here. The television images of their battered, decayed bodies hovered above them like the most haunting of ghosts.

“When did he buy this stuff?” Myron asked.

“Two weeks ago.” Her eyes were clear, controlled. “Listen, I’ve had time to think about this. Even if our worst fears are true, it doesn’t explain anything. What about the picture in the magazine? Or Kathy’s handwriting on that envelope? Or the phone calls? Or for that matter his murder?”

Myron looked at her. He knew she was seeking an explanation—any explanation but the one that stared them straight in the face. “Are you okay?” he asked.

She crossed her arms under her breasts, a hand on each elbow, as if she were hugging herself. “I feel,” she said, “unanchored.”

“Can you take more?”

Her hands dropped to her sides. “Why? What is it?”

He hesitated.

She exploded. “Goddamn it, don’t coddle me!”

“Jess—”

“You know I hate that protect-the-little-lady bullshit of yours! Tell me what the hell is going on!”

“Kathy was gang-raped by some of Christian’s teammates on the night she disappeared.”

Jessica looked as if she’d just been slapped with an open hand. Myron reached out. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Just tell me what happened. Everything.”

He did. Her clear, controlled eyes went blank, lifeless. She remained uncharacteristically silent.

“Bastards,” she managed. “The goddamn bastards.”

He nodded.

“One of them killed her,” she said. “Or all of them. To shut her up.”

“It’s possible.”

She paused, thinking. Then the eyes came back to life. “Suppose,” she began slowly, “that my father learned about the rape.”

Myron nodded.

“What would he do?” she continued. “How would you react—if it was your daughter?”

“I’d be enraged,” Myron replied.

“Would you be able to control yourself?”

“Kathy is not my daughter,” he said. “And I’m still not sure I can control myself.”

Jessica nodded. “So maybe, just maybe, that explains this whole setup. The electronics, the cuffs, the rifle. Maybe he was using this hideaway, deep in the woods, so he could grab a rapist and exact a little private justice.”

“Kathy was gang-raped. There were six of them. This place looks built for one.”

“But,” she continued with the hint of an eerie smile, “suppose my father was in the exact same position we are in now.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Suppose he knew the name of only one rapist. Maybe this Horton guy. What might he do then? What might you do then?”

“I might,” Myron said, “kidnap him and make him tell.”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s a hell of a reach. Why would I videotape it? Why would I need cameras and monitors?”

“Tape the confession, make sure no one comes down the road, I don’t know. You have a better scenario?”

He did not. “Have you gone through the rest of the house yet?”

“I didn’t have a chance. The realtor brought me here. He practically burst a blood vessel when he saw this stuff.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I knew all this was here. That my father was a private investigator working undercover.”

Myron made a face.

“Hey, it was the best I could come up with.”

“And he bought that?”

“I think so.”

Myron shook his head. “I thought you were a writer.”

“I’m not good with spur-of-the-moment. I’m a lot better with the written than the oral.”

“Based on past experience,” he said, “I’d have to disagree.”

“Nice time,” she said, “for a come-on.”

He shrugged. “Just trying to keep things loose.”

She almost smiled.

“Let’s look around,” he said.

There wasn’t much to search. The living room had no drawers or closets. Everything was in plain view—the electronic equipment, the handcuffs, the rifle. The kitchenette held no surprises. Same with the bathroom. That left the bedroom.

It was small. The size of a guest bedroom at a beach house. The double bed took up almost the entire room. There were reading lights on either side of the bed, attached to the wall because there was no room for night tables. No dressers either. The bed was made with flannel sheets. They checked the closet.

Bingo.

Black pants, black T-shirt, black sweatshirt. And worst of all, a black ski mask.

“Ski mask in June?” Myron said.

“He might have needed it to kidnap Horton,” she tried. But her tone would not make the leap.

Myron dropped to the floor and looked underneath the bed. He saw a plastic bag. He stretched out his hand, grabbed it, and dragged it along the dust-blanketed floor toward him. The bag was red. The initials BCME were emblazoned across the front.

“Bergen County Medical Examiner,” Jessica explained.

It looked like one of those old Lord and Taylor’s bags, the kind that snapped closed on the top. Myron pulled it back. The bag opened with a pop. He pulled out a pair of gray no-frills sweat pants with a drawstring. Then he reached back in and withdrew a yellow pullover with the letter T in red. Both were covered with caked-on dirt.

“Recognize these?” he asked.

“Just the yellow sweater,” she said. “It’s my dad’s old varsity sweater from Tarlow High School.”

“Funny thing to hide under a bed up here.”

Jessica’s eyes lit up. “Nancy’s message! Jesus Christ, she said my dad told her all about Kathy’s yellow sweater.”

“Whoa, slow down a second. What did Nancy say exactly?”

“She said—and I quote verbatim—‘He told me all about that favorite yellow sweater he gave Kathy. Such a sweet story.’ Those were her exact words. My father never wore it. Kathy did. Like a nightshirt or kick-around-the-house shirt.”

“Did your dad give it to her?”

“Yes.”

“So how did he get it back?”

“I don’t know. I imagine it was in her personal belongings at school.”

“Which doesn’t explain why he asked Nancy Serat about it. Or why it’s hidden under his bed.”

They stood in silence.

“We’re missing something here,” she said.

“Maybe your father saw something in these clothes we can’t see yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Myron admitted. “But these clothes were clearly significant to him. Maybe he found them somewhere unusual. Or maybe the police found them.”

“But Kathy was wearing blue the night she left. That’s been established.”

Myron remembered the testimony of the sorority sisters and the photograph. But then again …

“One way to check on that.”

“How?”

He ran out to the car. Darkness had finally laid claim on the long summer day. He turned on the phone, hoping they weren’t too far out of a calling area. Three of those little bars lit up. Enough for the phone to work. He tried Dean Gordon’s office. It rang twenty times. No answer. He tried the dean’s house. It was picked up on the third ring.

Dean Gordon said, “Hello?”

“What was Kathy wearing when she came to your house?” No need for identification or pleasantries.

“Wearing? A blouse and skirt of some kind.”

“What color?”

“Blue. I think the blouse was ripped a bit.”

Myron hung up.

Jessica said, “Back to square one.”

Maybe, Myron thought. But the flash of an image seared across his mind. He couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t even make out what it was exactly. But it had been there, and it would come back.

“Let’s go,” she said softly, taking his hand. The car light provided enough illumination to see the look in her eyes. They were beautiful eyes, so light colored they were almost yellow. “I want to get away from here.”

He closed the car door, feeling suddenly choked up. The car light went out, basking them in darkness. He couldn’t see her face anymore. “Where do you want to go?”

From the darkness he heard her voice. “Someplace,” she said, “where we can be alone.”

Chapter 37

They found a high-rise Hilton in Mahwah.

Myron checked them in to the best available suite. Jessica stood next to him. The hotel concierge swung his line of vision from Myron to Jessica, eyeing her lustily and Myron jealously. A formal affair was in full swing in the lobby. Men in tuxes, women in long gowns. But every man stared agog at Jessica, who was dressed in jeans and a button-down red blouse.

Myron was used to it. When they were first together, he had taken an almost perverse pleasure in seeing men stare, the familiar you-look-but-I-touch-ha-ha school of macho sneering. But then he started seeing things in the looks that weren’t there, and the even more familiar male insecurity burrowed through his rationality.

Jessica was practiced at this. She knew how to ignore the looks without looking cold, bothered, or interested.

Their room was on the sixth floor. They had barely closed the door when they kissed. Jessica’s tongue circled and gently darted, making his whole body spasm helplessly. He began to unbutton her blouse. His mouth went dry. He actually gasped when he saw her again. Breathlessness made him heady. He cupped a warm breast, feeling the delicious weight in his hand. She moaned into his mouth.

They moved to the bed.

Their lovemaking had always been intense, all-consuming, but this was somehow more animalistic, needier, and yet more tender.

Later, much later, Jessica sat up, kissed him gently on the cheek. “That,” she said, “was awesome.”

Myron shrugged. “Not bad.”

“Not bad?”

“For me. For you it was awesome.”

She swung her legs out of bed and slipped into a hotel robe. “I did enjoy myself,” she said.

“Sounded like it.”

“I was a tad noisy, huh?”

“The Who in concert is a tad noisy. You were loud.”

She stood above the bed, smiling. The robe was tied loosely, showing plenty of cleavage and legs that were so long, they were almost intimidating. “I didn’t hear you complain.”

“How could you,” Myron said, “over all your screaming?”

“What time is it?”

“Midnight.” He reached for the phone. “Hungry?”

She gave him a look he felt in his toes. Well, not exactly his toes. “Famished,” she said.

“For food, Jess. Food.”

“Oh.”

“Ever learn about the male’s ‘time for recovery’ in health class?”

“Must have been absent that day.”

“The three R’s. Replenishment, restoration, recuperation.” He looked at the menu. “Damn.”

“What?”

“No oysters.”

“Myron?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a hot tub in the bathroom.”

“Jess …”

She looked at him with who-me innocence. “We can soak until the food comes. Recuperate. One of the three R’s.”

“Just soak?”

“Just soak.”

She had said soak. He was sure of it. Soak. Not soap. But that was how it started. She soaped him back to life. Myron tried to fight it, almost afraid of how good it felt. But he couldn’t. Jess toyed with him, pushed him to the edge, let him teeter, then pulled him back. Myron was helpless. Words like heaven, ecstasy, paradise, ambrosia floated through his mind.

Total surrender.

With a whispered “Now,” she let him go. His nerve endings surged and sang. The white-hot explosion was so powerful, his ears popped. The bright light hurt his eyes.

“Awesome,” he managed.

She lay back, smiling. “Not bad.”

There was a knock on the door. Probably room service. Neither one of them moved.

“Why don’t you get it,” she said.

“My legs,” he said. “They can’t move. I may never walk again.”

Another knock.

“I’m not dressed,” she said.

“And what am I, ready for a press conference?”

“Bet you’d get good coverage.”

Myron moaned at the joke.

Another knock.

“Come on, Myron. Just throw a towel around your shapely ass and get moving.”

The second woman to mention his ass in the same day. Yowzer. He grabbed the bath towel and headed for the door. Another knock.

“One second.”

He opened the door. It wasn’t their food.

“Maid service,” Win said. “May I turn down your bed?”

“Didn’t you see the Do Not Disturb sign?”

Win glanced at the doorknob. “Sorry. No speaka da English.”

“How the hell did you find us?”

“I traced down your charge card,” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “You checked in here at eight twenty-two P.M.” Win leaned his head in the doorway. “Hello, Jessica.”

From the bathroom. “Hi, Win.” Myron heard her stepping out of the Jacuzzi. The image of water cascading down her naked body came to him like a deep punch.

“Come on in,” he grumbled.

“Thank you.” Win handed him a manila folder. “Thought you might want to take a look at this.”

Jessica came in from the bathroom. The robe was tied tighter. She was drying her hair with a towel. “What’s up?” she asked.

“The police rap sheet of one Fred Nickler, aka Nick Fredericks,” Win said.

“Imaginative alias,” Myron said.

“For an imaginative fellow.”

Jessica sat on the bed. “He’s the porno publisher, right?”

Myron nodded. The rap sheet was not very long. He started with the most recent dates. Traffic violations, two DWIs, one arrest for mail fraud.

“Nineteen seventy-eight,” Win said.

Myron skipped down. June 30, 1978. Fred Nickler had been arrested for endangering the welfare of a child. Charges dropped.

“So?”

“Mr. Nickler was involved in kiddie porn,” Win explained. “He was only a small-time photographer back then. But he was nabbed with his hand, so to speak, in the cookie jar. More precisely, taking photographs of an eight-year-old boy.”

Jessica said, “Jesus.”

Myron remembered their meeting. “ ‘Just an honest guy trying to make an honest buck.’ ”

“Indeed.”

Jessica asked, “Why were the charges dropped?”

“Ah,” Win said, pointing a finger in the air, “that’s where things get interesting. In many ways it’s not an uncommon story. Fred Nickler was only the photographer. A little fish. The authorities wanted the bigger fish. The little fish ratted out the big fish in exchange for leniency.”

“And they dropped the charges completely?” Myron said “Not even a misdemeanor?”

“Not even. It seems that Mr. Nickler also agreed to help out the police from time to time.”

“So what’s the significance?”

“This entire arrangement was negotiated between Nickler and the officer in charge of the investigation,” Win said. He shot a quick glance at Jessica.

“The officer in charge of the investigation was your friend Paul Duncan.”

Chapter 38

“That’s our man,” Win said. “Mr. Junior Horton.”

Horty looked like an ex–football player. Big and wide, all veins and bulges. His arms looked like corded wood. He was dressed for a rap video. His button-down St. Louis Cardinals baseball shirt was untucked. His baggy shorts reached down past his knees. No socks. Black Reebok high-tops. A Chicago White Sox baseball cap. Dark sunglasses and lots of jewelry.

It was nine in the morning. One Hundred Thirty-second Street in Manhattan. The street was quiet. Horty was making a drug deal. He had been in and out of jail plenty of times, his one long stint of freedom during his time at Reston U. Drugs, mostly. Armed robbery, once. Two sexual assault charges. Twenty-four years old and a complete punk. Like most inmates he had spent his prison time lifting weights. Pumping iron. Our penal institutions develop violent men’s physical strength, so when they get out, they’ll be able to intimidate and maim with far greater skill. Nice system.

Jessica was not with them. She was packing her father’s office—that is, the morgue—and checking for any additional bombshells. Myron had managed to talk her out of confronting Paul Duncan until they knew a little more. She listened grudgingly, but that was how Jessica usually listened anyway.

Horty finished the transaction with a kid who looked no older than twelve, slapped him five, headed west. He wasn’t wearing a Walkman, but he walked as though he were. Very jittery. His eyes were red. Every few steps he would snort the air and wipe his nose with the back of his hand.

“Boys and girls, can you say ‘Cokehead’?”

“Probably has the flu,” Win said.

“The Colombian strain.”

They ducked out of sight as he approached. When Horty reached the lip of the alley, Myron stepped in front of him.

“Junior Horton?”

Horty gave him a scornful street glare. “Who the fuck wants to know?”

“Snappy comeback,” Myron said.

“Get the fuck out of my way or I kick your ass.” He spotted Win. “Both your ass.”

“Asses,” Win corrected. “One ass. Two asses. Plural.”

“What the fuck—”

“We want to talk to you,” Myron said.

“Hey, fuck you, man.”

Myron turned to Win. “He’s a real badass.”

“Indeed,” Win said. “I may wet myself.”

Horty stepped toward Win. He had at least six inches and sixty pounds on him. Horty probably thought he was being clever, going after and intimidating the little guy. Myron tried not to smile when Horty spat, “Gonna fuck you up big-time.”

“If you curse again,” Win said in the tone of a preschool teacher, “I will be forced to silence you.”

“You?” Horty laughed heartily. He flexed for a moment and then lowered his nose until it almost touched Win’s. Win did not move. “Little piece of upper-crust whitebread gonna shut me up? Fuck—”

Win barely moved. His arm shot up, delivered a palm strike to the solar plexus, and was back at his side in what seemed like a tenth of a second. Horty stumbled back, gasping, unable to get any oxygen into his lungs.

“I asked you not to curse,” Win said.

It took Horty nearly half a minute to recover. When he did, the lips started flapping again. “Fucking cheap-shot motherfucker,” he said rising. “I gonna tear you a brand-new asshole.”

He charged Win, his arms outstretched as though tackling a fullback. Win sidestepped him and delivered a quick roundhouse kick, again hitting the solar plexus. Horty folded and went down. His face was a mixture of fury, pain, surprise, and of course, embarrassment. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching. He was, after all, getting his butt whipped by Mr. Wonderbread.

“There are two hundred and six bones in the body,” Win said evenly. “Next time I break one.”

But Horty wasn’t listening. His eyes bulged. Rage twisted his face—not to mention his limited ability to reason. Horty stood, stumbling, pretending he was more hurt than he was. The element of surprise. When Horty was close enough, he made his move.

He must have been really coked up, Myron mused. Or really stupid. Probably both.

Win leaned away and snapped a sidekick toward Horty’s lower leg. There was a cracking sound, like stepping on a dry twig. Horty screamed and went down. Win raised his leg for an ax kick, but Myron stopped him with a shake of his head.

“Two hundred five,” Win said, lowering his foot gently, “and counting.”

“You broke my f—” He stopped, holding his leg and rolling back and forth. “You broke my leg!”

“Your right tibia,” Win corrected.

“Who the—who are you?”

Myron said, “We’re going to ask you a few questions. You’re going to answer them.”

“My leg, man. I need a doctor.”

“When we’re finished.”

“Look, I just work for Terrell. He gave me this territory. You gotta a problem with that, you speak to him, okay?”

“We don’t want to talk to you about that.”

“Please, man, I’m begging you. My leg.”

“You used to attend Reston University.”

A surprised look replaced the pained one. “Yeah, so? You want my résumé?”

“You knew Kathy Culver.”

Panic now. “You guys cops?”

“No.”

Silence.

“You knew Kathy Culver.”

“Kathy who?”

Win said, “Number two-oh-five. The left femur. The femur is the largest bone in the body—”

“Okay, I knew her. So what?”

“How did you meet?” Myron asked.

“At a party. Her first week of school.”

“Did you ever date?”

“Date?” Horty laughed at that one. “No. She wasn’t the kind you date.”

“What kind was she?”

“The kind who sucked off my Johnson first night. Willie’s too.”

“Who is Willie?”

“My roomie.”

“He play football?”

“Yeah.” Then he added, “But only special teams,” as if that made him a lower species of being.

“Go on.”

“Man, why you want to hear this?”

“Go on.”

Horty shrugged. The leg was swelling badly, but the coke was numbing the pain enough to keep him going. “You see, we had this party. At Moore House. Where all the brothers lived. Kathy, she was like the only white chick there. So she comes in dressed like a prime-time ho. I mean, she was all that, you know? We start rapping and shit, you know. Did a little nose-candy like a Hoover vac. She liked the stuff. Then we start slow-dancing.” The grin returned with the memory. “Grinding, you know. She put her hand on the Black Blade right there on the dance floor. Starts rubbing it and shit. So I take her upstairs, and she sucks me off. But that ain’t all. She takes a camera—a fucking camera!—out of her bag and asks me to take pictures. No shit! Close-ups, she wants, of her and the Black Blade.”

Myron’s stomach began to churn again. Win looked on with his usual noninterest.

Horty continued. “Next night, she come back. Takes on me and Willie at the same time. We take more pictures, have a good old time. ’Cept this time I had my camera too.”

“So you took some pictures of your own.”

“Shit, yeah.”

“Did you and Kathy have any more, uh, encounters?”

“Nope. She moved on to other dudes, though. Primelooking babe for such a ho. All blond and built and shit.”

“You talk to her after that?”

He shrugged. “Little. Not much. But once she started up with Christian, man, it was a whole other story.”

“What do you mean?”

“She be all nose up in the air, like her shit don’t stink no more. Two of them all lovey-dovey and shit, like they was going steady on a TV show. All of a sudden the slut thinks she’s some fucking pure-ass cherry. I mean, the ho been riding the Blade like a fucking bronco, and now she don’t even say how-do. That ain’t right. That just ain’t right.”

Mr. Etiquette.

“So you decided to blackmail her,” Myron said.

“No way. Unh-unh.”

“We know about it, Horty. We know she paid you for the pictures.”

Horty made a snorting sound. “Aw, shit, that ain’t blackmail. That’s a business transaction. I just called her one day and told her I might have to knock her down a few pegs. And then I said a picture was worth a thousand words. She kinda agreed with all that and said she’d be willing to pay for such wonderful pictures. I told her they was real valuable to me. Had a lot of sentimental value and shit. But we finally reached an agreement. A mutually beneficial agreement,” he stressed, “not blackmail.” He took hold of his leg and winced. “End of story, man.”

“You left something out.”

“What?”

“The gang-rape in the locker room.”

He did not seem surprised. He half-smiled and said, “Rape? Man, you ain’t listening. This woman had Horty’s Three H’s: Hot, Horny, Ho. Shit, she’d jump naked into a rock pile if she thought there’d be a snake in it. She loved it. We all had a good time.”

Win looked at Myron. The look said Keep your cool.

“How many of you?” Myron asked.

“Six.”

“Why,” he said in a low voice, “didn’t you just take the money, Horty? Why did you have to rape her?”

“I just told you, man—”

“She didn’t come to that locker room for consensual sex with six people. You raped her.”

“Can’t be, man,” he said with a shake of his head. “She a ho through and through. And once a ho, always a ho. That just the way it is. Fucking cunt acting all high and prissy and shit. Quarterback’s girl. Miss fucking all-American cheerleader. Who the fuck did she think she was? So yeah, I showed her. I reminded her where she come from, what she really is. Not some fucking prom queen. A slut. A dick-loving ho.”

Win now stepped in front of Myron. Preventive measure.

“’Sides,” Horty continued, “I owed her boyfriend. Big-time.”

“Christian Steele?”

“Yeah. He did me wrong. I did him wrong. Passed around his little ho. Just a little payback, my man. To the prick who got me thrown off the team.”

“No,” Myron said. “It wasn’t Christian.”

“What you talking about?”

“I spoke with Coach Clarke. Two guys showed up for a game high. That’s why you were thrown off. Christian had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh,” Horty said with a shrug. “Ain’t that something.”

“Your remorse,” Myron said, “is very touching.”

“I gotta get to a doctor, man. My leg is killing me.”

“Weren’t you worried about getting caught?”

“What?”

“Weren’t you afraid she’d report the rape?”

Horty made a face as if Myron had suddenly started speaking Japanese. “You crazy, man? Who she gonna tell? She just gave me major cash to keep it all quiet. She say anything, it all gets out. The whole ugly truth. Everyone would know—Christian, her mammy, her pappy, her teachers. Everyone would know what she just paid all that money to hide. And what if she was dumb enough to tell? There were pictures and witnesses of her doing Willie and me at the party. Who gonna believe she was raped after seeing that?”

Dean Gordon had made the same argument, Myron remembered. Great minds thinking alike.

“Hey, look, man, my leg’s killing me.”

“Did you ever see Kathy again?” Myron managed.

“Nope.”

“Were you the one who threw away the panties?”

“Nope. One of the other guys had them. Thought he’d keep them as a souvenir. When he heard she was missing, he got scared, threw them away.”

“Who?”

“I ain’t giving names.”

“Yes,” Win said. “You are.” He rested his foot against the broken tibia. That was enough.

“Okay, okay. Like I said, they was six of us. Three brothers, two white dudes, one chink.”

Equal opportunity rapists.

“One was the place kicker. Guy named Tommy Wu. Then there was Ed Woods, Bobby Taylor, Willie and me.”

“That’s five.”

Horty hesitated. “Give me a break, man. The other dude was the one who threw away the panties. But he’s a friend, man. Still gives me money when I’m down, you know. I can’t just give him up. He’s big-time.”

“What do you mean, big-time?”

“Plays pro ball and shit. I can’t give you his name.”

Win put the slightest pressure on the leg. Horty bucked.

“Ricky Lane.”

Myron froze. “The running back for the Jets?” Dumb question. How many Ricky Lanes who now play pro football went to Reston University?

“Yeah. Now look, man, that’s all I know.”

Win said to Myron, “Do you have any other questions for him?”

Myron shook his head.

“Then leave,” Win said.

Myron did not move.

“I said,” Win continued, “leave.”

“No.”

“You heard what he said. You’ll never convict him. He pushes drugs to kids, rapes innocent women, blackmails, steals, whatever, and laughs about it.”

Horty sat up. “What the fuck is this?”

“Leave,” Win repeated.

Myron hesitated.

“Yo, man, I told you everything I know.” There was a tremble in Horty’s voice.

Myron did not move.

Horty shouted, “Don’t leave me alone with this crazy motherfucker!”

“Leave,” Win said.

Myron shook his head. “No. I’ll stay.”

Win studied Myron. Then he nodded and approached Horty, who was trying to claw away but not getting far.

“Don’t kill him,” Myron said.

Win nodded. He went to work with the careful precision of a surgeon. His face never changed expression. If he heard Horty’s cries, he never showed it.

After a short time Myron told him to stop. Reluctantly Win stepped away.

They left.

Chapter 39

Ricky Lane lived in a New Jersey condo development similar to Christian’s. Win waited in the car. As Myron approached the door, he felt rather than heard the bass from Ricky’s stereo. It took three rings of the bell and several knocks before Ricky appeared.

“Hey, Myron.”

He was wearing a silk shirt that was either very fashionable or a pajama top. Hard to tell. The shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a well-defined physique. His pants were held up by a drawstring. He was also wearing slippers. Maybe they were pajamas. Or lounging clothes. Or he was trying out for a walk-on role on I Dream of Jeannie.

“We need to talk,” Myron said.

“Come on in.”

The music was deafening and awful. Made Pap Smear sound like Brahms. The motif was sleek modern. Lots of fiberglass. Lots of black and white. Lots of rounded edges. The stereo took up a whole wall. The lights on the equalizer looked like something on Star Trek.

Ricky flipped the stereo off. The silence was abrupt. Myron felt his chest stop vibrating.

“So what’s up?” Ricky asked.

Myron tossed him a glass jar. Ricky caught it, looked a question.

“Pee in it,” Myron said.

“What?”

“I want you to urinate into this jar.”

Ricky looked at the jar. Then at Myron. “I don’t get it.”

“Your new size,” Myron said. “You’re taking steroids.”

“No way, man. Not me.”

“Then give me a urine sample. Right now. I’ll have it tested at a lab.”

Ricky stared at the jar. He said nothing.

“Go ahead, Ricky. I don’t have all day.”

“You’re my agent, Myron. You ain’t my mother.”

“True enough. Are you taking steroids?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Take it any way you’d like.”

“Did Horty sell them to you? Or have you gotten a new supplier since college?”

Silence.

Ricky said, “You’re fired, Myron.”

“I’m devastated. Now tell me about raping Kathy Culver.”

More silence. Ricky was struggling to look casual, but his body language was all wrong.

“I know all about it,” Myron continued. “Your buddy Horty told all. Nice guy, by the way. A real sweetheart.”

Ricky stumbled back. He put the jar down on a shiny cube that Myron guessed was a table. He turned away. His voice was barely audible. “I never touched her.”

“Bullshit. You and five other guys jumped her in the locker room. You took turns raping her.”

“No. That’s not how it happened.”

Myron waited. Ricky buttoned his shirt, his back still facing Myron. He took a CD out of the stereo and tucked it back into its case.

“I was there,” Ricky began, his voice low. “In the locker room. I was stoned. We all were. Stoned out of our minds. Horty had just gotten in a new supply, and …” He sort of shrugged away the rest of the sentence.

“It started as a dare, you know. We knew we’d never go through with it. We figured we’d walk right to the edge but never jump. We kept waiting for someone to call it off.” He stopped again.

Myron said, “But no one called it off.”

He nodded slowly. “It stopped. But too late. It stopped when it was my turn, and I said no.”

“After all the others had gone?”

“Yes. I stood there and watched them. I even cheered.”

Silence.

“You kept her panties?”

“Yes.”

“When you heard the police were investigating, you tossed them in that garbage bin.”

He faced Myron. “No,” he said with something close to a hint of a smile. “I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave them on top of a Dumpster. I’d have burned them.”

Myron considered that for a moment. It was, he thought, an excellent point. “Then who threw them away?”

Ricky shrugged. “Kathy, I guess. I gave them to her.”

“When?”

“Later.”

“What time later?”

“Around midnight, I think. After it happened … after she left the locker room, it was like someone had given us the antidote. Or like someone turned on the lights, and we finally saw what we’d done. We all went silent and just drifted away. Except Horty. He was laughing like a goddamn hyena, getting more and more stoned. The rest of us went back to our rooms. None of us said one word. I got into bed, for a little while anyway. Then I got dressed and went back out. I didn’t have a plan. Not really. I just wanted to find her. Say something to her. I just wanted to … shit, I don’t know.”

His fingers were playing with his hair, twisting it like a little kid. He looked smaller now. “I finally found her.”

“Where?”

“Crossing the campus.”

“Where specifically?”

“The middle, I guess. On the commons.”

“What direction was she walking in?”

He thought a moment. “South.”

“Like maybe she was coming from the faculty housing?”

“Yes.”

After she left Dean Gordon’s, he thought.

“Go on.”

“I approached her. Called out her name. I thought she’d just run away, you know. It was dark and all. But she didn’t. She just turned and stared at me. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t shaking. She just stood there and stared me down. I said I was sorry. She didn’t say anything. I gave her the panties. I told her she could use them as evidence. I even told her I’d testify. I didn’t plan on saying that. It just came out. Kathy took the panties and walked away. She never said anything.”

“Was that the last time you saw her?”

“Yes.”

“What was she wearing?”

“Wearing?”

“When you last saw her?”

He looked up, trying to recall. “Something blue, I think.”

“Not yellow?”

“No. Definitely not yellow.”

“She hadn’t changed clothes since the rape?”

“I don’t think so. No, they were the same clothes.”

Myron headed for the door. “You’re going to need more than a new agent, Ricky. You’re also going to need a good lawyer.”

Chapter 40

Jake was sitting next to Esperanza in the waiting area. He stood when Myron and Win entered.

“Got a minute?”

Myron nodded. “My office.”

Jake said, “Alone.”

Without a word Win spun and left.

“Nothing personal,” Jake said. “But the guy gives me the creeps.”

“Come on in.” He stopped at Esperanza’s desk.

“Did you reach Chaz?”

“Not yet.”

He handed her an envelope. “There’s a photograph inside. Bring it to Lucy. See if she recognizes him.”

Esperanza nodded.

Myron followed Jake into his office. The air conditioning was on full blast. It felt good.

“So what brings you to the Big Apple, Jake?”

“I was over at John Jay,” he said, “checking something out.”

“The crime lab?”

“Yup.”

“Find something?” Myron asked.

Jake did not reply. He examined the pictures on the client wall, leaning forward and squinting. “Heard of some of these guys,” he said. “But no superstars up here.”

“No, no superstars.”

“Nothing like Christian Steele.”

Myron sat down. He threw his legs up on the desk. “You still think he killed Nancy Serat?”

Jake did something with his shoulders. Might have been a shrug. “Let’s just say Christian is no longer our main suspect.”

“Who is?”

Jake moved away from the client wall. He sat down and crossed his legs. “I’ve been poking into Adam Culver’s homicide. Found out something interesting. Seems the cops concentrated solely on the murder scene and surrounding neighborhood. No reason for them to check anything else. They were convinced he was a victim of random street violence. I took a different avenue. I canvassed Culver’s neighborhood in Ridgewood. Nice town. Real white. No brothers at all. You been there, I assume?”

Myron nodded.

“Anyway, I talked to a guy who lives two houses down from the Culvers. He says he was walking his dog on the night in question. He wasn’t sure of the time, but he guessed it was eight o’clock or so. Seems he heard a big fight going on at the Culvers’ house. Major blowup. He said he’d never heard anything like that before. It was so bad he almost called the cops, but he didn’t want to pry. They’d been neighbors for twenty years and all. So he just let it slide.”

“Did he know what the fight was about?”

Jake shook his head. “Nope. Just loud voices. Adam’s and Carol’s.”

Myron sat quietly, still leaning back in his chair. Adam and Carol Culver had fought hours before Adam’s murder. Myron tried to put it together with what he already knew. For the first time things were beginning to fit.

“What else do you got?” Myron asked.

“On Adam Culver’s murder? Nothing.”

Silence.

“There were,” Jake continued, “a few hairs found at Nancy Serat’s murder scene. On the body itself. More specifically, clutched in Nancy’s hand.”

Myron sat up. “Like maybe she tore them off the killer?”

“Maybe,” Jake said. “But we checked the hairs at our own facilities and got a confirmation this morning at John Jay. There’s no question. The hairs belong to Kathy Culver.”

Myron felt his flesh turn to cold stone. He couldn’t speak.

“We had some of her hairs on file,” Jake continued. “From before. In case we ever found a body or wanted to check a location. Got them from her hairbrush at school. Both labs have done every comparison test conceivable. Neither one has any doubt. They’re Kathy’s hairs.”

Myron shook his head. He felt dizzy. Inside his head the Robot from Lost in Space was shouting “That does not compute!” over and over again.

“You have any thoughts on this, Myron?”

“Just the same ones you’re having.”

Jake nodded. “What Christian said.”

“ ‘Time for sisters to reunite,’ ” Myron quoted.

“Yup. Kinda takes on a whole new meaning now, don’t it.”

“But it still doesn’t explain anything,” Myron said. “Let’s assume Kathy Culver is alive. Let’s assume that Nancy Serat knows this. Why would Kathy kill her?”

Jake shrugged. “Sounds to me like Kathy may have gone off the deep end. I mean, first she’s got this whole weird past. Then she falls in love with a guy. Then she’s blackmailed. Then she’s gang-raped. Then the dean turns his back on her. She cracks. Has a breakdown. Runs away. Maybe she tells Nancy Serat, maybe she doesn’t. But somehow Nancy finds out. Nancy arranges a reunion—probably a surprise reunion—between sisters. Kathy gets there early. She’s not happy about Nancy’s surprise.”

“So she kills her?”

“Could be,” Jake said. “Kathy’s loony-tunes. She doesn’t want to be found. Shit, she probably killed her old man for the same reason. She’s nuts. Maybe she wants revenge for some reason. On her father, on her best friend—even on Christian and Dean Gordon and whoever else she sent that nutty magazine to.”

Didn’t feel right to Myron. “Then what about the big fight between Adam and Carol Culver? How does that fit in?”

“Hell if I know,” Jake said. “I’m making this shit up as I go along. Maybe the fight was just a coincidence. Maybe ol’ Adam was on edge because he was about to meet with his daughter. Maybe the mother knows more than she’s saying.”

Myron thought about it. It was confusing, but the last part made sense. Maybe Carol Culver did know more than she was saying. More than maybe. Myron even had some idea now of what she was hiding.

It was time to pay Carol Culver a visit.

Chapter 41

Myron pulled up in front of the familiar Victorian house on Heights Road in Ridgewood. He hesitated. He should have told Jessica about this, but there are things a woman might be more willing to tell a casual acquaintance than a daughter. This might be one of them.

Carol Culver answered the door. She was wearing an apron and those industrial rubber gloves. She smiled when she saw him, but the smile did not reach her eyes. “Hello, Myron.”

“Hello, Mrs. Culver.”

“Jessica isn’t home right now.”

“I know. I wanted to talk to you, if you have a minute.”

The smile stayed. But a shadow crossed over the face. “Come on in,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink? Maybe a little tea?”

“That would be nice.”

He stepped inside. He and Jessica had not visited here often during their time together. A major holiday or two, that was it. Myron never liked the house. Something about it was stifling, as though the air were too heavy for normal breathing.

He sat down on a couch that was hard as a park bench. The decor was solemn. Lots of religious memorabilia. Lots of madonnas and crosses and gold-leaf paintings. Lots of halos and serene faces looking skyward.

Two minutes later Carol reappeared, minus the gloves and apron, plus some tea and shortbread cookies. She was an attractive woman. She didn’t really look like her daughters, but Myron had seen pieces of her in both of them. Jessica’s straight posture. Kathy’s shy laugh.

“So how have you been?” she asked.

“Fine, thank you.”

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you, Myron.”

“Yes.”

“Are you and Jessica …?” She feigned embarrassment. She did that a lot. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business.”

She poured the tea. Myron sipped it and nibbled on a cookie. Carol Culver did likewise.

“Tomorrow’s the memorial service,” she said. “Adam donated his corpse to a medical school, you know. The spirit was all that mattered to him. The body was worthless tissue. I guess that’s part of being a pathologist.”

Myron nodded, took another sip.

“Well, I just can’t believe this weather,” she rambled, a distracted smile frozen to her face. “It’s so hot out. If we don’t have rain soon, the whole front lawn will be brown. And we just paid to have it reseeded last season—”

“The police will be here soon,” Myron interrupted. “I thought we should talk first.”

She put her hand to her chest. “The police?”

“They’ll want to talk to you.”

“Me? What about?”

“They know about the fight,” he said. “A neighbor was walking a dog. He heard you and Dr. Culver.”

She stiffened. Myron waited, but she said nothing.

“Dr. Culver wasn’t feeling sick that night, was he?”

The color ebbed from her face. She put down her cup of tea and dabbed the corners of her mouth with a cloth napkin.

“He never intended to go to that medical conference in Denver, isn’t that right, Mrs. Culver?”

She lowered her head.

“Mrs. Culver?”

No movement.

“I know this isn’t easy,” Myron said gently. “But I’m trying to find Kathy.”

Her eyes remained on the floor. “Do you really think you can, Myron?”

“It’s possible. I don’t want to give you false hope, but I think it’s possible.”

“Then you think she might be alive?”

“There’s a chance, yes.”

She finally raised her head. The eyes were wet. “You do what you have to do to find her, Myron.” Her voice was surprisingly steady and strong. “She’s my daughter. My baby. She has to come first. No matter what.”

Myron waited for Carol Culver to continue, but she fell back into silence. After nearly a full minute, Myron said, “Dr. Culver just pretended he was going to that medical conference.”

She took a deep breath and nodded.

“You thought he’d left that morning.”

Another androidlike nod.

“Then he surprised you here.”

“Yes.”

Myron’s soft voice seemed to boom in the room. An antique clock ticked maddeningly. “Mrs. Culver, what did he see when he arrived?”

Tears began to flow. She lowered her head again.

“Did he see you,” Myron continued, “with another man?”

Nothing.

“Was the man Paul Duncan?”

She lifted her head. Her eyes met his. “Yes,” she said. “I was with Paul.”

Myron waited again.

“Adam set a trap,” she continued, “and we got caught.” The words were once again steady and strong. “He had become suspicious. I don’t know how. So he did just what you said—pretended to go to a conference in Denver. He even had me arrange his flights, so I would be sure he was gone.”

“What happened when your husband saw you?”

Shaking fingers rubbed her cheeks. She stood, turned away. “Exactly what you’d expect to happen when a man finds his wife and best friend in bed. Adam went crazy. He’d been drinking pretty heavily, which didn’t help matters. He shouted at me, called me horrible names. I deserved that. I deserved a lot worse. He threatened Paul. We tried to calm him down, but of course that was impossible.”

She picked up the tea again. Each word was making her a little stronger, making it a little easier to breathe. “Adam stormed out. I was scared. Paul went after him. But Adam drove off. Paul left after that.”

“How long have you and Paul Duncan …?” His voice just sort of mumbled away.

“Six years.”

“Did anybody else know?”

Her composure gave way. Not slowly. But as if a small bomb had blown it off her face. She crumbled, weeping freely. A realization came to Myron. He felt his blood freeze.

“Kathy,” he whispered. “Kathy knew.”

The sobbing grew more intense.

“She found out,” he continued, “during her senior year.”

Carol tried to stop her tears, but that took time. Myron remembered how Kathy had worshiped her mother, the perfect woman, the woman who balanced old-fashioned values with a sense of the modern. Carol Culver had been a homemaker and a shop owner. She had raised three beautiful children. She had instilled in her children more than just a sense of what is now popularly called “family values.” For her values had been a rigid doctrine that she insisted her children follow. Jessica had rebelled. So had Edward. Only Kathy had been successfully locked in, like a lion kept in too small a cage.

And she had finally broken free.

“Kathy …” Carol Culver stopped, shut her eyes tightly. “She walked in on us.”

“And that was when she changed,” Myron finished.

Carol Culver nodded, her eyes still squeezed closed. “I did that to her. Everything that happened was because of me. God forgive me.” Then she shook her head. “No. I don’t deserve forgiveness. I don’t want it. I just want my baby back.”

“What did Kathy do when she saw you two?”

“Nothing. At first. She just turned and ran away. But the next day she broke up with her boyfriend Matt. And from there—she made sure I paid for what I’d done. For all the years I’d been a hypocrite. For all the years I lied to her. She wanted to hurt me in the worst way possible.”

“She began to sleep around,” Myron said.

“Yes. And she made sure I knew all about it.”

“By telling you?”

Carol Culver shook her head. “Kathy wouldn’t talk to me anymore.”

“So how did you find out?”

She hesitated. Her face was drawn, her skin pulled tight against her cheekbones. “Photographs,” she said simply.

Something else clicked into place. Horty and the camera. “She gave you photos of herself with men.”

“Yes.”

“White men, black men, sometimes more than one.”

Her eyes closed again, but she managed to say, “And not just men. It started slowly. A couple of nude pictures of her. Like the one in that magazine.”

“You saw that same picture before?”

“Yes. It even had the name of a photographer stamped on the back.”

“Global Globes Photos?”

“No. It was something like Forbidden Fruit.”

“Do you still have the picture?”

She shook her head.

“You threw them away?”

She shook her head again. “I wanted to destroy them. I wanted to burn them and pretend I’d never seen them. But I couldn’t. Kathy was punishing me. Keeping them was a form of penitence. I never told anyone about them, but I couldn’t just throw them away. You see that, Myron, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“So I hid them in the attic. In an old storage box. I thought they’d be safe there.”

Myron saw where this was going. “Your husband found them.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“A few months ago. He never told me about it. But of course I knew by the way he was acting. I checked the attic. The pictures were gone. Adam assumed that Kathy had hidden them up there. He had no idea she’d sent them to me. Or maybe he did. Maybe that’s how he became suspicious of Paul and me. I don’t know.”

“Do you know what your husband did with those pictures, Mrs. Culver?”

“No. They were so awful. So painful to look at. I think Adam destroyed them.”

Myron doubted it. They both sat in silence for several minutes. Finally Myron said, “Jessica is going to want to know.”

Carol Culver nodded. “You tell her, Myron.”

She showed him to the door. He stopped at his car and turned back around. He studied the gray Victorian house. Twenty-six years ago a young family had moved in. They’d put up swings in the backyard and a basketball hoop in the driveway. They’d owned a station wagon, carpooled to Little League and choir practice, attended PTA meetings, hosted birthday parties. Myron could almost see it all happening, like a life insurance commercial playing in his head.

He slid into his car and drove away.

Chapter 42

Myron was thinking about threads again.

Threads like Gary Grady. Dean Gordon. Nancy Serat. Carol Culver. Christian Steele. Fred Nickler. Paul Duncan. Ricky Lane. Horty and the thugs. But there was one thread he had overlooked.

Otto Burke.

Suppose Jake was right. Suppose the magazines had been sent out to wreak vengeance or maybe to satisfy some misguided or irrational anger. Either way, it meant that everyone who had received a copy of Nips was in some way connected to Kathy Culver.

Except Otto Burke.

How did he fit in? Otto hadn’t even known Kathy Culver.

Or had he?

Myron got off Route 4 at the Garden State Plaza Mall and took Route 17 south to Route 3. New Jersey, land of routes. He pulled into the Meadowlands and parked near the Titans’ executive offices. He found the general manager’s office and asked for Larry Hanson.

He was let in almost immediately. He quickly explained the reason for his visit.

Larry Hanson watched him without expression. His huge hands were folded on his desk. His neck strained the top button. Larry was about fifty, but he hadn’t gone to flab. He looked, Myron thought not for the first time, like Sergeant Rock in the old comic strips. Should have been chewing on a big cigar.

The office was adorned with trophies. Larry had been named league MVP twice. He’d been All-Pro twelve times. He had been elected into the Football Hall of Fame on the first ballot. There were plenty of his old football photos, from high school through college and into the pros. Black-and-whites and colors. Same crew cut. Same gritty smile. Different poses, including plenty of knee-up, straight-arm favorites from yesteryear.

When Myron finished, Larry studied his big hands for a minute, as if they were something he’d never noticed before.

“Why ask me?” he said. “Why don’t you ask Otto Burke about the magazine?”

“Because he won’t tell me.”

“And what makes you think I will?”

“Because you’re not a complete asshole.”

Larry’s mouth twitched toward a smile, but he caught himself. “Coming from you,” he said, “that really means a lot.”

Myron said nothing.

“This is important, huh?”

Myron nodded.

Larry sat back. “Burke didn’t get the magazine in the mail. He heard about it from a private detective.”

Myron shifted in his chair. “Otto was having Christian investigated?”

Larry’s tone was flat. “A man of Otto Burke’s unquestionable integrity would never stoop to such a level.”

“Under the desk,” Myron said, “you’re crossing your fingers.”

Again the twitch/smile. “This doesn’t leave this room, Bolitar. You understand?”

“Cross my heart.” Myron motioned such with his hand.

“Burke has a whole security division,” Larry explained. “They poke into everyone on the payroll. Including yours truly. They also have a source network all over the place. The credo is pretty simple: If you got dirt on a Titan, Burke will pay top dollar for it. So one of these sources came across the magazine.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s a steady reader.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Brian Sanford. A true sleazeball. He works out of Atlantic City. The casino route. Spies on gamblers, that kind of thing. A Titan puts a quarter in a slot machine, he reports it, especially since that whole Michael Jordan thing started. Burke likes to be kept informed. Gives him the edge in negotiating.”

Myron stood. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Hey, Bolitar. This don’t make us buddies or nothing. We talk again, I still hate your guts. You got it?”

Myron said, “We’re having a warm moment now, aren’t we, Larry?”

Hanson leaned his elbows on the desk, pointing a finger at Myron. “I still think you’re a little pissant piece of dog shit. And next time I see you, I’ll prove it.”

Myron spread his arms. “Come on, Larry. How about that hug now?”

“Wiseass.”

“Does that mean no?”

“Do me a favor, Bolitar.”

“Name it, bright eyes.”

“Get the fuck out of my office.”

Chapter 43

Myron called Brian Sanford. Answering machine. Myron said he had a real big case, one that paid ten grand, and he’d stop by his office tonight at seven o’clock. Brian Sanford would be there. For ten grand, a guy like Sanford would let his mother take a bullet in the gut.

Myron dialed his office.

Esperanza said, “MB SportReps.”

“Did you show Lucy the photo?”

“Yep.”

“And?”

“You found your buyer.”

Myron said, “Lucy was sure?”

“Positive.”

“Thanks.”

He hung up. An hour to kill. Myron headed over to the county medical examiner’s office—Dr. Adam Culver’s old office. Just a hunch, but worth checking out.

The building was a one-level brick building. Institutional, almost like a small elementary school. The furniture was metal chairs with thin padding, again like a schoolteacher’s. The waiting room magazines were pre-Watergate. The tiled floor was worn and yellowed with age, like the “before” shot on a Mr. Clean commercial. There was nothing even remotely decorative.

“Is Dr. Li in?” he asked the receptionist.

“I’ll buzz her.”

Sally Li was dressed in hospital scrubs, but there was no blood or anything on them. She was Chinese, approaching forty, but she could have passed for much younger. She wore bifocals. A pack of cigarettes was stashed in her front pocket. Cigarettes with a surgeon’s gown. Like bowling shoes with a tuxedo.

They had met a couple of times in the past. Sally Li came to many Culver family functions. She had been Adam’s right-hand woman for the past decade. Myron greeted her with a kiss on the cheek.

“Jessica told me you were looking into Adam’s death,” she said without preamble.

He nodded. “Can we talk for a minute?”

“Sure.” She led him to her office. Again, institutional. No personal stuff. Lots of pathology textbooks. A metal desk. Metal chair. A small tape recorder she probably used during autopsies. Her degrees on the wall. She wasn’t married, had no children, so there was no picture on the desk. Big ashtray, though. Overflowing.

She struck a match, lit up, and said, “How’s tricks?”

“An MD smoking,” Myron said. “Tsk, tsk.”

“My patients never complain.”

“Good point.”

She took a deep drag. “So what do you want to know?”

“Did you and Adam ever have an affair?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. She looked him right in the eye. “About four years ago. Lasted a week.”

“Did Adam have a lot of affairs?”

“Got me. A few, I guess. Why do you ask?”

“I’m just trying to put a few things together.”

“Vis-à-vis his murder?”

“Right.”

She took off her glasses. “What does Adam’s love life have to do with it?”

“Probably nothing,” Myron admitted. “How had Adam been acting the last couple months?”

“A bit wacko,” she said. Again no hesitation.

“In what way?”

She gave that one some thought. “Businesswise, he wasn’t letting me help him on a lot of big cases. He was keeping them all to himself.”

“And that was unusual?”

“That was unheard of. We always worked on big cases together.”

“These cases,” Myron said. “Were they the girls found in the woods upstate?”

She looked at him. “You want to tell me how you knew that?”

“Just a guess.”

“Hell of a guess, Myron.”

“You said big cases. I read the papers. Those are the big cases they keep talking about.”

Sally didn’t believe him, but she didn’t push it either.

Myron said, “So what else was there?”

She took another deep drag. “He was very distracted. You’d talk to him, he’d nod, but he wouldn’t listen.”

“Anything else?”

Sally crushed out the cigarette, though it still had plenty to go. She lit another. “A new way to quit smoking,” she said. “I smoke the same amount of cigarettes, but I take less puffs each day. Gradual slowdown until I quit entirely. At this rate it should take no more than twelve years.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

“So what else was there?”

Another puff. “Adam was ordering a lot of weird tests on the last girl they found in the woods.”

“What do you mean, weird tests?”

“Superfluous tests. In my opinion, anyway.”

Myron said, “You never got a positive ID on her, right?”

“Right.”

“So maybe he was running the tests to see if he could get a handle on her whereabouts.”

“Maybe. But he sent them out one at a time. He’d wait for one test to come back before he’d ask for the next one. Anthropological measurements, shape and size of cranium, pelvic bones, ossification of the bones, fusing of sutures on the skull—all one at a time.”

“So what do you make of that?”

She shrugged again. “I don’t make anything out of that. It’s just an example of what I meant by acting strangely. Distracted. The case was a weird one to start off. The girl’s skull had been crushed by the perp, but that wasn’t what killed her. In other words, she had been buried alive in those woods. She died trying to claw her way out.”

Silence.

“This girl,” Myron said, “what was she wearing?”

Sally stiffened a little. Then she leaned forward. “Okay, Myron, what’s going on?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You know why.”

Myron stopped. “The girl’s clothes are missing.”

“Yes.”

He felt his heart crash into the pit of his stomach, like a skydiver with a ripped parachute. “Oh, shit.”

“What is it?”

“Sally, I need you to run a test for me.”

Chapter 44

The address of Brian Sanford, private investigator, was a go-go bar conveniently located one block from Merv Griffin’s Resorts. Atlantic City was like that. The big hotels were like beautiful flowers untouched and unbothered by the unseemly weeds of poverty and sleaze that surrounded them. The big flowers had not beautified the neighborhood as promised by the casino owners. The contrast, if anything, had made the weeds more glaringly hideous.

The go-go bar was called Eager Beaver, and it was exactly what one would expect. Blinking sign with missing letters on the outside. Lots of lowlights around the bar, lots of bright spotlights on the stage. Bored women danced in shifts, most of them unattractive. Lots of flab. Lots of implants. Lots of herpes.

Myron made the key mistake of entering what might loosely be designated a bathroom. The urinals were stuffed with ice cubes—an adequate substitute, Myron supposed, for an actual flushing mechanism. No doors were on the stalls, which did not deter the defecators at all. One man smiled and waved to Myron from a squat.

Myron decided he could wait.

He called over a bartender. “Could you tell me how to get to Brian Sanford’s office?”

“Michelob, Bud, Bud Light, Coors.”

“I just want to know—”

“Michelob, Bud, Bud Light, Coors.”

Myron took out five dollars. The bartender pocketed it.

“Door in the back. Take the stairs up a level.”

He didn’t wait for Myron to thank him. Capitalism.

A dancer on break approached him. She smiled. Each tooth was angled in a different direction, as if her mouth were the masterwork of a mad orthodontist.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“You’re really cute.”

“I don’t have any money.”

She spun and walked away. Ah, romance.

The stairs did not creak. They cracked. Myron kept waiting for them to collapse. On the landing there was only one door. It was open. Myron knocked on the wall and peeked in.

Myron called out, “Hello.”

A man he assumed was Brian Sanford came to the door. All smiles. Dressed in a beige suit that had last been pressed during the Bay of Pigs. “You the guy who left the message?”

“Yes.”

The office was a minicasino. No desk but a roulette table. A one-armed bandit in the corner. Decks of cards everywhere. Souvenir dice, the kind that have a hole drilled in them, littered the floor. So did racing forms. Keno cards too.

The man put out his hand. “Brian Sanford. But everyone calls me Blackjack. You know who gave me that nickname?”

Myron shook his head.

“Frankie. That’s what I call Frank Sinatra. Frankie. Not Frank. Frankie, I call him.” He paused, waited.

Myron said, “Good nickname.”

“See, Frankie and me were playing at the Sands one night, right, and I was on one of my streaks, you know. And Frankie turns to me and says, ‘Yo, check out Blackjack. He can’t lose.’ Just like that. Frankie says, ‘Hey, Blackjack.’ Out of nowhere. The name stuck. Now everyone calls me Blackjack. All ’cause of Frankie.”

“Great story,” Myron said.

“Yeah, well, you know how it is. So what can I do for you, Mr.…?”

“Olson. Merlin Olson.”

Blackjack smiled knowingly. “Okay, I can play it that way. Have a seat, Mr. Olson.”

Myron sat.

“But before we start, Mr. Olson, I have to tell you one thing right up front.”

He was holding dice in his hand, moving them around in his hands the way some people do with those Chinese balls that are supposed to help circulation.

“What’s that?”

“I’m a very busy man. Lots of big stuff going on right now. You know how I started in this business?”

Myron shook his head.

“I used to be chief of security for Caesars Palace in Vegas. Head chief. You know how it is. I was in Vegas, right? But Donny—that’s what I call Donald Trump, Donny—Donny asked me to head up security for his first hotel on the strip. Then he started nagging me to set up the Taj Mahal’s security. I told him, I said, ‘Donny, I got too much on my plate, you know?’ ”

Myron looked up. A small crop plane flew overhead, leaving mucho cow manure in its wake.

“So my problem is this, you see. I got a meeting tomorrow morning with Stevie—Steve Wynn. First thing, seven A.M. sharp. Great guy, Stevie. Morning guy. Up at five every day. You know he’s practically blind? Got cataracts or something. He keeps it hidden. Only tells his closest friends. So anyway Stevie wants me to do something for him. Normally I’d tell him no, but it’s a personal favor and Stevie’s a good friend. Not like Donny. I’m not crazy about Donny. Thinks he’s some hot stud now that he’s got Marla.”

“Mr. Blackjack—”

“Please,” he said throwing up his hands, “just call me Blackjack.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, uh, Blackjack. I need your particular expertise on an important matter.”

He nodded. Very understanding. He didn’t hitch up his pants importantly, but he should have. “What’s this all about?”

“You performed some work for a friend of mine recently,” Myron said. “Mr. Otto Burke.”

A big smile now. “Sure. Otto. Swell kid. Smart as a whip. He calls me whenever he comes down.”

Probably calls him Ottie, Myron thought.

“You gave him a magazine a few days ago. An issue of Nips.”

Blackjack looked wary now. He rolled the dice on the table. A three. “What about it?”

“We need to know how you located it.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“I work with Mr. Burke.” Even saying it made Myron feel nauseous.

“So why didn’t Ken call? He’s the usual contact.”

Myron leaned forward. Conspiratorial. “This is bigger than Ken, Blackjack. We don’t feel anyone can be trusted with this but you.”

He nodded. Again very understanding.

“Frankly, Blackjack—and this has to remain hush-hush.”

“Of course.”

“You’re our first choice to replace Ken. But we know how busy you are.”

His eyes gleamed a bit. “I appreciate that, Mr. Olson, but for someone like Otto Burke, I could try to open—”

“Let’s talk about this case first, okay? How did you come across the magazine?”

The wary look again. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but how do I know you work with Otto? How do I know you’re not some schmo off the street?”

Myron smiled. “I knew it.”

“What?”

“I told Otto you were the right guy for the job. You’re not sloppy. You’re careful. We like that. We need that.”

Blackjack shrugged. He picked up the dice, gave another roll. Snake eyes. “I’m a professional,” he said.

“Clearly,” Myron agreed. “So why don’t you call Otto yourself on the private line? He’ll confirm everything. I’m sure you know the number.”

That slowed him down a bit. He swallowed, trying to disguise it, looked around like a cornered rabbit. Myron could see the wheels churning. “Uh, no reason to bother Otto with this,” Blackjack said. “You know how he hates that. I can tell you’re an honest Joe. Besides, how would you know about the magazine if Otto hadn’t told you?”

Myron shook his head. “You’re an amazing man, Blackjack.”

He waved a hand of modesty.

“How did you find the magazine?” Myron asked.

“Shouldn’t we talk about my fee? On the phone you said something about ten grand.”

“Otto said you were a trustworthy guy. He said to bill him through Ken. Whatever you think is fair.”

Another nod. He picked up the dice. Rolled again. Another three. Practice, practice. “I didn’t find the magazine,” Blackjack said. “It found me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was hired to do a job. Part of it was to send out copies of that mag to some people.”

“Was Christian Steele one of those people?”

“Yup. That’s how I got suspicious. I mean, the envelopes were given to me already addressed and sealed. I didn’t recognize any of the names except Christian’s. Otto had already put out word he wanted anything, anything, on Steele. So I opened it up and took a peek. That’s when I saw the picture.”

“Who hired you to mail out the magazines?”

Blackjack placed one chip on red, one chip on odd. He spun the roulette wheel. “You wanna put down a couple of chips?”

“No. Who hired you?”

“Well, that’s the weird part. I don’t know. I got this big package in the mail with very specific instructions. Plus cash. But no name.”

“Any return address?”

“Nope. Just a postmark.”

“From where?”

“Right here in Atlantic City. I got it about ten, twelve days ago.”

The roulette wheel stopped. Twenty-two. Black.

Blackjack said, “Damn.”

“Do you still have the instructions?”

“Yeah, sure.” He opened a drawer and handed him a piece of paper. “Here.”

The letter had been typed:

Dear Mr. Sanford,

For the sum of $5,000 (plus expenses) I would like you to perform the following services:

1. Enclosed find seven envelopes. Two of them should be mailed from the campus mail box at Reston University on Friday. The other three should be mailed from a post office box in their respective towns.

2. Please mail out the following New Jersey Bell literature to each person on the list at the same time.

3. Please arrange a phone number in the 201 area code, one that will work on Return Call. This number should be immediately disconnected should anyone call it back or answer it. I would like you to hook up an answering machine with the enclosed tape to that phone. I would then like you to make calls to each of the numbers listed below from that number. On the first two nights—Saturday and Sunday—you will simply call repeatedly, hold the line when they answer, and say nothing until they hang up. On Monday, you will call and say the following: “Enjoy the magazine. Come and get me. I survived.” Please make your voice sound female and vague. (As you know, there are phones that can disguise voices and make them sound female.)

4. Enclosed is a money order for $3,000. Upon completion of this exercise I will contact you personally on or around the ninth of the month and pay off the remaining $2,000 plus expenses.

My name must remain anonymous. Thank you for understanding.

Myron looked up. “I assume the New Jersey Bell literature explained Return Call.”

Nod.

“Who were the seven people?”

Blackjack shrugged. The dice were rolled yet again. Another snake eyes. The guy had the touch. “I don’t remember. Christian was one. Some dean was another. I mailed another from a town called Glen Rock.”

“To a Gary Grady.”

“Yeah, that’s the name. I also mailed three from New York.”

“One of those to Junior Horton?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so. Junior. That rings a bell.”

“And the last one?”

“Some other place in New Jersey. Near Glen Rock.”

Myron stopped. “Ridgewood?”

“Yeah. Something-wood anyway. A woman’s name. I remember because all the rest were men.”

Myron said, “Carol Culver?”

He thought a moment. “Yeah. That’s it. A name with two C’s.”

Myron’s shoulders slumped.

“Hey, buddy, you all right?”

“Fine,” he said softly. “What about the phone calls?”

“The numbers were on another page. I threw them away when I finished. I called Steele and hung up a few times. By the time I called him back to give him the message calls, the line was disconnected. Guess he’d moved.”

Myron nodded. Christian had moved from the campus to the condo.

“The guy in New York—Junior—he was never home so I never reached him either. The others all got hang-ups and then the message calls.”

“How many of them used Return Call?”

“Just two. Christian and the guy from Glen Rock. It wouldn’t have worked for the guys in New York anyhoo. Return Call only works for that area code.”

“Have you heard from your client yet?”

“Nope. And yesterday was the ninth. I tell you, he better not stiff Blackjack Sanford.” Another mental pants-hitch. “If he knows what’s good for him.”

“Uh-huh. Anything else you can tell me?”

“About this case? Nope. Hey, you wanna go over to Merv’s? They know me over there. I can get us on a good table. Play a little blackjack maybe. Watch the legend in action.”

Tempting, Myron thought. Like having electrolysis performed on his testicles. “Maybe some other time.”

“Yeah, okay. Say, how much you think I should bill Otto for? Like you said, I want to be fair.”

“Oh, I’d bill him for the full amount.”

“The whole ten G’s?”

“Yes. You’ve been very helpful, Blackjack. Thank you.”

“Yeah, take care. Come by anytime.”

“Oh, one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

Myron said, “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

Chapter 45

It was ten-thirty when Myron arrived at Paul Duncan’s house. Lights were still on. Myron had not called to make an appointment. He wanted the element of surprise.

The house was a simple Cape Cod. Nice. Needed a new coat of paint maybe. The front yard had lots of budding flower beds. Myron remembered that Paul liked gardening in his down time. Lot of cops did.

Paul Duncan answered the door holding a newspaper. A pair of reading glasses were low on his nose. His gray hair was neatly combed. He wore navy-blue Hagar slacks and a twist-a-flex Speidel watch. The casual man from Sears. A television played in the background. An audience applauded wildly. Paul was alone, except for a sleeping golden retriever curled in front of the television as if it were a fire on a snowy night.

“We need to talk, Paul.”

“Can’t this wait until the morning?” His voice was strained. “After Adam’s memorial service?”

Myron shook his head and stepped into the den. The television audience applauded again. Myron glanced at the screen. Ed McMahon’s Star Search. The spokes-models weren’t on, so Myron turned away.

Paul closed the door. “What’s this all about, Myron?”

A coffee table had National Geographic and TV Guide. Also two books—the latest Robert Ludlum and the King James Bible. Everything was very neat. A portrait of the golden retriever in its younger days hung on the wall. Lots of little porcelain figurines adorned the room. A couple of Rockwell plates too. Hardly a swinging bachelor pad or den of lust.

“I know about your affair with Carol Culver,” Myron said.

Paul Duncan played stiff-lip. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then let me try to clarify myself. The affair’s been going on for six years. Kathy caught you and Mommy a couple years back. Adam also caught you two on the night he was murdered. Any of this ring a bell?”

His face went ashen. “How …?”

“Carol told me.” Myron sat. He picked up the Bible and flipped through it. “Guess you skipped the part about not coveting your neighbor’s wife, huh, Paul?”

“It’s not what you think.”

“What’s not what I think?”

“I love Carol. She loves me.”

“That sounds swell, Paul.”

“Adam treated her awfully. He gambled. He whored. He was cold to his family.”

“So why didn’t Carol divorce him?”

“She couldn’t. We’re both devout Catholics. The Church wouldn’t allow it.”

“The Church prefers marital infidelity?”

“That’s not funny.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Who are you to judge us? You think any of this was easy?”

Myron shrugged. “You didn’t stop. Not even after Kathy saw you.”

“I love Carol.”

“So you say.”

“Adam Culver was my closest friend. He meant a great deal to me. But when it came to his family, he was a bastard. He provided for them materially, but that’s it. Ask Jessica, Myron. She’ll tell you. I’ve always been there. From the time she was a little girl. Who took her to the hospital when she fell off her bike? Me. Who built her swingset? Me. Who drove her down to Duke her freshman year? Me.”

“Did you also dress up as the Easter Bunny?” Myron asked.

He shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

“Correction: I don’t give a shit. There’s a difference. Now let’s go back to the day Kathy caught you two. Tell me what happened.”

His face became irritated. “You know what happened. She walked in on us.”

“Were you naked?”

“What?”

“Were you and Mrs. Culver in the throes of passion?”

“I won’t dignify that with an answer.”

Time to rattle his cage a bit. “What position? Missionary, doggie, what? Were either of you wearing handcuffs or a pig’s mask?”

He moved so he was standing directly over Myron. Everyone thought this was tremendously intimidating, towering over a seated foe. Fact was, Myron could deliver a palm strike to the groin before an ordinary man could even cock his fist.

“Watch it, son,” Paul said.

“How did Kathy react to seeing you two lovebirds?”

“There was no reaction. She ran away.”

“Did either of you follow her?”

“No. Frankly, we were both too shocked.”

“I bet. Did you ever discuss the matter with Kathy?”

Paul stepped away, circled, sat in the chair next to Myron. “She only mentioned it to me once.”

“When?”

“A few months later.”

“What happened?”

He looked away, his eyes darting about, searching for a safe place to land. “This isn’t easy to say.”

Myron nodded, feigned sympathy. “Go on.”

“Kathy made a pass at me.”

“Did you catch it?”

“What?”

“As in ‘catch her pass.’ ”

He flashed the irritated face again. “Of course not.”

“You turned her down?”

“I pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Did she persist?”

“Yes. But I kept ignoring her.”

“Bet you were real excited, though. Mother and daughter. Both good-lookers. Your fantasies must have been in overdrive.”

Irritation turned to rage. He finally took off his reading glasses. Very dramatically. “Last warning, pal.”

“Uh-huh. So now tell me about Fred Nickler.”

Piss him off. Quick subject change. Keep him off balance.

“Who?”

“For a cop,” Myron said, “you’re a lousy liar. Nineteen seventy-eight. You let Nickler plea-bargain a kiddie porn charge. I know all about your connection with him, Paul. What I don’t know is how he fits into all this.”

“He helped me out from time to time. With cases.”

“Including the disappearance of Kathy Culver?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“How?”

“I guess there’s no reason not to tell you.” He coughed into a shaking fist. The golden retriever opened an eye but didn’t move. “Adam found photographs of Kathy in his attic. He brought them to me in the strictest confidence. On the back of one was the name of a photography studio called Forbidden Fruit. I couldn’t find them anywhere. So Adam and I visited Nickler. Nickler told us that Forbidden Fruit was now called Global Globes. He gave me the address.”

“Then you went and bought all the pictures and negatives of Kathy?” A throwaway question. Lucy had already identified Paul Duncan from a photograph.

“Yes. We wanted to protect Kathy’s name. But we also wanted the name of the animal that’d brought Kathy to the studio.”

“Gary Grady.”

“You know about that?”

“I am,” Myron said, “well informed.”

“Well, I checked Grady out completely. He was shady, no question about it. A high school teacher with all those sex lines. He advertised in at least fifty pornographic magazines. I tailed him for a couple of weeks, did a lot of it on my own time. I also had his phone tapped for a while. But in the end we came up with nothing.”

“How did Adam react to that?”

“Not well. Adam was always coming to me with some new angle on Kathy’s case, mostly out of pure desperation. I don’t blame him. She was his youngest daughter. The one child he had a decent relationship with. Adam was willing to do anything to find her. He even wanted to kidnap Grady and torture him until he talked. I told him I’d do anything to help, but that we had to keep within the limits of the law. He didn’t like hearing that.”

“Tell me about the night Adam died.”

Paul took a deep breath. “He set us up beautifully.”

“I know all about that. What happened after he caught you and Carol in bed?”

Paul Duncan rubbed his eyes with his palms. “He went berserk. He started calling Carol names. Awful names. We tried to talk to him, but what could we say? After a while he told her he wanted a divorce and ran out.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went home.”

“Did you stop on the way?”

“No.”

“Anybody who can confirm you were home?”

“I live alone.”

“Anybody who can confirm you were home?” Myron repeated.

“No, dammit. That’s why Carol and I didn’t tell anyone. We knew how it would look.”

“Not good,” Myron agreed.

“I didn’t kill him. I wronged him. I was a terrible friend. But I didn’t kill him.”

Myron gave a small shoulder shrug. “You seem like a pretty good candidate, Paul. You lied about the night of his murder. You were having a long-term affair with his wife, a wife who could marry you only if her husband died. He confronted you two in his bed on the night of the murder. His missing daughter was the only person who knew about your secret liaison. Her photograph appears in a magazine published by your source. No, Paul, I’d say it looks pretty goddamn shitty.”

“I had nothing to do with any of that.”

“What did you do with Kathy’s pictures?”

“I gave them to Adam, of course.”

“Did you keep any for yourself? Maybe as a little souvenir?”

“Of course not!”

“And you never saw any of the pictures again?”

“Never.”

“Yet somehow Kathy’s picture ended up in a porno mag.”

Paul nodded slowly.

“A porno mag published by your buddy Fred Nickler.”

Another nod.

“So now comes the big question, Paul: How did Kathy’s picture end up in Nickler’s magazine?”

Using both arms for leverage Paul Duncan stood. He moved to the television and flicked it off. The junior dancers faded away. The dog did not move. Paul studied the blank screen for a while and then said, “It’s going to sound crazy.”

“I’m listening.”

“Adam arranged it. He put Kathy’s picture in that magazine.”

Myron waited. His spine began to tingle.

“I don’t understand it either,” Paul continued. “Nickler called me yesterday. He was all upset, said you were nosing around and realizing something was up. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he explained it to me. Adam had told Nickler to put that picture in his magazine. You see, Adam had met Nickler when we were trying to find the photographer’s studio. So Adam went back to him, pretended he was still working on a case with me. He told Nickler to put Kathy’s picture in Gary Grady’s ad. He also told him not to say anything if anybody asked about it—except to give out Gary’s alias and address.”

“Enough clues,” Myron said, “so someone would find Grady.”

“It seems so, yes.”

“Did Nickler tell you why he placed the picture only in Nips?”

“No. I can call and ask him, if you’d like.”

Myron shook his head. “Not necessary.”

“That’s all I know. I can’t for the life of me figure out what Adam was doing. Maybe he wanted to set up Grady. Or maybe he just snapped. But the truth is, I have no idea why Adam would put his own daughter’s picture in that magazine.”

Myron rose. He had a very good idea why.

Chapter 46

Win gazed into the mirror. Despite the fact that the hour was closing in on midnight, his evening was just beginning. He patted his hair, smiled at his reflection, and said, “God, I am handsome.”

Myron grunted.

“Are you going to call Jessica?” Win asked.

“I want to go over it again.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“And make my nubile lass wait?”

“She’ll survive.”

“You don’t understand. This girl is very special to me.”

“What’s her last name?”

Win thought a moment, shrugged. “Okay, what do you wish to review?”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” Myron said. “I want to know how you see it.”

Win turned away from the antique mirror. His Central Park West apartment had been a gift from his grandfather. It was huge, worth millions, and decorated like Versailles. Myron was afraid to touch anything. He was sitting in an antique chair with wooden arms digging into his ribs.

“Do you mind if I break the case down into three separate entities?” Win said.

“Whatever you want.”

“Fine. Then let us begin. Entity one: Kathy Culver’s disappearance. During her senior year of high school, Kathy’s personality changed for reasons her mother has now revealed to you. Kathy then sought to hurt said mother with promiscuity. Ergo the lewd photographs, which Kathy mailed to Carol. But Kathy Culver did not see the danger in her actions. She took for granted that she could just end it whenever she so desired. But that was not the case. When she wanted to stop—when she met Christian, it seems—she could not just backslide out.”

Myron nodded.

“Enter Mr. Junior Horton. He decided to cash in on the new, unsullied Kathy Culver through blackmail. Kathy agreed to pay him in exchange for silence and photographs. On the night in question Mr. Horton called Kathy at her sorority house. She agreed to meet him in the locker room. Once there, she was gang-raped by Junior Horton and several cohorts.”

Win stopped and moved toward a decanter. “Care for a little cognac?”

“No, thanks.”

He poured some into a snifter. “The rape bent her past the breaking point,” he continued. “She snapped. She suddenly craved redemption and justice above all else. So she headed immediately to Dean Gordon’s office to report the attack. Dean Gordon had been her employer, and she probably considered him a friend. She told him what had happened to her in the locker room. His reaction was either superfluous or detrimental to her resolve. Take your pick.”

“Probably detrimental,” Myron added.

“Yes, probably detrimental. Either way, Kathy left Dean Gordon’s house disheartened. She walked around the campus in a sort of catatonic daze, I imagine. Ricky Lane approached her. He apologized and gave her the panties—that is, evidence of the crime against her. After that—who knows? We slam into a big brick wall. The only thing we know for sure is that the panties were found on top of a waste bin several days later. Are there any questions so far?”

Myron shook his head.

“Then let’s move on to Entity two: Adam Culver’s involvement. Sometime after Kathy disappears, her father finds the lewd photographs of his little princess in the attic. We know that they were hidden there by Carol Culver. But Adam, I am sure, did not realize that. He would have naturally assumed that Kathy had hidden them there. He would also have naturally assumed that the pictures were connected to his daughter’s disappearance.”

“Logical,” Myron agreed.

“Yes, quite.” Win twirled his cognac, studying the color. “Adam Culver then enlists the aid of Paul Duncan in his investigation. They track down the photographs’ place of origin with the help of Fred Nickler. They also find out about Gary Grady. They continue their investigation, but nothing new develops. Paul wants to give up. Adam is desperate—so desperate that he tries to draw out the assailant in a most unorthodox manner.”

Win paused, considering. “Here,” he said, “is where it gets very interesting. We know Adam Culver had the photographs. We know he arranged to have them put in a pornographic magazine. I find it significant that the picture was placed only in Nips magazine.”

Myron leaned forward. They were on the same wavelength. “The magazine with the smallest—almost nonexistent—circulation.”

“That fact disturbed you from the beginning,” Win said.

Myron nodded. “Someone didn’t want that magazine seen by a lot of people.”

“Like her father.”

“Right.”

“And,” Win continued, “we know that Adam Culver liked to frequent the casinos of Atlantic City. He might have met your friend Blackjack during one of his visits or at least heard his name. He could have hired someone else to forge his daughter’s handwriting. He probably had a tape with her voice from an old answering machine. Ergo, Adam Culver set the whole thing up. He sent out the magazine to everyone who might have been involved in Kathy’s disappearance. Her fiancé, for one. People in the picture, like Junior Horton.”

“Why did he send one to his wife?” Myron asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And Dean Gordon?”

“Perhaps the dean was in one of those attic photographs. Or perhaps Adam found out about Kathy’s visit to the dean’s house that night. Most likely Adam was merely considering every possibility. But it’s not really that relevant to the case. What is relevant, however, is the question of why Adam did not once again enlist the help of Paul Duncan.”

“Because,” Myron said, “Adam found out that Paul was sleeping with his wife.”

Win nodded. “Paul was no longer a friend or trustworthy. Adam was now on his own. He sent the package to Sir Blackjack, making sure it would never be traced back to him. Then Adam set up his second little sting operation, the one on his wife and Paul. He walked in on them, ran out, and was killed.”

“So who murdered him?” Myron said.

Win put down the snifter on a harpsichord from the seventeenth century. He steepled his fingers, bouncing them gently off one another. “There are two strong possibilities,” he said. “First, Paul Duncan. We cannot just dismiss him. He had motive and opportunity. Second, Adam wanted to stir up the killer, that much is clear. But perhaps the magazine stirred up more trouble than he’d anticipated.”

“Except for one thing,” Myron interjected. “The magazines hadn’t been sent out yet. Adam was dead two days before Blackjack mailed them.”

“So perhaps someone discovered what Adam was up to before they were mailed.”

“Otto Burke?”

Win shrugged.

“But Otto has no connection to Kathy Culver,” Myron said.

“None that we are aware of. Which leads us to Entity three: the unknowns. A major unknown, as I see it, is Nancy Serat. We can assume that she gave Adam Culver valuable information. But we do not know who killed her. Or what she meant when she told Christian it was time for sisters to reunite. And we especially do not know why Kathy Culver’s hair was found on her dead body.”

Win rechecked his hair. Perfect. He smiled, winked, did everything but kiss his own reflection. “We also have no explanation for Adam Culver’s cabin in the woods. He could have become desperate enough to grab suspects and do his own interrogations. Or he could have been seeking retribution for all in the wicked photographs. On someone like Gary Grady. Or Junior Horton. But for some reason my mind cannot fully accept either of these rationales.”

Myron nodded. It didn’t feel right to him either.

“And so now we’ve reached the final unknown. The most significant unknown of all: Miss Kathy Culver herself. Is she alive? Is she behind all this? Is she involved in any way at all?”

Win picked the snifter off the harpsichord. He took a sip of cognac, let it roll around his tongue, swallowed. “The end.”

They both sat in silence. Myron churned the facts through his head yet again. None of them changed. Win studied his face.

“This was all a mental exercise,” Win said. “A test drive, as it were.”

Myron said nothing.

“You know what happened. You knew before I said a word.”

Myron handed Win the telephone. “Cancel your date. We have a lot of work to do.”

Chapter 47

The memorial service.

Myron slipped in late and ducked behind a pillar. He was in desperate need of a shower, a shave, a nap. And he looked it.

He spotted Jessica in the front pew. She sat on one side of her mother, Edward on the other. All three were crying.

The priest delivered the standard death spiel like an actor who knew his lines too well. Nothing new or original was said. There was no coffin, no well-dressed corpse in peaceful repose. The priest seemed bothered by this, by the absence of his customary prop. He kept motioning down on cue, only to draw back when he realized that there was nothing in front of him.

Myron stayed out of sight. The church was crowded. Paul Duncan sat in the second row, directly behind Carol. Every once in a while Paul would put his hand on her shoulder, but he’d never leave it there long. Appearances. Christian was next to him, head lowered in prayer. Otto Burke and Larry Hanson were a few rows back. Good PR move. The press would undoubtedly be made aware of Otto Burke’s heartfelt concern for his players’ personal plights. Again, appearances.

Win was near the back. To his right sat Sally Li. Her face looked drawn, as if she could use a cigarette. Myron had spoken to her late last night. She had done the test. It had come out as he’d suspected.

Dean Gordon and his wife Madelaine were off to the left. Dean Gordon looked grim. Madelaine Gordon looked good in black. Myron recognized a few other faces in the crowd, but he couldn’t put a name or place to any of them. It didn’t matter.

The priest made a few last comments about the hereafter, God’s will, and reuniting with the beloved in Heaven. Jessica’s sob racked her whole body. No one put an arm around her. No one comforted her. She looked small and frail. Myron felt a lump rise in this throat.

Here we go.

When the ceremony ended, Myron did not hesitate. He walked purposively down the aisle. Jessica ran toward him without hesitation. They hugged, both closing their eyes. The mourners turned away and began to head for the exit. Win kept close to Otto Burke, Larry Hanson, and Dean Gordon.

Jessica finally released her grip. “Where were you?” she asked.

Myron swallowed. He nodded to Paul Duncan, shook hands with Edward and Christian, lightly kissed Carol on the cheek.

“I don’t know how to say this,” Myron said.

“What’s the matter?”

He looked her straight in the eye. “I found Kathy. She’s alive.”

The group went silent.

Jessica opened her mouth, closed it.

“I’m meeting her tonight,” Myron said.

Jessica finally found her voice. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a long story. But she’s alive. I’ll bring her home to you tonight.”

Jessica looked at Carol. Carol looked back. Everyone looked at everyone else.

“I’ll go with you,” Jessica said.

“You can’t.”

“Like hell I can’t.”

“I promised her,” Myron said. “Just me. Alone. She’s scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of the person who tried to kill her.”

“Who?”

Myron shook his head. “She wouldn’t tell me. Not on the phone.” He took hold of Jessica’s hand. It was cold and stiff. Like marble. “I’ll bring her right to the house. I promise. We’ll all talk then. But we can’t risk scaring her off.”

Jessica shook her head. She looked lost. “Where are you meeting her?”

“It’s in the woods.”

“What woods?” Jessica pulled back a little. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I can’t tell you, Jess. I promised her. Kathy said it’s the spot where she was left for dead. She wants to show me where it happened.”

More silence.

Paul Duncan said, “Dear God.”

Carol practically fainted into his arms.

“Where has she been?” Jessica asked.

“I only know bits and pieces from my investigation. She spent most of the time recovering from her injuries. She also spent some time in the Caribbean. An island called Curaçao. I picked up her trail from an entry that night in St. Mary Hospital’s registry. On the night she vanished, a patient was found unconscious in the middle of a road. She gave her name as Katherine Pierce.”

Carol gasped. “Pierce? That’s my maiden name.”

Myron nodded. “I don’t know all the details yet. She was hit over the head. The blow cracked her skull. The assailant thought she was dead. But she wasn’t. He buried her in the woods. She woke up and managed to dig herself out. It’s a miracle she survived.”

Jessica’s eyes filled with tears. “She’s alive?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Jessica hugged her mother then. Edward joined in. Christian and Paul watched dumbfounded. Myron turned toward the door. Win was standing there. His nod was almost imperceptible.

Chapter 48

Myron parked his car on the dirt road. He was alone. The car’s clock read 8:30 P.M. He grabbed his flashlight and headed toward the meeting spot.

The brush was thick. Several branches whipped across his face. He listened for other sounds. Crickets hummed away. Nothing else. The flashlight sliced through the heavy darkness, carving a path for him to follow. Myron heard his feet crunch on twigs and leaves. His mouth felt bone-dry. It always felt that way at moments like this.

He was getting close now, no more than twenty or thirty yards away.

“Kathy?” he called out.

No answer.

“It’s Myron, Kathy. I’m alone.”

No reply. But then Myron heard a shuffling from in front of him. Something came into view. A head. A head of long blond hair.

“It’s okay,” Myron said gently. “I’m here alone.”

She stepped toward him tentatively. Her right hand shaded her eyes from the flashlight’s harsh glare. Myron pointed the beam away. “It’s all right,” he said.

She continued to move toward him, a dim silhouette. Her steps were slow, plodding, like a B-movie monster come to life.

“It’s okay,” Myron said again. “No one is going to hurt you.”

“I wish that were true.”

The voice had not come from her. It had come from behind him. Myron closed his eyes. His shoulders slumped. “Hello, Christian.”

“Don’t move, Mr. Bolitar. Put your hands up.”

“Why bother?”

“What?”

“You’re going to kill us. Just like you tried to kill Kathy. Just like you killed her father and Nancy.”

“I never meant to hurt anybody,” he said.

“But you did.”

Christian cocked the gun. “Hands up. Now.”

Myron raised his hands slowly. “Kathy opened up to you that night. She told you everything—every sordid detail of her past. She wanted to clean the slate.”

“She lied to me!” Christian shouted. “All the time we were together—it was all a lie.”

“So you tried to kill her.”

“Kathy wanted me to still love her, Mr. Bolitar. But don’t you see? I never loved her. I loved a lie. She wanted me to stand beside that lie while she told her story to the world. She wanted me to sell out my teammates, toss away a chance at a national championship and Heisman trophy—all for the sake of a lying whore.”

“A lying whore,” Myron said, “like your mother.”

He nodded. “Mr. Bolitar, tell her. Tell her what that game meant. In terms of money, fame, pride. You understand, Mr. Bolitar. It helped get me that contract.”

“So you hit her over the head.”

“I didn’t mean to. It just happened. I thought she was dead. I couldn’t find a pulse.”

“So you drove her out here and buried the body. You hoped she’d never be found, but if she were, it’d be blamed on a serial killer.”

Christian stepped closer. He raised the gun. “Enough talk,” he said. “I’m not going to let you stall around until someone shows up.”

“No need. Someone’s been here all the time.”

Win came out from behind a tree, no more than a yard away from Christian. He pressed the .44 against Christian’s ear and said, “Drop it, or your brain becomes squirrel lunch.”

Christian dropped the gun.

“It’s over,” Myron shouted.

From a farther distance two uniformed police arrived. They handcuffed Christian.

Jake Courter stumbled behind them, high-stepping through the long grass. “Too old for this shit,” he mumbled. When he reached the clearing he said, “Nice setup, Bolitar.”

“Lots of details. The secret to a good scam.”

“Gonna tell me what’s going on now?”

“Sure. Jess?”

Jessica took off the blond wig and stepped forward.

Christian’s mouth dropped open. “What the—”

“You killed Kathy,” Myron said, “but not from the blow to the head. She suffocated trying to claw her way out of the dirt.”

Jake looked confused. “Where’s the body?”

“In the morgue. Where it’s been since the police found it two months ago. Sally Li confirmed the identity last night.”

“So why hadn’t it been identified before?”

“Because the county medical examiner was Kathy’s father. He knew who it was right away, but he pretended otherwise.”

“Why?”

“Think about it a second, Jake. From Adam Culver’s perspective. Your case had gone nowhere in eighteen months. Adam knew that. He also knew the body provided no new clues. So he figured that the only way to catch Kathy’s killer was to draw him out. How? By making the killer think Kathy might still be alive. After all, she’d been alive when he dumped her in the woods. So Adam kept the corpse’s identity a secret from everyone—the police, his friends, even his own family. He also figured that the nude photographs were tied into all this. So he used them.”

“You mean he put that ad in the magazine?”

Myron nodded. “Adam Culver arranged everything. Even the mysterious phone calls saying ‘Come and get me. I survived.’ He did everything he could to make it look like Kathy was alive.”

Jake nodded. “So what you guys were just doing—”

“Was finishing up Adam Culver’s plan. Our performance at the church this morning sowed the final seeds of doubt.”

“You were forcing Christian to make a play for you.”

“Exactly.”

“Incredible. So everyone was in on on this?”

“Jessica was,” Myron said. “So were her mother and brother. It would have been too cruel to lie to them. But Paul Duncan didn’t know. Neither did anybody else, and Win made sure that all the suspects—Otto, the dean, even Gary Grady—knew about Kathy’s ‘survival.’ ”

“Then you weren’t sure it was Christian?”

“No, I was sure.”

“You were trying to play it fair.”

Myron nodded. “That’s why I didn’t tell you anything. I wanted you to see what happened without any preconceived notions.”

“Fair enough,” Jake said. “Go on.”

“Adam Culver understood that only the killer would know this spot. If he made the killer think Kathy could still be alive, he or she would have to come back here—just to make sure Kathy was dead. That was why Adam rented that cabin nearby. That was why he had all that electronic equipment. To tape him. To have proof.”

“Catching the killer returning to the scene of the crime,” Jake said.

“Right.”

“But I don’t get something. Adam was killed before the magazine was mailed out. How did Christian find out about it?”

“He didn’t. Remember, Adam was a pathologist. He wasn’t an investigator. He overlooked a very important clue. At first anyway.”

“What clue?”

“Kathy’s clothes.”

“What about them?”

“When Kathy’s body was found, she was wearing a yellow sweater and a pair of gray sweat pants. Yet the sorority sisters said she was wearing blue when she left the house. The rapists said she was wearing blue. Dean Gordon said she was wearing blue. Ricky Lane said she was wearing blue. The sorority sisters were also positive that Kathy never returned to the house. So the question was: Where did the yellow sweater and gray sweat pants come from?”

Jake shrugged.

“It took Adam a while to realize the significance of the clothes. But when he did, he went to the most obvious source. Kathy’s roommate.”

“Nancy Serat.”

“Right. But he didn’t want to let on that Kathy’s body had been found. So he asked Nancy where he could find her favorite yellow sweater, pretending to be a typical dad on some kind of nostalgic tour. But think about it. If Kathy didn’t go back to her sorority house, where did she change clothes?”

Jake saw it now. “At Christian’s,” he said with a snap of the fingers. “Kathy slept there all the time. She must have kept clothes there.”

“Right.”

“And Nancy and Christian were friends,” Jake said, picking up the thread. “She’d see nothing wrong with telling Christian all about Adam’s visit. Probably thought the whole thing was kinda cute.”

Myron turned toward Christian. “You got scared when you heard Adam had been asking about the yellow sweater. You knew he was getting close. So you followed him that night. You heard him fight with his wife. You saw him storm out of the house, and you figured this was the ideal opportunity to kill him. Another perfect misdirection.”

Christian said nothing.

Jake said, “What do you mean, ‘another perfect misdirection’?”

“When your investigation of Kathy’s disappearance began,” Myron said, “who did you focus in on?”

“Christian,” Jake said. “Like I said, we always check out the boyfriend.”

“So what did Christian do? With campus security combing the campus for clues, he planted the panties on the top of a garbage bin.”

“The panties,” Jake added, “with someone else’s semen.”

“Proof he didn’t do it.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“He also misdirected us with Nancy Serat. He strangled Nancy. Then he planted one of Kathy’s hairs at the scene.”

“But where did he get the hair?”

“Kathy slept in his room all the time, right? She would have kept other stuff there besides her clothes. Stuff like a hairbrush.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“It was almost perfect. Blame someone who was dead. And if Kathy wasn’t dead—if she had indeed survived—he’d make her look like a lunatic. Who’d believe the ravings of a girl who’d killed her old roommate? But Christian didn’t count on Jessica showing up at Nancy’s. He panicked. He hit her over the head and ran. Problem was, he’d left his fingerprints behind. But Christian was quick. He even used that to his advantage. When you dragged him in the next morning, he immediately admitted to being at Nancy’s house. And then he came up with that wonderful story about sisters reuniting.”

“Another perfect misdirection,” Jake said.

“Except he forgot about the glass.”

“What glass?”

“His fingerprints were found in several spots in the house, including a drinking glass. Yet Christian told us Nancy barely let him in the door, that she practically pushed him away mumbling about the reuniting sisters. Under those circumstances, isn’t it odd she’d offer him a drink?”

Myron looked at Christian. He lowered his eyes.

“I—I didn’t mean to hurt any of them, Mr. Bolitar,” he said.

“You were manipulative and calculating,” Myron said. “You covered all the bases, even when you hired me. I was small-time. I could be controlled. You knew about my background, that I was an experienced investigator. You knew if any trouble arose, I’d keep things quiet. That I’d keep you informed. That I’d try to protect you. You played me for a sucker.”

Everyone remained silent until Jake said, “All right. Get him out of here.”

The uniformed officers led Christian away.

Myron looked back at Jessica. She still hadn’t said a word. Tears slid down her cheeks. None of this morning’s tears had been for her father. Maybe some of these were.

Win shook his head. “ ‘Squirrel lunch.’ I can’t believe I said ‘squirrel lunch.’ ”

Jessica stopped crying. She even smiled a little. Myron put his arm around her and pulled her in close. Together they made their way back to the car.

Chapter 49

Three days later Myron drove Jessica to the airport.

“Just drop me off at the terminal,” she said.

“I’ll wait with you at the gate.”

“You should head back.”

“I have time.”

“The traffic will be murder.”

“I don’t care.”

“Myron?”

“What?”

“Just drop me off. Please. You know I hate scenes.”

“I won’t make a scene.”

“You always make a scene.”

Silence.

“What’s going to happen to Gary Grady?” she asked.

“I’ve sent all the information to the school board and the local press. I don’t know if he’ll spend any time in jail, but he’s finished.

“What about Dean Gordon?”

“He resigned this morning. He’s going to enter the private sector.”

“And the rapists?”

“Cary Roland is the DA. This case means big headlines. He’ll do his best. Ricky Lane is going to turn state’s evidence.”

“You dumped Ricky as a client?”

Myron nodded.

“And you lost Christian.”

Another nod.

“All in all,” she said, “this case hasn’t had a real positive economic effect on you.”

“I’m more worried about the personal effect.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’re back in my life.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It is. Except you’re leaving.”

“Just for a month or two. It’s a book tour.”

He pulled up to the front of the terminal.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

He nodded.

Jessica kissed him. He held on. She finally pushed him back. He released her grudgingly.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.” She stepped out of the car. “And I’ll be back.”

He watched her walk toward the entrance. He watched her pass through the sliding glass doors, watched her walk to the ticket gate, watched her disappear down an escalator. When she was out of sight, he still watched until a security guard knocked on his window.

“Unloading zone, bub. Move it!”

Myron looked back one more time. Then he drove back to the office.

This, like everything else, is for Anne.

The author wishes to thank Sunandan B. Singh, M.D.,
Chief Medical Examiner of Bergen County, New Jersey;
Bob Richter; Rich Henshaw; Richard Curtis; Jacob Hoye;
Shawn Coyne; and, of course, Dave Bolt.

DROP SHOT

A Dell Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Dell mass market edition published March 1996

Delacorte Press hardcover edition / September 2007

Dell mass market reissue / November 2008

Published by
Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1996 by Harlan Coben

Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33812-3
v3.0_r1

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents

Drop Shot

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1

“Cesar Romero,” Myron said.

Win looked at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m starting off with an easy one.”

On Stadium Court the players were changing sides. Myron’s client, Duane Richwood, was shellacking the number-fifteen seed Ivan Something-okov, leading 5–0 in the third set after winning the first two sets 6–0, 6–2. An impressive U.S. Open debut for the unseeded twenty-one-year-old upstart from the streets (literally) of New York.

“Cesar Romero,” Myron repeated. “Unless you don’t know.”

Win sighed. “The Joker.”

“Frank Gorshin.”

“The Riddler.”

Ninety-second commercial break. Myron and Win were keeping themselves busy with a scintillating game of Name the Batman Criminal. The TV Batman. The Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward and all those Pow, Bam, Slam balloons. The real Batman.

“Who played the second one?” Myron asked.

“The second Riddler?”

Myron nodded.

From across the court Duane Richwood flashed them a cocky smile. He sported garish aviator sunglasses with loud fluorescent green frames. The latest style from Ray•Ban. Duane was never without them. He had become not only identified by the shades but defined by them. Ray•Ban was rather pleased.

Myron and Win sat in one of the two players’ boxes reserved for celebrities and players’ entourages. For most matches every seat in the box was filled. When Agassi played the night before, the box had overflowed with his family, friends, suck-ups, young lasses, environmentally correct movie stars, hair weaves—like an Aerosmith backstage party. But Duane had only three people in the box: agent Myron, financial consultant Win, and Duane’s coach, Henry Hobman. Wanda, the love of Duane’s life, got too nervous and preferred to stay home.

“John Astin,” Win answered.

Myron nodded. “How about Shelley Winters.”

“Ma Parker.”

“Milton Berle.”

“Louie the Lilac.”

“Liberace.”

“Chandell the Great.”

“And?”

Win looked puzzled. “And what?”

“What other criminal did Liberace play?”

“What are you talking about? Liberace only appeared in that one episode.”

Myron leaned back and smiled. “Are you sure?”

In his seat next to the umpire’s chair Duane happily chugged down a bottle of Evian. He held the bottle so that the sponsor’s name could be clearly seen by the television cameras. Smart kid. Knew how to please the sponsor. Myron had recently signed Duane to a simple deal with the natural water giant: during the U.S. Open Duane drank Evian in marked bottles. In return Evian paid him ten grand. That was water rights. Myron was negotiating Duane’s soda rights with Pepsi and his electrolyte rights with Gatorade.

Ah, tennis.

“Liberace only appeared in that one episode,” Win announced.

“Is that your final answer?”

“Yes. Liberace only appeared in that one episode.”

Henry Hobman continued to study the court, scrutinizing with intense concentration, his line of vision swinging back and forth. Too bad no one was playing.

“Henry, you want to take a guess?”

Henry ignored them. Nothing new there.

“Liberace only appeared in that one episode,” Win repeated, his nose in the air.

Myron made a soft buzzing sound. “Sorry, that answer is incorrect. What do we have for our player, Don? Well, Myron, Windsor gets the home version of our game plus a year’s supply of Turtle Wax. And thank you for playing our game!”

Win was unmoved. “Liberace only appeared in that one episode.”

“That your new mantra?”

“Until you prove otherwise.”

Win—full name: Windsor Horne Lockwood III—steepled his manicured fingers. He did that a lot, steepling. Steepling fit him. Win looked liked his name. The poster boy for the quintessential WASP. Everything about his appearance reeked arrogance, elitism, Town and Country Parties Page, debutantes dressed in monogrammed sweaters and pearls with names like Babs, dry martinis at the clubhouse, stuffy old money—his fine blond hair, his pretty-boy patrician face, his lily-white complexion, his snotty Exeter accent. Except in Win’s case some sort of chromosomal abnormality had slipped through the generations of careful breeding. In some ways Win was exactly what he appeared to be. But in many more ways—sometimes very frightening ways—Win was not.

“I’m waiting,” Win said.

“You remember Liberace playing Chandell the Great?” Myron asked.

“Of course.”

“But you forgot that Liberace also played Chandell’s evil twin brother, Harry. In the same episode.”

Win made a face. “You cannot be serious.”

“What?”

“That doesn’t count. Evil twin brothers.”

“Where in the rule book does it say that?”

Win set his jutting jaw in that certain way.

The humidity was thick enough to wear as undergarments, especially in Flushing Meadows’s windless stadium court. The stadium, named strangely enough for Louis Armstrong, was basically a giant billboard that also happened to have a tennis court in the middle. IBM had a sign above the speedometer that clocked the velocity of each player’s serve. Citizen kept both the real time and how long the match had been going on. Visa had its name printed behind the service line. Reebok, Infiniti, Fuji Film, Clairol had their names plastered wherever there was a free spot. So did Heineken.

Heineken, the official beer of the U.S. Open.

The crowd was a complete mix. Down low—in the good seats—people had money. But anything went in the dress department. Some wore full suits and ties (like Win), some wore more casual Banana Republic–type clothes (like Myron), some wore jeans, some wore shorts. But Myron’s personal favorite were the fans who came in full tennis gear—shirt, shorts, socks, tennis shoes, warm-up jacket, sweatbands, and tennis racket. Tennis racket. Like they might get called on to play. Like Sampras or Steffi or someone might suddenly point into the stands and say, “Hey, you with the racket. I need a doubles partner.”

Win’s turn. “Roddy McDowall,” he began.

“The Bookworm.”

“Vincent Price.”

“Egghead.”

“Joan Collins.”

Myron hesitated. “Joan Collins? As in Dynasty?”

“I refuse to offer hints.”

Myron ran episodes through his mind. On the court the umpire announced, “Time.” The ninety-second commercial break was over. The players rose. Myron couldn’t swear to it, but he thought he saw Henry blink.

“Give up?” Win asked.

“Shhh. They’re about to play.”

“And you call yourself a Batman fan.”

The players took the court. They too were billboards, only smaller. Duane wore Nike sneakers and clothes. He used a Head tennis racket. Logos for McDonald’s and Sony adorned his sleeves. His opponent wore Reebok. His logos featured Sharp electronics and Bic. Bic. The pen and razor company. Like someone was going to watch a tennis match, see the logo, and buy a pen.

Myron leaned toward Win. “Okay, I give,” he whispered. “What criminal did Joan Collins play?”

Win shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“What?”

“I know she was in an episode. But I don’t remember her character’s name.”

“You can’t do that.”

Win smiled with perfect white teeth. “Where in the rule book does it say that?”

“You have to know the answer.”

“Why?” Win countered. “Does Pat Sajak have to know every puzzle on Wheel of Fortune? Does Alex Trebeck have to know every question on Jeopardy!”

Pause. “Nice analogy, Win. Really.”

“Thank you.”

Then another voice said, “The Siren.”

Myron and Win looked around. It seemed to have come from Henry.

“Did you say something?”

Henry’s mouth did not appear to be moving. “The Siren,” he repeated, his eyes still pasted to the court. “Joan Collins played the Siren. On Batman.”

Myron and Win exchanged a glance.

“Nobody likes a know-it-all, Henry.”

Henry’s mouth might have moved. Might have been a smile.

On the court Duane opened the game with an ace that nearly bore a hole through a ball boy. The IBM speedometer clocked it at 128 mph. Myron shook his head in disbelief. So did Ivan What’s-his-name. Duane was lining up for the second point when Myron’s cell phone rang.

Myron quickly picked it up. He was not the only person in the stands who was talking on a cell phone. He was, however, the only one in a front row. Myron was about to disconnect the power when he realized it might be Jessica. Jessica. Just the thought quickened his pulse a little.

“Hello.”

“It’s not Jessica.” It was Esperanza, his associate.

“I didn’t think it was.”

“Right,” she said. “You always sound like a whimpering puppy when you answer the phone.”

Myron gripped the receiver. The match continued without interruption, but sour faces spun to seek out the origin of the offending ring. “What do you want?” he whispered. “I’m in the stadium.”

“I know. Bet you look like a pretentious asshole. Talking on a cell phone at the match.”

Now that she mentioned it …

The sour faces were glaring daggers now. In their eyes Myron had committed an unpardonable sin. Like molesting a child. Or using the salad fork on the entree. “What do you want?”

“They’re showing you on TV right now. Jesus, it’s true.”

“What?”

“The TV does make you look heavier.”

“What do you want?”

“Nothing much. I thought you might want to know I got you a meeting with Eddie Crane.”

“You’re kidding.” Eddie Crane, one of the hottest tennis juniors in the country. He was seeing only the big-four agencies. ICM, TruPro, Advantage International, ProServ.

“No joke. Meet him and his parents by court sixteen after Duane’s match.”

“I love you, you know.”

“Then pay me more,” she said.

Duane hit a cross-court forehand winner. Thirty–love.

“Anything else?” Myron asked.

“Nothing important. Valerie Simpson. She’s called three times.”

“What did she want?”

“She wouldn’t say. But the Ice Queen sounded ruffled.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Myron hung up. Win looked at him. “Problem?”

Valerie Simpson. A weird, albeit sad case. The former tennis wunderkind had visited Myron’s office two days ago looking for someone—anyone—to represent her. “Don’t think so.”

Duane was up forty–love. Triple match point. Bud Collins, tennis columnist extraordinaire, was already waiting in the gangway for the postmatch interview. Bud’s pants, always a Technicolor fashion risk, were particularly hideous today.

Duane took two balls from the ball boy and approached the line. Duane was a rare commodity in tennis. A black man. Not from India or Africa or even France. Duane was from New York City. Unlike just about every other player on the tour, Duane had not spent his life preparing for this moment. He hadn’t been pushed by ambitious, carpooling parents. He hadn’t worked with the world’s top coaches in Florida or California since he was old enough to hold a racket. Duane was on the opposite end of the spectrum: a street kid who had run away at age fifteen and somehow survived on his own. He had learned tennis from the public courts, hanging around all day and challenging anyone who could hold a racket.

He was on the verge of winning his first Grand Slam match when the gunshot sounded.

The sound had been muffled, coming from outside the stadium. Most people did not panic, assuming the sound had come from a firecracker or car backfire. But Myron and Win had heard the sound too often. They were up and moving before the screams. Inside the stadium the crowd began to mumble. More screams ensued. Loud, hysterical screams. The court umpire in his infinite wisdom impatiently shouted “Quiet, please!” into his microphone.

Myron and Win sprinted up the metallic stairway. They leaped over the white chain, put out by the ushers so that no one could enter or leave the court until the players switched sides, and ran outside. A small crowd was beginning to gather in what was generously dubbed the “Food Court.” With a lot of work and patience the Food Court hoped to one day reach the gastronomic levels of, say, its mall brethren.

They pushed through the crowd. Some people were indeed hysterical but others hadn’t moved at all. This was, after all, New York. The lines for refreshments were long. No one wanted to lose their place.

The girl was lying facedown in front of a stand serving Moët champagne at $7.50 a glass. Myron recognized her immediately, even before he bent down and turned her over. But when he saw her face, when he saw the icy blue eyes stare back at him in a final, unbreakable death gaze, his heart plummeted. He looked back at Win. Win, as usual, had no expression on his face.

“So much,” Win said, “for her comeback.”

2

“Maybe you should just let it go,” Win said.

He whipped his Jaguar XJR onto the FDR Drive and headed south. The radio was tuned to WMXV, 105.1 FM. They played something called “Soft Rock.” Michael Bolton was on. He was doing a remake of an old Four Tops classic. Painful. Like Bea Arthur doing a remake of a Marilyn Monroe film.

Maybe Soft Rock meant Really Bad Rock.

“Mind if I put on a cassette?” Myron said.

“Please.”

Win swerved into a lane change. Win’s driving could most kindly be described as creative. Myron tried not to look. He pushed in a cassette from the original production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Like Myron, Win had a huge collection of old Broadway musicals. Robert Morse sang about a girl named Rosemary. But Myron’s mind remained fixed on a girl named Valerie Simpson.

Valerie was dead. One bullet to the chest. Someone had shot her in the Food Court of the United States Tennis Association National Tennis Center during the opening round of America’s sole Grand Slam event. Yet no one had seen a thing. Or at least no one was talking.

“You’re making that face,” Win said.

“What face?”

“The I-want-to-help-the-world face,” Win said. “She wasn’t a client.”

“She was going to be.”

“A large distinction. Her fate does not concern you.”

“She called me three times today,” Myron said. “When she couldn’t reach me, she showed up at the tennis center. And then she was gunned down.”

“A sad tale,” Win said. “But one that does not concern you.”

The speedometer hovered about eighty. “Uh, Win?”

“Yes.”

“The left side of the road. It’s for oncoming traffic.”

Win spun the wheel, cut across two lanes, and swerved onto a ramp. Minutes later the Jag veered into the Kinney lot on Fifty-second Street. They gave the keys to Mario, the parking attendant. Manhattan was hot. City hot. The sidewalk scorched your feet right through your shoes. Exhaust fumes got stuck in the humidity, hanging in the air like fruit on a tree. Breathing was a chore. Sweating was not. The secret was to keep the sweat to a minimum while walking, hoping that the air-conditioning would dry off your clothes without giving you pneumonia.

Myron and Win walked south down Park Avenue toward the high-rise of Lock-Horne Investments & Securities. Win’s family owned the building. The elevator stopped on the twelfth floor. Myron stepped out. Win stayed inside. His office at Lock-Horne was two floors up.

Before the elevator closed Win said, “I knew her.”

“Who?”

“Valerie Simpson. I sent her to you.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“No reason to.”

“Were you close?”

“Depends on your definition. She’s old money Philadelphia. Like my family. We were members of the same clubs, the same charities, that sort of thing. Our families occasionally summered together when we were kids. But I hadn’t heard from her in years.”

“She just called you out of the blue?” Myron asked.

“You could say that.”

“What would you say?”

“Is this an interrogation?”

“No. Do you have any thoughts on who killed her?”

Win stood perfectly still. “We’ll chat later,” he said. “I have some business matters I must attend to first.”

The elevator door slid closed. Myron waited for a moment, as though expecting the elevator to open again. Then he crossed the corridor and opened a door that read MB SportsReps Inc.

Esperanza looked up from her desk. “Jesus, you look like hell.”

“You heard about Valerie?”

She nodded. If she felt guilty about calling her the Ice Queen moments before the murder, she didn’t show it. “You have blood on your jacket.”

“I know.”

“Ned Tunwell from Nike is in the conference room.”

“I guess I’ll see him,” Myron said. “No use moping around.”

Esperanza looked at him. No expression.

“Don’t get so upset,” he continued. “I’m okay.”

“I’m putting on a brave front,” she said.

Ms. Compassion.

When Myron opened the conference room door, Ned Tunwell charged like a happy puppy. He smiled brightly, shook hands, slapped Myron on the back. Myron half-expected him to jump in his lap and lick his face.

Ned Tunwell looked to be in his early thirties, around Myron’s age. His entire persona was always upbeat, like a Hare Krishna on speed—or worse, a Family Feud contestant. He wore a blue blazer, white shirt, khaki pants, loud tie, and of course, Nike tennis shoes. The new Duane Richwood line. His hair was yellow-blond and he had one of those milk-stain mustaches.

Ned finally calmed down enough to hold up a videotape. “Wait till you see this!” he raved. “Myron, you are going to love it. It’s fantastic.”

“Let’s take a look.”

“I’m telling you, Myron, it’s fantastic. Just fantastic. Incredible. It came out better than I ever thought. Blows away the stuff we did with Courier and Agassi. You’re gonna love it. It’s fantastic. Fantastic, I tell you.”

The key word here: fantastic.

Tunwell flipped the television on and put the tape in the VCR. Myron sat down and tried to push away the image of Valerie Simpson’s corpse. He needed to concentrate. This—Duane’s first national television commercial—was crucial. Truth was, an athlete’s image was made more by these commercials than anything else—including how well he played or how he was portrayed by the media. Athletes became defined by the commercials. Everyone knew Michael Jordan as Air Jordan. Most fans couldn’t tell you Larry Johnson played for the Charlotte Hornets, but they knew all about his Grandmama character. The right campaign made you. The wrong one could destroy you.

“When is it going to air?” Myron asked.

“During the quarter finals. We’re gonna blitz the networks in a very big way.”

The tape finished rewinding. Duane was on the verge of becoming one of the most highly paid tennis players in the world. Not from winning matches, though that would help. But from endorsements. In most sports, the big-name athletes made more money from sponsors than from their teams. In the case of tennis, a lot more. A hell of a lot more. The top ten players made maybe fifteen percent of the money from winning matches. The bulk was from endorsements, exhibition matches, and guarantees—money paid big names to show up at a given tournament no matter how they fared.

Tennis needed new blood, and Duane Richwood was the most exhilarating transfusion to come along in years. Courier and Sampras were about as exciting as dry dog food. The Swedish players were always a snooze-a-thon. Agassi’s act was growing wearisome. McEnroe and Connors were history.

So enter Duane Richwood. Colorful, funny, slightly controversial, but not yet hated. He was black and he was from the streets, but he was perceived as “safe” street, “safe” black, the kind of guy even racists could get behind to show they are not really racists.

“Just check this baby out, Myron. This spot, I’m telling you, it’s … it’s just …” Tunwell looked up, as though searching for the word.

“Fantastic?” Myron tried.

Ned snapped his fingers and pointed. “Just wait till you see. I get hard watching it. Shit, I get hard just thinking about it. Swear to Christ, it’s that good.”

He pressed the PLAY button.

Two days ago Valerie Simpson had sat in this very room, coming in on the heels of his meeting with Duane Richwood. The contrast was striking. Both were in their twenties, but while one career was just blossoming, the other had already dried up and blown away. Twenty-four years old and Valerie had long been labeled a “has-been” or “never-was.” Her behavior had been cold and arrogant (ergo Esperanza’s Ice Queen comment), or perhaps she’d just been distant and distracted. Hard to know for sure. And yes, Valerie had been young, but she had not exactly been—to quote a cliché—full of life. Eerie to say it now, but her eyes seemed to have more life in death—more animated while frozen and staring—than when she’d sat across from him in this very room.

Why, Myron wondered, would someone want to kill Valerie Simpson? Why had she tried so desperately to reach him? Why had she gone to the tennis center? To check out the competition? Or to find Myron?

“Watch this, Myron,” Tunwell repeated yet again. “It’s so fantastic, I came. Really, swear to God. Right in my pants.”

“Sorry I missed that,” Myron said.

Ned whooped with pleasure.

The commercial finally began. Duane appeared, wearing his sunglasses, dashing back and forth on a tennis court. Lots of quick cuts, especially to his sneakers. Lots of bright colors. Pounding beat, mixed in with the sound of tennis balls being blasted across the net. Very MTV-like. Could have been a rock video. Then Duane’s voice came on:

“Come to my court …”

A few more hard ground strokes, a few more quick cuts. Then everything suddenly stopped. Duane vanished. The color faded to black and white. Silence. Scene change. A stern-looking judge glared down from his bench. Duane’s voice returned:

“… and stay away from his court.”

The rock music started up again. The color returned. The screen cut back to Duane hitting the ball, smiling through his sweat, his sunglasses reflecting the light. A Nike symbol appeared with the words COME TO DUANE’S COURT below them.

Fade to black.

Ned Tunwell groaned—actually groaned—in satisfaction.

“You want a cigarette?” Myron asked.

Tunwell’s smile doubled in wattage. “What did I tell you, Myron? Huh? Fantastic or what?”

Myron nodded. It was good. Very good. Hip, well-made, responsible message but not too preachy. “I like it,” he said.

“I told you. Didn’t I tell you? I’m hard again. Swear to God, that’s how much I like it. I might just come again. Right here, right now. As we speak.”

“Good to know.”

Tunwell broke into a seizurelike fit of laughter. He slapped Myron’s shoulder.

“Ned?”

Tunwell’s laughter faded away like the end of a song. He wiped his eyes. “You kill me, Myron. I can’t stop laughing. You really kill me.”

“Yeah, I’m a scream. Did you hear about Valerie Simpson’s murder?”

“Sure. It was on the radio. I used to work with her, you know.” He was still smiling, his eyes wide and bright.

“She was with Nike?” Myron asked.

“Yep. And let me tell you, she cost us a bundle. I mean, Valerie seemed like a sure thing. She was only sixteen years old when we signed her and she’d already reached the finals of the French Open. Plus she was good-looking, all-American, the works. And she was already developed, if you know what I mean. She wasn’t a cute little kid who might turn into a beast when she got a little older. Like Capriatti. Valerie was a babe.”

“So what happened?”

Ned Tunwell shrugged. “She had a breakdown. Shit, it was in all the papers.”

“What caused it?”

“Hell if I know. Lot of rumors.”

“Like?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it. “I forget.”

“You forget?”

“Look, Myron, most people thought it was just too much, you know? All that pressure. Valerie couldn’t hack it. Most of these kids can’t. They get it all, you know, reach such big heights and then poof, it’s gone. You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose everything like … uh …” Ned stammered to a stop. Then he lowered his head. “Ah, shit.”

Myron remained silent.

“I can’t believe I said that, Myron. To you of all people.”

“Forget it.”

“No. I mean, look, I can pretend I didn’t just put my foot in my mouth like that, but …”

Myron waved him off. “A knee injury isn’t a mental breakdown, Ned.”

“Yeah, I know but still …” He stopped again. “When the Celts drafted you, were you a Nike guy?”

“No. Converse.”

“They dump you? I mean, right away?”

“I have no complaints.”

Esperanza opened the door without knocking. Nothing new there. She never knocked. Ned Tunwell’s smile quickly returned. Hard to keep the man down. He stared at Esperanza. Appreciatively. Most men did.

“Can I see you for second, Myron?”

Ned waved. “Hi, Esperanza.”

She turned and looked right through him. One of her many talents.

Myron excused himself and followed her out. Esperanza’s desk was bare except for two photographs. One was of her dog, an adorable shaggy pooch named Chloe, winning a dog show. Esperanza was into dog shows—a sport not exactly dominated by inner-city Latinos, though she seemed to do pretty well. The desk’s other picture showed Esperanza wrestling another woman. Professionally wrestling, that is. The lovely and lithe Esperanza had once wrestled professionally under the name Little Pocahontas, the Indian Princess. For three years Little Pocahontas had been a crowd favorite of the Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling organization, popularly known as FLOW (someone had once suggested calling it the Beautiful Ladies of Wrestling, but the acronym was a problem for the networks). Esperanza’s Little Pocahontas was a scantily clad (basically a suede bikini) sexpot whom fans cheered and leered at as she bravely took on enormous evil, cheating nemeses every week. A morality play, some called it. A classic reenactment of Good vs. Evil. But to Myron the weekly action was more like those women-in-prison films. Esperanza played the beautiful, naive prisoner stuck in cell block C. Her opponent was Olga, the sadistic prison matron.

“It’s Duane,” Esperanza said.

Myron took the call at her desk. “Hey, Duane. What’s up?”

His voice came fast. “Get over here, man. Like now.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The cops are in my face. They’re asking me all kinds of shit.”

“About what?”

“That girl who got shot today. They think I got something to do with it.”

3

“Let me speak to the police officer,” Myron told Duane.

Another voice came on the line. “This is homicide detective Roland Dimonte,” the voice barked with pure cop impatience. “Who the hell is this?”

“I’m Myron Bolitar. Mr. Richwood’s attorney.”

“Attorney, huh? I thought you were his agent.”

“I’m both,” Myron said.

“That a fact?”

“Yes.”

“You got a law degree?”

“It’s hanging on my wall. But I can bring it if you’d like.”

Dimonte made a noise. Might have been a snicker. “Ex-jock. Ex-fed. And now you tell me you’re a goddamn lawyer?”

“I’m what you might call a Renaissance man,” Myron said.

“Yeah? Tell me, Bolitar, what law school would let in someone like you?”

“Harvard,” Myron said.

“Whoa, aren’t we a big shot.”

“You asked.”

“Well, you got half an hour to get here. Then I drag your boy to the precinct. Got me?”

“I’ve really enjoyed this little chat, Rolly.”

“You got twenty-nine minutes. And don’t call me Rolly.”

“I don’t want my client questioned until I’m present. Understood?”

Roland Dimonte didn’t answer.

“Understood?” Myron repeated.

Pause. Then: “Must be a bad connection, Bolitar.” Dimonte hung up.

Pleasant guy.

Myron handed the phone back to Esperanza. “Mind getting rid of Ned for me?”

“Done.”

Myron took the elevator to the ground floor and sprinted toward the Kinney lot. Someone shouted, “Go, O.J.!” at him. In New York everyone’s a comedian. Mario tossed Myron the keys without glancing up from his newspaper.

Myron’s car was parked on the ground floor. Unlike Win, Myron was not what one would label a “car guy.” A car was a mode of transportation, nothing more. Myron drove a Ford Taurus. A gray Ford Taurus. When he cruised down the street, chicks did not exactly swarm.

He’d driven about twenty blocks when he spotted a powder-blue Cadillac with a canary-yellow roof. Something about it bothered Myron. The color maybe. Powder blue with a yellow roof? In Manhattan? A retirement community in Boca Raton, okay, driven by some guy named Sid who always had his left blinker on. Myron could see that. But not in Manhattan. And more to the point, Myron remembered sprinting past the exact same car on his way to the garage.

Was he being followed?

A possibility, though not a great one. This was midtown Manhattan and Myron was heading straight down Seventh Avenue. About a million other cars were doing the same. Could be nothing. Probably was. Myron made a quick mental note and proceeded.

Duane had recently rented a place on the corner of Twelfth Street and Sixth Avenue. The John Adams Building, on the fringe of Greenwich Village. Myron illegally parked in front of a Chinese restaurant on Sixth, got passed through by the doorman, and took the elevator to Apartment 7G.

A man who had to be Detective Roland Dimonte answered the door. He was dressed in jeans, paisley green shirt, black leather vest. He also had on the ugliest pair of snakeskin boots—snow-white with flecks of purple—Myron had ever seen. His hair was greasy. Several strands were matted to his forehead like to flypaper. A toothpick—an actual toothpick—was jutting out of his mouth. His eyes were set deep in a pudgy face, like someone had stuck two brown pebbles in at the last minute.

Myron smiled. “Hi, Rolly.”

“Let’s get one thing straight, Bolitar. I know all about you. I know all about your glory days with the feds. I know all about how you like to play cop now. But I don’t give a shit about none of that. Nor do I give a shit that your client is a public figure. I gotta job to do. You hear what I’m saying?”

Myron put his hand to his ear. “Must be a bad connection.”

Roland Dimonte crossed his arms and gave Myron his most withering glare. The snakeskin boots had a high platform of some sort, pushing his height over six foot, but Myron still had a good three or four inches on him. A minute passed. Roland still glared. Then another minute. Roland gnawed on the toothpick. The glare persisted without a blink.

“On the inside,” Myron said, “I’m quaking in fear.”

“Go fuck yourself, Bolitar.”

“Chewing the toothpick is a nice touch. A little cliché perhaps, but it works for you.”

“Just keep it up, smart-ass.”

“Mind if I come in,” Myron said, “before I wet my pants?”

Dimonte moved out of the way. Slowly. The death glare was still locked on autopilot.

Myron found Duane sitting on the couch. He was wearing his Ray•Bans, but that was not surprising. He stroked his closely cropped beard with his left hand. Wanda, Duane’s girlfriend, stood by the kitchen. She was tall, five-ten or so. Her figure was what was commonly referred to as tight or hard rather than muscular, and she was a stunner. Her eyes kept darting about like birds moving from branch to branch.

It was not a huge apartment. The decor was standard New York rental. Duane and Wanda had moved in only a few weeks ago. Month-to-month lease. No reason to fix the place up. With the money Duane was about to start making they could live anywhere they wanted to soon.

“Did you say anything to them?” Myron asked.

Duane shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Want to tell me what’s going on?”

Duane shook his head again. “I don’t know.”

There was another cop in the room. A younger guy. Much younger. He looked to be about twelve. Probably just made detective. He had his pad out, his pen at the ready.

Myron turned to Roland Dimonte. Dimonte had his hands on his hips, emanating self-importance from every pore. “What’s this all about?” Myron asked.

“We just want to ask your client a few questions.”

“About what?”

“The murder of Valerie Simpson.”

Myron looked over at Duane. “I don’t know nothing,” Duane said.

Dimonte sat down, making a big production out of it. King Lear. “Then you won’t mind answering a few questions?”

Duane said, “No.” But he didn’t sound very confident about it.

“Where were you when the shooting occurred?”

Duane glanced at Myron. Myron nodded. “I was on Stadium Court.”

“What were you doing?”

“Playing tennis.”

“Who was your opponent?”

Myron nodded. “You’re good, Rolly.”

“Shut the fuck up, Bolitar.”

Duane said, “Ivan Restovich.”

“Did the match continue after the shooting?”

“Yeah. It was match point anyway.”

“Did you hear the gunshot?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“Do?”

“When you heard the shot?”

Duane shrugged. “Nothing. I just stood there until the umpire told us to keep playing.”

“You never left the court?”

“No.”

The young cop kept scribbling, never looking up.

“Then what did you do?” Dimonte asked.

“When?”

“After the match.”

“I did an interview.”

“Who interviewed you?”

“Bud Collins and Tim Mayotte.”

The young cop looked up for a moment, confused.

“Mayotte,” Myron said. “M-A-Y-O-T-T-E.”

He nodded and resumed his scribbling.

“What did you talk about?” Roland asked him.

“Huh?”

“During the interview. What did they ask you about?”

Dimonte shot a challenging glare at Myron. Myron responded with his warmest nod and a pilotlike thumbs up.

“I’m not going to tell you again, Bolitar. Cut the shit.”

“Just admiring your technique.”

“You’ll admire it from a jail cell in a minute.”

“Gasp!”

Another death glare from Roland Dimonte before he turned back to Duane. “Do you know Valerie Simpson?”

“Personally?”

“Yes.”

Duane shook his head. “No.”

“But you’ve met?”

“No.”

“You don’t know her at all?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve never had any contact with her?”

“Never.”

Roland Dimonte crossed his legs, resting his boot on his knee. His fingers caressed—actually caressed—the white-and-purple snakeskin. Like it was a pet dog. “How about you, miss?”

Wanda seemed startled. “Pardon me?”

“Have you ever met Valerie Simpson?”

“No.” Her voice was barely audible.

Dimonte turned back to Duane. “Had you ever heard of Valerie Simpson before today?”

Myron rolled his eyes. But for once he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to push it too far. Dimonte was not as dumb as he appeared. No one was. He was trying to lull Duane before the big whammy. Myron’s job was to disrupt his rhythm with a few choice interruptions. But not too many.

Myron Bolitar, darling of the tightrope.

Duane said with a shrug, “Yeah, I heard of her.”

“In what capacity?”

“She used to be on the circuit. Couple years back, I think.”

“The tennis circuit?”

“No, the nightclub circuit,” Myron interjected. “She used to open for Anthony Newley in Vegas.”

So much for Mr. Restraint.

The glare was back. “Bolitar, you’re really starting to piss me off.”

“Are you going to get to the point already?”

“I take my time with interrogations. I don’t like to rush.”

“Should do the same,” Myron said, “when purchasing footwear.”

Dimonte’s face reddened. Still glaring at Myron, he said, “Mr. Richwood, how long have you been on the circuit?”

“Six months.”

“And in those six months you never saw Valerie Simpson?”

“That’s right.”

“Fine. Now let me see if I got this right: You were playing a match when the gun went off. You finished the match. You shook hands with your opponent. I assume you shook hands with your opponent?”

Duane nodded.

“Then you did an interview.”

“Right.”

“Did you shower before or after the interview?”

Myron held up his hands. “Okay, that’s enough.”

“You got a problem, Bolitar?”

“Yeah. Your questions are beyond idiotic. I’m now advising my client to stop answering them.”

“Why? Your client got something to hide?”

“Yeah, Rolly, you’re too clever for us. Duane killed her. Several million people were watching him on national television during the shooting. Several thousand more were watching him in person. But that wasn’t him playing. It was really his identical twin, lost since birth. You’re just too smart for us, Rolly. We confess.”

“I haven’t ruled that out,” Dimonte countered.

“Haven’t ruled what out?”

“That ‘we’ stuff. Maybe you had something to do with it. You and that psycho-yuppie friend of yours.”

He meant Win. Lot of cops knew Win. None liked him. The feeling was mutual.

“We were in the stadium at the time of the shooting,” Myron said. “A dozen witnesses will back that up. And if you really knew anything about Win, you’d know he’d never use a weapon that close up.”

That made Dimonte hesitate. He nodded. Agreeing, for once.

“Are you through with Mr. Richwood?” Myron asked.

Dimonte suddenly smiled. It was a happy, expectant smile, like a school kid sitting by the radio on a snow day. Myron didn’t like the smile.

“If you’ll just humor me for another moment,” he said with syrupy phoniness. He rose and moved toward his partner, the Pad. The Pad kept scribbling.

“Your client claims he didn’t know Valerie Simpson.”

“So?”

The Pad finally looked up. His eyes were as vacant as a court stenographer’s. Dimonte nodded at him. The Pad handed him a small leather book encased in plastic.

“This is Valerie’s calendar book,” Dimonte said. “The last entry was made yesterday.” His smile widened. His head was held high. His chest puffed out like a rooster about to get laid.

“Okay, poker face,” Myron said. “What’s it say?”

He handed Myron a photocopy. Yesterday’s entry was fairly simple. Sprawled across the entire page it read:

D.R. 555-8705. Call!

555-8705. Duane’s phone number. D.R. Duane Richwood.

Dimonte appeared gleeful.

“I’d like to talk to my client,” Myron said. “Alone.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not going to duck away now that I have you on the ropes.”

“I’m his attorney—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. You take him away, I take him downtown in cuffs.”

“You don’t have anything,” Myron said. “His phone number is in her book. Means nothing.”

Dimonte nodded. “But how would it look? To the press, for example. Or the fans. Duane Richwood, tennis’s newest hero, being dragged into the station with handcuffs on. Bet that would be hard to explain to the sponsors.”

“Are you threatening us?”

Dimonte put his hand to his chest. “Heavens no. Would I do something like that, Krinsky?”

The Pad did not look up. “Nope.”

“There. You see?”

“I’ll sue your ass for wrongful arrest,” Myron said.

“And you might even win, Bolitar. Years from now, when the courts actually hear the case. Lot of good that’s going to do you.”

Dimonte looked a lot less stupid now.

Duane quickly stood and crossed the room. He snapped off the Ray•Bans, then, thinking better of it, put them back on. “Look, man, I don’t know why my number is in her book. I don’t know her. I never spoke to her on the phone.”

“Your phone is unlisted. Is that correct, Mr. Richwood?”

“Yeah.”

“And you just moved in. Your phone’s only been hooked up, what, two weeks?”

Wanda said, “Three.” She was hugging herself now, as though she were cold.

“Three,” Roland Dimonte repeated. “So how did Valerie get your number, Duane? How come some woman you don’t know has your brand-new, unlisted number in her date book?”

“I don’t know.”

Roland skipped skeptical and moved directly to absolute disbelief. For the next hour he continued to hammer Duane, but Duane stuck to his story. He never met her, he said. He didn’t know her. He never spoke to her. He had no idea how she could have gotten his phone number. Myron watched in silence. The sunglasses made it harder to read Duane, but his body language was all wrong. So was Wanda’s.

With an angry sigh Roland Dimonte finally stood up. “Krinsky?”

The Pad looked up.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The Pad closed the pad, joined his partner.

“I’ll be back,” Dimonte barked. Then pointing at no one in particular he added, “You hear me, Bolitar?”

“You’ll be back,” Myron said.

“Count on it, asshole.”

“Aren’t you going to warn us not to leave town? I love it when you cops do that.”

Dimonte made a gun with his hand. He pointed it at Myron and lowered the thumb/hammer. Then he and the Pad disappeared out the door.

For several minutes no one said anything. Myron was about to break the silence when Duane started laughing. “You sure showed him, Myron. Tore him a whole new asshole—”

“Duane, we need—”

“I’m tired, Myron.” He feigned a yawn. “I really need to get some sleep.”

“We need to talk about this.”

“About what?”

Myron looked at him.

Duane said, “Pretty weird coincidence, huh?”

Myron turned toward Wanda. She looked away, still hugging herself. “Duane, if you’re in some kind of trouble—”

“Hey, tell me about the commercial,” Duane interrupted. “How did it come out?”

“Good.”

Duane smiled. “How did I look?”

“Too handsome. I’ll be fighting off the movie offers.”

Duane laughed too hard. Much too hard. Wanda did not laugh. Neither did Myron. Then Duane feigned another yawn, stretched and stood. “I really need to get some rest,” he said. “Big match coming up. Hate to let all this bullshit distract me.”

He showed Myron to the door. Wanda still had not moved from her spot by the kitchen door. She finally met Myron’s eye.

“Good-bye, Myron,” Wanda said.

The door closed. Myron took the elevator back down and walked to his car. A ticket was nestled between the windshield and the wiper. He grabbed it and started the car.

Three blocks away Myron spotted the same powder-blue Cadillac with the canary-yellow top.

4

Yuppieville.

The fourteenth floor of Lock-Horne Investments & Securities reminded Myron of a medieval fortress. There was the vast space in the middle, and a thick, formidable wall—the big producers’ offices—safeguarding the perimeter. The open area housed hundreds of mostly men, young men, combat soldiers easily sacrificed and replaced, a seemingly endless sea of them, bobbing and blending into the corporate-gray carpet, the identical desks, the identical rolling chairs, the computer terminals, the telephones, the fax machines. Like soldiers they wore uniforms—white button-down shirts, suspenders, bright ties strangling carotid arteries, suit jackets draped across the backs of the identical rolling chairs. There were loud noises, screams, rings, even something that sounded like death cries. Everyone was in motion. Everyone was scattering, panicked, under constant attack.

Yes, for here was one of the final strongholds of true yuppieism, a place where man was free to practice the religion of eighties greed, greed at all costs, without pretense of doing otherwise. No hypocrisy here. Investment houses were not about helping the world. They were not about providing a service to mankind or doing what was best for all. This haven had a simple, clear-cut, basic goal. Making money. Period.

Win had a spacious corner office overlooking Park and Fifty-second Street. A prime-time view for the company’s number one producer. Myron knocked on the door.

“Enter,” Win called out.

He was sitting in a full lotus on the floor, his expression serene, his thumbs and forefingers forming circles in each hand. Meditation. Win did it every day without fail. Usually more than once.

But as with most things with Win, his moments of inner solitude were a tad unconventional. For one, he liked to keep his eyes open when meditating, while most practitioners kept them closed. For another, he didn’t imagine idyllic scenes of waterfalls or does in the forest; rather, Win opted for watching home videotapes—videos of himself and an interesting potpourri of lady friends in assorted throes of passion.

Myron made a face. “You mind turning that off?”

“Lisa Goldstein,” Win said, motioning toward a mound of writhing flesh on the screen.

“Charmed, I’m sure.”

“I don’t think you ever met her.”

“Hard to tell,” Myron said. “I mean, I’m not even sure where her face is.”

“Lovely lass. Jewish, you know.”

“Lisa Goldstein? You’re kidding.”

Win smiled. He uncrossed his legs and stood in one fluid motion. He switched off the television, hit the EJECT button, put the tape back in a box marked L.G. He filed the box under the G’s in an oak cabinet. There were a lot of tapes already there.

“You realize,” Myron said, “that you’re quite deranged.”

Win locked the cabinet with a key. Dr. Discretion. “Every man needs a hobby.”

“You’re a scratch golfer. You’re a champion martial artist. Those are hobbies. This is deranged. Hobbies; deranged. See the difference?”

“Moralizing,” Win said. “How nice.”

Myron did not respond. They had been down this road many times since they were freshmen at Duke. It never led anywhere.

Win’s office was pure, elitist WASP. Paintings of a fox hunt adorned paneled walls. Burgundy leather chairs ideally complemented the deep forest-green carpeting. An antique wooden globe stood next to an oak desk that could double as a squash court. The effect—not a subtle one, at that—could be summed up in two words: Serious. Cash.

Myron sat in one of the leather chairs. “You got a minute?”

“Of course.” Win opened a cabinet in the bar behind his desk, revealing a small refrigerator. He took out a cold Yoo-Hoo and tossed it to Myron. Myron shook the can as per the instructions (Shake! It’s Great!) while Win mixed himself a very dry martini.

Myron started off by telling Win about the police visit to Duane Richwood. Win remained impassive, allowing himself a small smile when he heard how Dimonte had called him a psycho-yuppie. Then Myron told him about the powder-blue Cadillac. Win sat back and steepled. He listened without interrupting. When Myron finished, Win rose from his seat and picked up a putter.

“So our friend Mr. Richwood is holding something back.”

“We can’t be sure.”

Win raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Do you have any thoughts as to how Duane Richwood and Valerie Simpson are connected?”

“Nope. I was hoping you might.”

“Moi?”

“You knew her,” Myron said.

“She was an acquaintance.”

“But you have a thought.”

“About a connection between Duane and Valerie? No.”

“Then what?”

Win strolled to a corner. A dozen golf balls were all in a line. He began to putt. “Are you really intent on pursuing this? Valerie’s murder, I mean?”

“Yep.”

“It might be none of your business.”

“Might be,” Myron agreed.

“Or you might unearth something unpleasant. Something you would rather not find.”

“A distinct possibility.”

Win nodded, checked the carpet’s lie. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“No. Not the first time. Are you in?”

“There is nothing in this for us,” Win said.

“Maybe not,” Myron agreed.

“No financial gain.”

“None at all.”

“In fact there is never any profit in your holy crusades.”

Myron waited.

Win lined up another putt. “Stop making that face,” he said. “I’m in.”

“Good. Now tell me what you know about this.”

“Nothing really. It’s just a thought.”

“I’m listening.”

“You know, of course, about Valerie’s breakdown,” Win said.

“Yes.”

“It was six years ago. She was only eighteen. The official word was that she collapsed under the pressure.”

“The official word?”

“It may be the truth. The pressure on her was indeed awesome. Her rise had been nothing short of meteoric—but nowhere near as meteoric as the tennis world’s expectations of her. Her subsequent fall—at least, up until the time of the breakdown—was slow and painful. Not at all like yours. Your fall, if you don’t mind me using that word, was far swifter. Guillotinelike. One minute you were the Celtics’ number one draft pick. The next minute you were finished. The end. But unlike Valerie, you had a freak injury and were thereby blameless. You were pitied. You cut a sympathetic figure. Valerie’s demise, on the other hand, seemed to be of her own doing. She was a failure, ridiculed, but still no more than a child. To the world at large, the fickle finger of fate had ended the career of Myron Bolitar. But in the case of Valerie Simpson, she alone was culpable. In the eyes of the public she did not possess enough mental fortitude. Her fall, thus, was slow, torturous, brutal.”

“So what does this have to do with the murder?”

“Perhaps nothing. But I always found the circumstances surrounding Valerie’s mental collapse a bit disturbing.”

“Why?”

“Her game had slipped, that much was true. Her coach—that famous gentleman who plays with all the celebrities …”

“Pavel Menansi.”

“Whatever. He still believed Valerie could come back and win again. He said it all the time.”

“Thereby putting more pressure on her.”

Win hesitated. “Perhaps,” he said slowly. “But there is another factor. Do you remember the murder of Alexander Cross?”

“The senator’s son?”

“The senator from Pennsylvania,” Win added.

“He was killed by robbers at his country club. Five, six years ago.”

“Six. And it was a tennis club.”

“You knew him?”

“Of course,” Win said. “The Hornes have known every important Pennsylvania politician since William Penn. I grew up with Alexander Cross. We went to Exeter together.”

“So what does he have to do with Valerie Simpson?”

“Alexander and Valerie were, shall we say, an item.”

“A serious item?”

“Quite. They were about to announce their engagement when Alexander was killed. That night, as a matter of fact.”

Myron did some quick mathematics in his head. Six years ago. Valerie would have been eighteen. “Let me guess. Valerie’s breakdown took place right after his murder.”

“Precisely.”

“But I don’t get something. The Cross murder was on the news every day for weeks. How come I never heard Valerie’s name mentioned?”

“That,” Win said, nailing another putt, “is why I find the circumstances disturbing.”

Silence.

“We need to talk to Valerie’s family,” Myron said. “Maybe the senator’s as well.”

“Yes.”

“You live in that world. You’re one of them. They’d be more apt to talk to you.”

Win shook his head. “They’ll never talk to me. Being ‘one of them,’ as you put it, is a severe handicap. Their guard will be up with someone like me. But with you they won’t be so concerned about facades. They’ll perceive you as someone who doesn’t matter, as someone inferior, as someone beneath them. A nobody.”

“Gee, that’s flattering.”

Win smiled. “The way of the world, my friend. Many things change, but these people still consider themselves the true, original Americans. You and your kind are just hired help, shipped in from Russia or Eastern Europe or from whatever gulag or ghetto your people originated.”

“I hope they don’t hurt my feelings,” Myron said.

“I’ll arrange a meeting for you with Valerie’s mother for tomorrow morning.”

“You think she’ll see me?”

“If I request it, yes.”

“Groovy.”

“Indeed.” Win put down his putter. “In the meantime what do you suggest we do?”

Myron checked his watch. “One of Pavel Menansi’s protégées is playing on Stadium Court in about an hour. I figured I’d pay him a visit.”

“And pour moi?”

“Valerie spent the past week at the Plaza Hotel,” Myron said. “I’d like you to look around, see if anybody remembers anything. Check her phone calls.”

“See if she did indeed call Duane Richwood?”

“Yes.”

“And if she did?”

“Then we have to look into that too,” Myron said.

5

The U.S.T.A. National Tennis Center is neatly snuggled into the bosom of Queens’ top attractions: Shea Stadium (home of the New York Mets), Flushing Meadows Park (home of the 1964–65 World’s Fair) and La Guardia Airport (home of, uh, delays).

Players used to complain about the La Guardia planes flying overhead, for the very simple reason that it made Stadium Court sound like a launch pad during an Apollo liftoff. Then-mayor David Dinkins, never one to let a terrible injustice go unheeded, immediately sprang into action. Using all his political might, the former mayor of New York City—who in a fascinating and almost eerie coincidence was also an enormous tennis fan—had La Guardia’s offending runway halt operations for the duration of the Open. Tennis millionaires were grateful. In a show of mutual respect and admiration Mayor David Dinkins returned their gratitude by showing up at the matches every day for the two weeks of play, except—in yet another eerie coincidence—during election years.

Only two courts were used for the night sessions: Stadium Court and the adjacent Grandstand Court. The day sessions, Myron thought, were much more fun. Fifteen or sixteen matches might be going on at the same time. You could cruise around, catch a great five-set match on some obscure court, discover an up-and-coming player, see singles, doubles, and mixed doubles matches all in the glorious sunshine. But at night you basically sat in one seat and watched a match under lights. During the Open’s first couple of days this match usually featured a top-seed mercilessly decapitating a qualifier.

Myron parked in the Shea Stadium lot and crossed the walking bridge over the No. 7 train. Someone had set up a booth with a radar gun where spectators could measure the speed of their own serve. Business was brisk. Ticket scalpers were also busy. So were the guys selling knockoff U.S. Open T-shirts. The knockoff T-shirts sold for five dollars, as opposed to the ones inside the gates that went for twenty-five dollars. Not a bad deal on the surface. Of course, after one wash the knockoff T-shirt could only be worn by a Barbie doll. But still.

Pavel Menansi was in one of the players’ boxes, the same one Myron and Win had sat in earlier in the day. It was 6:45 P.M. The final day match was over. The first night match, featuring Pavel’s latest protégée, fourteen-year old Janet Koffman, would not begin until 7:15 P.M. People were milling around during the day-to-night cusp. Myron spotted the usher from the day session.

“How ya doing, Mr. Bolitar?” the usher said.

“Fine, Bill. Just wanted to say a quick hello to a friend.”

“Sure, no prob, go right ahead.”

Myron headed down the steps. Without warning a man wearing a blue blazer and aviator sunglasses stepped in front of him. He was a big guy—six-four, two-twenty—just about Myron’s size. His neatly combed hair sat above a pleasant though unyielding face. He expanded his chest into a paddleball wall, blocking Myron’s path.

His voice said, “Can I help you, sir?” But his tone said, Take a hike, bub.

Myron looked at him. “Anyone ever tell you you look like Jack Lord?”

No reaction.

“You know,” Myron said. “Jack Lord? Hawaii Five-O?”

“I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir.”

“It’s not an insult. Many people find Jack Lord very attractive.”

“Sir, this is the last time I’m going to ask nicely.”

Myron studied his face. “You even have that Jack Lord surly grin. Remember it?” Myron imitated the grin for him, in case he’d never seen the show.

The face twitched. “Okay, buddy, you’re out of here.”

“I just want to speak to Mr. Menansi for a moment.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible at this time.”

“Oh, okay.” He spoke a little louder. “Just tell Mr. Menansi that Duane Richwood’s agent wanted to discuss something very important with him. But if he’s not interested I’ll go elsewhere.”

Pavel Menansi’s head jerked around as though pulled by a string. His smile flicked on like a cigarette lighter. He rose, his eyes half open, his whole persona oozing that foreign charm that some women find irresistible and others find nauseating beyond words. Pavel was Romanian, one of tennis’s original Bad Boys, the former doubles partner of Ilie “Nasty” Nastase. He was nearing fifty, his face tanned to the point of leathery. When he smiled, the leather cracked almost audibly.

“Pardon me,” he said. His voice was smooth—part Romanian, part American, part Ricardo Montalban discussing Corinthian leather. “You are Myron Bolitar, are you not?”

“I am.”

He dismissed Jack Lord with a nod. Big Jack was not happy about it, but he moved out of the way. His body swung to the side like a metal gate, allowing only Myron to enter. Pavel Menansi held out a hand. For a moment Myron thought he wanted him to kiss it, but it ended in a brief handshake.

“Please,” Pavel said. “Sit here. Next to me.”

Whoever was in the seat quickly made himself scarce. Myron sat. Pavel did likewise. “I apologize for my guard’s zeal, but you must understand. People, they want autographs. Parents, they want to discuss their child’s play. But here”—he spread his hands—“this is not the time or place.”

“I understand,” Myron said.

“I’ve heard quite a bit about you, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Please call me Myron.”

Pavel had the smile of a lifelong smoker, sans proper dental hygiene. “Only if you call me Pavel.”

“Deal.”

“Fine then. You discovered Duane Richwood, did you not?”

“Somebody pointed him out to me.”

“But you saw the potential first,” Pavel insisted. “He never played in the juniors, never went to college. That’s why all the big agencies missed him, am I right?”

“I guess so.”

“So now you have a top tennis contender. You are now competing with the big boys, yes?”

Myron knew that Pavel Menansi worked with TruPro, one of the country’s largest sports agencies. Working with TruPro didn’t automatically make you a sleazeball, but it brought you awfully close. Pavel was worth millions to them—not because of what he made as much as the young talent he brought in. Pavel got a Svengali-like hold on prodigies at the age of eight or ten, giving TruPro a hell of an advantage in getting them signed. TruPro had never been a reputable agency—almost a contradiction in terms anyway—but over the last year it had become mob-controlled, run by the appropriately named Ache brothers of New York City. The Ache brothers were into all the top mob favorites: drugs, numbers, prostitution, extortion, gambling. Sweethearts, those Aches.

“Your Duane Richwood,” Pavel continued. “He played a fine match today. Fine match indeed. His potential is quite limitless. You agree?”

“He works very hard,” Myron said.

“I’m sure he does. Tell me, Myron, who is Duane’s present coach?” He said present, but it came out more like former.

“Henry Hobson.”

“Ah.” Pavel nodded with vigor, as though this response explained something very complex. He, of course, already knew who coached Duane. Pavel probably knew who coached every player on the circuit. “Henry Hobson is a fine man. A competent coach.” He said competent, but it came out more like crappy.

“But I believe I can help him, Myron.”

“I’m not here to talk about Duane,” Myron said.

A shadow crossed his face. “Oh?”

“I want to discuss another client. Or should I say a once-potential client.”

“And who would that be?”

“Valerie Simpson.”

Myron looked for a reaction. He got one. Pavel lowered his head into his hands. “Oh, my God.”

The box rumbled with overwrought concern. Comforting hands found their way to Pavel’s shoulders, uttering his name in low voices. But Pavel pushed them away. Very brave.

“Valerie came to me a few days ago,” Myron continued. “She wanted to make a comeback.”

Pavel took a deep breath. He made a show of putting himself together a piece at a time. When he was able to continue, he said, “The poor child. I can’t believe it. I just can’t.…” He stopped. Overwhelmed again. Then: “I was her coach, you know. During her glory years.”

Myron nodded.

“To be shot down like that. Like a dog.” He shook his head dramatically.

“When was the last time you saw Valerie?”

“Several years ago,” he said.

“Have you seen her since the breakdown?”

“No. Not since she went into the hospital.”

“Spoken to her? On the phone maybe?”

Pavel shook his head again. Then he lowered it. “I blame myself for what happened to her. I should have looked out for her better.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you coach one so young, you have responsibilities that go beyond her life on the court. She was a child—a child growing up in the spotlight. The media, they are savages, no? They don’t understand what they do to sell papers. I tried to cushion some of their blows. I tried to protect her, to not let it eat her up inside. In the end, I failed.”

He sounded genuine, but Myron knew that meant nothing. People were amazing liars. The more sincere they sounded—the more they held your gaze and looked truthful—the more sociopathic they were. “Do you have any idea who would have wanted her dead?”

He looked puzzled by the question. “Why are you asking these questions, Myron?”

“I’m looking into something.”

“Into what? If I may ask.”

“It’s kind of personal.”

He studied Myron for a few seconds. The stench of tobacco was heavy on his breath. Myron was forced to inhale through his mouth. “I will tell you the same thing I told the police,” Pavel said. “In my opinion Valerie’s breakdown was not just from the usual tennis pressures.”

Myron nodded, encouraging him to continue.

Pavel turned his palms toward the sky, as though seeking divine intervention. “Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I want to believe that to—how do you say?—soothe my own guilt. I don’t know anymore. But I’ve had a lot of young people in my camp and never have I experienced anything like what happened to Valerie. No, Myron, her problems were caused by more than the pressures of big-time tennis.”

“What then?”

“I’m not a medical doctor, you understand. I cannot say for sure. But you must remember that Valerie was being menaced.”

Myron waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, Myron said, “Menaced?” Probing interrogatories—one of Myron’s strong suits.

“Stalked,” he said with a finger snap. “That’s the word they use nowadays. Valerie was being stalked.”

“By whom?”

“A very sick man, Myron. A terrible man. After all these years I still remember his name. Roger Quincy. Crazy animal. He wrote her love letters. He called all the time. He hung around her house, by her hotel, at every match she played.”

“When was this?”

“When she was on the tour, of course. It began—I don’t know—six months before she was hospitalized.”

“Did you try to stop him?”

“Of course. We went to the police. They could do nothing. We tried to get a court order, but this Quincy never actually threatened her. He would say ‘I love you, I want to be with you,’ things like that. We did our best. We changed hotels, signed in under different aliases. But you have to remember, Valerie was just a child. She became paranoid. The pressure on her was already tremendous. But now she had to look over her shoulder all the time. This Roger Quincy, he was a crazy beast. That’s what he was. He was the one who should have been gunned down.”

Myron nodded, waiting a beat. “How did Alexander Cross react to Roger Quincy?”

The question stunned Pavel like a surprise left hook. Lennox Lewis vs. Frank Bruno. He hesitated, trying to regain his footing. The players came out of the tunnel. Applause began to build. The distraction worked like a standing eight count, giving Pavel time to recover.

“Why would you ask that?” he asked.

“Weren’t Alexander Cross and Valerie Simpson involved?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Seriously?”

“She was away a lot. Traveling. But they seemed fond of each other.”

“And I assume their relationship was going on at the same time Quincy was stalking Valerie?”

“I believe the time periods overlapped, yes.”

“So it’s a natural question,” Myron said. “How did Valerie’s boyfriend react?”

“Natural, perhaps,” he said. “But you must admit it is also a bizarre question. Alexander Cross has been dead for several years now. How is his reaction relevant to what happened to Valerie today?”

“For one, they were both murdered.”

“You’re not suggesting a connection?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Myron said. “But I don’t understand why you don’t want to answer my question.”

“It’s not a matter of wanting or not wanting,” Pavel replied. “It’s a matter of doing what is right. You are delving into places where you do not belong. Personal places. Places that cannot possibly have any relevance in today’s world. I feel like I am betraying confidences. You see?”

“No.”

Pavel looked back at Jack Lord. Jack’s mouth twitched. He stood again. The chest self-inflated.

“The match is about to begin,” Pavel said. “I hate to be rude, but I really must ask you to leave now.”

“Hit a raw nerve, did I?”

“Yes. I cared for Valerie very deeply.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Please leave. I must concentrate on this match.”

Myron did not move. Jack Lord put a big mitt on Myron’s shoulder. “You heard the man,” he said. “Move out.”

“Let go of my shoulder,” Myron said.

Jack shook his head. “No more games, pal. It’s time for you to get lost.”

“If you don’t move your hand,” Myron explained calmly, “I’ll hurt you. Maybe severely.”

From behind his sunglasses Big Jack finally smiled. His grip on Myron’s shoulder tightened. Myron quickly reached up with his right hand and grabbed the man’s thumb. He locked the joint and pulled it back the wrong way. Jack dropped to one knee.

Myron lowered his mouth toward Jack’s ear. “I don’t want to make a scene, so I’m going to let you go,” he whispered. “If you do anything but smile I will hurt you. Definitely severely. Nod if you understand.”

He nodded, his face pale.

Myron let the thumb go. “Later, Pavel.”

Pavel said nothing.

Myron walked past Jack. As ordered, Jack was smiling.

“Book ’em, Dann-o,” Myron said.

6

A stalker.

Could it be that simple? Could some deranged fan have put a bullet into Valerie Simpson because a voice told him to? Doesn’t explain Duane Richwood’s connection. But maybe there was no connection. Or maybe the connection had nothing to do with the murder and, more important, was none of Myron’s business.

Myron turned onto Hobart Gap Road. He was only a mile from his home in Livingston, New Jersey. The powder-blue Caddy with the canary-yellow roof finally turned off, jumping on the JFK Parkway. Whoever it was must have figured Myron was going home for the night, and hence there was no reason to keep the tail. But if the Caddy was around tomorrow, Myron would have to take care of it—unmask the true identity of Mr. Miami Gin Tournament.

Right now he needed to concentrate on this whole stalker possibility.

If Valerie had been killed by Roger Quincy, then why had ol’ Pavel gotten so antsy when Myron mentioned Alexander Cross? Or was it just like Pavel said—he didn’t want to betray confidences? When you thought about it, wasn’t it a hell of a lot more probable that Pavel just felt it was in his best interest to keep quiet? Senator Cross was an awfully powerful man. Spreading stories about his murdered son wasn’t necessarily the wisest course of action. So there could be nothing there. Then again it could be something big. Or something small.

Thoughts like these are what made Myron a brilliant detective.

He parked in the driveway. His mom’s car was in the garage. His dad’s was nowhere in sight. He opened the door with his key.

“Myron?”

Myron. God, what a name. You’d think he’d be used to it by now, but occasionally the horror hit him anew. He had been dubbed Myron. A last-second decision, his parents claimed. Something Mom came up with at the hospital. But to name a kid Myron Bolitar? Was that fair? Was that ethical?

As a youngster Myron tried giving himself nicknames: Mike, Mickey, even Sweet J, for his famous jumpshot. Okay, maybe it was a good thing that Sweet J didn’t stick. But still.

Warning to parents naming children: Let’s be careful out there.

His mother called out, “Myron? Is that you?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“I’m in the den.” She was wearing an exercise outfit, watching some kind of workout tape. She stood on one leg, crane stance à la The Karate Kid. On the television a familiar voice crooned, “Now flow-step to the left.…”

David Carradine’s T’ai Chi Workout. Wonderful.

“Hi, Mom.”

“You’re late,” she said.

“I didn’t realize I had a curfew.”

“You said you’d be home by seven. It’s past nine.”

“Your point being?”

“I was worried. I saw on the news about that girl getting shot at the Open. How did I know you weren’t killed?”

Myron held back a sigh. “Did the news say I was killed? Did the news say anything about unidentified bodies? Or did they say only one girl named Valerie Simpson was shot?”

“They could have been lying.”

“Excuse me?”

“Happens all the time. The police lie to the reporters until they notify the next of kin.”

“Weren’t you home all day?”

“What, the police have my phone number?”

“But they could …” He stopped. What was the point? “Next time a murder takes place within a three-mile radius of my being I’ll be sure to call home.”

“Good.” She snapped off the tape. Then she placed a pillow in a corner and stood on her head.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“What are you doing?”

“What’s it look like? I’m standing on my head. It’s good exercise. Makes the blood flow. Makes me look my best. You know who used to stand on his head every day?”

Myron shook his head.

“David Ben-Gurion.”

“And everyone knows what a looker he was,” Myron said.

“Smart-mouth.”

Mom was a major paradox. On the one hand she’d been a practicing attorney for the past twenty years. She was the first generation born in the United States, her parents coming over from Minsk or somewhere like that, living lives that as near as Myron could tell paralleled Fiddler on the Roof. She became a sixties radical, an original bra burner, and experimented with various mind-altering drugs (hence naming a child Myron). She did not cook. Ever. She had no idea where the vacuum cleaner was stored. She did not know what an iron looked like, never mind whether or not she owned one. In the courtroom her crosses were legendary. She breakfasted on star witnesses. She was bright, frighteningly shrewd, and very modern.

On the other hand, all of this went out the window when it came to her son. She completely decompensated. She became her mother. And her mother before her. Only worse. Murphy Brown became Grandma Tzietl.

“Your father is picking up some Chinese food. I ordered enough for you.”

“I’m not hungry, thanks.”

“Spareribs, Myron. Sesame chicken.” Meaningful pause. “Shrimp with lobster sauce.”

“I’m really not hungry.”

“Shrimp with lobster sauce,” she repeated.

“Mom …”

“From Fong’s Dragon House.”

“No thanks.”

“What? You love Fong’s shrimp in lobster sauce. You’re crazy about it.”

“Maybe a little then.” Easier.

She was still standing on her head. She began to whistle. Very casuallike. “So,” she said in that strain-to-sound-aloof voice, “how’s Jessica?”

“Butt out, Mom.”

“Who’s butting? I just asked a simple question.”

“And I gave you a simple answer. Butt out.”

“Fine. But don’t go crying to me if something goes wrong.”

Like that happens.

“Why has she been away so long anyway? What’s she doing over there?”

“Thanks for butting out.”

“I’m concerned,” Mom said. “I just hope she’s not up to something.”

“Butt out.”

“Is that all you can say? Butt out? What are you, a parrot? Where is she anyway?”

Myron opened his mouth, wrestled it closed, and stormed into the basement. His dwelling. He was almost thirty-two years old and still lived at home. He hadn’t been here much the past few months. Most nights he’d spent at Jessica’s place in the city. They had even talked about moving in together but decided to take it slow. Very slow. Easier said than done. The heart don’t know from slow. At least Myron’s didn’t. As usual Mom had drilled into exposed nerve endings. Jessica was in Europe right now, but Myron had no idea where. He hadn’t heard from her in two weeks. He missed her. And he was wondering too.

The doorbell rang.

“Your father,” Mom called down. “Probably forgot his key again. I swear that man is getting senile.”

A few seconds later he heard the basement door open. His mother’s feet appeared. Then the rest of her. She beckoned him forward.

“What?”

“There’s a young lady here to see you,” she said. Then in a whisper, “She’s black.”

“Gasp!” Myron put his hand to his heart. “Hope the neighbors don’t call the police.”

“That’s not what I meant, smart-mouth, and you know it. We have black families in the neighborhood now. The Wilsons. Lovely people. They live on Coventry Drive. In the old Dechtman home.”

“I know, Mom.”

“I was just describing her for you. Like I might say she has blond hair. Or a nice smile. Or a harelip.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Or limp. Or she’s tall. Or short. Or fat. Or—”

“I think I get the drift, Mom. Did you ask her name?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t want to pry.”

Right.

Myron headed up the stairs. It was Wanda, Duane’s girlfriend. For some reason Myron was not surprised. She smiled nervously, waved quickly.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at home,” she said.

“No problem. Please come in.”

They headed down to the basement. Myron had subdivided it into two rooms. One, a small sitting room he basically never used. Hence it was presentable and clean. The inside room, his living quarters, resembled a frat house after a major kegger.

Wanda’s eyes darted around again, like they had when Dimonte had been at the apartment. “You live down here?”

“Only since I was sixteen.”

“I think that’s sweet. Living with your parents.”

From upstairs: “If only you knew.”

“Close the door, Mom.”

Slam.

“Please,” Myron said. “Sit down.”

Wanda looked unsure but finally settled into a chair. She was wringing her hands nonstop. “I feel a little foolish,” she said.

Myron gave her an understanding, encouraging smile—the Phil Donahue smile. Caller, are you there?

“Duane likes you,” she said. “A lot.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“The other agents, they call Duane all the time. All the big ones. They keep saying how you’re too small-time to represent Duane. They keep saying they can help him make a lot more money.”

“They might be right,” Myron said.

She shook her head. “Duane doesn’t think so. I don’t think so either.”

“That’s nice of you to say.”

“You know why Duane won’t meet with those other agents?”

“Because he doesn’t want to see me weep?”

She smiled at that one. The Master of Levity strikes again. Señor Self-Deprecation. “No,” she said. “Duane trusts you.”

“I’m glad.”

“You’re not just in it for the money.”

“That’s nice of you to say, Wanda, but Duane is making me a lot of money. There’s no denying that.”

“I know,” she said. “I don’t want to sound naive here, but you put him first. Before the money. You look out for Duane Richwood the human being. You care about him.”

Myron said nothing.

“Duane doesn’t have many people,” she continued. “He doesn’t have any family. He lived on the streets since he was fifteen, scraping by. He wasn’t an angel that whole time. He did some things he’d rather forget. But he never hurt anybody, never did anything serious. His whole life he never had anyone he could rely on. He had to take care of himself.”

Silence.

“Does Duane know you’re here?” Myron asked.

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He just took off. He does that sometimes.”

More silence.

“So anyway, like I said, Duane doesn’t have anybody else. He trusts you. He trusts Win, too, but only because he’s your best friend.”

“Wanda, what you’re saying is very nice, but I’m hardly driven by altruism. I’m well paid for what I do.”

“But you care.”

“Henry Hobson cares.”

“Maybe. But his wagon is hitched to Duane’s star. Duane is his ticket back to the bigs.”

“Many would say the same for me,” Myron countered. “Except that part about ‘back,’ since I’ve never been to the bigs. Duane’s my only big tennis player. In fact Duane is the only player I’ve got in the U.S. Open.”

She considered this for a moment, nodding. “Maybe that’s all true,” she said. “But when push came to shove—when trouble hit today—Duane came to you. And when push came to shove for me tonight, I came to you too. That’s the bottom line.”

The basement door opened.

“Would you kids like something to drink?”

“Got any Kool-Aid, Mom?”

Wanda laughed.

“Listen, smart-mouth, maybe your company is hungry.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Bolitar,” Wanda shouted up.

“You sure, hon? Coffee maybe? A Coke?”

“Nothing, really, thank you.”

“How about some Danish? I just bought some fresh at the Swiss House. Myron’s favorite.”

“Mom …”

“Okay, okay, I can take a hint.”

Right. The Mistress of the Subtle Signal. The basement door closed.

“She’s sweet,” Wanda said.

“Yeah, adorable.” Myron leaned forward. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”

She started wringing her hands again. “I’m worried about Duane.”

“If it’s about Dimonte’s visit, don’t let him get to you. Being a horse’s ass is part of his job.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “Duane wouldn’t hurt anybody. I know that. But something isn’t right with him. He’s tense all the time. He paces around the apartment. He flies off the handle at the littlest things.”

“He’s under a lot of pressure right now. It could just be nerves.”

She shook her head. “Duane thrives on pressure. He loves competing, you know that. But the last day or two it’s different. Something is really bothering him.”

“Any idea what?”

“No.”

Myron leaned forward. “Let me ask you the obvious question: Did Duane get a call from Valerie Simpson?”

She thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”

“Does he know her?”

“I don’t know that either. But I know Duane. We’ve been together for three years, since we were both eighteen. He was still on the streets when we met. My father freaked out when he heard. He’s a chiropractor. He makes a good living, worked hard to keep the bad element away from us. And here I was, dating a street kid, a runaway.”

She chuckled at the memory. Myron sat and waited.

“No one thought it would last,” she continued. “I left college and got a job so he could pursue tennis. Now he’s putting me through NYU. We love each other. We loved each other before all this tennis stuff started and we’ll love each other long after he puts down the racket for good. But for the first time he’s shutting me out.”

“And you think Valerie Simpson is somehow connected?”

She hesitated. “I guess I do.”

“How?”

“I have no idea.”

“What do you want me to do?”

She stood, paced in the small room. “I heard those policemen talking. They said you used to be a big deal with the government. You and Win. Something secretive with the FBI—after you recovered from the knee injury. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“I thought maybe you could, I don’t know, look into it?”

“You want me to investigate Duane?”

“He’s hiding something, Myron. It has to come out.”

“You might not like what I find,” he said, echoing Win’s earlier words.

“I’m more afraid of going on like this.” Wanda looked up at him. “Will you help him?”

He nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

7

The phone rang.

Myron reached out blindly, swimming back to consciousness. He grabbed the receiver and croaked, “Hello?”

“Is this the Rent-a-Stud hotline?”

Her voice hit him like a jolt. “Jess?”

“Oh shit,” Jessica said. “You were sleeping, right?”

“Sleeping?” Myron squinted at his digital. “At four-thirteen in the morning? Captain Midnight? Surely you jest.”

“Sorry. I forgot about the time difference.”

He sat up. “Where are you?”

“Greece,” she said. “I miss you.”

“You’re just horny.”

“Well, there’s that.”

“Captain Midnight is willing to help,” he said.

“My fearless hero. I suppose you’re not even a little horny.”

“Captain Midnight lives chastely.”

“Part of his image?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“It’s no fun,” she said. “Being away from you.”

His heart soared. “So come home.”

“I am.”

“When?”

“Soon.” Jessica Culver, Miss Specific USA. “Tell me what’s been going on,” she said.

“You hear about the shooting at the Open?”

“Sure. The hotel has CNN.”

Myron told her about Valerie Simpson. When he finished, her first comment was, “You didn’t have to bend that clod’s thumb back.”

“But it was all very macho,” Myron said.

“A real turn-on, I’m sure.”

“Guess you had to be there,” he said.

“Guess so. So are you going to find the killer?”

“I’m going to try.”

“For Valerie’s sake? Or for Wanda and Duane?”

“For all of them, I guess. But mostly Valerie. You should have seen her, Jess. She tried so hard to be sullen and unpleasant. A girl that young shouldn’t have to try that hard.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Of course. First, I’m going to visit Valerie’s mother tomorrow morning. In Philadelphia.”

“And then?”

“Well, the plan isn’t really that well developed. But I’m working on it.”

“Please be careful.”

“Captain Midnight is always careful.”

“It’s not just Captain Midnight I’m worried about it. It’s his alter ego.”

“And who might that be?”

“My Love Muffin.”

Myron grinned into the receiver. “Hey, Jess, did you know Joan Collins was on Batman?”

“Of course,” Jessica said. “She played the Siren.”

“Oh yeah? Well, who did Liberace play?”

8

Myron spent the rest of the night dreaming about Jessica, though as usual he could only remember meaningless scraps in the morning. Jessica was in his life again, but it was still new to him. Too new. He needed to hold back, to tread gently. He was afraid of being crushed under her heel again, of having his heart slammed in the door of love.

Door of love. Christ. He sounded like a bad country song.

He motored south on the famed New Jersey Turnpike. The powder-blue Cadillac with the canary-yellow top was four cars behind him. More than anything else, this stretch of roadway had made New Jersey the butt of so many jokes. He passed Newark Airport. Kind of ugly, but what airport isn’t? Then he drove by the turnpike’s pièce de résistance, its cause célèbre if you will—an enormous industrial power plant between exits 12 and 13 that closely resembled the futuristic nightmare world in the beginning of the Terminator movies. Thick smoke sprung from every orifice. Even in the bright sunshine the place looked dark, metallic, menacing, foreboding.

On the radio a rock group called the Motels were repeatedly singing the ingenious line Take the L out of lover, and it’s over. Deep. Literal, but still deep. The Motels. Whatever happened to them?

Myron picked up the cellular phone and dialed. A familiar voice answered.

“Sheriff Courter speaking.”

“Hey, Jake, it’s Myron.”

“I’m sorry. You must have the wrong number. Bye.”

“Good one,” Myron said. “Guess those night-school comedy courses are finally starting to pay off.”

“What do you want, Myron?”

“Can’t a friend just call and say hello?”

“So this is just a social call?” Jake said.

“Yes.”

“I feel so blessed.”

“Wait. It gets better. I’m going to be in your neck of the woods in a couple of hours.”

“Be still my heart.”

“I thought maybe we could meet for lunch. I’m buying.”

“Uh-huh. You bringing Win?”

“No.”

“Then okay. Guy gives me the creeps.”

“You don’t even know him.”

“Cool by me. Now what do you want, Myron? This may be a surprise to you, but I work for a living.”

“You still have friends on the Philadelphia force?”

“Sure.”

“Can you get someone to fax you a homicide file?”

“Recent homicide?”

“Er, not exactly.”

“How old?”

“Six years,” Myron said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“It gets worse. The victim was Alexander Cross.”

“The senator’s kid?”

“Right.”

“What the hell do you want that for?”

“I’ll tell you about it when I get there.”

“Someone is going to want to know why.”

“Make something up.”

Jake chewed on something that sounded like tree bark. “Yeah, all right. What time will you be here?”

“Probably around one. I’ll call you.”

“You’re going to owe me, Myron. Owe me big.”

“Didn’t I mention I was buying lunch?”

Jake hung up.

Myron headed off at exit 6. The toll was almost four dollars. He was tempted to pay the Caddy’s toll, but four dollars was a bit steep for the gesture. Myron handed the clerk the money. “I only wanted to drive on the road,” Myron said. “Not buy it.”

Not even a sympathetic smile. Complaining about toll prices. One of those signs you’re becoming your father. Next thing you know Myron’d be screaming at someone for turning up the thermostat.

Altogether the trip to Philadelphia’s wealthiest suburb took two hours. Gladwynne was old money. Plymouth Rock old money. Bloodlines were as important as credit lines. The house Valerie Simpson had grown up in was Gatsby-esque with signs of fray. The lawn was not quite manicured. The shrubbery was slightly overgrown. The paint was chipped in certain places. The ivy crawling along the walls seemed a tad too thick.

Still, the estate was huge. Myron parked so far away he almost waited for shuttle service. As he approached the front door Detectives Dimonte and Krinsky came out. In a major shock, Dimonte did not appear happy to see him. He put his hands on his hips. Important, impatient.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he barked.

“Do you know what happened to the Motels?” Myron asked.

“The what?”

Myron shook his head. “How quickly they forget.”

“Goddamn it, Bolitar, I asked you a question. What do you want here?”

“You left your underpants at my house last night,” Myron said. “Jockey shorts. Size thirty-eight. Little bunny design.”

Dimonte’s face grew red. Most cops were homophobes. Best way to needle them was to play on it. “You better not be playing fucking Hardy Boys with my case, asshole. You and your pal Psycho-yuppie.”

Krinsky laughed at that one. Psycho-yuppie. When ol’ Rolly got hold of a good one he didn’t let it go.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dimonte continued. “The case is just about wrapped up.”

“And I’ll be able to say I knew you when.”

“You’ll be happy to know your client is no longer my main suspect.”

Myron nodded. “Roger Quincy the stalker is.”

That didn’t please Dimonte. “How the fuck do you know about that?”

“I am all-seeing, all-knowing.”

“Doesn’t mean your boy is fully in the clear. He’s still lying about something. You know it. I know it. Krinsky here knows it.”

Krinsky sort of nodded. Mr. Sidekick.

“But now we just figure your boy was porking her. You know, on the side.”

“You have any evidence?”

“Don’t need none. Don’t give a shit. I want her killer, not her porker.”

“Poetically put, Rolly.”

“Ah screw it, I don’t have time for your wit.”

As they passed, Myron gave a little wave. “Nice talking to you, Krinsky.”

Krinsky nodded.

Myron rang the doorbell. It rang dramatically. Sounded like an orchestra. Tchaikovsky maybe. Maybe not. A man of about thirty came to the door. He was dressed in a pink oxford shirt open at the neck. Ralph Lauren. Big dimple on chin. Hair so black it was almost blue, like Superman’s.

He looked at Myron like he was a vagrant urinating on the steps. “Yes?”

“I’m here to see Mrs. Van Slyke.” Valerie’s mother had remarried.

“Now is not a good time,” he said.

“I have an appointment.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” he said in that haughty, Win-like accent. “Now is not a good time.”

“Please tell Mrs. Van Slyke that Myron Bolitar is here,” Myron persisted. “She is expecting me. Windsor Lockwood spoke with her last night.”

“Mrs. Van Slyke isn’t seeing anybody today. Her daughter was murdered yesterday.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then you’ll understand—”

“Kenneth?”

A woman’s voice.

“It’s okay, Helen,” the man said. “I’m handling the situation.”

“Who is it, Kenneth?”

“No one.”

Myron said, “Myron Bolitar.”

Kenneth shot Myron a look. Myron held back the temptation to stick out his tongue. It wasn’t easy.

She appeared in the foyer. All in black. Her eyes were red with equally red rims. She was an attractive woman, though Myron ventured to guess she was probably a lot more attractive twenty-four hours ago. Late forties. Blond hair, softly colored. Nicely coiffed. Not too bleachy.

“Please come in, Mr. Bolitar.”

Kenneth said, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Helen.”

“It’s okay, Kenneth.”

“You need your rest.”

She took Myron’s arm. “Please forgive my husband, Mr. Bolitar. He is just trying to protect me.”

Husband? Did she say husband?

“Please follow me.”

She led him into a room slightly larger than the Acropolis. Over the fireplace hung a gigantic portrait of a man with long sideburns and a walrus mustache. Kinda scary. The room was lit by a half dozen of those fixtures that look like candles. The furniture, while old-world tasteful, seemed a tad too worn. There wasn’t a silver tea set, but there should have been. Myron sat in an antique chair about as comfortable as an iron lung. Kenneth kept his eye on Myron. Making sure he didn’t pocket an ashtray or something.

Helen sat on the couch across from him. Kenneth stood behind her, hands on her shoulders. Would have made a nice photograph. Very regal. A little girl, no more than three or four, toddled into the room. “This is Cassie,” Helen Van Slyke said. “Valerie’s sister.”

Myron smiled widely and leaned toward the little girl. “Hello, Cassie.”

The little girl responded by bawling like she’d just been stabbed.

Helen Van Slyke comforted her daughter, and after a few more wails Cassie stopped. She peeked out behind balled-up fists every once in a while to study Myron. Maybe she too feared for the safety of the ashtrays.

“Windsor tells me you’re a sports agent,” Helen Van Slyke said.

“Yes.”

“Were you going to represent my daughter?”

“We were discussing the possibility.”

Kenneth said, “I don’t see why this conversation can’t wait, Helen.”

She ignored him. “So why did you want to see me, Mr. Bolitar?”

“I’d just like to ask you a few questions.”

“What kind of questions?” Kenneth asked. Sneering suspicion.

Helen silenced him with her hand. “Please go ahead, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I understand Valerie was hospitalized about six years ago.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Kenneth again.

“Kenneth, please leave us alone.”

“But Helen—”

“Please. Take Cassie for a walk.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He protested, but he was no match for her. She closed her eyes, signaling the argument’s end. Grudgingly Kenneth took his daughter’s hand. When they were out of earshot, she said, “He is a bit overprotective.”

“It’s understandable,” Myron said. “Under the circumstances.”

“Why do you want to know about Valerie’s hospitalization?”

“I’m trying to put some loose ends together.”

She studied his face for a moment. “You’re trying to find my daughter’s killer, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask why?”

“There are several reasons.”

“I’ll accept one.”

“Valerie tried to reach me before the murder,” Myron said. “She called my office three times.”

“That hardly makes you responsible.”

Myron said nothing.

Helen Van Slyke took a deep breath. “And you think her murder has something to do with her breakdown?”

“I don’t know.”

“The police feel quite certain the killer is a man who stalked Valerie.”

“What do you think?”

She stayed perfectly still. “I don’t know. Roger Quincy seemed harmless enough. But I guess they all seem harmless until something like this happens. He used to write her love letters all the time. They were sort of sweet, in a kooky kind of way.”

“Do you still have them?”

“I just gave them to the police.”

“Do you remember what they said?”

“They vacillated between almost normal courting words and outright obsession. Sometimes he would simply ask her on a date. Other times he would write about eternal love and how they were destined to be together forever.”

“How did Valerie react?”

“Sometimes it scared her. Sometimes it amused her. But mostly she ignored it. We all did. No one took it too seriously.”

“What about Pavel? Was he concerned?”

“Not overly.”

“Did he hire a bodyguard for Valerie?”

“No. He was dead set against the idea. He thought a bodyguard might spook her.”

Myron paused. Valerie hadn’t needed a bodyguard against a stalker, yet Pavel needs one against pestering parents and autograph hounds. It made one wonder. “I’d like to talk about Valerie’s breakdown, if that’s all right.”

Helen Van Slyke stiffened slightly. “I think it’s best to leave that alone, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Why?”

“It was painful. You have no idea how painful. My daughter had a mental collapse, Mr. Bolitar. She was only eighteen years old. Beautiful. Talented. A professional athlete. Successful by any rational measure. And she had a breakdown. It was stressful on all of us. We tried our best to help her get well, to keep it from getting in the papers and becoming public. We tried our best to keep it under wraps.”

She stopped then and closed her eyes.

“Mrs. Van Slyke.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

Silence.

“You were saying how you tried to keep it under wraps,” Myron prompted.

The eyes reopened. She smiled and sort of smoothed her skirt. “Yes, well, I didn’t want this episode ruining her life. You know how people talk. For the rest of her life people would point and whisper. I didn’t want that. And yes, I was embarrassed too. I was younger, Mr. Bolitar. I was afraid of how her breakdown would reflect on the Brentman family name.”

“Brentman?”

“My maiden name. This estate is known as Brentman Hall. My first husband was named Simpson. A mistake. A social climber. Kenneth is my second husband. I know tongues wag about our age differences, but the Van Slykes are an old family. His great-great-grandfather and my great-grandfather were partners.”

Good reason to get married. “How long have you and Kenneth been married?”

“Six years last April.”

“I see. So you got married around the same time Valerie was hospitalized.”

Her eyes narrowed and her words came slower now. “What exactly are you implying, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Nothing,” Myron said. “I wasn’t implying anything. Really.” Well, maybe a little. “Tell me about Alexander Cross.”

She stiffened again, almost like a spasm. “What about him?” She sounded annoyed now.

“He and Valerie were serious?”

“Mr. Bolitar”—impatience creeping in—“Windsor Lockwood is an old family friend. He is the reason I agreed to see you. You earlier portrayed yourself as a man concerned with finding my daughter’s killer.”

“I am.”

“Then please tell me what Alexander Cross or Valerie’s breakdown or my own marriage has to do with your task?”

“I am making an assumption, Mrs. Van Slyke. I am assuming that this was not a random killing, that the person who shot your daughter was not a stranger. That means I have to know about her life. All of it. I don’t ask these questions to amuse myself. I need to know who would have feared Valerie or hated her or had a lot to gain by her death. That means digging into all the unpleasantries of her life.”

She held his gaze a beat too long and then looked away. “Just what do you know about my daughter, Mr. Bolitar?”

“The basics,” Myron said. “Valerie became tennis’s next wunderkind at the French Open when she was only sixteen. Expectations ran wild, but her play quickly leveled off. Then it grew worse. She was stalked by an obsessive fan named Roger Quincy. She had a relationship with the son of a prominent politician, who was later murdered. Then she had a mental collapse. Now I need to fill in—and illuminate—more pieces of this puzzle.”

“It’s very difficult to talk about all this.”

“I understand that,” Myron said gently. He opted now for the Alan Alda smile over the Phil Donahue. More teeth, moister eyes.

“There’s nothing more I can tell you, Mr. Bolitar. I don’t know why anyone would want to kill her.”

“Perhaps you can tell me about the last few months,” Myron said. “How was Valerie feeling? Did anything unusual happen?”

Helen fiddled with her strand of pearls, twisting them around her fingers until they made a red mark around her neck. “She finally started getting better,” she said, her voice more of a choke now. “I think tennis helped. For years she wouldn’t touch a racket. Then she started playing. A little at first. Just for fun.”

The facade collapsed then. Helen Van Slyke lost it. The tears came hard. Myron took her hand. Her grip was both strong and shaky.

“I’m sorry,” Myron said.

She shook her head, forcing the words out. “Valerie started playing every day. It made her stronger. Physically, emotionally. She finally seemed to be putting it all behind her. And then …” She stopped again, her eyes suddenly flat. “That bastard.”

She might have been talking about the unknown killer. But somehow the anger seemed more specific.

“Who?” Myron tried.

“Helen?”

Kenneth was back. He quickly crossed the room and took his wife in his arms. Myron thought he saw her back away at his touch, but he couldn’t be sure.

Kenneth looked over her shoulder at Myron. “See what you’ve done,” he hissed. “Get out.”

“Mrs. Van Slyke?”

She nodded. “Please leave, Mr. Bolitar. It’s for the best.”

“Are you sure?”

Kenneth bellowed again. “Get out! Now! Before I throw you out!”

Myron looked at him. Not the time or the place. “I’m sorry for the intrusion, Mrs. Van Slyke. My most sincere condolences.”

Myron showed himself out.

9

When Myron entered the small police station Jake’s chin was coated with something red and sticky. Might have been from a jelly doughnut. Might have been from a small farm animal. Hard to tell with Jake.

Jake Courter had been elected sheriff of Reston, New Jersey two years before. In view of the fact that Jake was black in an almost entirely white community, most people considered the election result an upset. But not Jake. Reston was a college town. College towns were filled with liberal intellectuals who wanted to lift a black man up. Jake figured his skin color had been enough of a disadvantage over the years, might as well turn the tide. White guilt, he told Myron. The best vote-getter this side of Willie Horton ads.

Jake was in his early fifties. He’d been a cop in a half dozen major cities over the years—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, to name a few. Tired of chasing city scum, he’d moved out to the happy suburbs to chase suburban scum. Myron and Jake met a year ago, investigating the disappearance of Kathy Culver, Jessica’s sister, a student at Reston University.

“Hey, Myron.”

“Jake.”

Jake looked, as always, rumpled. Everything about him. His hair. His clothes. Even his desk looked rumpled, like a cotton shirt kept in the bottom of a laundry hamper. The desk also had an assortment of goodies. A Pizza Hut box. A Wendy’s bag. A Carvel ice-cream cup. A half-eaten sandwich from Blimpie. And, of course, a tin of Slim-Fast diet powder. Jake was closing in on two hundred and seventy-five pounds. His pants never fit right. They were too small for his stomach, too large for his waist. He was constantly adjusting them, searching for that one elusive point where they’d actually stay in place. The search required a team of top scientists and a really powerful microscope.

“Let’s go grab a couple burgers,” Jake said, wiping his face with a moist towelette. “I’m starving.”

Myron picked up the Slim-Fast can and smiled sweetly. “ ‘A delicious shake for breakfast. Another for lunch. And then a sensible dinner.’ ”

“Bullshit. I gave it a try. The shit doesn’t work.”

“How long were you on it?”

“Almost a day. Zip, nothing. Not a pound gone.”

“You should sue.”

“Plus the stuff tastes like used gunpowder.”

“You get the file on Alexander Cross?”

“Yeah, right here. Let’s go.”

Myron followed Jake down the street. They stopped at a place very generously dubbed the Royal Court Diner. A pit. If it were totally renovated, it might reach the sanitary status of an interstate public toilet.

Jake smiled. “Nice, huh?”

“My arteries are hardening from the smell,” Myron said.

“For chrissake, man, don’t inhale.”

The table had one of those diner jukeboxes. The records hadn’t been changed in a long time. The current number one single, according to the little advertisement, was Elton John’s Crocodile Rock.

The waitress was standard diner issue. She was grumpy, mid-fifties, her hair a purplish tint not found anywhere in the state of nature.

“Hey, Millie,” Jake said.

She tossed them menus, not speaking, barely breaking stride.

“That’s Millie,” Jake said.

“She seems great,” Myron said. “Can I see the file?”

“Let’s order first.”

Myron picked up the menu. Vinyl. And sticky. Very sticky. Like someone had poured maple syrup on it. There were also bits of coagulated scrambled eggs in the crease. Myron was losing his appetite in a hurry.

Three seconds later Millie returned, sighed. “What’ll it be?”

“Give me a cheeseburger deluxe,” Jake said. “Double order of fries instead of the coleslaw. And a diet Coke.”

Millie looked toward Myron. Impatiently.

Myron smiled at her. “Do you have a vegetarian menu?”

“A what?”

“Stop being an asshole,” Jake said.

“A grilled cheese will be fine,” Myron said.

“Fries with that?”

“No.”

“To drink?”

“A Diet Coke. Like my low-cal buddy.”

Millie eyed Myron, looked him up and down. “You’re kinda cute.”

Myron gave her the modest smile. The one that said, Aw, shucks.

“You also look familiar.”

“I have that kind of face,” Myron said. “Cute yet familiar.”

“You date one of my daughters once? Gloria maybe. She works the night shift.”

“I don’t think so.”

She looked him over again. “You married?”

“I’m involved with someone.”

“Not what I asked you,” she said. “You married?”

“No.”

“All right then.” She turned and left.

“What was that all about?”

Jake shrugged. “Hope she’s not getting Gloria.”

“Why?”

“She kinda looks like a white version of me,” Jake said. “Only with a heavier beard.”

“Sounds enticing.”

“You still with Jessica Culver?”

“Guess so.”

Jake shook his head. “Man, she’s something else. I’ve never seen nothing that looked that good in real life.”

Myron tried not to grin. “Hard to argue.”

“She also got you wrapped around her finger.”

“Hard to argue.”

“Lots of worse places for a man to be wrapped around.”

“Hard to argue.”

Millie came back with the two Diet Cokes. This time she almost managed to smile at Myron. “Good-looking man like you shouldn’t be single,” she said.

“I’m wanted in several states,” Myron said.

Millie did not seem discouraged. She shrugged, left. Myron turned back to Jake.

“All right,” Myron said. “Where’s the file?”

Jake flipped it open. He handed Myron a picture of a handsome, healthy man. Tan, fit, wearing tennis shorts. Myron had seen the picture in the paper after the murder.

“Meet Alexander Cross,” Jake began. “Age twenty-four at the time of the murder. Wharton graduate. Son of United States senator Bradley Cross of Pennsylvania. On the night of July twenty-fourth, six years ago, he was attending a party at a tennis club called Old Oaks in Wayne, Pennsylvania. The esteemed senator was there. It’s a pretty ritzy place—fancy food, indoor and outdoor courts, hard court, clay, lit, unlit, the works. Even grass courts.”

“Okay.”

“What happened next is a bit fuzzy, but here’s what we have. Alexander Cross and three buddies were taking a walk around the grounds.”

“At night? During a party?”

“Not unheard of.”

“Not common either.”

Jake shrugged. “Anyway, they heard a noise coming from the western end of the club. They went to check it out. They ran into two suspicious-looking youths.”

“Suspicious-looking?”

“The youths were—what are they calling us today?—African American.”

“Ah,” Myron said. “Is it safe to assume that Old Oaks did not have a lot of African American members?”

“Like none. It’s exclusive.”

“So you and I could never be members.”

“Real shame,” Jake said. “I bet we’d have loved that party.”

“So what happened next?”

“According to the witnesses, the white youths approached the black youths. One of the black youths—later identified as one Errol Swade—reacted by whipping out a switchblade.”

Myron made a face. “A switchblade?”

“Yeah, I know. Such a cliché. No imagination. Anyway, an incident ensued. Alexander Cross was stabbed. The two youths ran. A few hours later the police caught up with them in north Philadelphia, not far from where the youths lived. During the apprehension, one of the punks pulled out a gun. A Curtis Yeller. Sixteen years old. A police officer shot him. Yeller’s mother was at the scene, from what I understand. She was cradling the kid in her arms when he died.”

“She saw him being shot?”

Jake shrugged. “Doesn’t say.”

“So what happened to Errol Swade?”

“He escaped. A nationwide manhunt began. His mug shot was in all the papers, sent to all the stations. Lot of cops on it, of course—the victim being the son of a U.S. senator and all. But here’s where things get interesting.”

Myron sipped the Diet Coke. Flat.

“They never found Errol Swade,” Jake said.

Myron felt his heart sink. “Never?”

Jake shook his head.

“Are you telling me Swade escaped?”

“Appears so.”

“How old was he?”

“Nineteen at the time of the incident.”

Myron mulled that over a moment. “That would make him twenty-five now.”

“Whoa. A math major.”

Myron did not smile. Millie brought the food. She made another comment, but Myron did not hear it. Twenty-five years old. Myron couldn’t help but wonder. It was a dumb thought. Unforgivable. And maybe even racist. But there it was. Twenty-five years old. Duane claimed to be twenty-one, but who knew for sure?

But no. It can’t be.

Myron took another sip of the flat soda. “What do you know about Errol Swade?” he asked.

“A pedigree punk. He had already been in jail three times. First offense was stealing a car. He was twelve. Assorted felonies followed. Muggings, assaults, car thefts, armed robberies, drugs. Also a member of an ultraviolent street gang. Guess what the gang was called.”

Myron shrugged. “Josie and the Pussycats?”

“Close. The Stains. Short for Bloodstains. They always wear a shirt dipped in a victim’s blood. Kinda like a Boy Scout badge.”

“Charming.”

“Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller were also cousins. Swade had been living with the Yellers since his release a month earlier. Let’s see what else. Swade was a dropout. Big surprise. A coke addict. Another shocker. And a major league moron.”

“So how has he eluded the police for so long?”

Jake picked up his burger and took a bite. A big bite. Half the burger vanished. “He couldn’t have,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“No way he could have stayed out of trouble this long. Impossible.”

“Hold up. Did I miss something here?”

“Officially the police are still looking,” Jake said. “But unofficially they’re sure he’s dead. The kid was a dumb punk. He couldn’t find his ass with both hands, never mind hide from a nationwide dragnet.”

“So what happened?”

“Rumor has it the senator got a favor from the mob. They knocked him off.”

“Senator Cross put out a hit on him?”

“What, that surprises you? The guy’s a politician. That’s like a step below child molester.”

“Weren’t you elected sheriff?”

Jake nodded. “There you go.”

Myron risked a bite of his sandwich. Tasted a bit like a sink sponge. “Do you have a physical description of Errol Swade?” he asked, almost hoping the answer was no.

“I got better. I got Swade’s mug shot.” Jake dusted his hands off, rubbed them on his shirt for good measure. Then he reached into the folder and withdrew a photograph. He handed it to Myron. Myron tried not to appear too eager.

It wasn’t Duane.

Not even close. Not even with plastic surgery. For one, Errol Swade was much lighter skinned. Swade’s head was shaped like a block, completely different from Duane’s. His eyes were spaced too far apart. Everything was different. His height was listed as six-four, three inches taller than Duane. Can’t fake being shorter.

Myron almost sighed with relief. “Does the name Valerie Simpson pop up in that file?” he asked.

Jake’s eyes caught a little fire. “Who?”

“You heard me.”

“Golly, Myron, that wouldn’t be the same Valerie Simpson who was murdered yesterday?”

“By coincidence it is. Is her name in there?”

He handed Myron half the file. “Hell if I know. Help me look.”

They went through it. Valerie’s name was only on one sheet. A party guest list. Her name along with a hundred others. Myron jotted down the names and addresses of the witnesses to the murder—three friends of Alexander Cross’s. Nothing else of much interest in the file.

“So,” Jake said, “what does the lovely and dead Valerie Simpson have to do with this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jesus Christ.” Jake shook his head. “You still yanking my chain?”

“I’m not yanking anything.”

“What have you got so far?”

“Less than nothing.”

“That’s what you said about Kathy Culver.”

“But this isn’t your case, Jake.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“I really don’t have anything. Valerie Simpson visited my office a few days ago. She wanted to make a comeback, but somebody killed her instead. I want to know who, that’s all.”

“You’re full of shit.”

Myron shrugged.

“The TV said something about a stalker doing the job,” Jake said.

“Might be him. Probably is.”

Silence.

“You’re holding back again,” Jake said. “Just like with Kathy Culver.”

“It’s confidential.”

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“Nope. It’s confidential.”

“Protecting someone again?”

“Confidential,” Myron said. “As in not to be divulged. Communicated in the strictest of confidence. A secret.”

“Fine, be that way,” Jake said. “So how’s your sandwich?”

Myron nodded. “Maybe the ambience isn’t so good, but at least the food stinks.”

Jake laughed. “Hey, you got tickets to the Open?”

“Yeah.”

“How about getting me two?”

“For when?”

“The last Saturday.”

The men’s semis and women’s finals. “Tough day,” Myron said.

“But not for a big-time agent like yourself.”

“Then we’ll be even?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll leave them at the on-call window.”

“Make sure they’re good seats.”

“Who you taking?”

“My son Gerard.”

Myron had played ball against Gerard in college. Gerard was a bull. No finesse about his game. “He still working homicide in New York?”

“Yep.”

“Can he do me a little favor?”

“Shit. Like what?”

“The cop on Valerie’s murder is a devout asshole.”

“And you want to know what they have.”

“Yeah.”

“All right. I’ll ask Gerard to give you a call.”

10

“Messages?”

Esperanza nodded. “About a million of them.”

Myron fingered through the pile. “Any word on Eddie Crane?”

“You’re having dinner with him and his folks.”

He looked up. “When?”

“Tonight. Seven-thirty. At La Reserve. I already made a reservation. Make sure you use Win’s name.”

Win’s name carried weight at many of New York’s finest restaurants. “You realize, of course, that you’re a genius.”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“I want you to come too.”

“Can’t. School.” Esperanza went to law school at night.

“Is Eddie still being coached by Pavel Menansi?” Myron asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“He and I had a discussion last night at the Open.”

“What about?”

“He used to coach Valerie.”

“And you two ‘discussed’ that?”

Myron nodded.

“May I assume you wowed him with your usual charm?”

“Something like that.”

“So we don’t have a chance with Eddie,” she said.

“Not necessarily. If Eddie was really close to Pavel, then TruPro would have him signed by now. Maybe there’s some friction there.”

“Almost forgot.” Esperanza picked up a small stack of papers. “This just came in by fax. They want it signed right away.”

A contract for a baseball prospect named Sandy Repo. A pitcher. The Houston Astros had taken him in the first round. Myron scanned it over. The contract had been orally finalized yesterday morning, but Myron spotted the new paragraph right away. Sandwiched it in on the second-to-last page.

“Cute,” he said.

“Who?”

“The Astros. Get me Bob Wasson on the line.” The Astros’ general manager.

Esperanza picked up the phone. “You’re supposed to meet with Burger City tomorrow afternoon.”

“Same time as Duane’s match?”

She nodded.

“You mind handling it?” he asked.

“They’re not going to like dealing with a receptionist,” she said.

“You’re an associate,” Myron corrected. “A valued associate.”

“Still not the main man. Still not Myron Bolitar.”

“Ah, but who is?”

She rolled her eyes, picked up the phone, began dialing. She purposely did not look at him. “You really think I’m ready?”

The tone was hard to read. Myron couldn’t tell if it signaled sarcasm or insecurity. Probably both.

“They’re going to want Duane for their new promo,” he said. “But Duane wants to wait for a national deal. Try to push someone else on them.”

“Okay.”

Myron went into his office. Home. Tara. He had a nice view of the Manhattan skyline. Not a corner office view like Win’s, but not shabby either. On one wall he had movie stills. Everything from Bogie and Bacall to Woody and Diane. Another wall featured Broadway posters. Musicals mostly. Everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Andrew Lloyd Webber. The final wall was his client wall. Action photos of each player. He studied the picture of Duane, his body arched in a serving motion.

“What’s going on, Duane?” Myron said out loud. “What are you hiding?”

The photo did not answer. Photos rarely did.

His phone buzzed. Esperanza came on the speaker. “I have Bob Wasson on the line.”

“Okay.”

“I can put him on hold. Until you’re finished talking to your wall.”

“No, I think I’ll take it now.” Wiseass. He hit the speakerphone. “Bob?”

“Goddamn it, Bolitar, take me off the speaker. You’re not that goddamn important.”

Myron picked up the receiver. “That better?”

“Yeah, great. What do you want?”

“I got the contract today.”

“Well, yippee for you. Now, here’s what you do next. Step one: Sign it where the X is. You know how to do that, don’t you? I had your name typed under the X in case you’re unsure of the spelling. And use a pen, Myron. Blue or black ink, please. No crayons. Step two: Put the contract in the enclosed self-addressed envelope. Moisten the flap. With me so far?”

Good ol’ Bob. Funny as a case of head lice. “There’s a problem,” Myron said.

“A what?”

“A problem.”

“Look, Bolitar, if you’re trying to squeeze me for more dough, you can fuck yourself from behind.”

“Point thirty-seven. Paragraph C.”

“What about it?”

Myron read it out loud. “ ‘The player agrees that he will not engage in sports endangering his health or safety including, but not limited to, professional boxing or wrestling, motorcycling, moped riding, auto racing, skydiving, hang gliding, hunting, et cetera, et cetera.’ ”

“Yeah, so? It’s a prohibited activities clause. We got it from the NBA.”

“The NBA’s contract says nothing about hunting.”

“What?”

“Please, Bob, let’s try to pretend I don’t have a learning disability. You threw in the word hunting. Sneaked it in, if you will.”

“So what’s the big deal? Your boy hunts. He hurt himself in a hunting incident two years ago and missed half his junior year. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

“Then you have to compensate him for it,” Myron said.

“What? Don’t bust my balls, Bolitar. You want us to pay the kid if he gets hurt, right?”

“Right.”

“So we don’t want him hunting. Suppose he shoots himself. Or suppose some other asshole mistakes him for a deer and shoots him. You know what that’s going to cost us?”

“Your concern,” Myron said, “is touching.”

“Oh excuse me. A thousand pardons. I guess I should care more and pay less.”

“Good point. Strike my last statement.”

“So stricken. Can I go now?”

“My client enjoys hunting. It means a great deal to him.”

“And his left arm means a lot to us.”

“So I suggest a fair compromise.”

“What?”

“A bonus. If Sandy doesn’t hunt, you agree to pay him twenty thousand dollars at the end of the year.”

Laughter. “You’re out of your mind.”

“Then take that clause out. It’s not standard and we don’t want it.”

Pause. “Five grand. Not a penny more.”

“Fifteen.”

“Up yours, Myron. Eight.”

“Fifteen,” Myron said.

“I think you’re forgetting how this is played,” Bob said. “I say a number a little higher. You say a number a little lower. Then we meet somewhere in the middle.”

“Fifteen, Bob. Take it or leave it.”

Win opened the door and came in. He sat down silently, crossed his right ankle over his left thigh, and studied his manicured nails.

“Ten,” Bob said.

“Fifteen.”

The negotiation continued. Win stood, checked his reflection in the mirror behind the door. He was still fixing his hair five minutes later when Myron hung up. Not a blond lock was out of place, but that never seemed to deter Win.

“What was the final number?” Win asked.

“Thirteen five.”

Win nodded. He smiled at his reflection. “You know what I was just thinking?”

“What?”

“It must suck to be ugly.”

“Uh-huh. Think you can tear yourself away for a second?”

Win sighed. “It won’t be easy.”

“Try to be brave.”

“I guess I can always look again later.”

“Right. It’ll give you something to look forward to.”

With one last hair pat, Win turned away and sat down. “So what’s up?”

“The powder-blue Caddy is still following me.”

Win looked pleased. “And you want me to find out who they are?”

“Something like that,” Myron said.

“Excellent.”

“But I don’t want you to move in on them without me there.”

“You don’t trust my judgment?”

“Just don’t, okay?”

Win shrugged. “So how was your visit to the Van Slykes’ estate?”

“I met Kenneth. The two of us really hit it off.”

“I can imagine.”

“You know him?” Myron asked.

“Oh yes.”

“Is he as big an asshole as I think?”

Win spread his hands wide. “Of biblical proportions.”

“You know anything else about him?”

“Nothing significant.”

“Can you check him out?”

“But of course. What else did you find out?”

Myron told him about his visits to both the Van Slykes and Jake.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Win said when he finished.

“Yes.”

“So what’s the next step?” Win asked.

“I want to attack this from several directions.”

“Those being?”

“Valerie’s psychiatrist, for one.”

“Who will throw all kinds of terms like ‘doctor-patient confidentiality’ at you,” Win said with a dismissive wave. “A waste of time. Who else?”

“Curtis Yeller’s mother witnessed her son’s shooting. She’s also Errol Swade’s aunt. Maybe she has some thoughts on all this.”

“For example?”

“Maybe she knows what happened to Errol.”

“And you—what?—expect her to tell you?”

“You never know.”

Win made a face. “So basically your plan is to flail about helplessly.”

“Pretty much. I will also need to talk to Senator Cross. Do you think you can arrange it?”

“I can try,” Win said. “But you’re not going to learn anything from him either.”

“Boy, you’re a bundle of optimism today.”

“Just telling it like it is.”

“Did you learn anything at the Plaza?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” Win leaned back and steepled his fingers. “Valerie made only four calls in the past three days. All were to your office.”

“One to make an appointment to see me,” Myron said. “The other three on the day she died.”

Win gave a quick whistle. “Very impressive. First you figure out Kenneth is an asshole and now this.”

“Yeah, sometimes I even scare myself. Is there anything else?”

“A doorman at the Plaza remembered Valerie rather well,” Win continued. “After I tipped him twenty dollars, he recalled that Valerie took a lot of quick walks. He found it curious, since guests normally leave for hours at a time, rather than scant minutes.”

Myron felt a surge. “She was using a pay phone.”

Win nodded. “I called Lisa at NYNEX. By the way, you now owe her two tickets to the Open.”

Great. “What did she find out?”

“On the day before Valerie’s murder, two calls were placed from a nearby pay phone at Fifth and Fifty-ninth to the residence of one Mr. Duane Richwood.”

Myron felt a sinking feeling. “Shit.”

“Indeed.”

“So not only did Valerie call Duane,” Myron said, “but she went out of her way to make sure no one would know.”

“So it appears.”

Silence.

Win said, “You’ll have to talk to him.”

“I know.”

“Let it wait until after the tournament,” Win added. “Between the Open and the big Nike campaign, there’s no reason to distract him now. It will keep.”

Myron shook his head. “I’ll talk to Duane tomorrow. After his match.”

11

François, the maître d’ at La Reserve, flitted about their table like a vulture awaiting death—or worse, a New York maître d’ awaiting a very large tip. Since discovering that Myron was a close friend of Windsor Horne Lockwood III’s, François had befriended Myron in the same way a dog befriends a man with raw meat in his pocket.

He recommended the thinly sliced salmon appetizer and the chef’s special scrod as an entree. Myron took him up on both suggestions. So did the so-far silent Mrs. Crane. Mr. Crane ordered the onion soup and liver. Myron was not going to be kissing him anytime soon. Eddie ordered the escargot and lobster tails. The kid was learning fast.

François said, “May I recommend a wine, Mr. Bolitar?”

“You may.”

Eighty-five bucks down the drain.

Mr. Crane took a sip. Nodded his approval. He had not smiled yet, had barely exchanged a pleasantry. Luckily for Myron, Eddie was a nice kid. Smart. Polite. A pleasure to talk to. But whenever Mr. Crane cleared his throat—as he did now—Eddie fell silent.

“I remember your basketball days at Duke, Mr. Bolitar,” Crane began.

“Please call me Myron.”

“Fine.” Instead of reciprocating the informality, Crane knitted his eyebrows. The eyebrows were his most prominent feature—unusually thick and angry and constantly undulating above his eyes. They looked like small ferrets furrowing into his forehead. “You were captain of the team at Duke?” he began.

“For three years,” Myron said.

“And you won two NCAA championships?”

“My team did, yes.”

“I saw you play on several occasions. You were quite good.”

“Thank you.”

He leaned forward. The eyebrows grew somehow bushier. “If I recall,” Crane continued, “the Celtics drafted you in the first round.”

Myron nodded.

“How long did you play for them? Not long, as I recall.”

“I hurt my knee during a preseason game my rookie year.”

“You never played again?” It was Eddie. His eyes were young and wide.

“Never,” Myron said steadily. Better lesson than any lecture he could give. Like the funeral of a high school classmate who died because he was D.U.I.

“Then what did you do with yourself?” Mr. Crane asked. “After the injury?”

The interview. Part of the process. It was harder when you were an ex-jock. People naturally assumed you were dumb.

“I went through rehab for a long while,” Myron said. “I thought I could beat the odds, defy the doctors, come back. When I was able to face reality, I went to law school.”

“Where?”

“At Harvard.”

“Very impressive.”

Myron tried to look humble. He almost batted his eyes.

“Did you make Law Review?”

“No.”

“Do you have an MBA?”

“No.”

“What did you do upon graduation?”

“I became an agent.”

Mr. Crane frowned. “How long did it take you to graduate?”

“Five years.”

“Why so long?”

“I was working at the same time.”

“Doing what?”

“I worked for the government.” Nice and vague. He hoped Crane didn’t push it.

“I see.” Crane frowned again. Every part of him frowned. His mouth, his forehead, even his ears frowned. “Why did you enter the field of sports representation?”

“Because I thought I’d like it. And I thought I’d be good at it.”

“Your agency is small.”

“True.”

“You don’t have the connections of some larger agencies.”

“True.”

“You certainly don’t wield the power of ICM or TruPro or Advantage.”

“True.”

“You don’t have too many successful tennis players.”

“True.”

Crane gave a disapproving scowl. “Then tell me, Mr. Bolitar, why should we choose you?”

“I’m a lot of fun at parties.”

Mr. Crane did not break a smile. Eddie did. He caught himself, smothered the smile behind his hand.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Crane said.

“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Crane. You live in Florida, right?”

“St. Petersburg.”

“How did you get up to New York?”

“We flew.”

“No. I mean, who paid for the tickets?”

The Cranes shared a wary glance.

“TruPro bought your tickets, right?”

Mr. Crane nodded tentatively.

“They had a limo meet you at the airport?” Myron continued.

Another nod.

“Your jacket, ma’am. It’s new?”

“Yes.” First time Mrs. Crane had spoken.

“Did one of the big agencies buy it for you?”

“Yes.”

“The big agencies, they have wives or female associates who take you around town, show you the sights, do a little shopping, that sort of thing?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your point?” Crane interrupted.

“That kind of thing is not my bag,” Myron said.

“What kind of thing?”

“Ass-kissing. I’m not very good at ass-kissing a client. And I’m terrible at ass-kissing the parents. Eddie?”

“Yes?”

“Did the big agencies promise to have someone at every match?”

He nodded.

“I won’t do that,” Myron said. “If you need me I’m available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But I’m not physically there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. If you want your hand held at every match because Agassi’s or Chang’s is, go with one of the big agencies. They’re better at it than I am. If you need someone to run errands or do your laundry, I’m not the guy either.”

The Cranes shared another family glance. “Well,” Mr. Crane said. “I heard you speak your mind, Mr. Bolitar. It appears you are living up to your reputation.”

“You asked for a contrast between me and the others.”

“So I did.”

Myron focused his attention on Eddie. “My agency is small and simple. I will do all your negotiations—tournament guarantees, appearances, exhibitions, endorsements, whatever. But I won’t sign anything you don’t want to. Nothing is final until you look it over, understand it, and approve it yourself. Okay so far?”

Eddie nodded.

“As your father pointed out I am not an MBA. But I work with one. His name is Win Lockwood. He’s considered one of the best financial consultants in the country. Win’s theory is similar to mine: he wants you to understand and approve every investment he makes. I will insist that you meet with him at least five times a year, preferably more, so that you can set up solid, long-term financial and tax plans. I want you to know what your money is doing at all times. Too many athletes get taken advantage of—bad investments, trusting the wrong people, that sort of thing. That won’t happen here because you—not just me, not just Win, not just your parents, but you—won’t let it.”

François came by with the appetizers. He smiled brightly while the underlings served. Then he pointed and ordered them about in impatient French, like they couldn’t possibly know how to put a plate down in front of a human being without his fretting.

“Is that everything?” François asked.

“I think so.”

François sort of lowered his head. “If there is any way I can make your dining experience more pleasurable, Mr. Bolitar, please do not hesitate to ask.”

Myron looked down at his salmon. “How about some ketchup?”

François’s face lost color. “Pardon?”

“It’s a joke, François.”

“And a funny one at that, Mr. Bolitar.”

François slithered away. Myron the Card strikes again.

“How about the young lady who set up this dinner?” Mr. Crane asked. “Miss Diaz. What’s her function at your agency?”

“Esperanza is my associate. My right hand.”

“What’s her work background?”

“She currently goes to law school nights. That’s why she couldn’t join us tonight. She was also a professional wrestler.”

That piqued Eddie’s interest. “Really? Which one?”

“Little Pocahontas.”

“The Indian Princess? She and Big Chief Mama used to be the tag team champs.”

“Right.”

“Man, she is hot!”

“Yup.”

Mrs. Crane nibbled at her salmon. Mr. Crane ignored his onion soup for the moment. “So tell me,” Mr. Crane said, “what strategy would you employ for Eddie’s career?”

“Depends,” Myron said. “There’s no set formula. You have two conflicting factors pulling at your son. On the one hand Eddie is only seventeen. He’s a kid. Tennis shouldn’t consume him to the point where he hates it. He should still have fun, try to do the things seventeen-year-olds do. On the other hand it’s naive to think that tennis will still be just a game to him. Or that he’ll be a ‘normal’ kid. This is about money. Big money. If Eddie does it right, if he makes some sacrifices now and works with Win, he can be financially set for life. It’s a delicate balance—how many tournaments and exhibitions to play in, how many appearances, how many endorsements.”

Crane’s eyebrows nodded. They seemed to agree.

Myron turned his attention to Eddie. “You want to score a lot of money early, because you never know what can happen. I’m proof of that. But I don’t want you sucked dry. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to say no to staggering amounts of money. But in the end it’s your decision, not mine. It’s your money. If you want to play in every tournament and every exhibition match, it’s not my place to stop you. But you can’t do it, Eddie. No one can. You’re a good kid. You have your head on straight. You were raised right. But if you try to bend too far, you’ll break. I’ve seen it happen too often.

“I want you to make a lot of money. But not every cent out there. I don’t want to turn you into a money machine. I want you to have some fun. I want you to enjoy all of this. I want you to realize how lucky you are.”

The Cranes listened in rapt silence.

“That’s my theory, Eddie, for what it’s worth. You may make more money with the big agencies. I can’t deny that. But in the long run, with a long and healthy career, with careful planning, I think you’ll be wealthier and better off with MB SportsReps.”

Myron looked at Mr. Crane. “Anything else you care to know?”

Crane sipped his wine, studied its color, put the glass down. He did the eyebrow mambo again. “You came highly recommended to us, Mr. Bolitar. Or should I say to Eddie.”

“Oh?” Myron said. “By whom?”

Eddie looked away. Mrs. Crane put her hand on his arm. Mr. Crane provided the answer. “Valerie Simpson.”

Myron was surprised. “Valerie recommended me?”

“She thought you’d be good for Eddie.”

“She said that?”

“Yes.”

Myron turned to Eddie. He wasn’t crying, but he looked on the verge. “What else did she say, Eddie?”

Shrug. “She thought you were honest. That you’d treat me right.”

“How did you know Valerie?”

“They met at Pavel’s camp in Florida,” Crane answered. “She was sixteen when Eddie arrived. He was only nine. I think she looked after him a little.”

“They were quite close,” Mrs. Crane added. “Such a tragedy.”

“Did she say anything else, Eddie?”

Another shrug. Eddie finally looked up. Myron met his gaze, held it steady.

“It’s important,” Myron said.

“She told me not to work with TruPro,” he said.

“Why?”

“She didn’t say.”

“My theory,” Crane added, “is that she blamed them for her downfall.”

“What do you think, Eddie?” Myron asked.

Yet another shrug. “Could be. I don’t know.”

“But you don’t think so.”

Nothing.

Mrs. Crane said, “I think that’s enough for now. Valerie’s murder has been very hard on Eddie.”

The conversation slowly drifted back to business. But Eddie was silent now. Every once in a while he would open his mouth, then close it again. When they rose to leave, Eddie leaned toward Myron and whispered, “Why do you want to know so much about Valerie?”

Myron opted for the truth. “I’m trying to find out who killed her.”

That widened his eyes. He looked behind him. His parents were busy saying good-bye to François. François kissed Mrs. Crane’s hand.

“I think you might be able to help,” Myron said.

“Me?” Eddie said. “I don’t know anything.”

“She was your friend. You were close to her.”

“Eddie?”

Mr. Crane’s voice.

“I have to go, Mr. Bolitar. Thank you for everything.”

“Yes, thank you,” Crane added. “We have a few more agencies to see, but we’ll be in touch.”

After they left, François came by with the bill. “Your tie is very becoming, Mr. Bolitar.”

The man knew how to kiss ass. “You should have been an agent, François.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Myron gave him a Visa card and waited. He turned his cell phone back on. A message from Win. Myron called him back.

“Where are you?” Myron asked.

“On Twenty-sixth Street, near Eighth,” Win said. “There were two gentlemen—and I use that term in its absolute loosest sense—in the Cadillac. They followed you to La Reserve, sat outside for a while, and left about half an hour ago. They’ve just entered a drinking establishment of rather questionable repute.”

“Questionable repute?”

“It’s called the Beaver Hunt. Enough said?”

“Stay on them. I’m on my way down.”

12

Win was waiting across the street from the Beaver Hunt. The block was quiet, the only sound was the faint beat of music coming from inside the bar. A large neon sign said TOPLESS!

“Two of them,” Win said. “The driver was a white man, approximately six-three. Overweight but powerfully built. I think you’ll like his fashion sense.”

“Meaning?”

“You’ll see. He is with a black man. Six foot. Big scar on his right cheek. I guess you might describe him as thin and wiry.”

Myron looked down the street. “Where did they park?”

“A lot on Eighth Avenue.”

“Why not on the street? Plenty of spots.”

“I believe our man is quite attached to his charming chariot.” Win smiled. “If anything happened to it, I bet he’d be very upset.”

“How difficult will it be to break in?”

Win looked insulted. “I’ll pretend you didn’t ask that.”

“Fine, you check the car. I’ll go inside.”

Win snapped a salute. “Roger, Wilco.”

They split up. Win headed for the lot, Myron for the bar. Myron would have preferred it the other way around, especially since the two men obviously knew what Myron looked like, but they needed to play their strengths. Win was far better at breaking into cars or handling anything mechanical. Myron was better at, well, this.

He entered the bar with his head lowered, just in case. No need. No one paid him any attention. There was no cover charge here. Myron looked around. Two words came to mind: major dive. The decor’s theme was Early American Beer. The walls were ornamented with neon beer signs. The bar and table were crusted with beer rings. Behind the bar were pyramids of beer bottles from all over the land.

Of course, there were topless dancers. They lazily pranced atop small stages that looked like old stage props from Wonderama. Most of the dancers were not attractive. Far from it. The exercise craze had not yet hit the Beaver Hunt. Flesh jiggled. The place looked more like a cellulite test center than a male-fantasy cantina.

Myron moved to a corner table and sat by himself. There were a few suits, but for the most part the clientele was blue-collar. The well-to-do usually got their topless kicks at Goldfingers or Score, where the women were far more aesthetically pleasing, though their body parts were about as real as their inflatable brethren’s.

Two men were laughing it up by center stage. One black, one white. They fit Win’s description. When the dancers rotated stages, the one in front of them stepped off. Her downtime. The boys began to negotiate with her. In places like Goldfingers and Score, you paid about twenty or twenty-five dollars for a table dance. It was basically just what it sounded like. The girl took off her top and danced at your table for maybe five minutes. No touchy, no feely. At the Beaver Hunt, the order of the day was a recent craze known as the Lap Dance, which took place in discreet corners of the bar. The Lap Dance, known to young adolescents as the Dry Hump, consisted of a dancer gyrating on a man’s crotch until he, well, orgasmed. Moral repugnancy aside, Myron had several questions about the technical aspects of such an act. Like after the act, how does a guy go around the rest of the night? Does he bring a change of underwear with him?

So many questions. So little time.

The two men and the dancer headed toward Myron’s corner. Myron could now see clearly what Win had been talking about. The white guy did indeed have big arms, but he also had a protruding gut and flabby chest. Some of these flaws could be hidden with proper fashion sense, but the white guy was wearing a tight fishnet shirt. Fishnet. As in a lot of holes. As in practically no shirt at all. His chest hairs—and there were lots of them—were jutting through the holes. The hairs seemed unusually long, coiling around—and indeed getting enmeshed in—the many gold chains that were draped about his neck. As he walked by, Myron got a full view of his back, thank you very much, which was even hairier and somewhat oilier than the front.

Myron felt a little ill.

“Fifteen dollars for the first ten minutes,” the girl said. “I can’t do better than that.”

“Don’t jerk us around, whore,” Fishnet said. “There’s two of us here. Two for one.”

“Yeah,” the black guy chimed in. “Two for one.”

“I can’t do that,” the girl said. If she seemed insulted by the name calling, it didn’t show. Her voice was tired and matter-of-fact, like a diner waitress on the night shift.

Fishnet was not pleased by this. “Listen, bitch, don’t get me angry.”

“I’ll get the manager,” she said.

“The fuck you will. You ain’t leaving here till I get my rocks off, slut.”

“Yeah,” the black guy added. “Me too. Slut.”

“Look, I charge more for talking dirty,” the girl said.

Fishnet looked at her in disbelief. “What did you say?”

“There’s a surcharge for talking dirty.”

“A surcharge?” Fishnet shouted. He was enraged now. “This might come as a surprise to a stupid whore, but we live in the U.S. of A. Land of the free, home of the brave. I can say whatever I want, slut—or haven’t you ever heard of freedom of speech?”

A constitutional scholar, Myron thought. Nice to see a man defending the First Amendment.

“Look,” the dancer said, “the price is twelve dollars for five minutes, twenty dollars for ten minutes. Plus tip. That’s it.”

“How about this,” Fishnet said. “You dance on both of us at the same time.”

“Huh?”

“Like you’re dancing on me but stroking him. How’s that sound, pig?”

“Yeah,” the black guy said. “Pig.”

“Look, fellas, there’s no two-for-one deals,” the dancer said. “Just let me get another girl. We’ll take good care of you.”

Myron stepped into view. “Will I do?”

No one moved.

“Gee,” Myron said, “they’re both so attractive. I just can’t choose.”

Fishnet looked at the black guy. The black guy looked at Fishnet.

Myron turned to the girl. “Do you have a preference?”

She shook her head no.

“Then I’ll take him.” Myron pointed to Fishnet. “He likes me. I can tell by the erect nipples.”

The black guy said, “Hey, what’s he doing here?”

Fishnet shot him a look.

“I mean, who is this guy?”

Myron nodded. “Nice recovery. Very smooth.”

“What do you want, mister?” Fishnet asked.

“Actually, I was lying.”

“What?”

“About how I knew you liked me. It wasn’t just the erect nipples, though they were a noticeable—albeit nauseating—tip-off.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Your following me around the past two days, that’s what gave it away. Next time try the secret admirer route. Send flowers without signing for them. A nice Hallmark card. That kind of thing.”

“Come on, Jim,” Fishnet said to the black guy, “this guy’s nuts. Let’s get out of here.”

The girl said, “No lap dance?”

“No. We gotta go.”

“Someone’s got to pay for this,” the girl said. “Otherwise the manager’s going to fry my ass.”

“Get lost, whore. Or I’ll whack you.”

“Whoa, big man,” Myron said.

“Look, mister, I don’t got no beef with you. Just get out of my way.”

“No lap dance for me either?”

“You’re crazy.”

“I can offer you a special discount,” Myron said.

Fishnet’s hands tightened into fists. He’d been ordered to follow Myron, not to be found out or get involved in a physical altercation. “Come on, Jim.”

“Why have you been following me?” Myron asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Is it my hypnotic blue eyes? The strong features? The shapely derriere? By the way what do you think of these pants? They’re not too tight, are they?”

“Fruitcake.” They moved past him.

“Tell you what,” Myron said. “You tell me who you’re working for and I promise not to tell your boss.”

They kept walking.

“Promise,” Myron said.

They headed out the door. Another day, another friend. Myron had that knack.

Myron followed them out to the street. Fishnet and Jim hurried west.

Win appeared from the shadows across the street. “This way,” he said.

They cut through an alley and arrived at the lot before Fishnet and Jim. It was an outdoor lot. The parking attendant was in a little booth watching a Roseanne rerun on a minuscule black-and-white TV. Win pointed out the Cadillac. They ducked behind an Oldsmobile parked two cars away and waited.

Fishnet and Jim approached the booth. They were still looking down the street. Jim was panicking. “How did he find us, Lee? Huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“What we gonna do?”

“Nothing. We’ll change cars. Try again.”

“You got another car, Lee?”

“No,” Fishnet said. “We’ll rent one.”

They paid, got a receipt and their keys. Fishnet had insisted on parking the car himself.

“This,” Win said, “should be fun.”

When they arrived at the Cadillac, Fishnet put his key in the lock. He stopped, looked down, and began screaming.

“Shit! Goddamn fuck!”

Myron and Win stepped out of the shadows.

“Language, language,” Myron said.

Fishnet stared down at his car in disbelief. Win had drilled a hole under the lock to break in. He didn’t use that particular method when neatness counted, but this was an occasion when he thought it necessary. On top of that, Win’s hand had “accidentally” slipped, scratching both driver’s-side doors.

“You!” Fishnet shouted. He pointed at Myron, his face red and apoplectic. “You!”

Win turned to Myron. “Quite the vocabulary.”

“Yeah, but it’s the threads that really make me swoon.”

“You!” Fishnet said. “You did this to my car?”

“Not him,” Win said. “Me. And may I say you keep the inside lovely. I felt terrible about spilling that maple syrup all over the velour seats.”

Fishnet’s eyes popped. He looked inside, placed his hand on the inside, and screamed. The scream was deafening. It was so loud, the parking lot attendant almost stirred.

Myron looked at Win. “Maple syrup?”

“Log Cabin.”

“I’ve always been an Aunt Jemima man myself,” Myron said.

“To each his own.”

“You find anything inside the car?”

“Not very much,” Win said. “In the glove compartment were several parking stubs.” He handed them to Myron. Myron took a quick glance.

“So,” Myron called out, “who are you guys working for?”

Fishnet started walking over. “My car!” he shouted, his face red. “You … my car! My car!”

Win sighed. “Can we get past this, please? Très dull.”

“You motherfucker! You …” Fishnet’s hands were fists again. He stepped closer, smiling now at Win. It was an ugly smile in every way. “I’m going to break your fucking face, pretty boy.”

Win looked at Myron. “Pretty boy?”

Myron shrugged.

Jim stood next to Fishnet. Neither one was armed with a gun, Myron could tell. They might have a blade hidden somewhere, but he wasn’t worried.

Fishnet moved to within a yard of Win. Nothing unusual there. The bad guys always honed in on Win. He was smaller than Myron by nearly six inches and thirty-five pounds. Best of all, Win looked like a wimpy rich boy who raised his finger only to call for the butler—everything the discerning bully could want in a punching bag.

Fishnet took one more step and cocked his fist. Whoever had hired these guys had not briefed them well.

The punch whizzed toward Win’s nose. He sidestepped it. Sometimes Myron thought Win moved like a cat. But that wasn’t accurate. It was more ghostlike. One nanosecond he was there, the next he was two feet to the left. Fishnet tried again. Win blocked it this time. He grabbed Fishnet’s fist with one hand and connected with a knife-hand strike to Fishnet’s neck. Fishnet backed off, woozy. Jim stepped forward.

“Don’t even think about it,” Myron said.

Jim ran.

Myron Bolitar. The Intimidator.

Fishnet regained his footing. He charged Win, head lowered, attempting a tackle. Big mistake. Win hated it when an opponent tried to use superior size against him. Win had introduced Myron to tae kwon do during their freshman year at Duke, but he’d been studying it himself since he was five years old. He’d even spent three years in the Far East studying under some of the world’s greatest masters.

“Aaaarrrrghhh!” Fishnet shouted.

Again Win stepped to the side, like the smoothest matador against the clumsiest bull. Win connected on a roundhouse kick to the solar plexus and followed up with a palm strike to the nose. There was a sharp crack and blood flowed. Fishnet screamed and went down. He did not get up again.

Win bent down. “Who are you working for?”

Fishnet looked at the blood in his hand. “You broke my nose!” His voice was nasally.

“Wrong answer,” Win said. “Let me repeat the question. Who are you working for?”

“I ain’t saying nothing!”

Win reached down, gripped the broken nose with two fingers. Fishnet’s eyes bulged.

“Don’t,” Myron said.

Win looked up at him. “If you can’t take it, leave.” He turned his attention back to Fishnet. “Last chance. Then I start twisting. Who hired you?”

Fishnet said nothing. Win gave the nose a quick squeeze. The small bones grated against one another, making a sound like rain on a skylight. Fishnet bucked in agony. Win stifled his scream with his free hand.

“Enough,” Myron said.

“He hasn’t said anything yet.”

“We’re the good guys, remember?”

Win made a face. “You sound like an ACLU lawyer.”

“He doesn’t have to say anything.”

“What?”

“He’s a two-bit scum. He’d sell out his mother for a nickel.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he’s more terrified of opening his mouth than the pain.”

Win smiled. “I can change him.”

Myron held up one of the parking lot stubs. “This lot is at Fifty-fourth and Madison. It’s under TruPro’s building. Our pal here is working for the Ache brothers. They’re the only ones who could put that kind of scare into a guy.” Fishnet’s face was pure white.

“Or Aaron,” Win said.

Aaron.

“What about him?” Myron asked.

“The Aches could be using Aaron. He could put that kind of scare into a guy.”

Aaron.

“He isn’t working for Frank Ache anymore,” Myron said. “At least, that’s what I heard.”

Win looked down at Fishnet. “The name Aaron mean anything to you?”

“No,” he shouted. Quickly. Too quickly.

Myron lowered his head toward Fishnet. “Start talking or I’ll tell Frank Ache you told us all about it.”

“I didn’t say nothing about no Frank Ache!”

“Triple negative,” Win said. “Very impressive.”

There were two Ache brothers. Herman and Frank. Herman, the elder, was the boss, a sociopath responsible for countless murders and misery. But next to his whacked-out brother Frank, Herman Ache was Mary Poppins. Unfortunately, Frank ran TruPro.

“I didn’t say nothing,” Fishnet repeated. He was petting his nose like it was an abused dog. “Not a goddamn word.”

“But how’s Frank to know?” Myron asked. “You see, I’ll tell Frank you sang like the tastiest of stool pigeons. And you know what? He’ll believe me. How else would I know Frank hired you?”

Fishnet’s face went from pale-white to a sort of seaweed-green.

“But if you cooperate,” Myron said, “we’ll all pretend this never happened. That I never spotted your tail. You’ll be safe. Frank will never have to know about your little screwup.”

Fishnet didn’t have to think too long. “What do you want?”

“One of Ache’s men hired you?”

“Yeah.”

“Aaron?”

“No. Just some guy.”

“What were you hired to do?”

“Follow you. Report wherever you went.”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did you get hired?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“What time?”

“I don’t remember. Two, three o’clock. I was told you were at the tennis match and to get over there right away.”

That would have been almost immediately after Valerie’s murder.

“That’s all I know. I swear to God. That’s it.”

“Bull,” Win said. But Myron waved him off. Fishnet knew nothing more of any real significance.

“Let him go,” Myron said.

13

Myron woke up early. He grabbed some cold cereal from the pantry. Something called Nutri-Grain. Yummy name. He read on the back of the box about the importance of fiber. Snore.

Myron longed for his childhood cereals: Cap’n Crunch, Froot Loops, Quisp. Quisp cereal. Who could forget Quisp, the cute alien who competed on TV commercials with some coal-miner loser named Quake? Quisp vs. Quake. Extraterrestrial vs. Mr. Blue-collar. Interesting concept. What happened to those two rivals? Has even lovable Quisp gone the way of the Motels?

Myron sighed. He was far too young for such bouts of nostalgia.

Esperanza had managed to track down an address for Curtis Yeller’s mother. Deanna Yeller lived alone in a recently purchased house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a suburb outside Philadelphia. Myron made his way to his car. If he started out now, there would be time to drive to Cherry Hill, meet with Deanna Yeller, and get back to New York in time for Duane’s match.

But would Deanna Yeller be home? Best to make sure.

Myron picked up the car phone and dialed. A woman’s voice—probably Deanna Yeller—answered. “Hello?”

“Is Orson there?” Myron asked.

Warning: Clever deductive technique coming up. Those desiring professional pointers should pay strict attention.

“Who?” the woman asked.

“Orson.”

“You have the wrong number.”

“I’m sorry.” Myron hung up.

Deduction: Deanna Yeller was home.

He pulled up to a modest but modern home on a classic New Jersey suburban street. Every house was more or less the same. Different colors maybe. The kitchen might be on the right instead of the left. But genetically they were clones. Nice. A sprinkling of kids on the street. A sprinkling of multicolored bicycles. Couple of squirrels. A far cry from west Philadelphia. It made him wonder.

Myron walked up the little brick walk and knocked on the door. A very attractive black woman answered, a pleasant smile at the ready. Her hair was tied back in a severe bun, emphasizing the high cheekbones. Age lines around the eyes and mouth, but nothing drastic. She was well dressed, kind of conservative. Anne Klein II. Her jewelry was noticeable but not too flashy. The overall impression: classy.

Her smile seemed to fade when she saw him. “Can I help you?”

“Mrs. Yeller?”

She nodded slowly, as though not sure.

“My name is Myron Bolitar. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The smile fled completely. “What about?” Her diction was different now. Less suburban civil. More street suspicious.

“Your son.”

“I ain’t got a son.”

“Curtis,” Myron said.

Her eyes narrowed. “You a cop?”

“No.”

“I ain’t got the time. I’m on my way out.”

“It won’t take long.”

She put her hands on her hips. “What’s in it for me?”

“Pardon me?”

“Curtis is dead.”

“I realize that.”

“So what good is talking about it gonna do? He still gonna be dead, right?”

“Please, Mrs. Yeller, if I could just come in for a moment.”

She thought about it a second or two, glanced around, then shrugged in tired surrender. She checked her watch. Piaget, Myron noticed. Could be a fake, but he doubted it.

The decor was basic. Lot of white. Lot of pinewood. Torchère lamps. Very Ikea. There were no photographs on the shelves or coffee table. Nothing personal at all. Deanna Yeller didn’t sit. She didn’t invite Myron to either.

Myron offered up his warmest, most trustworthy smile. One part Harry Smith, two parts John Tesh.

She crossed her arms. “What the hell you grinning at?”

Yep, another minute and she’d be curled up in his lap.

“I want to ask you about the night Curtis died,” Myron said.

“Why? What’s this got to do with you?”

“I’m investigating.”

“Investigating what?”

“What really happened the night your son died.”

“You a private eye?”

“No. Not really.”

Silence.

“You got two minutes,” she said. “That’s it.”

“According to the police your son drew a gun on a police officer.”

“So they say.”

“Did he?”

She shrugged. “Guess so.”

“Did Curtis own a gun?”

Another shrug. “Guess he did.”

“Did you see it that night?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ever see it before that night?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

Boy, was this helpful. “Why would your son and Errol break into the Old Oaks Club?”

She made a face. “You serious?”

“Yes.”

“Why you think? To rob the place.”

“Did Curtis do that a lot?”

“Do what?”

“Rob places.”

Another shrug. “Places, people, whatever.” Her tone was matter-of-fact. No shame, no embarrassment, no surprise, no revulsion.

“Curtis didn’t have a record,” Myron said.

Yet another shrug. Her shoulders would tire soon. “Guess I raised a smart boy,” she said. “Until that night, anyhow.” She made a show of looking at her watch again. “I gotta go now.”

“Mrs. Yeller, have you heard from your nephew Errol Swade?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he went after your son was shot?”

“No.”

“What do you think happened to Errol?”

“He’s dead.” Again matter-of-fact. “I don’t know what you want here, but this thing is finished. Finished a long time ago. No one cares anymore.”

“How about you, Mrs. Yeller? Do you care?”

“It’s done. Closed.”

“You were there when the police shot your son?”

“No. I got there right after.” Her voice sort of faded away.

“And you saw your son on the ground?”

She nodded.

Myron handed her his business card. “If you remember anything else …”

She didn’t take it. “I won’t.”

“But if you do …”

“Curtis is dead. Nothing you can do can change that. Best to just forget it.”

“It’s that easy?”

“Been six years. Not like anybody misses Curtis.”

“How about you, Mrs. Yeller? Do you miss him?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Not like Curtis was a good kid or nothing. He was trouble.”

“Doesn’t mean he should have been killed,” Myron said.

She looked up at him, held his gaze. “Don’t matter. Dead is dead. Can’t change that.”

Myron said nothing.

“Can you change that, Mr. Bolitar?” she asked, challenging.

“No.”

Deanna Yeller nodded, turned away, picked up her purse. “I have to go now,” she said. “Best if you leave now too.”

14

Henry Hobman was the only one in the players’ box.

“Hi, Henry,” Myron said.

No one was playing yet, but Henry was still in his coach repose. Without turning away from the court, Henry muttered, “Heard you had a meeting with Pavel Menansi last night.”

“So?”

“You unhappy with Duane’s coaching?”

“No.”

Henry almost nodded. End of conversation.

Duane and his opponent, a French Open finalist named Jacques Potiline, came onto the court. Duane looked himself. No signs of strain. He gave Myron and Henry a big smile, nodded. The weather was perfect for tennis. The sun was out, but a cool breeze gently purled through Stadium Court, staving off the humidity.

Myron glanced around courtside. There was a rather buxom blonde in the next box. She was packed into a white tank top. The word for today, boys and girls, is cleavage. Plenty of men ogled. Not Myron, of course. He was far too worldly. The blonde suddenly turned and caught Myron’s eye. She smiled coyly, gave him a little wave. Myron waved back. He wasn’t going to do anything about it, but yowzer!

Win materialized in the chair next to Myron. “She’s smiling at me, you know.”

“Dream on.”

“Women find me irresistible,” Win said. “They see me, they want me. It’s a curse I live with every day of my life.”

“Please,” Myron said. “I just ate.”

“Envy. It’s so unattractive.”

“So go for it, stud.”

Win looked over at her. “Not my type.”

“Gorgeous blondes aren’t your type?”

“Her chest is too big. I have a new theory on that.”

“What theory?”

“The bigger the breasts, the lousier the lay.”

“Pardon me?”

“Think about it,” Win said. “Well-endowed women—I am referring here to ones with mega-fronts—have a habit of laying back and relying on their, er, assets. The effort isn’t always what it should be. What do you think?”

Myron shook his head. “I have several reactions,” he replied, “but I think I’ll stick with my initial one.”

“Which is?”

“You’re a pig.”

Win smiled, sat back. “So how was your visit with Ms. Yeller?”

“She’s hiding something too.”

“Well, well. The plot doth thicken.”

Myron nodded.

“In my experience,” Win said, “there is only one thing that can silence the mother of a dead boy.”

“And that is?”

“Cash. A great deal of it.”

Mr. Warmth. But in truth the same thought had crossed Myron’s mind. “Deanna Yeller lives in Cherry Hill now. In a house.”

Win leapt on that one. “A single widow from the dumps of west Philadelphia moving to the ’burbs? Pray tell, how does she afford it?”

“Do you really think she’s being bought?”

“Is there another explanation? According to what we know, the woman has no solid means of support. She spent her life in an impoverished area. Now all of a sudden she’s Miss Better Homes and Gardens.”

“Could be something else.”

“For example?”

“A guy.”

Win made a scoffing noise. “A forty-two-year-old ghetto woman does not find that kind of sugar daddy. It just doesn’t happen.”

Myron said nothing.

“Now,” Win continued, “add into that equation Kenneth and Helen Van Slyke, the grieving parents of another dead child.”

“What about them?”

“I’ve done a bit of checking. They too have no visible signs of support. Kenneth’s family was already destitute when they married. As for Helen, whatever money she had Kenneth lost in his business ventures.”

“You mean they’re broke?”

“Completely,” Win replied. “So pray tell, dear friend, how are they managing to carry on at Brentman Hall?”

Myron shook his head. “There has to be another explanation.”

“Why?”

“One mother being bought off by her child’s killer I might be able to buy. But two?”

Win said, “You have a rather rosy view of human nature.”

“And you have a rather dim one.”

“Which is why I’m usually correct in these matters,” Win said.

Myron frowned. “What about TruPro’s connection with this?”

“What about it?”

“Fishnet was hired to follow me immediately after the murder. Why?”

“The Ache brothers know you quite well by now. Perhaps they feared you’d investigate.”

“So? What’s their interest?”

Win thought a second. “Didn’t TruPro used to represent Valerie?”

“But that was six years ago,” Myron said. “Before the Ache brothers had even taken over the agency.”

“Hmm. Perhaps you are barking up the wrong tree.”

“What do you mean?” Myron asked.

“Perhaps there is no connection. TruPro is interested in signing Eddie Crane, correct?”

Myron nodded.

“And Eddie’s mentor—this Pavel fellow—is closely associated with TruPro. Perhaps they feel you are moving in on their turf.”

“Which the Ache brothers would not like,” Myron added.

“Precisely.”

A possibility. Myron tried it on and walked around a bit, but it just didn’t feel right.

“Oh, one other thing,” Win replied.

“What?”

“Aaron is in town.”

Myron felt a quick chill. “What for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Probably just a coincidence,” Myron said.

“Probably.”

Silence.

Win sat back and steepled his fingers. The match began. Duane’s play was nothing short of spectacular. He cruised through the first set 6–2. He stumbled a bit in the second, but came on to win it 7–5. Jacques Potiline had had enough. Duane whipped him in the final set 6–1.

Another impressive victory.

As the players left the court, Henry Hobman stood. His face remained locked on grim. He chewed at the inside of his mouth. “Better,” he said tightly. “But not great.”

“Stop gushing, Henry. It’s embarrassing.”

Ned Tunwell sprinted down the steps toward Myron. His arms were flapping like a kid making windmills in the snow. Several other Nike execs followed him. There were tears in Ned’s eyes.

“I knew it!” Ned shouted in glee. He shook Myron’s hand, hugged him, turned to Win, pumped his hand too. Win pulled his hand back and wiped it on his pants. “I just knew it!”

Myron simply nodded.

“Soon! So soon!” Ned cried. “The promo of the year begins! Everyone is going to know the name Duane Richwood! He was fantastic, utterly fantastic! I can’t believe it. I swear, I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited before!”

“You’re not going to come again, are you, Ned?”

“Oh, Myron!” He nudged Win playfully with his elbow. “Is he a kidder or what?”

“A gifted comedian,” Win agreed.

Ned slapped Win’s shoulder. Win visibly winced but did not break the offending hand. Amazing restraint for Win.

“Look, guys,” Ned said, “I’d love to stand here and chat all day. But I gotta run.”

Win managed to hide his disappointment.

“Ciao for now. Myron, we’ll talk, okay?”

Myron nodded.

“Bye, guys.” Ned skipped—actually skipped—back up the stairs.

Win watched him depart with something approaching horror. “What,” he asked, “was that?”

“A bad dream. I’ll meet you back at the office.”

“Where are you going?” Win asked.

“To talk to Duane. I have to ask him about Valerie’s call.”

“Let it go until after the tournament.”

Myron shook his head. “Can’t.”

15

Myron waited for the press conference to end. It took some time. Duane was holding court, firmly in his element. The media had a new darling. Duane Richwood. Cocky but not obnoxious. Confident yet gracious. Handsome. American.

When the hordes of press finally ran out of questions, Myron accompanied Duane back to the dressing room. He sat on a chair next to Duane’s locker. Duane took off his sunglasses and put them on the top shelf.

“Some match, huh?” Duane said.

Myron nodded.

“Hey, this win oughta make Nike happy.”

“Orgasmic,” Myron agreed.

“They going to air the ad during my next match, right?”

“Yep.”

Duane shook his head. “Quarterfinal, at the U.S. Open,” he said in awe. “I can’t believe it, Myron. We’re on our way.”

“Duane?”

“Yeah?”

“I know Valerie called you,” Myron said.

Duane stopped. “What?”

“She called your apartment twice. From a pay phone near her hotel.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Duane quickly reached for the sunglasses, fumbled them, put them on.

“I want to help you, Duane.”

“Nothing to help me with.”

“Duane …”

“Just leave me the fuck alone.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Look, Myron, I don’t need distractions right now. Just drop it.”

“She’s dead, Duane. That just won’t go away.”

Duane took off his shirt and began toweling off his chest. “Some stalker killed her,” he said. “I saw it on the news. Got nothing to do with me.”

“Why did she call you, Duane?”

His hands were clenching and unclenching. “You work for me, right?”

“Right.”

“Then drop it or you’re fired.”

Myron looked at him. “No,” he said.

Duane sunk into a chair, his head in his hands. “Shit, I’m sorry, Myron. I didn’t mean that. It’s just the pressure. What with this tournament and that Dimonte cop accusing me and all. Look, just forget I said anything, okay? Just forget this whole conversation happened.”

“No.”

“What?”

“Why did she call you, Duane?”

“Man, don’t you listen?”

“Not well.”

“Just stay out of it.”

“No.”

“It’s got nothing to do with the murder.”

“Then you admit she called you?”

Duane stood, turned his back toward Myron, leaned against his locker.

“Duane?”

His words were soft. “Yeah, she called me. So what?”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say we were acquainted. Intimately, if you get my drift.”

“You and Valerie …?” Myron made futile hand gestures.

Duane nodded slowly. “It was no big thing. Just a few times.”

“When did this start?”

“Couple of months ago.”

“Where did you meet?”

He looked at Myron, confused. “At a tournament.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t remember. New Haven, I think. But it was over quick.”

“So why did you lie to the police?”

“Why do you think?” he countered. “Wanda was standing right there. I love her, man. I made a mistake. I didn’t want to hurt her. Is that so wrong?”

“So why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“What?”

“When I asked you just now. Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

“Same reason.”

“But Wanda isn’t here.”

“I was ashamed, okay?”

“Ashamed?”

“I’m not proud of what I did.”

Myron watched him. With those sunglasses Duane’s face looked sleek and robotic. But something wasn’t right here. It was a nice sentiment, but twenty-one-year-old professional athletes, no matter how faithful to their partners, were not this ashamed of letting their agents know about an indiscretion. The excuse might be commendable, but it rang hollow. “If it was over, why was Valerie calling you?”

“I don’t know. She wanted to see me again. One last fling, I guess.”

“Did you agree to see her?”

“No. I told her we were finished.”

“What else did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure? Do you remember anything at all?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Did she seem distressed?”

“Not that I could tell.”

The door opened. Players began to file in, many offering Duane icy congratulations. Rising stars were not big in the locker room. If someone new was joining the ultra-exclusive tennis club known as the “Top Ten,” another member had to be thrown out. The way it was. No boardroom was this cutthroat. Everyone was a rival here. Everyone was competing for the same dollars and fame. Everyone was an enemy.

Duane suddenly looked very much alone.

“You hungry?” Myron asked.

“Starved,” Duane said.

“You want anything in particular?”

“Pizza,” Duane said. “Extra cheese and pepperoni.”

“Get dressed. I’ll meet you out front.”

16

“Myron Bolitar?”

The car phone. He’d just dropped Duane off at his apartment.

“Yes.”

“This is Gerard Courter with the NYPD. Jake’s son.”

“Oh, right. How’s it going, Gerard?”

“Can’t complain. I doubt you remember but we played against each other once.”

“Michigan State,” Myron said. “I remember. And I have the bruises to prove it.”

Gerard laughed. Sounded just like his old man. “Glad I was memorable.”

“That’s a polite word for what you were.”

Another Jake-like guffaw. “My dad said you needed info on the Simpson homicide.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“You probably heard there’s a major suspect. Guy named Roger Quincy.”

“The stalker.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything specific tying him to the murder?” Myron asked. “Besides the stalking?”

“He’s on the run, for one thing. When they got to Quincy’s apartment he was packed and gone. No one knows where he is.”

“He might have just been scared,” Myron said.

“Good reason to be.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Roger Quincy was at the tennis center on the day of the murder.”

“You have witnesses?”

“Several.”

That slowed Myron down. “What else?”

“She was shot with a thirty-eight. Very close range. We found the weapon in a garbage can ten yards away from the shooting. Smith & Wesson. It was in a Feron’s bag. The bag had a bullet hole in it.”

Feron’s. Another tournament sponsor. They were licensed to sell “official tournament merchandise.” Feron’s had at least half a dozen stands selling to a zillion people. No way to trace it back. “So the killer walked up to her,” Myron said, “shot her through the bag, kept walking, dumped the gun in the garbage, and headed out.”

“That’s how we see it,” Gerard said.

“A cool customer.”

“Very.”

“Any prints on the gun?” Myron asked.

“Nope.”

“Any witnesses to the shooting?”

“Several hundred. Unfortunately all anyone remembers is the sound of the gun, and Valerie toppling over.”

Myron shook his head. “The killer took a hell of a chance. Shooting her in public like that.”

“Yeah. A major case of brass balls.”

“You got anything else?”

“Just a question,” Gerard said.

“Shoot.”

“Where are our seats for next Saturday?”

17

Esperanza had neatly stacked two piles of six-year-old press clippings on Myron’s desk. The pile on the right—the taller pile—was made up of articles on the murder of Alexander Cross. The smaller stack was on the hospitalization of Valerie Simpson.

Myron ignored the third stack—the one with his messages—and started sifting through the pile on Valerie. The story was already familiar to him. Valerie’s family had claimed she was “taking time off,” but a well-placed source leaked the truth to the press: the teen tennis star was actually a patient at the famed Dilworth Mental Health Facility. The family denied it for a few days—until a photograph of Valerie taking a walk on the Dilworth grounds appeared in the papers. A belated statement from the family claimed that Valerie was “resting from exhaustion caused by external pressures,” whatever that meant.

The media coverage was only mildly intense. Valerie was already a has-been in the tennis world, ergo the press was interested but not ravenous. Still, rumors surfaced, especially in some of the fringe periodicals. One said that Valerie’s breakdown had been the result of a sexual assault. Another said she’d been attacked by a stalker. Still another claimed Valerie had murdered someone in cold blood, though the article didn’t bother the reader with mundane details—like the victim’s name, how he or she was killed, why the police hadn’t arrested Valerie, the little things.

But the most interesting rumor, the one that really snared Myron’s attention, appeared in two separate papers. According to several “unnamed sources,” Valerie Simpson had gone into hiding to cover up a pregnancy.

Might be something, might be nothing. Pregnancy rumors always surface when a young woman goes into hiding. Still …

He moved on to articles on Alexander Cross’s murder. Esperanza had limited her search to Philadelphia area periodicals, but the material was still immense. The stories basically followed the police version. Alexander Cross had been at a party at his snooty tennis club. He stumbled across two burglars, Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller. He took chase, confronted them on the main grass court, and was stabbed by Errol Swade. The blade punctured Alexander’s heart. Death was instantaneous.

Senator Cross and his family had not commented on the case. According to the senator’s spokesman, the family was “in seclusion” and was “relying on law enforcement agencies and the justice system,” whatever that meant.

The press focused on the manhunt for Errol Swade. The police were confident to the point of cocky that Swade would be captured within a matter of hours. But hours turned to days. Editorials harshly criticized the police for not being able to nab one nineteen-year-old drug addict, but the Cross family remained silent. The story provoked the standard public outrage—why, editorials demanded to know, had a lowlife like Errol Swade been let out on parole in the first place?

But the anger fizzled, as it always does in such cases. Other stories began to take precedence. The coverage trickled from front page to back page to oblivion.

Myron checked through the pile again. The police shooting of Curtis Yeller had been neatly glossed over. There was no mention of an internal affairs investigation into the incident. None of the usual reactionaries protested the police “brutality,” which was strange. Usually some whacko managed to get himself on television, no matter what the facts, especially in the case of a black teen being gunned down by a white cop. But not this time. Or at least it wasn’t covered by the press.

Wait. Hold the phone.

An article on Curtis Yeller. Myron had missed it the first time because it’d been printed the day immediately following the murder. Very early for this kind of piece. Probably sneaked in before Senator Cross put his foot down—but that might just be conspiracy paranoia on Myron’s part. Hard to tell.

It was a small article on the bottom corner of page 12 in the metro section. Myron read it twice. Then a third time. The article was not on the shooting in west Philly or even the police’s role in said shooting. The article was on Curtis Yeller himself.

It started out like any puff piece: Curtis Yeller was described as an “honor roll student.” Not a big deal really. A psychotic child molester with the IQ of a citrus beverage was suddenly dubbed an honor student when killed prematurely. Very Bonfire of the Vanities. But this story went a bit further. Mrs. Lucinda Elright, Curtis Yeller’s history teacher, described Curtis as her “best pupil” and a boy who “had never even gotten a detention.” Mr. Bernard Johnson, his English teacher, said Curtis was “unusually bright and inquisitive,” “one in a million,” and “like a son to me.”

The usual death hyperbole?

Perhaps. But school records backed the teachers up. Curtis had never been on report. He also had the best attendance record in his grade. On top of that, his transcript reported a 3.9 average, his sole B coming in some sort of health class. Both teachers firmly believed that Curtis Yeller was incapable of violence. Mrs. Elright blamed Curtis’s cousin Errol Swade, but no specifics were given.

Myron sat back. He stared at a movie still from Casablanca on the far wall. Sam was serenading Bogie and Bergman as the Nazis moved in. Here’s looking at you, kid. We’ll always have Paris. You’re getting on that plane. Myron wondered if young Curtis Yeller had ever seen the movie, if he had had the opportunity to behold the celluloid image of Ingrid Bergman with tears in her eyes at a foggy airport.

He picked up the basketball from behind his desk and began spinning it on his finger. He slapped it at just the right angle to increase the speed rotation without dislodging the ball from its axis. He stared at his handiwork as though it were a Gypsy’s crystal ball. He saw an alternate universe, one with a younger version of himself hitting a three-pointer at the buzzer on the Boston Garden’s parquet floor. He tried not to let himself dwell on this image too long, but there it stayed, front and center, refusing to leave.

Esperanza came in. She sat down and waited in silence.

The ball stopped spinning. Myron put it down and handed her the article. “Take a look at this.”

She read it. “A couple of teachers said something nice about a dead kid. So what? Probably misquoted anyway.”

“But this is more than just a couple of casual comments. Curtis Yeller had no police record, no school record, a nearly perfect attendance record, and a 3.9 GPA. For most kids that’s a hell of a statement. But this was a kid from one of the worst parts of Philadelphia.”

Esperanza shrugged. “I don’t see the relevance. What difference does it make if Yeller was Einstein or an idiot?”

“None. Except it’s just one more thing that doesn’t add up. Why did Curtis’s mother say he was a no-good thief?”

“Maybe she knew more than his teachers.”

Myron shook his head. He thought about Deanna Yeller. The proud, beautiful woman who answered the door. The suddenly hostile, defensive woman at the mention of her dead son. “She was lying.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Win thinks she’s being bought off.”

“Sounds like a good possibility,” Esperanza said.

“What, a mother taking bribes to protect her son’s murderer?”

Esperanza shrugged again. “Sure, why not?”

“You really think a mother …?” Myron stopped. Esperanza’s face was totally impassive—another one who always believed the worst. “Just look at this whole scenario for a second,” he tried. “Curtis Yeller and Errol Swade break into this ritzy tennis club at night. Why? To rob the place? Of what? It was night. It wasn’t like they were going to find wallets in the locker room. So what were they going to steal? Some tennis sneakers? A couple of rackets? That’s a hell of a long way to go for some tennis equipment.”

“Stereo equipment, maybe,” Esperanza said. “The clubhouse could have a big-screen TV.”

“Fine. Assume you’re right. Problem is, the boys didn’t take a car. They took public transportation and walked. How were they going to carry the loot? By hand?”

“Maybe they planned on stealing one.”

“From the club’s valet lot?”

She shrugged. “Could be,” she said. Then: “Mind if I change subjects for a second?”

“Go ahead.”

“How did it go with Eddie Crane last night?”

“He’s a big fan of Little Pocahontas. He said she was ‘hot.’ ”

“Hot?”

“Yup.”

She shrugged. “Kid’s got taste.”

“Nice too. I liked him. He’s smart, got his head on straight. Helluva good kid.”

“You going to adopt him?”

“Uh, no.”

“How about represent him?”

“They said they’ll be in touch.”

“What do you think?”

“Hard to say. The kid liked me. The parents are worried about me being small-time.” Pause. “How did it go with Burger City?”

She handed him some papers. “Prelim contract for Phil Sorenson.”

“TV commercial?”

“Yeah, but he has to dress up as a burger condiment.”

“Which one?”

“Ketchup, I think. We’re still talking.”

“Fine. Just don’t let it be mayonnaise or pickle.” He studied the contract. “Nice work. Good figures.”

Esperanza looked at him.

“Very good, in fact.” He smiled at her. Widely.

“Is this the part where I get all excited by your praise?” she asked.

“Forget I said anything.”

She pointed to the stack of articles. “I managed to track down Valerie’s shrink from her days at Dilworth. Her name is Julie Abramson. She has a private office on Seventy-third Street. She won’t see you, of course. Refuses to discuss her patient.”

“A woman doctor,” Myron mused. He put his hands behind his head. “Maybe I can entice her with my rapier wit and brawny body.”

“Probably,” Esperanza said, “but on the off chance she’s not comatose, I went with an alternative plan.”

“And that is?”

“I called her office back, changed my voice, and pretended you were a patient. I made an appointment for you to see her tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock.”

“What’s my psychosis?”

“Chronic priapism,” she said. “But that’s just my opinion.”

“Funny.”

“Actually, you’ve been much better since what’s-her-name left town.”

What’s-her-name was Jessica, which Esperanza knew very well. Esperanza did not care much for the love of Myron’s life. A casual observer might offer up jealousy as the culprit, but that’d be way off base. True, Esperanza was extraordinarily beautiful. Sure, there’d been moments of temptation between them, but one or the other had always been prudent enough to douse the flames before any real damage was done. There was also the fact that Esperanza liked a bit of diversity when it came to beaus—diversity that went well beyond tall or short, fat or thin, white or black. Right now, for example, Esperanza was dating a photographer. The photographer’s name was Lucy. Lucy. As in a female, for those having trouble catching the drift.

No, the reason for her strong dislike was far simpler: Esperanza had been there when Jessica left the first time. She had seen it all firsthand. And Esperanza held grudges.

Myron returned to his original question. “So what did you tell them was wrong with me?”

“I was vague,” she said. “You hear voices. You suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, delusions, hallucinations, something like that.”

“How did you get an appointment so fast?”

“You’re a very famous movie star.”

“My name?”

“I didn’t dare give one,” Esperanza said. “You’re that big.”

18

Dr. Julie Abramson’s office was on the corner of Seventy-third Street and Central Park West. Ritzy address. One block north, overlooking the park, was the San Remo building. Dustin Hoffman and Diane Keaton lived there. Madonna had tried to move in, but the board decided she was not San Remo material. Win lived a block south, in the Dakota, where John Lennon had lived and literally died. Whenever you entered the Dakota’s courtyard you crossed over the spot where Lennon had been gunned down. Myron had walked it a hundred times since the shooting, but he still felt the need to be silent when he did.

There was an ornate, wrought-iron gate on Dr. Abramson’s door. Protective or decorative? Myron couldn’t decide, but he saw some irony in a psychiatric office being guarded by a “wrought” iron gate.

Okay, not much irony but a little.

Myron pressed a doorbell. He heard the buzzer and let himself in. He was wearing his best pair of sunglasses for the occasion, even though it was cloudy outside. Mr. Movie Star.

The receptionist, a neatly attired man wearing fashionable spectacles, folded his hands and said, “Good morning,” in a supposedly soothing voice that grated like a tortured cat’s screech.

“I’m here to see Dr. Abramson. I have a nine o’clock appointment.”

“I see.” He perked up now, studying Myron’s face, trying to guess who the big movie star was. Myron adjusted his sunglasses but kept them on. The receptionist wanted to ask for a name, but discretion got the better of him. Afraid of insulting the big-time celebrity.

“Could you fill out this form while you’re waiting?”

Myron tried to look annoyed by the inconvenience.

“It’s just a formality,” the receptionist said. “I’m sure you understand how these things are.”

Myron sighed. “Very well then.”

After it was filled out the receptionist asked for it back.

“I’d rather give it directly to Dr. Abramson,” Myron said.

“Sir, I assure you—”

“Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.” Mr. Difficult. Just like a real movie star. “I will give it to Dr. Abramson personally.”

The receptionist sulked in silence. Several minutes later the intercom buzzed. The receptionist picked up the phone, listened for a second, hung up. “Right this way please.”

Dr. Abramson was tiny—four-ten, tops, and seventy pounds soaking wet. Everything about her looked shrunken, scrunched up. Except for her eyes. They peered out of the diminutive face like two big, radiant, warm beacons that missed nothing.

She placed her child-size hand in his. Her handshake was surprisingly firm. “Please have a seat,” she said.

Myron did. Dr. Abramson sat across from him. Her feet barely reached the ground. “May I have your sheet?” she asked.

“Of course.” Myron handed it to her. She glanced down for a brief second.

“You’re Bruce Willis?”

Myron gave her a cocky side smirk. Very Die Hard. “Didn’t recognize me with the sunglasses, huh?”

“You look nothing like Bruce Willis.”

“I would have put Harrison Ford, but he’s too old.”

“Still would have been a better choice.” Then studying him a bit more she added, “Liam Neeson would have been better still.” Dr. Abramson did not seem particularly upset by Myron’s stunt. Then again, she was a trained psychiatrist and thus used to dealing with abnormal minds. “Why don’t you tell me your real name.”

“Myron Bolitar.”

The little face broke open in a smile nearly as radiant as the eyes. “I thought I recognized you. You’re the basketball star.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘star’ exactly.” Blush, blush.

“Please, Mr. Bolitar, don’t be so modest. First team all-American three years in a row. Two NCAA championships. One College Player of the Year. Eighth pick overall in the draft.”

“You’re a fan?”

“And so observant.” She leaned back. Like a small child in a big rocking chair. “As I recall, you made the cover of Sports Illustrated twice. Unusual for a college player. You were also a good student, an academic all-American, popular with the press, and considered quite handsome. Am I correct?”

“Yes,” Myron said. “Except maybe for that ‘considered’ part.”

She laughed. It was a nice laugh. Her whole body seemed to join in. “Now why don’t you tell me what this is all about, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Please call me Myron.”

“Fine. And you can call me Dr. Abramson. Now what seems to be the problem?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“I see.” She looked skeptical, but Myron sensed that the good doctor was having a little fun at his expense. “So you have a ‘friend’ with a problem. Tell me all about it.”

“My friend,” he said, “is Valerie Simpson.”

That got her attention. “What?”

“I want to talk to you about Valerie Simpson.”

The open face slammed shut. “You’re not a reporter, are you?”

“No.”

“I thought I read you were a sports agent.”

“I am. Valerie Simpson was about to become a client.”

“I see.”

“When was the last time you saw Valerie?” Myron asked.

Dr. Abramson shook her head. “I can neither confirm nor deny that Valerie Simpson was ever a patient of mine.”

“You don’t have to confirm or deny it. I know she was.”

“I repeat: I can neither confirm nor deny that Valerie Simpson was ever a patient of mine.” She studied him for a moment. “Perhaps you can tell me what your interest is in this.”

“Like I said before, I was going to represent her.”

“That doesn’t explain your visiting me incognito.”

“I’m investigating her murder.”

“Investigating?”

Myron nodded.

“Who hired you?”

“No one.”

“Then why are you investigating?”

“I have my reasons.”

She nodded. “What are those reasons, Myron? I’d like to hear about them.”

Psychiatrists. “You want me to also tell you about the time I walked in on Mommy and Daddy?”

“If you want.”

“I don’t want. What I want is to know what caused Valerie’s breakdown.”

Her response was rote. “I can neither confirm nor deny that Valerie Simpson was ever a patient of mine.”

“Doctor-patient privilege?”

“That’s right.”

“But Valerie is dead.”

“That doesn’t alter my obligation in the slightest.”

“She’s been murdered. Gunned down in cold blood.”

“I understand that. Dramatics will not alter my obligation either.”

“But you may know something helpful.”

“Helpful in what way?”

“In finding the killer.”

She folded the tiny hands in her lap. Like a little girl in church. “And that’s what you’re attempting to do? Find this woman’s killer?”

“Yes.”

“What about the police? I understood from news reports that they have a suspect.”

“I don’t trust authority types,” Myron said.

“Oh?”

“It’s one of the reasons I want to help.”

Dr. Abramson fixed him with the big eyes. “I don’t think so, Myron.”

“No?”

“You look more like the rescue-complex sort to me. The kind of man who likes to play hero all the time, who sees himself as a knight in shining armor. What do you think?”

“I think we should save my analysis for later.”

She shrugged her little shoulders. “Just giving my opinion. No extra charge.”

“Fine.” Extra charge? “I’m not so sure the police have the right man.”

“Why not?”

“I was hoping you could help me with that. Valerie must have talked about Roger Quincy’s stalking her. Did she think he was dangerous?”

“For the final time, I will neither confirm nor deny—”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking about Roger Quincy. You don’t have a relationship with him, do you?”

“I also don’t know him.”

“Then how about one of those quick opinions. Like you did with me.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no way I can convince you to talk to me?”

“About a possible patient? No.”

“Suppose I got parental consent.”

“You won’t.”

Myron waited, watched. She was better at this than him. Her face gave away nothing, but the words couldn’t be taken back. “How do you know that?” he asked.

She remained silent. Her eyes dropped to the floor. Myron wondered if the faux pas had been on purpose.

“They called you already, didn’t they?” Myron said.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss any communications between myself and—”

“The family called. They hushed you up.”

“I will neither confirm—”

“The body is barely cold and they’re already covering their tracks,” Myron went on. “You don’t see anything wrong with that?”

Dr. Abramson cleared her throat. “I do not know what you’re talking about, but I will say this: it is not unreasonable in situations such as the one you’ve described to me for parents to want to protect their daughter’s memory.”

“Protect her memory”—Myron rose, put on his best lawyer-in-summation glower—“or her murderer?” Mr. High Drama.

“Now you’re being silly,” she said. “You surely don’t suspect the young woman’s family.”

Myron sat back down. He gave his best anything’s-possible head tilt. “Helen Van Slyke’s daughter is killed. Within hours the grieving mother calls you to make sure you keep your mouth shut. You don’t find that a tad odd?”

“I will neither confirm nor deny that I have ever heard the name Helen Van Slyke.”

“I see,” Myron said. “So you think this should all be shoved aside. Bottled up. Let the image rule over the reality. Somehow I don’t think that sits well with you, Doc.”

She said nothing.

“Your patient is dead,” Myron continued. “Don’t you think your obligation should be to her, not her mother?”

Dr. Abramson’s hands tightened into small balls for a moment, then relaxed. She took a deep breath, held it, let out it slowly. “Let us pretend—and just pretend—that I was the psychiatrist for this young woman. Wouldn’t I have an obligation not to betray what she told me in the strictest of confidences? If the patient chose not to reveal any of this while alive, wouldn’t I have an obligation to uphold that right for her in death?”

Myron stared at her. Dr. Abramson stared back. Unyielding. “Nice speech,” he said. “But maybe Valerie wanted to reveal something. And maybe someone killed her to deny her that right.”

The bright eyes blinked several times. “I think you should leave now,” she said.

She pressed a button on her intercom. The receptionist appeared at the door. He crossed his arms and tried to look intimidating. The attempt was hardly a rousing success.

Myron rose. He knew he had planted a seed. He would have to give it time to germinate. “Will you at least think about it?” he added.

“Good-bye, Myron.”

The receptionist stepped aside, allowing Myron room to pass.

19

Of the three witnesses to the murder of Alexander Cross—all college chums of the deceased—only one lived in the New York area. Gregory Caufield, Jr., was now a young associate at daddy’s law firm of Stillen, Caufield, and Weston, a high-powered, high-profile firm with offices in several states and foreign countries.

Myron dialed, asked for Gregory Caufield, Jr., and was put on hold. A woman came on the line several seconds later and said, “I’ll put you straight through to Mr. Caufield.”

A click. One ring. Then an enthusiastic voice said, “Well, hi!”

Well, hi?

“Is this Gregory Caufield?”

“Sure is. What can I do for you today?”

“My name is Myron Bolitar.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I’d like to make an appointment to see you.”

“Sure. When?”

“As soon as possible.”

“How about half an hour from now? Will that be okay?”

“That’ll be fine, thank you.”

“Super, Myron. Looking forward to it.”

Click. Super?

Fifteen minutes later Myron was on his way. He walked up Park Avenue past the mosque steps where Myron and Win liked to lunch on summer days. Prime woman-watching perch. New York has the most beautiful women in the world, bar none. They wear business attire and sneakers and sunglasses. They walk with cool purpose, with no time to waste. Amazingly, none of the beautiful women checked Myron out. Probably just being discreet. Probably ogling him like crazy from behind those sunglasses.

Myron cut west to Madison Avenue. He passed a couple of electronics stores with the same GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs they’d had up for at least a year. The sign was always the same—white sign, black letters. A blind man held out a cup. Didn’t even give out pencils anymore. His seeing-eye dog looked dead. Two cops were laughing on the corner. They were eating croissants. Not doughnuts. Another cliché blown to hell.

There was a security guard by the elevator in the lobby.

“Yes?”

“Myron Bolitar to see Gregory Caufield.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Bolitar. Twenty-second floor.” Didn’t call up. Didn’t check his list. Hmm.

When the elevator opened, a pleasant-faced woman was standing there. “Good afternoon, Mr. Bolitar. If you’d please follow me.”

Down a long corridor with an office-pink carpet, white walls, McKnight framed posters. No typewriters clicked, but Myron heard the whir of a laser printer. Someone was dialing a number on a speakerphone. A fax machine screeched its call to another fax machine. When they turned the corner, a second, equally pleasant-faced, woman approached. Plastic smiles all around.

“Hello, Mr. Bolitar,” the second woman said. “Nice to see you today.”

“Nice to see you too.” Every line a lady-slayer.

The first woman handed him over to the second. Tag-team style. “Mr. Caufield is waiting for you in conference room C,” the second woman said, her voice low, as if conference room C were a clandestine chamber in the bowels of the Pentagon.

She led him to a door very much like any other except it had a big bronze C on it. In a matter of seconds, Myron managed to deduce that the room was conference room C. The Adventures of Sherlock Bolitar. A man opened the door from the inside. He was young with a thick head of Stephanopoulos-like hair. He pumped Myron’s hand enthusiastically. “Hi, Myron.”

“Hi, Gregory.” Like they actually knew each other.

“Please come in. There’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”

Myron stepped fully into the room. Big walnut table with dark leather chairs, the expensive kind, the kind with those little gold buttons on them. Oil portraits of stern-faced men on the walls. The room was empty, except for one man down the other end of the table. Though they had never met, Myron recognized the man immediately. He should have been surprised, but he wasn’t.

Senator Bradley Cross.

Gregory did not bother with introductions. In fact he didn’t bother staying. He slipped out the door, closing it behind him. The senator stood. His were a far cry from the classic patrician good looks one usually associates with political families. They say people look like their pets; in that case Senator Bradley Cross owned a basset hound. His features were long and malleable. His finely tailored suit did nothing to disguise his exaggerated pear build; on a woman, his hips would be called child-bearing. His hair was wispy gray strands that seemed to be suffering from static cling. He wore thick glasses and an off-center smile. Still, it was an endearing smile—indeed, an endearing, trustworthy face. The kind of face you’d vote for.

Senator Cross slowly put out his hand. “I’m sorry for the dramatics,” he said, “but I thought we should meet.”

They shook hands.

“Please have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something?”

“No, thank you,” Myron said.

They sat facing each other. Myron waited. The senator seemed unsure how to begin. He coughed into his fists several times. Each cough made his jowls flap a bit.

“Do you know why I wanted to see you?” he asked.

“No,” Myron said.

“I understand you’ve been asking a lot of questions about my son. More specifically, about his murder.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Around. Here and there. I am not without my sources.” He tilted his head the way a basset hound does when he hears a strange sound. “I’d like to know why.”

“Valerie Simpson was going to be a client of mine,” Myron said.

“So I’ve been told.”

“I’m looking into her murder.”

“And you believe there might be a connection between Valerie’s murder and Alexander’s?”

Myron shrugged.

“My son was killed by a random street thug six years ago near Philadelphia. Valerie was killed almost gangland style at the U.S. Open in New York. What possible connection could there be?”

“Maybe none.”

Cross leaned back, fiddled his thumbs. “I want to be up-front with you, Myron. I’ve looked into your background a bit. I know about your past work. Not the details, of course, but your reputation. I’m not trying to apply any influence here. It’s not my style. I’ve never been comfortable at playing the tough guy.” He smiled again. His eyes were wet now and there was a discernible quake in his voice. “I’m talking to you now not as a United States senator but as a grieving father. A grieving father who just wants to let his son rest in peace. I’m asking you to please stop what you’re doing.”

The pain in the man’s voice was raw. Myron had not expected this. “I’m not sure I can, Senator.”

The senator rubbed his entire face vigorously, using both hands. “You see two young people …” he began tiredly. “You see two young people with the whole world in front of them. Practically engaged to one another. And what happens to them? They’re murdered in two separate incidents six years apart. The cruel coincidence is too much to fathom. You wonder about that, don’t you, Myron?”

Myron nodded.

“So you begin to scrutinize their deaths. You look for something that might explain such a bizarre double tragedy. And in your search you find inconsistencies. You see pieces that just don’t add up.”

“Yes.”

“And those inconsistencies lead you to believe that there is a connection between Alexander’s murder and Valerie’s.”

“Maybe.”

Cross glanced up at the ceiling and rested his index finger on his lip. “Will you take my word that those inconsistencies have nothing to do with Valerie Simpson?”

“No,” Myron said. “I can’t.”

Senator Cross nodded, more to himself than Myron. “I didn’t suspect you would,” he said. “You don’t have children, do you, Myron?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter. Even people who have children don’t understand. They can’t. What happened … it’s not just the pain. The death is all-consuming. It never lets you go, never gives you a chance to catch your breath. My wife still has to be medicated almost daily. It’s like someone scooped out everything inside of her and left behind only a pitiful shell. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see her like that.”

“I don’t mean to hurt anyone, Senator.”

“But you won’t stop either. And no matter how careful you are, someone is bound to get wind of your investigation, just as I did.”

“I’ll try to be discreet.”

“You know that’s impossible.”

“I can’t back away now. I’m sorry.”

The senator gave himself the face massage again. He sighed deeply and said, “You leave me no choice. I’ll have to tell you what happened. Maybe then you’ll let it go.”

Myron waited.

“You are an attorney, are you not?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“You’re a member of the New York bar?”

“Yes.”

Bradley Cross reached into his suit pocket. Sallow skin hung off his face in uneven clumps. He took out a checkbook. “I’d like to hire you as my attorney,” he said. “Will a five-thousand-dollar retainer be enough?”

“I don’t understand.”

“As my attorney, what I’m about to tell you falls under the jurisdiction of attorney-client privilege. You will not be allowed, even in a court of law, to repeat what I am about to tell you.”

“You don’t need to hire me for that.”

“I’d prefer it.”

“Fine. Make it a hundred dollars.”

Bradley Cross wrote out the check and handed it to Myron.

“My son was on drugs,” he said without preamble. “Cocaine mostly. Heroin too, but he’d only just started on it. I knew he was on something, but frankly I didn’t think it was serious. I saw him high. I saw the red eyes. But I thought it was just marijuana. Hell, I’ve tried marijuana. Inhaled even.”

Weak smile. Myron returned it, equally weak.

“Alexander and his friends weren’t taking a casual stroll around the club grounds that night,” he said. “They were going to get high. Alexander was found with a syringe in his pocket. There was cocaine found in the bushes not far from where the murder took place. And, of course, there were traces of both heroin and cocaine in Alexander’s body. Not just in his fluids but in his tissue. I’m told that shows he’d been using for a while.”

“I thought there was no autopsy,” Myron said.

“It was kept secret. Nothing was reported or filed. It didn’t matter anyway. A knife wound ended Alexander’s life, not drugs. The fact that my son was taking illegal substances was irrelevant.”

Maybe, Myron thought, keeping his expression blank.

Cross stared off for a while. After some time had passed he asked, “Where was I?”

“They left the party to get high.”

“Right, thank you.” He cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter. “The rest of the story is fairly straightforward. The boys stumbled upon Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller on one of the grass courts. The papers talked about how brave Alexander was, how he tried to thwart the evil-doers without concern for his own safety. My spin doctors at their best. But the truth is, he was flying so high he acted irrationally. He swooped in like some kind of superhero. The Yeller boy—the one the police shot—dropped everything and ran. But Errol Swade was a cooler customer. He took out a switchblade and punctured my boy’s heart like a balloon. Casually, they say. Nonchalant.”

Senator Cross stopped. Myron waited for him to continue. When it was clear he had reached the end of his saga, Myron asked, “Why were they at the club?”

“Who?”

“Swade and Yeller.”

Senator Cross looked puzzled. “They were thieves.”

“How do you know that?”

“What else would they have been doing here?”

Myron shrugged. “Selling drugs to your son. Dealing. It sounds a lot more plausible than a late-night robbery of a tennis club.”

Cross shook his head. “They were carrying items. Tennis rackets. Tennis balls.”

“According to whom?”

“According to Gregory and the others. The items were also found at the scene.”

“Tennis rackets and balls?”

“There may have been other things, I don’t remember.”

“That’s what they were after?” Myron said. “Some tennis gear?”

“The police believe that my son interrupted them before the robbery was complete.”

“But your son stumbled across them outside. If they’d already stolen some gear, then they’d already been inside.”

“So what are you suggesting?” the senator asked sharply. “That my son was murdered in a drug deal gone bad?”

“I’m just trying to see what sounds most plausible.”

“Would a drug deal murder make a connection with Valerie more likely?”

“No.”

“So what’s your point?”

“No point. Just trying out different theories. What happened next? Directly after the murder?”

He looked off again, this time in the general direction of one of the portraits, but Myron didn’t think he was actually seeing it. “Gregory and the other boys came running back into the party,” he said in a hollow voice. “I followed them outside. Blood was bubbling out of Alexander’s mouth. By the time I reached him he was dead.”

Silence.

“You can pretty much figure out the rest. Everything switched over to autopilot. I really didn’t do much. Aides did. Gregory’s father—he’s a senior partner here—helped too. I just stood and nodded numbly. I won’t lie to you. I won’t tell you I didn’t know what was going on. I did. Old habits die hard, Myron. There is no creature more selfish than a politician. We so easily justify our selfishness as the ‘common good.’ So the cover-up was done.”

“And if the truth came out now?”

He smiled. “I’d be destroyed. But I’m not really afraid of that anymore. Or maybe that’s a lie too, who knows anymore?” He threw up his hands, lowered them. “But my wife never learned the truth. I don’t know what it would do to her, I really don’t. Alexander was a good kid, Mr. Bolitar. I don’t want his memory ripped to shreds. In the end drugs do not make Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller any less culpable or my son any more guilty. He didn’t ask to be stabbed.”

Myron waited a beat. Then the left-field question: “What about Deanna Yeller?”

Puzzled. “Who?”

“Curtis Yeller’s mother.”

“What about her?”

“You have no relationship with her?”

More puzzled. “Of course not. Why would you ask something like that?”

“You never paid to keep her silent?”

“About what?”

“About the circumstances of her son’s death.”

“No. Why should I?”

“You know there was never an autopsy done on Curtis Yeller either. Strange, don’t you think?”

“If you’re insinuating that the police did not act strictly within regulations, I can’t answer that because I don’t know. I don’t care either. Yes, I’ve wondered about the police shooting myself. Perhaps there was a second cover-up that night. If there was, I was not involved in it. And more important, I don’t see what possible connection it could have with Valerie Simpson. In fact I don’t see any connection in any of this with Valerie.”

“She was at the party that night?”

“Valerie? Of course.”

“Do you know where she was at the time Alexander was murdered?”

“No.”

“Do you remember how she reacted to his death?”

“She was devastated. Her fiancé had just been killed in cold blood. She was distraught and angry.”

“Did you approve of their relationship?”

“Yes, very much so. I thought Valerie was a bit troubled. A bit too sad. But I liked her. She and Alexander were good together.”

“Valerie’s name was never mentioned in connection with your son’s murder. Why?”

The jowls were quivering big-time. “You know why,” he said. “Valerie Simpson was still something of a celebrity from her tennis days. We felt that there was already enough scrutiny without adding her name to the mix. It wasn’t a question of liking or not liking Valerie. We just wanted to minimize the story as much as possible. Keep it off the front pages.”

“You got lucky then.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yeller was killed. Swade vanished.”

Cross blinked several times. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“If they were alive there would have been a trial. More media attention. Maybe too much media attention for even your spin doctors to handle.”

He smiled. “I see you’ve heard the rumors.”

“Rumors?”

“That I had Errol Swade killed. That the mob did me a favor or some such nonsense.”

“You have to admit, Senator, their fates made for a convenient little public relations package. No one to dispute your spin on things.”

“I don’t cry over the fate of Curtis Yeller, and if Errol Swade was murdered I doubt I’d shed too many tears about that either. But I don’t know any mobsters. That may sound silly, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about enlisting the mob’s help. I did hire a detective agency to look for Swade.”

“Did they find anything?”

“No. They believe that Swade is dead. So do the police. He was a punk, Myron. He wasn’t on a path that led to a long life even before this incident.”

Myron followed up with a few more questions, but there was nothing more to learn. A few minutes later the two men stood.

“Would you mind if I spoke to Gregory Caufield before I leave?” Myron asked.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t.”

“If there’s nothing to hide—”

“I don’t want him knowing I told you this. Attorney-client privilege, remember? He won’t speak honestly to you anyway.”

“He will if you tell him to.”

Cross shook his head. “Gregory’s father controls him. He won’t talk.”

Myron shrugged. The senator was probably right. The only leverage he could apply on Gregory would be what Cross just told him. Cross had neatly arranged it so Myron couldn’t do that. He’d have to think of a way to end-run that. Caufield was an eyewitness. He’d be worth a few questions.

The two men shook hands, both making serious eye contact. Was Senator Cross a sweet old codger, a grieving father trying to protect his son’s memory? Or had he calculated that this would be the most effective strategy for dealing with Myron? Was he cagey or sympathetic or both?

Cross gave him the endearing off-center smile again. “I hope I’ve satisfied your curiosity,” he said.

He hadn’t. Not even close. But Myron didn’t bother telling him that.

20

Myron left the building and strolled down Madison Avenue. Traffic was at a standstill. Big surprise in Manhattan. Five lanes were merging into one on Fifty-fourth Street. The other four lanes were blocked by one of those purely New York construction sites with steam pouring up out of the streets. Very Dante. What was with all that steam anyway?

He was about to cut across Fifty-third Street when he felt a sharp stab in his ribs.

“Give me an excuse, asshole.”

Myron recognized the voice before seeing the taped nose and the black eyes. Fishnet. He was pressing a gun against Myron’s rib cage, using his body to hide the gun from any curious onlookers.

“You’re wearing the same shirt,” Myron said. “Jesus Christ, you didn’t even change.”

Fishnet gave him a little gun jab. “You’re going to wish you were never born, asshole. Get in the car.”

The car—the powder-blue Caddy with thick scratches on the side—pulled alongside of them. Jim, Fishnet’s partner, was driving, but Myron barely noticed him. His eyes immediately locked on the familiar figure in the backseat. The figure smiled and waved.

“Hey, Myron,” he called out. “How’s it going?”

Aaron.

“Bring him here, Lee,” Aaron said.

Fishnet Lee gave Myron a nudge with the gun. “Let’s go, asshole.”

Myron got in the backseat with Aaron. Fishnet Lee joined Jim in the front. The front seats were both covered with plastic where Win had dumped the maple syrup.

Aaron was dressed in his customary garb. Pure-snow-white suit, white shoes. No socks. No shirt. Aaron never wore a shirt, preferring to display his tan pectorals. They gleamed from some sort of oil or grease. He always looked fresh out of the wax salon, his body smooth as a baby’s bottom. Aaron was a big man, six-six, two-forty. The weight lifter’s build was not merely for show. Aaron moved with a speed and grace that defied the bulk. His black hair was slicked back and tied into a long ponytail.

He gave Myron a game-show–host grin and held it.

Myron said, “Nice smile, Aaron. Lots of teeth.”

“Proper dental hygiene. It’s a passion of mine.”

“You should share your passion with Lee,” Myron said.

Fishnet’s head spun. “What the fuck did you say, asshole?”

“Turn around, Lee,” Aaron said to Fishnet. Fishnet glared a few more daggers. Myron yawned. Jim drove. Aaron sat back. He said nothing, smiling brightly. Every part of him glistened in the sunlight. After two blocks of this Myron pointed at Aaron’s cleavage. “Your electrolysis missed a chest hair.”

To Aaron’s credit he didn’t look. “We need to chat, Myron.”

“What about?”

“Valerie Simpson. For once I think we’re on the same side.”

“Oh?”

“You want to capture Valerie Simpson’s killer. So do we.”

“You do?”

“Yes. Mr. Ache is determined to bring her killer to justice.”

“That Frank. Always the Good Samaritan.”

Aaron chuckled. “Still the funny man, eh, Myron? Well, I admit it sounds a bit bizarre, but we’d like to help you.”

“How?”

“We both know that Roger Quincy killed Valerie Simpson. Mr. Ache is willing to use his considerable influence to help locate him.”

“And in return?”

Aaron feigned shock. He put a manicured hand the size of a manhole cover to his chest. “Myron, you wound me. Really. We try to extend the hand of friendship and you slap it away with an insult.”

“Uh-huh.”

“This is one of those rare win-win situations,” Aaron said. “We’re willing to help you get your killer.”

“And you get?”

“Not a thing.” He settled back into his seat. “If the killer is found, the police will move on to other matters. We will move on to other matters. And you, Myron, should also move on to other matters.”

“Ah.”

“Now, there’s no reason to have a problem here,” Aaron added. When the sun hit his chest at a certain angle, the reflection dazzled the eyes. “This isn’t like some of our past encounters. We both want the same thing. We both want to put this tragic episode behind us. For you, that means finding the killer and bringing him to justice. For us, that means ending the investigation as soon as possible.”

“But suppose I’m not convinced Roger Quincy did it,” Myron said.

Aaron raised an eyebrow. “Come on now, Myron. You’ve seen the evidence.”

“It’s circumstantial.”

“Since when has that bothered you? Oh by the way, a new witness has come forward. We just got wind of it.”

“What kind of witness?” Myron asked.

“A witness who saw Roger Quincy talking to your beloved Valerie within ten minutes of the murder.”

Myron said nothing.

“You doubt my word?”

“Who’s the witness, Aaron?”

“Some housewife. She was at the matches with her kids. And to answer your next question we have nothing to do with her.”

“So why the big fear?”

“What fear?”

“What’s Ache so concerned about? Why hire Starsky and Hutch up there to follow me?”

Fishnet turned around. “What the fuck did you call me, asshole?”

“Turn around, Lee,” Aaron said.

“Ah, come off it, Aaron, let me fuck him up a little. You see what the motherfucker did to my car? And look at my fucking nose.” Car first, then nose. Priorities. “He and his faggot buddy jumped me. Two on one. When I wasn’t looking. Let me teach him a little respect.”

“You couldn’t, Lee. You and Jim together couldn’t.”

“Fuck I couldn’t. If I didn’t have this busted nose—”

“Shut up, Lee,” Aaron said.

Immediate silence.

Aaron rolled his eyes at Myron and spread his hands. “Rank amateurs,” he said. “Frank is always trying to cut corners. Save a buck here. Save a buck there. In the end it always costs more.”

“I thought you stopped working for the Ache brothers,” Myron said.

“I work freelance now.”

“So Frank just brought you in?”

“As of this morning.”

“Must be something big,” Myron said. “You don’t come cheap.”

Aaron gave him the teeth again, adjusted the jacket of his suit. “You want the best, you have to pay.”

“So why’s Frank so bent out of shape about this?”

“I have no idea. But make no mistake about it: Frank wants your investigation to end. Now. No excuses. Look, Myron, we both know you’ve been something of a pain in the ass to Frank. He doesn’t like you. To be honest he’d like to ace you. That’s no bullshit. I’m talking man to man here. Friend to friend. We’re friends, right? Buddies?”

“Best of chums,” Myron added. Shovel, shovel.

“But Frank is showing incredible restraint with you. Generosity even. He knows, for example, that you took Eddie Crane out to dinner. That alone would be reason for Frank to want you roughed up a bit. But he doesn’t. In fact he’s decided that if Eddie Crane chooses your agency, he won’t get in the way.”

“Big of him.”

“But it is big of him,” Aaron insisted. “He owns the kid’s coach, for crying out loud. By all rights he belongs to TruPro. But Frank is willing to let him go, and he’s willing to help you bring in Roger Quincy. Two very big favors. Gifts really. In exchange, you do nothing.”

Myron turned his palms up. “How can I pass up a deal like that?”

“Do I sense a whiff of sarcasm?”

Myron shrugged.

“Frank’s trying to be fair, Myron.”

“Yeah, the man’s a prince.”

“Don’t push him on this. It’s not worth it.”

“Can I leave now?”

“I’d like your answer first.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Myron said. “But I’d be much more willing to let go if I knew what Frank was trying to hide.”

Aaron shook his head. “Still the same old Myron, huh? You never change. I’m surprised no one has wasted you yet.”

“I’m not easy to kill,” Myron said.

“Maybe not.”

“And I’m also a snazzy dancer. No one likes to kill a snazzy dancer. There’re so few us left.”

Aaron put his hand on Myron’s knee and leaned toward him. “Can we stop the lunatic routine for a moment?”

Myron’s eyes flicked down to the knee, then back to Aaron. “Uh, your hand?”

“You know about the carrot and the stick, Myron?”

“The what?”

“The carrot and the stick.” The hand was still on Myron’s knee.

“Oh. Sure. The carrot and the stick.” What?

“So far I have shown you only the carrot. I would feel amiss if I did not also show a bit of stick.”

In the front seat Fishnet and Jim shared a chuckle.

Aaron’s fingers gave the knee a little squeeze. Like a hawk’s talons. “Now you know me. I’m not a stick man. I’m the gentle sort. I’m kind. I’m nice. I’m …” He looked up as though searching for the word.

“A carrot,” Myron finished.

“Right. A carrot.”

Myron had seen Aaron kill a man. Snap his neck as though it were a twig. He’d also seen the results of Aaron’s work in venues ranging from boxing rings to morgues. Some carrot.

“But nonetheless I need to add a bit of stick. Just for the record, you understand. It’s expected. I know it’s not necessary in your case. The stick, I mean.”

“I’m listening,” Myron said.

“Yeah,” Fishnet added, “tell him, Aaron.” Fishnet and Jim restarted the chuckle. Louder.

“Shut up,” Aaron said softly.

Again immediate silence. Like they’d both been shot in the head.

Aaron swung his line of vision to Myron. His eyes were suddenly dark and hard. “There will be no further warnings. We will simply strike. I know you don’t scare easily. I explained that to Frank. He doesn’t care. He suggested striking places that another man might consider taboo.”

“Like?”

“I understand Duane Richwood is playing well. I’d hate to see his career cut short.” He gave the knee a harder squeeze. “Or take your beautiful Jessica, for example. Now I know she’s out of the country right now. In Athens, in case you don’t know. The Grand Bretagne Hotel. Room 207. Frank has friends in Greece.”

Myron felt a cold chill. “Don’t even think about it, Aaron.”

“Not my decision.” He finally let go of the knee. “It’s Frank. He’s adamant about this. He wants you to let go now. You know what they say about grabbing a tiger by the tail.”

“If he touches her—”

Aaron waved him off. “Please, Myron, no threats. There’s no reason for threats here. You can’t win. You know that. The price of victory is too high. You and Win are only two men. Two good men. Two of the best. Worthy adversaries. But Frank has me, for one. And he has others. Many others. As many men as he needs. Men with no scruples. Men who would break into Jessica’s room, take turns with her, and then blow her away. Men who would jump Esperanza on her way home from work. Men who would even do unspeakable things to your mother.”

Myron stared at Aaron. Aaron did not blink. “You can’t win, Myron. No matter how tough you are, you can’t stand up to that kind of thing. We both know it.”

Silence. The Caddy pulled up to the front of Myron’s building.

“Can I have your answer now?” Aaron asked.

Myron tried not to shake as he got out of the car. Without glancing behind him he walked inside.

21

Win worked the heavy bag. He was snapping side kicks that bent the eighty-pound bag almost in half. He threw kicks at every level. The opponent’s knee. The abdomen. The neck. The face. He struck with his heel, his toes angled down. Myron went though several katas, or forms, concentrating on the precision of his strikes, imagining a person in front of him rather than the air. Sometimes the person was Aaron.

They were at Master Kwon’s new downtown location. The dojang was divided into two sections. One looked like a dance studio. Hardwood floor and lots of mirrors. The other section had matted floors, dumbbells, a speed bag, a heavy bag, a jump rope. On the shelf were rubber knives and guns to practice take-away techniques. The American flag and Korean flag were hung near the doorway. Each student bowed to them as they entered and left. School rules were listed on a poster. Myron knew them by heart. His favorite was rule number ten. Always finish what you start.

Hmm. Good advice? Hard to say right now.

There were fourteen school rules in all. Every once in a while Master Kwon added a new one. Number fourteen had been put up two months ago: Do not overeat. “Students too fat,” Master Kwon had explained. “Too much put in mouth.” In the twenty years since Win had helped Kwon relocate to the United States, Kwon’s English had continually degenerated. Myron suspected it was part of his image as a wise old man from the Far East. Playing Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies.

Win stopped. “Here,” he said, gesturing to the bag. “You need this more than I do.”

Myron began to hit the bag. Hard. He started with some punches. Tae kwon do’s fighting stance is simple and practical, not all that different from a boxer’s. Anyone who tried that crane-stance bullshit on the streets usually ended up on their ass. Myron followed up with some elbow and knee strikes. Elbows and knees were useful, particularly for fighting in close. Martial arts movies showed lots of spinning kicks to the head, jumping kicks to the chest, stuff like that. But street fighting was far simpler. You aimed for the groin, the knee, the neck, the nose, the eyes. Occasionally the solar plexus. The rest was wasteful. You get in a real life-or-death situation, you twist the guy’s balls. You stick your fingers in his eyes. You throw an elbow to his throat.

Win walked over to a full-length mirror. “Let’s review what we’ve learned so far,” he said in the mock voice of a kindergarten teacher. He began to play air-golf, practicing his swing in the mirror. He did that a lot. “One, the esteemed senator from Pennsylvania wants you off this case. Two, a major mobster from New York wants you off this case. Three, your client, the womanizing Duane Richwood, wants you off this case. Have I left anybody out?”

“Deanna Yeller,” Myron said. “And Helen Van Slyke. Kenneth too, don’t forget Kenneth. Pavel Menansi.” Myron thought a moment. “I think that’s it.”

“The police officer,” Win added. “Detective Dimonte.”

“Oh yeah, right. I forgot about Rolly.”

Win checked the grip on his imaginary club. “Thus,” he continued, “your cause is mustering its customary support—i.e., none.”

Myron shrugged, threw a combination. “ ‘Can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.’ ”

Win made a face. “Quoting Ricky Nelson?”

“It’s been a long day.”

“I would say.”

Myron back-kicked. A good countermove to almost any attack. “So why is everyone so afraid of Valerie Simpson? A United States senator sets up a clandestine meeting with me. Frank Ache brings in Aaron. Duane threatens to fire me. Why?”

Win took another air-golf swing in the mirror. He looked up after the shot, squinting, as though following the trajectory of the imaginary ball. He seemed displeased. Golfers.

The door to the dojang opened. Wanda peered inside, gave a shy wave.

“Hi,” Myron said.

“Hi.”

Myron smiled. He was happy to see her—someone who did indeed want him to continue his investigation. She wore a patterned, almost little-girlish summer dress. The dress was sleeveless, revealing her nicely toned arms. She wasn’t wearing one of those big summer hats, but she should have been. Her makeup had been applied with a light hand. Gold hoop earrings hung from her lobes. She looked young and healthy and quite beautiful.

A sign beside the door read NO SHOES ALLOWED. Wanda obeyed, slipped her flats off before stepping inside the dojang. “Esperanza told me you’d be here,” she said. “I’m really sorry about disturbing you outside the office again.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You know Win.”

“Yes,” she said, turning to him. She managed a smile. “Nice to see you.”

Win gave her an almost indiscernible head tilt. Stoic. Playing Tonto.

Wringing her hands together Wanda asked, “Can we talk for a moment?”

Win did not need prompting. He moved to the door, bowed deeply at the waist, left. They were alone.

She walked toward him deliberately, glancing around like she was on a house tour but not really interested in buying. “Do you come here a lot?” she asked.

“Here or one of Master Kwon’s other dojangs.”

“I thought they were called dojos,” she said.

“Dojo is Japanese. Dojang is Korean.”

She nodded as though this information had some significance in her life. She glanced around a bit more. “Have you studied this for a long time?”

“Yes.”

“And Win?”

“Even longer.”

“He doesn’t look the fighting type,” she said. “Except maybe in the eyes.”

Myron had heard that before. He waited.

“I just wanted to know if you’d learned anything,” she said. Her eyes flicked left, right, up, down.

“Not much,” he said. Not exactly the truth, but Myron wasn’t about to mention Duane’s liaisons with Valerie.

She nodded again. Her hands were in constant motion, searching for something to occupy them. “Duane is acting even stranger,” she said.

“How?”

“Just more of the same, I guess. He’s on edge all the time. He keeps getting these calls he takes in another room. When I answer the phone the caller hangs up. And he disappeared again last night. Said he needed some air, but he was gone for two hours.”

“Do you have any thoughts?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Myron aimed for his gentlest voice. “Could there be someone else?”

Her eyes stopped flicking and flared in his direction. “I’m not some hooker he picked up off the street.”

“I know that.”

“We love each other.”

“I know that too. But I also know a lot of guys in love who still do dumb things.” Women too. Jessica, for one. Four years ago with a guy named Doug. It still hurt. Guy named Doug. Go figure.

Wanda shook her head again firmly. Convincing herself or Myron? “It’s not like that with us. I know I sound like a gullible idiot, but it’s the way it is. I can’t explain it.”

“No need to. I was just seeing what you thought.”

“Duane’s not having an affair.”

“Okay.”

Her eyes were wet. She took a couple of deep breaths. “He’s not sleeping at night. He paces. I ask him what’s wrong, but he won’t tell me. I tried eavesdropping on a call, but the only thing I picked up was your name.”

“My name?”

She nodded. “He said it twice, but that’s all I heard.”

Myron thought a moment. “Suppose I put a tap on your phone.”

“Do it.”

“You don’t have a problem with that?”

“No.” The wet eyes broke into tears. She let out two quick sobs, made herself stop. “It’s getting worse, Myron. We have to find out what’s going on.”

“I’ll do my best.”

She gave him a brief hug. Myron wanted to stroke her hair and say something comforting. He didn’t do either. She strode out slowly, head high. Myron watched. As soon as she was out of sight Win returned.

“Well?” Win asked.

“I like her,” Myron said.

Win nodded. “Very shapely derriere.”

“That’s not what I meant. She’s a good woman. And she’s scared.”

“Of course she’s scared. Her meal ticket is about to go bye-bye.”

The Return of Mr. Warmth. “It’s not like that, Win. She loves him.”

Win strummed a few notes on an air-violin. Couldn’t talk to him about stuff like that. He just didn’t get it. “What did she want?”

Myron filled him in on the conversation. Win spread his legs, dropping into a full split and then sliding back up. He repeated the move several times, faster and faster. Ladies and gentlemen, the Godfather of Soul, Mr. James Brown.

When Myron finished, Win said, “Sounds like Duane is trying to hide more than a quick fling.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“You want me to watch him?”

“We can take shifts.”

Win shook his head. “He knows you.”

“He knows you too.”

“Yes,” Win said, “but I am invisible. I am the wind.”

“Sure you don’t mean passing wind?”

Win made a face. “That was a good one. I’m sure I’ll laugh for days.”

Truth was, Win could be nestled in your B.V.D.’s for a week and you’d never know. “Can you start tonight?” Myron asked.

Win nodded. “I’m already there.”

22

Myron shot baskets on the blacktop off the driveway. The long summer day was finally slipping into darkness, but the basket was illuminated with spotlights. He and his father had installed them when Myron was in the sixth grade. A variety of barbecue smells competed in the still air. Chicken from the Dempseys’ house. Burgers from the Weinsteins’. Shish kebab at the Ruskins’.

Myron shot, rebounded, shot again. He got a little rhythm going, the ball back-spinning gently through the basket. Nothing but net. Sweat matted his gray T-shirt to his chest. Myron always did his best thinking out here, but right now his mind was a blank. There was nothing but the ball, the hoop, and the sweet arc after the release. It felt pure.

“Hey, Myron.”

It was Timmy from next door. Timmy was ten.

“Bug off, kid. You’re bothering me.”

Timmy laughed and grabbed a rebound. It was an inside joke. Timmy’s mother was convinced that her son was bothering Myron and that Myron should send Timmy home whenever he came over. Didn’t stop Timmy. He and his friends always came over when Myron was shooting. Once in a while, when they needed an extra body, the kids would knock on the door and ask his mom if Myron could come out and play.

He and Timmy shot around for a while. They talked about stuff that was important to little boys. A few other kids came by. The Daleys’ boy. The Cohens’ girl. Others. Bikes were parked at the end of the driveway. They started playing a game. Myron was designated steady passer. No one kept score accurately. Everyone laughed a lot. A few fathers came by and joined in. Arnie Stollman. Fred Dempsey. It’d been a while since they’d done this. A bit too Rockwellian for some, but it felt very right to Myron.

It was nearly ten when mothers started to call out for their children. From their front stoops the mothers smiled brightly and waved at Myron. Myron waved back. The kids “aw, Mom” ’d, but they listened.

Summer and school break. Still a touch of innocence. Kids were supposed to be different now. They had to deal with guns and drugs and crime and AIDS. But a summer night in middle-class suburbia was the great generational equalizer, a place far away from people like Aaron and the Ache brothers. A place far away from young women being murdered.

Valerie would have had fun tonight.

Mom opened the back door. “Telephone,” she said shortly.

“Who is it?”

Her voice was like a closed fist. “Jessica.” She made a face when she said it, like the name tasted bad on her lips.

Myron tried not to sprint. He walk/ran up the back steps and into the kitchen. The kitchen had been completely redone last year. Why, Myron couldn’t say. No one in the house cooked, unless you count microwaving Celeste frozen pizzas.

“I’ll take it in the basement,” he said.

A grunt from Mom. No wisecrack. Like Esperanza, Mom too held grudges. Especially when it came to her little boy.

He closed the door, grabbed the receiver, heard his mother hang up the extension. “Jess?”

“Is this Stallions ‘R’ Us?”

As usual her voice made him soar. “Why, yes it is. What can we do for you, ma’am?”

“I’m looking for a true stallion.”

“You called the right place. Any preference?”

“Well hung,” she replied. “But you’ll do.”

“Nice talk.”

There was a lot of noise in the background. “What took you so long to pick up?” she asked.

“I was outside. Playing with Timmy and the kids.”

“Did I interrupt?”

“Nope. Game just ended.”

“Your mom sounded a tad frosty on the phone.”

“She gets that way,” Myron said.

“She used to like me.”

“She still does.”

“And Esperanza?”

“Esperanza never liked you.”

“Oh yeah,” she said.

“You still at the Grand Bretagne Hotel?” Myron asked. “Room 207?”

Pause. “Were you spying on me?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know—”

“Long story. I’ll tell you about it when you get home. Where are you?”

“Kennedy Airport. We just landed.”

His heart did a quick twirl. “You’re home?”

“I will be as soon as I find my luggage.” She hesitated. “Will you come right over?”

“I’m on my way.”

“Wear something I can easily rip off your bod,” she said. “I’ll be waiting in the tub with all kinds of exotic oils from overseas.”

“Hussy.”

There was another hesitation. Then Jessica said, “I love you, you know. I get funny sometimes, but I do love you.”

“Never mind that. Tell me more about the oils.”

She laughed. “Hurry now.”

He put the receiver back in its cradle. He quickly stripped down and showered. A cold shower for the time being. He was whistling “Tonight” from West Side Story. He dried himself off and checked out his closet. Something in the easy-to-rip-off family. Found it. Snap buttons. He sprinkled on a little cologne. Myron rarely wore cologne, but Jess liked it. He heard the doorbell ring as he was bounding up the stairs.

“I’ll get it,” he called out.

Two uniformed police officers were at the door.

“Are you Myron Bolitar?” the taller one asked.

“Yes.”

“Detective Roland Dimonte sent us. We would appreciate it if you would come with us.”

“Where?”

“Queens Homicide.”

“What for?”

“Roger Quincy has been captured. He’s a suspect in the murder of Valerie Simpson.”

“So?”

The shorter cop spoke for the first time. “Mr. Bolitar, do you know Roger Quincy?”

“No.”

“You’ve never met him?”

“Not to my knowledge.” Not to my knowledge. Lawyer talk for no.

The officers exchanged a glance.

“You better come with us,” the taller cop said.

“Why?”

“Because Mr. Quincy refuses to make a statement until he talks with you.”

23

Myron called Jessica’s place and left a message that he’d be late.

When they arrived at the precinct, Dimonte greeted Myron at the door. He was chewing a wad of gum or maybe it was spitting tobacco. And he was smiling a whole lot. He wore a different pair of boots this time. Still snakeskin, still hideous. But these were bright yellow with blue fringes.

“Glad you could make it,” Dimonte said.

Myron pointed to the boots. “Mug a cheerleader, Rolly?”

Dimonte laughed. This wasn’t good. “Come on, smart-guy,” he said with something approaching good nature. He led Myron down a corridor, threading between lots of bored-looking cops. Almost every one of them had a cup of coffee in their hands, leaning against a wall or refreshment machine, pleading some pathetic case to a nodding head.

“No press,” Myron noted.

“They haven’t been told of Quincy’s capture yet,” Dimonte said. “But it’ll leak soon enough.”

“You going to leak it?”

He shrugged happily. “The public has a right to know.”

“Sure.”

“What about you, Bolitar? You want to come clean?”

“Come clean on what?”

He shrugged again. Mr. Carefree. “Suit yourself.”

“I don’t know him, Rolly.”

“Guess he got your name out of the yellow pages, huh?”

Myron stayed silent. No point in arguing now.

Dimonte opened a door into a small interrogation room. Two cops were already in there. Their neckties were loosened low enough to double as a belt. They’d been working Roger Quincy over pretty good, but Quincy did not seem too agitated. In most movies or TV shows a prisoner in a holding cell wear stripes or grays. But in reality they wear loud, fluorescent orange. Better to see them should they opt to flee.

Roger Quincy’s eyes lit up when he saw Myron. He was younger than Myron had expected—early thirties, though he probably could have passed for mid-twenties. He was thin, his face pretty in a feminine way. His fingers were graceful and elongated. He looked like a ballet dancer.

From his chair Roger Quincy waved and said, “Thanks for coming, Myron.”

Myron looked at Dimonte. Dimonte smiled back. “Don’t know him, huh?” He nodded to the other cops. “Come on, guys. Let’s leave the two buddies alone.”

A few quiet snickers later, the cops were gone. Myron sat in the chair across the table from Roger Quincy.

“Do I know you?” Myron asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” Quincy extended his hand. “I’m Roger Quincy.”

Quincy’s hand felt like a small bird. Myron gave it a quick shake. “How do you know my name?”

“Oh, I’m a big sports fan,” he said. “I know I don’t look the type, but I’ve been one for years. I don’t follow basketball that closely anymore. Tennis is my favorite. Do you play at all?”

“Just a little.”

“I’m not very good, but I try.” His eyes lit up again. “Tennis is such a magnificent sport when you think about it. A competitive acrobatic dance really. A small ball hurls at you with un-earthly velocity and you have to move, set your feet, hit the ball back using a racket. Everything has to be calculated in a matter of moments: the speed of the oncoming ball, the spot it will land, the spin on it, the angle of the bounce, the distance between your hand and the center of the racket head, the stroke you will use, the placement of your return. It’s amazing when you think about it.”

Two words: Looney Tunes.

“Uh, Roger, you didn’t answer my question,” Myron said. “How do you know me?”

“I’m sorry.” He flashed a shy smile. “I get overexcited sometimes. Some people think it’s a flaw. Me, I’d rather be like that than some couch potato. Did I mention that I’m also a basketball fan?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how I know your name. I saw you play at Duke.” He smiled like that explained everything.

“Okay,” Myron said, struggling to keep a patient tone. “So why did you tell the police you wanted to talk to me?”

“Because I did. Want to talk to you, that is.”

“Why?”

“They think I killed Valerie, Myron.”

“Did you?”

His mouth made a surprised little O. “Of course not. What kind of man do you think I am?”

Myron shrugged. “The kind who stalks young girls. The kind who harassed Valerie Simpson, who followed her around, called her repeatedly, wrote her long letters, frightened her.”

He waved Myron off with those long fingers. “You’re exaggerating,” he said. “I courted Valerie Simpson. I loved her. I cared about her well-being. I was merely a persistent suitor.”

“She wanted you to leave her alone.”

He laughed. “So she turned me down. Big deal. Am I the first man ever rejected by a beautiful woman? I just don’t give up as easily as most. I sent her flowers. I wrote her love letters. I asked her out again. I tried different tactics. Do you ever read romance novels?”

“Not really.”

“The hero and heroine are always rejecting each other. Through wars or pirate attacks or high society parties, the couple fight and claw and seem to hate each other. But deep down they are in love. They’re repressing their true feelings, see? That’s how it was with Valerie and me. There was an undeniable tension there. A high-voltage surge between us.”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said. “Roger, why did you want to see me?”

“I thought you could talk to the police for me.”

“And tell them what?”

“That I didn’t kill Valerie. That she was in imminent danger from someone else.”

“Who?”

“I thought you knew.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Valerie told me. Right before she was murdered.”

“She told you what exactly?”

“That she was in danger.”

“In danger of what?”

“I thought you’d know.”

Myron raised his hand. “Slow down a second, okay? Let’s start at the beginning. You were at the U.S. Open.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I go every year. I’m a big fan. I love to watch the matches. They’re so mesmerizing—”

“I think we covered that already, Roger. So you went as a fan. Your going had nothing to do with Valerie Simpson? You didn’t follow her there?”

“Of course not. I had no idea she’d even be there.”

“Okay, so what happened?”

“I was sitting in the stadium watching Duane Richwood demolish Ivan Restovich. Incredible performance. I mean, Duane slaughtered him.” He smiled. “But why am I telling you this? You’re his agent, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get me his autograph?”

“Sure.”

“Not tonight, of course. Tomorrow maybe?”

“Maybe.” Earth to Roger. “But let’s stick with Valerie right now. You were watching Duane’s match.”

“Exactly.” His voice grew serious. “I wish I’d known you were Duane Richwood’s agent then, Myron. Maybe everything would have been okay then. Maybe Valerie would still be alive and I’d be the hero who saved her and she’d have to stop denying her true feelings and let me into her life and let me protect her forevermore.”

Myron remembered a quote from Man of La Mancha: “I can see the coo-coo singing in the coo-coo berry tree.”

“What happened, Roger?”

“The match was basically over so I checked my program. Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario was about to start her match on court sixteen, so I figured I’d go over there and get a good seat. Arantxa’s a wonderful player. Such a hustler. Her brothers Emilio and Javier are pros also. Nice players, but they don’t have her heart.”

“So you left the stadium,” Myron tried

“I left the stadium. I had a few minutes, so I went over to the booth near the front entrance. The one with all the TV monitors giving the scores of the other matches. I saw that Steffi had already won and that Michael Chang had been dragged into a fifth set. I was checking out some doubles matches on the board. Men’s doubles, I think. Ken Flach was one of the people. No, it was … I can’t remember.”

“Stay with me, Roger.”

“Anyway, that’s when I saw Valerie.”

“Where?”

“By the front gate. She was trying to get in, but the guard wouldn’t let her. She didn’t have a ticket. She was very upset, that was clear. You know, the Open is always sold out. Every year. But I still couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The guard wouldn’t let her in. Valerie Simpson. He didn’t even recognize her. So naturally I went to her aid.”

Naturally. “What did you do?”

“I got my hand stamped by another guard and walked outside the gate. Then I came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. When she turned around I couldn’t believe what I saw.”

“What?”

“I know Valerie Simpson,” he said, his words slower now. “Even you will have to concede that. I’ve seen every match she ever played in. I saw her at work. I saw her at play. I’ve seen her on the streets, on the court, at her house, practicing with that slimy coach of hers. I’ve seen her happy and sad, up and down, in triumph and defeat. I saw her progress from an enthusiastic teenager to a fierce competitor to a despondent, lifeless beauty. My heart has ached for her so many times, I’ve lost count. But I’d never seen her like this.”

“Like what?”

“So scared. She was absolutely terrified.”

Little wonder, Myron thought. Daffy Duck here sneaks up behind her and taps her on her shoulder. “Did she recognize you?”

“Of course.”

“What did she do then?”

“She asked for my help.”

Myron arched a skeptical eyebrow. He’d learned the technique from Win.

“It’s true,” Roger insisted. “She said she was in danger. She said she needed to get in and see you.”

“She mentioned me by name?”

“Yes. I’m telling you, she was desperate. She pleaded with the guard, but he wouldn’t listen. So I came up with an idea.”

“What was that?”

“Scalp a ticket,” he answered. He was clearly pleased with himself. “There were dozens of scalpers hanging around the subway entrance. I found one. A black man. Nice enough fellow. He wanted a hundred and fifty dollars. I told him that was way too much. They always start high. The scalpers, I mean. You have to negotiate with them. They expect it. But Valerie would have none of that. She just accepted his price. That’s Valerie. No head for money. If we’d gotten married, I would have had to handle the finances. She’s too impulsive.”

“Focus with me, Roger. What happened after you bought the ticket?”

His face went soft and dreamy. “She thanked me,” he said, like he’d seen a burning bush. “It was the first time she ever opened up to me. I knew then that my patience had won out. After all this time I’d finally cracked the face. Funny, isn’t it? For years I tried so hard to make her love me. And then when I least expect it, boom!—love crashed into my life.”

I, me, I, me, I, me. Even Valerie’s murder he could only see in terms of himself. “What did she do then?” Myron asked.

“I escorted her through the gates. She asked me if I knew what you looked liked. I said, you mean Myron Bolitar the basketball player? She said yes. I said yes, I knew. She said she needed to find you.” He leaned forward. Earnest. “You see what I mean? If I had known you were Duane’s agent I would have known exactly where you were. I would have led her right to you. Then everything would have been all right. I’d have gotten a bigger thank-you and that priceless Valerie Simpson smile all for me. I’d have saved her life. I would have been her hero.” He shook his head for what might have been. “It would have been perfect.”

“But instead?” Myron tried.

“We split up. She asked me to cover the outside courts while she searched the Food Court and the stadium area. We were going to meet back by the Perrier booth every fifteen minutes. I took off and began my search. I was anxious. Finding you would have proved my undying love—”

“Yeah, I got that part.” This guy must have been gobs of fun for ol’ Rolly to interrogate. “What happened next?”

“I heard a gunshot,” Quincy continued. “Then I heard screams. I ran back toward the Food Court. By the time I got there a crowd had formed. You were running toward the body. She was on the ground. So still. You bent down and cradled her body. My dreams. My life. My happiness. Dead. I knew what the police would think. They tormented me for courting her. Called me names. Heck, they threatened to put me in jail for asking her out—what were they going to think now? They never understood the bond between us. The attraction.”

“So you ran,” Myron said.

“Yes. I went to my place and packed a bag. Then I took out the maximum amount on my MAC card. I saw on TV once how the police tracked a guy down by where he used his credit cards, so I wanted to make sure I had enough cash. Smart, huh?”

“Ingenious,” Myron agreed. But he felt his heart sink. Valerie Simpson had had no one. She’d been alone. When danger struck she turned to Myron, a man she barely knew. And someone had murdered her. A painful pang consumed him.

“I stayed in crummy motels and used fake names,” Quincy rambled. “But someone must have recognized me. Well, you know the rest. When they caught me, I asked for you. I thought you’d be able to explain to them what really happened.” Quincy leaned forward, whispered conspiratorially. “That Detective Dimonte can be rather hostile.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The only time he smiled was when I mentioned your name.”

“Oh?”

“I told him you and I were friends. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Myron said.

24

Myron faced Dimonte and sidekick Krinsky in the adjoining interrogation room. It was identical to the other one in every way. Dimonte was still gleeful.

“Would you care for an attorney?” he asked sweetly.

Myron looked at him. “Your face is positively beaming, Rolly. New moisturizer?”

The smile stayed. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Of course not. Have a seat. Care for a drink?”

“Sure.”

“What would you like?” Quite the host, that Rolly. “Coke? Coffee? Orange juice?”

“Got any Yoo-Hoo?”

Dimonte looked at Krinsky. Krinsky shrugged and went to check. Dimonte folded his hands and put them on the table. “Myron, why did Roger Quincy ask for you?”

“He wanted to speak to me.”

Dimonte smiled. Mr. Patience. “Yes, but why you?”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that.”

“Can’t,” Dimonte said. “Or won’t?”

“Can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I think it falls under attorney-client privilege. I have to check.”

“Check with who?”

“With whom,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Check with whom. Not who, whom. Prepositional phrase.”

Dimonte nodded. “So it’s going to be like that, is it?”

“Like what?”

His voice was a little rougher now. “You’re a suspect, Bolitar. No, check that. You’re the suspect.”

“What about Roger?”

“He’s the trigger man. I’m sure of that. But he’s too much of a nut job to have done it on his own. Way we figure it, you set the whole thing up. Had him do the dirty work.”

“Uh-huh. And my motive?”

“Valerie Simpson was having an affair with Duane Richwood. That’s why his phone number was in her book. A white girl with a black guy. How would the sponsors have reacted to that?”

“It’s the nineties, Rolly. There’s even a mixed marriage on the Supreme Court.”

Dimonte put a boot up on a chair and leaned on the raised knee. “Times may change, Bolitar, but sponsors still don’t like black boys boffing white chicks.” He tickled his chin with two fingers. “Let me run this by you, see how it sounds: Duane is a bit of a coonhound. He sniffs out white meat. He nails Valerie Simpson, but she doesn’t fancy the idea of being a one-nighter. We know she’s a bit of a fruitcake, spent time in an asylum. Probably a bunny burner to boot.”

“Bunny burner?”

“You seen Fatal Attraction?”

Myron nodded. “Oh. Bunny burner. Right.”

“So like I said, Valerie Simpson is crazy. Her elevator don’t stop at every floor. But now she’s also pissed off. So she calls up Duane just like it says in her little diary and threatens to go to the press. Duane is scared. Like he was yesterday when I came by. So who does he call? You. That’s when you hatch your little scheme.”

Myron nodded. “That’ll hold up in court.”

“What? Greed isn’t a good motive?”

“I might as well confess right here.”

“Fine, smart-guy. You play it that way.”

Krinsky returned. He shook his head. No Yoo-Hoo.

“You want to tell me why Quincy called you first?” Dimonte continued.

“Nope.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because you’ve hurt my feelings.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Bolitar. I’ll throw your ass into a holding cell with twenty psychos and tell them you’re a child molester.” He smiled. “He’ll like that, won’t he, Krinsky?”

“Yeah,” Krinsky said, mirroring Dimonte’s smile.

Myron nodded. “Right. Okay, now I say, what do you mean? Then you say, a tasty morsel like you will be popular in the slammer. Then I say, please don’t. Then you say, don’t bend over to pick up the soap. Then you both give me a cop snicker.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“Don’t waste my time, Rolly.”

“You think I won’t throw your ass in jail?”

Myron stood. “I know you won’t. If you thought you could I’d be handcuffed by now.”

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

“Arrest me or get out of my way. I got places to go, people to see.”

“I know you’re dirty, Bolitar. That whacko didn’t ask for you by accident. He thought you could save him. That’s why you’ve been playing cop with us. Pretending to investigate on your own. You just wanted to stay close, find out what we knew.”

“You got it all figured out, Rolly.”

“We’ll grill him and grill him and grill him until he gives you up.”

“No, you won’t. As his attorney I am forbidding any interrogation of my client.”

“You can’t represent him. Ever heard of conflict of interest?”

“Until I find him someone else I’m still his attorney of record.”

Myron opened the door and stepped into the corridor. He was surprised to see Esperanza. So were the cops. Every one of them up and down the corridor stared at her hungrily. Probably just being careful, Myron mused, afraid maybe Esperanza had a concealed weapon in her tight jeans. Yeah, that was probably it.

“Win called,” she said. “He’s looking for you.”

“What’s up?”

“He followed Duane. There’s something he thinks you should see.”

25

Esperanza and Myron shared a yellow cab to the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth. The cab smelled like a Turkish whorehouse, which was an improvement over most.

“Win will be seated in a red chair near the house phones,” she told him when they stopped. “It’s to the right of the concierge’s desk. He’ll be reading a newspaper. If he’s not reading a newspaper, the coast isn’t clear. Ignore him and walk out. He’ll meet you at the Billiards Club.”

“Win said that?”

“Yes.”

“Even that part about the coast not being clear?”

“Yes.”

Myron shook his head. “You want to come?”

“Can’t. I still have studying to do.”

“Thanks for finding me.”

She nodded.

Win was seated where advertised. He was reading the Wall Street Journal so the coast was clear. Oooo. Win looked exactly like himself, except a black wig covered the blond locks. Dr. Disguise. Myron sat next to him and whispered, “The white rabbit turns yellow when the black dog urinates on him.”

Win continued to read. “You said to contact you if Duane did anything unusual.”

“Yep.”

“He arrived here about two hours ago. He took the elevator to the third floor and knocked on the door to room 322. A woman answered. They embraced. He entered. The door closed.”

“That’s not good,” Myron said.

Win turned the page. Bored.

“Do you know who the woman is?” Myron asked.

He shook his head. “Black. Five-seven, five-eight. Slim. I took the liberty of booking room 323. The peephole has a view of Duane’s door.”

Myron thought of Jessica waiting for him. In a warm tub. With those exotic oils.

Damn.

“I’ll stay if you want,” Win said.

“No. I’ll handle this.”

“Fine.” Win stood. “I’ll see you at the match tomorrow, if our boy isn’t too tired to play.”

Myron took the stairs to the third floor. He peered out into the corridor. No one. With key in hand he hurried down to room 323 and went inside. Win, as usual, was right. From the keyhole he had a good, albeit convex, view of the door to room 322. Now he had to wait.

But wait for what?

What the hell was he doing here? Jessica was waiting for him in a bathtub filled with exotic oils—the thought made his body both sing and ache—and here he was, playing Peeping Tom over …

Over what?

What was he after anyway? Duane had explained his connection to Valerie Simpson. They’d briefly been lovers. What was so weird about that? They were both attractive, both in their early twenties, both tennis players. So what was the big deal? The racial thing? Nothing unusual about that anymore. Hadn’t he just pointed that out to Dimonte?

So what was Myron doing with his eye pressed against a peephole? Duane was a client, for chrissake, an important client. What right did Myron have to invade his privacy like this? And for what reason—because his girlfriend didn’t like the fact that Duane was having affairs? So what? That wasn’t Myron’s concern. Myron wasn’t Duane’s social worker, parole officer, priest, shrink—he was his agent. His job was to get the maximum return for his client, not make morality judgments.

On the other hand, what the hell was Duane doing here? Maybe he liked to play the field, fine and dandy, no problem. But tonight of all nights? It’s crazy. Tomorrow was the biggest day of Duane’s career. Nationally televised match. His first U.S. Open quarterfinal. His first match against a seeded player. The launching of the Nike spots. Kind of a strange night for a romantic tryst in a hotel room.

Duane Richwood, the Wilt Chamberlain of professional tennis.

Myron didn’t like it.

Duane had always been a bit of a mystery. In reality Myron knew nothing about his past. He’d been a runaway, or so Duane said, but who knew for sure? Why had he run in the first place? Where was his family now? Myron had created a spin on the facts—portraying Duane as the poor street kid struggling to escape the shackles of poverty. But was that the truth? Duane seemed like a good kid—intelligent, well-spoken, well-mannered—but could that all be an act? The young man Myron had known would not be spending such an important night screwing in a strange hotel room—which, of course, circled Myron back to the question:

So what?

Myron was his agent. Period. The kid had talent to burn and a terrific court sense. He was good-looking and could make a lot of money in endorsements. In the end, that was all that mattered to an agent. Not a player’s love life. The kid was a dream on the court. Who cared what he was like off it? Myron was getting too close to this. He had no perspective anymore. He had a business to run, and spying on one of his biggest clients, invading that client’s privacy, was not good business sense.

He should leave. He should go to Jessica and talk to her about it, see what she thought.

Ten more minutes.

He needed only two. He switched eyes just as the door to room 322 opened. Duane appeared, or at least the back of him. Myron saw a woman’s arms go around his neck, pulling him down. They embraced. He couldn’t see the woman’s face, just the arms. Myron thought about Wanda’s intuition. She had been so sure of herself, so blind to this possibility. Myron understood. He’d been there. Love has a way of putting on the blinders.

“Putting on the blinders,” Myron muttered to himself. “Unbelievable.”

After the hug broke, Duane straightened up. The woman’s arms dropped out of sight. Duane looked ready to leave. Myron pushed his eye closer to the peephole. Duane spun and looked directly at Myron’s door. Myron almost jumped back. For a second it was like Duane was looking right at Myron, like he knew Myron was there.

Once again Myron wondered how he had ended up here. If his job included checking on the promiscuity of every athlete he represented, he would spend his life peering through peepholes. Duane was a kid. Twenty-one years old. He wasn’t even married or officially engaged. Nothing Myron was seeing was connected in any way with Valerie Simpson’s murder.

Until Duane finally stepped away.

Duane had given the woman one more brief hug. There had been muffled voices, but Myron couldn’t make out any specific words. Duane looked left, then right, then moved away. The woman was already starting to close the door, but she glanced out one last time. And that was when Myron saw her.

The woman was Deanna Yeller.

26

The morning.

Myron had not confronted Duane. He’d stumbled to Jessica’s in something of a daze. He’d opened the door with his key and said, “I’m sorry. I had to—”

Jessica shushed him with a kiss. Then a bigger kiss. Hungrier kiss. Myron tried to fight off her advances, though some might call his struggle less than valiant.

He rolled over in the bed. Jessica was gently padding across the room. Naked. She slipped into a silk robe. He watched, as he always did, with utter fascination. “You’re so hot,” he said, “you make my teeth sweat.”

She smiled. There is something that happens to men when Jessica looks at them. Shallow breathing. Fluttering stomach. A cruel longing. But her smile raised all those symptoms to the tenth power.

“Good morning,” she said. She bent down and kissed him gently. “How are you feeling?”

“My ears are still popping from last night.”

“Nice to know I still have the touch,” she said.

The understatement of the millennium. “Tell me about your trip.”

“Tell me about your murder first.”

He did. Jess was a great listener. She never interrupted, except to ask the right question. She looked at him steadily without a lot of that phony head nodding or out-of-context smiling. Her eyes focused in on him as if he were the only person in the world. He felt light-headed and happy and scared.

“This Valerie got to you,” Jessica said when he finished.

“She had no one. Her life was in danger and she had no one.”

“She had you.”

“I only met her once. She wasn’t even signed yet.”

“Doesn’t matter. She knew what you were. If I were in trouble, you’d be the person I’d run to.” She tilted her head. “How did you know my room number and hotel?”

“Aaron. He was trying to be intimidating. He succeeded.”

“Aaron threatened to hurt me?”

“You, me, my mom, Esperanza.”

She hesitated, thinking. “Esperanza would be my choice. I mean, if it has to be one of us.”

“I’ll tell him.” He took her hand. “I’m glad you’re home.”

“No third degree?”

Myron shook his head.

“But I owe you an explanation.”

“I don’t want one,” he said. “I just want to be with you. I love you. I’ve always loved you. We are soul mates.”

“Soul mates?”

He nodded.

“When did you decide this?” she asked.

“A long time ago.”

“So why not tell me before now?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to scare you off.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s more important to tell you how I feel.”

The room was still. “What am I supposed to say to that?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“I do love you, Myron. You know that.”

“I know.”

Silence. A long silence.

Jessica crossed the room. Naked. She was not self-conscious about her body. Then again, she had no reason to be. “It seems to me,” she began, “there are a lot of weird connections with this murder. But there is one overriding constant.”

Change of subjects. That was okay. Enough had been said for one day. “What?” Myron asked.

“Tennis,” she said. “Alexander Cross is killed at a tennis club. Valerie Simpson is murdered at the national tennis center. Valerie and Duane have an affair—both are professional tennis players. Those two kids who supposedly killed Alexander Cross—what’s their names?”

“Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller.”

“Swade and Yeller,” she repeated. “They were both up to no good at a tennis club. The Ache brothers and Aaron are connected to an agency who deals with tennis players. That leaves us with Deanna Yeller.”

“What about her?”

“Her sleeping with Duane. It can’t just be a coincidence.”

“So?”

“So how would she have met Duane?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

“Does she play tennis?”

“What if she does?”

“Keeps things constant.” She stopped. “I don’t know. I’m ranting. It’s just that everything circles back to tennis—except for Deanna Yeller.”

Myron thought about it a moment. Nothing clicked, but something did rumble somewhere in the back of his brain.

“Just a thought,” she said.

He sat up. “Before you said ‘supposedly’ killed Alexander Cross. What did you mean?”

“What real evidence do you have that Swade and Yeller murdered the Cross kid?” she asked. “They might have just been convenient scapegoats. Think about it a second. Yeller was conveniently killed by the police. Swade has conveniently fallen off the face of the earth. Who better to take the fall?”

“Then who do you think killed Alexander Cross?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Probably Swade and Yeller. But who knows for sure?”

More rumbling in the brain. But still nothing surfaced. Myron checked his watch. Seven-thirty.

“You in a rush?” she asked.

“A little.”

“I thought Duane Richwood doesn’t play until one,” she said.

“I’m trying to land a kid named Eddie Crane. He’s playing in the juniors at ten.”

“Can I come along?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“What are your chances of landing him?” she asked.

“I think they’re pretty good. His father might be a problem.”

“The father doesn’t like you?”

“I think he’d prefer a bigger agency,” Myron said.

“Should I smile sweetly at him?” she asked.

Myron thought a moment. “Flash a little cleavage. I’m not sure this guy’s into subtle.”

“Anything to get a client,” she said.

“Maybe you should practice a little first,” he said.

“Practice what?”

“Flashing cleavage. I’m told it’s something of an art.”

“I see. And on whom should I practice?”

Myron spread his hands. “I’m willing to volunteer my services.”

“The sacrifices you make for clients,” she said. “It’s heroic, really.”

“So what do you say?”

Jessica gave him a look. The look, actually. Myron felt it in his toes, to name one place. She leaned toward him. “No.”

“No?”

She put her lips to his ear. “Let’s try out my new oils first.”

One word: Yowzer.

27

Jessica hadn’t need to flash cleavage.

Both Cranes were immediately entranced. Mrs. Crane chatted with Jess about her books. Mr. Crane couldn’t stop smiling and sucking in his gut. At the start of the second set Mr. Crane tried to chew down the commission a half point. A very good sign. Myron made a mental note to bring Jess to more business gatherings.

There were other agents there. Lots of them. Most wore business suits and had their hair slicked back. They ranged in age, but most looked pretty young. Several tried to approach, but Mr. Crane shooed them away.

“Vultures,” Jessica whispered to Myron as one forced his card on Mr. Crane.

“Just trying to hustle business,” Myron said.

“You’re defending them?”

“I do the same thing, Jess. If they’re not aggressive they don’t have a chance. You think the Cranes are going to come to them?”

“But still. You don’t hang around like these guys.”

“What exactly am I doing now?”

Jessica thought a second. “Yeah, but you’re cute.”

Hard to argue. Eddie crushed his opponent 6–0, 6–0, but the match was not as close as the score indicated. Eddie lacked finesse. He relied on power. But what power. His racket ripped through the still air like the reaper’s scythe. The ball shot off the strings as though from a bazooka. The finesse would come. But for now the awesome power was more than enough.

After the players shook hands Eddie’s parents went onto the court.

“Do me a favor,” Myron said to Jess.

“What?”

“Get rid of the parents for a couple of minutes. I want to talk to Eddie alone.”

She did it with a lunch invitation. Jessica escorted Mr. and Mrs. Crane to the Racquets restaurant overlooking the Grandstand. Myron accompanied Eddie to the locker room. The kid had barely broken a sweat. Myron had exerted himself more just watching. Eddie walked with big, unhurried steps, a towel draped around his neck, completely relaxed.

“I told TruPro I wasn’t interested,” Eddie said.

Myron nodded. That explained Aaron’s generous offer to let Myron represent Eddie. “How did they respond?”

“They were pretty pissed,” Eddie said.

“I bet.”

“I think I want to go with your agency,” he said.

“How do your parents feel?”

“Doesn’t matter really. They both know it’s my decision.”

They walked a few more steps.

“Eddie, I need to ask you about Valerie.”

He half-smiled. “Are you really trying to find her killer?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just something I have to do.”

Eddie nodded. The answer was good enough for him. “Shoot.”

“You first met Valerie at Pavel’s camp in Florida?”

“Right.”

“How did you two become friends?”

“You ever been to Pavel’s academy?” Eddie asked.

“No.”

“You might not get it.” Eddie Crane stopped, brushed the hair from his eyes, continued. “It probably sounds weird—a sixteen-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy being close friends. That’s pretty normal in tennis. You don’t make friends with kids your own age. They’re the enemy. Val and I were both lonely, I guess. And because of our differences we weren’t threats to each other. I guess that’s how it started.”

“Did she ever mention Alexander Cross?”

“Yeah, a couple of times. They dated or something.”

“Did you get the impression they were serious?”

He shrugged. The guard checked their passes and let them enter. “Not really. Tennis was her life. Boyfriends were peripheral.”

“Tell me more about Pavel’s academy. What was it like for Valerie?”

“What was it like?” Eddie grinned sadly, shook his head. “It was like one big game of King of the Mountain. Every kid is trying to knock off every other kid.”

“And Valerie was king of the women’s side?”

Eddie nodded. “The undisputed king.”

“Did Pavel and Valerie get along?”

“Yeah. At first anyway. He motivated Val like no one else could. She would practice for hours with his assistants, and just when you thought she couldn’t take one more step Pavel would come out and boom! it was like an energy boost. Val was a great player, but Pavel knew how to get her competitive juices really flowing. When he was there, she blew away everyone else. Diving, stretching, running down every lob. She was incredible.”

“So when did things start going wrong?”

Eddie shrugged. “When she started losing.” He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” He stopped again, thinking. “She stopped caring, I guess. It happens to a lot of the players. They burn out. Too much pressure too fast.”

“What did Pavel do?”

“He tried all his old tricks. You see, Pavel fostered the whole dog-eat-dog atmosphere. It weeded out the weak, he told me. But Valerie wasn’t responding anymore. She still beat most of the girls. But when she played against the game’s greats—Steffi, Monica, Gabriela, Martina—she didn’t have the heart to beat them anymore.”

Eddie sat in a chair in front of his locker. Very few people were around. The floor, carpeted in an office-brown, was littered with little pieces of wrap and bandaging. Myron sat down next to him. “You told me you saw Valerie a few days before she died.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “In the lobby of the Plaza.” He took off his shirt. The kid was bony. The kind of bony where it appears the chest concaves into the heart. “I hadn’t seen her in a long time.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She was going to make a comeback. She seemed pretty excited about the idea, kinda like the old Val. Then she gave me your number and told me to stay away from Pavel and TruPro.”

“Did she say why you should stay away?”

“No.”

“Did she say anything else?”

He paused, his mind flashing back. “Not really. She was kinda in a hurry. She said she had to go out and settle something.”

“Settle what?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”

“What day was this?” Myron asked.

“Thursday, I think.”

“Do you remember the time?”

“Must have been around six.”

Valerie had called Duane’s apartment Thursday at six-fifteen. Settle something. Settle what? Settle her relationship with Duane? Or expose it? And what if she did threaten that? Would Duane kill her to stop her? Myron didn’t think so, especially in light of the fact that Duane was serving a tennis ball in front of several thousand people when she was shot.

Eddie slipped out of his sneakers and socks.

“I got two tickets to the Yankees for Wednesday night,” Myron said. “You want to go?”

Eddie smiled. “I thought you didn’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That ass-kissing stuff.”

“I do. Every agent does. I’m not above it. But in this case I actually thought it might be fun.”

Eddie stood. “Should I be skeptical of your motives?” he asked.

“Only if you’re smart.”

Duane liked to be alone before a match. Win had taught him meditation techniques, sans the dirty videotapes, and you could usually find him curled up in a corner, sitting in the lotus position with his eyes closed. He didn’t like to be disturbed, which was good. Myron wasn’t sure he wanted to see him right now anyway. His main responsibility, he knew, was still to help his client perform his best—especially on this, the most important day of Duane’s career. Raising the issue of Duane’s late-night rendezvous with Deanna Yeller would be a distraction. A major distraction.

It would have to wait.

The crowd was huge. Everyone had been waiting for this match between the upstart American Duane Richwood and the cool Czech Michel Brishny, a former number one player now ranked fifth. Myron and Jessica took their seats in the front row. Jess looked incredible in a simple yellow sundress. Spectators gaped. Nothing new there. Without a doubt, the TV cameras would be getting plenty of shots of the box today. Between Jess’s beauty and her fame in the literary world they wouldn’t be able to resist.

Myron debated having her hold up one of his business cards. Nah. Too tacky.

A bevy of favorites was already in their seats. Ned Tunwell and other Nike VIPs crowded a corner box. Ned waved like a windmill on LSD. Myron gave a small wave back. Two boxes behind them sat chubby Roy O’Connor, the rotund president of TruPro. Sitting with him was Aaron. Aaron had his face tilted to the sun, soaking up the rays. He was garbed in his usual attire—white suit, no shirt. Across the way Myron also spotted Senator Cross in a box jammed with gray-haired lawyer types—the exception being Gregory Caufield. Myron still wanted to talk to Gregory. Perhaps an opportunity would present itself after the match. The buxom blonde from the other day was back in the same seat. The shapely lass gave Myron another small wave. He didn’t wave back.

Myron turned to Jessica. She smiled at him.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

“More beautiful than the blonde with the big boobs?” she asked.

“Who?” Myron said.

“The Silicone She-Beast giving you the eye.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Then: “How do you know they’re silicone?”

The players took the court for warm-ups. Two minutes later Pavel Menansi made his grand entrance. There was a smattering of applause. Pavel displayed his gratitude with a circular hand gesture. Very popelike. He wore tennis whites, with a green sweater tied around his neck. The smile was on full blast. Pavel made his way toward the TruPro box. Aaron rose, let him in, then sat back down. Pavel and Roy O’Connor shook hands.

It hit Myron like a shot to the solar plexus. “Oh no,” he said.

“What?” Jessica asked.

Myron stood. “I’ve got to go.”

“Now?”

“I’ll be back. Make my excuses.”

28

The match was on the car radio. WFAN, 66 AM. From the sound of it Duane was not playing well. He had just dropped the first set 6–3 when Myron pulled into a lot off Central Park West in Manhattan.

Dr. Julie Abramson lived in a town house half a block down from her office. Myron rang the bell. There was a buzzing noise and then her voice came over the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“Myron Bolitar. It’s urgent.”

There were a few seconds of silence. Then: “Second floor.” The buzzer sounded again. Myron pushed the door open. Julie Abramson was waiting for him on the stairwell.

“Did you call and hang up on me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To see if you were home.”

He arrived at her door. They stood and faced each other. With their height difference—she well under five feet, he six-four—the sight was almost comical.

She looked up. Way up. “I still can’t deny or confirm that Valerie Simpson was ever a patient of mine,” she said.

“That’s okay. I want to ask you about a hypothetical situation.”

“A hypothetical situation?”

He nodded.

“And that couldn’t wait until Monday?”

“No.”

Dr. Abramson sighed. “Come on in.”

She had the television turned on to the match. “I should have known,” she said. “The TV keeps flashing to Jessica Culver in the players’ box, but never you.”

“With her there they wouldn’t show me anyway.”

“The sportscaster says you two are an item. Is that true?”

Myron shrugged. Noncommittal. “What’s the score now?” he asked.

“Your client lost the first set 6–3,” she said. “He’s down 2–0 in this set.” She switched off the television with the remote and signaled to a chair. They both sat. “So tell me about your hypothetical situation, Myron.”

“I want to start off with a young girl. Fifteen years old. Pretty. From a well-to-do family, parents divorced, the father absent. She dates a boy from a prominent family. She’s also a tennis protégée.”

“This isn’t sounding too hypothetical,” Dr. Abramson said.

“Just bear with me a second. The young girl is such a great tennis player that her mother ships her off to an academy run by a world-famous tennis coach. When this young girl arrives at the academy she finds the competition cutthroat. Tennis is the most individual of sports. There is no team spirit here. There is no camaraderie. Everybody is vying for the approval of the world-famous coach. Tennis is not conducive to making friends.” Echoing Eddie’s words. “It isolates. Would you say that’s true, Doctor?”

“On the level you’re talking about, yes.”

“So when this young girl is uprooted from the life she has known and tossed into this rather hostile environment, she is not made to feel welcome. Far from it. The other girls see this new tennis protégée as a threat and when they realize what a magnificent player she is, the threat becomes reality. The other girls shun her all the more. She grows even more isolated.”

“Okay.”

“Now, this world-famous coach, he’s a bit Darwinian. Survival of the fittest and all that. He sort of plays a dual role here. On the one hand this isolation will force the girl to search for an escape, a place where she can thrive.”

“The tennis court?” Abramson said.

“Exactly. The young girl begins to practice even harder than before. But at the same time the world-famous coach is nice to her. While everyone else is cruel, the world-famous coach praises her. He spends time with her. He gets the most out of her.”

“Which in turn,” Dr. Abramson interjected, “isolates her from the other girls all the more.”

“Right. The young girl becomes dependent on the coach. She thinks he cares and like any eager student she wants—needs—his approval. She begins to play even harder. She also knows that pleasing the world-famous coach will also please her mother. She tries even harder. The cycle continues.”

Dr. Abramson had to see where Myron was going with this, but her face remained blank. “Go on,” she said.

“The tennis academy is not the real world. It’s a secluded domain ruled by the world-famous coach. But he acts like he cares for the young girl. He treats her like she’s something special. The young girl plays even harder, pushing herself more than she could ever imagine—not for herself, but to please him. Maybe he offers her a pat on the back after practice. Maybe he rubs her sore shoulders. Maybe they have dinner one night to discuss her tennis. Who knows how it started?”

“How what started?” Abramson asked.

Myron chose to ignore the question. For now. “The young girl and world-famous coach start touring together,” he continued. “She starts playing competitive tennis against women who again treat her as a feared rival. But now the young girl and the world-famous coach are alone. On the road. Staying in hotels.”

“More isolation,” Abramson offered.

“She plays well. She’s beautiful, she’s young, she’s American. The press begins to swarm. The sudden attention frightens her. But the world-famous coach is there to protect her.”

“She becomes more dependent on him.”

Myron nodded. “Now let’s remember that the world-famous coach is a former world-famous player himself. He is accustomed to the narcissistic lifestyle that goes along with being a professional athlete. He is used to doing as he pleases. And that’s exactly what he does with this girl.”

Silence.

“Could this happen, Doc? In theory?”

Dr. Abramson cleared her throat. “In theory, yes. Whenever a man wields power and authority over a woman the potential for abuse is high. But in your scenario the potential for abuse is maximized. The man is older, the woman no more than a child. A teacher or a boss might control their victim for a few hours a day, but in your scenario the coach is both omnipotent and omnipresent.”

They looked at each other.

“The girl in my scenario,” Myron said softly. “Her play would deteriorate if he abused her?”

“Without question.”

“What else would happen to her?”

“Every case is different,” Abramson replied as though giving a dissertation. “But the results would invariably be catastrophic. A scenario like yours would probably start out for the young girl as nothing more than a crush. This sophisticated, older man is nice to her when nobody else is. He understands and cares about her. She probably doesn’t have to invite his advances—they just sort of happen. The young girl may encourage them at first, but probably not. She may even resist, but at the same time she feels responsible. She blames herself.”

Myron felt something in the pit of his stomach open wide. “Which causes more problems.”

“Yes. You talked about how the world-famous coach isolates her,” Abramson continued. “But in your scenario he does more than that. He dehumanizes her. Her adolescence is turned upside down by her tennis greatness. Her life is not about school and friends and family. It’s about money and winning. She’s become a commodity. She knows that if she displeases him, the commodity becomes worthless. And her being a commodity makes it easier on him too.”

“How?” Myron asked.

“A commodity is far easier to abuse than a human being.”

Silence.

“So what happens when it’s all over?” Myron asked. “When the world-famous coach uses up the commodity, what happens to her?”

“The young girl would reach out for something—anything—that she thinks might save her.”

“The old boyfriend maybe?”

“Perhaps.”

“She might even want to get engaged right away.”

“That’s possible, yes. She may see the old boyfriend as a return to her innocence. In her mind the boyfriend may be raised to savior status.”

“And suppose this boyfriend was murdered?”

“You’ve pulled out the final block,” Abramson replied softly. “The young girl was already in need of serious therapy. Now a complete mental breakdown is a very real possibility. Maybe even a likelihood.”

Myron felt his heart crumble.

Dr. Abramson looked away for a moment. “But there are other aspects to your scenario that need to be explored,” she said, trying to sound offhanded.

“Like?”

“Like what actually occurred during the abuse. If, as you say, the world-famous coach was a narcissistic man, he would only concern himself with his pleasure. He wouldn’t worry about her. He probably wouldn’t, for example, wear protection. And since this girl is rather young and probably not sexually active, she wouldn’t be using oral contraceptives.”

Dread flooded Myron’s chest. He remembered the rumors. “He got her pregnant.”

“In the realm of your scenario,” Abramson said, “that is certainly a possibility.”

“What would happen …?” Myron stopped. The answer was obvious. “The world-famous coach would make her get an abortion.”

“I imagine so, yes.”

Silence.

Myron felt something well up in his eyes. “What she went though …” He shook his head. “Everyone thought Valerie was so weak. But in reality—”

“Not Valerie,” Abramson corrected. “A young girl. A theoretical young girl in a theoretical situation.”

Myron looked up. “Still trying to protect your ass, Doc?”

“You can’t say anything, Myron. It’s all hypothetical. I will neither confirm nor deny that Valerie Simpson was ever a patient of mine.”

He shook his head, stood, and headed for the door. When he reached it, he turned back toward her. “One more hypothetical question,” he said. “The world-famous coach. If he’s willing to abuse one child, how likely is it he’ll do it again?”

Dr. Abramson did not face him. “Very likely,” she said.

29

By the time Myron got back to Stadium Court, Duane had dropped the first two sets 6–3, 6–1, and it was 2–2 in the third set. Myron sat between Jessica and Win. Pavel Menansi, he immediately noticed, was no longer in his seat. Aaron was still there. Senator Cross and Gregory Caufield were in their box too. Ned Tunwell still sat with his Nike colleagues. Ned was no longer waving. He was, in fact, crying. The entire Nike box looked like a deflated balloon. Henry Hobman was still as a Rodin.

Myron turned to Jessica. She looked concerned but said nothing. She took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. He squeezed back and gave her a small smile. He noticed that she was now wearing a bright pink Ray•Ban cap.

“What’s with the cap?” he asked.

“A guy offered me a thousand dollars to wear it.”

Myron was familiar with the old advertising trick. Companies—in this case, Ray•Ban—paid anyone seated in the players’ boxes to wear the caps during matches, figuring, of course, that there was an excellent chance the person and hence the hat would show up on television. Relatively cheap and effective exposure.

Myron looked at Win. “What about you?”

“I don’t do caps,” Win replied. “They muss my hair.”

“That,” Jessica added, “and the guy only offered him five hundred dollars.”

Win shrugged. “Sexual discrimination. It’s an ugly thing.”

More like smart business. Five hundred dollars was the normal rate. But somebody at Ray•Ban realized Jess was both attractive and a celebrity—ergo, extra exposure.

Duane dropped another game. Down 3–2 after losing the first two sets. Not good. The players collapsed in their chairs on either side of the umpire for the changeover. Duane toweled down his racket. He changed shirts. Some female fans whistled. Duane did not smile. He glanced over at their box. Unlike just about any other sport in the world, tennis players are not allowed to talk to their coaches during the match. But Henry did move. He took his hand off his chin and made a fist. Duane nodded.

“Time,” the chair ump said.

That was when Pavel made his return.

He entered through the portal on the right near the grandstand carrying an Evian in his hand. Myron’s eyes locked on to him. He felt his pulse quicken. Pavel Menansi was still wearing the sweater tied around his neck. He took his seat behind Aaron. Pavel Menansi. He smiled. He laughed. He sipped a cold Evian. He breathed in and out. He lived. People patted his back. Someone asked for an autograph. A young girl. Pavel said something to her. The young girl giggled behind her hand.

“Burgess Meredith,” Win said. He was looking at the court, not Myron.

“What?”

“Burgess Meredith.”

More Name the Batman Criminal. “Not now,” Myron said.

“Now. Burgess Meredith.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re staring. Aaron will pick it up.” Win adjusted his sunglasses. “Burgess Meredith.”

He was right. “The Penguin.”

“Victor Buono.”

“King Tut.”

“Bruce Lee.”

Jessica leaned over. “Trick question,” she said.

“No hints,” Win said.

“He played Kato,” Myron said. “Green Hornet’s sidekick. He guest-starred on one episode. I don’t know if you could call him a criminal.”

“Correct.” Silence. Then Win said: “That bad?”

“Worse.”

“The police released Valerie’s body,” Win said. “The funeral is tomorrow.”

Myron nodded. On the court Duane served up an ace. Only his second of the match. Myron said, “It may get ugly now.”

“How so?”

“I know why the Ache brothers want us out.”

“Ah,” Win said. “May I assume the Aches will not want you to disseminate this information to the general public?”

“Correct assumption.”

“And may I further assume this information is worth the cost of Aaron and an all-star cast?”

“Another correct assumption.”

Win sat back. He was very still. He was also smiling. Myron turned to Jessica. Her hand still held his.

“If you get killed,” she whispered, “I’ll kill you. Soul mate.”

Silence.

On the court Duane hit two more aces and then an overhead to tie the third set at three games apiece. Duane looked over at the box. The reflection of the sun off his sunglasses was blinding, giving him a sleek, robotic look. But something in his face had changed. Duane made the fist again.

Henry spoke for the first time. “He’s baaack.”

30

Henry Hobman was good as his word. Duane rallied. He took the third set 6–4. Ned Tunwell stopped crying. The fourth set went to a tiebreaker, which Duane won 9–7, saving three match points. Ned started the windmill wave again. Duane won the fifth set 6–2. Ned had to change his underwear.

Final score of the marathon match: 3–6, 1–6, 6–4, 7–6, (9–7), 6–2. Before the combatants had even left the court the word classic was being bantered about.

By the time all the congratulations and news conferences ended it was getting late. Jess borrowed Myron’s car to visit her mother. Win dropped him off at the office. Esperanza was still there.

“Big win,” she said.

“Yup.”

“Duane played like shit in the first two sets.”

“He had a long night,” Myron said. “What have we got?”

Esperanza handed him a stack of papers. “Prenuptial agreement for Jerry Prince. Final copy.”

Ah, the beloved prenup. A necessary evil. Myron hated to recommend them. Marriage should be about love and romance. A prenup, frankly speaking, was about as romantic as licking a litter box. Still, Myron had an obligation to guard the financial well-being of his clients. Too many of these marriages ended in quickie divorces. Gold-digging, it used to be called. Some mistook his concern for sexism. It wasn’t. Well-to-do female athletes should do the same.

“What else?” he asked.

“Emmett Roberts wants you to call. He needs your opinion on a car he’s buying.”

Myron drove a Ford Taurus, hardly qualifying him as Motor Trend’s Man of the Year.

Emmett was a fringe basketball player who bounced between bench-sitting in the NBA and starring in the Continental Basketball Association—a sort of basketball minor league where players do nothing but try to impress NBA scouts. Very few do. There were exceptions. John Starks and Anthony Mason of the Knicks, to name two. But for the most part the CBA gymnasiums were yet another haven of shattered dreams, a bottom rung on the ladder before slipping off altogether.

Myron fingered through his Rolodex. Esperanza was good about keeping it up-to-date and in alphabetical order for him. Raston. Ratner. Rextell. Rippard. Roberts. There. Emmett Roberts.

Myron stopped.

“Where’s Duane’s card?” he asked.

“What?”

Myron quickly skimmed through the rest of the R’s. “Duane Richwood isn’t in my Rolodex. Could you have misfiled it?”

She dismissed that possibility with a glare. “Look around. It’s probably on your desk someplace.”

Not on the desk. Myron tried the D’s. No Duane.

“I’ll make you up a new one,” she said, heading for the door. “Try not to lose it this time.”

“Thanks a bunch,” he said. Still, the missing card gnawed at him. Another coincidence involving Duane? He dialed Emmett Roberts’s phone. Emmett answered.

“Hey, Myron. How’s it going?”

“Good, Emmett. What’s this about buying a car?”

“I saw this Porsche today. Red. Fully loaded. Seventy Gs. I was thinking about using the play-off bonus money to buy it.”

“If that’s what you want,” Myron said.

“Man, you sound like my mother. I wanted your opinion.”

“Buy something cheaper,” Myron said. “A lot cheaper.”

“But the car is so hot, Myron. If you could just see it …”

“Then buy it, Emmett. You’re an adult. You don’t need my blessing.” Myron hesitated. “Did I ever tell you about Norm Booker?”

“Who?”

How soon they forget.

“I was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old,” Myron said, “and I was working at this summer camp in Massachusetts. It was a Celtics camp. They used to have their rookie tryouts there. I was basically a towel boy. I met a lot of the draft picks back then. Cedric Maxwell. Larry Bird. But my first year the Celtics had a first-round pick named Norm Booker. I think he was out of Iowa State.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Norm was a great player. Six-seven, smooth moves, nice touch. Strong as an ox. And nice guy too. He talked to me. Lot of the guys ignored the towel boys, but Norm wasn’t like that. I remember he used to shoot foul shots with his back to the basket. He’d toss the ball over his shoulder. He had such a great touch that he could make better than fifty percent that way.”

“So what happened to him?”

“He sat the bench as a rookie. The Celtics cut him the next year. He scrounged around a bit and then he landed with the Portland Trailblazers. He mostly rode the bench, played garbage time, that sort of thing. When the Trailblazers made the play-offs Norm got the usual bonus. He was so excited about it he went out and bought a Rolls-Royce. Dropped every dime he had on that car. But he wasn’t worried. There was always next year. And the year after that. Only thing was, Portland cut him. He tried out with a couple of other clubs, but nobody wanted him. Last I heard Norm had to sell the car to feed his family.”

Silence.

After some time passed Emmett said, “I also saw this Honda Accord. They had a pretty good lease deal.”

“Go for it, Emmett.”

They hung up a few minutes later. Myron hadn’t thought about Norm Booker in a long time. He wondered what became of him.

Esperanza came back in. She put a new card for Duane Richwood in his Rolodex. “Happy?”

“Yes.” He handed her two sheets of paper. “This is a party list for the night Alexander Cross was killed.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Heck if I know. A familiar name. Something that leaps out at you.”

She nodded. “You know about the funeral tomorrow?”

Myron nodded.

“You going?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I tracked down one of the schoolteachers from the article on Curtis Yeller.”

“Which one?”

“Mrs. Lucinda Elright. She’s retired now, lives in Philadelphia. She’ll see you tomorrow afternoon. You can go right after the funeral.”

Myron leaned back. “I’m not sure that’s necessary anymore.”

“You want me to cancel?”

Myron thought a moment. In light of what he’d learned about Pavel Menansi, the connection between Valerie’s murder and what happened to Curtis Yeller seemed more tenuous than ever. The murder of Alexander Cross had not caused Valerie’s downfall. It wasn’t even the final push. Pavel Menansi had pushed Valerie off the cliff years before. He had watched her slowly plummet, tumbling over jagged rocks on her painful way down. Alexander Cross’s death had marked the end of the descent. The ground, if you will. The final crash. Nothing more. Clearly there was no connection between Valerie’s death and the events of six years ago. There was also no connection between Duane and Valerie other than what Duane had said—they slept together. No big deal.

Except …

Except for last night’s rendezvous between Duane and Curtis Yeller’s mother.

If not for that—if Myron hadn’t seen them together at the hotel—he would be able to dismiss them both entirely. But Duane and Deanna Yeller having an affair—it was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection.

“Don’t cancel,” Myron said.

31

Valerie’s funeral was strictly cookie-cutter.

The reverend, a porky man with a red nose, hadn’t known her with any depth. He listed achievements as though reading from a résumé. He mixed in a few oldies but goodies: loving daughter; so full of life; taken so young; God has a plan. An organ sounded self-righteous indignation. Tacky flowers, like something you’d find draped around a winning horse, adorned the chapel. Stern stain-glass figures peered from above.

The crowd did not linger long. They stopped by Helen and Kenneth Van Slyke, not so much to offer comfort but to be sure they’d been seen and recognized, which was the real reason they’d come in the first place. Helen Van Slyke shook hands with her head high. She did not blink. She did not smile. She did not cry. Her jaw was set. Myron waited in the receiving line with Win. As they got closer they could hear Helen repeat the same phrases—“Good of you to come, thank you for coming, good of you to come, thank you for coming”—in a singsong voice reminiscent of a flight attendant upon disembarkation.

When it was Myron’s turn Helen gripped his hand hard. “Do you know who hurt Valerie?”

“Yes.” She had said hurt, Myron noted. Not kill.

Helen Van Slyke looked at Win for confirmation. Win nodded.

“Come back to the house,” she said. “There’s going to be a reception.” She turned to the next mourner and hit PLAY on her internal tape recorder. “Good of you to come, thank you for coming, good of you to come …”

Myron and Win did as she asked. The mood at Brentman Hall was neither Irish wake–like nor devastating grief. There were no tears. No laughter. Either would have been more welcome than this room completely void of any emotion. “Mourners” milled around like they were at an office cocktail party.

“No one cares,” Myron said. “She’s gone and no one cares.”

Win shrugged. “No one ever does.” The eternal optimist.

The first person to approach them was Kenneth. He was dressed in proper black with well-shined shoes. He greeted Win with a back slap and a firm handshake. He ignored Myron.

“How are you holding up?” Win asked. Like he cared.

“Oh I’m doing okay,” he said with a heavy sigh. Mr. Brave. “But I’m worried about Helen. We’ve had to medicate her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Myron said.

Kenneth turned to him, as though seeing him for the first time. He made a face like he was sucking on a lemon. “Do you mean that?” he asked.

Myron and Win shared a glance. “Yes, I do, Kenneth,” Myron said.

“Then do me the courtesy of staying away from my wife. She was very upset after your visit the other day.”

“I meant no harm.”

“Well, you caused plenty of it, I can tell you. I think it’s high time, Mr. Bolitar, you showed some respect. Leave my wife alone. We are grieving here. She’s lost her daughter and I’ve lost my stepdaughter.”

Win rolled his eyes.

Myron said, “You have my word, Kenneth.”

Kenneth nodded a manly nod and moved away.

“His stepdaughter,” Win said in disgust. “Bah.”

From across the room Myron caught Helen Van Slyke’s eye. She made a gesture toward a door on her right and slipped through it. Like they were meeting for a secret liaison.

“Keep Kenneth away,” Myron said.

Win feigned surprise. “But you gave Kenneth your word.”

“Bah,” Myron said. Whatever that meant.

He ducked through the doorway and followed Helen. She too wore all black, a suit of some sort with the skirt cut just low enough to be sexy yet proper. Good legs, he noticed, and felt like a pig for thinking such a thing at such a time. She led him to a small room down the end of an ornate corridor and closed the door behind them. The room looked like a miniature version of the living room. The chandelier was smaller. The couch was smaller. The fireplace was smaller. The portrait over the mantel was smaller.

“This is the drawing room,” Helen Van Slyke explained.

“Oh,” Myron said. He’d always wanted to know what a drawing room was. Now that he was in one he still had no idea.

“Would you care for some tea?”

“No thanks.”

“Do you mind if I have some?”

“Not at all,” he said.

She sat demurely and poured herself a cup from the silver set on the table. Myron noticed that there were two tea sets on the table. He wondered if that was a clue as to the definition of drawing room.

“Kenneth tells me you’re on medication,” he said.

“Kenneth is full of shit.”

Big surprise.

“Are you still investigating Valerie’s murder?” she asked. There was almost a mocking quality in her voice. Her words also seemed just a tad slurred, and Myron wondered if perhaps she was indeed being medicated or if she’d added a little home brew to her tea.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you still feel some chivalrous responsibility toward her?”

“I never did.”

“Then why do you do it?”

Myron shrugged. “Someone should care.”

She looked up, searching his face for a shred of sarcasm. “I see,” she said. “So tell me: what have you learned from your investigation?”

“Pavel Menansi abused your daughter.”

Myron watched for a reaction. Helen Van Slyke smiled semi-teasingly and put a sugar cube in her tea. Not exactly the reaction he had in mind. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

“I am.”

“What do you mean, abused?”

“Sexual abuse.”

“As in rape?”

“You may call it that, yes.”

She made a scoffing noise. “Come now, Mr. Bolitar. Isn’t that a tad extreme?”

“No.”

“It is not as though Pavel forced himself on her, is it? They had an affair. It’s hardly unheard of.”

“You knew about it?”

“Of course. And frankly, I was quite displeased. Pavel showed poor judgment. But my daughter was sixteen years old at the time—maybe seventeen, I’m not really sure. Anyway, she was certainly of legal age. Calling it rape or sexual abuse, well, I think that’s being a tad overdramatic, don’t you?”

Maybe both medication and booze. Maybe even mixing them. “Valerie was a young girl,” he said. “Pavel Menansi was her coach, a man of nearly fifty.”

“Would it have made it any better if he was forty? Or thirty?”

“No,” Myron said.

“So why bring up their age difference?” She put down the tea. The smile was again toying with her lips. “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Bolitar. If Valerie was a sixteen-year-old boy and he had an affair with a beautiful female coach who was, let’s say, thirty—would you call that sexual abuse? Would you call that rape?”

Myron hesitated for a second. It was a second too long.

“I thought so,” she said triumphantly. “You’re a sexist, Mr. Bolitar. Valerie had an affair with an older man. It happens all the time.” Again the playful smile. “To me even.”

“Did you have a breakdown after it was over?”

She raised an eyebrow. “So that’s your definition of abuse?” she asked. “A breakdown?”

“You entrusted your daughter to this man,” Myron said. “He was supposed to help her. But he used her instead. He tore her down. He destroyed and discarded her.”

“Tore? Destroyed? Discarded? My, my, Mr. Bolitar, we are out for shock effect, aren’t we?”

“You don’t see anything wrong with what he did?”

She put down her tea and took a cigarette. She lit it, inhaled deeply with her eyes closed, and let it all out. “If it makes you happy to blame me for what happened, fine, blame me. I was a lousy mother. The worst. Is that better?”

Myron watched her calmly smoking her cigarette and sipping her tea. Too calmly. Did she really buy this crap she was peddling? Or was it an act? Was she just deluding herself or …

“Pavel bought you off,” Myron said.

“No.”

“TruPro and Pavel are paying—”

“That’s not it at all,” she interrupted.

“We know about the money, Mrs. Van Slyke.”

“You don’t understand. Pavel blames himself for what happened. He took it upon himself to remedy the situation in the only way he could.”

“By paying you off.”

“By providing us with some of the funds Valerie may have earned had her career continued. He didn’t have to do that. The affair wasn’t necessarily the cause—”

“It’s called hush money.”

“Never,” she said in a near-hiss. “Valerie was my daughter.”

“And you sold her for cash.”

She shook her head. “I did what I thought was best for my daughter.”

“He abused her. You took his money. You let him get away with it.”

“There was nothing I could do,” she said. “We didn’t want to make it public. Valerie wanted to put it behind her. She wanted to keep it confidential. We all did.”

“Why?” Myron said. “It was just an affair with an older man. Happens all the time. To you even.”

She bit down on her lip for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was softer. “There was nothing I could do,” she repeated. “It was in everyone’s best interest to keep it quiet.”

“Bullshit,” Myron said. He realized he was pushing too hard, but something inside of him wouldn’t let him back off. “You sold your daughter.”

She was silent for a few moments, concentrating only on her cigarette, watching the ash grow longer and longer. In the distance they could hear the low rumble from the funeral crowd. Glasses clinking. A polite titter.

“They threatened Valerie,” she said.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Men who work with Pavel. They made it very clear that if she opened her mouth she was dead.” She looked up, pleading. “Don’t you see? What option did we have? No good could come from talking. They’d kill her. I was afraid for Valerie. Kenneth—well, I think Kenneth was more interested in the money. Hindsight may be twenty-twenty, but at the time I believed it was the best thing.”

“You were protecting your daughter,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“But she’s dead now.”

Helen was puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to worry about her being hurt anymore. She’s dead. You’re free to do as you please.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, tried again. “I have another daughter,” she managed. “I have a husband.”

“So then what was all that talk before about protecting Valerie?”

“It … I was trying …” Her voice churned to a silence.

“You took the hush money,” Myron said. He tried to remind himself that the woman who sat before him had buried her daughter today, but not even that fact could slow him down. If anything, it seemed to fuel him. “Don’t blame your husband. He’s a spineless worm. You were Valerie’s mother. You took money to protect a man who abused your daughter. And now you’ll keep taking money to protect a man who might have killed her.”

“You have no proof Pavel had anything to do with her murder.”

“The murder, no. His other crimes against Valerie—that’s a different story.”

She closed her eyes. “It’s too late.”

“It’s not too late. He’s still doing it, you know. Guys like Pavel don’t stop. They just find new victims.”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“I have a friend,” Myron said. “Her name is Jessica Culver. She’s a writer.”

“I know who she is.”

He handed her Jess’s card. “Tell her the story. She’ll write it up. Put it in a major publication. Sports Illustrated maybe. It’ll be out before Pavel’s people even know about it. They’re bad men, but they’re not wasteful or stupid. Once it’s published there’ll be no reason to go after your family anymore. It’ll end him.”

“I’m sorry.” She lowered her head. “I can’t do it.”

She was crumbling. Her whole body was slumped and shaking. Myron watched her, tried to muster up some pity, couldn’t do it. “You left her alone with him,” he continued. “You didn’t look after her. And when you had the chance to help her, you told her to bury it. You took money.”

Her body racked. Probably from a sob. Attacking a mother at her own daughter’s funeral, Myron thought. What could he do for an encore? Drown newborn kittens in the neighbor’s pool?

“Perhaps,” he went on, “Valerie wanted to tell the truth. Maybe she needed that to put it all behind her. And maybe that’s why she was murdered.”

Silence. Then without warning Helen Van Slyke raised her head. She stood and left without saying another word. Myron followed. When he reentered the living room he could hear her voice.

“Good of you to come. Thank you for coming.”

32

Lucinda Elright was big and warm with thick, jiggly arms and an easy laugh. The kind of woman that as a child you feared would hug you too hard and as an adult you wish like hell she would.

“Come on in,” she said, shooing several small children away from the door.

“Thank you,” Myron said.

“You want something to eat?”

“No thanks.”

“How about some cookies?” There were at least ten kids in the apartment. All black, none over the age of seven or eight. Some were using a paint set. Some were building a castle out of sugar cubes. One, a boy about six years old, was sticking his tongue out at Myron. “Not homemade, you understand. I can’t cook worth spit.”

“Actually, cookies sound good.”

She smiled. “I do day care now that I’m retired. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

Mrs. Elright went into the kitchen. The little boy waited until she was out of the room. Then he stuck his tongue out again. Myron stuck his tongue out back. Mr. Mature. The kid giggled.

“Now sit, Myron. Right over there.” She knocked various paraphernalia off the sofa. The plate was full of the classics. Oreos. Chips Ahoys. Fig Newtons.

“Eat,” she said.

Myron reached for a cookie. The little boy stood behind Mrs. Elright so he couldn’t be seen. He stuck his tongue out again. Without so much as a backward glance Mrs. Elright said, “Gerald, you stick your tongue out one more time, I’ll cut it off with my pruning shears.”

Gerald rolled his tongue back. “What’s pruning shears?”

“Never you mind. Just go over there and play now, you hear? And don’t you be causing no trouble.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When he was out of earshot Mrs. Elright said, “I like them better at this age. They break my heart when they get a little older.”

Myron nodded, pulled apart an Oreo. He didn’t lick out the cream. Very adult.

“Your friend Esperanza,” Mrs. Elright began, grabbing a Fig Newton. “She said you wanted to talk about Curtis Yeller.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He handed her the article. “Were you correctly quoted in this article?”

She lifted her half-moon reading glasses from her hefty bosom and scanned the page. “Yes, I said that.”

“Did you mean it?”

“This wasn’t just talk, if that’s what you’re getting at. I taught high school for twenty-seven years. I’ve seen lots of kids go to jail. I’ve seen lots of kids die in the streets. Never said a word to the newspapers about any of them. See this scar?” She pointed to an immense, fleshy bicep.

Myron nodded.

“Knife wound. From a student. I got shot at once too. I’ve confiscated more weapons than any damn metal detector.” She put her arm down. “That’s what I mean when I say I like them younger. Before they get like that.”

“But Curtis was different?”

“Curtis was more than just a good boy,” she said. “He was one of the best students I ever had. He was always polite and friendly and never caused a lick of trouble. But he wasn’t a sissy either, you understand. He was still popular with the other boys. Good at all kinds of sports. I’m telling you, the boy was one in a million.”

“What about his mother?” Myron asked. “What was she like?”

“Deanna?” Lucinda sat a little straighter. “Fine woman. Like so many of them young mothers today. Single. Proud. Did whatever she had to to get by. But Deanna was smart. She set rules. Curtis had a curfew. Kids today don’t even know what curfew means anymore. Couple nights ago, a ten-year-old boy got shot at three in the morning. Now you tell me, Myron—what’s a ten-year-old boy doing out on the streets at three in the morning?”

“I wish I knew.”

She waved a hand at the air. “Anyway you don’t want to hear no old woman rambling on.”

“I got time.”

“You’re a sweet man, but you’re here for a reason. A good reason, I think.”

She looked at Myron. He nodded but said nothing.

“Now,” she continued, slapping her thighs with her palms, “what were we talking about?”

“Deanna Yeller.”

“That’s right. Deanna. You know, I think about her a lot too. She was such a caring mother. She came to every open house. She loved parent-teacher conferences. She basked in all that praise we heaped on her boy.”

“Did you talk to her after his death?”

“Nope.” She shook her head hard and let out a sigh. “Never heard from Deanna again, poor woman. No funeral. No nothing. I called her a couple of times, but nobody ever answered. Like she fell off the face of the earth. But I understood. She’d always had it rough. From the start. She used to be a street girl, you know.”

“I didn’t know. When?”

“Oh, a long time ago. She doesn’t even know who Curtis’s father really was. But she quit. Got herself cleaned up. Worked like a dog, any job she could get. All for her boy. And then, just like that …” She shook her head. “Gone.”

“Did you know Errol Swade?” Myron asked.

“Just enough to know he was trouble. In and out of prison his whole life. He was Deanna’s sister’s boy. The sister was a junkie. Ended up dying of an overdose. Deanna had to take Errol in. He was family. She was a responsible woman.”

“How did Errol get along with Curtis?”

“Actually, they got along pretty good—considering how different they were.”

“Well, maybe they weren’t so different,” Myron said.

“What do you mean?”

“Errol got him to break into that tennis club.”

Lucinda Elright watched him a moment before she picked up a cookie and began to nibble. A small smile toyed with her lips. “Come on, Myron, you know better than that,” she said. “You’re a smart boy. So was Curtis. What would he want to steal way out there? It don’t make sense, robbing a place like that at night. Think about it.”

Myron had already. He was glad to see someone else had the same trouble with the official scenario. “So what do you think happened?”

“I’ve thought a lot about it, but I don’t really know. Nothing makes much sense to me about that whole night. But I do think Curtis and Errol were set up. Even if Curtis decided to steal—and even if he was dumb enough to break in to this club—I can’t believe he’d shoot at a police officer. A boy can change, but that’s like the tiger changing his stripes. It’s just too incredible.” She sat up, adjusting herself on the couch. “I think some fool thing happened at the rich white club and they needed a couple of black boys to take the fall. Now, I’m not that way. I’m not one of those who think the white man is always plotting against the black man. It’s just not in my nature. But in this case I don’t know what else could have happened.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Elright.”

“Lucinda. And Myron, do me a favor.”

“What?”

“When you find out what really happened to Curtis, let me know.”

33

Myron and Jessica drove out to New Jersey for dinner at Baumgart’s. They ate there at least twice a week. Baumgart’s was a strange combination. For half a century it had been a popular soda fountain and deli, the kind of place neighbors went for lunch and Archie took Veronica for an after-school smooch. Eight years ago a Chinese immigrant named Peter Li bought the place and turned it into the best Chinese around—but without getting rid of the old soda fountain. You could still twirl on a stool at the counter, surrounded by chrome and blenders and ice-cream scoops in hot water. You could order a milkshake with your dim sum and have french fries with your General Tso’s chicken. When they first lived together, Myron and Jess had come at least once a week. Now that they were back together, the tradition had resumed.

“It’s the Alexander Cross murder,” Myron said. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Before Jess could answer, Peter Li arrived. Myron and Jess never ordered. Peter chose for them. “Coral shrimp for the beautiful lady,” he said, putting down her plate, “and Baumgart’s Szechuan chicken and eggplant for the man not fit to grovel at her feet.”

“Good one,” Myron said. “Very funny.”

Peter bowed. “In my country they consider me a man of great humor.”

“Must be a lot of laughs in your country.” Myron looked down at his plate. “I hate eggplant, Peter.”

“You’ll eat it and beg for more,” he said. He smiled at Jess. “Enjoy.” He left.

“Okay,” Jess said, “so what about Alexander Cross?”

“It’s not Alexander, per se. It’s actually Curtis Yeller. Everyone says he was a great kid. His mom was very involved, loved him like mad, the whole nine yards. Now she acts like nothing happened.”

“ ‘There’s a grief that can’t be spoken,’ ” Jessica replied. “ ‘There’s a pain goes on and on.’ ”

Myron thought a second. “Les Mis?” The ongoing game of Guess the Quote.

“Correct, but what character said it?”

“Valjean?”

“No, sorry. Marius.”

Myron nodded. “Either way,” he said, “it’s a lousy quote.”

“I know. I was listening to the tape in the car,” she said. “But it might not be that far off the mark.”

“A grief that can’t be spoken?”

“Yes.”

He took a sip of water. “So it makes sense to you, the mother acting like nothing happened.”

Jessica shrugged. “It’s been six years. What do you want her to do—break down and cry every time you come around?”

“No,” Myron said, “but I’d think she’d want to know who killed her son.”

Before touching her shrimp, Jessica reached across the table and forked a piece of Myron’s chicken. Not the eggplant. The chicken. “Maybe she already knows,” Jess said.

“What, you think she’s being bought off too?”

Jess shrugged. “Maybe. But that’s not what’s really bugging you.”

“Oh?”

Jess chewed daintily. Even the way she chewed food was a thing to behold. “Seeing Duane in that hotel room with Curtis Yeller’s mother,” she replied. “That’s what’s got to you.”

“You must admit it’s a hell of a coincidence,” he said.

“Do you have a theory?” she asked.

Myron thought a moment. “No.”

Jessica forked another piece of chicken. “You could ask Duane,” she said.

“Sure. I could just say, ‘Gee, Duane, I was following you around and noticed you’re shacking up with an older woman. Care to tell me about it?’ ”

“Yeah, that could be a problem,” she agreed. “Of course, you could approach it from the other direction.”

“Deanna Yeller?”

Jessica nodded.

Myron took a taste of his chicken. Before Jess finished the whole thing. “Worth a try,” he said. “You want to come along?”

“I’ll scare her off,” Jess said. “Just drop me off at my place.”

They finished eating. Myron even ate the eggplant. It was pretty good. Peter brought them a rich chocolate dessert—the kind of dessert you could gain weight just looking at. Jess dove in. Myron held back. They drove back over the George Washington Bridge to the Henry Hudson and down the west side. He dropped her off at her loft on Spring Street in Soho. She leaned back into the car.

“You’ll come by after?” she said.

“Sure. Put on that little French maid’s uniform and wait.”

“I don’t have a French maid’s uniform.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we can pick one up in the morning,” she said. “In the meantime I’ll find something suitable.”

“Groovy,” Myron said.

Jess got out of the car then. She made her way up the stairs to the third floor. Her loft took up half the floor. She turned the key and entered. When she flicked on the lights she was startled to see Aaron lounging on her couch.

Before she could move, another man—a man with a fishnet shirt—came up behind her and put a gun to her temple. A third man—a black man—locked the door and turned the dead bolt. He too had a gun.

Aaron smiled at her. “Hello, Jessica.”

34

Myron’s car phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Bubbe, it’s your aunt Clara. Thanks for the referral.”

Clara wasn’t really his aunt. Aunt Clara and Uncle Sidney were just longtime friends of his parents. Clara had gone to law school with Myron’s mom. Myron had set her up to represent Roger Quincy.

“How’s it going?” Myron asked.

“My client wanted me to give you an important message,” Clara said “He stressed that I, his attorney, should treat this as my number one priority.”

“What?”

“Mr. Quincy said you promised him an autograph of Duane Richwood. Well, he’d like it to be an autographed picture of Duane Richwood, not just an autograph. Color picture, if that’s not too much trouble. And he’d like it inscribed to him, thank you very much. By the way, did he tell you he was a tennis fan?”

“I think he might have mentioned it. Fun guy, huh?”

“A constant party. Laughs galore. My sides are aching from all the laughing. It’s like representing Jackie Mason.”

“So what do you think?” Myron asked.

“In legal terms? The man is a major fruitcake. But is he guilty of murder—and more important, can the D.A. prove it?—that’s a different kettle of gefilte.”

“What do they have?”

“Circumstantial nothings. He was at the Open. Big deal, so were a zillion other people. He has a weird past. So what, he never made any overt threats that I’m aware of. No one saw him shoot her. No tests link him to the gun or that Feron’s bag with the bullet hole. Like I said, circumstantial nothings.”

“For what’s it worth,” Myron said, “I believe him.”

“Uh-huh.” Clara wouldn’t say if she believed him or not. It didn’t matter. “I’ll speak to you later, doll-face. Take care of yourself.”

“You too.”

He hung up and dialed Jake.

A gruff voice said, “Sheriff Courter’s office.”

“It’s me, Jake.”

“What the fuck do you want now?”

“My, what a charming salutation,” Myron said. “I must use it sometime.”

“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass.”

“You know,” Myron said, “I can’t for the life of me understand why you’re not invited to more parties.”

Jake blew his nose. Loudly. Geese in the tristate area scattered. “Before I’m left mortally wounded by your caustic wit,” he said, “tell me what you want.”

“You still have your copy of the Cross file?” Myron asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’d like to meet the coroner on the case and the cop who shot Yeller,” Myron said. “Think you can set it up?”

“I thought there was no autopsy.”

“Nothing formal, but the senator said someone did some work on him.”

“Yeah, all right,” Jake said. “But I know the cop who did the shooting. Jimmy Blaine. A good man, but he ain’t gonna talk to you.”

“I’m not interested in bringing him down.”

“That’s a big comfort,” Jake said.

“I just want some information.”

“Jimmy won’t see you, I’m sure of it. Why do you need all this anyway?”

“I see a connection between Valerie’s murder and Alexander Cross’s.”

“What connection?”

Myron explained. When he finished, Jake said, “I still don’t see it, but I’ll call you if I get something.”

He hung up.

Myron lucked out and found a spot within two blocks of the hotel. He walked in like he belonged and took the elevator to the third floor. He stopped in front of room 322 and knocked.

“Who is it?” Deanna Yeller’s voice was cheerful, singsong.

“Bellhop,” Myron said. “Flowers for you.”

She flung open the door with a wide smile. Just like the first time they’d met. When she saw no flowers—and more to the point, when she saw Myron—the smile fled. Again, just like the first time.

“Enjoying your stay?” Myron said.

She didn’t bother hiding her exasperation. “What do you want?”

“I can’t believe you came to town and didn’t call me. A less mature man would be insulted.”

“I got nothing to say to you.” She began to close the door.

“Guess who I just spoke to?”

“I don’t care.”

“Lucinda Elright.”

The door stopped. With Deanna looking slightly dazed, Myron slid through the opening.

Deanna recovered. “Who?”

“Lucinda Elright. One of your son’s teachers.”

“I don’t remember none of his teachers.”

“Oh but she remembers you. She said you were a wonderful mother to Curtis.”

“So?”

“She also said that Curtis was a wonderful student, one of the best she ever had. She said he had a bright future. She said he never got into trouble.”

Deanna Yeller put her hand on her hips. “There a point to all this?”

“Your son had no police record. He had a perfect school record, not so much as a detention. He was one of the top students in his class, if not the top student. You were clearly involved in his activities. You were an excellent mother, raising an excellent young man.”

She looked away. She might have been looking out the window, except the blinds were drawn. The TV was humming softly. A commercial for men’s pickup trucks featuring a soap opera star. Soap opera star, pickup trucks—what advertising genius came up with that combo?

“This is none of your business,” she whispered.

“Did you love your son, Ms. Yeller?”

“What?”

“Did you love your son?”

“Get out. Now.”

“If you cared about him at all, help me find out what happened to him.”

She glared at him. “Don’t give me that,” she countered. “You don’t care about my boy. You’re trying to find out who killed that white girl.”

“Maybe. But Valerie Simpson’s death and your son’s are connected. That’s why I need your help.”

She shook her head. “You don’t listen too good, do you? I told you before: Curtis is dead. Can’t change that.”

“Your son wasn’t the type to rob. He wasn’t the type to carry a gun or threaten the police with one. That’s just not the boy you raised.”

“Don’t matter,” she said. “He’s dead. Can’t bring him back.”

“What was he doing at the tennis club that night?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did you suddenly get all your money?”

Pow. Deanna Yeller looked up, startled. The old change-topic attention-getter. Works every time. “What?”

“Your house in Cherry Hills,” Myron said. “It was a cash deal four months ago. And your bank account at First Jersey. All cash deposits within the past half year. Where did the money come from, Deanna?”

Her face grew angry. Then suddenly she relaxed and smiled eerily. “Maybe I stole it,” she said, “just like my son. You gonna report me?”

“Or maybe it’s a payoff.”

“A payoff? For what?”

“You tell me.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you nothing. Get out.”

“Why are you here in New York?”

“To see the sights. Now leave.”

“One of those sights Duane Richwood?”

Double pow. She stopped. “What?”

“Duane Richwood. The man who was in your room the other night.”

She stared at him. “You were following us?”

“No. Just him.”

Deanna Yeller looked horror-stricken. “What kind of man are you?” she said slowly. “You get off on that kind of thing, watching other people and all? Checking their bank accounts? Following them around like a Peeping Tom?” She opened the door. “Don’t you have no shame at all?”

The argument was a little too close for comfort. “I’m trying to find a killer,” Myron argued, but his tone rang lamely in his own ears. “Maybe the person who killed your son.”

“And it don’t matter who you hurt to do it, right?”

“That’s not true.”

“If you really want to do some good, then just drop this whole thing.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She shook her head. “Curtis is dead. So is Valerie Simpson. Errol …” She stopped. “It’s enough.”

“What’s enough? What about Errol?”

But she kept shaking her head. “Just let it go, Myron. For everyone’s sake. Just let it go.”

35

Jessica felt the cold barrel of the gun against her temple.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Aaron signaled. The man behind her covered her mouth with his free hand. He pressed her hard against him. Jessica could feel hot spittle on her neck. It was hard to breathe. She twisted her head back and forth. Her chest hitched as she scrambled for more air. Panic seized her.

Aaron rose off the couch. The black man moved a step closer, his gun still pointed at her.

“No reason for preliminaries,” Aaron said calmly. He took off his white jacket. He wore no shirt underneath, revealing instead the hairless, bodybuilder physique. He flexed a little. His pectoral muscles made ripples, like a stadium crowd doing the wave. “If you can still speak when we’re through, make sure you tell Myron it was me.” He cracked his knuckles. “I’d hate for my work to go unaccredited.”

“Should I break her jaw?” the man with the fishnet asked. “So she can’t yell or nothing.”

Aaron thought a moment. “No,” he said. “I kind of enjoy a good yell now and again.”

All three men laughed.

“I go second,” the black man said.

“Like hell,” the man with the fishnet countered.

“You always go before me,” the black man whined.

“All right, we’ll flip for it.”

“You got a coin? I never carry change.”

“Shut up,” Aaron said.

Silence.

Jessica struggled feverishly, but the man in the fishnet was too strong. She bit down and managed to skim one of his fingers. He yelped and called her a bitch. Then he bent her head back in a way it was never supposed to go. Pain shot down her spine. Her eyes widened.

Aaron was about to unbutton his pants when it happened.

A gunshot. Or more than one gunshot. It sounded to Jessica like only one, but it had to be more. The hand pressed hard against her mouth slackened and slid off. The gun against her temple dropped to the floor. She turned just enough to see the man behind her no longer had a face or even much of a head. He was dead well before his legs realized it and let him cave onto the floor.

At seemingly the same time, the back half of the black man’s head flew across the room. He too fell to the floor in a bloody heap.

Aaron’s speed was uncanny. Seemingly before the first bullet even hit its target he had rolled into a crouch and whipped out a gun. Everything—the shots, the men going down, Aaron rolling to safety—had taken less than two seconds. Aaron came up aiming his gun at Win, who aimed his right back. Jessica stood frozen. Win must have come in through the terrace window, though how he could have gotten there and how long he’d been there Jessica could not say.

Win smiled casually and gave a half-nod. “My, my, Aaron, you’re looking rather buff.”

“I try to stay in shape,” Aaron said. “Nice of you to notice.”

The two men continued to aim their guns at each other. Neither blinked. Neither stopped smiling. Jessica had not moved. Her body quaked as though from fever. She felt something sticky on her face and realized it was probably brain matter from the man at her feet.

“I have an idea,” Aaron said.

“An idea?”

“For how to end this deadlock. One I think you’ll like, Win.”

“Do tell,” Win said.

“We both put our guns down at the same time.”

“So far it doesn’t sound very appealing,” Win said.

“I’m not finished.”

“How rude of me. Please continue.”

“We’ve both killed men with our bare hands,” Aaron said. “We both know we like it. A lot. We both know there are very few worthy adversaries in this world. We both know we are rarely if ever seriously challenged.”

“So?”

“So I’m suggesting the ultimate test.” Aaron’s grin grew brighter. “You and me. Man to man, hand-to-hand combat. What do you say?”

Win chewed on his upper lip. “Intriguing,” he said.

Jessica tried to say something, but her tongue would not obey. She just stood there, stone-faced; the thing that used to wear fishnet shirts bled without a twitch.

“One condition,” Win said.

“What’s that?”

“No matter who wins, Jessica goes free.”

Aaron shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Frank will get her some other time.”

“Maybe. But not tonight.”

“Fine then,” Aaron said. “But she can’t leave until it’s over.”

Win nodded at her. “Wait by the door, Jessica. When the fight ends, run.”

“But you have to wait until it’s over,” Aaron added.

Jessica found her voice. “How will I know when it’s over?”

“One of us will be dead,” Win said.

She nodded numbly. She couldn’t stop shaking. Both men were still pointing the guns at one another.

“You know the drill?” Aaron asked.

“Of course.”

Still holding the guns, both men placed their hand on the floor. At the same time, they twisted their weapons so that the barrel was no longer pointing at the other man. They both released their weapons at the same time. They both stood at the same time. They both kicked the weapons into a corner at the same time.

Aaron grinned. “It’s done,” he said.

Win nodded.

They approached each other slowly. Aaron’s grin spread into something fully maniacal. He got into some weird fighting position—dragon or grasshopper or something—and beckoned with his left hand. His body was sleek, all muscle. He towered over Win. “You forgot the basic premise of the martial arts,” Aaron said.

“What’s that?” Win asked.

“A good big man will always beat a good little man.”

“And you forgot the basic premise of Windsor Horne Lockwood III.”

“Oh?”

“He always carries two guns.”

Almost nonchalantly, Win reached into his leg holster, took out his gun, and fired. Aaron ducked, but the bullet still hit him in the head. The second bullet also hit Aaron’s head. So too, Jessica guessed, did the third.

The big man fell to the ground. Win walked over and studied the still figure, tilting his head from side to side like a dog hearing a strange sound.

Jessica watched him in silence.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Win continued to look down. He shook his head and made a tsk, tsk noise.

“What is it?” she asked.

Win turned to her, an almost shy smile toying with his lips. He gave a half-shrug. “I guess I’m not much for fair fights.”

He looked back down at the body and started to laugh.

36

Jessica didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to make love. Myron understood. Death and violence do that to a person. The fine line. There was definitely something to that “reaffirming life” stuff after facing down the Grim Reaper.

When they were spent, Jessica lay her head on his chest, her hair a wonderful fan. For a long time she didn’t say anything. Myron stroked her back. Finally she spoke. “He enjoys it, doesn’t he?”

Myron knew she meant Win. “Yes.”

“Do you?” she asked.

“Not like Win.”

She lifted her head and looked at him. “That sounded a tad evasive.”

“Part of me hates it more than you can imagine.”

“And another part of you?” she prompted.

“It’s the ultimate test. There’s an undeniable rush to that. But it’s not like what happens with Win. He craves it. He needs it.”

“And you don’t?”

“I like to think I loathe it.”

“But do you?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

“It was scary,” she said. “Win was scary.”

“He also saved your life.”

“Yes.”

“It’s what Win does. He’s good at it—the best I’ve ever seen. Everything with him is black and white. He has no moral ambiguities. If you cross the line, there is no reprieve, no mercy, no chance to talk your way out of it. You’re dead. Period. Those men came to harm you. Win wasn’t interested in rehabilitating them. They made their choice. The moment they entered your apartment they were doomed.”

“It sounds like the theory of massive retaliation,” she said. “You kill one of ours, we kill ten of yours.”

“Colder,” Myron said. “Win’s not interested in teaching a lesson. He sees it as extermination. They’re no more than pestering fleas to him.”

“And you agree with that?”

“Not always. But I understand it. Win’s moral code is not mine. We’ve both known that for a long time. But he’s my best friend and I’d trust him with my life.”

“Or mine,” she said.

“Right.”

“So what is your moral code?” she asked.

“It’s flexible. Let’s leave it at that.”

Jessica nodded. She lay her head back down on his chest. The warmth of her felt good against his heartbeat. “Their heads,” she said. “They just exploded like melons.”

“Win doctors the bullets to maximize impact.”

“Where did he take the bodies?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Will they be found?”

“Only if he wants them to be.”

A few minutes later Jessica’s eyes closed and her breathing grew deep. Myron watched her drift into a sound sleep. She cuddled closer to him, looking small and frail. He knew what would happen tomorrow. She’d still be in some form of shock—not a dazed shock as much as a denial. She’d go about her day as though nothing had happened, straining extra-hard for normalcy but falling just short of achieving it. Everything would be just a little different than yesterday. Nothing drastic, just the little things. Her food would taste a little different. The air would smell a little different. Colors would have an almost indiscernibly different hue.

At six in the morning, Myron got out of bed and showered. When he came back she was sitting up. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“To see Pavel Menansi.”

“This early?”

“They’ll think Aaron took care of the problem last night. I might catch them off guard.”

She pulled the covers over her. “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night at dinner. About the connection to the Alexander Cross murder.”

“And?”

“Suppose you’re right. Suppose something else happened that night six years ago.”

“Like?”

She sat upright, leaning against the headboard. “Suppose Errol Swade didn’t kill Alexander Cross,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, suppose Valerie saw what really happened to Alexander Cross. And suppose that whatever she saw pushed her already battered psyche over the edge. She had already been weakened by what Pavel Menansi did to her. But now suppose whatever she saw was the ultimate cause of her breakdown.”

Myron nodded. “Go on.”

“And now suppose years pass. Valerie gets stronger. She makes a remarkable recovery. She even wants to play tennis again. But most of all, she wants to face up to her darkest fear: the truth of what really happened that night.”

He saw where she was going with this. “She’d have to be silenced,” he said.

“Yes.”

Myron slipped a pair of pants on. Over the past few months his clothes had begun a slow migration to Jess’s loft. About a third of his wardrobe now resided here. “If you’re right,” he said, “we now have two people who want to silence Valerie: Pavel Menansi and whoever killed Alexander Cross.”

“Or someone who wants to protect those two.”

He finished dressing. Jess hated his tie and told him to change it. He complied. When he was ready to leave, Myron said, “You’ll be safe this morning, but I want to move you someplace out of town for a little while.”

“For how long?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Few days. Maybe longer. Just until I can get this situation under control.”

“I see,” she said.

“Are you going to fight me on this?”

She got out of bed and pattered across the room. She wore no clothes. Myron’s mouth went a little dry. He stared. He could stare all day. She walked with the ease of a panther. Every movement was supple and marvelous and rawly sensual. She slipped into a silk robe. “I know this is the part where I’m supposed to get all indignant and say that I’m not going to change my life,” she said. “But I’m scared. I’m also a writer who could use a few days of solitude. So I’ll go. No arguments.”

He hugged her. “You’re always a surprise,” he said.

“What?”

“Being reasonable. Who would have thought?”

“I’m trying to keep the mystery alive,” she said.

They kissed. Passionately. Her skin felt wonderfully warm.

“Why don’t you stay a little longer?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I want to get to Pavel before Ache realizes what happened.”

“One more kiss then.”

He stepped away. “Not unless you want to pack me in ice.” He blew her a kiss and left the bedroom area. Clumps of blood were stuck to the exposed brick wall by the door. Courtesy of Fishnet Lee’s head.

Outside, Win was nowhere in sight, but Myron knew he was there. Jess would be safe until they moved her.

Pavel Menansi was staying at the Omni Park Central on Seventh Avenue, across the street from Carnegie Hall. Myron would have preferred to go in with backup, but it was better Win wasn’t there. There had been a bond between Win and Valerie—more than just the family-friend variety. Myron didn’t know what that bond was. Win cared about very few people, but for those select few he would go to any lengths. The rest of the world meant nothing to him. Somehow Valerie had entered that protective circle. Myron would have enough trouble keeping his own rage in check. If Win were here—if Win were to question Pavel about his “affair” with Valerie—it wouldn’t be a very pretty sight.

Pavel was staying in room 719. Myron checked his watch. Six-thirty. Not much activity in the lobby. The floor was being mopped. An exhausted family was checking out. Three kids, all whining. The parents looked like they could use a vacation. Myron walked purposefully onto an elevator, like he belonged. He pressed the button for the seventh floor.

The corridor was empty. When Myron reached the door to Pavel’s room, he knocked. No answer. He knocked again. Still no answer. He tried once again. Nothing. He was about to go downstairs and try the house phone when a sound made him stop. He listened again. The sound was barely perceptible. He pressed his ear against the door.

“Hello?” he called out.

Crying. Faint. Growing stronger. The cries of a little girl.

Myron pounded the door this time. The crying picked up a little steam now, becoming more a sob. “Are you okay?” Myron asked. More crying, but still no words. A minute or so more of this and Myron began to look for the familiar sight of the maid cart and her passkey. But it was six-thirty in the morning. The maid wasn’t on her run yet.

Picking locks was not Myron’s forte. Win was a lot better at it. Plus he didn’t have the tools. Another cry from the room. “Open the door,” he shouted. The only answer was more cries.

To hell with it, he thought.

Leading with his shoulder, Myron pile-drove his body into the door. It stung him pretty good, but the lock gave way. The cries were still muffled, but for a moment Myron forgot about them. Sprawled across the bed was Pavel Menansi. His eyes were wide open but unseeing. His mouth was frozen in a surprised oval. Dried, dark blood was caked on his chest where the bullet had entered.

He was naked.

Myron stared for a few moments before the renewed cries snapped him out of it. He turned to his right. The sound emanated from behind the bathroom door. Myron moved toward it. There was a plastic Feron’s bag on the floor. The same kind they used at the U.S. Open. The same kind they found at Val’s murder.

The bag had a bullet hole in it.

In front of the bathroom door, jammed under the knob, was a chair. Myron kicked it out of the way and opened the door. A young girl was sitting on the tile, her knees pulled up to her chest. She was huddled in a corner against the toilet. Myron recognized her right away. It was Janet Koffman, Pavel’s newest protégée. Fourteen years old.

She too was naked.

Janet looked up at him. Her eyes were large and red and puffy. Her lower lip quivered. “We were just talking tennis,” she said in a dead voice. “He’s my coach. We were just talking about a match. That’s all.”

Myron nodded. Janet started to cry again. He bent down and wrapped a towel around her. He reached out, but she shrank away.

“It’s okay now,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “You’re going to be okay.”

37

Janet Koffman had stopped crying. She was sitting on the loveseat by the window. Her back was to the bed and hence Pavel’s corpse. From what Myron could get out of her she had been in the bathroom when someone locked her in with the chair and killed Pavel. She hadn’t seen a thing. She was still sticking to her other story too: she and her coach had been talking tennis. Myron chose not to probe into the small details—like why, for example, they would have this particular discussion in the nude.

He had called the police. They’d be here any minute now. The question was, what should he do with Janet? On the one hand, he wanted to protect her from all of this; on the other, he knew she had to deal with what she had been through, that she couldn’t just pretend nothing had happened to her. So what should Myron do—tamper with a police investigation or expose her to the brutish ways of the cops and worse, the press? What message of shame would hiding the truth send her? Then again, what would happen to this young girl if the story hit the airwaves?

Myron didn’t have a clue.

“He was a good coach,” Janet said softly.

“You did nothing wrong,” Myron said, again realizing how lame he sounded. “Whatever else happens, remember that. You did absolutely nothing wrong.”

She nodded slowly, but Myron wasn’t sure if she’d even heard him.

Ten minutes later the police arrived, led by Dimonte. Rolly looked like something the proverbial cat had dragged in. He was unshaven. His shirt was untucked and buttoned wrong. His hair was all over the place. He had sleep-buggers in both eyes. Still, the boots were nicely polished. He charged up to Myron. “Returning to the scene of the crime, asshole?”

“Yeah,” Myron said, “that’s it.”

The press rounded the corner. Flashbulbs started strobing. “Keep those assholes downstairs!” Dimonte hollered. Some uniformed cops pushed them back. “Downstairs, I said! No one on this floor.”

Dimonte turned back to Myron. Krinsky came in and stood next to him. His pad was out.

“Hey, Krinsky,” Myron said.

Krinsky nodded.

“So what the hell happened?” Dimonte demanded.

“I came up to see him. I found him like this.”

“Stop fucking with me, asshole.”

Myron didn’t bother with a retort. Cops were all over the place. The coroner was slitting a hole in Pavel’s torso with a surgical scalpel. The liver area, Myron knew. Trying to get a liver temperature reading to find out time of death.

Dimonte spotted the Feron’s bag on the floor. “You touch this?”

Myron shook his head.

Dimonte bent down and looked at the bullet hole. “Cute,” he said.

“You going to let Roger Quincy go now?”

“Why should I?”

“You didn’t have squat on him before. Now you have less than squat.”

Dimonte shrugged. “Could just be a copycat. Or”—he snapped his fingers—“or it could be someone who wants to get Quincy off.” A smile. “Someone like you, Bolitar.”

“Yeah,” Myron said, “that’s it.”

Dimonte stepped closer. He gave Myron the tough-guy glare again. Then, as though suddenly remembering it, he quickly whipped out his toothpick and put it in his mouth. He glared again and gnawed the toothpick.

“I was wrong before,” Myron said.

“What?”

“About the toothpick being cliché. It’s actually very intimidating.”

“Keep it up, funny man.”

“It’s too early for this, Rolly.”

“Listen, asshole, I want to know what you’re doing here.”

“I told you. I came to see Pavel.”

“Why?”

“To talk about him coaching a player of mine.”

“At six-thirty in the morning?”

“I’m an early riser. It’s why they call me Mr. Sunbeam.”

“They should call you Mister Lying Sack of Shit.”

“Oooo,” Myron said. “That hurt.”

Dimonte started gnawing on the toothpick with renewed vigor. You could almost hear something churn inside his head. “So tell me, Bolitar,” he said with the beginnings of a smile, “you came to the hotel to talk business. You took the elevator up to see our victim here. You knocked on the door. No one answered. Right so far?”

“Yep.”

“So then you kicked the door in, right?”

Myron said nothing.

Dimonte turned to Krinsky. “That make sense to you, Krinsky? Kicking in the door like that?”

Krinsky looked up from his pad, shook his head, looked back down.

“You always do that when no one answers a door, asshole? Kick it down?”

“I didn’t kick it. I used my shoulder.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Bolitar. You didn’t come here to talk business. And you didn’t kick down the door just because no one answered.”

The coroner tapped Dimonte on the shoulder. “Bullet to the heart. Clean shot. Death was instantaneous.”

“Time of death?” Rolly asked.

“He’s been dead six, maybe seven hours.”

Dimonte looked at his watch. “It’s seven now. That would mean he was killed between midnight and one.”

Myron turned to Krinsky. “And he didn’t even see you use his fingers.”

Krinsky almost smiled.

Dimonte tossed out another glare. “You got an alibi, Bolitar?”

“I was with a lady friend.”

“That Jessica Culver?”

“Correct.” Myron waited for Krinsky to look up. When he did, Myron said, “Her number is 555-8420.”

Krinsky wrote it down.

“All right, Bolitar, now stop busting my balls. Why did you kick down the door?”

Myron hesitated. He looked at Dimonte. Dimonte looked back and said, “Well?”

“Come with me,” Myron said in a quiet voice. He began to leave the room.

“Hey, where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

“For once, Rolly, don’t be an ass. Just shut up and follow me.”

To Myron’s surprise Dimonte kept quiet. They went down the corridor in silence. Krinsky stayed at the crime scene. Myron stopped in front of a door, took out a key, and opened it. Janet Koffman was sitting on the bed. She was wearing a hotel bathrobe. If she realized they were there, she didn’t show it. Janet rocked back and forth, humming to herself.

Dimonte looked a question at Myron.

“Her name is Janet Koffman.”

“The tennis player?”

Myron nodded. “The killer locked her in the bathroom before he shot Menansi. I heard her crying when I knocked on the door. That’s why I kicked it in.”

Dimonte looked at Myron. “You mean she and Menansi were …?”

Myron nodded.

“Christ, how old is she?”

“Fourteen, I think.”

Dimonte closed his eyes. “We have someone down at the precinct,” he said softly. “A doctor. She’s good with this stuff. I’ll talk to the Manhattan cop in charge about sneaking her out, see if he can keep the press away. I’ll try to keep the victim’s name out of the papers for a while.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve seen this kinda thing before, Bolitar. The girl is going to need help.”

“I know.”

“Any chance she offed him herself? Frankly I wouldn’t give a shit but …”

Myron shook his head. “She was locked in from the outside with a chair. It couldn’t have been her.”

Dimonte gave the toothpick a little chew. “Thoughtful killer,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t want the girl to see what happened. He made sure she had an alibi by locking her in with the chair. And most of all he saved her from going through any more of Menansi’s hell.” He looked at Myron. “I’d probably pin a medal on the guy if he hadn’t also killed Valerie Simpson.”

Myron said, “Me too.” It made him wonder.

38

The office was only about ten blocks away. Myron decided to walk it. Cars sat completely still on Sixth Avenue, though the lights were green and there was no visible construction. Everyone honked their horns. Like this ever does any good. A well-groomed man got out of a taxi. He wore a pin-striped suit, a gold Tag Heuer watch, and Gucci shoes. He also wore a green pinwheel hat and plastic Spock ears. New York—my kind of town.

Myron ignored the fumes and tried to think the whole thing through. The popular theory—the main theory, if you will—had gone something like this: Valerie Simpson had been abused by Pavel Menansi. Regaining her mental strength, she had decided to expose him. This exposure would have been detrimental to the financial well-being of TruPro and the Ache brothers. So they eliminated her before she could do any damage. It all added up. It all made sense.

Until this morning.

A major monkey wrench had been tossed into the main theory: Pavel Menansi had been murdered too, in a fashion similar to Valerie Simpson. Under the main theory, the murders of Valerie Simpson and Pavel Menansi were at cross-purposes. Why kill Valerie Simpson to protect Pavel Menansi, only to go ahead and kill Pavel Menansi? It didn’t mesh. It wasn’t profitable for TruPro or the Aches.

Of course, there was the possibility that Frank Ache had decided Menansi was too big a risk, that exposure was imminent and losses might as well be cut right now. But if Frank had wanted Pavel dead, he would have had Aaron do it. Pavel had been murdered between midnight and one. Aaron was dead by midnight. Myron mulled this over a bit and decided that Aaron’s being dead made it extremely unlikely he was the killer. And moreover, if Frank had intended to kill Pavel, there would have been no reason to scare Myron off with the attack on Jessica.

On the street in front of him a pale woman with a bullhorn screamed that she had recently met Jesus face-to-face. She stuffed a pamphlet into Myron’s hand.

“Jesus sent me back with this message,” she said.

Myron nodded, glanced down at the ink smears on the pamphlet. “Too bad he didn’t give you a decent printer.”

She gave him a funny look and went back to her bullhorn. Myron stuffed the pamphlet into his pocket and continued walking. His mind returned to the problem at hand.

Frank Ache wasn’t behind Pavel’s murder, he thought. To the contrary, Frank Ache wanted Pavel saved because Pavel meant mucho dinero to TruPro. Frank Ache had even brought Aaron in to protect Pavel. He had ordered Aaron to harm Jessica and to protect Pavel. Killing TruPro’s main tennis drawing card would make no sense.

So what did that leave us?

Two possibilities. One, we were dealing with two separate killers with two separate agendas. Seeing an opportunity, Pavel’s killer had left behind a Feron’s bag to put the blame on Valerie’s killer. Or two, there was some other linkage between Valerie and Pavel, one that was not readily apparent. Myron favored this possibility, and of course it led back to Myron’s earlier obsession:

The murder of Alexander Cross.

Both Valerie Simpson and Pavel Menansi had been at the Old Oaks tennis club that night six years ago. Both had been attending the party for Alexander Cross. But so what? Let’s suppose Jessica had been right this morning. Suppose Valerie Simpson had seen something that night, maybe even the identity of the real murderer. Suppose she’d been about to reveal the truth. Suppose that was why she’d been killed. How would that tie in to Pavel Menansi? Even if he had seen the same thing, he hadn’t opened his mouth in years. Why would Pavel start now? It’s not as though he’d come forward to help poor Valerie. So what is the connection? And what about Duane Richwood? How did he fit into this equation, if at all? And Deanna Yeller? And where was Errol Swade? Was he still alive?

He headed east three blocks and then turned down Park Avenue. The majestic (if not ostentatious) Helmsley Palace or Helmsley Castle or Helmsley Whatever sat straight ahead, seemingly in the middle of the street; the MetLife building huddled over it like a protective parent. For eons the MetLife building had been something of a New York landmark known as the Pan Am building. Myron couldn’t get used to the change. Every time he turned the corner he still expected to see the Pan Am logo.

Activity was brisk in the front of Myron’s building. He headed past the modern sculpture that adorned the entrance. The sculpture was hideous. It looked very much like a giant intestinal tract. Myron had looked for a name on the sculpture once, but in a typical New York move, someone had pried off the name plaque. What someone did with an ugly sculpture’s name plaque was beyond comprehension. Maybe they sold it. Maybe there was an underground market for name plaques from works of art—for those who couldn’t afford actual stolen artworks and thus settled for the plaques.

Interesting theory.

He entered the lobby. Three Lock-Horne hostesses sat on stools behind a tall counter, smiling plastically. They wore enough makeup to double as cosmetic counter girls at Bloomies. Of course, they didn’t wear the official white lab coat of genuine Bloomie counter girls, so you could tell they weren’t professional makeup people. Still, all three were attractive—model wannabes who found this more enjoyable (and put them in touch with more potential bigwigs) than waiting tables. Myron walked past them, smiled, nodded. None gave him the eye. Hmm. They must know how committed he was to Jessica. Yeah, that must be it.

When the elevator opened on his floor, he walked toward Esperanza. Her white blouse was a nice contrast against her dark, flawless skin. She’d have been great on one of those Bain de Soleil commercials. The Santa Fe tan without any sun.

“Hi,” he said.

Esperanza cupped the phone against her shoulder. “It’s Jake. You want to take it?”

He nodded. She handed him the phone.

“Hey, Jake.”

“Some girl did a partial autopsy on Curtis Yeller,” Jake said. “She’ll see you.”

Myron said, “Some girl?”

“Mea culpa for not being politically sensitive,” Jake said. “Sometimes I still refer to myself as black.”

“That’s because you’re too lazy to say African American,” Myron said.

“Is it African or Afro?”

“African now,” Myron said.

“When in doubt,” Jake said, “ask a honky.”

“Honky,” Myron repeated. “Now there’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.”

“Damn shame too. Anyway, the assistant M.E. is Amanda West. She seemed anxious to talk.” Jake gave him the address.

“What about the cop?” Myron asked. “Jimmy Blaine?”

“No dice.”

“He still with force?”

“Nope. He retired.”

“You have his address?”

“Yes,” Jake said.

Silence. Esperanza kept her eyes on her computer screen.

“Could you give it to me?” Myron asked.

“Nope.”

“I won’t hassle him, Jake.”

“I said no.”

“You know I can find the address on my own.”

“Fine, but I’m not giving it to you. Jimmy is one of the good guys, Myron.”

“So am I,” Myron said.

“Maybe. But sometimes the innocent get hurt in your little crusades.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just leave him alone.”

“And why so defensive?” Myron continued. “I just want to ask him a couple of questions.”

Silence. Esperanza didn’t look up.

Myron continued, “Unless he did something he shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t matter,” Jake said.

“Even if he—”

“Even if. Good-bye, Myron.”

The phone went dead. Myron stared at it a second. “That was bizarre.”

“Uh-huh.” Esperanza still stared at her computer screen. “Messages on your desk. Lots of them.”

“Have you seen Win?”

Esperanza shook her head.

“Pavel Menansi is dead,” Myron said. “Someone murdered him last night.”

“The guy who molested Valerie Simpson?”

“Yep.”

“Gee, I’m so brokenhearted. I hope I don’t lose too much sleep.” Esperanza finally flicked a glance away from the screen. “Did you know he was on that party list you gave me?”

“Yeah. You find any other interesting names?”

She almost smiled. “One.”

“Who?”

“Think puppy dog,” Esperanza said.

Myron shook his head.

“Think Nike,” she continued. “Think Duane’s contact with Nike.”

Myron froze. “Ned Tunwell?”

“Correct answer.” Everyone in Myron’s life was a game show host. “Listed as E. Tunwell on the list. His real name is Edward. So I did a little digging. Guess who first signed Valerie Simpson to a Nike deal.”

“Ned Tunwell.”

“And guess who had plenty of egg on his face when her career took a nosedive.”

“Ned Tunwell.”

“Wow,” she said dryly, “it’s like you’re clairvoyant.” She lowered her eyes back to her computer screen and started typing.

Myron waited. Then: “Anything else?”

“Just a very unsubstantiated rumor.”

“What?”

“The usual in a situation like this,” Esperanza said, her eyes still on the screen. “That Ned Tunwell and Valerie Simpson were more than friends.”

“Get Ned on the phone,” Myron said. “Tell him I need—”

“I already made the appointment,” she said. “He’ll be here at seven tonight.”

39

Dr. Amanda West now worked as chief pathologist at St. Joseph Medical Center in Doylestown, not too far from Philadelphia. Myron pulled into the hospital parking lot. On the radio was the classic Doobie Brothers song “China Grove.” Myron sang along with the chorus, which basically consisted of saying “Oh, Oh, China Grove” repeatedly. Myron sang it louder now, wondering—not for the first time—what a “China Grove” actually was.

As he took a parking ticket from the attendant the car phone rang.

“Jessica is hidden,” Win said.

“Thanks.”

“See you at the match tomorrow.”

Click. Abrupt, even for Win.

Inside Myron asked the receptionist where the morgue was. The receptionist looked at him like he was nuts and said, “The basement, of course.”

“Oh, right. Like on Quincy.”

He took the elevator down a level. No one was around. He found a door marked MORGUE, and again using his powers of deductive reasoning, quickly realized that this was probably the morgue. Myron the Medium. He braced himself and knocked.

A friendly female voice chimed, “Come in.”

The room was tiny and smelled like Janitor-in-a-Drum. The decor theme was metal. Two desks facing each other, both metal, took up half the room. Metal bookshelves. Metal chairs. Lots of stainless steel trays and bins all over the place. No blood in them. No organs. All shiny and clean. Myron had indeed seen plenty of violence, but the sight of blood still made him queasy once the danger passed. He didn’t like violence, no matter what he’d told Jessica before. He was good at it, no denying that, but he did not like it. Yes, violence was the closest modern man came to his true primitive self, the closest he came to the intended state of nature, to the Lockean ideal, if you will. And yes, violence was the ultimate test of man, a test of both physical strength and animalistic cunning. But it was still sickening. Man had—in theory anyway—evolved for a reason. In the final analysis, violence was indeed a rush. But so was skydiving without a parachute.

“Can I help you?” the friendly voiced woman asked.

“I’m looking for Dr. West,” he said.

“You found her.” She stood and extended her hand. “You must be Myron Bolitar.”

Amanda West smiled a bright, clear smile, which illuminated even this room. She was blond and perky with a cute little upturned nose—the complete opposite of what he’d expected. Not to be stereotyping, but she seemed a tad too sunny, too upbeat, for someone handling rotting corpses all day. He tried to picture her cheerful face splitting open a dead body with a Y-incision. The picture wouldn’t hold.

“You wanted to know about Curtis Yeller?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Been waiting six years for someone to ask,” she said. “Come on in. There’s more room in the back.”

She opened a door behind her. “You squeamish?”

“Uh, no.” Mr. Tough-guy.

Amanda West smiled again. “There’s nothing to see really. Just that some people get freaked out by all the drawers.”

He entered the room. The drawers. There was a wall of huge drawers. Floor to ceiling. Five drawers up. Eight across. That equals forty drawers. Mr. Multiplication Tables. Forty dead bodies could fit in here. Forty dead rotting corpses that used to have lives and families, that used to love and be loved, that once cared and struggled and dreamed. Freaked out? By a bunch of drawers? Surely you jest.

“Jake said you remembered Curtis Yeller,” he said.

“Sure. It was my biggest case.”

“Pardon me if I sound out of line,” Myron said, “but you look awfully young to have been an M.E. six years ago.”

“You’re not out of line,” she said, still smiling sweetly. Myron smiled back with equal sweetness. “I had just finished my residency and worked there two nights a week. The chief M.E. was with the corpse of Alexander Cross. Both bodies came in nearly the same time. So I did the prelim on Curtis Yeller. I didn’t get the chance to do anything resembling a full autopsy—not that I needed one to know how he was killed.”

“How was he killed?”

“Bullet wound. He was shot twice. Once in the lower left rib cage”—she leaned to the side and pointed at her own—“and once in the face.”

“Did you know which was one fatal?”

“The shot to the ribs didn’t do much damage,” she said. Amanda West was, Myron decided, cute. She tilted her head a lot when she talked. Jess did that too. “But the bullet in Yeller’s head ripped off his face like it was Silly Putty. There was no nose. Both cheekbones were barely splinters. It was a mess. The shot was at very close range. I didn’t get a chance to run all the tests, but I’d say the gun was either pressed against his face or no more than a foot away.”

Myron almost took a step back. “Are you saying a cop shot him in the face at point-blank range?”

Water dripped into a stainless steel sink, echoing in the room. “I’m just giving you the facts,” Amanda West said steadily. “You draw your own conclusions.”

“Who else knows about this?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. It was a zoo in there that night. I usually worked alone, but there must have been half a dozen other guys with me on this one. None of them worked for the coroner’s office.”

“Who were they?”

“Cops and government guys,” she replied.

“Government guys?”

She nodded. “That’s what I was told. They worked for Senator Cross. Secret service or something like that. They confiscated everything—tissue samples, the slugs I extracted, everything. They told me it was a matter of national security. The whole night was crazy. Yeller’s mother even managed to get in the room once. She started screaming at me.”

“What was she screaming about?”

“She was very insistent that there should be no autopsy. She wanted her son back immediately. She got her wish too. For once the police acquiesced. They weren’t interested in having anyone look too closely at this, so it worked out for all concerned.” She smiled again. “Funny thing, don’t you think?”

“The mother not wanting an autopsy?”

“Yes.”

Myron shrugged. “I’ve heard of parents not wanting autopsies before.”

“Right, because they want the body preserved for a decent burial. But this kid wasn’t buried. He was cremated.” She offered up another smile, this one more saccharine.

“I see,” Myron said. “So any evidence of police wrongdoing would have been burned up with Curtis Yeller.”

“Right,” she said.

“So you think—what—someone got to her?”

Amanda West put her hands up in surrender. “Hey, I said it was a funny thing. Not ha-ha funny, just strange funny. The rest is up to you. I’m just an M.E.”

Myron nodded again. “You find anything else?”

“Yes,” she said. “And this too I found funny. Very funny.”

“Ha-ha funny or strange funny?”

“You decide,” she said. She smoothed her lab coat. “I’m no ballistics expert, but I know a little something about bullet slugs. I pulled two slugs from Yeller. One from the rib cage, one from the head.”

“Yeah so?”

“The two slugs were of different calibers.” Amanda West put up her index finger. All traces of a smile were gone now. Her face was clear and determined. “Understand what I’m telling you, Mr. Bolitar. I’m not just saying two different guns here. I’m talking about different caliber. And here’s the funny part: all the officers on the Philadelphia force use the same caliber weapon.”

Myron felt a chill. “So one of the two bullets came from someone other than a cop.”

“And,” she continued, “all those secret service men were carrying guns.”

Silence.

“So,” she said, “ha-ha funny or strange funny?”

Myron looked at her. “You don’t hear me laughing.”

40

Myron decided to ignore Jake’s advice. Especially after listening to Amanda West.

Finding Officer Jimmy Blaine’s current address had not been easy. The man had retired two years ago. Still Esperanza found out he lived alone on some small lake in the Poconos. Myron drove through the wilderness for two hours until he pulled into what he hoped was the right driveway. He checked his watch. He still had plenty of time to see Jimmy Blaine and get back to the office in time for his meeting with Ned Tunwell.

The house was rustic and quaint, about what you’d expect to find nestled away in the Poconos. Gravel driveway. Dozens of small wooden animals guarded a front porch. The air was heavy and still. Everything—the weather vane, the American flag, the rocking chair, all the leaves and blades of grass—stood frighteningly motionless, as if inanimate objects had the ability to hold their breaths. As Myron climbed up the porch stairs, he noticed a modern-looking wheelchair ramp that also led to the front door. The ramp looked out of place here, like a doughnut in a health food store. There was no doorbell, so he knocked.

No one answered. Curious. Myron had called ten minutes ago, had heard a man answer, and hung up. Could be out back. Myron circled around the house. As he hit the backyard, the lake stared him in the face. It was a spectacular picture. The sun shone off the still—again, frighteningly motionless—water and made Myron squint. Placid. Tranquil. Myron felt the muscles in his shoulders start to unbunch.

Sitting in a wheelchair facing the lake was a man. A Saint Bernard lay by his feet. The dog too was frighteningly motionless. As Myron approached he saw that the man was whittling wood.

“Hi,” Myron called out.

The man barely raised his eyes. He wore a red T-shirt and a John Deere cap pulled down over a weathered face. His legs were covered with a blanket, even in this heat. There was a portable phone within reach. “Hi.” He went back to whittling. If he was surprised or upset to have company he was certainly taking it all in stride.

“Beautiful day,” Myron said. Mr. Engaging Neighbor.

“Yep.”

“Are you Jimmy Blaine?”

“Yep.”

Even without the wheelchair it was hard to picture this guy working the city bowels of Philadelphia for eighteen years. Then again, it was hard to picture the bowels of Philadelphia, period, when you were out here.

Silence. No birds or crickets or anything but the whittling.

After some time had passed, Myron asked, “Had much rain this year?” Myron Bolitar, Salt of the Earth. Mr. Farmer’s Almanac.

“Some.”

“This your dog?”

“Yep. Name is Fred.”

“Hi, Fred.” Myron scratched the dog behind the ears. The dog wagged its tail without moving any other part of its body. Then it farted loudly.

“Great place you have here,” Myron tried. Yep, just two good ol’ boys shooting the breeze. Eb and Mr. Haney on Green Acres. Myron half expected denim overalls to materialize on his body.

“Uh-huh.” Whittle, whittle.

“Listen, Mr. Blaine, my name is—”

“Myron Bolitar,” Blaine finished for him. “I know who you are. Been expecting you.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised. “Jake called you?”

Blaine nodded without looking up from his whittling. “He said you were stubborn. Said you wouldn’t listen to him.”

“I just want to ask you a few questions.”

“Nothing I care to say to you though.”

“I’m not here to hound you, Mr. Blaine.”

He nodded again. “Jake told me that too. Said you were okay. Said you liked to right wrongs, is all.”

“What else did he say?”

“That you don’t know how to mind your own business. That you’re a wiseass. And that you’re a major pain in the butt.”

“He left out snazzy dancer,” Myron said.

For the first time since he arrived Jimmy Blaine stopped whittling. “You trying to right the wrong done to Curtis Yeller?”

“I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

“Simple,” Blaine said. “Me.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

That stopped him for a brief moment. He gave Myron the once-over and then began whittling again.

“Could you tell me what happened that night?” Myron asked.

“The boy pulled a gun. I shot him. That’s it.”

“How far away were you when you shot him?”

He shrugged, whittled. “Thirty feet. Maybe forty.”

“How many shots did you fire?”

“Two.”

“And he just dropped?”

“Nope. He swung around the corner with the other one—that Swade kid, I guess. They disappeared.”

“You shot a man in the face and ribs and he kept running?”

“I didn’t say they kept running. The two of them were by a corner. They disappeared around it. Didn’t know it at the time, but the Yellers lived right there. They must have climbed in a window.”

“With a bullet in his skull?”

Jimmy Blaine shrugged again. “The Swade kid probably helped him,” he said.

“That’s not how it happened,” Myron said. “You didn’t kill him.”

Blaine eyed him and then went back to his whittling. “Second time you’ve said that,” he noted. “You want to explain what you mean?”

“Two bullets hit Yeller.”

“I just told you I shot twice.”

“But two different caliber slugs were pulled out of him. One of the shots—the one in the head—was from close range. Less than a foot away.”

Jimmy Blaine said nothing. He concentrated hard on his whittling. It looked like he was sculpting an animal of some sort, like the ones on the front porch. “Two different calibers, you say?” He aimed for nonchalance, but he wasn’t making it.

“Yes.”

“That kid I shot didn’t have a record,” Blaine continued. “You know what the odds are of that? In that part of the city?”

Myron nodded.

“I checked up on him,” Blaine continued. “On my own. His name was Curtis Yeller. He was sixteen years old. He did well in school. He was a good kid. He had a chance at a good life until that night.”

“You didn’t kill him,” Myron said.

Blaine whittled with a bit more intensity now. He blinked a lot. “How did you find out about those slugs?”

“The assistant M.E. told me,” Myron said. “You never knew?”

He shook his head. “I guess it makes sense though,” he said. “Blame me for it. Why not? It’s easier. It’s a legit shooting. No one questioned it. IAD barely broke a sweat. It didn’t hurt my record. Didn’t hurt anyone. No harm done, they figured.”

Myron waited for him to say more, but he just kept whittling. Two long ears were now evident in the wood. Maybe he was making a rabbit. “Do you know who really killed Curtis Yeller?” Myron asked.

There was a long moment of the same whittle-filled silence. Fred farted again and wagged his tail. Myron’s eyes kept going back to the lake. He stared out at the silver water. The effect was hypnotizing.

“No harm done,” Jimmy Blaine said again. “That’s what they all probably thought. Good ol’ Jimmy. We won’t let him take the rap. It’ll be washed clean from his record. No one will know. Hell, some of the guys will even treat him special—making a shooting like that. They’ll say he saved his partner’s life. Good ol’ Jimmy will come out of this looking like a hero. Except for one thing.”

Myron was tempted to ask what, but he sensed the answer was coming.

“I saw that boy dead,” Blaine continued. “I saw Curtis Yeller lying in his own blood. I saw his mother hold him in her arms and cry. Sixteen years old. If he was a street punk or a drug addict or …” He stopped. “But he wasn’t any of those things. Not this kid. He was one of the good ones. I found out later he never even touched the senator’s kid. The other one—the Swade punk—he did the stabbing.”

Two ducks splashed madly for a second, then stopped. Blaine put down the whittling, then thinking better of it, picked it back up again. “I replayed that night a lot of times in my head. It was dark, you know. There was barely any light. Maybe the Yeller kid wasn’t going to fire the gun. Maybe what I saw wasn’t even a gun. Or maybe none of that mattered. Maybe it was a legit shooting, but the pieces still never quite added up. I kept hearing the mother’s screams. I kept seeing her press her dead boy’s bloody face into her bosom. And I think about it, you know, and thinking ain’t always a good thing for a cop to do. And four years later, the next time a kid is pointing a gun at me, I think about seeing another crying mother. I think long and hard. Too long.”

He pointed to his legs. “And this is the result.” He changed tools and kept whittling. “Nope, no harm done.”

Silence.

Myron now understood Jake’s attitude on the phone. Jimmy Blaine had gone through enough. If he’d done wrong in the case of Curtis Yeller, he had already paid an enormous price. Problem was, Jimmy Blaine hadn’t done wrong. He hadn’t killed Curtis Yeller—legit shooting or not. In the end Jimmy Blaine was yet another victim of that night.

After some time had passed, Myron tried again. “Do you know who killed Curtis Yeller?”

“No, not really.”

“But you have a thought.”

“A thought maybe.”

“You mind telling me?”

Blaine looked down at Fred, as if looking for an answer. The dog maintained his bear-rug pose. “Henry and I—he was my partner—got the call at a little past midnight,” he began. “The two suspects had stolen a car from a driveway three blocks from the Old Oaks tennis club. A dark blue Cadillac Seville. We spotted a vehicle matching the description coming off the Roosevelt Expressway twenty minutes later. When we pulled up behind the stolen vehicle, the suspects sped off. We then engaged in a high-speed pursuit.”

His voice had changed. He was a cop again, reading from a notepad he had read too many times in the past. “Henry and I followed the vehicle down an alley not far from Hunting Park Avenue, off Broad. The chase then proceeded on foot. At the time we had no identification on the two youths and thus no address. We only had the car. The chase proceeded for several blocks. As we turned a corner, the driver drew a firearm. My partner told him to freeze and drop his weapon. Yeller responded by aiming the firearm at Henry. I then fired two shots. The youth fell or stumbled out of sight beyond the next corner. By the time Henry and I turned the same corner, there was no sign of either youth. We figured that they were hiding in the nearby vicinity and awaited backup before proceeding. We secured the area as best we could. But the cops didn’t get there first. The so-called secret service guys did.”

“Senator Cross’s men?”

Blaine nodded. “They called themselves ‘national security,’ but they were probably mob guys.”

“Senator Cross told me he had no mob connections,” Myron said.

Jimmy Blaine raised an eyebrow. “You serious?”

“Yes.”

“The mob owns Bradley Cross,” Blaine said. “More specifically, the Perretti family. Cross is a major gambler. I know he’s also been arrested twice with prostitutes. One of his early opponents—this is back when he was just a congressman—ended up in the river during the primaries.”

“And you traced it back to Cross?”

“Nothing anyone could prove. But we knew.”

Myron considered this for a moment. Clearly, the beloved senator had lied to him. Big surprise. He had played Myron for a sucker. Another big surprise. Win was right. Myron always went astray when he believed the best about people. “So what happened next?”

“The senator’s hoods were at the scene almost immediately. Been monitoring our radio. We’d been told over the air to cooperate with them one hundred percent. A real community effort finding these two kids. I’m surprised we spotted them first. Mob goons are usually better at this stuff than we are, you know?”

Myron knew. The mob had all the advantages over the police. They were closer to the city’s underbelly. They could pay top dollar. They didn’t have to worry about rules or laws or constitutional rights. They could inspire genuine fear.

“So what happened?” Myron asked.

“We started combing the area with flashlights, checking garbage Dumpsters, the whole bit. Cops and goons hand in hand. We found nothing for a while. Then we heard some gunshots. Henry and I ran to some dumpy apartment adjacent to where I’d shot Yeller. But Senator Cross’s men were already there.”

Blaine stopped. He leaned and gave Fred a good ear scratch. Fred still didn’t move except for the thumping tail. Still scratching his dog, Blaine said, “Well, you know what we found.” His voice was low and dead. “Yeller was dead. His mother was cradling him in her arms. She went through all these stages. First she just kept calling out his name over and over. Sweetly sometimes. Like she was trying to wake him up for school. Then she stroked the back of his head and rocked him and told him to go back to sleep. We all stood around and watched. Even the goons didn’t bother her.”

“What about the other gunshots?” Myron asked.

“What about them?”

“Didn’t you wonder where they had come from?”

“I guess I did,” he replied. “But I figured the security guys had shot after Swade. I didn’t think they’d be dumb enough to admit it, but that’s what I thought.”

“It never crossed your mind they might have shot Yeller?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I told you the mother went through stages.”

“Right.”

“Once she realized her boy wasn’t waking up again, she started pointing fingers and screaming. She wanted to know who had shot her boy. She wanted to look the killer in the eyes, the murderer who had shot her son on the street in cold blood. She said that Swade had dragged her boy in like that. Already shot up and dead.”

“She said all that? That Swade dragged him in and that he was already shot?”

“Yes.”

Silence. No water rippling. No birds chirping. Not even whittling. Several minutes passed before Blaine looked up and squinted. Then he said, “Cold.”

“What?” Myron asked.

“That mother. If she was lying about who killed her boy. I always wondered why there were no repercussions. The mother never made a fuss. She didn’t go to the newspapers. She didn’t press charges. She didn’t demand an explanation.” He shook his head. “But what could have made her do that to her own flesh and blood? How could they have gotten to her so fast? With money? With threats? What?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

Jimmy Blaine finished whittling. It was a rabbit. Pretty good one too. A bird finally chirped, but it wasn’t a pretty sound. More like a caw than a melody. Blaine spun his wheelchair around. “You want something to eat?” he asked. “I’m about to make lunch.”

Myron looked at his watch. It was getting late. He had to get back to the office for his meeting with Ned Tunwell. “Thanks, but I really have to get going.”

“Some other time then. When you’re all done with this.”

“Yes,” Myron said.

Blaine blew the wood dust off the rabbit. “Still don’t get it,” he said.

“What?”

He stared at his finished handiwork, turning the rabbit over in his hand, studying it from every angle. “Could the mother have really been that frosty?” he asked. “How much money did they offer her? How much fright did they put into her? Hell, is there enough money or frights in the world for a mother to do that to her son?” He shook his head, dropped the wooden rabbit into his lap. “I just don’t get it.”

Myron didn’t get it either.

41

Myron got back into his Ford Taurus and headed east. He drove several miles without seeing a car. Mostly he saw trees. Lots of trees. Yes, the great outdoors. Myron was not an outdoors kind of guy. He didn’t hunt or fish or do any of that. The appeal seemed clear, but it just wasn’t for him. Something about being alone in the woods always reminded him of Ned Beatty in Deliverance. He needed people. He needed movement. He needed noise. City noise—as opposed to squeal-like-a-pig noise.

He now knew a lot more about the deaths of both Alexander Cross and Curtis Yeller than he’d known twenty-four hours ago, but he still didn’t know if any of it was relevant to what happened to Valerie Simpson. And that was what he was after. Digging into a sensational six-year-old murder might be fun, but it was beside the point. He wanted Valerie Simpson’s murderer. He wanted to find the person who had decided to snuff out that young, tortured life. Call it righting a wrong. Call it having a rescue or hero complex. Call it chivalry. Didn’t matter. It was far simpler to Myron: Valerie deserved better.

The roads were still abandoned. The foliage on both sides of the road blurred into green walls. He started putting together what he knew. Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller had been spotted by Jimmy Blaine and his partner. A chase had ensued. Leaving aside the question of whether it was a legitimate shooting or not, Jimmy Blaine fired at Curtis Yeller. One of Blaine’s bullets probably hit Curtis Yeller in the ribs, but the key fact is that somebody else shot Yeller in the head at close range. Somebody who was using a different caliber gun. Somebody who was not a cop.

So who shot Curtis Yeller?

The answer now seemed fairly obvious. Senator Cross’s men—thugs or security forces or whatever they were—had been carrying firearms. Both Amanda West and Jimmy Blaine had confirmed that. They certainly had the opportunity. They certainly had the motive. It didn’t matter if Cross had lied to Myron or not. Either way it would be in the senator’s best interest for Curtis Yeller and Errol Swade to end up dead. Live suspects could talk. Live suspects could tell tales of drug use. Live suspects could counter the claim that Alexander Cross had died a hero. Dead men tell no tales. More important, dead men do not dispute spin doctors.

As for Errol Swade—the mysterious “escapee”—he’d almost assuredly been killed, probably in that gunfire Jimmy Blaine heard. The senator’s men could have hid the body and dumped it later. Not definite, but again most likely. Errol Swade had a lot working against him. He was no genius. He was six-four. Myron knew from personal experience it was difficult to hide when you were that big. The odds of Swade eluding the police dragnet for so long—not to mention the mob’s underworld army—were, as they say, statistically insignificant.

The sun was beginning to lower. The beams were now positioned in that one spot high enough to be in Myron’s eyes but still low enough to avoid the sun visor. Myron squinted and slowed. His mind shifted gears again, this time to the aftermath of the Yeller shooting. Somehow Curtis Yeller ended up in his mother’s arms, and somehow somebody got to her. Through either money or fear of reprisal—probably a combination of both—Deanna Yeller had been convinced to let the death of her son slide.

There were problems with this scenario, of course. For example, the money. Deanna Yeller’s son had been murdered six years ago—yet the first big deposit in her account had occurred five months ago. Why the time lapse? She could have been biding her time, hiding the money under a mattress or something. But that didn’t feel right. On the other hand, if the money was indeed new, the questions became more focused: why, all of a sudden, was Deanna getting this money? Why, all of a sudden, had Valerie been murdered? And how did Pavel fit in?

Good questions. No answers yet, but good questions. Maybe Ned Tunwell would know something useful.

Something caught Myron’s eye. He glanced up. A car grew suddenly large in the rearview mirror. A big car. Black with a tinted windshield so you couldn’t see inside. The license plate was New York.

The black car moved to its right, disappearing from the rearview mirror and appearing in the passenger-side mirror. Myron watched its progress. The imprint in the mirror reminded him that objects may be closer than they appear. Thanks for the clue. The black car picked up a little speed. As it came alongside of him, Myron could see it was a stretch limousine. A Lincoln Continental stretch. Extra-long stretch. The side windows too were tinted so you couldn’t look in. It was like staring into a pair of giant aviator sunglasses. Myron could see himself in the reflection. He smiled and waved. His reflection smiled and waved back. Handsome devil.

The limo was dead-even with Myron’s car now. The back window on the driver’s side began to slide open. Myron half expected an elderly man to stick his head out and ask for Grey Poupon. Imagine his surprise when, instead, a gun appeared.

Without warning the gun fired twice, hitting the front and back tires on the passenger side of Myron’s car. Myron swerved. He fought to regain control. The car veered off the road. Myron twisted the wheel and skidded away from a tree. The Ford Taurus came to a stop with a thud.

Two men jumped out of the limousine and headed toward him. Both wore blue suits. One also wore a Yankees cap. Business suit, baseball cap—an interesting fashion combo. They also carried guns. Their faces were stern and ready. Myron felt his heart in his throat. He was unarmed. He didn’t like carrying guns, not for some moral reason but because they were bulky and uncomfortable and he so rarely ever used one. Win had warned him, but who listens to Win on a subject like this? But Myron had been careless. He was pissing off some powerful people and he should have been better prepared. He should have at least kept one in the glove compartment.

A little late for self-admonishments. Then again he might never have the chance again.

The two men approached. Not knowing what else to do, Myron ducked out of sight. He started dialing the car phone.

“Get your ass out of the car,” one of the men barked.

Myron said, “Take another step and I’ll drop you where you stand.” Mr. Bluff.

Silence.

Myron dialed furiously and hit the send button. At that exact moment, he heard a sound like a twig breaking and then static. The goon with the Yankees cap had snapped off his antenna. This wasn’t good. Myron kept himself low. He opened the glove compartment and reached inside. Nothing but maps and registration. His eyes searched the floor anxiously for some sort of weapon. The only thing he saw was the car cigarette lighter. Somehow he doubted that it would be effective against two armed goons. Maps, registration card, cigarette lighter. Unless Myron suddenly became MacGyver, he was in serious trouble.

He could hear footsteps shuffling about now. Myron’s mind raced for an answer. Nothing came to him. Then he heard the car door of the limo open again. A quiet curse followed. Sounded like “Shit.” Then a deep sigh.

“Bolitar, I ain’t here to play no fucking games.”

The voice sent a chill through Myron. Something hardened in his chest. New York accent. More specifically, a Bensonhurst accent. Frank Ache.

This was not good.

“Get the fuck out of the car now, ass-wipe. I ain’t here to kill you.”

“Your men just shot out my tires,” Myron called back.

“Right, and if I wanted you dead, they would have shot out your fucking head.”

Myron mulled that one over. “Good point,” he said.

“Yeah, how about this one? I got two AK’s sitting in the back here. If I wanted you dead, I could have Billy and Tony spray-paint this piece of shit you call a car with them.”

“Another good point,” Myron said.

“Now get the fuck out here,” Frank barked. “I don’t got all goddamn day. Ass-wipe.”

Myron didn’t really have a choice. He opened the car and stood. Frank Ache ducked back into the backseat. Billy and Tony scowled at him.

“Get in here,” Frank called out.

Myron walked to the car. Billy and Tony blocked his path. “Give me your gun,” the one with the Yankees cap said.

“Are you Billy or Tony?”

“The gun. Now.”

Myron squinted at the baseball cap. “Wait a second, I get it. Plugs, right?”

“What?”

“Wearing a baseball cap with a suit. You’re covering up new hair plugs.”

The two men exchanged a glance. Bingo, Myron thought.

“Now, ass-wipe,” the cap man said. “The gun.”

Ass-wipe. The goon word of the week. “You didn’t say please.”

Frank’s voice came from inside the car. “Jesus Christ, Billy, he don’t have no piece. He was just yanking your hardware.”

Billy’s scowl grew angrier. Myron smiled, turned his palms to the sky, shrugged.

Tony opened the door. Myron slid into the backseat. Tony and Billy moved into the front. Frank pressed a button and a partition slid up, separating the back compartment from the front seats. The limo had a wet bar and television with VCR. The inside was sort of a royal red, blood-red actually, which, knowing Frank’s history, probably helped cut down on the cost of cleanings.

“Nice wheels, Frank,” Myron said.

Frank wore his customary garb—a velour sweat suit a couple of sizes too small. This one was green with yellow trim. The front zipper was down midway, like those guys in the seventies wore at discos. His gut was enormous enough to be mistaken for a multiple gestation. He was bald. He stared at Myron for several seconds before he spoke.

“You enjoy crawling up my ass crack, Bolitar?”

Myron blinked. “Gee, Frank, there’s an appetizing thought.”

“You’re a crazy fuck, you know that? Why you always trying to piss me off? Huh?”

“Hey, I’m not the one who sent goons to rape his girlfriend,” Myron said.

Frank pointed his finger at Myron’s chest. “And what—you didn’t have that coming? You didn’t ask for that?”

Myron remained still. Stupid to raise Jessica with this man. Impossible as it seemed, you couldn’t let it get personal. You had to separate, to stop thinking of Frank as the man who tried to do grievous harm to the love of your life. To think such thoughts would be at best counterproductive. At worst, suicide.

“I warned you,” Frank continued. “I even sent Aaron so you’d know I was serious. You know what Aaron costs per day?”

“Not much anymore,” Myron said.

“Ho, ho, I’m dying of laughter,” Frank countered, but he wasn’t laughing. “I tried to be reasonable with you. I let you have that Crane kid. And how do you thank me? By fucking around with my business.”

“I’m trying to find a killer,” Myron said.

“And I’m supposed to give a rat’s ass? You want to go play fucking Batman, fine, do it without costing me any money. Once you cost me money, you cross the line. Pavel meant money to me.”

“Pavel also slept with underage girls,” Myron said.

Frank held up his hands. “Hey, what a guy does in the privacy of his own bedroom, that don’t concern me.”

“You’re so progressive, Frank. You voting Democratic now?”

“Look, ass-wipe, you want to hear I knew about Pavel? Fine, I knew. I knew Pavel fucked kiddies. So what? I work with guys who make Pavel Menansi look like Mother Teresa. I can’t go picking and choosing in my line of work. So I ask myself one simple question: Is the guy making me money? If the answer is yes, then that’s it. That’s my rule. Pavel was making me money. End of story.”

Myron said nothing. He was waiting for Ache to get to the point, which he sincerely hoped was not a bullet in the skull.

Frank took out a packet of chewing gum. Dentyne. He popped one in his mouth. “But I ain’t here to get in no philosophy talk with you. Fact is, Pavel is dead. He’s not making me money anymore, so my rule don’t apply no more. You see?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a simple businessman,” Frank went on. “Pavel can’t make me money no more. That means you and me don’t have a beef no more. So you get to live. Wasting you would no longer be profitable to me. You understand?”

Myron nodded. “Are we having a tender moment, Frank?”

Frank leaned forward. His eyes were small and black. “No, ass-wipe, we’re not. Next time I ain’t gonna fuck around. Hiding your girlfriend won’t help you. I’ll find her. Or I’ll waste someone else instead. Your mommy, your daddy, your friends—hell, even your fucking barber.”

“His name is Pierre. And he prefers the term ‘beauty technician.’ ”

Frank looked him square in the eye. “You fucking joking with me?”

“You just threatened my parents,” Myron said. “What’s the proper way to respond?”

Frank nodded slowly and sat back. “It’s over. For now.” He pressed a button and the partition slid down.

Billy said, “Yes, Mr. Ache?”

“Call a towing service for Bolitar’s car.”

“Yes, Mr. Ache.”

Frank turned back to Myron. “Get the fuck out of my car.”

“No hug first?”

“Out.”

“Can I ask you one quick question?”

“What?”

“Did you have Valerie killed to protect Pavel?”

Frank grinned with bad, ferretlike teeth. “Get out,” he said. “Or I’ll use your nuts for snack foods.”

“Right, thanks. Nice chatting with you, Frank, stay in touch.” He opened the door and got out.

Frank slid across the seat and leaned his head through the open door. “You tell Win we talked, okay?”

“Why?”

“None of your business why. You just tell Win. Got it?”

“Got it,” Myron said.

Frank closed the door. The limo drove away.

42

Triple A got there pretty quickly. Myron reached his office at six-thirty. Ned wasn’t there yet. Esperanza handed him his messages. He went into his office and returned calls.

Esperanza buzzed. “The bitch. Line three.”

“Stop calling her that.” He picked up the phone. “You’re back at the loft?”

“Yes,” Jessica said. “That didn’t take long.”

“I work fast,” he said.

“And yet I never complain,” she said.

“Ouch.”

“So what happened?” she asked.

“Someone murdered Pavel Menansi. There’s nothing for Ache to protect anymore.”

“It’s that simple?”

“It’s business. Business with these guys is very simple.”

“No profit, no kill.”

“The cardinal rule,” Myron said.

“Will you come over tonight?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“But one rule of our own,” she said.

“Oh?”

“No talking about Valerie Simpson or murder or any of this. We forget it all.”

“What will we do instead?” Myron asked.

“Screw each other’s brains out.”

Myron said, “I guess I can live with that.”

Esperanza leaned her head in and said, “He’s heeeeeere.”

He nodded at Esperanza and said to Jessica, “I’ll call you later.”

Myron put the phone back in the cradle. He stood and waited. An evening alone with Jessica. Sounded perfect. It also sounded scary. Things were moving too fast. He had no control. Jess was back and things appeared to be better than ever. Myron wondered about that. Mostly he wondered if he could survive another crash like last time, if he could go through the pain again. He also wondered what he could do to protect himself, realized the answer was nothing, and wished he was better at putting up defenses.

Ned Tunwell practically leaped into his office, hand extended—like an enthusiastic late-show guest coming through a curtain. Myron half expected him to wave to the crowd. He pumped Myron’s hand. “Hey, Myron!”

“Hi, Ned. Have a seat.”

Ned’s smile dropped at Myron’s tone. “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with Duane, is there?”

“No.”

Still standing but his voice was panicky. “He’s not hurt?”

“No, Duane is fine.”

“Great.” The smile was back. Tough to keep a good man down. “That match yesterday—he was fantastic. Fantastic, Myron. I tell you, the way he came back—it’s all anyone’s talking about. The exposure was awesome. Simply awesome. We couldn’t have scripted it better. I practically wet myself.”

“Uh-huh. Sit down, Ned.”

“Sure.” Ned sat. Myron hoped he wouldn’t leave a stain on the seat. “Just a few hours away, Myron. The big day. The Saturday Semis. Big live crowd, huge TV audience. You think Duane’s got a shot against Craig? Papers don’t seem to think so.”

Thomas Craig, the second seed and the game’s premier serve-and-volley player, was currently playing his career-best tennis. “Yes,” Myron said. “I think Duane’s got a shot.”

Ned’s eyes were bright. “Wow. If he could somehow pull it off …” He stopped and just shook his head and grinned.

“Ned?”

He looked up. Wide-eyed. “Yes?”

“How well did you know Valerie Simpson?”

Ned hesitated. The eyes dulled a bit. “Me?”

Myron nodded.

“A little, I guess.”

“Just a little?”

“Yeah.” He flashed a nervous smile, struggled to hold it. “Why, what’s up?”

“I heard differently.”

“Oh?”

“I heard you were the one who got Nike to sign her. That you handled her account.”

He squirmed a bit. “Yeah, well, I guess so.”

“So you must have known her pretty well then.”

“Maybe, I guess. Why are you asking me this, Myron? What’s the big deal?”

“Do you trust me, Ned?”

“With my life, Myron. You know that. But this subject is painful for me. You understand?”

“You mean her dying and all?”

Ned made a lemon-sucking face. “No,” he said. “I mean her career plummet. She was the first person I signed for Nike. I thought she’d launch me to the top. Instead she set me back five years. It was painful.”

Another Mr. Sensitive.

“When she flopped,” Ned continued, “guess who took the fall? Go ahead, guess.”

Myron thought the question was rhetorical, but Ned waited with that expectant face of his. Myron finally said, “Would that be you, Ned?”

“Damn straight, me. I was thrown to the bottom. Just dumped there. I had to start climbing up all over again. Because of Valerie and her collapse. Don’t get me wrong, Myron. I’m doing okay now—knock wood.” He rapped his knuckles on the desk.

Myron knocked wood too. The sarcasm was lost on Ned. “Did you know Alexander Cross?” Myron asked.

Both Ned’s eyebrows jumped. “Hey, what’s the deal here?”

“Trust me, Ned.”

“I do, Myron, really, but come on.…”

“It’s a simple question: Did you know Alexander Cross?”

“I may have met him once, I don’t remember. Through Valerie, of course. They were something of an item.”

“How about you and Valerie?”

“What about me and Valerie?”

“Were you two an item?”

He put his hand out in a gesture of stop. “Hey, hold up. Look, Myron, I like you, I really do. You’re an honest Joe. A straight shooter just like me—”

“No, Ned, you’re not a straight shooter. You’re jerking me around. You knew Alexander Cross. In fact you were at the Old Oaks tennis club the night he was murdered.”

Ned opened his mouth but no sounds came out. He managed to shake his head no.

“Here.” Myron stood and handed him the party guest list. “In yellow highlighter. E. Tunwell. Edward né Ned.”

Ned looked down at the paper, looked up, looked down again. “This was a long time ago,” he said. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Why are you lying about it?”

“I’m not lying.”

“You’re hiding something, Ned.”

“No, I’m not.”

Myron stared down at him. Ned’s eyes scattered, searching for safe haven and finding none. “Look, Myron, it’s not what you think.”

“I don’t think anything.” Then: “Did you sleep with her?”

“No!” Ned finally looked up and held a steady gaze. “That damn rumor almost ended my career. It’s a lie that slimeball Menansi made up about me. It’s a lie, Myron, I swear.”

“Pavel Menansi told people that?”

Ned nodded. “He is a sick son of a bitch.”

“Was.”

“What?”

“Pavel Menansi is dead. Someone killed him last night. Shot in the chest. Very similar to what happened to Valerie.” Myron waited two beats. Then he pointed his finger at Ned. “Where were you last night?”

Ned’s eyes were two golf balls. “You can’t think …”

Myron shrugged. “If you’ve got nothing to hide …”

“I don’t!”

“Then tell me what happened.”

“Nothing happened.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Ned?”

“It was nothing, Myron. I swear—”

Myron sighed. “You admit Valerie Simpson severely damaged your career. You admit you’re still ‘pained’ by what she did. You’ve also told me that Pavel Menansi spread rumors about you. In fact you referred to a recent murder victim as—and I quote—‘a sick son of a bitch.’ ”

“Hey, come on, Myron, that was just talk.” Ned tried to smile his way out of it, but Myron kept his face stern. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But I wonder how your superiors at Nike are going to react to the publicity.”

The smile stayed in place, but there was nothing behind it. “Hey, you can’t be serious. You can’t go around spreading rumors like that.”

“Why?” Myron asked. “You going to kill me too?”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Ned shouted.

Myron feigned fear. “I don’t know …”

“Look, Valerie took me outside that night, okay, that’s all. We kissed, but it went no further, I swear.”

“Whoa, back up a second,” Myron said. “Start at the beginning. You were at the party.”

Ned slid to the tip of his chair, his words came fast now. “Right, I was at the party, okay? So was Valerie. We arrived together. She was very excited because Alexander was going to announce their engagement. But when he backed out, she got really pissed off.”

“Why did he back out?”

“His father. He made Alexander call it off.”

“Senator Cross?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why?” Myron asked.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? Valerie told me the man was a major prick. She hated him. But when Alexander bowed to his whim like that, she blew her stack. She wanted revenge. A little payback.”

“And you were handy?”

Ned snapped his fingers. “Right, exactly, I was handy. That’s all. It wasn’t my fault, Myron. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time. You understand, right?”

“So you two went outside,” Myron prompted.

“We went outside and found a spot behind a shed. We only kissed, I swear. Nothing more. Just kissed. Then we heard some noise, so we stopped.”

Myron sat back down. “What noise?”

“First it was just someone hitting tennis balls. But then we heard raised voices. One of them was Alexander’s. Then we heard this awful scream.”

“What did you do?” Myron asked.

“Me? Nothing at first. Valerie screamed too. Then she broke into a run. I followed her. I lost her for a second. Then I came around a bend and saw her up ahead just standing there. When I got to her I saw what she was staring at. Alexander was bleeding all over the grass. His friends were starting to run away. The big black guy was standing over the body. He had a tennis racket in one hand, a big knife in the other.”

Myron leaned forward. “You saw the murderer?”

Ned nodded. “Up close and personal.”

“And he was a big black guy?”

“Yep.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Two. Both black.”

So much for the setup theory. Unless Ned was lying, which Myron doubted. “So what happened next?”

Ned paused for a second. “You ever see Valerie in her prime? On the court, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“You ever see that look in her eyes?”

“What look?”

“Certain athletes get it. Larry Bird used to. Joe Montana. Michael Jordan. Maybe you used to too. Well, Val had it, and she had it now. The smaller black guy started screaming at the big one, saying stuff like, ‘Look what you did,’ ‘Are you crazy,’ stuff like that. Then they started to run. They ran right toward us. Me, I ran. I’m no fool. But not Val. She just stood there and waited. When they got close she let out this big scream and dove at the little guy. I couldn’t believe it. She tackled him like a linebacker. They both ended up on the ground. The little guy whacked her with his tennis racket and managed to pull away.”

“Did you get a good look at them?”

“Pretty good, I guess.”

“Did you ever see pictures of Errol Swade?”

“Yeah, sure, his picture was on the news every day for a while.”

“Was it the same guy you saw?”

“Definitely,” he said without hesitation. “No question about it.”

Myron mulled this over. They’d been there that night. At the Old Oaks Club. Myron had been wrong. Lucinda Elright had been wrong. Swade and Yeller were not just casual fall guys. “So what did you two do then?” Myron asked.

“Hey, her career was in enough trouble. We didn’t need this kind of press. So I brought her back to the party. Didn’t say anything to anyone about it. Val was out of it anyway—in a real funk, but that wasn’t any surprise. I mean, think about it. She takes me outside to cheat on her boyfriend at the exact moment he’s getting murdered. Weird, huh?”

Myron nodded. “Very.”

And, Myron thought, the kind of thing that would push a troubled soul over the final ledge.

43

Myron and Jessica kept their promise. They did not talk about the murders. They snuggled and watched Strangers on a Train on AMC while eating Thai takeout. They made love. They snuggled and watched Rear Window while downing some Häagen-Dazs. They made love again.

Myron felt light-headed. For one night he actually forgot all about the world of Valerie Simpson and Alexander Cross and Curtis Yeller and Errol Swade and Frank Ache. It felt good. Too good. He started thinking about the suburbs and the hoop in the driveway and then he made himself stop thinking such thoughts.

Several hours later the morning sunlight drop-kicked him back into the real world. The escape had been paradise and for a fleeting moment, as he lay in bed with Jessica, he considered wrapping his arms around her and not going anywhere. Why move? What was out there that could come close to this?

He had no answer. Jessica hugged him a little tighter, as though reading his thoughts, but it didn’t last long. They both dressed in silence and drove to Flushing Meadows. Today was the big match. The last Tuesday of the U.S. Open. The women’s finals sandwiched by the men’s semifinals. First match of the day featured the number-two seed, Thomas Craig, vs. the tournament’s biggest surprise, Duane Richwood.

After they passed through the gate Myron gave Jessica a ticket stub. “I’ll meet you inside. I want to talk to Duane.”

“Now?” she said. “Before the biggest match of his career?”

“Just for a second.”

She shrugged, gave him a skeptical eye, took the ticket.

He hurried over to the players’ lounge, showed his ID to the guard at the gate, and entered. The room was fairly unspectacular, considering that it was the players’ lounge for a Grand Slam event. It reeked of baby powder. Duane sat alone in a corner. He had his Walkman on and his head tilted back. Myron couldn’t tell if his eyes were opened or closed because, as always, Duane had on his sunglasses.

When he approached, Duane’s finger switched off the music. He tilted his face up toward Myron. Myron could see himself in the reflection of the sunglasses. It reminded him of the windows in Frank’s limo.

Duane’s face was a rigid mask. He slowly slid the headphones off his ears and let them hang around his neck like a horseshoe. “She’s gone,” Duane said slowly. “Wanda left me.”

“When?” Myron asked. The question was stupid and irrelevant, but he wasn’t sure what else to say.

“This morning. What did you tell her?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard she came to you,” Duane said.

Myron said nothing.

“Did you tell her about seeing me at the hotel?”

“No.”

Duane changed tapes in the Walkman. “Get out of here,” he said.

“She cares about you, Duane.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

“She just wants to know what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

The sunglasses were disconcerting. He looked straight up at Myron; it appeared as though they were making eye contact, but who knew? “This match is important,” Myron said, “but not like Wanda.”

“You think I don’t know that?” he snapped.

“Then tell her the truth.”

Duane’s chiseled face smiled slowly. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Make me understand.”

He fiddled with the Walkman, popping the tape out, pushing it back in. “You think telling the truth will make it better, but you don’t know what the truth is. You talking like ‘The truth will set you free’ when you don’t even know the truth. The truth don’t always set you free, Myron. Sometimes the truth can kill.”

“Hiding the truth isn’t working,” Myron said.

“It would if you’d let it lie.”

“Someone was murdered. That’s not something you can just let lie.”

Duane put the Walkman’s headphones back on his ears. “Maybe it should be,” he said.

Silence.

The two men stared dares. Myron could hear the faint din coming from the Walkman. Then he said to Duane, “You were there the night Alexander Cross was murdered. You were at the club with Yeller and Swade.”

The stares continued. Behind them, Thomas Craig lined up by the door. He carried several tennis rackets and what looked like an overnight bag. Security was there too with walkie-talkies and earplugs. They nodded toward Duane. “Show time, Mr. Richwood.”

Duane stood. “Excuse me,” he said to Myron. “I have a match to play.”

He walked behind Thomas Craig. Thomas Craig smiled politely. Duane did likewise. Very civil, tennis. Myron watched them leave. He sat there for a few minutes in the abandoned locker room. In the distance he heard the cheers as both men entered the court.

Show time.

Myron found his way to his seat. It was during the match—in the fourth set actually—when he finally figured out who murdered Valerie Simpson.

44

Stadium Court was packed by the time Myron sat down. Duane and Thomas Craig were still warming up, each taking turns lofting easy lobs for the other to slam away. The fans floated and mingled and socialized and made sure they were seen. The usual celebs were there: Johnny Carson, Alan King, David Dinkins, Renee Richards, Barbra Streisand, Ivana Trump.

Jake and his son Gerard came down to the box.

“I see you got the tickets okay,” Myron said.

Jake nodded. “Great seats.”

“Nothing’s too good for my friends.”

“No,” Jake said, “I meant yours.”

Ever the wiseass.

Jake and Gerard chatted a moment with Jessica before moving up to their seats, which were by any stretch of the imagination excellently situated. Myron scanned the crowd. A lot of familiar faces. Senator Bradley Cross was there with his entourage, including his son’s old chum Gregory Caufield. Frank Ache had shown up wearing the same sweat suit Myron had seen him in yesterday. Frank nodded toward Myron. Myron did not nod back. Kenneth and Helen Van Slyke were there too—surprise, surprise. They were sitting a few boxes over. Myron tried to catch Helen’s eye, but she was trying very hard to pretend she didn’t see him. Ned Tunwell and Friends (not to be confused with Barney and Friends, though the confusion would be understandable) were in their usual box. Ned too was doing his utmost not to see Myron. He seemed less animated today.

“I’ll be right back,” Jessica said.

Myron sat. Henry Hobman was already in game mode. Myron said, “Hi, Henry.”

“Stop messing with his head,” Henry said. “Your job is to keep him happy.”

Myron didn’t bother responding.

Win finally showed up. He wore a pink shirt from some golf club, bright green pants, white bucks, and a yellow sweater tied around his neck. “Hello,” Win said.

Myron shook his head. “Who dresses you?”

“It’s the latest in sophisticated wear.”

“You clash with the world.”

“Pardon moi, Monsieur Saint Laurent.” Win sat down. “Did you talk to Duane?”

“Just a little pep talk.”

Jessica returned. She greeted Win with a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered to him.

Win said nothing.

They stood for the national anthem. When it was over, the English-accented voice on the loudspeaker asked everyone to lower their heads for a moment of silence to remember the great Pavel Menansi. Heads lowered. The crowd hushed. Someone sniffled. Win rolled his eyes. Two minutes later the match began.

The play was incredible. Both men were power hitters, but no one expected anything like this. The pace was like something from another planet. A far faster planet. The IBM serve speedometer drew constant “Ooo”s from the crowd. Rallies didn’t last very long. Mistakes were made, but so were incredible shots. This was serve and volley in the old tradition taken to the tenth power. Duane was unconscious. He whacked at the ball with uncommon fury, as though the ball had personally offended him. Myron had never seen either man play better.

Win leaned over and whispered, “Must have been some pep talk.”

“Wanda left him.”

“Ah,” Win said with a nod. “That explains it. The shackles are off.”

“I don’t think that’s it, Win.”

“If you say so.”

Myron didn’t bother. It was like talking colors with a blind man.

Duane won the first set 6–2. The second set went into a tiebreaker, which Thomas Craig won. As the third set opened, Win said, “What have you learned?”

Myron filled him in, trying to keep his voice down. At one point, Ivana Trump shushed him. Win waved a hand in her direction. “She digs me. Big-time.”

“Get real,” Myron said.

During a change of sides in the third set, Win said, “So first we believed that Valerie was eliminated because she knew something harmful about Pavel Menansi. Now we believe that she was eliminated because she saw something the night Alexander Cross was killed.”

“A possibility,” Myron said.

During the next change of sides, Myron felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked down—way down—and was surprised. “Dr. Abramson,” he said.

“Hello, Myron.”

“Nice to see you, Doc.”

“Nice to see you too,” she said. “Your client is playing very well. You must be pleased.”

“I’m sorry,” Myron said. “I can neither confirm nor deny that Duane Richwood is a client of mine.”

She didn’t smile. “Was that supposed to be funny?”

“Guess not,” Myron said “I didn’t know you were a tennis fan.”

“I come every year.” She spotted Win. “Hello, Mr. Lockwood.”

Win nodded. “Dr. Abramson.”

“This is my friend Jessica Culver,” Myron said.

The two women shook hands and exchanged polite smiles. “A pleasure,” Dr. Abramson said. “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I just wanted to say a quick hello.”

“Can we talk a little later?” Myron asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Good-bye.”

“Did you know that Kenneth and Helen Van Slyke are here?”

“Yes. And I also know they just stepped out for a moment.”

Myron looked toward their seats. Empty. He smiled. “You crafty shrink. Coming over to say hello when they weren’t looking.”

“And to say good-bye,” she said, returning the smile. She turned away and left. The match started up again. During the next change of sides, the Van Slykes returned. Myron leaned over to Win. “How do you know Dr. Abramson?”

“I visited Valerie,” he said.

“Often?”

Win didn’t answer. He might have shrugged, might not. Either way it told Myron to mind his own business. Myron looked at Jessica. She shrugged too.

On the court Duane was growing more erratic, but he was still hitting enough winners to maintain the edge. He won the third set 7–5. He was up two sets to one—one set away from the U.S. Open finals. The Nike box was animated. Hands were slapping Ned’s back. Even Ned seemed to be perking up now. Hard to keep a good man down.

Senator Cross watched in silence. No one talked to him, and he talked to no one. Not even during breaks. He had met Myron’s eyes only once. He stared for a long time, but did not move. Helen and Kenneth Van Slyke spoke to the people around them, but they both looked uncomfortable. Frank Ache adjusted his crotch and jabbered with Roy O’Connor, the president of TruPro. Frank looked comfortable. Roy looked like he wanted to puke. Ivana Trump glanced about her surroundings. Every time she looked near Win, he blew her kisses.

It was during a serve in the third set when Myron finally began to see it. It started small, a statement made by Jimmy Blaine that did not compute. Something about the foot chase in Philadelphia. The rest sort of tumbled into place. When the final piece clicked, he sat up.

Win and Jessica traded glances. Myron stared off.

“What is it?” Jessica asked.

Myron turned to Win. “I need to talk to Gregory Caufield.”

“When?”

“Right away, next break. Can you get him alone?”

Win nodded. “Done.”

45

In the tournament’s first few rounds it was not uncommon for fifteen or more matches to be going on at the same time. The biggest names usually stayed on Stadium Court or the Grandstand, while other matches took place in smaller venues, some with no seating. Today those courts were so barren, Myron half expected a tumbleweed to blow through. He waited by court sixteen, a semimajor court. It had the most seating next to the Stadium and Grandstand, though less than most high school gyms.

He sat on an aluminum bench in the front row. The sun had gained strength and was now at its most potent. Every once in a while he heard cheers erupt from the Stadium’s crowd a hundred yards or so away. Sometimes tennis fans sounded like they were having an orgasm during particularly brilliant points. It sort of built up slowly with a low oh-oh-oh, and then increased Oh-Oh, and finally the big OH-OH-OH, followed by a loud sigh and clapping.

Weird thought.

Distracting thought too.

He heard Gregory Caufield well before he saw him. That same creepy, money accent that Win possessed said, “Windsor, where on earth are we going?”

“Just over here, Gregory.”

“Are you sure this couldn’t wait, old boy?”

Old boy. Neither one of them was thirty-five yet and he was using term old boy.

“No, Gregory, it can’t.”

They rounded the corner. Gregory’s eyes widened a bit when he saw Myron, but he recovered fast. He smiled and stuck out his hand. “Hello, Myron.”

“Hi, Greg.”

His face flinched for a second. He was Gregory, not Greg.

“What’s this all about, Windsor? I thought you had something private to tell me.”

Win shrugged. “I lied,” he said. “Myron needs to speak with you. He needs your cooperation.”

Gregory turned to Myron and waited.

“I want to talk to you about the night Alexander Cross was murdered.”

“I know nothing about it,” Gregory said.

“You know plenty about it, but I just have one question for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Gregory said. “I must be getting back now.” He turned to leave. Win blocked his path. Gregory looked puzzled.

“Just one question,” Myron said.

Gregory ignored him. “Please move out of my way, Windsor.”

Win said, “No.”

Gregory could not believe what he was hearing. He half-smiled and put a hand through his unruly hair. “Are you prepared to use force to keep me here?”

“Yes.”

“Please, Windsor, this is no longer amusing.”

“Myron needs your cooperation.”

“And I am not prepared to give it to him. Now I insist you move.”

Win did not move. “Are you telling me you will not cooperate, Gregory?”

“That is precisely what I am telling you.”

Win’s palm shot out and hit the solar plexus. The wind gushed from Gregory. He collapsed to one knee, his face pale and shocked. Myron shook his head at Win, but he understood what he was doing. To people like Gregory—actually, to most people—violence is abstract. They read about it. They see it in movies and in the newspapers. But it never really touches them. It simply doesn’t exist in their world. Win had shown Gregory how quickly that can change. Gregory had now experienced physical pain from the hands of a fellow human being. He would be different now. Not just here, not just today.

Gregory held his chest. He was on the verge of tears.

“Do not make me strike you again,” Win said.

Myron stepped toward him but did not help him up. “Gregory, we know all about that night,” he said. “I have just one question. I don’t care what you were doing out there. I don’t care if you were snorting or shooting illegal substances. That doesn’t interest me in the least. What you say will in no way incriminate you—unless you lie to me.”

Gregory looked up at him. His face was completely void of any color.

“They weren’t robbing the club, were they?” Myron asked.

Gregory did not answer.

“Errol Swade and Curtis Yeller hadn’t broken into the club to rob it,” Myron said. “And they weren’t there selling drugs either. Am I right? If I am, just nod.”

Gregory looked at Win, then back to Myron. He nodded.

“Tell me what they were doing,” Myron said.

Gregory didn’t say anything.

“Just say it,” Myron continued. “I already know the answer. I just need you to say it. What were they doing there that night?”

Gregory’s breathing was returning to normal now. He reached out his hand. Myron took it. He stood up and looked Myron straight in the eye.

“What were they doing?” Myron asked. “Tell me.”

And then Gregory Caufield said exactly what Myron had expected. “They were playing tennis.”

46

Myron ran to his car.

Duane was ahead two sets to one, 4–2 in the fourth set. He was two games away from reaching the U.S. Open finals, but that no longer seemed like such a big deal. Myron now knew what happened. He knew what happened to Alexander Cross and Curtis Yeller and Errol Swade and Valerie Simpson and maybe even Pavel Menansi.

He picked up the car phone and began placing calls. His second call was to Esperanza’s house. She picked up.

“I’m with Lucy,” she said. Esperanza had been dating a woman named Lucy for a couple months now. They seemed serious. Of course, Myron thought Esperanza was serious with a guy named Max just a few months earlier. Dating a Max, then a Lucy. Never a dull moment.

“Do you have the appointment book?” Myron asked.

“I got a copy on my computer here.”

“The last day Valerie Simpson was in our office, who had the appointment right before her?”

“Give me a second.” He heard her clack some keys. “Duane.”

As he thought. “Thanks.”

“You’re not at the match?”

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“In my car.”

“Is Win with you?” she asked.

“No.”

“How about the witch?”

“I’m alone.”

“Swing by and pick me up then. Lucy’s leaving anyway.”

“No.”

He hung up and switched on the radio. Duane was up 5–2. One game away. He dialed the home number of Amanda West, M.E. Then he called Jimmy Blaine. It all checked out. Myron felt something very cold caress his spine.

His hand actually trembled when he called Lucinda Elright. The old teacher answered on the first ring.

“Can you see me today?” Myron asked.

“Yes, of course.”

“I should be there in a couple of hours.”

“I’ll be here,” Lucinda said. She asked no questions, wanted no explanations. She simply said, “Good-bye.”

Duane won the final set 6–2. He was in the finals of the U.S. Open, but the postgame wrap-up was short for several reasons. First, the women’s finals came up right on the heels of Duane’s impressive win. Second, the colorful Duane Richwood had run out without doing any interviews. The radio broadcasters seemed surprised.

Myron was not.

He reached Lucinda Elright’s apartment in less than two hours. He stayed less than five minutes, but the visit was the final confirmation Myron needed. There was no longer any doubt. He took the book and got back in his car. Half an hour later he parked in the driveway. Myron rang the doorbell. No smile this time when the door opened. No surprise this time either.

“I know what happened to Errol Swade,” Myron said. “He’s dead.”

Deanna Yeller blinked. “I told you that the first time you came by.”

“But,” Myron said, “you didn’t tell me you killed him.”

47

Myron didn’t wait for an invitation. He pushed past her. Again he was struck by the impersonal feel of this house. Not one picture. Not one remembrance. But now he understood why. The TV was tuned on the tennis match. No surprise there. The women were midway through the first set.

Deanna Yeller followed him.

“It must torture you,” he said.

“What?”

“Watching Duane on TV. Instead of in person.”

“It was just a fling,” she said in a monotone. “It didn’t mean anything.”

“Duane was just a one-nighter?”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t think so,” Myron said. “Duane Richwood is your son.”

“What are you talking about? I only had one son.”

“That’s true.”

“And he’s dead. They killed him, remember?”

“That’s not true. Errol Swade was killed. Not Curtis.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. But there wasn’t much conviction in her voice. She sounded tired, like she was going through the motions—or maybe she just realized that Myron was beyond buying the lies.

“I know now.” Myron showed her the book in his hand. “Do you know what this is?”

She looked at the book, her face blank.

“It’s the yearbook from Curtis’s high school. I just got it from Lucinda Elright.”

Deanna Yeller looked so frail, a stiff breeze would send her crashing into the wall. Myron opened the yearbook. “Duane has had a nose job since then. Maybe some other surgery too, I can’t be sure. His hair is different. He’s gotten a lot more muscular, but then again, he’s not a skinny sixteen-year-old anymore. Plus he always wears sunglasses in public. Always. Who would recognize him? Who would even imagine Duane Richwood was a murder suspect killed six years ago?”

Deanna stumbled over to a table. She sat down. She pointed weakly to the chair across from her. Myron took it.

“Curtis was a great athlete,” Myron continued, fingering through the pages. “He was only a sophomore, but he was already starting varsity football and basketball. The high school he went to didn’t have a tennis team, but Lucinda told me that didn’t stop him. He played as often as he could. He loved the game.”

Deanna Yeller remained still.

“You see, from the beginning I never bought the robbery angle,” Myron said. “You were quick to call your son a thief, Deanna, but the facts didn’t back it up. He was a good kid. He had no record. And he was smart. There was nothing to steal out there. Then I thought maybe it was a drug deal gone bad. That made the most sense. Alexander Cross was a user. Errol Swade was a seller. But that didn’t explain why your son was there. I even thought for a while that Curtis and Errol had never gone to the club, that they were just scapegoats. But a fairly reliable witness swears he saw them both. He also said he heard tennis balls being hit at night. He also saw Curtis and Errol each carrying one tennis racket. Why? If you’re robbing the place, you carry as many rackets as you can. If you’re doing a drug deal, you don’t carry any rackets. The answer was obvious in the end: they were there to play tennis. They jumped the fence not to rob the place, but because Curtis wanted to play tennis.”

Deanna lifted her head up. She was hollow-eyed. Her movements were sparse and slow. “It was a grass court,” she said. “He’d watched Wimbledon on TV that week. He just wanted to play on a grass court, that’s all.”

“Unfortunately Alexander Cross and his buddies were outside getting high,” Myron went on. “They heard Curtis and Errol. What happened next is not exactly clear, but I think we can probably take Senator Cross’s word on this one. Alexander, high as a kite, created a conflict. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of a couple of black kids playing on his court. Or maybe he really thought they were there to rob the club. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Errol Swade took out a knife and killed him. It might have been self-defense, but I doubt it.”

“He just reacted,” Deanna said. “Stupid kid saw a bunch of white boys, so he stabbed. Errol didn’t know any different.”

Myron nodded. “They ran away then, but Curtis got tackled in the bushes by Valerie Simpson. They struggled. Valerie got a good look at Curtis. A very good look. When you are fighting with someone you believed killed your fiancé, you don’t forget the face. Curtis managed to break away. He and Errol jumped the fence and ran down the block. They found a car in a driveway. Errol had been arrested several times already for stealing cars. Breaking in and hot-wiring one was no problem for him. That’s what first gave it to me. I talked to the officer who supposedly shot your son. His name is Jimmy Blaine. Jimmy said he shot the driver of the car, not the passenger. But Curtis wouldn’t have been driving. That wouldn’t make any sense. The driver was the experienced thief, not the good kid. So then it dawned on me: Jimmy Blaine didn’t shoot Curtis Yeller. He shot Errol Swade.”

Deanna Yeller sat still as a stone.

“The bullet hit Errol in the ribs. With Curtis’s help they managed to round the corner and crawl in through the fire escape. They made their way to your apartment. By now sirens were sounding all over the place. They were closing in on all of you. Errol and Curtis were probably in a state of panic. It was pandemonium. They told you what happened. You knew what this meant—a rich white boy stabbed at a fancy rich white club. Your son was doomed. Even if Curtis had only been standing there—even if Errol told the police that it was all his fault—Curtis was finished.”

“I knew more than that,” Deanna interjected. “It’d been almost an hour since the murder. The radio already said who the victim was. Not just a rich white boy, but the son of a United States senator.”

“And,” Myron continued, “you knew Errol had a long record. You knew it was his fault. You knew he was going away for good this time. Errol’s life was over, and he had no one to blame but himself. But Curtis was innocent. Curtis was a good boy. He’d done everything right, and now because of the stupidity of his cousin, his life was about to be flushed away.”

Deanna looked up. “But that was all true,” she insisted, sparking up just a bit. “Can’t deny any of that, can you? Can you?”

“No,” Myron said. “I guess I can’t. What you did next probably didn’t take much thought. You’d heard the police fire two bullets. You saw only one in Errol. Most important, Curtis didn’t have a record. His mug shot wasn’t on file. His description wasn’t on file.” He stopped. Her eyes were clear and on him. “Whose gun was it, Deanna?”

“Errol’s.”

“He had it with him?”

She nodded.

“So you took the gun. You pressed it against Errol’s cheek. And you fired.”

She nodded again.

“You blew his face right off,” Myron continued. “I wondered about that too. Why would someone shoot him up close in the face? Why not in the back of the head or the heart? The answer is, you didn’t want anyone to see his face. You wanted him to be an unrecognizable lump. Then you put on your big act. You cradled him in your arms and cried while the police and the senator’s hoods came crashing in. It was so simple really. I asked the medical examiner how they identified Curtis’s body. She scoffed at such a ridiculous question. The usual way, she told me. The next of kin. You, Deanna. The mother. What else did they need? Why question that? The cops were thrilled you didn’t want to make a big deal over it, so they didn’t look too closely. And just to cement your plan, you were smart enough to have the body cremated immediately. Even if someone wanted to go back and check, the evidence was ashes.

“As for Curtis, his escape was easy. A nationwide manhunt began for Errol Swade, a six-foot four-inch man who looked nothing like your son. No one was looking for Curtis Yeller. He was dead.”

“It wasn’t quite that easy,” Deanna said. “Curtis and I were careful. Powerful men were in this. The police scared me, sure, but not as much as those men who worked for the senator. And then the papers all made that Cross boy out to be a hero. Curtis knew the truth. If the senator ever got a hold of my boy …” She shrugged away the obvious.

Myron nodded. He’d thought the same thing too. Dead men tell no tales. “So Curtis spent the next five years underground?” he asked.

“I guess you could call it that,” Deanna said. “He roamed around, scraped by on whatever he could. I sent him money when I had some, but I told him to never come back to Philadelphia. We’d arrange times to talk on public phones and stuff. He grew up on his own. He lived on the streets, but he was well-spoken enough to get some decent jobs. He worked for three years at a tennis club near Boston. He played all the time, even hustled a few games. I saved up enough for him to get a little plastic surgery done. Just some little touches, you know, in case he ran into someone he knew. Like you said, he got a lot bigger. He grew an inch and put on thirty pounds. He also wore those sunglasses, though I always thought that was going a little too far. No one’s gonna recognize him, I thought. Not anymore. It’d been too long. Worst thing happen, someone might think he resembles a dead boy they used to know. I mean, five years passed. We thought he was safe.”

“That’s why you started getting money recently,” Myron said. “It wasn’t a pay-off. The money came from Duane’s turning pro. He bought you this house.”

She nodded.

“And when I saw you two at the hotel that night, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that you were lovers. But it was actually a son visiting his mother. The embrace I saw when he left your room—it wasn’t the embrace of lovers, but a mother hugging her son good-bye. In fact Duane hadn’t slept around at all. That was an act on his part. Wanda was right all along. He loved her. He never cheated on her. Not with you. And not with Valerie Simpson.”

She nodded again. “He loves that girl. He and Wanda are good together.”

“Everything was going just fine until Valerie spotted Duane in my office,” Myron continued. “His sunglasses were off. She saw him up close, and like I said before, you don’t forget the face of the man you think killed your fiancé. She recognized him. She stole his card from my Rolodex and called. What happened next, Deanna? Did she threaten to expose him?”

“There’s some stuff we left out,” Deanna said. “I just want to be clear, okay?”

Myron nodded.

“Curtis didn’t know I was going to kill Errol that night,” she said. “I just told him to hide in the basement. There was a closed-off tunnel down there. I knew he’d be safe for a while. I told Errol to stay with me, I’d fix his ribs. When Curtis was out of the room, I shot Errol.”

“Did Curtis ever learn the truth?”

“He figured it out later. But he didn’t know then. He had nothing to do with it.”

“So what about Valerie? Was she going to talk?”

“Yes.”

Their eyes met.

“So you killed her,” Myron said.

For a few moments Deanna said nothing. She stared down at her hands, as though looking for something. “She wouldn’t listen to reason,” she said softly. “Duane told me that Valerie called him. He tried to convince her she had the wrong man, but she wouldn’t hear it. So I met up with her at the hotel. I tried to persuade her too. I told her he’d done nothing wrong, but she just kept talking this nonsense about not hiding things anymore—how she’d buried too many things and it had to all come out.” Deanna Yeller closed her eyes and shook her head. “The girl left me no choice. I watched her hotel. I saw her rush out. I saw her rush to the matches, and I knew she was scared and I knew she was going to say something and I knew I couldn’t wait anymore, that I had to stop her now or …” She sat still. Then she moved her hands off the table and folded them on her lap. “I had no choice.”

Myron remained quiet.

“I did the only thing I could,” she said. “It was her life or my son’s life.”

“So for the second time you chose your son.”

“Yes. And if you turn me in, it’ll all be for nothing. The truth will come out, and they’ll kill my boy. You know they will.”

“I’ll protect him,” Myron said.

“No, that’s my job.”

Tires squealed in the driveway. Myron rose and looked out the window. It was Duane. He threw the car in park and leaped out.

“Keep him out,” Deanna said, suddenly out of her chair. “Please.”

“What?”

She ran to the door and threw the dead bolt. “I don’t want him to see.”

“See what?”

But now Myron did see. She turned toward him. She had a gun in her hand. “I’ve already killed twice to save him. What’s a third?”

Myron looked for a safe place to dive, but for the second time in this case he’d been careless. He was out in the open. It would be impossible to miss. “Killing me won’t make it go away,” he said.

“I know,” she replied.

There was a pounding at the door. Duane shouted, “Open up! Don’t say anything to him!” More pounding.

Deanna’s eyes welled with tears. “Don’t tell anyone, Myron. No need to say anything anymore. The guilty will have all been punished.”

She placed the barrel of the gun against her head.

“Don’t,” Myron whispered.

From outside the door, Duane shouted, “Mama! Open up, Mama!”

She turned toward the voice. Myron tried to reach her in time, but he had no chance. She pulled the trigger and made one final sacrifice for her son.

48

Time passed. Myron had to persuade Duane to leave his mother alone. It was what she would have wanted, Myron reminded him. When they were both far enough away, Myron placed an anonymous call to the Cherry Hill police. “I think I heard a gunshot,” he said. He gave the address and hung up.

They met up at a stop along the New Jersey Turnpike. Duane was no longer crying.

“Are you going to tell?” Duane asked.

“No,” Myron said.

“Not even Valerie’s mother?”

“I don’t owe her anything.”

Silence. Then Duane started tearing again.

“Did the truth set you free, Myron?”

He ignored the question. “Tell Wanda,” Myron said. “If you really love her, tell her everything. It’s the only chance you have.”

“You can’t be my agent anymore,” Duane said.

“I know,” Myron said.

“There was no other way for her. She had to protect me.”

“There was another way.”

“What? If it was your kid, what would you have done?”

Myron didn’t have the answer. He only knew that killing Valerie Simpson was not it. “Are you going to play tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he said. He climbed back in his car. “And I’m going to win.”

Myron did not doubt it.

It was late when he got back to New York. He parked the car at the Kinney lot and headed past the ugly intestinal sculpture and into the building. The security guard greeted him. It was Saturday night. Practically no one was there. But even on street level Myron had seen the light on.

He took the elevator to the fourteenth floor. The customary hubbub of activity at Lock-Horne Securities was absent. The floor was dark. Most of the computers had been turned off and covered with plastic, though a few were left on, the bizarre screen savers dancing streaks of lights across the desk. Myron walked toward the light in the corner office. Win was sitting at his desk, reading a book in Korean. He looked up when Myron entered.

“So tell me,” Win said.

Myron did. The whole story.

“Ironic,” Win said when he’d finished.

“What?”

“We kept wondering how a mother could care so little for her son when in reality the problem was just the opposite. She cared too much.”

Myron nodded.

Silence.

Then Win said, “You know?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Dr. Abramson,” Myron said. “Your visiting Valerie enough for her to know your name. It got me thinking.”

Win nodded. “I was going to tell you.”

“You didn’t have to kill him,” Myron said.

“You’re a child sometimes,” Win said. “I did what had to be done.”

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

“Frank Ache would have killed us,” Win said. “The only reason he chose to back off was because Pavel Menansi was dead—ergo the profit was gone. By eliminating Pavel, I took away his motive. Our options were clear: we could have taken on the mob and eventually gotten killed, or we could exterminate a vermin. In the end, sacrificing scum saved our lives.”

“What else did you do to Ache?” Myron asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Frank didn’t show up in the woods just to call off a hit. Something had scared him. He told me to mention our meeting to you.”

“Oh,” Win said, “that.” He stood and grabbed his putter. He dropped a few golf balls on the floor. “I sent him a little package.”

“What package?”

“One containing Aaron’s right testicle. That, added together with Pavel’s death, was enough to convince him that it would be in all of our interests to drop the matter.”

Myron shook his head. “What separates you from Deanna Yeller?”

“Just one thing,” Win said. He lined up a putt and sank it. “I don’t fault her for what she did the night Alexander Cross was murdered. It was practical. It made sense. She didn’t trust the justice system. She didn’t trust a United States senator. In both cases, she was undoubtedly right. And what did she sacrifice? Her lowlife nephew who would have spent his life behind bars anyway. No, in that case we were the same.”

He lined up over the next putt and checked the lie. “Where we differ, however, is that she killed an innocent person the second time around. I did not.”

“You’re drawing a pretty thin line,” Myron said.

“The world is made up of thin lines, my friend. I was there. I visited Valerie every week in the institution. Did you know that?”

Myron shook his head. He was probably closer to Win than anyone, and he hadn’t known that. He hadn’t even known he knew Valerie Simpson.

Win took another putt. “From the first moment I saw her in that godforsaken place I wanted to know what changed her. I wanted to know what monstrosity had deadened the spirit that had soared so. You were the one who figured it out. Pavel Menansi did that to her, just as he would have done it to Janet Koffman if I hadn’t stopped him.” Win looked over at Myron. “You already know this, but I’ll say it just the same: the fact that killing Pavel helped us with Frank Ache was just a bonus. I would have killed him anyway. I really didn’t need any justification.”

“There were other ways to make him pay,” Myron said.

“How?” Win scoffed. “By arresting him? No one would press charges. And even if all was revealed as per your plan, what would happen to him? He’d probably write a book and go on Oprah. He’d tell the world how he’d been abused as a child or some such nonsense. He’d be an even bigger celebrity.” Win took another putt. Another make. “We’re not the same, you and I. We both know that. But it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

“Yes, it is. If we were the same it wouldn’t work. We’d both be dead by now. Or insane. We balance each other. It’s why you’re my best friend. It’s why I love you.”

Silence.

“Don’t do it again,” Myron said.

Win did not reply. He lined up another putt.

“Did you hear me?”

“It’s time to move on,” Win said. “This incident is in the past. You know better than to try to control the future.”

More silence. Win sank another putt.

“Jessica is waiting,” Win said. “She told me to remind you about her new oils.”

Myron turned and left then. He felt unclean and unsure. But he knew Win was right: it was over. It would just take a bit of time for things to feel normal again. He would recover.

And, Myron thought as he headed into the elevator, what better way to start the healing process than with Jessica’s oils?

For Anne and Charlotte,
from the luckiest man in the whole world

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank the following: my friends and college roommates James Bradbeer Jr. and Lawrence Vitale; David Pepe of Pro Agents Inc.; Peter Roisman of Advantage International; my editor and friend Jacob Hoye; Natalie Ayars, M.D.; E. W. Count; the AOL Writers Club; and, of course, Dave Bolt.

FADE AWAY
A Delacorte Press Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Dell mass market edition published December 1996
Delacorte Press hardcover edition / September 2008

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
1745 Boradway
New York, New York 10019

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved
Copyright © 1996 by Harlan Coben

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33843-7
v3.0_r2

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Fade Away

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

“Just behave.”

“Me?” Myron said. “I’m always a delight.”

Myron Bolitar was being led through the corridor of the darkened Meadowlands Arena by Calvin Johnson, the New Jersey Dragons new general manager. Their dress shoes clacked sharply against the tile and echoed through empty Harry M. Stevens food stands, Carvel Ice Cream carts, pretzel vendors, souvenir booths. The smell of sporting-event hot dogs—that sort of rubbery, chemically, yet nostalgically delicious aroma—wafted from the walls. The stillness of the place consumed them; there is nothing more hollow and lifeless than an empty sports arena.

Calvin Johnson stopped in front of a door leading to a luxury box. “This may all seem a bit strange,” he said. “Just go with the flow, okay?”

“Okay.”

Calvin reached for the knob and took a deep breath. “Clip Arnstein, the owner of the Dragons, is in there waiting for us.”

“And yet I’m not trembling,” Myron said.

Calvin Johnson shook his head. “Just don’t be an ass.”

Myron pointed to his chest. “I wore a tie and everything.”

Calvin Johnson opened the door. The luxury box faced midcourt. Several workers were putting down the basketball floor over the hockey ice. The Devils had played the night before. Tonight was the Dragons’ turn. The box was cozy. Twenty-four cushioned seats. Two television monitors. To the right was a wood-paneled counter for the food—usually fried chicken, hot dogs, potato knishes, sausage and pepper sandwiches, that sort of stuff. To the left was a brass cart with a nicely stocked bar and minifridge. The box also had its own bathroom—this so the corporate high rollers would not have to urinate with the great unwashed.

Clip Arnstein faced them, standing. He wore a dark blue suit with a red tie. He was bald with patches of gray over both ears. He was burly, his chest still a barrel after seventy-some-odd years. His large hands had brown spots and fat blue veins like garden hoses. No one spoke. No one moved. Clip glared hard at Myron for several seconds, examining him from head to toe.

“Like the tie?” Myron asked.

Calvin Johnson shot him a warning glance.

The old man made no movement toward them. “How old are you now, Myron?”

Interesting opening question. “Thirty-two.”

“You playing any ball?”

“Some,” Myron said.

“You keep in good shape?”

“Want me to flex?”

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

No one offered Myron a seat and no one took one. Of course the only chairs in here were the spectator seats, but it still felt weird to stand in a business setting where you’re supposed to sit. Standing suddenly became difficult. Myron felt antsy. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He took out a pen and held it, but that didn’t feel right. Too Bob Dole. He stuck his hands in his pockets and stood at a weird angle, like the casual guy in the Sears circular.

“Myron, we have an interesting proposition for you,” Clip Arnstein said.

“Proposition?” Always the probing interrogatory.

“Yes. I was the one who drafted you, you know.”

“I know.”

“Ten, eleven years ago. When I was with the Celtics.”

“I know.”

“First round.”

“I know all this, Mr. Arnstein.”

“You were a hell of a prospect, Myron. You were smart. You had an unbelievable touch. You were loaded with talent.”

“I coulda been a contenda,” Myron said.

Arnstein scowled. It was a famous scowl, developed over some fifty-plus years in professional basketball. The scowl had made its first appearance when Clip played for the now-defunct Rochester Royals in the forties. It grew more famous when he coached the Boston Celtics to numerous championships. It became a legendary trademark when he made all the famous trades (“clipping” the competition, ergo the nickname) as team president. Three years ago Clip had become majority owner of the New Jersey Dragons and the scowl now resided in East Rutherford, right off Exit 16 of the New Jersey Turnpike. His voice was gruff. “Was that supposed to be Brando?”

“Eerie, isn’t it? Like Marlon’s actually in the room.”

Clip Arnstein’s face suddenly softened. He nodded slowly, giving Myron the doelike, father-figure eyes. “You make jokes to cover the pain,” he said gravely. “I understand that.”

Dr. Joyce Brothers.

“Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Arnstein?”

“You never played in a single professional game, did you, Myron?”

“You know very well I didn’t.”

Clip nodded. “Your first preseason game. Third quarter. You already had eighteen points that game. Not bad for a rookie in his first scrimmage. That was when fate took over.”

Fate took the form of big Burt Wesson of the Washington Bullets. There had been a collision, a searing pain, and then nothing.

“Awful thing,” Clip said.

“Uh huh.”

“I always felt bad about what happened to you. Such a waste.”

Myron glanced at Calvin Johnson. Calvin was looking off, arms crossed, his smooth black features a placid pool. “Uh huh,” Myron said again.

“That’s why I’d like to give you another chance.”

Myron was sure he’d heard wrong. “Pardon?”

“We have a slot open on the team. I’d like to sign you.”

Myron waited. He looked at Clip. Then he looked at Calvin Johnson. Neither one was laughing. “Where is it?” Myron asked.

“What?”

“The camera. This is one of those hidden camera shows, right? Is this the one with Ed McMahon? I’m a big fan of his work.”

“It’s not a joke, Myron.”

“It must be, Mr. Arnstein. I haven’t played competitive ball in ten years. I shattered my knee, remember?”

“All too well. But as you said, it was ten years ago. I know you went through rehabilitation to rebuild it.”

“And you also know I tried a comeback. Seven years ago. The knee wouldn’t hold up.”

“It was still too early,” Clip said. “You just told me you’re playing again.”

“Pickup games on weekends. It’s a tad different than the NBA.”

Clip dismissed the argument with a wave of his hand. “You’re in shape. You even volunteered to flex.”

Myron’s eyes narrowed, swerving from Clip to Calvin Johnson, back to Clip. Their expressions were neutral. “Why do I have the feeling,” Myron asked, “that I’m missing something here?”

Clip finally smiled. He looked over to Calvin Johnson. Calvin Johnson forced up a return smile.

“Perhaps I should be less”—Clip paused, searched for the word—“opaque.”

“That might be helpful.”

“I want you on the team. I don’t much care if you play or not.”

Myron waited again. When no one continued, he said, “It’s still a bit opaque.”

Clip let loose a long breath. He walked over to the bar, opened a small hotel-style fridge, and removed a can of Yoo-Hoo. Stocking Yoo-Hoos. Hmm. Clip had been prepared. “You still drink this sludge?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

He tossed Myron the can and poured something from a decanter into two glasses. He handed one to Calvin Johnson. He signaled to the seats by the glass window. Exactly midcourt. Very nice. Nice leg room too. Even Calvin, who was six-eight, was able to stretch a bit. The three men sat next to one another, all facing the same way, which again felt weird in a business setting. You were supposed to sit across from one another, preferably at a table or desk. Instead they sat shoulder to shoulder, watching the work crew pound the floor into place.

“Cheers,” Clip said.

He sipped his whiskey. Calvin Johnson just held his. Myron, obeying the instructions on the can, shook his Yoo-Hoo.

“If I’m not mistaken,” Clip continued, “you’re a lawyer now.”

“I’m a member of the bar,” Myron said. “I don’t practice much law.”

“You’re a sports agent.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t trust agents,” Clip said.

“Neither do I.”

“For the most part, they’re bloodsucking leeches.”

“We prefer the term ‘parasitic entities,’ ” Myron said. “It’s more PC.”

Clip Arnstein leaned forward, his eyes zeroing in on Myron’s. “How do I know I can trust you?”

Myron pointed at himself. “My face,” he said. “It screams trustworthiness.”

Clip did not smile. He leaned a little closer. “What I’m about to tell you must remain confidential.”

“Okay.”

“Do you give me your word it won’t go any farther than this room?”

“Yes.”

Clip hesitated, glanced at Calvin Johnson, shifted in his seat. “You know, of course, Greg Downing.”

Of course. Myron had grown up with Greg Downing. From the time they had first competed as sixth graders in a town league less than twenty miles from where Myron now sat, they were instant rivals. When they reached high school, Greg’s family moved to the neighboring town of Essex Fells because Greg’s father did not want his son sharing the basketball spotlight with Myron. The personal rivalry then began to take serious flight. They played against each other eight times in high school, each winning four games. Myron and Greg became New Jersey’s hottest recruits and both matriculated at big-time basketball colleges with a storied rivalry of their own—Myron to Duke, Greg to North Carolina.

The personal rivalry soared.

During their college careers, they had shared two Sports Illustrated covers. Both teams won the ACC twice, but Myron picked up a national championship. Both Myron and Greg were picked first-team All-American, both at the guard spots. By the time they both graduated, Duke and North Carolina had played each other twelve times. The Myron-led Duke had won eight of them. When the NBA draft came, both men went in the first round.

The personal rivalry crashed and burned.

Myron’s career ended when he collided with big Burt Wesson. Greg Downing sidestepped fate and went on to become one of the NBA premier guards. During his ten-year career with the New Jersey Dragons Downing had been named to the All-Star team eight times. He led the league twice in three-point shooting. Four times he led the league in free-throw percentage and once in assists. He’d been on three Sports Illustrated covers and had won an NBA championship.

“I know him,” Myron said.

“Do you talk to him much?” Clip Arnstein asked.

“No.”

“When was the last time you spoke?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Within the last few days?”

“I don’t think we’ve spoken in ten years,” Myron said.

“Oh,” Clip said. He took another sip. Calvin had still not touched his drink. “Well, I’m sure you heard about his injury.”

“Something with his ankle,” Myron said. “It’s day to day. He’s in seclusion working on it.”

Clip nodded. “That’s the story we gave the media anyway. It’s not exactly the truth.”

“Oh?”

“Greg isn’t injured,” Clip said. “He’s missing.”

“Missing?” Again the probing interrogatory.

“Yes.” Clip took another sip. Myron sipped back, not an easy task with Yoo-Hoo.

“Since when?” Myron asked.

“Five days now.”

Myron looked at Calvin. Calvin remained placid but he had that kind of face. During his playing days, his nickname had been Frosty because he never displayed emotion. He was living up to his name now.

Myron tried again. “When you say Greg is missing—”

“Gone,” Clip snapped. “Disappeared. Into thin air. Without a trace. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Have you called the police?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Clip gave him the wave-off again. “You know Greg. He’s not a conventional guy.”

The understatement of the millennium.

“He never does the expected,” Clip said. “He hates the fame. He likes to be on his own. He’s even disappeared before, though never during a playoff drive.”

“So?”

“So there’s a good chance he’s just being his usually flaky self,” Clip continued. “Greg can shoot like a dream, but let’s face facts: the man is a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. You know what Downing does after games?”

Myron shook his head.

“He drives a cab in the city. That’s right, a goddamn Yellow taxi cab in New York City. Says it keeps him close to the common man. Greg won’t do appearances or endorsements. He doesn’t do interviews. He doesn’t even do the charity thing. He dresses like something out of a seventies sitcom. The man is a nut job.”

“All of which makes him immensely popular with the fans,” Myron said. “Which sells tickets.”

“I agree,” Clip said, “but that just underlines my point. If we call the cops it could damage both him and the team. Can you imagine the media circus if this got out?”

“It would be bad,” Myron admitted.

“Exactly. And suppose Greg is just hanging out in French Lick or whatever hickville town he goes to in the off-season, fishing or something? Christ, we’d never hear the end of it. On the other hand, suppose he’s up to something.”

“Up to something?” Myron repeated.

“Hell, I don’t know. I’m just talking here. But I don’t need a goddamn scandal. Not now. Not with the playoffs coming up, you know what I’m saying?”

Not really, but Myron decided to let it go for now. “Who else knows about this?”

“Just the three of us.”

The work crew rolled in the baskets. Two extras were kept in storage in case someone pulled a Darryl Dawkins and shattered a backboard. They then began putting down additional seats. Like most arenas, the Meadowlands holds more seats for basketball than hockey—in this case around a thousand more. Myron took another sip of Yoo-Hoo and let it roll around his tongue. He waited until it slid down his throat before he asked the obvious question. “So how do I fit in?”

Clip hesitated. His breathing was deep, almost labored. “I know something of your years with the FBI,” he said finally. “No details, of course. Not even vagaries really, but enough to know you have a background in this kinda stuff. We want you to find Greg. Quietly.”

Myron said nothing. His “undercover” work for the feds, it seemed, was the worst kept secret in the continental United States. Clip sipped his drink. He looked at Calvin’s full glass, then at Calvin. Calvin finally took a sip. Clip turned his attention back to Myron. “Greg’s divorced now,” Clip went on. “He’s basically a loner. All his friends—hell, all his acquaintances—are teammates. They’re his support group, if you will. His family. If anyone knows where he is—if anyone’s helping him stay hidden—it’s got to be one of the Dragons. I’ll be honest with you. These guys are a major pain in the ass. Spoiled, pampered prima donnas who think our purpose in life is to serve them. But they all have one thing in common: They see management as the enemy. Us against the world and all that crap. They won’t tell us the truth. They won’t tell reporters the truth. And if you approach them as some, uh, ‘parasitic entity,’ they won’t talk to you either. You have to be a player. It’s the only way to get on the inside.”

“So you want me to join the team so I can find Greg.”

Myron heard the echoes of hurt in his voice. It was unintentional, but he saw that both men heard it too. His face flushed in embarrassment.

Clip put a hand on his shoulder. “I meant what I said, Myron. You could have been great. One of the greatest.”

Myron took a deep swig of his Yoo-Hoo. No more sipping. “I’m sorry, Mr. Arnstein. I can’t help you.”

The scowl was back. “What?”

“I have a life. I’m a sports agent. I have clients to tend to. I can’t just drop it all.”

“You’ll get the players’ minimum prorated. That’s two hundred thousand dollars less whatever. And there’s only a couple of weeks left until the playoffs. We’ll keep you on till then no matter what.”

“No. My playing days are over. And I’m not a private investigator.”

“But we need to find him. He could be in danger.”

“I’m sorry. The answer is no.”

Clip smiled. “Suppose I sweeten the pot.”

“No.”

“Fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Greg could show up tomorrow and you’d still get to keep that. Fifty grand. Plus a share of playoff money.”

“No.”

Clip sat back. He stared at his drink, dipped his finger into it, stirred. His voice was casual. “You say you’re an agent, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m very friendly with the parents of three guys that will go in the first round. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Suppose,” Clip said slowly, “I guarantee you that one of them signs with you.”

Myron pricked up. A first round draft pick. He tried to keep his expression cool—to do like Frosty—but his heart was thumping. “How can you do that?”

“Don’t worry about how.”

“It doesn’t sound ethical.”

Clip made a scoffing noise. “Myron, don’t play choirboy with me. You do me this favor and MB SportsReps gets a first round draft pick. Guaranteed. No matter how this thing with Greg plays out.”

MB SportsReps. Myron’s company. Myron Bolitar, ergo MB. Representing sports people, ergo SportsReps. Add it together: MB SportsReps. Myron came up with that name on his own but still no offers came in from major advertising companies to use his services.

“Make it a hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus,” Myron said.

Clip smiled. “You’ve learned well, Myron.”

Myron shrugged.

“Seventy-five thousand,” Clip said. “And you’ll take it so don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

The two men shook hands.

“I have a few more questions about the disappearance,” Myron said.

Using both armrests Clip rose and stood over Myron. “Calvin will answer all your questions,” he said with a nod toward his general manager. “I have to go now.”

“So when do you want me to start practicing?”

Clip looked surprised. “Practicing?”

“Yeah. When do you want me to start?”

“We have a game tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Of course,” Clip said.

“You want me to suit up tonight?”

“We’re playing our old team, the Celtics. Calvin will make sure you have a uniform by game time. Press conference at six to announce your signing. Don’t be late.” Clip headed toward the door. “And wear that tie. I like it.”

“Tonight?” Myron repeated, but Clip was already gone.

Chapter 2

After Clip left the box, Calvin Johnson allowed himself a small smile. “I warned you it would be strange.”

“Serious strange,” Myron agreed.

“Finished with your nutritious chocolate beverage?”

Myron put down the can. “Yeah.”

“Come on. Let’s get you ready for the big debut.”

Calvin Johnson walked fluidly, back straight. He was black, six-foot-eight, thin but not gawky or disproportionate. He wore an olive Brooks Brothers suit. Perfectly tailored. Perfectly knotted tie. Perfectly shined shoes. His tightly kinked hair was receding, making his forehead overly prominent and shiny. When Myron matriculated at Duke, Calvin had been a senior at North Carolina. That made him around thirty-five years old, though he looked older. Calvin had enjoyed a solid pro career over eleven seasons. When he retired three years ago, everyone knew he’d end up in the front office. He started off as an assistant coach, moved to player personnel, and just recently was promoted to vice president and general manager of the New Jersey Dragons. These however were just titles. Clip ran the show. General managers, vice presidents, player personnel, trainers, even coaches all bent to his will.

“I hope you’re all right with this,” Calvin said.

“Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

Calvin shrugged. “I played against you,” he said.

“So?”

“You were the most competitive son of a bitch I ever faced,” Calvin said. “You’d stomp on someone’s head to win. Now you’re going to be a pissant bench-warmer. How’s that going to sit with you?”

“I can handle it,” Myron said.

“Uh huh.”

“I’ve mellowed over the years.”

Calvin shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“No?”

“You may think you’ve mellowed. You may even think you’ve got basketball out of your system.”

“I have.”

Calvin stopped, smiled, spread his arms. “Sure you have. Just look at you. You could be the poster child for life after sports. A fine example to your fellow athletes. Your whole career crashed down around your ears, but you rose to the challenge. You went back to school—at Harvard Law nonetheless. You started up your own business—a growing company in the field of sports representation. You still dating that writer?”

He meant Jessica. Their togetherness seemed to always be an iffy thing but Myron said, “Yes.”

“So you got the education, the job, and the gorgeous girlfriend. Yep, on the outside you’re happy and well adjusted.”

“On the inside too.”

Calvin shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Everyone’s Dr. Joyce Brothers. “Hey, I didn’t ask to be put on the team.”

“No, but you didn’t argue much either—except to up your price.”

“I’m an agent. That’s what I do. I up the price.”

Calvin stopped and looked at Myron. “Do you really think you have to be on the team to find Greg?”

“Clip seemed to think so.”

“Clip is a great man,” Calvin said, “but he often has ulterior motives.”

“Like what?”

Calvin did not respond. He started walking again.

They reached the elevator. Calvin pressed the button and the doors immediately slid open. They stepped inside and began to descend. “Look me in the eye,” Calvin said. “Look me in the eye and tell me you never think about playing again.”

“Who doesn’t think about it?” Myron countered.

“Yeah, but tell me you don’t take it one step further. Tell me you never drift off and dream about making a comeback. Even now, when you’re watching a game on TV, tell me you don’t sit there and do a slow burn. Tell me you never watch Greg and think about all the adulation and fame. Tell me you never say, ‘I was better than him,’ because it’s the truth. Greg is great. One of the top ten players in the league. But you were better, Myron. We both know that.”

“Long time ago,” Myron said.

Calvin smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

“What’s your point?”

“You’re here to find Greg. Once he’s found, you’re gone. The novelty will be over. Clip will be able to say he gave you a chance, but you weren’t up to the challenge. He’ll still be the good guy with the good press.”

“Good press,” Myron repeated, remembering the upcoming press conference. “One of his ulterior motives?”

Calvin shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you understand you don’t have a chance. You’re only going to play during scrub time and we rarely win or lose by a lot so that doesn’t happen and even if it does, even if you play spectacularly, we both know it’s scrub time. And you won’t play well because you are such a competitive son of a bitch, you need the points to mean something to the outcome of the game or you don’t play your best.”

“I understand,” Myron said.

“I hope you do, my friend.” Calvin looked up at the numbered lights. The lights flickered in his brown eyes. “Dreams never die. Sometimes you think they’re dead, but they’re just hibernating like some big old bear. And if the dream has been hibernating for a long time, that bear is going to wake up grumpy and hungry.”

“You should write country songs,” Myron said.

Calvin shook his head. “Just giving a friend fair warning.”

“Much obliged. Now why don’t you tell me what you know about Greg’s disappearance?”

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Calvin led the way. “Not much to tell,” he said. “We played against the Sixers in Philly. After the game Greg got on the bus with everybody else. When we got here, he got off the bus with everybody else. The last time anyone saw him he was getting into his car. The end.”

“How did Greg seem that night?”

“Fine. He played well against Philly. Scored twenty-seven points.”

“And his mood?”

Calvin thought about it. “Nothing I noticed,” he said.

“Anything new going on in his life?”

“New?”

“Changes, that kind of thing.”

“Well, the divorce,” Calvin said. “It’s been nasty. I understand Emily can be quite difficult.” He stopped walking again and smiled at Myron. The Cheshire cat smile. Myron stopped but did not return the smile.

“Something on your mind, Frosty?”

The smile spread a bit farther. “Weren’t you and Emily an item at one time?”

“A lifetime ago.”

“College sweethearts, if I recall.”

“Like I said, a lifetime ago.”

“So,” Calvin said, starting to walk again, “you were even better with the women than Greg.”

Myron ignored the comment. “Does Clip know about my so-called past with Emily?”

“He’s very thorough.”

“So that explains why you chose me,” Myron said.

“It was a consideration, but I don’t think it’s too important.”

“Oh?”

“Greg hates Emily. He’d never confide in her. But since this whole custody battle started there’s definitely been a change in Greg.”

“How so?”

“For one thing, he signed a deal with Forte sneakers.”

Myron was surprised. “Greg? An endorsement deal?”

“It’s very hush-hush,” Calvin said. “They’re supposed to announce it end of the month, right before the playoffs.”

Myron whistled. “They must have paid him a bundle.”

“A bundle and a half, I hear. Upwards of ten million a year.”

“Makes sense,” Myron said. “A popular player who has refused to endorse any products for more than a decade—it’s an irresistible draw. Forte does well with track and tennis shoes, but they’re fairly unknown in the basketball world. Greg gives them instant credibility.”

“That he does,” Calvin agreed.

“Any idea why he changed his mind after all these years?”

Calvin shrugged. “Maybe Greg realized he wasn’t getting any younger and wanted to cash in. Maybe this whole divorce thing. Maybe he got whacked on the head and woke up with an iota of sanity.”

“Where’s he been living since the divorce?”

“In the house in Ridgewood. It’s in Bergen County.”

Myron knew it well. He asked for the address. Calvin gave it to him. “What about Emily?” Myron asked. “Where’s she staying?”

“She and the kids are with her mother. I think they’re in Franklin Lakes or thereabouts.”

“Have you done any checking yet—Greg’s house, his credit cards, bank accounts?”

Calvin shook his head. “Clip thought this thing was too big to trust to an agency. That’s why we called you. I’ve driven past Greg’s house a few times, knocked on the door once. No car in the driveway or garage. No lights on.”

“But no one’s checked inside the house?”

“No.”

“So for all you know he slipped in the bathtub and hit his head.”

Calvin looked at him. “I said, no lights on. You think he bathed in the dark?”

“That’s a good point,” Myron said.

“Some hotshot investigator.”

“I’m a slow starter.”

They arrived at the team room. “Wait here,” Calvin said.

Myron took out his cellular. “Mind if I make a call?”

“Go ahead.”

Calvin disappeared behind the door. Myron turned on the power and dialed. Jessica answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

“I’m going to have to cancel dinner tonight,” Myron said.

“You better have a good excuse,” Jessica said.

“A great one. I’ll be playing professional basketball for the New Jersey Dragons.”

“That’s nice. Have a good game, dear.”

“I’m serious. I’m playing for the Dragons. Actually, ‘playing’ is probably not the right word. Might be more accurate to say I’ll be getting fanny sores for the Dragons.”

“Are you for real?”

“It’s a long story, but yes, I’m now officially a professional basketball player.”

Silence.

“I’ve never boffed a professional basketball player,” Jessica said. “I’ll be just like Madonna.”

“Like a virgin,” Myron said.

“Wow. Talk about a dated reference.”

“Yeah, well, what can I say. I’m an eighties kinda guy.”

“So, Mr. Eighties, you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“No time now. Tonight. After the game. I’ll leave a ticket at the window.”

Calvin stuck his head back in. “What’s your waist? Thirty-four?”

“Thirty-six. Maybe thirty-seven.”

Calvin nodded and withdrew. Myron dialed the private line of Windsor Horne Lockwood III, president of the prestigious investment firm of Lock-Horne Securities in midtown Manhattan. Win answered on the third ring.

“Articulate,” Win said.

Myron shook his head. “Articulate?”

“I said articulate, not repeat.”

“We have a case,” Myron said.

“Oh yippee,” he drawled in that preppy, Philly Main-Line accent of his. “I’m enthralled. I’m elated. But before I completely wet myself, I must ask but one question.”

“Shoot.”

“Is this case of your customary charity persuasion?”

“Wet away,” Myron said. “The answer is no.”

“What? No moral crusade for brave Myron?”

“Not this time.”

“Heavens be, do tell.”

“Greg Downing is missing. It’s our job to find him.”

“And for services rendered we receive?”

“At least seventy-five grand plus a first round draft pick as a client.” Now was not the time to fill Win in on his temporary career change.

“My, my,” Win said happily. “Pray tell, what shall we do first?”

Myron gave him the address of Greg’s house in Ridgewood. “Meet me there in two hours.”

“I’ll take the Batmobile,” Win said and hung up.

Calvin returned. He held out a purple-and-aqua Dragon uniform. “Try this on.”

Myron did not reach for it right away. He stared at it, his stomach twisting and diving. When he spoke his voice was soft. “Number thirty-four?”

“Yeah,” Calvin said. “Your old number at Duke. I remembered.”

Silence.

Calvin finally broke it. “Go try it on.”

Myron felt something well up in his eye. He shook his head. “No need,” he said. “I’m sure it’s the right size.”

Chapter 3

Ridgewood was a primo suburb, one of those old towns that still calls itself a village, where ninety-five percent of the students go on to college and no one lets their kids associate with the other five percent. There were a couple of strips of tract housing, a few examples of the mid-sixties suburban explosion, but for the most part Ridgewood’s fine homes dated from an earlier, theoretically more innocent time.

Myron found the Downing house without any problem. Old Victorian. Very big but not unwieldy, three levels with perfectly faded cedar shingles. On the left side there was one of those rounded towers with a pointy top. Lots of outdoor porch space with all the Rockwellian touches: the kind of double swing where Atticus and Scout would share a lemonade on a hot Alabama night; a child’s bicycle tipped on its side; a Flexible Flyer snow sled, although it hadn’t snowed in six weeks. The required basketball hoop hung slightly rusted over the driveway. Fire Department “Tot Finder” stickers glistened red and silver from two upstairs windows. Old oak trees lined the walk like weathered sentries.

Win hadn’t arrived yet. Myron parked and rolled down a window. The perfect mid-March day. The sky was robin-egg blue. The birds chirped in cliché. He tried to picture Emily here, but the picture would not hold. It was far easier to see her in a New York high rise or one of those nouveau-riche mansions all done in white with Erté sculptures and silver pearls and too many gaudy mirrors. Then again he hadn’t spoken to Emily in ten years. She may have changed. Or he may have misjudged her all those years ago. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Funny being back in Ridgewood. Jessica had grown up here. She didn’t like coming back anymore, but now the two loves of his life—Jessica and Emily—had something else in common: the village of Ridgewood. That could be added to the list of commonalities between the two women—stuff like meeting Myron, being courted by Myron, falling in love with Myron, crushing Myron’s heart like a tomato under a stiletto heel. The usual fare.

Emily had been his first. Freshman year of college was late to lose one’s virginity, if one were to listen to the boasts of friends. But if there had indeed been a sexual revolution among American teenagers in the late seventies/early eighties, Myron had either missed it or been on the wrong side. Women had always liked him—it wasn’t that. But while his friends discoursed in great detail on their various orgylike experiences, Myron seemed to attract the wrong girls, the nice girls, the ones who still said no—or would have had Myron had the courage (or foresight) to try.

That changed in college when he met Emily.

Passion. It’s a word bandied about quite a bit, but Myron thought it might apply here. At a minimum, unconfined lust. Emily was the type of woman a man labels “hot,” as opposed to “beautiful.” See a truly “beautiful” woman and you want to paint or write a poem. See Emily and you want to engage in mutual fabric-ripping. She was raw sexuality, maybe ten pounds bigger than she should have been but those pounds were exquisitely distributed. The two of them made a potent mix. They were both under twenty, both away from home for the first time, both creative.

In a word: kaboom.

The car phone rang. Myron picked it up.

“I assume,” Win said, “that you plan on having us break into the Downing residence.”

“Yes.”

“Then parking your car in front of said residence would not be a sound decision, would it?”

Myron glanced about. “Where are you?”

“Drive down to the end of the block. Make a left, then your second right. I’m parked behind the office building.”

Myron hung up and restarted the car. He followed the directions and pulled into the lot. Win leaned against his Jaguar with his arms crossed. He looked, as he always did, as if he were posing for the cover of WASP Quarterly. His blond hair was perfectly in place. His complexion slightly ruddy, his features porcelain and high and a little too perfect. He wore khaki pants, a blue blazer, Top-Siders sans socks, and a loud Lilly Pulitzer tie. Win looked like what you’d picture a guy named Windsor Horne Lockwood III to look like—elitist, self-absorbed, wimpy.

Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

The office building held an eclectic mix. Gynecologist. Electrolysis. Subpoena delivery service. Nutritionist. Women-only health club. Not surprisingly Win was standing near the entrance to the women-only health club. Myron approached.

“How did you know I was parked in front of the house?”

Keeping his eye on the entranceway Win motioned with his head. “Up that hill. You can see everything with a pair of binoculars.”

A woman in her early twenties wearing a black Lycra aerobics suit walked out carrying a baby. It hadn’t taken her long to get her figure back. Win smiled at her. The woman smiled back.

“I love young mothers,” Win said.

“You love women in Lycra,” Myron corrected.

Win nodded. “There’s that.” He snapped on a pair of sunglasses. “Shall we begin?”

“You think breaking into that house will be a problem?”

Win made his I’ll-pretend-you-didn’t-ask-that face. Another woman exited the health club; sadly, this one did not warrant a Win smile. “Fill me in,” Win said. “And move away. I want to make sure they can see the Jag.”

Myron told him all he knew. Eight women came out in the five minutes it took to tell the story. Only two of them were awarded The Smile. One wore a tiger-striped leotard. She was treated to the Full-Wattage Smile, the one that almost touched Win’s eyes.

Win’s face did not seem to register anything Myron said. Even when he told him about taking Greg’s temporary slot on the Dragons, Win went on staring hopefully at the health club door. Normal Win behavior. Myron finished up by asking, “Any questions?”

Win bounced a finger against his lip. “Do you think the one in the tiger-striped leotard was wearing any underwear?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said, “but she was definitely wearing a wedding band.”

Win shrugged. Didn’t matter to him. Win didn’t believe in love or relationships with the opposite sex. Some might take this for simple sexism. They’d be wrong. Women weren’t objects to Win; objects sometimes got his respect.

“Follow me,” Win said.

They were less than half a mile from the Downing house. Win had already scouted it out and found the path with the least chance of being seen or arousing suspicion. They walked in the comfortable silence of two men who had known each other a long time and very well.

“There’s one interesting aside in all this,” Myron said.

Win waited.

“Do you remember Emily Schaeffer?” Myron asked.

“The name rings a bell.”

“I dated her for two years at Duke.” Win and Myron had met at Duke. They had also been roommates for all four years. It had been Win who had introduced Myron to the martial arts, who had gotten him involved with feds. Win was now a top producer at his Lock-Horne Securities on Park Avenue, a securities firm that had been run by Win’s family since the market had first opened. Myron rented space from Win, and Win also handled all money-matters for MB SportsReps’ clients.

Win thought a bit. “Is she the one who used to make the little monkey noises?”

“No,” Myron said.

Win seemed surprised. “Who was the one who made the little monkey noises?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe it was someone I was with.”

“Maybe.”

Win considered this, shrugged. “What about her?”

“She used to be married to Greg Downing.”

“Divorced?”

“Yep.”

“I remember her now,” Win said. “Emily Schaeffer. Built.”

Myron nodded.

“I never liked her,” Win said. “Except for those little monkey noises. They were rather interesting.”

“She wasn’t the one who made monkey noises.”

Win smiled gently. “The walls were thin,” he said.

“And you used to listen in?”

“Only when you pulled down the shade so I couldn’t watch.”

Myron shook his head. “You’re a pig,” he said.

“Better than a monkey.”

They reached the front lawn and proceeded to the door. The secret was to look like you belonged. If you scurried around back, hunched over, someone might take notice. Two men in ties approaching the door does not normally lead one to think thief.

There was a metal keypad with a little red light. The light was on.

“Alarm,” Myron said.

Win shook his head. “Fake. It’s just a light. Probably bought it at Sharper Image.” Win looked at the lock and made a tsk-tsk noise. “A Kwiktight brand on a pro basketball player’s salary,” he said, clearly disgusted. “Might as well use Play-Doh.”

“What about the dead bolt?” Myron asked.

“It’s not locked.”

Win already had out his strip of celluloid. Credit cards are too stiff. Celluloid worked much better—known as ’loiding the lock. In no more time than it would take with a key, the door was open and they were inside the front foyer. The door had a chute and the mail was all over the place. Myron quickly checked some postage dates. No one had been here in at least five days.

The decor was nice in a fake-rustic, Martha Stewart sort of way. The furniture was what they called “simple country” where the look was indeed simple and the price outrageous. Lots of pines and wickers and antiques and dry flowers. The smell of potpourri was strong and cloying.

They split up. Win went upstairs to the home office. He turned on the computer and began to download everything onto floppy disks. Myron found the answering machine in a room that used to be called a “den” but now went by such lofty titles as the “California room” or “great room.” The machine announced the time and date of each message. Awfully convenient. Myron pressed a button. The tape rewound and started playing. On the first message, which according to the digital voice was received at 9:18 P.M. the night Greg vanished, Myron hit bingo.

A shaky woman’s voice said, “It’s Carla. I’ll be in the back booth until midnight.” Click.

Myron rewound and listened again. There were lots of noises in the background—people chatting, music, glasses clinking. The call had probably been placed from a bar or restaurant, especially with that back-booth reference. So who was this Carla? A girlfriend? Probably. Who else would call that late to set up a meeting for even later that night? But of course this had not been just any night. Greg Downing had vanished sometime between the time this call was made and the next morning.

Strange coincidence.

So where did they meet—assuming Greg had indeed made their back-booth liaison? And why did Carla, whoever she might be, sound so shaky—or was this just Myron’s imagination?

Myron listened to the rest of the tape. No other messages from Carla. If Greg hadn’t shown up at said back booth, wouldn’t Carla have called again? Probably. So for now, Myron could safely assume that Greg Downing had seen Carla sometime before his disappearance.

A clue.

There were also four calls from Martin Felder, Greg’s agent. He seemed to grow more perturbed with each message. The last one said, “Jesus, Greg, how can you not call me? Is the ankle serious or what? And don’t go incommunicado on me now, not when we’re wrapping up the Forte deal. Call me, okay?” There were also three calls from a man named Chris Darby, who apparently worked for Forte Sports Incorporated. He too sounded panicked. “Marty won’t tell me where you are. I think he’s playing a game with us, Greg, trying to up the price or something. But we had a deal, am I right? Let me give you my home number, okay, Greg? How bad’s this injury anyhow?”

Myron smiled. Martin Felder’s client was missing, but he was doing all he could to turn it into a positive lever. Agents. He pressed the mode button on the answering machine several times. Eventually the LCD screen scrolled to reveal the code number Greg had set to call in for messages: 317. A fairly new trick of the trade. Now Myron could call in anytime, press 317, and hear what messages had been left on the machine. He hit the redial button on the phone. Another fairly new trick. Find out who Greg called last. The phone rang twice and was picked up by a woman saying, “Kimmel Brothers.” Whoever they were. Myron hung up.

Myron joined up with Win in the upstairs office. Win continued copying onto computer disks while Myron went through the drawers. Nothing particularly helpful.

They moved on to the master bedroom. The king-size bed was made. Both night tables were cluttered with pens and keys and papers.

Both.

Curious for a man who lived alone.

Myron’s eyes swept the room and landed on a reading chair that doubled as a dressing dummy. Greg’s clothes were strewn over one arm and the back. Normal enough, Myron guessed—neater than Myron, in fact, though that wasn’t saying much. But looking again, he noticed something a tad strange on the other arm of the chair. Two articles of clothing. A white blouse and a gray skirt.

Myron looked at Win.

“They might belong to Miss Monkey Noises,” Win said.

Myron shook his head. “Emily hasn’t lived here in months. Why would her clothes still be on a chair?”

The bathroom, too, proved interesting. A large Jacuzzi on the right, a big steam shower with a sauna, and two vanities. They checked the vanities first. One contained a can of men’s shaving cream, a roll-on deodorant, a bottle of Polo after-shave, a Gillette Atra razor. The other vanity had an open makeup case, Calvin Klein perfume, baby powder, and Secret Roll-On. A sprinkling of baby powder was on the floor near the vanity. There were also two disposable Lady Schick razors in the soap dish next to the Jacuzzi.

“He’s got a girlfriend,” Myron said.

“A professional basketball player shacking up with some nubile lass,” Win remarked. “Quite a revelation. Perhaps one of us should cry out, ‘Eureka.’ ”

“Yes, but it raises an interesting question,” Myron said. “If her boyfriend had suddenly vanished, wouldn’t said lover have reported it?”

“Not,” Win said, “if she were with him.”

Myron nodded. He told Win about the cryptic message from Carla.

Win shook his head. “If they were planning on running away,” he said, “why would she say where they were meeting?”

“She didn’t say where. Only in a back booth at midnight.”

“Still,” Win said. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing you do before you disappear. Let’s say that for some reason Carla and Greg decide to vanish for a little while. Wouldn’t Greg know where and when to meet her before the fact?”

Myron shrugged. “Maybe she was changing their meeting place.”

“From what? Front booths to back booths?”

“Damned if I know.”

They checked the rest of the upstairs. Not much doing. Greg’s son’s bedroom had racing-car wallpaper and a poster of Dad driving past Penny Hardaway for a layup. The daughter’s room was done in Early American Barney—dinosaurs and purple. No clues. In fact there were no other clues until they reached the basement.

When they turned on the lights, Myron saw it right away.

It was a finished basement, a brightly colored playroom for the kids. There were lots of Little Tikes cars and big Legos and a plastic house with a sliding board. There were scenes from Disney movies like Aladdin and The Lion King on the wall. There was a television and a VCR. There was stuff too for when the kids got a little older—a pinball machine, a jukebox. There were small rocking chairs and mattresses and knock-around couches.

There was also blood. A fair amount of it in drips on the floor. Another fair amount smeared on a wall.

Bile nestled in Myron’s throat. He had seen blood many times in his life, but it still left him queasy. Not so with Win. Win approached the crimson stains with something akin to amusement on his face. He bent to get a better look. Then he stood back up.

“Look at the bright side,” Win said. “Your temporary slot on the Dragons may become more permanent.”

Chapter 4

There was no body. Just the blood.

Using Glad sandwich bags he found in the kitchen, Win collected a few samples. Ten minutes later they were back outside, the lock on the front door reengaged. A blue Oldsmobile Delta 88 drove past them. Two men sat in the front seat. Myron glanced at Win. Win barely nodded.

“A second pass,” Myron said.

“Third,” Win said. “I saw them when I first drove up.”

“They’re not exactly experts at this,” Myron said.

“No,” Win agreed. “But of course, they hadn’t known the job would require expertise.”

“Can you run the plates?”

Win nodded. “I’ll also run Greg’s ATM and credit card transactions,” he said. He reached the Jag and unlocked it. “I’ll contact you when I have something. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

“You heading back to the office?”

“I’m going to Master Kwon’s first,” Win said.

Master Kwon was their tae kwon do instructor. Both of them were black belts—Myron a second degree, Win a sixth degree, one of the highest ranking Caucasians in the world. Win was the best martial artist Myron had ever seen. He studied several different arts including Brazilian jujitsu, animal kung fu, and Jeet Kun Do. Win the Contradiction. See Win and you think pampered, preppy pantywaist; in reality, he was a devastating fighter. See Win and you think normal, well-adjusted human being; in reality, he was anything but.

“What are you doing tonight?” Myron asked.

Win shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“I can get you a ticket to the game,” Myron said.

Win said nothing.

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

Without another word, Win slipped behind the wheel of his Jag, started the engine, peeled out with nary a squeal. Myron stood and watched him speed away, puzzled by his friend’s abruptness. But then again, to paraphrase one of the four questions of Passover: why should today be different than any other day?

He checked his watch. He still had a few hours before the big press conference. Enough time to get back to the office and tell Esperanza about his career shift. More than anyone else, his playing for the Dragons would affect her.

He took Route 4 to the George Washington Bridge. There was no waiting at the tolls. Proof there was a God. The Henry Hudson however was backed up. He swung off near Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center to get on Riverside Drive. The squeegee guys—the homeless men who “cleaned” your windshield with a mixture of equal parts grease, Tabasco sauce, and urine—were no longer at the light. Mayor Giuliani’s doing, Myron guessed. They had been replaced by Hispanic men selling flowers and something that looked like construction paper. He asked once what it was and had gotten an answer back in Spanish. As much as Myron could translate, the paper smelled nice and spruced up any home. Maybe that was what Greg used as potpourri.

Riverside Drive was relatively quiet. Myron arrived at his Kinney lot on 46th Street and tossed Mario the keys. Mario did not park the Ford Taurus up front with the Rolls, the Mercedes, Win’s Jag; in fact, he usually managed to find a cozy spot underneath what must have been a nesting ground for loose-stooled pigeons. Car discrimination. It was an ugly thing, but where were the support groups?

The Lock-Horne Securities building was on Park Avenue and 46th, perpendicular to the Helmsley building. High-rent district. The street bustled with the doings of big finance. Several stretch limos double-parked illegally in front of the building. The ugly modern sculpture that looked like someone’s intestines stood pitifully in its usual place. Men and women in business attire sat on the steps, eating sandwiches too hurriedly, lost in their own thoughts, many talking to themselves, rehearsing for an important afternoon meeting or rehashing a morning mistake. People who worked in Manhattan learned how to be surrounded by others yet remain completely alone.

Myron entered the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator. He nodded to the three Lock-Horne Hostesses, known to everyone else as the Lock-Horne Geishas. They were all model/actress wanna-bes, hired to escort high rollers up to the offices of Lock-Horne Securities and look attractive while doing it. Win had brought the idea home after a trip to the Far East. Myron guessed this could be more blatantly sexist, but he wasn’t sure how.

Esperanza Diaz, his valued associate, greeted him at the door. “Where the hell have you been?”

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Later. You’ve got a million messages.”

Esperanza wore a white blouse—an absolute killer look against her dark hair, dark eyes, and that dark skin that shimmered like moonlight on the Mediterranean. Esperanza had been spotted by a modeling scout when she was seventeen, but her career took a few weird turns and she ended up making it big in the world of professional wrestling. Yes, professional wrestling. She’d been known as Little Pocahontas, the brave Indian Princess, the jewel of the Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling (FLOW) organization. Her costume was a suede bikini, and she was always cast as the good guy in the morality play that was professional wrestling. She was young, petite, tight-bodied, gorgeous, and though of Latin origin, she was dark enough to pass for Native American. Racial backgrounds were irrelevant to FLOW. The real name of Mrs. Saddam Hussein, the evil harem girl in the black veil, was Shari Weinberg.

The phone rang. Esperanza picked it up. “MB SportsReps. Hold on a moment, he’s right here.” She flashed the eyes at him. “Perry McKinley. It’s his third call today.”

“What does he want?”

She shrugged. “Some people don’t like dealing with underlings.”

“You’re not an underling.”

She looked at him blankly. “You going to take it or not?”

Being a sports agent was—to use computer terminology—a multitasking environment with the capability of performing a variety of services with but a click of a button. It was more than simple negotiating. Agents were expected to be accountants, financial planners, real estate agents, hand-holders, personal shoppers, travel agents, family counselors, marriage counselors, chauffeurs, errand boys, parental liaisons, lackeys, butt-kissers, you name it. If you weren’t willing to do all that for a client—to be what is known as a “full service agency”—the next guy would be.

The only way to compete was to have a team, and Myron felt he had assembled a small yet extremely effective one. Win, for example, handled all the finances for Myron’s clients. He set up a special portfolio for each player, met with them at least five times a year, made sure they understood what their money was doing and why. Having Win gave Myron a big leg up on the competition. Win was a near-legend in the financial world. His reputation was impeccable (at least in the financial world) and his track record unmatched. He gave Myron an instant “in,” instant credibility in a business where credibility was a rare and heady concoction.

Myron was the JD. Win was the MBA. Esperanza was the all-purpose player, the unflappable chameleon who held it all together. It worked.

“We need to talk,” he said again.

“So we’ll talk,” she said in a dismissing tone. “First take this call.”

Myron entered his office. He overlooked Park Avenue in midtown. Great View. On one wall he had posters of Broadway musicals. On another there were movie stills from some of Myron’s favorites: the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Alfred Hitchcock, and a potpourri of other classics. On a third wall were photographs of Myron’s clients. The client wall was a bit sparser than Myron would have liked. He imagined what it would look like with an NBA first rounder in the middle.

Good, he decided. Very good.

He strapped on his headset.

“Hey, Perry.”

“Jesus Christ, Myron, I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

“Good, Perry. And you.”

“Hey, I don’t mean to be impatient but this is important. You get anything on my boat?”

Perry McKinley was a golfer on the fringe, no pun intended. He was a pro. He made some money, but he wasn’t a name anyone but big golf fans would recognize. Perry loved to sail and was in need of a new vessel.

“Yeah, I got something,” Myron said.

“What company?”

“Prince.”

Perry did not sound thrilled. “Their boats are just okay,” he whined. “Nothing great.”

“They’ll let you trade in your old boat for a new one. You have to do five personal appearances.”

“Five?”

“Yep.”

“For a Prince eighteen-footer? That’s too many.”

“They originally wanted ten. But it’s up to you.”

Perry thought about it a moment. “Ah, shit, okay the deal. But first I want to make sure I like the boat. A full eighteen-footer, right?”

“That’s what they said.”

“Yeah, all right. Thanks, Myron. You’re the best.”

They hung up. Bartering—an important component in the agent’s multitasking environment. No one ever paid for anything in this business. Favors were exchanged. Trading products for some form of endorsement. Want a free shirt? Wear it in public. Want a free car? Shake hands at a few car shows. The big stars could demand serious payments in exchange for their endorsements. The lesser-known athletes happily seized the freebies.

Myron stared at the pile of messages and shook his head. Playing for the Dragons and keeping MB SportsReps afloat—how the hell was he going to pull it off?

He buzzed Esperanza. “Come on in here, please,” he said.

“I’m in the middle—”

“Now.”

Silence.

“Gosh,” she said, “you’re so macho.”

“Give me a break, huh?”

“No, really, I’m very frightened. I better drop everything and immediately do your bidding.”

Her phone fell. She sprinted in, feigning fear and breathlessness. “Fast enough?”

“Yes.”

“So what is it?”

He told her. When he came to the part where he’d be playing for the Dragons, he was once again surprised to see no reaction. This was strange. First Win, now Esperanza. The two of them were his closest friends. They both lived for ridiculing him. Yet neither one of them had taken advantage of the obvious opening. Their silence on the subject of his “comeback” was a tad unnerving.

“Your clients aren’t going to like this,” she said.

“Our clients,” he corrected.

She made a face. “Does it make you feel better to be patronizing?”

Myron ignored the comment. “We have to turn this into a positive,” he said.

“How?”

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. He leaned back in his chair. “We can say that the publicity of all this will help them.”

“How?”

“I can make new contacts,” he said, the ideas coming to him even as he spoke. “I can get closer to sponsors, learn more about them. More people will hear about me and indirectly my clients.”

Esperanza made a scoffing sound. “And you think that’s going to fly?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s bullshit. ‘Indirectly my clients.’ Sounds like trickle-down economics.”

She had a point. “What’s the big deal really?” he asked, palms to the ceiling. “Basketball will only be a couple of hours a day. I’ll be here the rest of the time. I’ll have the cellular phone with me all the time. We just have to emphasize that I won’t be there long.”

Esperanza looked at him skeptically.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“No, I want to know. What?”

“Nothing,” she said. She looked him straight in the eye, her hands resting on her lap. “What does the bitch say about all this?” she asked sweetly.

Her pet name for Jessica. “Will you please stop calling her that?”

She made a suit-yourself face, for once not arguing. There had been a time—long, long ago—when Jessica and Esperanza had at least tolerated each other. But then Jessica left, and Esperanza saw what it did to Myron. Some people held grudges. Esperanza internalized them. It didn’t matter that Jessica had come back.

“So what does she think?” Esperanza asked again.

“About what?”

“About the prospects for peace in the Middle East,” she snapped. “What do you think I mean? Your playing again.”

“I don’t know. We haven’t had a chance to talk about it much. Why?”

Esperanza shook her head again. “We’re going to need help in here,” she said, closing the subject. “Someone to answer the phones, do some typing, that kind of thing.”

“You have someone in mind?”

She nodded. “Cyndi.”

Myron blanched. “Big Cyndi?”

“She could answer the phone, do some odd jobs. She’s a good worker.”

“I didn’t even know she could talk,” Myron said. Big Cyndi had been Esperanza’s tag-team wrestling partner, fighting under the name of Big Chief Mama.

“She’ll take orders. She’ll do shit work. She’s not ambitious.”

Myron tried not to wince at the thought. “Isn’t she still working at the strip joint as a bouncer?”

“It’s not a strip joint. It’s a leather bar.”

“My mistake,” Myron said.

“And she’s a bartender now.”

“Cyndi’s been promoted?” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’d hate to sidetrack her burgeoning career by asking her to work here.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Esperanza said. “She works there nights.”

“What,” Myron said, “Leather and Lust doesn’t do a big lunch crowd?”

“I know Cyndi. She’ll be perfect.”

“She scares people,” Myron said. “She scares me.”

“She’ll stay in the conference room. No one will see her.”

“I don’t know.”

Esperanza rose smoothly. “Fine, you find somebody. I mean, you’re the boss. You know best. Me, I’m just a pissant secretary. I wouldn’t dare question how you handle our clients.”

Myron shook his head. “Low blow,” he said. He leaned forward, his elbows on his desk, his hands holding up his head. “All right,” he said finally, releasing a deep breath. “We’ll give her a try.”

Myron waited. Esperanza stared back at him. After several seconds passed, she said, “Is this the part where I jump up and down and say thank you, thank you?”

“No, this is the part where I leave.” He checked his watch. “I got to talk to Clip about those bloodstains before the press conference.”

“Have fun.” She headed for the door.

“Hold up,” he called out. She turned and faced him. “Do you have class tonight?” Esperanza took night classes at NYU. Law school.

“No.”

“You want to go to the game?” He cleared his throat. “You can, uh, bring Lucy, if you’d like.”

Lucy was Esperanza’s latest love. Before Lucy she had dated a man named Max. Her sexual preference seemed to vacillate. “We broke up,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Myron said, not knowing what else to say. “When?”

“Last week.”

“You didn’t say anything.”

“Maybe because it’s none of your business.”

He nodded. True enough. “Well, you can bring a new, uh, friend, if you’d like. Or you can go yourself. We’re playing the Celtics.”

“I’ll pass,” she said.

“You sure?”

She nodded again, left the room. Myron grabbed his jacket and headed back to the lot. Mario tossed him his keys without looking up. He took the Lincoln Tunnel and hopped onto Route 3. He passed a huge and fairly famous appliance and electronics store called Tops. The billboard featured a giant nose jutted out over Route 3. The caption: Tops Is Right Under Your Nose. Very lifelike. The only thing missing were the giant nose hairs. He was only a mile or so from the Meadlowlands when the car phone rang.

“I have some preliminaries,” Win said.

“Go ahead.”

“None of Greg Downing’s accounts or credit cards have been accessed in the past five days.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Any cash withdrawals from his bank?”

“Not in the past five days.”

“How about earlier? Maybe he grabbed out a lot of money before he vanished.”

“It’s being worked on. I don’t know yet.”

Myron took the Meadowlands exit. He considered what this all meant. So far, not much, but it wasn’t really good news. The blood in the basement. No sign of Greg. No financial activity. It wasn’t really promising. “Anything else?” Myron asked.

Win hesitated. “I may soon have an idea where dearest Greg had that drink with fair Carla.”

“Where?”

“After the game,” Win said. “I’ll know more then.”

Chapter 5

“Sports is folklore,” Clip Arnstein told the room full of reporters. “What captures our imagination is not simply the winning and losing. It’s the stories. The stories of perseverance. The stories of sheer will. The stories of hard work. The stories of heartbreak. The stories of miracles. The stories of triumph and tragedy. The stories of comebacks.”

Clip looked down at Myron from the podium, his eyes properly moist, his smile his most grandfatherly. Myron cringed. He fought back an intense desire to duck under the conference table and hide.

After a proper pause Clip turned back to the front. The reporters were silent. An occasional flashbulb burst forth. Clip swallowed several times as though summoning some inner resolve he’d need to continue. His throat slid up and down. He raised his moist eyes to the audience.

A little hammy, Myron thought, but all in all a fine performance.

The press conference was more crowded than Myron would’ve thought. Not a free seat and many reporters standing. Must have been a slow news day. Clip took his time, regaining his seemingly lost composure. “A little over a decade ago, I drafted an exceptional young man, a player I believed was destined for greatness. He had a great jumper, a well-honed court sense, mental tenacity, and on top of all that was a fine human being. But the gods had other plans for that young man. We all know what happened to Myron Bolitar on that fateful night in Landover, Maryland. There is no reason to dredge up the past. But as I said when I opened this press conference, sports is folklore. Today the Dragons are giving that young man a chance to weave his own legend into the lush tapestry of sports. Today the Dragons are allowing that young man to try and recapture what was so cruelly snatched away from him all those years ago.”

Myron started squirming. His cheeks flushed. His eyes darted about, seeking a safe haven and finding none. He settled for looking at Clip’s face, as per the media’s expectations. He zeroed in on a cheek mole, staring so hard his vision began to mercifully blur.

“It won’t be easy, Myron,” Clip said, turning now and addressing Myron directly. Myron kept his vision locked on the mole; he couldn’t meet the gaze. “No promises have been made to you. I don’t know what happens from here. I don’t know if this is the culmination of your story or the commencement of a brave new chapter. But those of us who love sports can’t help but hope. It is in our nature. It is in the nature of all true combatants and fans.” Clip’s voice started to crack.

“This is reality,” he went on. “I have to remind you of that, Myron, much as I’d rather not. On behalf of the New Jersey Dragons I welcome you, a man of class and courage, to the team. We wish you nothing but the best. We know that no matter what happens to you on the court, you will bring honor to the entire Dragon organization.” He stopped, tightened his lips, and managed a quick “Thank you.”

Clip held out a hand to Myron. Myron played his part. He stood to shake Clip’s hand. Clip however had other ideas. He put his arms around Myron and pulled him toward him. The flashbulbs increased to the point of being a disco strobe. When Clip finally pulled back, he wiped his eyes with two fingers. Sheesh, the man put Pacino to shame. Clip held out an arm, ushering Myron to the podium.

“How does it feel to be back?” one reporter yelled out.

“Scary,” Myron replied.

“Do you really think you have what it takes to play at this level?”

“No, not really.”

The moment of honesty stopped them for a second. But only a second. Clip laughed and everyone else in the room followed suit. Figuring it was a joke. Myron didn’t bother correcting them.

“Do you think you still have three-point shooting range?” another asked.

Myron nodded. “I have the shooting range,” he said. “I’m just not sure I have the making range.” A stolen joke but what the hey.

More laughs.

“Why the comeback so late, Myron? What convinced you to come back now?”

“The Psychic Friends Network.”

Clip stood and warded off further questions with a raised hand. “Sorry, gang, that’s it for now. Myron has to get suited up for tonight’s game.”

Myron followed Clip out. They hurried down the corridor and into Clip’s office. Calvin was already there. Clip shut the door. Before he sat down Clip asked, “So what’s the matter?”

Myron told him about the blood in the basement. Clip visibly blanched. Frosty’s fingers tightened against the armrest.

“So what are you trying to say?” Clip snapped when he finished.

“Say?”

Clip gave an elaborate shrug. “I don’t get it.”

“There’s nothing to get,” Myron said. “Greg is missing. No one has seen him for five days. He hasn’t used his ATM or credit card. And now there’s blood in the basement.”

“In his kids’ playroom, right? That’s what you said before. The kids’ playroom.”

Myron nodded.

Clip looked a question at Calvin then turned his palms to the sky. “So what the hell does that mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It doesn’t exactly add up to foul play, now does it?” Clip continued. “Think it through, Myron. If Greg were murdered, for example, where is his body? Did the killer or killers take it with them? And what do you think happened here? The killers—what?—surprised Greg? Alone? In his kids’ playroom where, I guess, Greg was playing with his little dolly? Then what happened? They killed him down there and dragged him out of the house without leaving traces of blood anywhere but in the basement?” Clip spread his hands. “Does that make sense?”

The scenario had bothered Myron too. He sneaked a glance at Calvin. Calvin seemed deep in thought. Clip stood.

“For all we know,” Clip went on, “one of Greg’s kids cut himself playing down there.”

“Hell of a cut,” Myron said.

“Or a bloody nose. Christ, those things gush like mad. Could be nothing but a bloody nose.”

Myron nodded. “Or maybe they were slaughtering chickens,” he said. “Could be that too.”

“I don’t need sarcasm, Myron.”

Myron waited a beat. He glanced at Calvin. Nothing. He glanced at Clip. Nada. “It’s getting opaque in here again.”

“Pardon?”

“You hired me to find Greg. I’m tracing down a major lead. Yet you don’t want to hear it.”

“If you mean I don’t want to hear that perhaps Greg has met with foul play—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. You’re afraid of something and it’s not just that Greg may have met with foul play. I’d like to know what.”

Clip looked over at Calvin. Calvin nodded almost imperceptibly. Clip sat back down. His fingertips drummed the desktop. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked an imitating echo. “Understand,” Clip said, “that we have Greg’s best interests at heart. We really do.”

“Uh huh.”

“You know anything about hostile takeovers?”

“I was alive in the eighties,” Myron said. “In fact, someone recently remarked on what an eighties kinda guy I am.”

“Well, I’m undergoing one now.”

“I thought you were a majority owner.”

Clip shook his head. “Forty percent. No one else owns more than fifteen percent. A couple of the minority shareholders have gotten together and are trying to oust me.” Clip made two fists and put them on his desk like paperweights. “They say I’m too much a basketball mind and not enough a business mind. I should only be handling players and the on-court affair. They vote in two days.”

“So?”

“So right now the vote is very close. A scandal and I’m done.”

Myron looked at both men and waited a beat. Then he said, “You want me to sit on this?”

“No, no, of course not,” Clip said quickly. “I’m not saying that at all. I just don’t want the press going berserk over what might be nothing. I can’t afford to have anything unsavory uncovered now.”

“Unsavory?”

“Right.”

“Like what?”

“Hell if I know,” Clip said.

“But Greg might be dead.”

“And if that’s the case, a day or two isn’t going to help—cold as that might sound. And if something did happen to Greg, there might be a reason.”

“A reason?”

Clip threw up his hands. “Hell, I don’t know. You lift up a corpse or even a man in hiding and worms start to crawl out. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Myron said. But Clip went on.

“I don’t need that, Myron. Not now. Not till after this vote.”

“Then you are telling me to sit on this,” Myron said.

“Not at all. We just don’t want an unnecessary panic. If Greg is dead, we can’t do him any good now anyway. If he’s vanished, well, then you are his best hope to avoid media glare or to save him.”

They were still not telling him everything but Myron decided not to press it just now. “Do you have any idea why someone would be watching Greg’s house?”

Clip looked puzzled. “Someone is watching his house?”

“I think so, yes.”

Clip looked over to Calvin. “Calvin?”

“No idea,” Calvin said.

“I don’t know either, Myron. Do you have any thoughts?”

“Not yet. One more question: did Greg have a girlfriend?”

Again Clip looked toward Calvin.

Calvin shrugged. “He played around a lot. But I don’t think there was anyone special.”

“Do you know any of the women he played around with?”

“Not by name. Some groupies, stuff like that.”

“Why?” Clip asked. “You think he ran off with a broad?”

Myron shrugged and stood. “Guess I better get to the locker room. It’s almost game time.”

“Wait.”

Myron stopped.

“Please, Myron, I know it sounds like I’m being cold, but I really do care about Greg. Very much. I want him found alive and well.” Clip swallowed. The wrinkles in his skin looked more pronounced, like someone had just pinched them out a bit. His color was not good. “If you can honestly tell me that revealing what we know to the public is best, I’ll go along with it. No matter what the costs. Think about it. I want to do what’s best for Greg. I care about him very much. I care about both of you. You’re both fine young men. I mean that. I owe you both a great deal.”

Clip looked like he was about to cry. Myron wasn’t sure what to make of all this. He decided to nod and say nothing. He opened the door and left.

As he approached the elevator Myron heard a familiar, husky voice say, “If it isn’t the Comeback Kid.”

Myron looked over at Audrey Wilson. She was wearing her customary sports-reporter garb: dark blue blazer, black turtleneck, what they called “stone-washed” jeans. Her makeup was either light or nonexistent, her nails short and unpolished. The only splash of color could be found on her sneakers—bright aqua Chuck Taylor Cons. Her looks were completely unspectacular. There was nothing wrong with her features but nothing particularly right about them either. They were just there. Her straight black hair was cut short in a pageboy with bangs. “Do I detect the scent of cynicism?” he asked.

Audrey shrugged. “You don’t really think I buy all this, do you?”

“Buy what?”

“Your sudden desire to”—she checked her notes—“weave your own legend into the lush tapestry of sports.” She looked up, shook her head. “That Clip can sure talk some shit, huh?”

“I have to get dressed, Audrey.”

“How about giving me the lowdown first?”

“The lowdown, Audrey? Gee, why not ask for a ‘scoop’? I love it when you reporters say that.”

She smiled at that. It was a nice smile. Full and open. “Kinda defensive, aren’t we, Myron?”

“Me? Never.”

“Then how about—to coin yet another cliché—a statement for the press?”

Myron nodded, put his hand to his chest in dramatic fashion. “A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins.”

“Lombardi?”

“Felix Unger. It was on The Odd Couple, the one where Howard Cosell guest starred.”

He turned and walked toward the locker room. Audrey followed. She was probably the top female sports reporter in the country. She covered the Dragons for the East Coast’s biggest newspaper. She had her own radio show on WFAN in a coveted time slot with huge ratings. She had a Sunday morning roundtable talk show called Talking Sports on ESPN. And yet, like almost every other female in this male-dominated profession, there was something tenuous about her station, her career always a half-step from toppling over no matter how big she became.

“How’s Jessica?” Audrey asked.

“Good.”

“I haven’t spoken to her in a month,” she said with a singsong tone. “Maybe I should give her a call. Sit down and have a heart-to-heart, you know.”

“Gee,” Myron said, “that won’t be transparent.”

“I’m trying to make this easier on you, Myron. There’s something strange going on here. You know I’m going to find out what it is. Might as well just tell me.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“First Greg Downing leaves the team under mysterious circumstances—”

“What’s mysterious about an ankle injury?”

“—then you, his old nemesis, take his place after being out of commission for the better part of eleven years. You don’t find that strange?”

Great, Myron thought. On the job five minutes and already someone was voicing suspicion. Myron Bolitar, master of the undercover. They reached the door to the locker room.

“I gotta go, Audrey. We’ll talk later.”

“Count on it,” she said. She smiled at him with a gentle mocking sweetness. “Good luck, Myron. Knock them dead.”

He nodded, took a deep breath, and pushed open the locker-room door.

Showtime.

Chapter 6

No one greeted Myron when he entered the locker room. No one broke stride. No one even looked at him. The room did not go quiet like something out of an old Western where the sheriff pushes open the creaking door and sashays into the saloon. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the door needed to creak. Or maybe Myron had to work on his sashay.

His new teammates were sprawled about like socks in a college dorm. Three of them were draped over benches, semidressed and seminapping. Two were on the floor, a leg being held in the air by assistants, stretching quads and calves. A couple others were dribbling basketballs. Four were hobbling back to their lockers after getting taped. Almost all were chewing gum. Almost all were also listening to Walkmans, the tiny speakers jammed in their ears and blaring so loudly that they sounded like competing floor models at a stereo store.

Myron found his dressing area pretty easily. All the other lockers had bronze plaques with a player’s name engraved on it. Myron’s did not. It had a piece of white adhesive tape above it, the kind used to tape ankles, with the letters M. BOLITAR scrawled in black marker. It hardly inspired confidence or spoke commitment.

He glanced around for someone to talk to, but the Walkmans were the ideal room dividers. Everyone was in their own private space. Myron spotted Terry “TC” Collins, the team’s famed whining superstar, sitting alone in a corner. TC was the media’s newest poster boy for the spoiled athlete, the guy “ruining” the genteel world of sports “as we know it,” whatever that meant. TC was a hell of a physical specimen. Six-ten, muscular, wiry. His cleanly shaven head glistened in the fluorescent light. Rumor had it TC was black though it was hard to see any trace of skin through the work of his tattoo artist. The obscure ink images blanketed almost all available somatic sites. Body piercing too appeared to be more of a lifestyle with TC than a hobby. The man looked like a nightmare version of Mr. Clean.

Myron caught TC’s eye, smiled, and nodded a hello. TC glared daggers and turned away. Making chums already.

His uniform was hung where it should be. His name had already been sewn on the back in block letters. BOLITAR. He stared at it for a moment or two. Then he quickly snatched it off the hanger and put it on. Everything caused bouts of déjà vu. The feel of the crumbly cotton. The shoelacelike tie-string on his shorts. The slight elastic tug at the waist when he put them on. The slight tightness of the top as it went over his shoulders. The practiced hands tucking in the tail. The lacing up of his high-tops. It all caused pangs. It was getting harder to breathe. His eyes blinked something back. He sat and waited until the feeling went away.

Myron noticed very few of the guys wore jockstraps anymore, preferring those tight, Lycra shorts. Myron stuck with old dependable. Mr. Old Fashioned. Then he strapped a contraption onto his leg that was loosely labeled a “knee brace.” Felt more like a metal compressor. The last thing he put on was his warm-ups. The bottoms had dozens of snaps up and down the legs, so a player could dramatically rip them off when called to go into a game.

“Hey, kid, how’s it going?”

Myron stood and shook hands with Kip Corovan, one of the team’s assistant coaches. Kip wore a plaid jacket that was about three sizes too small. The sleeves inched up to the forearms. The gut jutted out with great defiance. He looked like a farmer at the semiannual square dance. “I’m doing fine, coach.”

“Great, great. And call me Kip. Or Kipper. Most people call me Kipper. Sit down, relax.”

“Okay.” Kipper?

“Great, happy to have you with us.” The Kipper pulled over a chair, turned it so the back faced Myron, and straddled it. His pants inseam didn’t look happy with the move. “I’ll be honest with you, Myron, okay? Donny wasn’t thrilled about this. Nothing personal, you understand. Just Donny likes to pick his own players. He don’t like interference from upstairs, you know what I’m saying?”

Myron nodded. Donny Walsh was the head coach.

“Great, good. Donny’s a straight guy though. He remembers you from the old days, liked you a lot. But we got a team heading for the playoffs. With a bit of luck we can lock up home-court advantage throughout the playoffs. It took a while to get the ducks all in a row. It’s a balance, you know. Got to keep the ducks on an even keel. Losing Greg really knocked the wind from our sails, but we finally got those ducks back up. Now you come along, see. Clip doesn’t tell us why, but he insists we add you to the roster. Fine, Clip is the big chief, no question. But we worry about getting our ducks back sailing straight, you see?”

The mixing of metaphors was making Myron dizzy. “Sure. I don’t want to cause any problems.”

“I know that.” He stood, put the chair back with a sweeping motion. “You’re a good guy, Myron. Always were a straight arrow. We need that now. A team-comes-first kinda guy, am I right?”

Myron nodded. “A straight-sailing duck.”

“Great, fine. See you out there. And don’t worry. You’re not going to get in unless it’s a blowout.” With that the Kipper hoisted his belt up over the gut and sauntered—almost sashayed—across the room.

Three minutes later, the Kipper shouted out, “Gather round the board, boys.” No one paid any attention. He repeated this several times, tapping Walkman-entranced players on the shoulders, so that they would hear. It took a full ten minutes to get twelve professional athletes to move less than ten feet. Coach Donny Walsh strode in with great self-importance, took center stage, and began spilling out the tired clichés. This didn’t mean he was a bad coach or anything. You play over a hundred games a season it’s hard to come up with anything new.

The pep talk lasted a full two minutes. Some of the guys never bothered turning off their Walkmans. TC was busy taking off his jewelry, a task that took great concentration and a team of well-trained technicians. Another minute or two passed and then the locker-room door opened. Everyone removed their Walkmans and headed out. Myron realized they were heading for the court.

Game time.

Myron stood at the end of the line. He swallowed deeply. A cold rush swept through him. As he made his way up the ramp he heard a voice over the loudspeaker scream, “And nowwwwww, your New Jersey Dragons!” Music blared. The jog quickened into a full trot.

The ovation was thunderous. The players automatically split into two makeshift lines for the lay-up drill. Myron had done this a zillion times before, but for the first time he really thought about what he was doing. When you were a star or a starter, you warmed up casually, loosely, unhurriedly. There was no reason to press it. You had the whole game to show the crowd what you could do. The scrubs—something Myron had never been—handled the warm-ups in one of two ways. Some went all out, slamming reverse dunks, doing windmill moves. In a phrase: showing off. Myron had always found this behavior sort of desperate. Others hung around the superstars, feeding them the ball, playing the mock defender like a boxer with a sparring partner. Cool by association.

Myron got to the front of the lay-up line. Someone passed him the ball. When you’re warming up, you are subconsciously convinced that all eyes in the arena are on you, though in point of fact, most people were settling in or chatting or getting food or checking out the crowd and those that were watching couldn’t care less what you did. Myron took two dribbles and laid the ball against the glass and in. Sheesh, he thought. The game hadn’t started yet and already he didn’t know what to do.

Five minutes later the lay-up lines disintegrated and players began to free shoot. Myron glanced into the stands for Jessica. She was not hard to spot. It was like a beacon hit her, like she came forward and the rest of the crowd stepped back, like she was the Da Vinci and the rest of the faces were but a frame. Jessica smiled at him and he felt a warmth spread through him.

With something close to surprise, he realized that this would be the first time Jessica had seen him play in anything but pickup games. They’d met three weeks before Myron’s injury. The thought made him pause. And remember. For a brief moment his mind dragged him back. Guilt and pain washed over him until a ball careened off the backboard and smacked him in the head. But the thought remained:

I owe Greg.

The buzzer sounded and the players moved to the bench. Coach Walsh blurted out a few more clichés and made sure each player knew who they were covering. The players nodded, not listening. TC still glared. Game face, Myron hoped, but didn’t really believe it. He also kept an eye on Leon White, Greg’s roommate on the road and closest friend on the team. The huddle broke. The players from both sides approached the center circle, greeting one another with handshakes and hand slaps. Once out there, the players on both teams started pointing around, trying to figure out who was covering whom since no one had listened thirty seconds earlier. Coaches from both sides were up, yelling out the defensive assignments until the ball was mercifully tossed in the air.

Basketball is normally a game of momentum shifts, keeping things fairly close until the final minutes. Not tonight. The Dragons cruised. They led by twelve after one quarter, twenty points by halftime, twenty-six by the end of the third period. Myron started getting nervous. The lead was big enough for him to get in. He hadn’t really counted on that. Part of him silently cheered on the Celtics, hoping they could stage enough of a comeback to keep his butt on the aluminum chair. But it was a no-go. With four minutes remaining the Dragons led by twenty-eight points. Coach Walsh shot a glance down the bench. Nine of the twelve players had already gotten in. Walsh whispered something to the Kipper. The Kipper nodded and walked down the bench, stopping in front of Myron. Myron could feel his heart beating in his chest.

“Coach is going to clear the bench,” he said. “He wants to know if you want to go in.”

“Whatever he wants,” Myron replied, while sending out telepathic messages of no, no, no. But he couldn’t tell them that. It wasn’t in his nature. He had to play the good trooper, Mr. Team-First, Mr. Dive-On-The-Grenade-If-That’s-What-The-Coach-Wants. He didn’t know how else to do it.

A time-out was called. Walsh looked down the bench again. “Gordon! Reilly! You’re in for Collins and Johnson!”

Myron let loose a breath. Then he got mad at himself for feeling such relief. What kind of competitor are you? he asked himself. What kind of a man wants to stay on the bench? Then the truth rose up and smacked him hard in the face:

He was not here to play basketball.

What the hell was he thinking? He was here to find Greg Downing. This was just undercover work, that’s all. Like with the police. Just because a guy goes undercover and pretends he’s a drug dealer doesn’t make him a drug dealer. The same principle applied here. Just because Myron was pretending to be a basketball player didn’t make him one.

The thought was hardly comforting.

Thirty seconds later, it started. And it filled Myron’s chest with dread.

One voice triggered it. One beer-infested voice rising clearly above all others. One voice that was just deep enough, just different enough, to separate it from the usual cacophony of fandom. “Hey, Walsh,” the voice cried out. “Why don’t you put in Bolitar?”

Myron felt his stomach plummet. He knew what was coming next. He had seen it happen before, though never to him. He wanted to sink into the floor.

“Yeah!” another voice crowed. “Let’s see the new guy!”

More shouts of agreement.

It was happening. The crowd was getting behind the underdog, but not in a good way. Not in a positive way. In the most blatantly patronizing and mocking way possible. Be-Nice-To-The-Scrub time. We’ve won the game. We want a few laughs now.

A few more calls for Myron and then … the chant. It started low but built. And built. “We want Myron! We want Myron!” Myron tried not to slouch. He pretended not to hear it, feigning intense concentration on what was happening on the court, hoping his cheeks weren’t reddening. The chant grew louder and faster, eventually disintegrating into one word, repeated over and over, mixed with laughter:

“Myron! Myron! Myron!”

He had to defuse it. There was only one way. He checked the clock. Still three minutes to go. He had to go in. He knew that wouldn’t be the end of it, but it would at least quiet the crowd temporarily. He looked down the bench. The Kipper looked back. Myron nodded. The Kipper leaned over to Coach Walsh and whispered something. Walsh did not stand up. He simply shouted, “Bolitar. In for Cameron.”

Myron swallowed and rose to his feet. The crowd erupted in sarcasm. He headed for the scorer’s table, ripping off his sweats. His legs felt stiff and cramped. He pointed to the scorer, the scorer nodded and sounded the buzzer. Myron stepped on the court. He pointed at Cameron. Cameron jogged off. “Kraven,” he said. The name of the man Myron would defend.

“Now reporting for Bob Cameron,” the loudspeaker began. “Number 34. Myron Bolitar!”

The crowd went absolutely wild. Hoots, whistles, screams, laughs. Some might think they were wishing him well, but that was not really the case. They were wishing him well the same way you wish a circus clown well. They were looking for pratfalls and darn gone-it, Bolitar was their man!

Myron stepped on the court. This was, he suddenly realized, his NBA debut.

He touched the ball five times before the game ended. Each time it was met with cheer/jeers. He shot only once, from just inside the three point line. He almost didn’t want to, knowing the crowd would react no matter what happened, but some things are just too automatic. There was no conscious thought. The ball went in with a happy swish. By now there were only thirty seconds left and thankfully most everyone had had enough and were heading to their cars. The sarcastic applause was minimal. But for those brief seconds when Myron caught the ball, when his fingertips found the groove, when he bent his elbow and cradled the ball half an inch above both palm and forehead, when the arm smoothed into a straight line, when the wrist flowed into a front curl, when the fingertips danced along the ball’s surface and created the ideal backspin, Myron was alone. His eyes were focused on the rim, only the rim, never glancing at the ball as it arched its way toward the cylinder. For those few seconds there was only Myron and the rim and the basketball and it all felt very right.

The mood in the locker room was far more animated after the game. Myron managed to meet all of the players except TC and Greg’s roommate Leon White, the one man he wanted to get close to most. Figures. He couldn’t push it either; that would just backfire. Tomorrow maybe. He’d try again.

He stripped down. The knee began to tighten up, as though somebody had pulled all the tendons too taut. He slapped on an ice pack and fastened it with a stretch wrap. He limped to the showers, dried off, and was just finishing dressing when he realized TC was standing over him.

Myron looked up. TC had his various pierce-jewelry in place. Ear, of course. Three in one, four in the other. One in his nose. He wore black leather pants and a black cut-off mesh tank top, giving one an excellent view of the ring on his left nipple and the one in the belly button. Myron couldn’t make out what the tattoos were. They just looked like swirls. TC wore sunglasses now, the wraparound kind.

“Your jeweler must send you a hell of a Christmas card,” Myron said.

TC replied by sticking out his tongue and revealing another ring near the tip. Myron almost gagged. TC looked pleased by his reaction.

“You new, right?” TC said.

“Right.” Myron held out his hand. “Myron Bolitar.”

TC ignored the hand. “You gots to get thumped.”

“Excuse me?”

“Thumped. You the new guy. You gots to get thumped.”

Several other players started chuckling.

“Thumped?” Myron repeated.

“Yeah. You the new guy, right?”

“Right.”

“Then you gots to get thumped.”

More chuckling.

“Right,” Myron said. “Thumped.”

“There you go.” TC nodded, snapping his fingers, pointed at Myron, left.

Myron finished dressing. Thumped?

Jessica was waiting for him outside the locker-room door. She smiled as he approached, and he smiled back, feeling goofy. She hugged him and gave him a brief kiss. He smelled her hair. Ambrosia.

“Ah,” a voice said. “Now ain’t this just too sweet?”

It was Audrey Wilson.

“Don’t talk to her,” Myron said. “She’s the Antichrist.”

“Too late,” Audrey said. She put her hand through Jessica’s arm. “Jess and I are going out now to have a few drinks, talk over old times, that kind of thing.”

“God, you are shameless.” He turned to Jessica. “Don’t tell her anything.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Good point,” Myron said. “So where are we going?”

“We are going nowhere,” Jessica said. She made a motion behind her with her thumb. Win was leaning against the wall, completely still and at ease. “He said you’d be busy.”

“Oh.” Myron looked over at Win. Win nodded. Myron excused himself and made his way over.

Without preamble, Win said, “The last cash transaction Greg made was at an ATM machine at eleven oh three P.M. the night he vanished.”

“Where?”

“Manhattan. A Chemical Bank near Eighteenth Street on the West Side.”

“It makes sense,” Myron said. “Greg gets a call at nine eighteen P.M. from Carla. Carla tells him to meet her in the back booth. So he drives himself to the city and picks up cash before he sees her.”

Win looked at him with flat eyes. “Thank you for that analysis of the obvious.”

“It’s a gift really.”

“Yes, I know,” Win said. “Moving right along, there are eight saloons within a four-block radius of this particular ATM. I limited my search to those. Of the eight only two have what one might term a ‘back booth.’ The others had tables or dining facilities sans booths in the rear. Here are the names.”

Myron had long since gotten past asking how Win did it. “You want me to drive?”

“I can’t go,” Win said.

“Why not?”

“I’m going away for a few days.”

“When?”

“I leave from Newark airport in an hour,” Win said.

“This is sudden.”

Win didn’t bother responding. The two men headed out the players’ entrance. Five kids ran up to Myron and asked for his autograph. Myron obliged. One kid who looked to be around ten years old took back the paper, squinted at Myron’s scrawl, and said, “Who the hell is he?”

Another kid said, “Some scrub.”

“Hey!” Win snapped. “That’s Mr. Scrub to you.”

Myron looked at him. “Thanks.”

Win made an it’s-nothing gesture.

The first kid looked at Win. “You anybody?”

“I’m Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Win replied.

“Who?”

Win spread his hands. “Our blessed youth.” He walked away then without saying another word. Win was not big on good-byes. Myron reached his car. When he put the key in the door, he felt a slap on the back. It was TC. He pointed at Myron with a finger holding more jewelry than a Gabor-family reunion. “Remember,” TC said.

Myron nodded. “Thumped.”

“Exacto.”

Then he, too, was gone.

Chapter 7

Myron arrived at MacDougal’s Pub, the first bar on Win’s list. The back booth was empty so he grabbed it. He sat there for a moment, hoping a psychic force would tell him if this was the place where Greg had met up with Carla. He felt nothing—positive or negative. Maybe he should hold a séance.

The waitress came over slowly, as if the effort of crossing the floor was synonymous with wading through deep snow and she should be rewarded for it. Myron warmed her up with one of his patented smiles. The Christian Slater model—friendly yet devilish. Not to be mistaken for the Jack Nicholson model which was also friendly yet devilish.

“Hi,” he said.

She put down a Rolling Rock cardboard coaster. “What can I get you?” she asked, trying to toss up a friendly tone and falling way short. You rarely find a friendly barmaid in Manhattan, except for those born-again waitresses at chains like TGI Friday’s or Bennigan’s where they tell you their name and that they’ll be your “server” like you might mistake them for something else, like your “legal consultant” or “medical advisor.”

“Got any Yoo-Hoo?” Myron asked.

“Any what?”

“Never mind. How about a beer?”

She gave him flat eyes. “What kind?”

Subtlety was not going to work here. “Do you like basketball?” he asked her.

Shrug.

“Do you know who Greg Downing is?”

Nod.

“He told me about this place,” Myron said. “Greg said he was here the other night.”

Blink.

“Did you work last Saturday night?”

Nod.

“Same station? I mean, this booth?”

Quicker nod. Getting impatient.

“Did you see him?”

“No. I got tables. Michelob okay?”

Myron looked at his watch, faked shock. “Whoops, look at the time. I gotta go.” He gave her two dollars. “Thanks for your time.”

The next bar on the list was called the Swiss Chalet. Not even close. A dive. The wallpaper was supposed to trick you into believing that the place was wood paneled; the effect may have worked better had the wallpaper not been peeling in so many spots. The fireplace had a flickering, Christmas-light log in it, hardly giving the place the desired ski-lodge warmth. For some reason there was one of those disco-mirrored balls in the middle of the bar. No dance floor. No lights. Just the disco-mirrored ball—another staple of authentic Swiss chalets, Myron surmised. The place had the stale smell of spilled beer mixed with just a hint of what might have been vomit, the kind of smell only certain bars or frat houses held, the kind where the odor had seeped into the walls like rodents that ended up dying and rotting.

The jukebox blared “Little Red Corvette” by Prince. Or was it by the Artist Formerly Known As Prince? Wasn’t that what he called himself now? But of course when “Little Red Corvette” had been released he had been Prince. So which was it? Myron tried to reconcile this crucial dilemma, but it began to confuse him like one of those time paradoxes in the Back to the Future movies so he gave up.

The place was pretty empty. A guy with a Houston Astros baseball cap and bushy mustache was the sole patron seated at the bar. There was a man and woman seminecking at a table in the center of the room—the most conspicuous table in the place, as a matter of fact. No one seemed to mind. Another male patron skulked around the back like he was in the adult movie area at his local video store.

Again Myron took the back booth. Again he struck up a conversation with a far more animated waitress. When he reached the part about Greg Downing telling him about the Swiss Chalet, she said, “Yeah, no kidding? I only seen him in here once.”

Bingo.

“Would that have been Saturday night?”

She scrunched up her face in thought.

“Hey, Joe,” the waitress shouted to the bartender. “Downing was in here Saturday night, right?”

“Who the fuck wants to know?” Joe shouted back from his spot behind the bar. He looked like a weasel with mousy hair. Weasel and mouse. Nice combination.

“This guy and me, we was just talking.”

Joe Weasel squinted with beady, ferret eyes. The eyes widened. “Hey, you’re the new guy, right? On the Dragons? I saw you on the news. With the dorky name.”

“Myron Bolitar,” Myron said.

“Yeah, right, Myron. That’s it. You guys gonna start hanging out here?”

“I don’t know.”

“We get a pretty exclusive celebrity clientele,” Joe said, wiping the bar with what looked like a gas station rag. “You know who was in here once? Cousin Brucie. The disc jockey. Real regular guy, you know.”

“Sorry I missed that,” Myron said.

“Yeah, well we’ve had other celebs, right, Bone?”

The guy with the Astros hat and bushy mustache pepped up and nodded. “Like that guy who looked like Soupy Sales. Remember him?”

“Right. Celebrities.”

“Except that wasn’t really Soupy Sales. Just someone who looked like him.”

“Same difference.”

Myron said, “Do you know Carla?”

“Carla?”

“The girl Greg was with.”

“That her name? No, never got a chance to meet her. Didn’t meet Greg either. He just kinda ducked in, cognito-like. We didn’t bother them.” He sort of puffed out his chest like he was about to salute. “At the Swiss Chalet, we protect our celebrities.” He pointed at Myron with the dishrag. “You tell the other guys that, okay?”

“Will do,” Myron said.

“Fact, we weren’t even sure it was Greg Downing at first.”

“Like with Soupy Sales,” Bone added.

“Right, like that. Except this was really him.”

“Guy looked like Soupy though. Great actor, that Soupy.”

“And what a nickname.”

“Talent all the way round,” Bone agreed.

Myron said, “Had he ever been in here before?”

“The guy who looked like Soupy?”

“Moron,” Joe said, snapping the rag at Bone. “Why the fuck would he want to know about that? He’s talking about Greg Downing.”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know? I look like I work for one of those psychic networks or something?”

“Fellas,” Myron tried.

Joe held up a hand. “Sorry, Myron. Believe me, this don’t normally happen here at the Swiss Chalet. We all get along, right, Bone?”

Bone spread his arms. “Who’s not getting along?”

“My point exactly. And no, Myron, Greg isn’t one of our regulars. That was his first time here.”

“Same with Cousin Brucie,” Bone added. “He only came in that one time.”

“Right. But Cousin Brucie liked the place, I could tell.”

“He ordered a second drink. That shoulda told you something.”

“Right you are. Two drinks. Coulda just had one and left. Course, they were only Diet Cokes.”

Myron said, “How about Carla?”

“Who?”

“The woman Greg was with.”

“What about her?”

“Had she been here before?”

“I never seen her here before. Bone?”

Bone shook his head. “Nope. I woulda remembered.”

“What makes you say that?”

Without hesitation, Joe said, “Serious hooters.”

Bone cupped his hands and stuck them in front of his chest. “Major Charlies.”

“Not that she was good looking or anything.”

“Not at all,” Bone agreed. “Kinda old for a young guy.”

“How old?” Myron asked.

“Older than Greg Downing, that’s for sure. I’d say late forties. Bone?”

Bone nodded. “But a first-rate set of ta-tas.”

“Humongous.”

“Mammoth.”

“Yeah, I think I got that,” Myron interrupted. “Anything else?”

They looked puzzled.

“Eye color?” Myron tried.

Joe blinked, looked at Bone. “Did she have eyes?”

“Damn if I know.”

“Hair color?” Myron said.

“Brown,” Joe said. “Light brown.”

“Black,” Bone said.

“Maybe he’s right,” Joe said.

“No, maybe it was on the lighter side.”

“But I’m telling you, Myron. That was some rack. Major guns.”

“Guns of Navarone,” Bone agreed.

“Did she and Greg leave together?”

Joe looked at Bone. Bone shrugged. “I think so,” Joe said.

“Do you know what time?”

Joe shook his head.

“Bones, you know?” Myron tried.

The bill of the Astros hat jerked toward Myron like a string had been pulled. “Not Bones, dammit!” he shrieked. “Bone! No S at the end. Bone! B-O-N-E! No S! And what the fuck do I look like, Big Ben?”

Joe snapped the dishrag again. “Don’t insult a celebrity, moron.”

“Celebrity? Shit, Joe, he’s just a scrub. Not like he’s Soupy or something. He’s a nobody, a zero.” Bone turned to Myron. The hostility was completely gone now. “No offense, Myron.”

“Why would I take offense?”

“Say,” Joe said, “you got a photograph? We can put your picture on the wall. You could autograph it to your pals at the Swiss Chalet. We should start like a celebrity wall, you know?”

“Sorry,” Myron said. “I don’t have one on me.”

“Can you send us one? Autographed, I mean. Or bring it next time you come.”

“Er, next time.”

Myron continued to question them but learned nothing more except Soupy Sales’s birthday. He left and headed up the block. He passed a Chinese restaurant with dead ducks hung in the window. Duck carcasses, the ideal appetite whetter. Maybe Burger King should hang slaughtered cows in the window. Really draw the kids in.

He tried putting the pieces together a bit. Carla calls Greg on the phone and tells him to meet her at the Swiss Chalet. Why? Why there of all places? Did they not want to be seen? Why not? And who the hell is Carla anyway? How does all this fit into Greg’s vanishing act? And what about the blood in the basement? Did they go back to Greg’s house or did Greg go home alone? Was Carla the girl he lived with? And if so, why meet here?

Myron was so preoccupied he didn’t spot the man until he almost bumped into him. Of course calling him a man might be a bit of an understatement. More like a brick wall doubling as a human being. He stood in Myron’s way. He wore one of those pectoral-displaying ribbed T-shirts under an unbuttoned flower-patterned semiblouse. A gold horn dangled between his near-cleavage. Muscle-head. Myron tried to pass him on the left. The brick wall blocked his path. Myron tried to pass him on the right. The brick wall blocked his path. Myron went back and forth one more time. Brick Wall followed suit.

“Say,” Myron said, “you know the cha-cha?”

The brick wall showed about as much reaction as one might expect from a brick wall. Then again it wasn’t one of Myron’s better quips. The man was truly enormous, the size of your average lunar eclipse. Myron heard footsteps. Another man, this one on the large size but at least of the human variety, came up behind Myron. The second man wore fatigue camouflage pants, a popular new urban fashion trend.

“Where’s Greg?” Camouflage Pants asked.

Myron feigned startled. “What? Oh, I didn’t see you.”

“Huh?”

“In those pants,” Myron said. “You just blended into the background.”

Camouflage didn’t like that. “Where’s Greg?”

“Greg?” Snappy retort.

“Yeah. Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Greg.”

“Greg who?”

“You trying to be funny?”

“What, you think this is funny?”

Camouflage looked over at Brick Wall. Brick Wall remained completely silent. Myron knew that there was a very real possibility of a physical altercation. He also knew he was good at such things. He also knew—or at least figured—that these two goons were probably good too. Despite Bruce Lee movies, one man defeating two or more quality opponents was nearly impossible. Experienced fighters were not stupid. They worked as a team. They never rushed one at a time.

“So,” Myron said. “You guys want to catch a beer? Chat this through?”

Camouflage made a scoffing noise. “We look like guys who like to chat?”

Myron motioned to Brick Wall. “He does.”

There were three ways to get out of a situation like this unharmed. One was to run, which was always a good option. Problem was, his two adversaries were close enough yet spaced far enough to tackle and/or slow him down. Too risky. Second option: your opponents underestimate you. You act scared and cower and then whammo, you surprise them. Unlikely for Myron. Goons rarely underestimate a guy six-four, two-twenty. Third option: you strike first and hard. By doing this you increase the likelihood of putting one out of commission before the other one can react. This action however required a delicate balance. Until someone strikes, you really cannot say for sure that a physical altercation could not be avoided altogether. But if you wait for someone to strike, this option becomes null and void. Win liked option three. Then again Win liked option three even if there was only one opponent.

Myron never got the chance to make a selection. Brick Wall slammed a fist into the small of Myron’s back. Myron sensed the blow coming. He shifted enough to avoid both the kidney and serious damage. At the same time he spun and delivered an elbow strike to Brick Wall’s nose. There was a satisfying, crunching noise like a fist closing over a bird’s nest.

The victory was short-lived. As Myron had feared, these guys knew what they were doing. Camouflage Pants struck at the same time, connecting where his comrade had failed. Pain erupted in Myron’s kidney. His knees buckled but he fought it off. He doubled over toward Brick Wall and threw a back kick, his foot snapping out like a piston. His lack of balance threw off his aim. The blow landed on Camouflage’s thigh. It didn’t do much damage but it was powerful enough to push him away. Brick Wall was starting to recover. He groped blindly and found Myron’s hair. He grabbed and pulled up. Myron pinned the hand with one of his own, digging his fingernails into the sensitive pressure points between the joints. Brick Wall screamed. Camouflage Pants was back. He punched Myron straight in the stomach. It hurt. A lot. Myron knew he was in trouble. He went down to one knee and bounced up, a palm strike at the ready. It connected with Brick Wall’s groin. Brick Wall’s eyes bulged. He dropped like somebody had pulled a stool out from under him. Camouflage Pants connected with a solid shot to the side of Myron’s head. Numbness flowed into Myron’s skull. Another blow landed. Myron’s eyes began to lose focus. He tried to stand up but his legs wouldn’t let him. He felt a kick land on a rib. The world began to spin.

“Hey! Hey, what you doing? Hey, you!”

“Stop it! What the fuck!”

In his haze Myron recognized the voices. Joe and Bone from the bar. Myron took the opportunity to scramble away on all fours. There was no need. Camouflage Pants had already helped Brick Wall to his feet. Both men ran.

Joe and Bone quickly came over and looked down at Myron.

“You okay?” Joe asked.

Myron nodded.

“You won’t forget about sending us that autographed picture, will you? Cousin Brucie never sent one.”

“I’ll send you two,” Myron said.

Chapter 8

He convinced Joe and Bone not to call the cops. They didn’t take much convincing. Most people do not like activities that involve law enforcement. They helped Myron into a taxi. The driver wore a turban and listened to country music. Multiculturalism. Myron spit out Jessica’s Soho address and collapsed into the ripped cushions. The driver wasn’t interested in conversation. Good.

Myron mentally checked over his body. Nothing broken. The ribs would be bruised at worst. Nothing he couldn’t play through. The head was another matter. Tylenol with codeine would help tonight, then he could move down to Advil or something in the morning. There was nothing much you could do for head trauma but give it time and control the pain.

Jessica met him at the door in her bathrobe. He felt, as he often did around her, a little short of breath. She skipped admonishments, drew a bath, helped him undress, crawled in behind him. The water felt good against his skin. He leaned back on her as she wrapped washcloths around his head. He let loose a deep, totally content breath.

“When did you go to medical school?” he asked.

From behind him Jessica kissed his cheek. “Feeling better?”

“Yes, Doctor. Much better.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

He did. She listened in silence, her fingertips gently massaging his temples. Her touch was soothing. Myron imagined there were better things in life than being in this tub leaning back against the woman he loved, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of any. The pain began to dull and slacken.

“So who do you think they were?” she asked.

“No idea,” Myron said. “I imagine they’re hired goons.”

“And they wanted to know where Greg was?”

“Seems so.”

“If two goons like that were looking for me,” she said, “I might disappear too.”

That thought had crossed Myron’s mind too. “Yes.”

“So what’s your next step?”

He smiled and closed his eyes. “What? No lectures? No telling me it’s too dangerous?”

“Too cliché,” she said. “Besides, there’s something else here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something about all this you’re not telling me.”

“I—”

She put a finger over his lips. “Just tell me what you plan on doing next.”

He settled back down. Scary how easily she read him. “I have to start talking to people.”

“Like?”

“His agent. His roommate, a guy named Leon White. Emily.”

“Emily. That would be your old college sweetheart?”

“Uh huh,” Myron said. Quick subject change before she started reading him again. “How was your evening with Audrey?”

“Fine. We mostly talked about you.”

“What about me?”

Jessica began to stroke his chest. The touch slowly drifted away from being merely soothing. Her fingertips caressed his chest with a feather touch. Gently. Too gently. She was strumming him like Perlman on a violin.

“Uh, Jess.”

She shushed him. Her voice was soft. “Your ass,” she said.

“My ass?”

“Yep, that’s what we talked about.” To emphasize the point her hand cupped a cheek. “Even Audrey had to admit it was edible, running up and down the court like that.”

“I have a mind too,” Myron said. “A brain. Feelings.”

She lowered her mouth toward his ear. When her lips touched the lobe, he felt a jolt. “Who cares?”

“Uh, Jess …”

“Shhh,” she said as her other hand slid down his chest. “I’m the doctor here, remember?”

Chapter 9

The ringing phone jabbed at the base of nerves in the back of his skull. Myron’s eyes blinked open. Sunlight knifed through the slit in the curtain. He checked next to him in the bed—first with his hands, then with his eyes. Jessica wasn’t there. The phone continued to blare. Myron reached for it.

“Hello.”

“So this is where you are.”

He closed his eyes. The ache in his head multiplied tenfold. “Hi, Mom.”

“You don’t sleep in your home anymore?”

His home was the basement of his parents’ house, the same house in which he’d been raised. More and more he was spending his nights at Jessica’s. It was probably a good thing. He was thirty-two; he was fairly normal; he had plenty of money. There was no reason to still be living with Mommy and Daddy.

“How’s your trip?” he asked. His mother and father were on some tour of Europe. One of those bus tours that hit twelve cities in four days.

“You think I called at the Vienna Hilton’s long distant rates to chitchat about our itinerary?”

“Guess not.”

“You know how much it cost to call from a hotel in Vienna? With all their surcharges and taxes and everything?”

“A lot, I’m sure.”

“I have the rates right here. I’ll tell you exactly. Hold on. Al, what did I do with those rates?”

“Mom, it’s not important.”

“I had it a second ago. Al?”

“Why don’t you tell me when you get home?” Myron suggested. “It’ll give me something to look forward to.”

“Save the fresh remarks for your friends, okay? You know very well why I’m calling.”

“I don’t, Mom.”

“Fine, then I’ll tell you. One of the other people on this tour—the Smeltmans, very nice couple. He’s in the jewelry business. Marvin, his name is. I think. They have a shop in Montclair. We used to drive by it all the time when you were a kid. It’s on Bloomfield Avenue, near that movie theater. Remember?”

“Uh huh.” He had no idea what she was talking about but it was easier.

“So the Smeltmans talked to their son on the phone last night. He called them, Myron. He had their itinerary and everything. Just called his parents to make sure they were having a nice time, that kind of thing.”

“Uh huh.” Mom was in decompensation mode. There was no way to stop it. She could go in a heartbeat from the modern, intelligent woman he knew her to be to something out of summer stock Fiddler on the Roof. Right now she was Golda heading toward Yenta.

“Anyway, the Smeltmans brag how they’re on the same trip with Myron Bolitar’s parents. Big deal, right? Who knows you anymore? You haven’t played in years. But the Smeltmans are big basketball fans. Go figure. Their son used to watch you play or something, I don’t know. So anyway, the son—I think his name is Herb or Herbie or Ralph, something like that—he tells them you’re playing professional basketball. That the Dragons signed you. He says you’re making a comeback or something, what do I know? Your father is so embarrassed. I mean, complete strangers are talking about it and your own parents don’t even know. We thought the Smeltmans were crazy.”

“It’s not what you think,” Myron said.

“What’s not what I think?” she countered. “You shoot around in the driveway a little. Okay, no big deal. But I don’t understand. You never even mentioned you were playing again.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t lie to me. You scored two points last night. Your father called Sports Phone. You know what it cost to call Sports Phone from here?”

“Mom, it’s no big deal.”

“Listen to me, Myron, you know your father. The man pretends it doesn’t mean anything. He loves you no matter what, you know that. But he hasn’t stopped smiling since he heard. He wants to fly home right now.”

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t,” she repeated, exasperated. “You tell him, Myron. The man is loo-loo, you know that. A crazy person. So tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s a long story, Mom.”

“But it’s true? You’re playing again?”

“Only temporarily.”

“What does that mean, ‘only temporarily’?”

Jessica’s Call Waiting clicked in. “Mom, I gotta go. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.”

“What? That’s it?”

“I’ll tell you more later.”

Surprisingly she backed off. “You be careful with your knee.”

“I will.”

He changed over to the other line. It was Esperanza. She didn’t bother with hello.

“It’s not Greg’s blood,” she said.

“What?”

“The blood you found in the basement,” she said. “It’s AB positive. Greg’s blood type is O negative.”

Myron had not expected to hear this. He tried to reconcile it in his head. “Maybe Clip was right. Maybe it was one of Greg’s kids.”

“Impossible,” she said.

“Why?”

“Didn’t you take basic biology in high school?”

“Eighth grade. But I was too busy staring at Mary Ann Palmiero. What?”

“AB is rare. In order for a kid to have it, his parents have to be A and B or it’s impossible. In other words, if Greg is O, then his kids can’t be AB.”

“Maybe it’s a friend’s,” Myron tried. “Maybe one of the kids had a friend over.”

“Sure,” Esperanza said. “That’s probably it. The kids have some friends over. One of them bleeds all over the place and nobody cleans it up. Oh and then by a strange coincidence Greg vanishes.”

Myron threaded the phone cord through his fingers like his hand was a loom. “Not Greg’s blood,” he repeated. “Now what?”

Esperanza didn’t bother responding.

“How the hell am I supposed to investigate something like this without getting anyone suspicious?” he went on. “I have to ask people questions, right? They’re going to want to know why.”

“I feel very sorry for you,” Esperanza said in a tone that made clear she was anything but. “I got to get to the office. You coming in?”

“Maybe this afternoon. I’m going to see Emily this morning.”

“Is that the old girlfriend Win told me about?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“Don’t take any chances. Put on a condom now.” She hung up.

Not Greg’s blood? Myron didn’t get it. As he drifted off to sleep last night he had worked up a neat little theory that went something like this: The hoods were searching for Greg. Maybe they had roughed him up a bit, made him bleed a little. Just to show him they meant serious business. Greg had reacted by running away.

It all sort of fit. It explained the blood in the basement. It explained why Greg suddenly took off. Yep, all a very nice and neat equation: One beating plus one death threat equaled a man on the run.

Problem was, the blood in the basement was not Greg’s. Kinda put a damper on the theory. If Greg had been beaten in the basement, then it would have been his blood. Greg would have bled his own blood, not someone else’s. In fact, it was very difficult to bleed someone else’s blood. Myron shook his head. He needed a shower. A bit more deducing like this and the slaughtered-chicken theory would begin to pick up steam.

Myron soaped himself up, then turned his back to the shower and let the water cascade over his shoulders and down his chest. He toweled off and got dressed. Jessica was on the word processor in the other room. He had learned never to disturb her when the keyboard was clacking. He left a quick note and slipped out. He grabbed the 6 train up to midtown and walked to the Kinney lot on 46th Street. Mario tossed him the keys without glancing up from his paper. He picked up the FDR north at 62nd Street and took it to the Harlem River Drive. There was a slowdown for right lane construction, but he made it to the George Washington Bridge in pretty good time. He took Route 4 through a place called Paramus, which was actually a giant mall pretending to also be a township. He veered to the right and passed the Nabisco building on Route 208. He was hoping for a factory Ritz-whiff, but today he got nothing.

As he pulled up to Emily’s house, déjà vu swatted him in the back of the head like a father’s warning blow. He had been here before, of course, during college breaks in their courting days. The house was brick and modern and fairly huge. It sat in a well-groomed cul-de-sac. The backyard was fenced. He remembered that there was a swimming pool in the back. He remembered that there was also a gazebo. He remembered making love with Emily in the gazebo, their clothes wrapped around ankles, the humidity coating their skin with a thin layer of sweat. The sweet bird of youth.

He parked the car, pulled the key out of the ignition, and just sat there. He had not seen Emily in more than ten years. Much had happened in the ensuing years, but he still feared her reaction to seeing him. The mental image of Emily opening the door, screaming “Bastard,” then slamming it in his face was one of the reasons he hadn’t worked up the nerve to call first.

He looked out the car window. There was no movement on the street. Then again there were only ten houses. He debated his approach and came up with nothing. He checked his watch, but the time didn’t register in his head. He sighed. One thing was for sure: he couldn’t sit here all day. This was a nice neighborhood, the kind where someone would spot him and call the police. Time to get a move on. He opened the door and stepped out. The development was at least fifteen years old but it still looked new. All the yards were just a little too sparse. Not enough trees and shrubbery yet. The grass looked like a guy with a bad hair transplant.

Myron walked up the brick path. He checked his palms. They were wet. He rang the doorbell. Part of him flashed back to earlier visits, his mind playing along with the long, still-familiar chime of the bell. The door opened. It was Emily.

“Well, well, well,” she said. Myron could not tell if the tone was one of surprise or sarcasm. Emily had changed. She looked a little thinner, a bit more toned. Her face was less fleshy too, accentuating the cheekbones. Her hair was cut shorter and styled. “If it isn’t the good one I let get away.”

“Hi, Emily.” Mr. Big Opening.

“Here to propose?” she asked.

“Been there, done that.”

“But you didn’t mean it, Myron. I wanted sincerity back then.”

“And now?”

“Now I realize sincerity is overrated.” She flashed him a smile.

“You look good, Emily,” he said. Get Myron on a roll and it’s one good line after another.

“So do you,” she said. “But I’m not going to help you.”

“Help me what?”

She made a face. “Come on in.”

He followed her inside. The house was full of skylights and cathedral ceilings and white painted walls. Airy. The front foyer was done in some expensive tile. She led Myron to the living room. He sat on a white couch. The floors were beechwood. It was exactly the same as it was ten years ago. Either they had gotten the exact same couches again or their house guests had been exceptionally well behaved. There wasn’t a spot on them. The only mess was a pile of newspapers in the corner. Mostly daily tabloids, from the looks of it. A New York Post front-page headline read SCANDAL! in huge 72 point print. Specific.

An old dog traipsed into the room on rigid legs. It looked like he was trying to wag his tail, but the result was a pitiful sway. He managed to lick Myron’s hand with a dry tongue.

“Look at that,” Emily said. “Benny remembers you.”

Myron stiffened. “This is Benny?”

She nodded.

Emily’s family had bought the overactive puppy for her younger brother Todd when Myron and Emily had first started dating. Myron was there when they brought the puppy home from the breeder. Little Benny had stumbled around with blinking eyes and then peed on this very floor. No one cared. Benny quickly got used to people. He greeted everyone by jumping on them, believing in a way only a dog could that no one would ever do him harm. Benny was not jumping now. He looked very old. He looked a brief step away from death. A sudden sadness swept through Myron.

“You looked good last night,” Emily said. “It was nice seeing you back on the court.”

“Thanks.” The quips never stop.

“Are you thirsty?” she asked. “I could make you some lemonade. Like in a Tennessee Williams play. Lemonade for the gentleman caller, except I doubt Amanda Wingfield used a Crystal Light mix.” Before he could answer she disappeared around the corner. Benny looked up at Myron, struggling to see through milky cataracts. Myron scratched the dog’s ear. The tail picked up a bit of velocity. Myron smiled sadly at Benny. Benny moved closer, as if he understood how Myron felt and appreciated the sentiment. Emily returned with two glasses of lemonade.

“Here,” she said. She handed him a glass and sat down.

“Thank you.” Myron took a sip.

“So what’s next on your agenda, Myron?”

“Next?”

“Another comeback?”

“I don’t understand.”

Emily gave him the smile again. “First you replace Greg on the court,” she said. “Maybe next you’ll want to replace him in the bedroom.”

Myron almost gagged on his lemonade, but he managed to smother the sound. Going for the shock. Classic Emily. “Not funny,” he said.

“I’m just having a little fun,” she said.

“Yes, I know.”

She put her elbow on the back of the couch and propped up her head with her hand. “I see you’re dating Jessica Culver,” she said.

“Yep.”

“I like her books.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“But we both know the truth.”

“What’s that?”

She leaned forward now and took a slow sip from her glass. “Sex with her isn’t as good as it was with me.”

More classic Emily. “You’re sure about that?” he said.

“Very sure,” she replied. “I’m not being immodest. I’m sure your Ms. Culver is quite skilled. But with me it was new. It was discovery. It was impossibly hot. Neither of us can ever recapture that rapture with anyone else. It’d be impossible. It would be like going back in time.”

“I don’t compare,” Myron said.

With a smile and a tilt of the head, she said, “Bullshit.”

“You don’t want me to compare.”

The smile was unfazed. “Come, come now, Myron. You’re not going to give me that spiritual crap, are you? You’re not going to tell me it’s better because you share a deep and beautiful relationship and thus the sex is beyond something physical? That line would be so unbecoming on you.”

Myron did not respond. He didn’t know what to say and he didn’t feel very comfortable with the conversation. “What did you mean before?” he asked, shifting gears. “When you said you wouldn’t help me.”

“Exactly what I meant.”

“What won’t you help with?”

Again the smile. “Was I ever stupid, Myron?”

“Never,” he said.

“Do you really think I believed that comeback story? Or the one about Greg being”—she made quote marks in the air—“ ‘in seclusion’ for an ankle injury? Your visit here just confirms my suspicion.”

“What suspicion?”

“Greg is missing. You’re trying to find him.”

“What makes you think Greg is missing?”

“Please, Myron, don’t play games with me. You owe me that much at least.”

He nodded slowly. “Do you know where he is?”

“No. But I hope the bastard is dead and rotting in a hole.”

“Stop mincing words,” Myron said. “Tell me how you really feel.”

The smile was sadder this time. Myron felt a pang. Greg and Emily had fallen in love. They’d been married. They had two children. What had torn that all apart? Was it something recent … or was it something in their pasts, something tainted from the beginning? Myron felt his throat go dry.

“When was the last time you saw Greg?” he asked.

“A month ago,” she said.

“Where?”

“In divorce court.”

“Are you two on speaking terms?”

“I meant what I said before. About him being dead and rotting.”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

Emily nodded a suit-yourself.

“If he was hiding, do you have any idea where?”

“Nope.”

“No summer house? No place he liked to get away?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know if Greg had a girlfriend?”

“Nope. But I would pity the poor woman.”

“Have you ever heard the name Carla?”

She hesitated. Her index finger tapped her knee, an old gesture so familiar to him it almost hurt to watch. “Wasn’t there a Carla who lived on my floor at Duke?” she asked. “Yes, Carla Anderson. Sophomore year, wasn’t it? Pretty girl.”

“Anything more recent?”

“No.” She sat up, crossed her legs. “How’s Win?”

“The same.”

“One of life’s constants,” she said. “He loves you, you know. I wonder if he’s a latent homosexual.”

“Two men can love each other and not be gay,” Myron said.

She arched an eyebrow. “You really think so?”

He was letting her get to him. Bad mistake. “Are you aware that Greg was going to sign an endorsement deal?” he asked her.

That got her attention. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“A big one?”

“Huge from my understanding,” Myron replied. “With Forte.”

Emily’s hands tightened. She would have made fists had her nails not been so long. “Son of a bitch.”

“What?”

“He waited until the divorce had been finalized and I got squat. Then he signs the deal. That son of a bitch.”

“What do you mean, squat? Greg was still wealthy.”

She shook her head. “His agent lost it all. Or so he claimed in court.”

“Martin Felder?”

“Yep. Didn’t have a penny to his name. Son of a bitch.”

“But Greg still works with Felder. Why would he stay with a guy who lost his money?”

“I don’t know, Myron.” Her voice was clipped and annoyed. “Perhaps the son of a bitch was lying. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Myron waited. Emily looked at him. Tears welled in her eyes but she bit them back down. She stood and walked to the other side of the room. Her back was now to him. She looked out the sliding glass doors into the fenced-in yard. The pool was covered with a tarp; random sticks and leaves clung to the aqua. Two children appeared. A boy of about ten chased a girl who looked to be eight. They were both laughing with faces wide and open and a little rosy from either cold or exertion. The boy stopped when he saw his mother. He gave her a big smile and wave. Emily raised her hand and gave a small wave back. The children ran on. Emily crossed her arms like she was hugging herself.

“He wants to take them away from me,” she said in a remarkably calm voice. “He’ll do anything to get them.”

“Like?”

“Like the sleaziest things you can imagine.”

“How sleazy?”

“None of your goddamn business.” She stopped. She still had her back to him. Myron could see her shoulders quake. “Get out,” she said.

“Emily …”

“You want to help him, Myron.”

“I want to find him. There’s a difference.”

She shook her head. “You don’t owe him,” she said. “I know you think you do. It’s your way. I saw the guilt in your face back then, and I could still see it the second I opened the front door. It’s over, Myron. It had nothing to do with what happened to us. He never found out.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he asked.

She spun toward him. “It’s not supposed to make you feel better,” she snapped. “It’s not about you. I’m the one who married him. I’m the one who betrayed him. I can’t believe you’re still beating yourself up about it.”

Myron swallowed. “He visited me in the hospital. After I got injured. He sat and talked with me for hours.”

“And that makes him a swell guy?”

“We shouldn’t have done it.”

“Grow up,” she said. “It was more than ten years ago. Gone and forgotten.”

Silence.

After some time had passed, Myron looked up at her. “Could you really lose your kids?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How far would you go to keep them?”

“As far as I had to.”

“Would you kill to keep them?” Myron asked.

“Yes.” No hesitation.

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea why some goons would be looking for Greg?”

“No.”

“You didn’t hire them?”

“If I did,” she said, “I wouldn’t tell you. But if these ‘goons’ want to hurt Greg, I’ll do all I can to help them locate him.”

Myron put down the lemonade. “I guess I better get going.”

She showed him to the door. Before she opened it, she put a hand on his arm. Her touch burned right through the material. “It’s okay,” she said gently. “Let it go. Greg never found out.”

Myron nodded.

She took a deep breath and smiled again. Her voice returned to its normal tone. “It was good to see you again, Myron.”

“Same here,” he said.

“Come back again, will you?” She was trying so hard to be casual. Myron knew it was just an act, one he had seen before. “Perhaps we can have a quick fling for old times’ sake. Couldn’t hurt, right?”

One last grasp at the shock. Myron pulled away. “That’s what we said last time,” he said. “And it still hurts.”

Chapter 10

“It was the night before they got married,” Myron began. He was back at his office. Esperanza sat in front of him. Her eyes were on him, but he didn’t know that. He stared at the ceiling, his fingers laced and resting on his chest. He had his chair tilted far back. “Do you want the details?”

“Only if you want to tell me,” Esperanza said.

He told her. He told her how Emily had called him. He told her how she came to his room. He told her that they’d both had too much to drink. He said that last one as a sort of trial balloon, but a quick glance at Esperanza blew that particular old balloon out of the sky. She interrupted with one question.

“How long after the draft did all this take place?”

Myron smiled at the ceiling. She was so damned perceptive. There was no reason to answer.

“I assume,” Esperanza continued, “that this little tryst occurred sometime between the pro draft and your injury.”

“You assume correctly.”

“Ah,” she said with a small nod. “So let me see if I got the true picture now. It’s your senior year of college. Your team won the NCAA finals—a point for you. You end up losing Emily and she ends up engaged to Greg—a point for him. The draft comes. Greg is the seventh overall pick; you are the eighth—a point for Greg.”

Myron closed his eyes and nodded. “You’re wondering if I was trying to even the score.”

“Not wondering,” Esperanza corrected. “The answer is obvious.”

“You’re not helping.”

“You want help, go to a shrink,” she said. “You want the truth, come to me.”

She was right. He took his hands off his chest. Keeping the fingers laced, he placed them behind his head. He put his feet on the desk.

“Did she cheat on you with him?” she asked.

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. They met after we broke up.”

“Too bad,” she said. “It would have given you a nice out.”

“Yeah. Pity.”

“So this is why you feel obligated to Greg? Because you slept with his fiancée?”

“That’s a big part of it, but there’s more to it than that.”

“Like?”

“It’s going to sound corny, but there’s always been a bond between us.”

“A bond?”

Myron’s line of vision traveled from the ceiling to his movie-still wall. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton were enjoying a Manhattan moment in Annie Hall. Bogie and Bergman leaned on Sam’s piano back in the days when Paris had been theirs. “Greg and I were once-in-a-lifetime competitors,” he said. “And there is a special bond between competitors. Kinda like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. You become defined by one another. It was like that with Greg and me. It was unspoken, but we both knew the bond was there.”

He stopped. Esperanza waited in silence. “When I hurt my knee,” Myron continued, “Greg visited me in the hospital. He showed up the very next day. I woke up from some pain medication and there he was. Sitting with Win. And I instantly understood. Win must have understood too, otherwise he would have thrown him out.”

Esperanza nodded.

“Greg stayed around too. He helped with rehab. That’s what I mean by a bond. He was devastated by the news because when I got hurt, it was like a part of him was gone too. He tried to tell me why it meant so much to him, but he couldn’t put it into words. It didn’t matter. I knew. He just had to be there.”

“And you hurt your knee how long after you’d slept with his new bride?”

“About a month.”

“Did seeing him all the time help or hurt?”

“Yes.”

She said nothing.

“Do you understand now?” he asked. “Do you see why I have to pursue this? You’re probably right. Sleeping with Emily was probably nothing more than payback for not getting drafted before Greg. Just another stupid battle. But what kind of way was that for a marriage to start? I owe Greg Downing. It’s that simple.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because too much of your past is resurfacing. First Jessica—”

“Don’t start with that.”

“I’m not,” she said calmly. Her voice was rarely calm when it came to Jessica. “I’m just stating a fact. Jessica crushed you when she left. You never got over her.”

“But she’s back now.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Basketball also crushed you when it left. You never got over it.”

“Sure I did.”

She shook her head. “First you spent three years trying every possible remedy to fix your knee.”

“I just tried to get better,” he interjected. “Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“Nothing. But you were a pain in the ass. You pushed Jessica away. I’m not forgiving her for what she did to you. You didn’t ask for that. But you played a part in her leaving.”

“Why are you bringing this all up?”

She shook her head. “You’re the one who’s bringing it all up. Your entire past. Jessica and now basketball. You want us to watch you go through all this again, but we won’t.”

“Go through what?”

But she didn’t answer. Instead she asked, “Do you want to know why I didn’t go see you play last night?”

He nodded, still not facing her. His cheeks felt flush and hot.

“Because with Jessica, at least there’s a chance you won’t get hurt again. There’s a chance the witch smartened up. But with basketball, there is no chance. You can’t come back.”

“I can handle it,” he said, hearing those words yet again.

She said nothing.

Myron stared off. He barely heard the phone ring. Neither one of them moved to answer it. “You think I should drop this?” he asked.

“Yes. I agree with Emily. She’s the one who betrayed him. You were just a handy tool. If what happened somehow poisoned their relationship, it was her doing. It was her decision. You don’t owe Greg Downing a thing.”

“Even if what you’re saying is true,” he said, “that bond is still there.”

“Bullshit,” Esperanza said. “That’s just a load of pedantic, macho bullshit. You’re just proving my point. There’s no bond anymore, if there ever was one. Basketball hasn’t been a part of your life for a decade. The only reason you think the bond is still there is because you’re playing again.”

There was a loud pounding on the door. The frame shook and almost gave way. Myron startled upright. “Who’s manning the phones?” he asked.

Esperanza smiled.

“Oh no.”

“Come in,” Esperanza said.

The door opened. Myron’s feet fell to the floor. Though he had seen her many times before, his jaw still dropped open. Big Cyndi ducked in. She was mammoth. Six-five and over three hundred pounds. Cyndi wore a white T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off at the biceps. Her arms were the envy of Hulk Hogan. Her makeup was more garish than it had been in the ring. Her hair was purple spikes; her mascara was also purple though a darker shade than her hair. Her lipstick was a red smear. Cyndi looked like something out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She was the single most frightening sight Myron had ever seen.

“Hi, Cyndi,” Myron tried.

Cyndi growled. She held up her middle finger, turned, stepped back through the door, closed it.

“What the—”

“She’s telling you to pick up line one,” Esperanza said.

“Cyndi’s answering phones?”

“Yes.”

“She doesn’t talk!”

“In person. On the phone she’s very good.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Pick up the phone and stop whining.”

Myron did so. It was Lisa, their contact at New York Bell. Most people think that only the police can get phone records. Not true. Almost every private eye in the country has a contact at their local phone company. It’s just a matter of simply paying someone off. A month’s phone records can cost you anywhere from one thousand to five thousand dollars. Myron and Win had met Lisa during their days with the feds. She didn’t take money, but they always took care of her in some way or another. “I got what Win wanted,” Lisa said.

“Go ahead.”

“The call at nine eighteen P.M. came from a public phone located in a diner near Dyckman Street and Broadway,” she said.

“Isn’t that up near Two Hundredth Street?”

“I think so. You want the phone number?”

Carla had called Greg from a diner on 200th Street? Weirder and weirder. “If you have it.”

She gave it to him. “Hope that helps.”

“It does, Lisa. Thanks.” He held up the paper to Esperanza. “Lookie what I got,” he said. “A real live clue.”

Chapter 11

To be fair, the Parkview Diner lived up to its name. You did indeed have a view of Lieutenant William Tighe Park across the street; it was smaller than the average backyard with shrubs so high you really couldn’t see the landscaped garden within. A wire-mesh fence enclosed the grounds. Hung on the fence in several places were signs that read in big, bold letters: DO NOT FEED THE RATS. No joke. In smaller print the warning was repeated in Spanish: No Des Comida a Las Ratas. The signs had been placed there by a group calling itself the Quality of Life Zone. Myron shook his head. Only in New York would this be a problem—people who could not contain themselves from the seductive lure of feeding vermin. Myron glanced again at the sign, then the diner. Rats. Quite the appetite-enhancer.

He crossed the street. Two levels above the Parkview Diner, a dog squeezed his head through the grates of a fire escape and barked at passing pedestrians. The Parkview’s green overhang was ripped in several spots. The letters were faded to the point of unintelligibility, and the support pole was bent so far that Myron had to duck to get to the door. There was a poster of a gyro sandwich in the window. Today’s specials, according to a blackboard in the same window, included eggplant parmigiana and chicken à la king. The soup was beef consommé. There were permits from the City of New York Department of Buildings stuck on the door like car-inspection decals.

Myron entered and was immediately greeted by the familiar yet nonspecific smell of a Manhattan diner. Fat was in the air. Taking a deep breath felt as if it would clog an artery. A waitress with hair bleached to the point of straw offered him a table. Myron asked her for the manager. Using her pencil she pointed over her shoulder at a man behind the counter.

“That’s Hector,” she said. “He owns the place.”

Myron thanked her and grabbed a soda-fountain stool at the counter. He debated spinning himself in the seat and decided the act might be viewed as immature. Two stools to his right, an unshaven, perhaps homeless man with black Thom McAn sneakers and a tattered overcoat smiled and nodded. Myron nodded and smiled back. The man went back to his coffee. He raised his shoulders and huddled into the drink as though he suspected someone might try to swipe it in mid-sip.

Myron picked up a vinyl menu with cracked binding. He opened it but didn’t really read it. There were a lot of worn index cards jammed into protective plastic cases announcing various specials. Worn was an apt description of the Parkview Diner, but it didn’t fairly convey the overall impression. There was something welcoming and even clean about this place. The counter gleamed. So did the utensils and the silver milk shake maker and the soda fountain. Most patrons read a newspaper or gabbed with one another as if they were eating at home. They knew their waitress’s name, and you could bet your last dollar she didn’t introduce herself and tell them she was going to be their server when they first sat down.

Hector the owner was busy at the grill. Almost two P.M. It wasn’t the height of the lunch hour, but business was still pretty brisk. He barked out some orders in Spanish, his eyes never leaving the food. Then he turned around with a polite smile, wiped his hands on a rag, and asked Myron if he could help him. Myron asked if he had a pay phone.

“No, sir, I’m sorry,” Hector answered. The Hispanic accent was there, but Hector had worked on it. “There’s one on the street corner. On the left.”

Myron looked at the number Lisa had given him. He read it out loud. Hector did several things at the same time. He flipped burgers, folded over an omelette, checked the french fries. His eyes were everywhere—the cash register, the clientele at both the tables and the counter, the kitchen to his left.

“Oh that,” Hector said. “It’s in the back. In the kitchen.”

“The kitchen?”

“Yes, sir.” Still polite.

“A pay phone in the kitchen?”

“Yes, sir,” Hector said. He was on the short side, thin under his white apron and polyester black pants. His nose had been broken several times. His forearms looked like steel cords. “It’s for my staff.”

“Don’t you have a business phone?”

“Of course we do.” His voice spiked up a bit now, as if the question was an insult. “We do a big takeout and delivery business here. Lots of people order lunch from us. We have a fax machine too. But I don’t want my staff tying up the lines, you know? You get a busy signal, you give your business to someone else, yes? So I put a pay phone in the back.”

“I see.” An idea came to Myron. “Are you telling me customers never use it?”

“Well, sir, if a customer truly insists, I would never refuse him.” The practiced politeness of a good businessman. “The customer must come first at the Parkview. Always.”

“Has a customer ever insisted?”

“No, sir. I don’t think any customers even know we have it.”

“Can you tell me who was using the pay phone at nine-eighteen P.M. last Saturday?”

That question got his attention. “Excuse me?” Myron started to repeat the question but Hector interrupted him. “Why would you want to know that?”

“My name is Bernie Worley,” Myron said. “I’m a product supervising agent with AT&T.” A product what? “Somebody is trying to cheat us, sir, and we are not happy about it.”

“Cheat you?”

“A Y511.”

“A what?”

“A Y511,” Myron repeated. You start tossing the bull, your best bet is to just keep tossing. “It’s an electronic monitoring device built in Hong Kong. It’s new on the market, but we’re onto it. Sold on the streets. Somebody used one on your phone at nine-eighteen P.M. on March eighteenth of this year. They dialed Kuala Lumpur and spoke for nearly twelve minutes. The total cost of the call is twenty-three dollars and eighty-two cents, but the fine for using a Y511 will be at least seven hundred dollars with the potential for up to one year in prison. Plus we’ll have to remove the phone.”

Hector’s face became a mask of pure panic. “What?” Myron wasn’t thrilled with what he was doing—scaring an honest, hard-working immigrant like this—but he knew that the fear of government or big business would work in a situation like this. Hector turned around and shouted something in Spanish to a teenager who looked like him. The teenager took over the grill. “I don’t understand this, Mr. Worley.”

“It’s a public phone, sir. You just admitted to a product supervising agent that you used the public phones for private use; that is, for your employees only and denying public access. This violates our own code, section one-twenty-four B. I wouldn’t report it normally, but when you add in the use of a Y511—”

“But I didn’t use a Y511!”

“We don’t know that, sir.” Myron was playing Mr. Bureaucrat to the hilt; nothing made a person feel more impotent. There is no darker pit than the blank stare of a bureaucrat. “The phone is on your premises,” Myron continued in a bored singsong voice. “You just explained to me that the phone was only used by your employees—”

“Exactly!” Hector leaped. “By my employees! Not me!”

“But you own this establishment. You are responsible.” Myron looked around with his best, bored expression—the one he learned while waiting on line at the Division of Motor Vehicles. “We’ll also have to check out the status of all your employees. Maybe we can find the culprit that way.”

Hector’s eyes grew big. Myron knew this would hit home. There wasn’t a restaurant in Manhattan that didn’t employ at least one illegal alien. Hector’s jowls slackened. “All this,” he said, “because someone used a pay phone?”

“What someone did, sir, was use an illegal electronic device known as a Y511. What you did, sir, was refuse to cooperate with the product supervising agent investigating this serious matter.”

“Refuse to cooperate?” Hector was grasping at the possible life preserver Myron had offered up. “No, sir, not me. I want to cooperate. I want to very much.”

Myron shook his head. “I don’t think you do.”

Hector bit down and set his polite meter on extra-strength now. “No, sir,” he said. “I want to help very much. I want to cooperate with the phone company. Tell me what I can do to help. Please.”

Myron sighed, gave it a few seconds. The diner bustled. The cash register dinged while the guy who looked homeless with the Thom McAn sneakers picked out greasy coins from a dirty hand. The griddle sizzled. The aroma from the various foods battled each other for dominance with none winning outright. Hector’s face grew more and more anxious. Enough, Myron thought. “For starters, you can tell me who was using the pay phone at nine-eighteen P.M. last Saturday.”

Hector held up a finger imploring patience. He shouted something in Spanish to the woman (Mrs. Hector maybe?) working the cash register. The woman shouted something back. She closed the drawer and walked toward them. As she drew closer, Myron noticed that Hector was suddenly giving him an odd look. Was he starting to see through Myron’s rather husky load of bull-dooky? Perhaps. But Myron looked back at him steadily and Hector quickly backed down. He might be suspicious, but not suspicious enough to risk offending the all-powerful bureaucrat by questioning his authority.

Hector whispered something to the woman. She urgently whispered back. He made an understanding “ah” noise. Then he faced Myron and shook his head.

“It figures,” he said.

“What?”

“It was Sally.”

“Who?”

“At least I think it was Sally. My wife saw her on the phone around then. But she said she was only on for a minute or two.”

“Does Sally have a last name?”

“Guerro.”

“Is she here now?”

Hector shook his head. “She hasn’t been here since Saturday night. That’s what I mean by, figures. She gets me in trouble and then she runs out.”

“Has she called in sick?”

“No, sir. She just up and left.”

“You got an address on her?” Myron asked.

“I think so, let me see.” He pulled out a big carton that read “Snapple Peach Iced Tea” on the side. Behind him, the griddle hissed when fresh pancake batter touched down upon the hot metal. The files in the box were neat and color coded. Hector pulled one out and opened it. He shuffled through the sheets, found the one he was looking for, and frowned.

“What?” Myron prompted.

“Sally never gave us an address,” Hector said.

“How about a phone number?”

“No.” He looked up, remembering something. “She said she didn’t have a phone. That’s why she was using the one in the back so much.”

“Could you tell me what Ms. Guerro looked like?” Myron tried.

Hector suddenly looked uncomfortable. He glanced at his wife and cleared his throat. “Uh, she had brown hair,” he began. “Maybe five-four, five-five. Average height, I guess.”

“Anything else?”

“Brown eyes, I think.” He stopped. “That’s about it.”

“How old would you say she was?”

Hector checked the file again. “According to this, she was forty-five. That sounds about right.”

“How long has she worked here?” he asked.

“Two months.”

Myron nodded, rubbed his chin vigorously. “It sounds like an operative who goes by the name Carla.”

“Carla?”

“A notorious phone fraud,” Myron continued. “We’ve been after her for a while.” He glanced left, then right. Trying to look conspiratorial. “Have you ever heard her use the name Carla or hear someone call her Carla?”

Hector looked at his wife. She shook her head. “No, never.”

“Did she have any visitors? Any friends?”

Again Hector checked with his wife. Again the head shook. “No, none that we ever saw. She kept to herself most of the time.”

Myron decided to push a little further and confirm what he already knew. If Hector balked at this stage, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He leaned forward; Hector and his wife did likewise. “This may sound insensitive,” Myron whispered, “but was this woman large chested?”

Both nods were immediate. “Very large,” Hector said.

Suspicion confirmed.

He asked a few more questions, but any useful information had already been culled from these waters. Before leaving, he told them that they were in the clear and could continue to violate code section 124B without fear. Hector almost kissed his hand. Myron felt like a louse. What did you do today, Batman? Well, Robin, I started off by terrorizing a hard-working immigrant’s livelihood with a bunch of lies. Holy Cow, Batman, you’re the coolest! Myron shook his head. What to do for an encore—throw empty beer bottles at the dog on the fire escape?

Myron exited the Parkview Diner. He debated going to the park across the street, but suppose he became overcome by a lustful need to feed rats? No, he couldn’t risk it. He’d have to stay away. He began to head to the Dyckman Street subway station when a voice stopped him.

“You looking for Sally?”

Myron turned. It was the homeless-looking man with the Thom McAns from the diner. He sat on the pavement, his back leaning against the brick building. He had an empty plastic coffee cup in his hand. Panhandling.

“You know her?” Myron asked.

“She and I …” He winked and crossed his fingers. “We met because of that damn phone, you know.”

“Really.”

Using the wall for support the man stood. His facial hair was whitish, not full enough to be a beard yet past the stage of a Miami Vice wanna-be. His long hair was black as coal. “Sally was using my phone all the time. It pissed me off.”

“Your phone?”

“The pay phone in the back,” he said, licking his lips. “It’s right by the back door. I hang out in the back alley a lot so I can hear it, you know? It’s kind of like my business phone.” Myron couldn’t guess his age. His face was boyish but leathered—from the passing years or hard living, Myron couldn’t say. His grin was missing a couple of prominent teeth, reminding Myron of that beloved Christmas classic “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” Such a nice song really. No toys, no Sega Genesis video game. The kid just wanted teeth. So selfless really.

“I used to have my own cellular,” the man continued. “Two of them, as a matter of fact. But they got stolen. And the damn things are so unreliable, especially around the high buildings. And anyone can listen in with the right equipment. Me, I need to keep what I do secret, you see. Spies are everywhere. And they also give you brain tumors. The electrons or something. Brain tumors the size of beach balls.”

Myron kept his face blank. “Uh huh.” Speaking of tossing the bull.

“So anyway Sally started using it, too. It pissed me off, you know? I mean, I’m a businessman. I got important calls coming in. I can’t have the line tied up. Am I right?”

“As rain,” Myron said.

“See, I’m a Hollywood screenwriter.” He stuck out his hand. “Norman Lowenstein.”

Myron tried to remember the fake name he used with Hector. “Bernie Worley.”

“Nice to meet you, Bernie.”

“Do you know where Sally Guerro lives?”

“Sure. We used to be …” Norman Lowenstein crossed his fingers.

“So I heard. Could you tell me where she lives?”

Norman Lowenstein pursed his lips and used his pointer finger to scratch a spot near his throat. “I’m not real good with addresses and stuff,” he said. “But I could take you there.”

Myron wondered how big of a waste of time this was going to be. “Would you mind?”

“Sure, no problem. Let’s go.”

“Which way?”

“The A train,” Norman said. “Down to One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street.”

They walked toward the subway.

“You go the movies much, Bernie?” Norman asked.

“Much as the next guy, I guess.”

“Let me tell you something about movie-making,” he began, growing more animated. “It’s not all glamour and glitz. It’s a dog-eat-dog business like no other, making dreams for people. All the back-stabbing, all that money, all that fame and attention … it makes people act funny, you know? I got this screenplay with Paramount right now. They’re talking to Willis about it. Bruce Willis. He’s really interested.”

“Good luck with it,” Myron said.

Norman beamed. “Thanks, Bernie, that’s real nice of you. I mean it. Real nice. I’d like to tell you what my flick is about, but well, my hands are tied. You know how it is. Hollywood and all the theft out there. The studio wants it kept hush-hush.”

“I understand,” Myron said.

“I trust you, Bernie, it’s not that. But the studios insist. I can’t blame them really. They got to protect their interests, right?”

“Right.”

“It’s an action-adventure flick, that much I can tell you. But with heart too, you know? Not just a shoot-em-up. Harrison Ford wanted in, but he’s too old. I guess Willis is okay. He’s not my first choice, but what can you do?”

“Uh huh.”

One Twenty-fifth Street was not the nicest stop in the city. It was safe enough during the day, Myron surmised, but the fact that he was now carrying a gun made him feel a tad more secure. Myron did not like “packing heat” and rarely did so. It was not that Myron was particularly squeamish; it had more to do with comfort. The shoulder holster dug into his armpit and made it itch like he was wearing a tweed condom. But after last night’s soiree with Camouflage Pants and Brick Wall, it would be foolhardy to walk around unarmed.

“Which way?” Myron asked.

“Downtown.”

They headed south on Broadway. Norman regaled him with tales of Hollywood. The ins and outs. Myron nodded and kept walking. The farther south they headed, the better the area became. They passed the familiar iron gates of Columbia University, then turned left. “It’s right up here,” Norman said. “Toward the middle of the block.”

The street was lined with low-rise apartments that were mostly used by Columbia’s grad students and professors. Strange, Myron thought, that a diner waitress would live here. But then again nothing else about her involvement in all this made sense—why should where she lived? If she lived here at all, and not, say, with Bruce Willis in Hollywood.

Norman interrupted his thoughts. “You’re trying to help her, right?”

“What?”

Norman stopped walking. He was less animated now. “All that stuff about being from the phone company. That was all crap, right?”

Myron said nothing.

“Look,” he said, putting his hand on Myron’s forearm, “Hector is a good man. He came to this country with nothing. He works his ass off in that diner. He and his wife and son—they slave there every day. No days off. And every day he’s scared someone’s going to take it all away from him. All that worry … it clouds the thinking, you know? Me, I got nothing to lose so I’m not afraid of anything. Makes it easier to see some stuff. Know what I mean?”

Myron gave a slight nod.

Norman’s bright eyes dimmed as a bit of reality swept through him. Myron looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time. He made his eyes stop sweeping by him with barely a notice of age or height or even species. Myron realized that behind the lies and self-delusion lay the dreams of any man, the hopes and wants and needs that are the sole reserve of the human race.

“I’m worried about Sally,” Norman went on. “Maybe that’s clouding my thinking. But I know she wouldn’t just up and leave without saying good-bye to me. Sally wouldn’t do that.” He stopped, met Myron’s eyes with his own. “You’re not from the phone company, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“You want to help her?”

“Yes,” Myron said. “I want to help her.”

He nodded and pointed. “In here. Apartment two E.”

Myron walked up the stoop while Norman stayed on the street level. He pressed the black button reading 2E. No one answered. No surprise there. He tried the entrance door, but it was locked. You had to be buzzed in.

“You better stay there,” he told Norman. Norman nodded, understanding. These buzzer-protected doors were mild deterrents to crime, but their true purpose was to prevent vagrants from coming in and setting up camp in the lobby. Myron would just wait. Eventually an occupant would leave or enter the building. While said occupant opened the door, Myron would enter as though he belonged. No one would question a man dressed in khakis and a button-down BD Baggies shirt. If Norman stood next to him, however, that same occupant might react differently.

Myron moved down two steps. When he saw two young women approach the door from the inside, he slapped his pockets as though looking for keys. Then he walked purposefully up to the door, smiled, and waited for them to push it open. He need not have bothered with the dramatics. The two young women—college students, Myron guessed—went through the portal without looking up or decelerating their oral activities. Both were talking nonstop, neither listening. They paid absolutely no attention to him. Amazing restraint really. Of course from this angle they couldn’t see his ass, so their self-control was not only admirable but somewhat understandable.

He looked back at Norman, who thankfully waved him off. “You go yourself,” he said. “I don’t want to cause a problem.”

Myron let the door close.

The corridor was pretty much what he expected. It was painted off-white. No stripes or designs. There were no wall-hangings other than a huge bulletin board that read like a schizophrenic political manifesto. Dozens of leaflets announced everything from a dance sponsored by the Native American Gay and Lesbian Society to poetry readings by a group calling itself the Rush Limbaugh Review. Ah, the college life.

He ascended a stairway lit by two bare bulbs. All this walking and stair climbing were starting to take a toll on his bad knee. The joint tightened up like a rusted hinge. Myron felt himself dragging the leg behind him. He used the railing for support and wondered what the knee would be like when he reached arthritis age.

The floor plan of the building was far from symmetrical. Doors seemed to be placed in the wall as though at random. Off in a corner, a good distance from the other apartments, Myron found the door marked 2E. The positioning made the apartment look like an afterthought, as if someone had spotted some extra space in the back and decided to add an extra room or two. Myron knocked. No answer. No surprise. He checked the corridor. No one in sight. He was thankful that Norman was not here because he wouldn’t want someone to witness him breaking in.

Myron was not great at the lock-picking game. He had learned a bit over the years, but picking locks was a bit like playing a video game. You work at it enough, and eventually you move up levels. Myron hadn’t worked at it. He didn’t like it. He really didn’t have much natural talent for it. In most cases, he relied on Win to handle the mechanical stuff, like Barney used to do on Mission: Impossible.

He examined the door and felt his heart sink. Even for New York the dead bolts were nothing short of impressive. Three of them stacked intimidatingly from six inches above the knob to six inches below the top frame. Top of the line stuff. Brand-new, judging by the gleam and lack of scratches. This was a tad odd. Was Sally/Carla the extra cautious type, or was there a more aberrant reason for such security? Good question. Myron looked at the locks again. Win would have enjoyed the challenge; Myron knew that any effort he made would be fruitless.

He debated kicking in the door when he noticed something. He moved closer and squinted into the door crack. Again something struck him as being odd. The dead bolts were not engaged. Why buy all these expensive locks and not use them? He tried the knob. It was locked, but that one would be easy to get through with the ’loid card.

He took out the card. He couldn’t remember the last time he had used it. It looked pristine. Maybe never. He jammed it into the opening. Despite being an old lock it still took Myron almost five minutes to find the right spot to push the lock back. He gripped the knob. The door began to swing open.

It was open barely six inches when the odor attacked.

The bloodcurdling stench popped out into the hallway like pressurized gas. Myron felt his stomach dive and swoop. He gagged a little and felt a weight on his chest. He knew the smell, and dread filled him. He searched his pockets for a handkerchief and came up empty. He blocked his nose and mouth with the crook of his elbow, as if he were doing Bela Lugosi in Dracula. He didn’t want to go in. He wasn’t good at this type of thing. He knew that whatever image lay behind the door would stay with him, would haunt his nights and too often his days too. It would stay with him like a dear friend, tapping him on the shoulder every once in a while when he thought he was alone and at peace.

He pushed the door all the way open. The rancid smell permeated his meager protection. He tried to breathe through his mouth, but the thought of what he was sucking in made that option unbearable.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to travel far to find the source of the odor.

Chapter 12

“Whoa, Bolitar, new cologne?”

“Funny, Dimonte.”

NYPD homicide detective Roland Dimonte shook his head. “Christ, what a stink.” He was out of uniform, but you wouldn’t ever call him “plainclothes.” He wore a green silk shirt and jeans that were too tight and too dark blue. The bottoms were tucked into purple snakeskin boots; the color faded in and out with any angle change, like some psychedelic Hendrix poster from the sixties. Dimonte gnawed on a toothpick, a habit he picked up, Myron surmised, when he spotted himself doing it in the mirror and decided it looked tough. “You touch anything?” he asked.

“Just the doorknob,” Myron said. He had also checked the rest of the apartment to make sure there weren’t any other gruesome surprises. There weren’t.

“How did you get in?”

“The door was unlocked.”

“Really?” Dimonte raised an eyebrow and looked back at the door. “The door is set to lock automatically when you close it.”

“Did I say unlocked? I meant, ajar.”

“Sure you did.” Dimonte did a bit more gnawing, shook his head. He ran his hand through greasy hair. Ringlets clung to his forehead, refusing to give ground. “So who is she?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

Dimonte scrunched up his face like a closed fist. Displaying very skeptical. Subtle body language was not Dimonte’s forte. “Little early in the day to be pulling my hardware, ain’t it, Bolitar?”

“I don’t know her name. It might be Sally Guerro. Then again it might be Carla.”

“Uh huh.” Toothpick chew. “I thought I saw you on TV last night. That you were playing ball again.”

“I am.”

The coroner came over. He was tall and thin and his wire-rim glasses looked too big on the elongated face. “She’s been dead awhile,” he pronounced. “At least four days.”

“Cause?”

“Hard to say for sure. Someone bludgeoned her with a blunt object. I’ll know more when I get her on the table.” He looked at the corpse with professional disinterest, then back at Dimonte. “They’re not real, by the way.”

“What?”

He vaguely motioned toward the torso. “Her breasts. They’re implants.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dimonte said, “you fiddling with dead bodies now?”

The elongated face sagged, his jaw dropping to somewhere around his navel. “Don’t even joke about that,” the coroner said in a stage whisper. “You know what rumors like that could do to a guy in my business?”

“Get him promoted?” Dimonte said.

The coroner did not laugh. He gave Myron a wounded look, then Dimonte. “You think that’s funny, huh? Goddamn it, this is my career you’re fucking around with!”

“Calm down, Peretti, I’m just playing with you.”

“Playing with me? You think my career is some kind of fucking joke? What the hell is wrong with you?”

Dimonte’s eyes narrowed. “Kind of sensitive about all this, Peretti.”

“You have to be in my position,” he said, back straightening.

“If you say so.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“ ‘The lady protests too much, methinks.’ ”

“What?”

“It’s Shakespeare,” Dimonte said. “From Macbeth.” Dimonte looked over to Myron.

Myron smiled. “Hamlet.”

“I don’t give a shit who said it,” Peretti protested. “You shouldn’t mess around with a man’s reputation. I don’t think any of this is funny.”

“Like I give a rat’s ass what you think,” Dimonte said. “You got anything else?”

“She’s wearing a wig.”

“A wig? No kidding, Peretti. The case is as good as solved now. All we need to do is find a killer who hates wigs and fake tits. This is helpful, Peretti. What kind of panties was she wearing, huh? You sniff them yet?”

“I was just—”

“Do me a big favor, Peretti.” Dimonte made himself a little taller, hitched his pants. Signaling importance. Again the subtlety. “Tell me when she died. Tell me how she died. Then we’ll talk about her fashion accessories, okay?”

Peretti held up his hands in surrender and returned to the body. Dimonte turned to Myron. Myron said, “The implants and wig might be important. He was right to tell you.”

“Yeah, I know. I just like busting his chops.”

“And the quote is, ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’ ”

“Uh huh.” Dimonte changed toothpicks. The one in his mouth was frayed like a horse’s mane. “You going to tell me what the fuck is going on, or am I going to drag you downtown?”

Myron made a face. “Drag me downtown?”

“Don’t bust my balls on this, Bolitar, okay?”

Myron forced himself to look at the bloodied corpse. His stomach did back flips. He was starting to get used to the smell, the thought of which was nearly as bad as the smell itself. Peretti was back at it, making a small slit to get to the liver. Myron diverted his gaze. The homicide crew from John Jay was setting up, taking photographs, that kind of thing. Dimonte’s partner, a kid named Krinsky, quietly walked around and took notes. “Why would she make them so big?” Myron wondered out loud.

“What?”

“Her breasts. I can understand the desire to enlarge them. All the pressures in this society. But why make them that big?”

Dimonte said, “You’re shitting me, right?”

Krinsky came over. “All her stuff is in those suitcases.” He motioned with his hand to two bags on the floor. Myron had met Krinsky on maybe half a dozen occasions. Talking was not the kid’s forte; he seemed to do it as often as Myron picked locks. “I’d say she was moving out.”

“You got an ID yet?” Dimonte asked.

“Her wallet says her name is Sally Guerro,” Krinsky continued in a soft voice. “So does one of her passports.”

They both waited for Krinsky to continue. When he didn’t, Dimonte shouted, “What do you mean, one of her passports? How many does she have?”

“Three.”

“Jesus Christ, Krinsky, talk.”

“One is in the name Sally Guerro. One is in the name Roberta Smith. One is in the name Carla Whitney.”

“Give me those.” Dimonte scanned through the various passports. Myron looked over his shoulder. The same woman was in all three pictures, albeit with different hair (ergo the wig) and different Social Security numbers. Judging by the amount of stamps, the woman had traveled extensively.

Dimonte whistled. “Forged passports,” he said. “And good ones too.” He turned more pages. “Plus she has a couple of visits to South America in here. Colombia. Bolivia.” The passports closed with a dramatic snap. “Well, well, well. Looks like we got ourselves a nice, neat drug hit.”

Myron mulled over that bit of information. A drug hit—could that be part of the answer? If Sally/Carla/Roberta was dealing drugs, it might explain her connection with Greg Downing. She was his source. The meeting on Saturday night was nothing more than a buy. The waitress job was a cover. It also explained her using a pay phone and maintaining powerful door locks—tools of a drug dealer’s trade. It made some sense. Of course, Greg Downing did not appear to be a drug user, but he would not be the first person to fool everyone.

Dimonte said, “Anything else, Krinsky?”

The kid nodded. “I found a stack of cash in the bedside drawer.” He stopped again.

Dimonte gave him exasperation. “Did you count it?”

Another nod.

“How much?”

“A little over ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten grand in cash, huh?” That pleased Dimonte. “Let me see it.”

Krinsky handed it over. New bills, held by rubber bands. Myron watched while Dimonte shuffled through them. All hundreds. The serial numbers were sequential. Myron tried to memorize one of them. When Dimonte finished, he tossed the packet back to Krinsky. The smile was still there.

“Yep,” Dimonte said, “it looks like things are coming together in a nice, neat, drug-hit package.” He paused. “Only one problem.”

“What?”

He pointed at Myron. “You, Bolitar. You’re messing up my nice, neat drug-hit. What the hell are you doing—?” Dimonte stopped himself and snapped his fingers. “Holy shit …” His voice sort of drifted off. He slapped the side of his own head. A small spark in his eyes expanded. “My God!”

Again note the subtlety. “You have a thought, Rolly?”

Dimonte ignored him. “Peretti!”

The coroner looked up from the body. “What?”

“Those plastic tits,” he said. “Myron noticed they were huge.”

“Yeah, so?”

“How big?”

“What?”

“How big are they?”

“You mean like cup size?”

“Yeah.”

“I look like a lingerie manufacturer? How the fuck would I know?”

“But they’re big, right?”

“Right.”

“Really big.”

“You got eyes, don’t you?”

Myron watched the exchange in silence. He was trying to follow Dimonte’s logic—a most treacherous trail.

“Would you say they were bigger than a water balloon?” Dimonte continued.

Peretti shrugged. “Depends on the balloon.”

“Didn’t you ever make water balloons when you were a kid?”

“Yeah, sure,” Peretti said. “But I don’t remember how big the balloons were. I was a kid then. Everything looks bigger when you’re a kid. A couple years ago I went back to my old elementary school to visit my third grade teacher. She still works there, if you can believe it. Her name is Mrs. Tansmore. I swear to God the building looked like a goddamn dollhouse to me. It was huge when I was a kid. It was like—”

“All right, moron, let me make this simple.” Dimonte took a deep breath. “Could they be used for smuggling drugs?”

Silence. Everyone in the room stopped moving. Myron wasn’t sure if he just heard the most idiotic thing in the world or the most brilliant. He turned toward Peretti. Peretti looked up, mouth open in fly-catching pose.

“Well, Peretti? Could it be?”

“Could it be what?”

“Could she stick dope in her boobs? Smuggle drugs through customs with them?”

Peretti looked at Myron. Myron shrugged. Peretti turned back to Dimonte. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“How can we find out?”

“I’d have to examine them.”

“Then what the fuck you staring at me for? Do it.”

Peretti did as asked. Dimonte smiled at Myron; his eyebrows did a little dance. Proud of his deduction. Myron remained quiet.

“Nope, no way,” Peretti said.

Dimonte wasn’t happy with this report. “Why the hell not?”

“There’s hardly any scar tissue,” Peretti said. “If she were smuggling drugs in there, they’d have to rip the skin open and sew it up. Then they’d have to do it again on this side. There’s no sign of that.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

Dimonte said, “Shit.” Then he glared at Myron and pulled him into a corner. “Everything, Bolitar. Now.”

Myron had debated how to handle it, but in truth he had no choice. He had to tell. He couldn’t keep Greg Downing’s disappearance a secret any longer. The best he could hope to do was keep it contained. He suddenly remembered that Norman Lowenstein was waiting outside. “One second,” he said.

“What? Where the fuck you going?”

“I’ll be right back. Just wait here.”

“Like hell.”

Dimonte followed him down the stairs and out onto the stoop. Norman wasn’t there. Myron looked up and down the block. No sign of Norman. This was hardly a surprise. Norman probably ran when he saw the cops. Guilty or not, the homeless learn quickly to make themselves scarce when the authorities come calling.

“What is it?” Dimonte asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then start talking. The whole story.”

Myron told him most of it. The story almost knocked the toothpick out of Dimonte’s mouth. Dimonte didn’t bother asking questions, though he continuously stuck in exclamations of “Jesus Christ!” and “Frigging A,” whenever Myron paused. When Myron finished, Dimonte sort of stumbled back and sat on the steps of the stoop. His eyes looked unfocused for a few moments. He gathered himself together, but it took some time.

“In-fuckin-credible,” he managed.

Myron nodded.

“Are you telling me no one knows where Downing is?”

“If they do, they aren’t talking.”

“He just vanished?”

“That’s how it appears.”

“And there’s blood in his basement?”

“Yes.”

Dimonte shook his head again. He reached down and put his hand on his right boot. Myron had seen him do this before. He liked to sort of pet the boot. Myron had no idea why. Maybe he found the feel of snakeskin soothing. Reminiscent of the womb.

“Suppose Downing killed her and ran,” he said.

“That’s a pretty big suppose.”

“Yeah, but it fits,” Dimonte said.

“How?”

“According to what you said, Downing was seen with the victim Saturday night. How much you want to bet that once Peretti gets her on the table we find the time of death around then?”

“Doesn’t mean Downing killed her.”

Dimonte increased the speed of his boot-petting stroke. A man on Rollerblades skated by with his dog. The dog looked out of breath, trying to keep up. New product idea: Dog Rollerblades. “Saturday night, Greg Downing and the victim get together at some gin joint downtown. They leave sometime around eleven o’clock. Next thing we know she’s dead and he’s vanished.” Dimonte looked up at Myron. “That points to him killing her and running.”

“It points to a dozen things.”

“Like what?”

“Like maybe Greg witnessed the murder and got scared and ran. Maybe he witnessed the murder and was kidnapped. Maybe he was killed by the same people.”

“So where’s his body?” Dimonte asked.

“It could be anywhere.”

“Why not just leave it here with hers?”

“Maybe they killed him someplace else. Or maybe they took his body because he’s famous and they didn’t want that kind of heat.”

He scoffed at that one. “You’re reaching, Bolitar.”

“So are you.”

“Maybe. Only one way to find out.” He stood. “We got to get out an APB on Downing.”

“Whoa, hold up a second. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Dimonte looked at Myron as if he were something left unflushed in a toilet. “I’m sorry,” he said feigning politeness. “You must be mistaking me for someone who gives a rat’s ass what you think.”

“You’re suggesting putting out an APB on a major, beloved sports hero.”

“And you’re suggesting I play favorites because he’s a major, beloved sports hero.”

“Not at all,” Myron said, his mind racing. “But imagine what happens when you call out this APB. The press gets it. You start getting that OJ coverage. But there’s a difference here. You got squat on Downing. No motive. No physical evidence. Nothing.”

“Not yet I don’t,” Dimonte said. “But it’s early—”

“Exactly, it’s early. Wait a little while, that’s all I’m saying. And handle this one right because the whole world is going to look at everything you do. Tell those bozos upstairs to videotape every step. Leave nothing to chance. Don’t let anyone come back later and say you tampered or contaminated something. Get a warrant before you go to Downing’s house. Do everything by the book.”

“I can do all that and still put out an APB.”

“Rolly, suppose Greg Downing did kill her. You put out an APB, you know what happens? One, you look single-minded. You look like you got it in your head that Downing was the killer and that was it. Two, you got the press in your face—watching your every move, trying to beat you to the evidence, compromising and commenting on everything you do. Three, you drag Greg in here now and you know what bottom-feeders are stuck to him?”

Dimonte nodded and made a lemon-sucking face. “Fucking lawyers.”

“A dream team’s worth. Before you have anything, they’re filing motions and suppressing whatever and, well, you know the routine.”

“Shit,” Dimonte said.

Myron nodded. “You see what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do,” Dimonte said. “But there’s some stuff you forgot, Bolitar.” He gave Myron big-time toothpick gnawing. “For example, if I issue an APB your little team investigation goes down the toilet. You lose out.”

“Could be,” Myron said.

Dimonte studied him with a small, uneven smile. “That doesn’t mean what you’re saying is wrong. I just don’t want you to think I don’t see what you’re up to.”

“You read me,” Myron said, “like Vasco da Gama reads a map.”

Dimonte gave him hard eyes for a moment; Myron fought off the desire to roll his in return. “So here’s how we’re going to play it. You’re going to stay on the team and you’re going to continue your little investigation. I’m going to try to keep what you told me to myself as long”—he held up a finger for emphasis—“as long as it benefits my case. If I find enough to haul Downing’s ass in here, I put out the APB. And you are going to report everything to me. You are not going to hold back. Any questions?”

“Just one,” Myron said. “Where do you buy your boots?”

Chapter 13

On the ride to practice, Myron placed a call from the car phone.

“Higgins,” a voice answered.

“Fred? It’s Myron Bolitar.”

“Hey, long time, no speak. How you doing, Myron?”

“Can’t complain. You?”

“A thrill a minute here at the Treasury Department.”

“Yeah, I bet.”

“How’s Win?” Higgins asked.

“The same,” Myron said.

“The guy scares the piss out of me, you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Myron said, “I do.”

“You two miss working for the feds?”

“I don’t,” Myron said. “I don’t think Win does either. It got too restrictive for him.”

“I hear you. Hey, I read in the papers you’re playing ball again.”

“Yep.”

“At your age and with that knee? How come?”

“Long story, Fred.”

“Say no more. Hey, you guys are coming down to play the Bullets next week. Can you get me tickets?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Great, thanks. So what do you need, Myron?”

“The wheres and whys of about ten grand in hundred-dollar bills. Sequentially wrapped. Serial number B028856011A.”

“How fast you need it?”

“Soon as you can get it.”

“I’ll do my best. You take care, Myron.”

“You too, Fred.”

Myron held nothing back at practice. He let it all hang out. The feeling was awesome and overpowering. He entered his own zone. When he shot, it was like an invisible hand carried the ball to the cylinder. When he dribbled, the ball became part of his hand. His senses were heightened like a wolf’s in the wilderness. He felt like he’d fallen into some black hole and emerged ten years earlier at the NCAA finals. Even his knee felt great.

Most of practice consisted of a scrimmage between the starting five players and the five who saw the most bench time. Myron played his best ball. His jumper was popping. He came off screens strong and ready to shoot. He even drove straight down the lane twice—into the teeth of the big men’s domain—and came away the victor both times.

There were moments he completely forgot about Greg Downing and Carla/Sally/Roberta’s mangled corpse and the blood in the basement and the goons who jumped him and yes, even Jessica. An exhilarating rush like no other flooded his veins—the rush of an athlete at his peak. People talked about a runner’s high, a euphoria from a gland secretion when your body was pressed to its limit. Myron couldn’t relate to that, but he understood the incredible highs and plunging depths of being an athlete. If you played well, your whole body tingled and tears of pure joy came to your eyes. The tingles lasted well into the night when you lay in bed with no chance of sleep and replayed your finest moments, often in slow motion, like an overzealous sportscaster with his finger on the replay button. When you played poorly, you were surly and depressed and stayed that way for hours and even days. Both extremes were way out of proportion with the relevant importance of jamming a ball through a metallic circle or swatting a ball with a stick or throwing a sphere with great velocity. When you played poorly, you tried to remind yourself how stupid it was to get so caught up in something so meaningless. When you hit that rare high, you kept your internal big mouth shut.

As Myron dashed back and forth in the wave of basketball action, a thought sneaked in through the back door of his brain. The thought stayed on the fringes, hiding behind a couch, popping into view every once in a while before ducking back down again. You can do this, the thought taunted. You can play with them.

Myron’s lucky streak continued when it came to his defensive assignment: Leon White, Greg’s roomie-on-the-road and best friend. Myron and Leon bonded a bit while playing, the way teammates and even opponents often do. Whispering quick jokes in one another’s ear while lined up chest-to-chest for an inbounds pass. Patting the other guy on the back when he made a nice play. Leon was a classy guy on the floor. No trash talk. Even when Myron burned his butt on a fade-away eighteen-footer, Leon offered only words of encouragement.

Coach Donny Walsh blew the whistle. “That’s it, fellas. Take twenty foul shots and go home.”

Leon and Myron exchanged a half-handshake, half-high-five the way only children and professional athletes can. Myron had always loved this part of the game, the almost soldierlike camaraderie; he hadn’t had that in years. It felt good. The players partnered themselves up in groups of two—one guy to shoot, one to rebound—and went off to different baskets. Myron lucked out again and hooked up with Leon White. They each snatched a towel and a water bottle and strolled past the bleachers. Several reporters were perched up there for the practice. Audrey was there, of course. She looked at him with an amused smile. He resisted the temptation to stick his tongue out at her. Or his ass. Calvin Johnson had been watching practice too. He wore a suit and leaned against the wall like he was posing for a candid picture. Myron tried to gauge his reaction during the scrimmage, but of course Calvin’s expression remained unreadable.

Myron shot first. He stood at the foul line, feet spread shoulder length, his eyes on the front rim. The ball back-spun through the hoop.

“I guess we’re going to be roommates,” Myron said.

“That’s what I heard,” Leon said.

“Probably won’t be for very long.” Myron took another shot. Swish. “When do you think Greg will be back?”

In one motion Leon grabbed the bouncing ball and swooped it back to Myron. “I don’t know.”

“How’s Greg feeling? The ankle doing okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said again.

Myron took another foul shot. Another swish. His shirt, heavy with sweat, felt right. He grabbed the towel and wiped his face again. “Have you talked to him at all?”

“No.”

“That’s funny.”

Leon passed the ball to Myron. “What’s funny?”

Myron shrugged, took four dribbles. “I heard you two were tight,” he said.

Leon gave a half-smile. “Where did you hear that?”

Myron released the ball. Another swish. “Around, I guess. In the newspapers and stuff.”

“Don’t believe everything you read,” Leon said.

“Why’s that?”

He bounce-passed the ball to Myron. “The press loves to build up a friendship between a white player and a black player. They’re always looking for that Gale Sayers–Brian Piccolo slant.”

“You two aren’t close?”

“Well, we’ve known each other a long time. I’ll say that.”

“But you’re not tight?”

Leon looked at him funny. “Why you so interested?”

“I’m just making conversation. Greg is my only real connection to this team.”

“Connection?”

Myron started dribbling again. “He and I used to be rivals.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So now we’re going to be teammates. It’ll be weird.”

Leon looked at Myron. Myron stopped dribbling. “You think Greg still cares about some old college rivalry?” There was disbelief in his voice.

Myron realized how lame he was sounding. “It was a pretty intense thing,” he said. “At the time, I mean.” Extra lame. Myron didn’t look at Leon. He just lined up the shot.

“I hope this don’t hurt your feelings or nothing,” Leon said, “but I’ve been rooming with Greg for eight years now. I’ve never heard him mention your name. Even when we talk about college and stuff.”

Myron stopped right before releasing the ball. He looked over at Leon, fighting to keep his face neutral. Funny thing was—much as Myron didn’t want to admit it—that did hurt his feelings.

“Shoot already,” Leon said. “I want to get out of here.”

TC lumbered toward them. He palmed a basketball in each hand with the ease most adults palm grapefruits. He dropped one of the balls and did a handshaking/slapping ritual with Leon. Then he looked over at Myron. His face broke into a big smile.

“I know, I know,” Myron said. “Thumped, right?”

TC nodded.

“What exactly is thumped?”

“Tonight,” TC said. “Party at my house. All will be revealed then.”

Chapter 14

Dimonte was waiting for him in the Meadowlands parking lot. He leaned out of his red Corvette. “Get in.”

“A red Corvette,” Myron said. “Why aren’t I surprised?”

“Just get in.”

Myron opened the door and slid into the black leather seat. Though they were parked with the engine off, Dimonte gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared in front of him. His face was sheet-white. The toothpick hung low. He kept shaking his head over and over. Yet again, the subtlety. “Something wrong, Rolly?”

“What’s Greg Downing like?”

“What?”

“You fucking deaf?” Dimonte snapped. “What’s he like?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

“But you knew him, right? In school. What was he like back then? Did he hang out with perversive types?”

Myron looked at him. “Perversive types?”

“Just answer the question.”

“What the hell is this? Perversive types?”

Dimonte turned the ignition key. The sound was loud. He hit the gas a bit, let the engine do the rev thing for a while. The car had been jacked up like a race car. The sound was, like, totally rad, man. No women were in the nearby vicinity to hear this human mating call or they would surely be disrobing by now. Dimonte finally shifted into gear.

“Where we going?” Myron asked.

Dimonte didn’t answer. He followed the ramp that leads from the arena to Giants Stadium and the horse track.

“Is this one of those mystery dates?” Myron asked. “I love those.”

“Stop fucking around and answer my question.”

“What question?”

“What’s Downing like? I need to know everything about him.”

“You’re asking the wrong guy, Rolly. I don’t know him that well.”

“Tell me what you do know.” Dimonte’s voice left little room for disagreement. His tone was less fake-macho than usual, and there was a funny quake in it. Myron didn’t like it.

“Greg grew up in New Jersey,” Myron began. “He’s a great basketball player. He’s divorced with two kids.”

“You dated his wife, right?”

“A long time ago.”

“Would you say she was left-wing?”

“Rolly, this is getting too weird.”

“Just answer the goddamn question.” The tone aimed for angry and impatient, but fear seemed to overlap them. “Would you call her politics radical?”

“No.”

“She ever hang out with perversives?”

“Is that even a word? Perversives?”

Dimonte shook his head. “Do I look like I’m in the mood for your shit, Bolitar?”

“Okay, okay.” Myron made a surrendering gesture with his hands. The Corvette swerved across the empty stadium lot. “No, Emily did not hang out with perversives, whatever they are.”

They headed past the racetrack and took the other ramp back toward the arena. It became apparent to Myron that they were just going to circle the Meadowlands’ vast expanse of paved lots. “Let’s get back to Downing then.”

“I just told you we haven’t talked in years.”

“But you know about him, right? You’ve been investigating him; you’ve probably read stuff about him.” Gear shift up. Extra rev power. “Would you say he was a revolutionary?”

Myron could not believe these questions. “No, Mr. Chairman.”

“Do you know who he hangs out with?”

“Not really. He’s supposed to be closest to his teammates, but Leon White—that’s his roommate on the road—seemed less than enamored. Oh, here’s something that might interest you: after home games, Greg drives a taxi in the city.”

Dimonte looked puzzled. “You mean he picks up fares and stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Why the fuck does he do that?”

“Greg is a little”—Myron searched for the word—“off.”

“Uh huh.” Dimonte rubbed his face vigorously, as if he were polishing a fender with a rag. He did this for several seconds, not looking at the road; fortunately, he was in the middle of an empty parking lot. “Does it make him feel like a regular guy or something? Could that be part of it? Getting closer to the masses?”

“I guess,” Myron said.

“Go on. What about his interests? His hobbies?”

“He’s a nature boy. He likes to fish and hunt and hike and boat, that goyish stuff.”

“A back-to-nature type?”

“Sort of.”

“Like maybe an outdoor, communal guy?”

“No. Like maybe an outdoor, loner guy.”

“You have any idea where he might be?”

“None.”

Dimonte hit the gas and circled the arena. He came to a stop in front of Myron’s Ford Taurus and put the car in park. “Okay, thanks for the help. We’ll talk later.”

“Whoa, hold up a second. I thought we were working together on this.”

“You thought wrong.”

“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on?”

His voice was suddenly soft. “No.”

Silence. The rest of the players were gone by now. The Taurus stood alone in the still, empty lot.

“It’s that bad?” Myron said.

Dimonte kept frighteningly still.

“You know who she is, don’t you?” Myron went on. “You got an ID?”

Dimonte leaned back. Again he rubbed his entire face. “Nothing confirmed,” he muttered.

“You got to tell me, Rolly.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“I won’t say anything. You know—”

“Get the fuck out of my car, Myron.” He leaned across Myron’s lap and opened the car door. “Now.”

Chapter 15

TC lived in a turn-of-the-century red brick mansion encircled by a six-foot, matching brick fence on one of the better streets of Englewood, New Jersey. Eddie Murphy lived down the block. So did three Forbes 500 CEOs and several major Japanese bankers. There was a security post by the driveway entrance. Myron gave the security guard his name. The guard checked his clipboard.

“Please park along the drive. The party is out back.” He raised the yellow-and-black striped gate and waved him through. Myron parked next to a black BMW. There were maybe a dozen other cars, all glistening from fresh washes and waxes or perhaps they were all new. Mostly Mercedes Benzes. A few BMWs. A Bentley. A Jag. A Rolls. Myron’s Taurus stood out like a zit in a Revlon commercial.

The front lawn was immaculately manicured. Perfectly pruned shrubs guarded and clung to the brick facade. In stark contrast to this majestic setting was the rap music blaring from the speakers. Awful. The shrubs looked pained by the sound. Myron didn’t necessarily hate all rap. He knew there was worse music out there—John Tesh and Yanni proved it every day. Some rap songs Myron found engaging and even profound. He also recognized that rap music had not been written for him; he didn’t get it all, but he suspected that he wasn’t supposed to.

The party was held in the well-lit pool area. The crowd of about thirty mingled about in a fairly subdued fashion. Myron was wearing a blue blazer, a button-down pinstripe shirt, a flower tie, J. Murphy casual loafers. Bolitar the Prep. Win would be so proud. But Myron felt frighteningly underdressed next to his teammates. At the risk of sounding racist, the black guys on the team—there were only two other white players on the Dragons right now—knew how to dress with style. Not Myron’s style (or lack thereof), but definitely with style. The group looked like they were readying themselves for a Milan runway walk. Perfectly tailored suits. Silk shirts buttoned to the neck. No ties. Shoes polished like twin mirrors.

TC reclined in a lounge chair by the shallow end of the pool. He was surrounded by a bunch of white guys who looked like college students. They were laughing at his every word. Myron also spotted Audrey in her customary reporter’s garb. She had added pearls for the occasion. Really dressing up. He barely had a chance to step toward them when a woman in her late thirties/maybe forty approached him. “Hello,” the woman said.

“Hi.” The Wordsmith Strikes Again.

“You must be Myron Bolitar. My name is Maggie Mason.”

“Hi, Maggie.” They shook hands. Firm grip, nice smile.

She was dressed conservatively in a white blouse, charcoal-gray blazer, red skirt, and black pumps. Her hair was down and slightly mussed, as if she’d just released her bun. She was slim and attractive and would have been the perfect choice to play the opposing attorney on L.A. Law.

She smiled at him. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“Sorry, I don’t.”

“They call me Thumper.”

Myron waited. When she didn’t add anything, he said, “Uh huh.”

“Didn’t TC tell you about this?”

“He mentioned something about getting thump …” He stopped midword. She just smiled at him and spread her arms. After some time had passed, he said, “I don’t get it.”

“Nothing to get,” she said matter-of-factly. “I have sex with all the guys on the team. You’re new to the team. It’s your turn.”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “You don’t look like a groupie.”

“Groupie.” She shook her head. “God, I hate that word.”

Myron closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Let me see if I’m getting this.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ve slept with every guy on the Dragons?”

“Yes.”

“Even the married ones?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Anyone who has been on the team since 1993. That’s when I started with the Dragons. I started with the Giants in 1991.”

“Wait a second. You’re a groupie for the Giants too? The football Giants?”

“I told you. I don’t like the term groupie.”

“What word would you be more comfortable with?”

She tilted her head a little and kept the smile. “Look, Myron, I’m an investment banker on Wall Street. I work very hard. I like taking cooking classes and I’m a step-aerobics nut. All in all I am pretty normal by this world’s standards. I don’t hurt anybody. I don’t want to get married or have a relationship. But I have this one little fetish.”

“You have sex with professional athletes.”

She held up her index finger. “Only with the guys on the Giants and Dragons.”

“Nice to see team loyalty,” Myron said, “in this era of free agency.”

Thumper laughed. “That’s pretty funny.”

“Are you telling me you’ve slept with every player on the Giants?”

“Just about. I have tickets on the fifty-yard line. After every game, I have sex with two players—one from the defense, and one from the offense.”

“Sort of like the game MVPs?”

“Exactly.”

Myron shrugged. “Beats getting the game ball, I guess.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “It definitely beats getting a game ball.”

Myron rubbed his eyes. Ground control to Major Tom. He studied her for a moment. She seemed to be doing the same thing to him. “So how did you get the nickname Thumper?” he asked.

“It’s not what you think.”

“What’s not what I think?”

“How I got the nickname. Everyone assumes it has something to do with screwing like a rabbit.”

“And it doesn’t?”

“No, it doesn’t.” She looked up in the air. “How do I explain this delicately?”

“You’re worried about delicacy?”

She gave him a mildly disapproving look. “Don’t be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like some right-wing, narrow-minded, Pat Buchanan–type Neanderthal. I have feelings.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t.”

“No, but you’re acting like it. I don’t hurt anyone. I’m honest. I’m forward. I’m direct. I control what I do and to whom. And I’m happy.”

“Not to mention disease-ridden,” he heard himself say and immediately regretted it. The words had just slipped out; that happened to him sometimes.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was uncalled for.”

But he had hit a nerve. “The men I have sex with always wear condoms,” she snapped. “I get tested frequently. I’m clean.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

She didn’t stop. “And I don’t sleep with anyone I think might be infected with something. I’m careful that way.”

Myron bit his lip this time. No point. “My mistake,” he said. “I didn’t mean it; I’m sorry. Please accept my apology.”

Her chest heaved, but she was calm now. “Okay,” she said with an exhale. “Apology accepted.”

Her eyes met his again. They smiled at each other for far too long. Myron felt like a game-show contestant. A thought thankfully interrupted the semitrance. “Did you sleep with Greg Downing?” he asked.

“In 1993,” she said. “He was one of the first Dragons.”

How that must swell his bosom with pride. “You still see him?”

“Sure. We’re good friends. I’m friends with most of the guys afterwards. Not all, but most.”

“Do you two talk a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“Recently?”

“Not the past month or two.”

“Do you know if he’s seeing anyone?”

Thumper gave him a curious look. “Why would you want to know about that?”

Myron shrugged. “Just making conversation.” The Return of Mr. Lame.

“It’s an odd topic,” she said.

“I guess I’ve been thinking about him a lot. All this talk about my being on Greg’s team and our history together. It just got me thinking.”

“It got you thinking about Greg’s love life?” She wasn’t buying it.

Myron sort of shrugged and mumbled something even he didn’t understand. A laugh broke out from the other side of the pool. A group of his new teammates were enjoying a joke. Leon White was one of them. He met Myron’s eye and nodded a hello. Myron nodded back. Myron realized that while no one seemed to be staring at them, all of his teammates had to know why Thumper had approached him. Again he felt like he was back in college, but this time the feeling didn’t bring on the same happy nostalgia.

Thumper was busy studying him again, her eyes narrowed and focused. Myron tried to look neutral, but he felt like a doofus. Being so openly inspected did that to him. He tried to meet her gaze.

Thumper suddenly smiled widely and folded her arms. “I get it now,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s obvious.”

“What’s obvious?”

“You want revenge,” she said.

“Revenge for what?”

The smile grew a bit, then relaxed. “Greg stole Emily from you. Now you want to steal someone back.”

“He didn’t steal her from me,” Myron said quickly. He heard the defensive tone in his voice and didn’t like it. “Emily and I broke up before they started dating.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so.” Mr. Snappy Retort.

She let loose a throaty laugh and put a hand on his arm. “Relax, Myron. I’m only teasing you.” She looked at him again. All of this eye contact was beginning to give Myron a headache. He stared at her nose instead. “So are we going to do this?” she asked.

“No,” Myron said.

“If it’s the fear of disease—”

“It’s not. I’m involved with someone.”

“So?”

“So I don’t cheat on her.”

“Who wants you to cheat? I just want to have sex with you.”

“And you think those two things are mutually exclusive?”

“Of course they are,” Thumper said. “Our having sex should have absolutely no effect on your relationship. I don’t want you to stop caring about your girlfriend. I don’t want to be a part of your life. I don’t even want to be intimate.”

“Gee, you make it sound so romantic,” Myron said.

“But that’s just the point. It’s not romantic. It’s just a physical act. Sure, it feels great, but in the end it’s just a physical act. Like shaking hands.”

“Shaking hands,” Myron repeated. “You should write greeting cards.”

“I’m just telling you how it is. Past civilizations—ones far more intellectually advanced than us—understood that pleasure of the flesh was no sin. Associating sex with guilt is a modern, absurd hang-up. This whole concept of tying sex to possession is something we got from uptight Puritans who wanted to maintain control over their major possession: their wife.”

A history scholar, Myron thought. Nice to see.

“Where is it written,” she continued, “that two people can’t reach heights of physical ecstasy without being in love? I mean, think about how ridiculous that is. It’s silly, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Myron said. “But I’ll still pass, thank you.”

She shrugged a suit-yourself. “TC will be very disappointed.”

“He’ll get over it,” he said.

Silence.

“Well,” she said, clasping her hands together, “I think I’ll mingle. It was nice chatting with you, Myron.”

“A true experience,” Myron agreed.

Myron mingled a bit too. He hooked up with Leon for a while. Leon introduced him to his wife, a blond sexpot named Fiona. Very Playmate-like. She had a breathy voice and was one of those women who made even the most casual conversation one long double entendre—so accustomed to using her physical charms that she did not know when to turn them off. Myron chatted with them both briefly and excused himself.

The bartender informed him that they were not stocking any Yoo-Hoo. He took an Orangina instead. Not just orange soda, but Orangina. How European. He took a sip. Pretty good.

A hand slapped Myron’s back. It was TC. He had foregone the GQ-suit look, opting for white leather pants and a white leather vest. No shirt. He wore dark sunglasses.

“Having a good time?” he asked.

“It’s been interesting,” Myron said.

“Come on. I’ll show you something.”

They walked in silence up a grassy hill away from the party. The incline grew steadily steeper, the music fainter. The rap had been replaced with an alternative group called the Cranberries. Myron liked their music. “Zombie” was on right now. Dolores O’Riordan was repeatedly singing, “In your head, in your head,” until she got tired and moved to repeating the word, “Zombie, zombie” several hundred times. Okay, the Cranberries could work on their chorus lyrics, but the song still worked. Good stuff.

There were no lights now, but a glow from the ones by the pool provided enough illumination. When they reached the plateau, TC motioned in front of them. “There.”

Myron looked out, and the sight nearly took his breath away. They were up high enough to get an unimpeded, spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline. The sea of lights seemed to shimmer like beads of water. The George Washington Bridge looked close enough to touch. They both stood in silence for several moments.

“Nice, huh?” TC said.

“Very.”

He took off his sunglasses. “I come up here a lot. By myself. It’s a good place to think.”

“I would think so.”

They looked off again.

“Thumper talk to you yet?” Myron asked.

TC nodded.

“Were you disappointed?”

“No,” TC said. “I knew you’d say no.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “Just a feeling. But don’t let her fool you. Thumper’s good people. She’s probably the closest thing I got to a friend.”

“What about all those guys you were hanging out with?”

TC sort of smiled. “You mean the white boys?”

“Yeah.”

“Not friends,” he said. “If tomorrow I stopped playing ball, they’d all look at me like I’m pinching a loaf on their sofa.”

“Poetically put, TC.”

“Just the truth, man. You in my position, you don’t have no friends. Facts of life. White or black, it don’t matter. People hang around me because I’m a rich superstar. They figure they can get something for free. That’s all.”

“And that’s okay with you?”

“Don’t matter if it’s okay,” TC said. “It’s the way it is. I ain’t complaining.”

“Do you get lonely?” Myron asked.

“Too many people around to get lonely.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” TC sort of jerked his head from side to side, like he was trying to loosen up his neck before a game. “Folks always talking about the price of fame, but you wanna know the real price? Forget that privacy shit. So I don’t go out to the movies as much. Big fucking deal—where I come from you can’t afford to go anyway. The real price is you ain’t a person anymore. You’re just a thing, a shiny thing like one of those Benzes out there. The poor brothers think I’m a golden ladder with goodies at every step up. The rich white boys think I’m a fancy pet. Like with OJ. Remember those guys who hung out in OJ’s trophy room?”

Myron nodded.

“Look, I ain’t complaining. Don’t get me wrong. This is a whole lot better than pumping gas or working in a coal mine or something. But I always got to remember the truth: the only thing that separates me from any nigger on the street is a game. That’s it. A knee going pop, like with what happened to you, and I’m back down there. I always remember that. Always.” He gave Myron hard eyes, letting his words hang in the crisp air. “So when some hot babe acts like I’m something special, it ain’t me she’s after. You see what I’m saying? She’s blinded by all that money and fame. Everyone is, male or female.”

“So you and I could never be friends?” Myron asked.

“Would you be asking me that if I was just some ignorant fool pumping gas?”

“Maybe.”

“Bullshit,” he said with a smile. “People bitch about my attitude, you know. They say I act like everybody owes me. Like I’m a prima donna. But they just mad because I see through them. I know the truth. They all think I’m some ignorant nigger—the owners, the coaches, whatever—so why should I respect them? Only reason they even talk to me is because I can slam the ball through the hoop. I’m just a monkey making them money. Once I stop, that’s it. I’m just another dumb slice of ghetto shit not fit to sit my black ass on their toilet.” He stopped then, as though out of breath. He looked back at the skyline. The sight seemed to rejuvenate him. “You ever meet Isiah Thomas?” he asked.

“The Detroit Piston? Yeah, once.”

“I heard him doing this interview one time, must have been when the Pistons won those championships. Some guy asked him what he’d be doing if he wasn’t a basketball player. You know what Isiah said?”

Myron shook his head.

“He said he’d be a United States senator.” TC laughed hard and high-pitched. The sound echoed in the still night. “I mean, is the brother crazy or what? Isiah really believe that shit. A United States senator—who the fuck is he kidding?” He laughed again, but the sound seemed more forced now. “Me, I know what I’d be. I’d be working in a steel mill, the midnight to ten A.M. shift, or maybe I’d be in jail or dead, I don’t know.” He shook his head. “United States senator. Shit.”

“What about the game?” Myron asked.

“What about it?”

“Do you love playing basketball?”

He looked amused. “You do, don’t you? You buy all that ‘for the love of the game’ bullshit.”

“You don’t?”

TC shook his head. The moon reflected off his shaved pate, giving his head an almost mystical glow. “It was never about that for me,” he said. “Basketball was just a means to an end. It’s about making money. It’s about setting me up for life.”

“Did you ever love the game?”

“Sure, I guess I must have. It was a good place to go, you know? But I don’t think it was the game—I mean, not the running and jumping and shit. Basketball was just what I was all about. Everywhere else I was just another dumb black boy, but on the basketball court, I was, well, the man. A hero. It’s an incredible high, everyone treating you like that. You know what I mean?”

Myron nodded. He knew. “Can I ask you something else?”

“Go ahead.”

“What’s with all the tattoos and rings?”

He smiled. “They bother you?”

“Not really. I’m just curious.”

“Suppose I just like wearing them,” TC said. “That enough?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“But you don’t believe it, do you?”

Myron shrugged. “I guess not.”

“Truth is, I do like them a little. The bigger truth is, it’s business.”

“Business?”

“Basketball business. Making money. Lots of it. You know how much money I make in endorsements? A shit load. Why? Because outrageousness sells. Look at Deon. Look at Rodman. The more crazy shit I do, the more they pay me.”

“So it’s just an act?”

“A lot of it, yeah. I like to shock, too, just my way. But mostly I do it for the press.”

“But the press is always ripping you apart,” Myron said.

“Don’t matter. They write about me, they make me more money. Simple as that.” He smiled. “Let me clue you in on something, Myron. The press is the dumbest animal on God’s green earth. You know what I’m gonna do one day?”

Myron shook his head.

“One day I’ll get rid of the rings and shit, and I’ll start dressing nice. Then I’ll start talking polite, you know, giving them all yes-sirs and yes-ma’ams and start spitting out all that team-effort bullshit they like to hear. You know what’ll happen? These same fucks that say I’m destroying the integrity of the game will be kissing my black ass like it’s the Blarney Stone. They be talking about how I went through some sort of miraculous transformation. How now I’m a hero. But only thing that’s really changed is my act.” TC gave him a big smile.

Myron said, “You’re a piece of work, TC.”

TC turned back to the water. Myron watched him in silence. He hadn’t bought all of TC’s rationalizations. There was more at work here. TC wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t exactly telling the truth either—or maybe he couldn’t admit the truth even to himself. He hurt. He truly believed no one could love him, and no matter who you are, that hurts. It made you insecure. It made you want to hide and build fences. The sad thing was, TC was at least partially right. Who’d care about him if he wasn’t playing professional basketball? If not for his ability to play a child’s game, where would he be right now? TC was like the beautiful girl who wanted you to look down deep to find the soul within—but the only reason you’d bother trying was because she was beautiful. Get rid of that physical beauty—become the ugly girl—and nobody gives a damn about scratching the surface to find the beauty within. Get rid of TC’s physical prowess and the same thing happens.

In the end, TC was not as off-the-wall as he appeared in public nor was he as put-together as he wanted Myron to think. Myron was no psychologist, but he was sure that there was more to the tattoos and body piercing than making money. They were too physically destructive for so pat an explanation. With TC, there were a lot of factors at work. Being a former basketball star himself, Myron understood some of them; being that Myron and TC came from completely different worlds, there were others he could not so readily grasp.

TC interrupted their joint solitude. “Now I got a question for you,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“Why you really here?” TC asked.

“Here? As in your house—”

“On the team. Look, man, I saw you play when I was in junior high. In the NCAAs. You were great, okay? But that was a long time ago. You got to know you can’t do it anymore. You had to see that at practice today.”

Myron tried not to look stunned. Had he and TC been at the same practice? But of course they had, and of course, TC was right. Didn’t Myron remember the days when he was the team’s superstar? Didn’t he remember scrimmaging against the last five guys who would play their butt off while the starting five screwed around and played with no incentive? Didn’t he remember how disillusioned those last five became, fooling themselves into believing they were just as good as the first five when the first five were tired from real games and were just slacking off? And back then, Myron was in college. He played maybe twenty-five games a season—these guys played almost a hundred against vastly superior competition.

Good enough to play with these guys? Who had he been kidding?

“I’m just giving it a shot,” Myron said softly.

“Can’t let go, huh?”

Myron said nothing. They fell back into a brief silence.

“Hey, I almost forgot,” TC said. “I hear you’re good friends with a big hotshot at Lock-Horne Securities. That true?”

“Yes.”

“Was he that slice of white bread you talking with after the game?”

Myron nodded. “His name is Win.”

“You know Thumper works on Wall Street, right?”

“She told me,” Myron said.

“Thumper wants to change jobs. Think your friend could talk to her?”

Myron shrugged. “I could ask him.” Win would certainly appreciate her outlook on the role of sex in ancient civilizations. “Who does she work for now?”

“Small outfit. Called Kimmel Brothers. But she needs to move on, you know? They won’t make her a partner, even though she busts her butt for them.”

TC said something else but Myron was no longer listening. Kimmel Brothers. Myron remembered the name immediately. When he’d hit the redial button on the phone at Greg’s house, a woman had answered and said, “Kimmel Brothers.” Yet Thumper had just told Myron she hadn’t spoken to Greg in a month or two.

Coincidence? Myron thought not.

Chapter 16

Thumper was gone.

“She came for you,” TC said. “When it didn’t happen she split. She got work tomorrow morning.”

Myron checked his watch. Eleven-thirty. Long day. Time for a little shut-eye. He made his good nights and headed for his car. Audrey was leaning against the hood, her arms folded across her chest, her ankles crossed. Pure casual.

“You going back to Jessica’s?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Mind giving me a lift?”

“Hop in.”

Audrey gave him the same smile he had seen back at practice. He had thought at the time she had been impressed with his play; now it was clearer that the amusement was more akin to ridicule than appreciation. He unlocked the doors in silence. She took off her blue blazer and laid it on the backseat; he did likewise. She wore a forest green turtleneck underneath it. She adjusted the neck part, folding it back an extra time. She took off the pearls and jammed them in the front pocket of her jeans. Myron started the car.

“I’m starting to put this thing together,” Audrey said.

Myron did not like the way she said it. Too much authority in her voice. Audrey hadn’t needed a lift home, he was sure of that. She wanted to talk to him alone. That worried him. He gave her the good-natured smile and said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with my ass, does it?”

“What?”

“Jessica told me you two were discussing my ass.”

She laughed. “Well, I hate to admit this,” she said, “but it did look pretty scrumptious.”

Myron tried not to look too pleased. “So you doing a story on it?”

“On your ass?”

“Yes.”

“Of course,” she said. “I was thinking we could give it a big spread.”

Myron groaned.

“You’re trying to change the subject,” she said.

“There was a subject?”

“I was telling you how I was putting this thing together.”

“That’s a subject?”

He glanced at her. She was sitting with her left knee on the seat and her left ankle tucked under her so her entire body could face him. Audrey had a wide face and a few freckles, though he bet she had a lot more when she was a kid. Remember that tomboy who was kinda cute in your sixth grade class? Here she was all grown up. No beauty certainly. Not in the classic sense. But there was an earthy appeal to Audrey that made you want to reach out and hug her and roll in leaves on a crisp autumn day.

“It shouldn’t have taken me so long to figure out,” she continued. “It’s pretty obvious in hindsight.”

“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

“No,” she replied. “You’re supposed to continue to play dumb for a few more minutes.”

“My specialty.”

“Good, then just drive and listen.” Her hands were in constant gesturing motion, peaking and valleying along with her voice. “See, I was waylaid by the whole poetic irony stuff. That’s what I concentrated on. But your backgrounds as rivals is secondary in all this. It’s not nearly as important as, say, your past relationship with Emily.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t play AAU. You didn’t play in any summer league. You play in pickup games at the Y maybe once a week. Your major workout revolves around Master Kwon’s place with Win—and they don’t have a basketball court.”

“Is there a point?”

Her hands spread in disbelief. “You haven’t been honing your skills. You haven’t played anyplace where Clip or Calvin or Donny would have seen you play. So why would the Dragons sign you? It doesn’t make sense. Was the move strictly P.R.? Unlikely. The positive bump will be minimum, and if you fail—which, let’s face it, is very likely—that good publicity will probably be nullified. Ticket sales are good. The team is doing well. They don’t need a publicity stunt right now. So there has to be another reason.” She stopped and readjusted herself on the car seat. “Enter the timing.”

“The timing?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why now? Why sign you so late in the season? The answer is obvious really. There is only one thing about the timing that stands out.”

“And that is?”

“Downing’s sudden disappearance.”

“He didn’t disappear,” Myron corrected. “He’s injured. That’s your precious timing. Greg got hurt. A spot opened up. I filled it.”

Audrey smiled and shook her head. “Still want to play dumb, huh? Fine, go ahead. You’re right. Downing is supposed to be injured and in seclusion. Now I’m good, Myron, and for the life of me I can’t find this secluded spot of his. I’ve called in all my best contacts and I can’t get anything. Don’t you find that a bit odd?”

Myron shrugged.

“Maybe,” she went on, “if Downing really craved seclusion to fix his injured ankle—an injury which doesn’t show up on any game tape, by the way—he could find a way. But if all he’s doing is working on an injury, why work so hard at it?”

“So pain in the asses like you don’t bother him,” Myron said.

Audrey almost laughed at that one. “Said with such conviction, Myron. It’s almost like you believe it.”

Myron said nothing.

“But let me just add a few more points and then you can stop playing dumb.” Audrey counted them off on ringless, slightly callused fingers. “One, I know you used to work for the feds. That gives you some background in investigative work. Two, I know Downing has a habit of vanishing. He’s done it before. Three, I know Clip’s situation with the other owners. The big vote is coming up. Four, I know you visited Emily yesterday and I doubt you were there to restoke the flames.”

“How did you know about that?” Myron asked.

She just smiled and put her hand down. “Add them up and there’s only one conclusion: you are looking for Greg Downing. He’s missing again. This time however the timing is much more critical; Clip’s ownership vote and the playoffs are coming up. Your job is to find him.”

“You got a hell of an imagination, Audrey.”

“I do at that,” she agreed, “but we both know I got this right so let’s end playing dumb and cut to the heart of it: I want in.”

“Want in.” Myron shook his head. “You reporters and your lingo.”

“I don’t want to give you up,” she continued. Her knee was still up on the seat. Her face was as bright and expectant as a school kid’s waiting for the final bell in May. “I think we should team up. I can help. I got great sources. I can ask questions without worrying about blowing my cover. I know this team inside and out.”

“And what exactly do you want for this help?”

“The full story. I’m the first reporter to know where he is, why he vanished, whatever. You promise to tell only me; I get the full exclusive.”

They passed several sleazy motels and a potpourri of gas stations on Route 4. No-tell motels in New Jersey always gave themselves lofty names that belied their social station. Right now, for example, they were driving past the “Courtesy Inn.” This fine establishment not only gave you courteous attention, but they gave it to you by the hour at a rate, according to the sign, of $19.82. Not twenty dollars, mind you, but $19.82—so priced, Myron guessed, because it was also the year they last changed sheets. The CHEAP BEER DEPOT, according to another sign, was the next building on Myron’s right. Truth in advertising. Nice to see. The Courtesy Inn could learn a lesson from them.

“We both know I could report it now,” she said. “It’d still be a pretty good scoop—reporting that Downing wasn’t really injured and you’re just here to find him. But I’d be willing to trade it in for a larger story.”

Myron thought it over as he paid the toll. He glanced at her expectant face. She looked wild-eyed and wild-haired, kind of like the refugee women coming off the boat in Palestine in the movie Exodus. Ready to do battle to claim her homeland.

“You have to make me a promise,” he said.

“What?”

“No matter what—no matter how incredible the story seems—you won’t jump the gun. You won’t report any of it until he’s found.”

Audrey nearly leapt from her seat. “What do you mean? How incredible?”

“Forget it, Audrey. Report whatever you want.”

“All right, all right, you have a deal,” she said quickly, hands raised in surrender. “You had to know saying something like that would pique my interest.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah, yeah, I promise. So what’s up?”

Myron shook his head. “You first,” he said. “Why would Greg vanish?”

“Who knows?” she replied. “The man is a professional flake.”

“What can you tell me about his divorce?”

“Just that it’s been acrimonious as all hell.”

“What have you heard?”

“They’ve been battling over the kids. They’re both trying to prove the other is an unfit parent.”

“Any details on how they’re going about that?”

“No. It’s been kept pretty hush-hush.”

“Emily told me Greg had pulled some sleazy tricks,” Myron said. “Do you know anything about that?”

Audrey chewed on her bottom lip for a few moments. “I heard a rumor—a very unsubstantiated rumor—that Greg hired a private eye to follow her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“To film her maybe? Catch her with another man?”

She shrugged. “It’s just a rumor. I don’t know.”

“You know the P.I.’s name, or who he works for?”

“Rumor, Myron. Rumor. A pro basketball player’s divorce is hardly earth-shattering sports news. I didn’t follow it that closely.”

Myron made a mental note to check Greg’s files for any payment to an investigation firm. “How was Greg’s relationship with Marty Felder?”

“His agent? Good, I guess.”

“Emily told me Felder had lost Greg millions.”

She shrugged. “I’ve never heard anything about that.”

The Washington bridge was fairly clear. They stayed to the right and took the Henry Hudson Parkway south. On their right, the Hudson River sparkled like a blanket of black sequins; on their left was a billboard with Tom Brokaw displaying his friendly yet firm smile. The caption under his picture read: “NBC News—Now More Than Ever.” Very dramatic. What the hell did it mean?

“How about Greg’s personal life?” Myron continued. “Girlfriends, that kind of thing?”

“You mean a steady?”

“Yes.”

She ran her fingers through the thick, curling locks, then rubbed the back of her own neck. “There was this one girl. He kept it kind of secret, but I think they were living together for a while.”

“What’s her name?”

“He never told me. I saw them together at a restaurant once. A place called the Saddle River Inn. He didn’t look happy to see me.”

“What did she look like?”

“Nothing special from what I remember. She was a brunette. She was sitting so I couldn’t tell you height or weight.”

“Age?”

“I don’t know. Thirty-ish, I guess.”

“What makes you think they were living together?”

It seemed like an easy question, but she stopped and raised her eyes. “Leon let something slip once,” she said.

“What did he say?”

“I don’t remember anymore. Something about the girlfriend. Then he clammed up.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Three, four months ago. Maybe more.”

“Leon implied that he and Greg weren’t really that close, that the media made a bigger deal out of it than it was.”

Audrey nodded. “There is a tension there now, but I think it’s just temporary.”

“Why would there be a tension?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long have you noticed the tension?”

“Not long. Within the last two weeks maybe.”

“Anything happen recently between Greg and Leon that you’re aware of?”

“Nope. They’ve been friends for a long time. Friends have disagreements. I didn’t take it too seriously.”

Myron let loose a deep breath. Friends did indeed have disagreements, but the timing was curious. “Do you know Maggie Mason?”

“Thumper? Of course.”

“Were she and Greg close?”

“If you mean did they screw—”

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“Well, they screwed. That I’m sure of. Despite what Thumper claims, not every guy on the team has gotten thumped. Some have turned her down. Not many, I admit. But some. She hit on you yet?”

“Just a few short hours ago.”

She smiled. “I assume you joined the few, the proud, the Unthumped?”

“You assume correctly. But what about her relationship with Greg? Are they close?”

“They’re pretty close, I’d say. But Thumper is closest to TC. Those two are very tight. It’s not purely sexual either. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure TC and Maggie have had sex and probably still do on occasion. But they’re like brother and sister too. It’s weird.”

“How do TC and Greg get along?” Myron asked.

“Not bad for team superstars. Not great either.”

“Care to elaborate?”

She paused, gathered her thoughts. “For five years now, TC and Downing have shared the spotlight. I guess there is a mutual respect for each other on the court, but they don’t talk off it. At least, not very much. I’m not saying they dislike each other, but playing basketball is a job like any other. You might be able to stand one another at work, but you don’t want to see the person socially.” She looked up. “Take the Seventy-ninth Street exit.”

“You still live on Eighty-first?”

“Yes.”

Myron took the exit and stopped at a traffic light on Riverside Drive.

“Now it’s your turn, Myron. Why did they hire you?”

“It’s like you said. They want me to find Greg.”

“What have you learned so far?”

“Not much.”

“So why were you so concerned I’d jump the gun and tell the story early?”

Myron hesitated.

“I promised not to say anything,” she reminded him. “You have my word.”

Fair is fair. He told her about the blood in Greg’s basement. Her mouth dropped open. When he told her about finding Sally/Carla’s body, he feared her heart might give out.

“My God,” Audrey said when he finished. “You think Downing killed her.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She fell back against the seat. Her head lolled against the headrest as though her neck could no longer support her. “Christ, what a story.”

“And one you can’t tell.”

“Don’t remind me.” She sat back up again. “Do you think it’ll leak soon?”

“It might.”

“Why can’t I be the recipient of that leak?”

Myron shook his head. “Not yet. We got a lid on this so far. You can’t be the one to blow it off.”

Her nod was grudging. “Do you think Downing killed her and ran?”

“There is no evidence of that.” He pulled up to her building. “One last question,” he said. “Was Greg involved in anything unsavory?”

“Like what?”

“Like is there any reason thugs would be after him?”

Again her excitement was palpable. The woman was like an electric current. “What do you mean? What thugs?”

“A couple of thugs were watching Greg’s house.”

Her face was positively glowing. “Thugs? You mean like professional gangsters?”

“Probably. I don’t know for sure yet. Can you think of anything that would connect Greg to thugs or for that matter, the murder of this woman? Drugs maybe?”

Audrey shook her head immediately. “It can’t be drugs.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Downing is a health nut, a real Granola head.”

“So was River Phoenix.”

She shook her head again. “Not drugs. I’m sure of it.”

“Look into it,” he said. “See what you can come up with.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll look into everything we talked about.”

“Try to be discreet.”

“No problem,” she said. She got out of the car. “Good night, Myron. Thanks for trusting me.”

“Like I had a choice.”

Audrey smiled and closed the car door. He watched her walk into the building. He put the car in drive and headed back to Seventy-ninth Street. He got back on the parkway and continued south toward Jessica’s. He was about to pick up his cellular phone and call her when the phone rang. The dashboard clock read 12:07 A.M. It had to be Jessica.

“Hello?”

It wasn’t Jessica. “Right lane, three cars behind you. You’re being followed.”

It was Win.

Chapter 17

“When did you get back?” Myron asked.

Win ignored the question. “The automobile following you is the same one we spotted at Greg’s house. It is registered to a storage facility in Atlantic City. No known mob connections, but that would seem to me to be a safe bet.”

“How long have you been following me?”

Again Win ignored him. “The two men who jumped you the other night. What did they look like?”

“Big,” Myron said. “One was absolutely huge.”

“Crew cut?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in the car following you. Passenger seat.”

Myron didn’t bother asking how Win knew about the thugs jumping him. He had a pretty good idea.

“They’ve been communicating on the telephone quite a bit,” Win continued. “I believe they’re coordinating with someone else. The phone activity picked up after your stop on Eighty-first Street. Hold on a second. I’ll call you right back.” He hung up. Myron checked his rearview mirror. The car was still there, right where Win said it was. A minute later the phone rang again.

“What?” Myron said.

“I just spoke to Jessica again.”

“What do you mean, again?”

Win sighed impatiently. He hated explanations. “If they are planning to jump you tonight, it is logical to assume it will be by her loft.”

“Right.”

“Ergo, I called her ten minutes ago. I told her to keep an eye out for anything unusual.”

“And?”

“An unmarked white van parked across the street,” Win answered. “No one got out.”

“So it appears they are going to strike,” Myron said.

“Yes,” Win said. “Should I preempt it?”

“How?”

“I could disable the car following you.”

“No,” Myron said. “Let them make their move and see where it leads.”

“Pardon?”

“Just back me up. If they grab me, I may be able to get to the boss.”

Win made a noise.

“What?” Myron asked.

“You complicate the simple,” Win said. “Would it not be easier to simply take out the two in the car? We could then make them tell us about their boss.”

“It’s that ‘make them’ part I have trouble with.”

“But of course,” Win countered. “A thousand pardons for my lack of ethics. Clearly it is far wiser to risk your own life than to make a worthless goon feel momentary discomfort.”

Win had a way of putting things that made very frightening sense. Myron had to remind himself that the logical was often more terrifying than the illogical—especially where Win was concerned. “They’re just hired help,” Myron said. “They’re not going to know anything.”

Pause. “Fair point,” Win conceded. “But suppose they simply shoot you.”

“That wouldn’t make any sense. The reason they’re interested in me is because they think I know where Greg is.”

“And dead men tell no tales,” Win added.

“Exactly. They want to make me talk. So just follow me. If they take me someplace well guarded—”

“I’ll get through,” Win said.

Myron did not doubt it. He gripped the steering wheel. His pulse began to race. Easy to dismiss the possibility of getting shot by reasonable analysis; it was another thing to have to park a car down the street from men you knew were out to hurt you. Win would have his eye on the van. So would Myron. If a gun came out before a person, the situation would be handled.

He got off the highway. The streets of Manhattan were supposed to be a nice, even grid. Streets ran north/south and east/west. They were numbered. They were straight. But when you got to Greenwich Village and Soho, it was like a grid painted by Dalí. Gone were the numerical roads for the most part, except when they twisted and turned between streets with real-live names. Gone was any pretext of straight or systematized.

Luckily Spring Street was a direct run. A bicyclist sped by Myron, but no one else was out. The white van was parked right where it was supposed to be. Unmarked, just as Jessica had said. The windows were tinted so you couldn’t look in. Myron didn’t see Win’s car, but then again he wasn’t supposed to. He moved slowly down the street. He passed the van. When he did, the van started its motor. Myron pulled into a spot toward the end of the block. The van pulled out.

Showtime.

Myron parked the car, straightened out the steering wheel, turned the engine off. He pocketed the keys. The van inched forward. He took out his revolver and stuck it under the car seat. It wouldn’t do him any good right now. If they grabbed him, they would search him. If they started shooting, shooting back would be a waste of time. Win would either remove the threat or not.

He reached for the door handle. Fear nestled into his throat, but he did not stop. He pulled the handle, opened the door, and stepped out. It was dark. The streetlights in Soho were nearly worthless, like pen beams in a black hole. Lights drifting out from nearby windows provided more of an eerie kindle than real illumination. There were plastic garbage bags out on the street. Most had been torn open; the odor of spoiled food wafted through the air. The van slowly cruised toward him. A man stepped out from a doorway and approached without hesitation. The man wore a black turtleneck under a black overcoat. He pointed a gun at Myron. The van stopped, and the side door slid open.

“Get in, asshole,” the man with the gun said.

Myron pointed at himself. “You talking to me?”

“Now, asshole. Haul ass.”

“Is that a turtleneck or a dickey?”

The man with the gun moved closer. “I said, now.”

“It’s nothing to get angry about,” Myron said, but he stepped toward the van. “If it is a dickey, you can’t tell. It’s a very sporty look.” When Myron got nervous, his mouth went into overdrive. He knew it was self-destructive; Win had pointed that out to him on several occasions. But Myron couldn’t stop himself. Diarrhea of the mouth or some such ailment.

“Move.”

Myron got in the van. The man with the gun did likewise. There were two more men in the back of the van and one man driving. Everyone was in black, except for one guy who looked to be in charge. He wore a blue pinstripe suit. His Windsor-knotted yellow tie was held in place by a gold tie bar at the collar. Euro-chic. He had long, bleached-blond hair and one of those tans that were a little too perfect to come from the sun. He looked more like an aging surfer boy than a professional mobster.

The van’s interior had been custom designed, but not in a good way. All the seats had been ripped out except for the driver’s. There was a leather couch in the back along one wall where Pinstripe sat alone. A lime-green shag carpet even Elvis would have found too garish ran along the van’s floor and up the sides like a poor man’s ivy.

The man in the pinstripe suit smiled; his hands were folded in his lap, very much at ease. The van started moving.

The gunman quickly searched Myron. “Sit, asshole,” he said.

Myron sat on the carpeted floor. He ran his hand over the shag. “Lime green,” he said to Pinstripe. “Nice.”

“It’s inexpensive,” Pinstripe said. “That way we don’t worry about bloodstains.”

“Thinking of overhead.” Myron nodded coolly, though his mouth felt very dry. “That’s smart business.”

Pinstripe did not bother with a response. He gave the man with the gun and dickey/turtleneck a look that made the man jolt upward. The man cleared his throat.

“This here is Mr. Baron,” the gunman told Myron, indicating Pinstripe. “Everyone calls him the B Man.” He cleared his throat again. He spoke like he’d been rehearsing this little speech, which, Myron surmised, was probably likely. “He’s called the B Man because he enjoys breaking bones.”

“Say, that must woo the women,” Myron said.

The B Man smiled with capped teeth as white as anything in those old Pepsodent commercials. “Hold his leg out,” he said.

The man with the turtleneck/dickey pressed the gun against Myron’s temple hard enough to leave a permanent imprint. He wrapped his other arm around Myron’s neck, the inside of his elbow jammed into Myron’s windpipe. He lowered his head and whispered, “Don’t even flinch, asshole.”

He forced Myron into a lying position. The other man straddled Myron’s chest and pinned the leg to the floor. Myron had trouble breathing. Panic seized him, but he remained still. Any move at this stage would almost inevitably be the wrong one. He’d have to play it out and see where it went.

The B Man moved off the leather couch slowly. His eyes never left Myron’s bad knee; his smile was a happy one. “I’m going to place one hand on the distal femur and the other on your proximal tibia,” he explained in the same tone a surgeon might use with a student. “My thumbs will then rest on the medial aspect of the patella. When my thumbs snap forward, I will basically rip off your kneecap laterally.” He met Myron’s gaze. “This will tear your medial retinaculum and several other ligaments. Tendons will snap. I fear it will be most painful.”

Myron didn’t even try a wisecrack. “Hey, wait a second,” he said quickly. “There’s no reason for violence.”

The B Man smiled, shrugged. “Why does there have to be a reason?”

Myron’s eyes widened. Fear hardened in his belly. “Hold on,” he said quickly. “I’ll talk.”

“I know you will,” the B Man replied. “But first you’ll jerk us around a bit—”

“No, I won’t.”

“Please don’t interrupt me. It’s very rude to interrupt.” The smile was gone. “Where was I?”

“First he’ll jerk us around,” the driver prompted.

“That’s right, thank you.” He turned the white smile back to Myron. “First, you’ll stall. You’ll do a song-and-dance. You’ll hope we’ll take you someplace where your partner can save you.”

“Partner?”

“You’re still friends with Win, aren’t you?”

The man knew Win. This was not a good thing. “Win who?”

“Precisely,” B Man said. “This is what I mean by being jerked around. Enough.”

He moved closer. Myron started to struggle, but the man jammed the gun in Myron’s mouth. It struck teeth and made him gag. The taste was cold and metallic.

“I’ll destroy the knee first. Then we’ll talk.”

The other man pulled Myron’s leg straight while the gunman took the revolver out of Myron’s mouth and pressed it back against his temple. Their grips grew a bit tighter. The B Man lowered his hands to Myron’s knee, his fingers spread like eagles’ talons.

“Wait!” Myron shouted.

“No,” B Man replied calmly.

Myron started to squirm. He grabbed a loading handle on the floor of the van, the kind of thing used to tie down cargo. He held on and braced himself. He didn’t have to wait very long.

The crash jarred them. Myron had been ready for it. No one else had. They all went flying, their grips slackening. Glass shattered. The scream of metal hitting metal filled the air. Brakes screeched. Myron held on until the van slowed. Then he curled into a ball and rolled out of harm’s way. There were shouts and a door opened. Myron heard a shot being fired. Voices sounded in a cacophony of confusion. The driver ducked out through his door. The B Man followed, leaping like a grasshopper. The side door opened. Myron looked up as Win stepped in with his gun drawn. The man with the turtleneck/dickey had recovered. He picked up his gun.

“Drop it,” Win said.

The man with the turtleneck/dickey didn’t. Win shot him in the face. He turned his aim toward the man who had straddled Myron’s chest.

“Drop it,” Win said.

The man did. Win smiled at him. “Fast learner.”

Win’s eyes slid smoothly from side to side, never darting. Win barely moved, seeming to glide rather than walk. His movements were short and economical. He returned his eyes to his captive. The one still breathing.

“Talk,” Win said.

“I don’t know nothing.”

“Bad answer,” Win said. He spoke with calm authority, his matter-of-fact tone more intimidating than any scream. “If you know nothing, you are useless to me; if you are useless to me, you end up like him.” He vaguely motioned toward the still form at his feet.

The man held up his hands. His eyes were round and white. “Hey, wait a sec, okay? It’s no secret. Your buddy heard the guy’s name. Baron. The guy’s name is Baron. But everyone calls him the B Man.”

“The B Man works out of the Midwest,” Win said. “Who brought him in?”

“I don’t know; I swear.”

Win moved the gun closer. “You’re being useless to me again.”

“It’s the truth, I’d tell you if I knew. All I know is the B Man flew in late last night.”

“Why?” Win asked.

“It’s got something to do with Greg Downing. That’s all I know, I swear.”

“How much does Downing owe?”

“I don’t know.”

Win moved closer still. He pressed the barrel of the gun between the man’s eyes. “I rarely miss from this distance,” he said.

The man dropped to his knees. Win followed him down with the gun. “Please.” His voice was a pained plea. “I don’t know nothing else.” His eyes filled with tears. “I swear to God, I don’t.”

“I believe you,” Win said.

“Win,” Myron said.

Win’s eyes never left the man. “Relax,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure our friend here had confessed all. Confession is good for the soul, is it not?”

The man nodded hurriedly.

“Have you confessed all?”

More nods.

“You’re sure?”

Nod, nod.

Win lowered the weapon. “Go then,” he said. “Now.”

The man didn’t have to be told twice.

Chapter 18

Win looked down at the dead body as though it were a bag of peat moss. “We best depart.”

Myron nodded. He reached into his pants pocket and took out the cellular phone. A relatively new trick of the trade. Neither he nor Win had hung up after their call. The line was left open; Win had been able to hear everything that had gone on in the van. It worked as well as any bug or walkie-talkie.

They stepped into the cool night. They were on Washington Street. During the day the place was popping with delivery trucks, but at night it was completely silent. Someone would find a nasty surprise in the morning.

Win normally drove a Jaguar, but he had smashed a 1983 Chevy Nova into the van. Totaled. Not that it mattered. Win had several such vehicles he kept out in New Jersey to use for surveillance or activities just east of legal. The car was untraceable. The plates and paperwork were all phony. It would never lead back to anyone.

Myron looked at him. “A man of your breeding in a Chevy Nova?” He tsk-tsked.

“I know,” Win said. “Sitting in it almost gave me a rash.”

“If anyone at the club saw you …”

Win shuddered. “Do not even think such a thought.”

Myron’s legs still felt shaky and numb. Even as the B Man had reached down for his knee, Myron had known that Win would find a way to get to him. But the thought of how close he’d come to being crippled for life kept plucking at the muscles in his calves and thighs. He kept bending down and touching the bad knee, as if he couldn’t believe it was still there. Tears brimmed in his eyes as he looked at Win. Win saw them and turned away.

Myron followed behind him. “So how do you know this B Man?” he asked.

“He operates out of the Midwest,” Win said. “He is also a superb martial artist. We met in Tokyo once.”

“What sort of operation does he run?”

“The usual assorted sundries—gambling, drugs, loan sharking, extortion. A bit of prostitution too.”

“So what’s he doing here?”

“It appears that Greg Downing owes him money,” Win said, “probably from gambling. The B Man specializes in gambling.”

“Nice to have a specialty.”

“Indeed. I would assume that your Mr. Downing owes them a large sum of money.” Win glanced over at Myron. “That’s good news for you.”

“Why?”

“Because it implies that Downing is on the run rather than dead,” Win said. “The B Man is not wasteful. He wouldn’t kill someone who owes him a lot of money.”

“Dead men pay no debts.”

“Precisely,” Win said. “On top of that, he is clearly looking for Downing. If he killed him, he wouldn’t need you to find him.”

Myron considered this for a moment. “It sort of meshes with what Emily told me. She said Greg had no money. Gambling might explain that fact.”

Win nodded. “Kindly fill me in on what else has occurred in my absence. Jessica mentioned something about finding a dead woman.”

Myron told him everything. As he spoke, new theories rushed forward. He tried to sort through them and organize them a bit. When he finished the recap, Myron went right into the first one.

“Let’s assume,” he said, “that Downing does owe a lot of money to this B Man. That might explain why he finally agreed to sign an endorsement deal. He needs the money.”

Win nodded. “Go on.”

“And let’s also assume the B Man is not stupid. He wants to collect, right? So he would never really hurt Greg. Greg makes him money through his physical prowess. Broken bones would have an adverse effect on Greg’s financial status and thus his ability to pay.”

“True,” Win said.

“So let’s say Greg owes them a lot of money. Maybe the B Man wanted to scare him in another way.”

“How?”

“By hurting someone close to him. As a warning.”

Win nodded again. “That might work.”

“And suppose they followed Greg. Suppose they saw him with Carla. Suppose they figured that Greg and Carla were close.” Myron looked up. “Wouldn’t killing her be a hell of a warning?”

Win frowned. “You think the B Man killed her to warn Downing?”

“I’m saying it’s possible.”

“Why wouldn’t he just break some of her bones?” Win asked.

“Because the B Man wasn’t personally on the scene yet, remember? He got in last night. The murder would have been the work of hired muscle.”

Win still didn’t like it. “Your theory is improbable, at best. If the murder was indeed a warning, where is Downing now?”

“He ran away,” Myron said.

“Why? Because he was afraid for his own life?”

“Yes.”

“And did he run away immediately after learning Carla was dead?” Win asked. “On Saturday night?”

“That would be most logical.”

“He was frightened off then? By the murder?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“Ah.” Win stopped and smiled at Myron.

“What?” Myron asked.

“Pray tell,” Win began with a lilt in his voice, “if Carla’s body was just discovered today, how did Downing know about the murder last Saturday night?”

Myron felt a chill.

“For your theory to hold up,” Win continued, “Greg Downing would have to have done one of three things. One, he witnessed the murder; two, he stumbled into her apartment after the murder; three, he committed the murder himself. Furthermore, there was a great deal of cash in her apartment. Why? What was it doing there? Was this money to help pay back the B Man? If so, why didn’t his men take it? Or better yet, why didn’t Downing take it back when he was there?”

Myron shook his head. “So many holes,” he said. “And we still haven’t come up with what connection there is between Downing and this Carla or Sally or whatever her name is.”

Win nodded. They continued walking.

“One more thing,” Myron said. “Do you really think the mob would kill a woman just because she happened to be with Greg at a bar?”

“Very doubtful,” Win agreed.

“So basically, that whole theory is blown to hell.”

“Not basically,” Win corrected. “Entirely.”

They kept walking.

“Of course,” Win said, “Carla could have been working for the B Man.”

An icy finger poked at Myron. He saw where Win was going but he still said, “What?”

“Perhaps this Carla woman was the B Man’s contact. She collected for him. She was meeting Downing because he owed a great deal of money. Downing promises to pay. But he doesn’t have the money. He knows they are closing in on him. He has stalled long enough. So he goes back to her apartment, kills her, and runs.”

Silence. Myron tried to swallow, but his throat felt frozen. This was good, this talking it through. It helped. His legs were still rubbery from the incident, but what really bothered him now was how easily he had forgotten the dead man lying in the van. True, the man was probably a professional scum bag. True, the man had jammed the barrel of a gun into his mouth and had not dropped his weapon when Win told him to. And true, the world was probably a better place without him. But in the past Myron would have still felt some remorse for this fellow human being; in all honesty, he didn’t now. He tried to muster some sympathy, but the only thing he felt sad about was that he didn’t feel sad.

Enough self-analysis. Myron shook it off and said, “There are problems with that scenario too.”

“Such as?”

“Why would Greg kill her? Why not just run off before the back-booth meeting?”

Win considered this. “Fair point. Unless something happened during their meeting to set him off.”

“Like what?”

Win shrugged.

“It all comes back to this Carla,” Myron said. “Nothing about her adds up. I mean, even a drug dealer doesn’t have a setup like hers—working as a diner waitress, hiding sequentially numbered hundred-dollar bills, wearing wigs, having all those fake passports. And on top of that, you should have seen Dimonte this afternoon. He knew who she was and he was in a panic.”

“You contacted Higgins at Treasury?” Win asked.

“Yes. He’s tracing those serial numbers.”

“That could help.”

“We also need to get ahold of the telephone records from the Parkview Diner. See who Carla called.”

They fell back into silence and kept walking. They didn’t want to hail a taxi too close to the scene.

“Win?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you want to go to the game the other night?”

Win kept on walking. Myron kept pace. After some time, Win said, “You’ve never watched a replay of it, have you?”

He knew he meant the knee injury. “No.”

“Why not?”

Myron shrugged. “No point.”

“No, there is a point.” Win kept walking.

“Mind telling me what that is?” Myron said.

“Watching what happened to you might have meant dealing with it. Watching it might have meant closure.”

“I don’t understand,” Myron said.

Win nodded. “I know.”

“I remember you watched it,” Myron said. “I remember you watched it over and over.”

“I did that for a reason,” Win said.

“For vengeance.”

“To see if Burt Wesson injured you on purpose,” Win corrected.

“You wanted to pay him back.”

“You should have let me. Then you might have been able to put it behind you.”

Myron shook his head. “Violence is always the answer for you, Win.”

Win frowned. “Stop sounding melodramatic. A man committed a vile act upon you. Squaring things would have helped put it behind you. It’s not about vengeance. It’s about equilibrium. It’s about man’s basic need to keep the scales balanced.”

“That’s your need,” Myron said, “not mine. Hurting Burt Wesson wouldn’t have fixed my knee.”

“But it might have given you closure.”

“What does that mean, closure? It was a freak injury. That’s all.”

Win shook his head. “You never watched the tape.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. The knee was still ruined. Watching a tape wouldn’t have changed that.”

Win said nothing.

“I don’t understand this,” Myron continued. “I went on after the injury. I never complained, did I?”

“Never.”

“I didn’t cry or curse the gods or do any of that stuff.”

“Never,” Win said again. “You never let yourself be a burden on any of us.”

“So why do you think I needed to relive it?”

Win stopped and looked at him. “You’ve answered your own question, but you choose not to hear it.”

“Spare me the Kung-Fu-grasshopper philosophical bullshit,” Myron shot back. “Why didn’t you go to the game?”

Win started walking again. “Watch the tape,” he said.

Chapter 19

Myron didn’t watch the tape. But he had the dream.

In the dream he could see Burt Wesson bearing down on him. He could see the gleeful, almost giddy violence in Burt’s face as he drew closer and closer. In the dream, Myron had plenty of time to step out of harm’s way. Too much time really. But in this dream—as in many—Myron could not move. His legs would not respond, his feet mired in thick, dream-world quicksand while the inevitable approached.

But in reality, Myron had never seen Burt Wesson coming. There had been no warning. Myron had been pivoting on his right leg when the blinding collision befell him. He heard rather than felt a snap. At first there had been no pain, just wide-eyed astonishment. The astonishment had probably lasted less than a second, but it was a frozen second, a snapshot Myron only took out in dreams. Then came the pain.

In the dream Burt Wesson was almost on him now. Burt was a huge man, an enforcer-type player, the basketball equivalent of a hockey goon. He did not have much talent, but he had tremendous bulk and he knew how to use it. It had gotten him far, but this was the pros now. Burt would be cut before the start of the season—poetic irony that neither he nor Myron would play in a real professional basketball game. Until two nights ago anyway.

In the dream Myron watched Burt Wesson approach and waited. Somewhere in his subconscious, he knew that he would awaken before the collision. He always did. He lingered now in that cusp between nightmare and being awake—that tiny window where you are still asleep but you know it is a dream and even though it may be terrifying, you want to go on and see how it will end because it is only a dream and you are safe. But reality would not keep that window open for long. It never did. As Myron swam to the surface, he knew that whatever the answer was, he would not find it in any nocturnal voyage to the past.

“Phone for you,” Jessica said.

Myron blinked his eyes and rolled onto his back. Jessica was already dressed. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Nine.”

“What? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You needed the sleep.” She handed him the phone. “It’s Esperanza.”

He took it. “Hello.”

“Christ, don’t you ever sleep in your own bed?” Esperanza said.

He was hardly in the mood. “What is it?”

“Fred Higgins from Treasury is on the line,” she said. “I thought you’d want it.”

“Pass it through.” A click. “Fred?”

“Yeah, how you doing, Myron?”

“I’m okay. You got anything on those serial numbers?”

There was a brief hesitation. “You stumbled into some heavy shit, Myron. Some very heavy shit.”

“I’m listening.”

“People don’t want this out, you understand? I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get this.”

“Mum’s the word.”

“Okay then.” Higgins took a deep breath. “The bills are from Tucson, Arizona,” he said. “More specifically, First City National Bank of Tucson, Arizona. They were stolen in an armed bank heist.”

Myron shot up in the bed. “When?”

“Two months ago.”

Myron remembered a headline, and his blood turned cold.

“Myron?”

“The Raven Brigade,” Myron managed. “That was one of theirs, right?”

“Right. You ever work on their case with the feds?”

“No, never.” But he remembered. Myron and Win had worked on cases with a special and almost contradictory nature: high profile with the need for undercover. They had been perfect for such situations—who, after all, would suspect a former basketball star and a rich, Main Line prep of being undercover agents? They could travel in whatever circles they wanted to and not raise suspicion. Myron and Win didn’t have to create a cover; their reality was the best one the agency had. But Myron was never full-time with them. Win was their fair-haired boy; Myron was more a utility fielder Win called in when he thought it necessary.

But of course he knew about the Raven Brigade. Most people with even a passing familiarity with sixties extremism knew about them. Started by a charismatic leader named Cole Whiteman, the Ravens had been yet another splinter group of the Weather Underground. They were very much like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst. The Ravens, too, attempted a high-profile kidnapping, but the victim ended up dead. The group had gone underground. Four of them. Despite the FBI’s best efforts, the four escapees—including Cole Whiteman, who with his Win-like blond hair and Waspy background never looked the part of an extremist—had remained hidden for nearly a quarter century.

Dimonte’s bizarre questions about radical politics and “perversives” no longer seemed so bizarre.

“Was the victim one of the Ravens?” Myron asked.

“I can’t say.”

“You don’t have to,” Myron said. “I know it was Liz Gorman.”

There was another brief hesitation. Then: “How the hell did you know that?”

“The implants,” Myron said.

“What?”

Liz Gorman, a fiery redhead, had been one of the founding members of the Raven Brigade. During their first “mission”—a failed attempt to burn down a university chemistry lab—the police had picked up a code name on the scanner: CD. It was later revealed that the male members of the Brigade called her CD, short for Carpenter’s Dream, because she was “flat as a board and easy to screw.” Sixties radicals, for all their so-called progressive thoughts, were some of the world’s biggest sexists. Now the implants made sense. Everyone Myron had interviewed remembered one thing about “Carla”—her cup size. Liz Gorman had been famous for her flat chest—what better disguise than oversized breast implants?

“The feds and cops are cooperating on this one,” Higgins said. “They’re trying to keep this quiet for a while.”

“Why?”

“They got her place under surveillance. They’re hoping to maybe draw out another member.”

Myron felt completely numb. He had wanted to learn more about the mystery woman and now he had: she was Liz Gorman, a famous radical who had not been seen since 1975. The disguises, the various passports, the implants—they all added up now. She wasn’t a drug dealer, she was a woman on the run.

But if Myron had hoped learning the truth about Liz Gorman would help clarify his own investigation, he had been sadly mistaken. What possible connection could there be between Greg Downing and Liz Gorman? How had a professional basketball player gotten enmeshed with a wanted extremist who had gone underground when Greg was still a kid? It made absolutely no sense.

“How much did they get in the bank heist?” Myron asked.

“Hard to say,” Higgins answered. “About fifteen thousand in cash, but they also blew open the safe-deposit boxes. Over a half million in goods have been declared for insurance purposes, but a lot of it is bullshit. A guy gets robbed, all of a sudden he was keeping ten Rolexes in the box instead of one—trying to rip off the insurance company, you know how it is.”

“On the other hand,” Myron said, “anyone keeping illegal dollars in there wouldn’t declare it. They’d just have to swallow the loss.” Back to drugs and drug money. The extremists in the underground needed resources. They’d been known to rob banks, blackmail former followers who had gone mainstream, deal drugs, whatever. “So it could have been even more.”

“Right, hard to say.”

“You got anything else on this?”

“Nothing,” Higgins said. “It’s being kept sealed tight, and I’m not in the loop. I can’t tell you how hard it was to get this, Myron. You owe me big.”

“I already promised you the tickets, Fred.”

“Courtside?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Jessica came back into the room. When she saw Myron’s face, she stopped and looked a question at him. Myron hung up and told her. She listened. Remembering Esperanza’s crack, Myron realized that he had now spent four nights in a row here—a post-breakup world and Olympic record. He worried about that. It wasn’t that he didn’t like staying here. He did. It wasn’t that he feared commitment or any of that other drivel; to the contrary, he craved it. But part of him was still afraid—old wounds that wouldn’t heal and all that.

Myron had a habit of exposing too much of himself. He knew that. With Win or Esperanza it was okay. He trusted them absolutely. He loved Jessica with all his heart, but she had hurt him. He wanted to be tentative. He wanted to hold back, to not leave himself so open, but the heart don’t know from stop. At least, Myron’s didn’t. Two primal internal forces were at odds here: his natural instinct to give all he had when it came to love vs. the survival instinct of pain avoidance.

“This whole thing,” Jessica said when he had finished, “is just too weird.”

“Yep,” he said. They had barely talked last night. He had assured her that he was all right and they had both gone to sleep. “I guess I should thank you.”

“For what?”

“You were the one who called Win.”

She nodded. “After those goons jumped you.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going to interfere.”

“Wrong. I said I wasn’t going to try to stop you. There’s a difference.”

“True enough.”

Jessica started chewing on her bottom lip. She was wearing jeans and a Duke sweatshirt several sizes too large on her. Her hair was still wet from a recent shower. “I think you should move in,” she said.

Her words hit him square in the jaw. “What?”

“I didn’t mean to just blurt it out like that,” she said. “I’m not very good at beating around the bush.”

“That’s my job anyway,” he said.

She shook her head. “You pick the strangest times to be crude.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

“Look, I’m not good at this stuff, Myron. You know that.”

He nodded. He knew.

She tilted her head to the side, shrugged, smiled nervously. “It’s just that I like having you here. It feels right.”

His heart soared and sung and quivered in fear. “It’s a big step.”

“Not really,” she said. “You’re here most of the time anyway. And I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

The pause lingered a bit longer than it should. Jessica jumped into it before it could do irreparable harm. “Don’t say anything now,” she said, rushing the words out in a gush. “I want you to think about it. It was a dumb time to bring it up, with all this stuff going on. Or maybe that’s why I chose now, I don’t know. But don’t say anything. Just think about it. Don’t call me today. Or tonight. I’m going to your game, but then I’m taking Audrey out for a few drinks. It’s her birthday. Sleep at your house tonight. Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” Myron agreed.

Chapter 20

Big Cyndi sat at the reception desk. “Sat” was probably the wrong word. Talk about the proverbial camel trying to squeeze through the eye of the needle. The desk’s four legs were off the floor, the top teetering on Big Cyndi’s knees like a seesaw. Her coffee mug disappeared into fleshy hands that resembled couch cushions. Her short spikes of hair had more of a pinkish hue today. Her makeup reminded him of a childhood incident involving melted Crayola crayons. She wore white lipstick, like something out of an Elvis documentary. Her size-3XL T-shirt read CLUB SODA NOT SEALS. It took Myron a few seconds to get it. Politically correct but cute.

Usually she growled when she saw Myron. Today she smiled sweetly and batted her eyes at him. The sight was far more frightening, like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, only on steroids. Big Cyndi pointed up her middle finger and bounced it up and down.

“Line one?” he tried.

She shook her head. The up and down gesture became more hurried. She looked up at the ceiling. Myron followed her gaze but he saw nothing. Cyndi rolled her eyes. The smile was frozen on her face, like a clown’s.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Win wants to see you,” she said.

It was the first time Myron had heard her voice, and it startled him. She sounded like one of those perky hostesses on a cable shopping network, the one where people call up and describe in far too much detail how much their lives were improved by purchasing a green vase shaped like Mount Rushmore.

“Where’s Esperanza?” he asked.

“Win’s cute.”

“Is she here?”

“Win seemed to think it was important.”

“I’m just—”

“You’re going to see Win,” Cyndi interrupted. “You’re certainly not checking up on your most valued associate.” The sweet smile.

“I’m not checking up. I just want to know—”

“Where Win’s office is. It’s two stories up.” She made a sound with her coffee that some might loosely label “slurping.” Moose in the tri-state area scattered in search of mates.

“Tell her I’ll be back,” Myron said.

“But of course.” She batted her eyelashes. They looked like two tarantulas in death throes. “Have a nice day.”

Win’s corner office faced Fifty-second Street and Park Avenue. Major league view for Lock-Horne Securities’ golden boy. Myron sank into one of the lush burgundy leather chairs. There were several paintings of fox hunts on the richly paneled walls. Dozens of manly men on horseback, dressed in black hats, red blazers, white pants, black boots, rode out armed with only rifles and dogs to chase down a small furry creature until they caught and killed it. Ah, gamesmanship. A tad overkill maybe. Like using a flamethrower to light a cigarette.

Win typed on a laptop computer that looked lonely on the mono-expanse he called a desk. “I found something of interest on the computer disks we made at Greg’s house.”

“Oh?”

“It appears our friend Mr. Downing had an e-mail address with America Online,” Win said. “He downloaded this particular piece of mail on Saturday.” Win spun the laptop around so Myron could read the screen:

Subj: Sex!

Date: 3-11 14:51:36 EST

From: Sepbabe

To: Downing22

Meet you tonight at ten. The place we discussed. Come. I promise you the greatest night of ecstasy imaginable.

—F

Myron looked up. “Greatest night of ecstasy imaginable?”

“She has quite the writing flair, no?” Win said.

Myron made a face.

Win put a sincere hand to his heart. “Even if she could not live up to such a promise,” he continued, “one has to admire her ability to take risk, her dedication to her craft.”

“Uh huh,” Myron said. “So who is F?”

“There is no profile for the screen name Sepbabe on line,” Win explained. “That doesn’t mean anything, of course. Many users don’t have a profile. They don’t want everyone knowing their real name. I would assume however that F is yet another alias for our dearly departed friend Carla.”

“We have Carla’s real name now,” Myron said.

“Oh?”

“Liz Gorman.”

Win arched an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

“Liz Gorman. As in the Raven Brigade.” He told Win about Fred Higgins’s call. Win leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. As usual his face gave away nothing.

When Myron finished, Win said, “Curiouser and curiouser.”

“It comes down to this,” Myron said. “What connection could there possibly be between Greg Downing and Liz Gorman?”

“A strong one,” Win said, nodding toward the screen. “The possibility of the greatest night of ecstasy imaginable, if one is to buy into the hyperbole.”

“But with Liz Gorman?”

“Why not?” Win almost sounded defensive. “You shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of age or implants. It wouldn’t be right.”

Mr. Equal Rights. “It’s not that,” Myron said. “Let’s pretend that Greg has the hots for Liz Gorman, even though nobody described her as much of a looker …”

“You’re so shallow, Myron,” Win said with a disenchanted shake of the head. “Did you ever consider the possibility that Greg saw beneath that? She did, after all, have large breasts.”

“As usual when discussing sex,” Myron replied, “you’ve missed the point.”

“Which is?”

“How would they have hooked up in the first place?”

Win steepled his fingers again, bouncing the tips against his nose. “Ah,” he said.

“Right, ah. Here’s a woman who’s been living underground for more than twenty years. She’s traveled all over the world, probably never staying in one spot for very long. She was in Arizona robbing a bank two months ago. She’s working as a waitress in a tiny diner on Dyckman Street. How does this woman hook up with Greg Downing?”

“Difficult,” Win allowed, “but not impossible. There is plenty of evidence to support that.”

“Like?”

Win motioned to the computer screen. “This e-mail is talking about last Saturday night, for one—the same night Greg and Liz Gorman met in a New York City bar.”

“In a dive bar,” Myron corrected. “Why there? Why not go to a hotel or her place?”

“Perhaps because it is out of the way. Perhaps, as you implied, Liz Gorman would want to keep out of the public eye. Such a bar might be a good alternative.” He stopped steepling and lightly drummed his fingers on the desk. “But you, my friend, are forgetting something else.”

“What?”

“The woman’s clothes in Greg’s house,” Win said. “Your investigation has led us to conclude that Downing has a lover he was keeping secret. The question, of course is: why? Why would he work so hard to keep a love affair clandestine? One possible explanation is that the secret love was the infamous Liz Gorman.”

Myron wasn’t sure what to think. Audrey had seen Greg at a restaurant with a woman that did not fit Liz Gorman’s description. But what did that mean? It might have been another date. It might have been something innocent. It might have been a side affair, who knows? Still, Myron had trouble buying a romantic entanglement involving Greg Downing and Liz Gorman. Something about it just didn’t wash. “There must be a way of tracing down this screen name and finding out the user’s real identity,” he said. “Let’s make sure it checks back to Liz Gorman or one of her aliases.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I don’t have any contacts with America Online, but someone we know must.” Win reached behind him. He opened up the paneled door on his minifridge. He tossed Myron a can of Yoo-Hoo and poured himself a Brooklyn Lager. Win never drank beer, only lager. “Greg’s money has been difficult to locate,” he said. “I’m not sure there is very much.”

“That would fit into what Emily said.”

“However,” Win continued, “I did find one major withdrawal.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars in cash. It took some time because it came out of an account that Martin Felder holds for him.”

“When did he withdraw it?”

“Four days before he disappeared,” Win said.

“Paying off a gambling debt?”

“Perhaps.”

Win’s phone rang. He picked it up and said, “Articulate. Okay, put it through.” Two seconds later he handed the phone to Myron.

“For me?” Myron asked.

Win gave him flat eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m handing you the phone because it’s too heavy for me.”

Everyone’s a wiseass. Myron took the phone. “Hello?”

“I got a squad car downstairs.” It was Dimonte in full bark. “Get your ass in it now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m at fucking Downing’s house, that’s what’s wrong. I had to practically suck off a judge to get the warrant.”

“Nice imagery, Rolly.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Bolitar. You said there was blood in the house.”

“In the basement,” Myron corrected.

“Well, I’m in the basement right now,” he countered. “And it’s as clean as a baby’s ass.”

Chapter 21

The basement was indeed clean. No blood anywhere.

“There’s got to be traces,” Myron said.

Dimonte’s toothpick looked like it was about to snap between his clenched teeth. “Traces?”

“Yeah. With a microscope or something.”

“With a …” Dimonte flapped his arms, his face crimson. “What the hell good is traces going to do me? They don’t prove a damn thing. You can’t test traces.”

“It’ll prove there was blood.”

“So what?” he shouted. “You go through any house in America with a microscope and you’re bound to find traces of blood. Who the fuck cares?”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Rolly. The blood was there.”

There were maybe five lab cops—no uniforms, no marked cars—going through the house. Krinsky was there too. The video-camera in his hand was off right now. He also had what looked like manila files jammed into his armpit. Myron motioned to them. “That the coroner’s report?”

Roland Dimonte stepped in to block Myron’s view. “That ain’t none of your business, Bolitar.”

“I know about Liz Gorman, Rolly.”

The toothpick hit the floor on that one. “How the hell …?”

“It’s not important.”

“The fuck it ain’t. What else do you know? If you’re holding out on me, Bolitar—”

“I’m not holding out on you, but I think I can help.”

Dimonte narrowed his eyes. Señor Suspicious. “Help how?”

“Just tell me Gorman’s blood type. That’s all I want to know. Her blood type.”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Because you’re not a total numb nut, Rolly.”

“Don’t give me that shit. Why do you want to know?”

“Remember I told you about finding blood in the basement?” Myron said.

“Yeah.”

“I left something out.”

Dimonte gave him the glare. “What?”

“We tested some of the blood.”

“We? Who the fuck is …” His voice trailed off. “Oh Christ, don’t tell me that psycho-yuppie is in on all this?”

To know Win was to love him. “I’d like to make a little trade.”

“What kind of trade?”

“You tell me the blood type in the report. I tell you the blood type we found in the basement.”

“Fuck you, Bolitar. I can arrest your ass for tampering with evidence in a police investigation.”

“What tampering? There was no investigation.”

“I could still nail your ass for breaking and entering.”

“If you could prove it. And if Greg were around to press charges. Look, Rolly—”

“AB positive,” Krinsky said. He ignored Dimonte’s renewed glare and continued. “It’s fairly rare. Four percent of the populace.”

They both turned their attention to Myron. Myron nodded. “AB positive. It’s the same.”

Dimonte put up both hands and scrunched his face into perplexed. “Whoa, hold up here. Just what the fuck are you trying to say? That she was killed down here and moved?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Myron said.

“Cause we didn’t see any evidence of the body being moved,” Dimonte went on. “None at all. Not that we were looking for it. But the bleeding pattern—I mean, if she was killed down here, there wouldn’t have been so much blood like that at her apartment. You saw the mess there, right?”

Myron nodded.

Dimonte’s eyes darted aimlessly. Myron could practically see the gears inside his head grinding to a halt. “You know what that means, don’t you, Bolitar?”

“No, Rolly, why don’t you enlighten me?”

“It means the killer came back here after the murder. It’s the only explanation. And you know who all this is starting to point to? Your pal Downing. First we found his fingerprints in the victim’s apartment—”

“What’s this?”

Dimonte nodded. “That’s right. Downing’s fingerprints were by the door frame.”

“But not inside?”

“Yeah, inside. Inside the door frame.”

“But nowhere else?”

“What the hell’s the difference? The fingerprints prove he was at the scene. What more do you need? Anyway, here’s how it must have happened.” He stuck a new toothpick in his mouth. New toothpick for a new theory. “Downing kills her. He comes back to his house to pack or something. He’s in a rush so he leaves a little mess in the basement. Then he runs away. A few days later he comes back and cleans it up.”

Myron shook his head. “Why come down to the basement in the first place?”

“The laundry room,” Dimonte answered. “He was coming down here to wash his clothes.”

“The laundry room is upstairs off the kitchen,” Myron said.

Dimonte shrugged. “So maybe he was getting a suitcase.”

“They’re in the bedroom closet. This is just a kids’ playroom, Rolly. Why did he come down here?”

That stopped Dimonte for a moment. It stopped Myron too. None of this made much sense. Had Liz Gorman been killed here and dragged to her apartment in Manhattan? That didn’t seem to make much sense based on the physical evidence. Could she have been injured down here?

Whoa, hold the phone.

Maybe the attack started here. Maybe there had been a scuffle in the basement. In the course of subduing or knocking her out, blood was spilled. But then what? Did the killer stick her in a car and drive to Manhattan? And then—what?—on a fairly active street, the killer parked a car, dragged her injured body up the stairs, entered her apartment, killed her?

Did that make any sense?

From the first level a voice cried down, “Detective! We found something! Quick!”

Dimonte wet his lips. “Turn on the video,” he told Krinsky. Videotaping all the relevant moments. Just like Myron had told him. “Stay here, Bolitar. I don’t want to have to explain your ugly mug being on the film.”

Myron followed but at a discreet distance. Krinsky and Dimonte headed up the stairs into the kitchen. They turned left. The laundry room. Vinyl yellow wallpaper with white chicks blanketed all four walls. Emily’s taste? Probably not. Knowing Emily she’d probably never even seen the inside of a laundry room.

“Over here,” someone said. Myron stayed back. He could see that the dryer had been pushed away from the wall. Dimonte bent down and looked behind it. Krinsky arched over to make sure the whole thing was being filmed. Dimonte stood back up. He was trying like hell to look grim—a smile wouldn’t look good on film—but he was having a rough time of it. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and lifted the item into view.

The baseball bat was covered with blood.

Chapter 22

When Myron got back to the office, Esperanza was at the reception desk.

“Where’s Big Cyndi?” Myron asked.

“Having lunch.”

The image of Fred Flintstone’s car tipping over from the weight of his Bronto-ribs flashed in front of Myron’s eyes.

“Win filled me in on what’s been going on,” Esperanza said. She wore an aqua-blue blouse open at the throat. A gold heart on a slender chain dangled proudly against the dark skin of her sternum. Her always-mussed hair was slightly entangled in big hoop earrings. She pushed the hair back with one finger. “So what happened at the house?”

He explained about the cleaned-up blood and the baseball bat. Esperanza usually liked to do other things while she listened. She wasn’t right now. She stared square into his eyes. When she looked at you like that, there was such intensity it was sometimes hard to look back.

“I’m not sure I understand,” she said. “You and Win found blood in the basement two days ago.”

“Right.”

“Since then, someone cleaned up that blood—but they left behind the murder weapon?”

“So it appears.”

Esperanza considered this for a moment. “Could it have been a maid?”

“The police already checked on that. She hasn’t been there in three weeks.”

“Do you have a thought?”

He nodded. “Someone is trying to frame Greg. It’s the only logical explanation.”

She arched a skeptical eyebrow. “By planting and then cleaning up blood?”

“No, let’s start from the beginning.” He grabbed the chair and sat in front of her. He had been going over it in his mind the whole ride back, and he wanted to talk it out. In the corner on his left, the fax machine sounded its digitally primordial screech. Myron waited for the sound to subside. “Okay,” he said, “first I’m going to assume that the killer knew Greg was with Liz Gorman that night—maybe he followed them, maybe he was waiting for them near her apartment. Whatever, he knows they were together.”

Esperanza nodded, stood. She walked over to the fax machine to check the incoming transmission.

“After Greg leaves, the killer murders Liz Gorman. Knowing that Downing would make a good fall guy, he takes some blood from the murder scene and plants it at Greg’s house. That will raise suspicion. To put the icing on the cake, the killer also takes the murder weapon and plants it behind the dryer.”

“But you just said the blood was cleaned up,” she interjected.

“Right. Here’s where it gets a little tricky. Suppose, for example, I wanted to protect Greg Downing. I go into his house and find the blood. Now remember, I want to protect Greg from a murder rap. So what would I do?”

She squinted at the fax coming through. “Clean up the blood.”

“Exactly.”

“Wow, thanks. Do I get a gold star? Get on with it already.”

“Just bear with me, okay? I would see the blood and clean it up. But—and here’s the important part—the first time I was in that house I never saw the bat. That’s not just in this example. That’s real life. Win and I only saw the blood in the basement. No baseball bat.”

“Hold on,” she said. “You’re saying someone cleaned up the blood to protect Greg from a murder rap but didn’t know about the bat?”

“Right.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

Esperanza shook her head. She moved back to her desk and hit some keys on her computer keyboard. “It doesn’t add up.”

“Why not?”

“Suppose I’m madly in love with Greg Downing,” she said, moving back to the fax machine. “I’m in his house. For some reason I can’t fathom, I’m in his kids’ playroom. Doesn’t matter where I am. Imagine I’m in my own apartment. Or I’m visiting your house. I could be anywhere.”

“Okay.”

“I see blood on the floor or on the walls or wherever.” She stopped, looked at him. “What conclusion would you logically expect me to draw?”

Myron shook his head. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Esperanza thought a moment. “Suppose you left here right now,” she began, “and went back to the bitch’s loft.”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Whatever. Suppose when you walked in, you found blood on her walls. What would be your first reaction?”

Myron nodded slowly. Now he saw what she was getting at. “I’d be worried about Jessica.”

“And your second reaction? After you found out she was okay?”

“Curiosity, I guess. Whose blood is it? How did it get there? That sort of thing.”

“Right,” she said with a quick nod. “Would you think to yourself, ‘Gee, I better clean it up before the bitch gets accused of murdering somebody’?”

“Stop calling her that.”

Esperanza waved him off. “Would you think that or not?”

“Not in that circumstance, no,” Myron said. “So in order for my theory to hold water—”

“Your protector had to know about the murder,” she finished for him, back checking her computer for something. “He or she would also have to know that Greg was somehow involved.”

Myron’s head spun with possibilities. “You think Greg killed her,” he said. “You think he went back to his house after the murder and left behind some traces of the crime—like blood in the basement. Then he sent this protector back to the house to help cover his tracks.”

Esperanza made a face. “Where the hell did you come up with that?”

“I just—”

“That’s not what I think at all,” Esperanza said. She stapled the fax pages together. “If Greg sent someone to get rid of the evidence, the weapon would be gone too.”

“Right. So that leaves us where?”

Esperanza shrugged, circled something on the fax page with a red marker. “You’re the great detective. You figure it out.”

Myron thought about it a moment. Another answer—one he prayed was wrong—came to him all at once. “There’s another possibility,” he said.

“What?”

“Clip Arnstein.”

“What about him?”

“I told Clip about the blood in the basement,” Myron said.

“When?”

“Two days ago.”

“How did he react?”

“He freaked, pretty much,” Myron said. “He’s also got motive—any scandal will destroy his chances of keeping control of the Dragons. Hell, that’s why he hired me. To keep any trouble contained. Nobody else even knew about the blood in the basement.” Myron stopped. He leaned back and ran it through his mind again. “Of course I haven’t had a chance to tell Clip about Liz Gorman’s murder. He didn’t even know the blood wasn’t Greg’s. All he knew was that there was blood in the basement. Would he go that far just on that? Would he still risk covering it all up if he didn’t know anything about Liz Gorman?”

Esperanza gave him a small smile. “Maybe he knows more than you think,” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

She handed him the fax. “It’s the list of long distance calls made from the pay phone at the Parkview Diner,” she said. “I already cross-checked it with my computer Rolodex. Look at the number I circled.”

Myron saw it. A call lasting twelve minutes had been made from the Parkview Diner four days before Greg’s disappearance. The phone number was Clip’s.

Chapter 23

“Liz Gorman called Clip?” Myron looked up at Esperanza. “What the hell is going on?”

Esperanza shrugged. “Ask Clip.”

“I knew he was keeping something from me,” he went on, “but I don’t get it. How does Clip fit into this equation?”

“Uh huh.” She shuffled through some papers on her desk. “Look, we got a ton of work to do. I mean, sports agent work. You have a game tonight, right?”

He nodded.

“So ask Clip then. In the meantime, we’re just going around in circles here.”

Myron scanned the sheet. “Any other numbers jump out at you?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But I want to talk about something else for a minute.”

“What?”

“We have a problem with a client.”

“Who?”

“Jason Blair.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He’s pissed off,” she said. “He’s not happy with me handling his contract negotiations. He said he hired you, not some”—she made quote marks in the air with her fingers—“ ‘scantily clad wrestler with a nice ass.’ ”

“He said that?”

“Yep. Nice ass. Didn’t even notice my legs.” Esperanza shook her head.

Myron smiled. “So what happened?”

Behind them the elevator dinged. Only one hit this part of the floor. The elevator opened directly into the reception area of MB SportsReps. Classy, or so he had been told. When the doors opened, two men came out. Myron recognized them right away. Camouflage Pants and Brick Wall. They were both armed. They aimed their guns at Myron and Esperanza. B Man stepped out behind them like he’d just been introduced on the Leno show. Big smile, acknowledging-the-crowd wave.

“How’s the knee, Myron?” he asked.

“Better than your van.”

B Man laughed at that one. “That Win,” he mused. “The man is always a surprise. How did he know when to hit us?”

No reason not to tell. “We kept the cellular phones on.”

B Man shook his head. “Ingenious really. I’m very impressed.” He wore one of those suits that are just a tad too shiny and a pink tie. His shirt was french-cuffed and monogrammed with four letters: B MAN. Taking the nickname thing a little far. A thick, ropelike gold bracelet encircled his right wrist.

“How did you get up here?” Myron asked.

“Do you really think a few rent-a-cops are going to stop us?”

“I’d still like to hear,” Myron said.

B Man shrugged. “I called Lock-Horne Securities and told them I was looking for a new financial advisor for my millions. An anxious young peon told me to come right up. I hit the twelfth floor on the elevator instead of the fifteenth.” He spread his hands. “So here I am.” He smiled at Esperanza. What with the too-white teeth and the tan, it looked like he switched on a nightlight.

“And who is this fetching creature?” he asked with a wink.

“My,” Esperanza said, “what woman doesn’t love to be called a creature?”

B Man laughed again. “The little lady has gumption,” he said. “I like that. I really do.”

“Like I care,” Esperanza said.

More laughter. “May I indulge you a moment, Miss …?”

“Money Penny,” she finished for him. She said it with her best Sean Connery imitation. No Rich Little, but not bad either.

Another laugh from the B Man. The man was half-hyena. “Would you please call Win down here? On the speakerphone if you don’t mind. Tell him to come down unarmed.”

She looked at Myron. Myron nodded. She dialed. Over the speakerphone, Win offered up another, “Articulate.”

Esperanza said, “Some bottled blond with a bottled tan is down here to see you.”

“Ah, I’ve been expecting him,” Win said. “Hello, B Man.”

“Hello, Win.”

“I assume you are in well-armed company.”

“That I am, Win,” B Man said. “If you try anything, your friends won’t make it out alive.”

“ ‘Won’t make it out alive’?” Win repeated. “I expected better from you, B Man, really. I’ll be down in a second.”

“Come unarmed, Win.”

“Not a chance. But there will be no violence. That I promise you.” The phone clicked off. For several moments everyone looked at one another as if wondering who was going to take the lead.

“I don’t trust him,” B Man said. He pointed to Brick Wall. “Take the girl in the other room. Duck down behind a desk or something. You hear any shooting, you blow her head off.”

The Brick Wall nodded.

B Man directed his attention to Camouflage Pants. “Keep your gun on Bolitar.”

“Right.”

B Man took out his own weapon. When the elevator dinged, he squatted and aimed. The doors slid open, but it wasn’t Win. Big Cyndi emerged from the elevator, not unlike a dinosaur emerging from its egg.

“Jesus Christ!” Camouflage Pants said. “What the hell is that?”

Big Cyndi growled.

“Who is she, Bolitar?” B Man demanded.

“My new receptionist.”

“Tell her to wait in the other room.”

Myron nodded to her. “It’s okay. Esperanza’s in there.”

Cyndi growled again, but she listened. She walked past the B Man on her way to Myron’s office. His gun looked like a disposable lighter next to her. She opened the door, snarled one last time, and closed it.

Silence.

“Jesus Christ,” Camouflage Pants said again.

They waited approximately thirty seconds before the elevator dinged again. B Man got back into his squat and aimed. The doors slid open. Win stepped out. He looked mildly annoyed when he saw the weapon aimed his way. His voice was clipped. “I told you there would be no violence.”

“You have information we need,” B Man said.

“I’m well aware of that,” Win replied. “Now put that gun away and we’ll talk civilly.”

The B Man kept his weapon on Win. “You armed?”

“Of course.”

“Hand over your weapon.”

“No,” Win said. “And it’s not weapon. It’s weapons. Plural.”

“I said—”

“And I heard you, Orville.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Win sighed. “Fine, B Man.” He shook his head as he said it. “You are making this far more difficult than it has to be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that for an intelligent fellow, you too often forget that brute strength is not the only course. There are situations that call for restraint.”

Win lecturing on restraint, Myron thought. What next? Xaviera Hollander lecturing on monogamy?

“Think about what you’ve already done,” Win said. “First, you have Myron roughed up by a pair of amateurs—”

“Amateurs!” Camouflage Pants didn’t like that. “Who you calling—”

“Shut up, Tony,” B Man said.

“You hear what he called me? An amateur?”

“I said, shut up, Tony.”

But Tony The Pants wasn’t through yet. “Hey, I got feelings too, B Man.”

The B Man gave him hard eyes. “Your left femur, if you don’t shut up.”

Tony closed his mouth.

The B Man looked back to Win. “Sorry about the interruption.”

“Apology accepted.”

“Go on.”

“As I was saying,” Win continued, “first you try to rough Myron up. Then you try to kidnap and cripple him. All for naught.”

“Not for naught,” B Man countered. “We need to know where Downing is.”

“And what makes you think Myron knows?”

“You were both at his house. Then all of a sudden Bolitar is on Downing’s team. As a matter of fact, he takes his place on the roster.”

“So?”

“So I’m not stupid. You two know something.”

“And what if we do?” Win said, hands spread. “Why didn’t you just ask? Did you ever even consider that possibility? Did you ever think that maybe the best course of action would be simply to ask?”

“I did ask!” Camouflage Pants jumped in. He was defensive now. “On the street! I asked him where Greg was. He gave me lip.”

Win looked at him. “Were you ever in the military?” he asked.

Pants seemed confused. “No.”

“You are a worthless punk,” Win said in the same tone he might use when discussing a mixed stock report. “A pitiful ectoplasm such as yourself wearing army fatigues is an affront to any man or woman who has ever experienced real combat. If I ever happen across you again donning any similar garb, I will hurt you severely. Do I make myself clear?”

“Hey—”

“You don’t know this guy, Tony,” B Man interrupted. “Just nod and shut up.”

Camouflage Pants looked hurt but he did as he was told.

Win turned his attention back to the B Man. “We can help each other out in this situation,” he said.

“How?”

“It just so happens that we, too, are searching for the elusive Mr. Downing. That is why I wish to make a proposal.”

“I’m listening.”

“First,” Win said, “stop aiming the weapons at us.”

B Man gave him a funny look. “How do I know I can trust you?”

“If I wanted you dead,” Win answered, “I would have killed you last night.”

The B Man thought it over, nodded, lowered his weapon. He signaled Camouflage Pants, who then did likewise. “Why didn’t you?” B Man asked. “I probably would have killed you in the same situation.”

“That’s what I mean about brute force,” Win said. “About being wasteful. We need each other here. If I had killed you, I wouldn’t be able to make this proposal today.”

“Fair enough. The floor is yours.”

“I assume that Mr. Downing owes you a rather hefty sum.”

“Very hefty sum.”

“Fine,” Win said. “You tell us what you know. We find him, no cost to you. When we do find him, you promise not to hurt him if he pays up.”

“And if he doesn’t pay up?”

Win grinned and held his hands out, palms up. “Who are we to interfere with the way you conduct your business?”

B Man thought about it, but not for very long. “Okay, I can live with that,” he said. “But I don’t talk with the hired help around.” He turned to Camouflage. “Go sit in the other room.”

“Why?”

“Because if someone decides to torture you, you’ll know nothing.”

That answer seemed to make perfect sense to Camouflage. He went into Myron’s office without another word.

“Why don’t we sit?” Win suggested.

They did so. B Man crossed his legs and started right in. “Downing is your basic gamble-a-holic,” he began. “He had pretty good luck for a long time. That’s a bad thing when a man has the itch. When his luck changed—as it must in the long run—he kept thinking he could win it back. They all do. When they have the sort of money that Downing has, I let them go. Let them dig their own grave. It’s good for business. But at the same time, you have to keep an eye out. There is a fine line working here. You don’t want them to end up digging to China either.” He turned and looked at Myron. “You know what I’m saying?”

Myron nodded. “China.”

“Right. Anyway, Downing started losing big. I’m talking very big here. He was never a prompt payer, but he was always good for it. I sometimes let the tab run as high as two-fifty or even three.”

“Hundred thousand?” Myron asked.

“Yeah.” B Man smiled. “You don’t know any gamblers, do you?”

Myron kept silent. He wasn’t about to tell this slime bucket his life story.

“It’s as bad as alcohol or heroin,” B Man went on. “They can’t stop themselves. In some ways, it’s even worse. People drink and do drugs to escape despair. Gambling has that element, too, but it also offers you the friendly hand of hope. You always got hope when you gamble. You always believe that you’re just one bet away from turning it all around. It’s a catch-twenty-two. If you got hope, you keep on gambling. But with gambling, there’s always hope.”

“Very deep,” Win said. “Let’s get back to Greg Downing.”

“Simply put, Greg stops paying his tab. It runs up to half a million. I start putting some pressure on him. He tells me he’s flat broke, but I shouldn’t worry because he’s signing some big endorsement deal that will net him zillions.”

The Forte deal, Myron thought. Greg’s sudden change of heart about endorsement money made more sense now.

“I asked him when this endorsement money will be coming in. He tells me in about six months. Six months? On a half million dollar debt and growing? I told him that’s not good enough. He’d have to pay up now. He said he didn’t have the money. So I ask for a show of good faith.”

Myron knew where this was going. “He shaved points.”

“Wrong. He was supposed to shave points. The Dragons were favored by eight over Charlotte. Downing was going to see to it that the Dragons won by less than eight. No big deal.”

“He agreed?”

“Sure he did. The game was on Sunday. I dumped a ton on Charlotte. A ton.”

“And Greg never played,” Myron finished for him.

“You got it,” B Man said. “The Dragons won by twelve. Okay, I figure Greg got hurt. Like the papers say. A freak injury, that’s not his fault. Don’t get me wrong. He’s still responsible for what I lost. Why should I pay for his freak injury?” He paused to see if anyone was going to argue with his logic. No one bothered. “So I waited for Downing to call me, but he never did. I’m owed close to two million by now. Win, you know I can’t just sit back with that kind of thing, right?”

Win nodded.

“When was the last time Greg made a payment to you?” Myron asked.

“It’s been a while. I don’t know. Five, six months maybe.”

“Nothing more recent?”

“Nothing.”

They talked a bit more. Esperanza, Big Cyndi, Camouflage, and Brick Wall came back into the room. Win and B Man changed the topic to martial art buddies they had in common. A few minutes later B Man and his entourage left. When the elevator door closed, Big Cyndi turned and smiled widely at Esperanza. Then she began to skip in a circle. The floor shook.

Myron looked a question at Esperanza.

“That big guy,” Esperanza said, “the one who was with us in the other room.”

“What about him?”

“He asked Cyndi for her phone number.”

Big Cyndi continued skipping with childlike abandon. The occupants of the floor beneath them were probably diving for cover like it was the last day of Pompeii. He turned to Win. “Did you catch the fact that Greg hadn’t paid anything in months?”

Win nodded. “Clearly the fifty thousand dollars he withdrew before his disappearance was not to pay off gambling debts.”

“So what was it for?”

“To run, I imagine.”

“So he knew at least four days before the fact that he was going to take off,” Myron said.

“It would appear so.”

Myron thought about that for a moment. “Then the timing of the murder can’t just be a coincidence. If Greg planned to disappear, it can’t be a coincidence that the day he takes off is the day Liz Gorman gets killed.”

“Doubtful,” Win agreed.

“You think Greg killed her?”

“The clues point in that direction,” Win said. “I mentioned to you that the money had come from an account handled by Marty Felder. Perhaps Mr. Felder has an answer.”

Myron wondered about that. Big Cyndi suddenly stopped skipping. She hugged Esperanza and made a la-la noise. Young love. “If Felder knew Greg was going into hiding,” Myron said, “why would he leave those messages on Greg’s machine?”

“Perhaps to throw us off. Or perhaps he did not know Greg’s intent.”

“I’ll call him,” Myron said. “See if I can make an appointment for tomorrow.”

“You have a game tonight, do you not?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Seven-thirty.” Myron checked his watch. “But I need to leave pretty soon if I want to talk to Clip first.”

“I’ll drive,” Win said. “I’d like to meet this Mr. Arnstein.”

After they left, Esperanza went through the messages on the voice mail. Then she straightened out her desk. Her two photographs—one of her bearded collie Chloe getting Best in Breed at the Westchester Dog Show; the other of her as Little Pocahontas and Big Cyndi as Big Chief Mama, holding up their FLOW (Fabulous Ladies Of Wrestling) tag-team title belts—had been knocked askew by Cyndi’s knees.

As she stared at the photographs, something Myron said kept needling her. He was worried about timing. The timing of the murder. The timing of Downing’s disappearance. But what about Liz Gorman’s timing? What about the timing of her arrival in New York City? The bank in Tucson was robbed two months ago; Liz Gorman also started working for the Parkview Diner two months ago. A criminal on the run would want to get far away from the crime scene, yes, but to a place as populated as New York City? Why?

The more Esperanza thought about it, the more she grew bewildered. There had to be a cause and effect at work here. There had to be something about the bank heist that made Liz Gorman come out this way. Esperanza chewed on this for another minute or two. Then she picked up the phone and called one of Myron and Win’s closest contacts at the Bureau.

“They need everything you got on the Raven Brigade bank heist in Tucson,” Esperanza said. “Can you send me a copy of the file?”

“You’ll have it by tomorrow morning.”

Chapter 24

Win and Myron shared a somewhat unusual passion for Broadway musicals. Right now, the stereo system in Win’s Jag was pumping out the sound track from 1776. A Continental Congressman cried out, “Somebody better open up a window!” This led to a fierce argument over the merits of opening said window (it was “hot as hell in Philadelphia”) vs. keeping them closed (“too many flies”). Interspersed in this argument, people were telling John Adams to sit down. History.

“Who played the original Thomas Jefferson?” Win asked. He knew the answer. Life with Myron’s friends was a nonstop quiz show.

“Movie version or stage?”

Win frowned. “I don’t do movie versions.”

“Ken Howard,” Myron answered.

“Correct. What is Mr. Howard’s most famous role?”

“The coach on the White Shadow.”

“Correct again. The original John Adams?”

“William Daniels.”

“Best known as?”

“The obnoxious surgeon on St. Elsewhere.”

“The actress who portrayed Martha Jefferson?”

“Betty Buckley. Best known as Abby on Eight Is Enough.”

Win smiled. “You are good.”

Myron stared out the window, the buildings and cars blurring into one pulsating mass, and thought about Jessica. Moving in with her. There was no reason not to. He loved her. She loved him. More than that, she had made the first move—the first time he could remember such a thing. In most relationships, one partner has more control than the other. It was just the natural order of things. Perfect balance was a hard thing to find. In their case, Jessica currently had the upper hand. Myron knew that—if he hadn’t, Esperanza’s constant references to his being “whipped” would surely have made him aware. It didn’t mean he loved her more or Jessica loved him less. Or maybe it did. Myron wasn’t sure anymore. What he did know for sure was that moments where Jessica made the move—where she was the one exposing herself—were rare. Myron wanted to embrace it, encourage it. He had waited a long time for her to say such words to him. But something held him back. Like with TC, there were a lot of factors pushing and pulling at him.

His mind churned through the pros and cons, but no conclusions spewed forward. What he really wanted was to bounce his thoughts off someone. He deliberated best that way—by thinking out loud with a close friend. The problem was, who? Esperanza, his most dependable confidante, hated Jessica. Win … well, when it came to matters of the heart, Win was simply not your man; something in that nether region had shorted out a long time ago.

Still Myron heard himself say, “Jessica asked me to move in.”

For a moment Win said nothing. Then: “Do you get a full share of the playoff money?”

“What?”

“You joined the team late. Have you worked out what share of the playoff money you’ll be getting?”

“Don’t worry. It’s taken care of.”

Win nodded. His eyes remained on the road. The speedometer hovered around eighty, a swiftness Route 3 was not built to bear. Win swerved lanes constantly. Myron had gotten somewhat used to Win’s driving over the years, but he still kept his eyes averted from the front windshield.

“Are you staying for the game?” Myron asked.

“That depends.”

“On?”

“On if this Thumper will be there,” Win replied. “You said she was seeking employment. Perhaps I can interrogate her at the same time.”

“What will you say?”

“That,” Win said, “is a dilemma we both face. If you ask her about Downing’s call, you blow your cover. If I ask her, she’ll want to know the whys and wherefores. Either way, unless this Thumper is brain dead, she will be suspicious. Moreover, if she knows anything significant, she will most probably lie.”

“So what do you suggest?”

Win tilted his head as though in deep thought. “Perhaps I’ll bed her,” he concluded. “Then I can make her talk while lost in the throes of passion.”

“She only sleeps with men on the Giants or the Dragons,” Myron said. Then he frowned and added, “ ‘Bed her’?”

Win shrugged. “Just suggesting an alternative to whipping her with a rubber hose,” he said. “Unless, of course, she’s into that kind of thing.”

“Any other suggestions?”

“I’m working on it.” They took the exit to the Meadowlands in silence. On the CD player, Abigail Adams was telling John Adams that women in Massachusetts needed pins. Win hummed along with the music for a moment. Then he spoke. “As far as Jessica goes”—he took one hand off the wheel and sort of waved it—“I’m not one to ask about such things.”

“I know.”

“You were miserable the first time she left,” he added. “I don’t know why you would risk going through that again.”

Myron looked at him. “You really don’t, do you?”

Win said nothing.

“That’s sad, Win.”

“Yes,” he replied. “So very tragic.”

“I’m serious,” Myron said.

Win put a dramatic forearm to his brow. “Oh, what woe that I may never experience the depths of misery you plunged to when Jessica left. Pity this child.”

“You know there’s more to it than that.”

Win put down the arm, shook his head. “No, my friend, there is not. What was real was your pain. The rest of what you felt is the stuff of cruel delusion.”

“You really feel that way?”

“Yes.”

“About all relationships?”

Win shook his head. “I never said that.”

“How about our friendship? Is that a cruel delusion too?”

“This isn’t about us,” Win said.

“I’m just trying to understand—”

“There is nothing to understand,” Win interrupted. “Do what you believe is best. As I said, I am not the one with which to have this discussion.”

Silence. The arena loomed in front of them. For years, it had been called the Brendan Byrne Arena, named for the unpopular governor who had been in office when the complex had been built. Recently, however, the sports authority needed to raise funds, so the name had been changed to the Continental Airlines Arena—not exactly musical, but then again the old name didn’t exactly make you want to break out in song either. Brendan Byrne and his past lackeys cried foul over this affront. What a disgrace, they shouted with grave indignation. This was Governor Byrne’s legacy. How could they sell him out like this? But Myron didn’t have a problem with the name change. Which would you rather do—tax the people to collect twenty-seven million dollars or bruise a politician’s ego? No contest when you thought about it.

Myron glanced over at Win. Win’s eyes were on the road, his fingers tightly wrapped around the wheel. Myron’s mind flashed back to the morning after Jessica left five years ago. He’d been moping around his house alone when Win knocked on the door. Myron opened it.

Without preamble, Win said, “Come on. I’ll hire you a girl. You need to get laid.”

Myron shook his head.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“Do me a favor then.”

“What?”

“Don’t go out and get drunk,” Win said. “That would be such a cliché.”

“And what, getting laid isn’t?”

Win pursed his lips together. “But at least it’s a good cliché.”

Then Win turned around and left. That had been it. They had never broached the subject of his relationship with Jessica again. It’d been a mistake to have brought it up now. Myron should have known better.

There were reasons Win was the way he was. Myron looked now at his friend and truly did pity him. From Win’s vantage point, his life had been one long lesson in how to take care of himself. The results weren’t always pretty, but they were usually effective. Win had not severed off his feelings or anything that dramatic, nor was he as robotic as he sometimes wanted people to think. But Win had learned not to trust or depend on others very much. There were not many people he cared about, but those he did were cherished with an intensity few ever experienced. The rest of the world meant very little to him.

“I’ll get you a seat near Thumper’s,” Myron said softly.

Win nodded, pulled into a parking spot. Myron gave his name to Clip’s secretary and they were shown into his office. Calvin Johnson was already there, standing to Clip’s right. Clip was behind his desk. He looked older today. His cheeks were grayer; and the skin around his jowls seemed looser. When he stood, it seemed to take more effort.

Clip eyed Win for a moment. “This must be Mr. Lockwood.”

He even knew about Win—again well prepared. “Yes,” Myron said.

“He’s helping us with our problem?”

“Yes.”

Introductions were made. Hands were shaken. Rear ends were seated. As was his custom in such situations, Win remained silent. His eyes slid from one side of the room to the other, taking in everything. He liked to study people for a while before speaking to them, especially in their home environment.

“So,” Clip began, forcing up a tired smile, “what have we got?”

“When you first approached me,” Myron began, “you were afraid I’d uncover something unsavory. I’d like to know what that something was.”

Clip tried to look amused. “Nothing personal, Myron,” he began with a light chuckle, “but if I knew that, I wouldn’t have needed to hire you.”

Myron shook his head. “Not good enough.”

“What?”

“Greg has disappeared before.”

“So?”

“So you never suspected anything unsavory then,” Myron said. “Why now?”

“I told you. I have the owners’ vote coming up.”

“That’s your only concern?”

“Of course not,” Clip said. “I’m worried about Greg too.”

“But you never hired anyone to find him before. What are you afraid of?”

Clip shrugged. “Probably nothing. I’m just covering all my bases. Why? What have you found out?”

Myron shook his head. “You never cover all your bases, Clip. You’re a risk-taker. Always were. I’ve seen you trade popular, proven veterans for untested draft picks. I’ve seen you risk going for the steal rather than hoping your defense holds. You’ve never been afraid to lean over that edge, to risk it all.”

Clip smiled thinly. “The problem with that strategy,” he said, “is that you lose too. Sometimes you lose a lot.”

“What did you lose this time?” Myron asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “But if Greg doesn’t come back, it might cost my team a championship ring.”

“That’s not what I meant. There’s something more going on.”

“I’m sorry,” Clip said, spreading his hands. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I hired you because it was the logical thing to do. Greg vanished. Now true, he’s vanished before, but never this late in the season and never when we were so close to a championship. This simply isn’t like him.”

Myron glanced over at Win. Win appeared to be bored.

“Do you know a woman named Liz Gorman?” Myron tried.

In the corner of his eye, Myron saw Calvin sit up a bit.

“No,” Clip said. “Should I?”

“How about a woman named Carla or Sally?”

“What? You mean have I ever known a woman named—”

“Recently. Or any woman involved in some way with Greg Downing.”

Clip shook his head. “Calvin?” Calvin also shook his head, but the shake was a little too lingering. “Why do you ask?” Clip demanded.

“Because that’s whom Greg was with the night he vanished,” Myron said.

Clip sat up, his words coming scatter-gun. “Have you located her? Where is she now? Maybe they’re together.”

Myron looked at Win again. This time, Win nodded ever so slightly. He’d caught it too. “She’s dead,” Myron said.

Any traces of color on Clip’s face drained away. Calvin remained silent, but he crossed his legs. A big move for ol’ Frosty. “Dead?”

“Murdered, to be more specific.”

“Oh my God …” Clip’s eyes leapt from one face to another, as though seeking some sort of answer or solace there. He found none.

“Are you sure you don’t know the names Liz Gorman, Carla, or Sally?” Myron asked.

Clip opened his mouth, closed it. No sound came out. He tried again. “Murdered?”

“Yes.”

“And she was with Greg?”

“He’s the last known person to see her alive. His fingerprints are at the murder scene.”

“The murder scene?” His voice trembled, his eyes dazed. “My God, the blood you found in the basement,” he said. “The body was at Greg’s house?”

“No. She was killed in her apartment in New York.”

Clip looked puzzled. “But I thought you found blood in Greg’s basement. In the playroom.”

“Yes. But that blood is gone now.”

“Gone?” Clip sounded both confused and annoyed. “What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean somebody cleaned it up.” He looked straight at Clip. “I mean somebody entered Greg’s house in the past two days and tried to snuff out an unsavory scandal.”

Clip startled up at that one. Life came back into the eyes. “You think it was me?”

“You were the only one I told about the blood. You wanted to keep the discovery secret.”

“I left that up to you,” Clip countered. “I said I thought it was the wrong move, but I’d respect your decision. Of course, I would want to avoid a scandal. Who wouldn’t? But I would never do something like that. You know me better than that, Myron.”

“Clip,” Myron said, “I have the dead woman’s phone records. She called you four days before the murder.”

“What do you mean she called me?”

“Your office number is in the phone records.”

He started to say something, stopped, started again. “Well, maybe she called here, but that doesn’t mean she spoke to me.” His tone was far from convincing. “Maybe she spoke to my secretary.”

Win cleared his throat. Then he spoke for the first time since entering the office. “Mr. Arnstein?” he said.

“Yes.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Win continued, “your lies are growing tiresome.”

Clip’s mouth dropped. He was used to underlings kissing his rear, not to being called a liar. “What?”

“Myron has a great deal of respect for you,” Win said. “That’s admirable. People do not earn Myron’s respect easily. But you know the dead woman. You talked to her on the phone. We have proof.”

Clip’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of proof?”

“The phone records, for one—”

“—but I just told you—”

“And your own words, for another,” Win finished.

He slowed down, his expression wary. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Win steepled his fingers. “Earlier in this conversation, Myron asked you if you knew Liz Gorman or a woman named Carla or Sally. Do you recall that?”

“Yes. I told him no.”

“Correct. And then he told you—and I quote his exact words because they are relevant—‘that’s whom Greg was with the night he vanished.’ Awkward phrasing, I admit, but with a purpose. Do you recall your next two queries, Mr. Arnstein?”

Clip looked lost. “No.”

“They were—and again I quote exact words—‘Have you located her yet? Where is she now?’ ” Win stopped.

“Yeah, so?”

“You said, her. Then you said, she. Yet Myron asked you if you knew Liz Gorman or Carla or Sally. From his wording, wouldn’t it be natural to assume he was referring to three different women? A they rather than a she or her? But you, Mr. Arnstein, immediately concluded that these three names belonged to one woman. Don’t you find that odd?”

“What?” But Clip’s anger was all bluster now. “You call that evidence?”

Win leaned forward. “Myron is being well compensated for his efforts here. For that reason, I would normally recommend that he continue working for you. I would advise him to mind his own business and take your money. If you wish to muck up your own investigation, who are we to interfere? Not that Myron would listen. He is a nosy man. Worse, he has this warped sense of doing right, even when it is not required.”

Win stopped, took a breath, leaned back again. Instead of steepling his fingers, he gently bounced the tips against one another. All eyes were on him. “The problem is,” he continued, “a woman has been murdered. On top of that, someone has tampered with a crime scene. Someone has also vanished and may very well be a murderer or another victim. In other words, it is now far too dangerous to remain in such a situation with blinders on. The potential costs outweigh the possible benefits. As a businessman, Mr. Arnstein, you should understand that.”

Clip remained silent.

“So let us get to it, shall we?” Win spread his hands, then resteepled. “We know the murder victim spoke to you. Either tell us what she said, or we shake hands and part company.”

“She spoke to me first.” It was Calvin. He shifted in his seat. He avoided Clip’s eyes, but there was no need. Clip did not seem upset by the outburst. He sank farther down in his chair, a balloon continuing to deflate. “She used the name Carla,” Calvin continued.

With a small nod, Win settled back into his chair. He had done his part. The reins were back in Myron’s hands.

“What did she say?” Myron asked.

“She said she had some kind of dirt on Greg. She said she could destroy the franchise.”

“What was the dirt?”

Clip came back into the fold. “We never found out,” he chimed in. Clip hesitated a moment—to buy time or gather himself, Myron wasn’t sure which. “I didn’t mean to lie to you, Myron. I’m sorry. I was just trying to protect Greg.”

“You spoke to her too?” Myron asked.

Clip nodded. “Calvin came to me after she called. The next time she called we both spoke to her. She said she wanted money in exchange for silence.”

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand dollars. We were supposed to meet on Monday night.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” Clip said. “She was going to tell us the locale on Monday morning, but she never called.”

Probably because she was dead, Myron thought. Dead people rarely made phone calls. “And she never told you her big secret?”

Clip and Calvin looked a question at each other. Calvin nodded. Then Clip turned back to Myron. “She didn’t have to,” Clip said with resignation. “We already knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Greg gambled. He owed a lot of money to some very bad people.”

“You already knew about his gambling?”

“Yes,” Clip said.

“How?”

“Greg told me.”

“When?”

“About a month ago,” Clip said. “He wanted help. I … I’ve always been something of a father figure to him. I care about him. I care about him very much.” He looked up at Myron, his eyes raw with pain. “I care about you too, Myron. That’s what makes this so hard.”

“Makes what so hard?”

But he shook it off. “I wanted to help him. I convinced him to start seeing somebody. A professional.”

“Did he listen?”

“Greg started with the doctor just last week. A psychiatrist who specializes in gambling addictions. We also talked about him signing an endorsement deal,” he added. “To pay off the gambling debt.”

“Did Marty Felder know about the gambling?” Myron asked.

“I can’t say for certain,” Clip said. “The doctor told me about the amazing lengths gamblers go to keep their addiction a secret. But Marty Felder handled most of Greg’s money. If he didn’t know, I’d be surprised.”

Behind Clip’s head was a poster of this year’s team. Myron looked at it a moment. The co-captains, TC and Greg, were kneeling in front. Greg smiled widely. TC sneered in typical fashion. “So even when you first hired me,” Myron said, “you suspected Greg’s disappearance had something to do with his gambling.”

“No.” Then thinking further, Clip added, “At least not in the way you think. I never thought Greg’s bookie would harm him. I figured the Forte deal bought him time.”

“Then in what way?”

“I worried about his sanity.” Clip motioned to Greg’s image on the poster behind him. “Greg is not the most balanced person to begin with, but I wondered how much the pressure from the gambling debt weighed on his already questionable sanity. He loved his image, you know, strange as that might sound. He loved being a fan favorite more than the money. But if his fans learned the truth, who knows how they’d react? So I wondered if all of this pressure was too much for him. If maybe he had snapped.”

“And now that a woman is dead,” Myron asked, “what do you think?”

Clip shook his head vehemently. “I know Greg better than anyone. When he feels trapped, he runs away. He wouldn’t kill anyone. I believe that with all my heart. He is not a violent man. Greg learned the dangers of violence a long time ago.”

No one spoke for several moments. Myron and Win both waited for Clip to elaborate. When he didn’t, Win said, “Mr. Arnstein, do you have anything else to tell us?”

“No. That’s all.”

Win rose without another word or gesture and walked out of the office. Myron sort of shrugged and started after him.

“Myron?”

He turned back to Clip. The old man was standing now. His eyes looked moist.

“Have a good game tonight,” he said softly. “It’s only a game, after all. Remember that.”

Myron nodded, discomfited yet again by Clip’s demeanor. He jogged ahead and caught up with Win.

“Do you have my ticket?” Win asked.

Myron handed it to him.

“Describe this Thumper person please.”

Myron did. When they reached the elevator, Win said, “Your Mr. Arnstein is still not telling us the truth.”

“Anything concrete or just a hunch?”

“I don’t do hunches,” Win said. “Do you believe him?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You are fond of Mr. Arnstein, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Even though he has already admitted lying to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me present you with an interesting scenario,” Win said. “Who, besides Greg, has the most to lose if his gambling addiction becomes public knowledge? Who, besides Greg, would have the greatest motive to keep Liz Gorman silent? And finally, if Greg Downing was about to become a terrible embarrassment to the franchise—to the point of devaluating if not destroying Clip Arnstein’s chances of maintaining control—who would have the best motive to make sure Greg Downing disappeared?”

Myron did not bother answering.

Chapter 25

The seat next to Thumper was open. Win took it and gave her the full-wattage smile.

“Good evening,” he said.

She smiled back. “Hello.”

“You must be Ms. Mason.”

She nodded. “And you are Windsor Horne Lockwood III. I recognize you from the picture in Forbes.”

They shook hands, their eyes meeting. Their hands released one another; their eyes didn’t. “A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Mason.”

“Please call me Maggie.”

“Yes, fine.” Win upped the smile for a moment. A buzzer sounded on the court. The first quarter was over. He saw Myron stand up to let his teammates sit. Seeing him dressed in a uniform on an NBA court hit Win in a very weird, unpleasant way. He didn’t like to watch. He turned back toward Thumper. She looked at him expectantly.

“I understand that you are seeking employment with my firm,” Win said.

“Yes.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Please do.” She motioned a welcome with her hand.

“You are currently employed by Kimmel Brothers, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“How many traders do they currently engage?” Win asked.

“Less than ten,” she said. “We’re very small.”

“I see.” Win did the steepling, feigning consideration of her words. “Do you work there on weekends?”

“Sometimes.”

“Weekend evenings?”

Her eyes narrowed just slightly, then relaxed back into place. “Sometimes,” she repeated.

“How about last Saturday night?”

“Pardon me?”

“You know Greg Downing, do you not?”

“Of course, but—”

“As you are no doubt aware,” Win continued, “he has been missing since last Saturday night. Interestingly enough, the last call Mr. Downing made from his home was to your office. Do you recall that phone call?”

“Mr. Lockwood—”

“Please. Call me Win.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do here—”

“It’s quite simple really,” Win interrupted. “Last night, you told my associate Mr. Bolitar that you had not spoken to Greg Downing in several months. Yet, as I have just told you, I have information that contradicts your statement. So there is a discrepancy here—a discrepancy that may cause some to view you, Ms. Mason, as less than honest. I cannot have that at Lock-Horne Securities. My employees must be beyond reproach. For that reason, I’d like you to explain this contradiction.”

Win took out a bag of peanuts from his coat pocket. He shelled a few in the neatest manner imaginable, swept the shells with small movements into a second bag, then placed the peanuts into his mouth one at a time.

“How do you know Mr. Downing called my office?” Thumper asked.

“Please,” Win said with a side glance. “Let us not waste time with trivialities. His call is an established fact. You know it. I know it. Let us move beyond it.”

“I didn’t work last Saturday night,” she said. “He must have been calling somebody else.”

Win frowned. “I grow weary of your tactics, Ms. Mason. As you just admitted to me, yours is a small firm. I could call your employer, if you wish. I am sure he would be glad to tell Mr. Windsor Horne Lockwood III if you were there or not.”

Thumper sat back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest, looking out at the game. The Dragons were up 24 to 22. Her eyes followed the course of the ball down the court. “I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Lockwood.”

“Ah. No longer interested in a job?”

“That’s right.”

“You misunderstand,” Win said. “I don’t mean just with Lock-Horne Securities. I mean with anybody, including your current employer.”

She turned to him. “What?”

“There are two options here,” Win said. “Let me spell them out for you clearly, so that you choose the one most suitable for you. One, you tell me why Greg Downing called you on Saturday night. You tell me why you lied to Myron about it. You tell me everything you know about his disappearance.”

“What disappearance?” she interrupted. “I thought he was injured.”

“Option two,” Win went on. “You continue to either stay silent or lie to me, in which case I will begin to circulate a rumor within our industry vis-à-vis your integrity. More specifically, I will let it be known that there are federal authorities looking into serious allegations of embezzlement.”

“But …” she started, stopped. “You can’t do that.”

“No?” He made an amused face. “I am Windsor Horne Lockwood III. My word on such matters will not be questioned. You, on the other hand, will have difficulty finding employment as a hat-check girl in a roadside Denny’s when I’m through.” He smiled and tilted the bag her way. “Peanut?”

“You’re insane.”

“And you are normal,” Win countered. He looked down at the court. “Say, that young towel boy is wiping a player’s sweat off the floor. That must be worth”—he gave a big shrug—“oh, I don’t know. Fellatio at the very least, wouldn’t you say?”

Win smiled at her sweetly.

“I’m leaving.” She started to stand.

“Would you sleep with me?” he asked.

She looked at him in horror. “What?”

“Would you sleep with me? If you’re very good, I may consider employing you at Lock-Horne.”

Her teeth were clenched. “I’m not a prostitute,” she hissed.

“No, you are not a prostitute,” Win said, loud enough so that a few heads turned. “But you are a hypocrite.”

“What are you talking about?”

Win motioned to her seat. “Please sit down.”

“I’d rather not.”

“And I’d rather not have to shout.” He motioned again. “Please.”

With wary eyes she did as he asked. “What do you want?”

“You find me attractive, do you not?”

She made a face. “I think you are the most repulsive man I have—”

“I am just speaking only about looks here,” Win said. “The physical, remember? As you told Myron just last night, having sex is merely a physical thing. Like shaking hands—though with an analogy like that I question your partners’ prowess. Now, at the risk of appearing immodest, I know that I am not physically unattractive. When you think back over the many Giants and Dragons you’ve bedded in your stellar career, surely there must be at least one that was less physically attractive than moi.”

Her eyes squinted. She looked intrigued and horror-stricken at the same time. “Perhaps,” she allowed.

“Yet you will not sleep with me. That, my dear, is hypocritical.”

“How so?” Thumper countered. “I’m an independent woman. I choose.”

“So you’ve told me,” Win said. “But why do you choose only Giants and Dragons?” When she hesitated a bit too long, he smiled and wagged his finger. “You should at least be honest as to why you made that particular choice.”

“You seem to know a lot about me,” Thumper said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Fine. You immediately announce this bizarre rule about Dragons and Giants and whatnot. You set limits. I do not. If I find a woman attractive, that is enough. But you need this random team affiliation. You use it as a fence to separate you.”

“Separate me from what?”

“Not from what. Whom. From so-called freewheeling sluts. As you just pointed out to me, you are not a prostitute. You choose, dammit. You are no slut.”

“That’s right, I’m not.”

He smiled. “But what is a slut? A woman who sleeps around? Well, no. That’s what you do. You wouldn’t criticize a fellow sister to the cause. So what exactly is a slut? Well, by your definition, there is no such thing. Except, of course, you needed to deny being a slut when I questioned you. Why?”

“Don’t make it out to be more than it is,” Thumper said. “Slut carries with it a negative connotation. That’s the only reason I got defensive.”

Win spread his hands. “But why should there be any negative connotation? If a slut is, by definition, a so-called loose woman, a woman who sleeps around, why not embrace the term with both legs? Why put up these fences? Why create these artificial limits? You use your team affiliations to announce your independence. But it announces the opposite. It announces that you are unsure and insecure.”

“And that’s why I’m a hypocrite?”

“Of course. Go back to my request to sleep with you. Either sex is a purely physical act, in which case my brusque behavior with you now should have no bearing on it, or sex is something more than physical. Which is it?”

She smiled, gave a quick head shake. “You’re an interesting man, Mr. Lockwood. Maybe I will sleep with you.”

“No good,” he said.

“What?”

“You’ll be doing it simply to prove I’m wrong. That, my dear, is as pathetic and insecure as what you are currently doing. But we are getting sidetracked. That is my fault, I apologize. Are you going to tell me about your conversation with Greg Downing, or do I destroy your reputation?”

She looked dazed. It was what he wanted.

“Of course there is option three,” Win continued, “which closely follows option two. That is, on top of having your reputation destroyed you face a murder charge.”

That made her eyes widen. “What?”

“Greg Downing is a serious suspect in a murder investigation. If it is discovered that you in some way helped him, that would make you an accessory.” He stopped, frowned. “But to be frank, I don’t think the D.A. will get a conviction. No matter. I’ll start with your reputation. We’ll see how it goes from there.”

Thumper looked at him steadily. “Mr. Lockwood?”

“Yes.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said.

Win rose. “Undeniably a better option than present company.” He smiled and bowed. If he had a hat, he would have tipped it. “Good day.”

He moved away, head high. There was, of course, a method to such madness. She would not talk. He knew that almost immediately. She was both smart and loyal. A dangerous albeit admirable combination. But what he had said would jar her. Even the best amongst us would panic or at the very least act. He would wait outside and follow her.

He checked the scoreboard. Midway through the second quarter. He had no interest in watching any more of this game. But as he reached the gate, a buzz came over the loudspeaker and then a voice said, “Now coming in for Troy Erickson, Myron Bolitar.”

Win hesitated. Then he took another step for the exit. He did not wish to watch. But he stopped again and, still standing, he faced the court.

Chapter 26

Myron sat at the far end of the bench. He knew that he wasn’t going to play, but his chest was still wrapped in the steel bands of pregame jitters. In his younger days Myron had enjoyed the pressure of big-time competition, even when the jitters reached a level of near paralysis. They never lasted long after the opening tip. Once he had physical contact with an opponent or chased down a loose ball or shot a fade-away jumper, the butterflies flew off, the crowd’s cheers and jeers dissolving into something akin to office background music.

Pregame jitters hadn’t been a part of Myron’s existence for over a decade, and he knew now what he’d always suspected: this nerve-jangled high was directly connected to basketball. Nothing else. He had never experienced anything similar in his business or personal life. Even violent confrontations—a perverted high if ever there was one—were not exactly like this. He had thought this uniquely sports-related sensation would ebb away with age and maturity, when a young man no longer takes a small event like a basketball game and blows it into an entity of near biblical importance, when something so relatively insignificant in the long run is no longer magnified to epic dimensions through the prism of youth. An adult, of course, can see what is useless to explain to a child—that one particular school dance or missed foul shot would be no more than a pang in the future. Yet here Myron was, comfortably ensconced in his thirties and still feeling the same heightened and raw sensations he had known only in youth. They hadn’t gone away with age. They’d just hibernated—as Calvin had warned him—hoping for a chance to stir, a chance that normally never came in one man’s lifetime.

Were his friends right? Was this all too much for him? Had he not put this all behind him? He spotted Jessica in the stands. She was watching the action, that funny look of concentration on her face. She alone seemed unconcerned by his return, but then again, she had not been a part of his life in his basketball heyday. Did the woman he loved not understand, or did she—?

He stopped.

When you are on the bench, an arena can be a small place. He saw, for example, Win speaking with Thumper. He saw Jessica. He saw the other players’ wives and girlfriends. And then, entering from a gate dead straight in front of him, he saw his parents. His eyes quickly fled back to the court. He clapped his hands and yelled out encouragement to his teammates, pretending to be interested in the outcome of the game. His mom and dad. They must have flown in early from their trip.

He risked a quick glance. They sat near Jessica now, in the family and friends section. His mom was staring back at him. Even from the distance he could see the lost look in her glassy eyes. Dad’s eyes darted about, his jaw taut, as though he were summoning up a little extra before looking at the court straight-on. Myron understood. This was all too familiar, like an old family film coming to life. He looked away again.

Leon White came out of the game. He grabbed an empty seat next to Myron. A towel boy draped his sweat top around his shoulders and gave him a squeeze bottle. Leon guzzled some Gatorade, his body glistening with sweat.

“Saw you talking with Thumper last night,” Leon said.

“Yeah.”

“You get some?”

Myron shook his head. “I remain thump-less.”

Leon chuckled. “Anyone tell you how she got that nickname?”

“No.”

“When she gets into it—I mean, when she gets really fired up—she’s got this habit of thumping her leg up and down. Left leg. Always her left leg, you know. So she’s like on her back and you’re pumping her for all you’re worth and then all of a sudden her left leg starts bopping up and down. You hear thump-thump, get it?”

Myron nodded. He got it.

“So if she don’t do that—if a guy don’t get Thumper thumping—it’s like you haven’t done your duty. You can’t show your face. You hang your head.” Then he added, “It’s a pretty serious tradition.”

“Like lighting a menorah on Hanukkah,” Myron said.

Leon laughed. “Well, not exactly.”

“You ever been thumped, Leon?”

“Sure, once.” Then he quickly added, “But that was before I was married.”

“How long you been married?”

“Me and Fiona been married a little over a year.”

Myron’s heart plummeted down an elevator shaft. Fiona. Leon’s wife’s name was Fiona. He looked up in the stands at the flashy, well-rounded blonde. Fiona began with the letter F.

“Bolitar!”

Myron looked up. It was Donny Walsh, the head coach. “Yeah?”

“Go in for Erickson.” Walsh said it like the words were fingernail clippings he needed to spit out. “Take the off guard spot. Put Kiley at the point.”

Myron looked at his coach as if he were speaking Swahili. It was the second quarter. The score was tied.

“What the fuck you waiting for, Bolitar? For Erickson. Now.”

Leon slapped his back. “Go, man.”

Myron stood. His legs felt like strung-out Slinkys. Thoughts of murder and disappearances fled like bats in a spotlight. He tried to swallow but his mouth was bone dry. He jogged over to the scorer’s table. The arena spun like the bed of a drunk. Without conscious thought he discarded his sweats on the floor like a snake changing skin. He nodded at the scorer. “For Erickson,” he said. Ten seconds later, a buzzer sounded. “Now coming in the game for Troy Erickson, Myron Bolitar.”

He jogged out, pointing to Erickson. His teammates looked surprised to see him. Erickson said, “You got Wallace.” Reggie Wallace. One of the game’s best shooting guards. Myron lined up next to him and prepared. Wallace studied him with an amused smile.

“SWB alert,” Reggie Wallace called out with a mocking laugh. “Goddamn SWB alert.”

Myron looked at TC. “SWB?”

“Slow White Boy,” TC told him.

“Oh.”

Everyone else was breathing deeply and coated with sweat. Myron felt stiff and unprepared. His eyes swung back to Wallace. The ball was about to be inbounded. Something caught Myron’s eye and he looked up. Win stood near an exit. His arms crossed. Their eyes met for a brief second. Win gave a half nod. The whistle blew. The game began.

Reggie Wallace began the trash talk immediately. “You got to be kidding me,” he said. “Old-timer, I’m gonna make you my woman.”

“Dinner and a movie first,” Myron said.

Wallace looked at him. “Lame retort, old man.”

Hard to argue.

Wallace lowered himself to a ready position. He shook his head. “Shit. Might as well have my grandma cover me.”

“Speaking of making someone your woman,” Myron said.

Wallace looked at him hard, nodded. “Better,” he said.

The Pacers inbounded the ball. Wallace tried to post Myron up under the basket. This was a good thing. Physical contact. Nothing unclasped those steel bands like battling for position. Their bodies bounced against one another with small grunts. At six-four, two-twenty, Myron held his ground. Wallace tried digging back with his butt, but Myron held firm, putting a knee into Wallace’s backside.

“Man,” Wallace said, “you are so strong.”

And with that, he made a move Myron barely saw. He spun off Myron’s knee so quickly that Myron barely had time to turn his head. Seeming to use Myron for leverage, Wallace leaped high in the air. From Myron’s vantage point, it looked like an Apollo spacecraft heading straight out of the arena. He watched helplessly as Wallace’s outstretched hands grasped the lob pass at rim level. He seemed to pause in midair, then continue rising as though gravity itself had decided to freeze frame the moment. When Reggie Wallace finally began to descend, he pulled the ball behind his head before throwing it through the cylinder with frightening force.

Slam dunk.

Wallace landed with both arms spread for applause. His taunting chased Myron up court. “Welcome to the NBA, has-been. Or never-was. Or whatever the fuck you are. Oh, man, was that pretty or what? How did I look going up? Be honest. Bottom of my sneakers look sweet, don’t they? I’m so pretty. So very pretty. How did it feel when I slammed it in your face? Come on, old-timer, you can tell me.”

Myron tried to tune him out. The Dragons came down and missed a quick shot. The Pacers grabbed the rebound and headed back up court. Wallace faked going back inside and popped way out past the three-point circle. He caught the pass and shot in one motion. The ball went in with a swish. Three pointer.

“Whoa, old man, did you hear that sound?” Reggie Wallace went on. “That swish? There is no sweeter sound on earth. You hear me? No sweeter sound at all. Not even a woman crying out in orgasm.”

Myron looked at him. “Women have orgasms?”

Wallace laughed. “Touché, old-timer. Touché.”

Myron checked the clock. He’d been in for thirty-four seconds and his man had scored five points. Myron did some quick math. At that rate, Myron could hold Reggie Wallace to under six hundred points per game.

The boos started soon after. Unlike his youth, the crowd sounds did not fade into the background. They were not one indistinguishable blur of sound, a home-court cheer to perhaps ride upon the way a surfer picks up a wave. Or a boo in a rival’s arena—something you expect and even thrive on in a perverse way. But to hear your own fans boo your specific performance, to hear your home crowd turn against you—Myron had never experienced that before. He heard the crowd now as never before, as a collective entity of derision and as distinct voices making ugly catcalls. “You suck, Bolitar!” “Get that stiff outta there!” “Blow out your other knee and sit down!” He tried to ignore them but each catcall punctured him like a dagger.

Pride took over. He would not let Wallace score. The mind was willing. The heart was willing. But as Myron soon saw, the knee was not. He was simply too slow. Reggie Wallace scored six more points off Myron that period for a total of eleven. Myron scored two off an open jumper. He took to playing what he used to call “appendix” basketball; that is, certain players on the floor are like your appendix—they’re either superfluous or they hurt you. He tried to stay out of the way and hit TC down low. He kept passing and moving away from the ball. When he saw a big opening and drove the lane near the end of the quarter, the Pacers’ big center swatted the shot into the crowd. The boos were thunderous. Myron looked up. His mom and dad were still as two statues. One box over, a group of well-dressed men were cupping their hands around their mouths and starting a “Bolitar Sucks” chant. Myron saw Win move quickly toward them. Win offered his hand to the cheer’s leader. The leader took it. The leader went down.

But the odd thing was, even as Myron stunk up the joint, even as he continued to get beaten on defense and play ineffectively on offense, the old confidence remained. He wanted to stay in the game. He would still look for an opening, relatively unshaken, a man in denial, a man ignoring the mounting evidence that a crowd of 18,812 (according to the loudspeaker) could plainly see. He knew his luck would change. He was a little out of shape, that was all. Soon it would all turn around.

He realized how much that sounded like B Man’s description of a compulsive gambler’s rationale.

The half ended not long after that. As Myron headed off the court, he looked up again at his parents. They stood and smiled down at him. He smiled and nodded back. He looked toward the group of well-dressed booers. They were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Win.

Nobody spoke to him at halftime, and Myron didn’t get in the rest of the game. He suspected that Clip had been behind his playing. Why? What had Clip been trying to prove? The game ended in a two-point victory for the Dragons. By the time they got into the locker room and began changing, Myron’s performance was forgotten. The media surrounded TC, who had played a brilliant game, scoring thirty-three points and grabbing eighteen rebounds. TC slapped Myron’s back when he walked past him but said nothing.

Myron unlaced his sneakers. He wondered if his parents were going to wait for him. Probably not. They would figure he would want to be alone. His parents, for all their butting in, were actually pretty good at knowing when to make themselves scarce. They’d wait for him at home, staying up all night if they had to. To this day, his father stayed awake watching TV on the couch until Myron got home. Once Myron put the key in the lock, his father feigned sleep, his reading glasses still perched at the end of his nose, the newspaper lying across his chest. Thirty-two years old and his father still waited up for him. Christ, he was too old for that anymore, wasn’t he?

Audrey peered tentatively around the corner and waited. Only when he signaled with a beckoning wave did she approach. She stuck her pad and pencil in her purse and shrugged. “Look at the bright side,” she said.

“And that is?”

“You still have a great ass.”

“It’s these pro shorts,” Myron said. “They really mold and hold.”

“Mold and hold?”

He shrugged. “Hey, Happy Birthday.”

“Thanks,” Audrey said.

“ ‘Beware the Ides of March,’ ” Myron pronounced in dramatic fashion.

“The Ides are the fifteenth,” Audrey said. “Today is the seventeenth.”

“Yeah, I know. But I never skip an opportunity to quote Shakespeare. Makes me look smart.”

“Brains and a good ass,” Audrey said. “Who cares if you have no lateral movement?”

“Funny,” Myron said, “Jess never complains about that.”

“At least not to your face.” Audrey smiled. “Nice to see you so chipper.”

He returned the smile, shrugged.

Audrey looked around to make sure no one was in earshot. “I got some info for you,” she said.

“On?”

“On the private eye in the divorce case.”

“Greg hired one?”

“Either him or Felder,” she replied. “I have a source who does electronics work for ProTec Investigations. They do all of Felder’s work. Now my source doesn’t know all the details, but he helped set up a videotaping at the Glenpointe Hotel two months ago. You know the Glenpointe?”

Myron nodded. “The hotel on Route 80? Maybe five miles from here?”

“Right. My source doesn’t know what it was for or what ended up on it. He just knows the work was for the Downing divorce. He also confirmed the obvious: this thing is usually done to catch a spouse in flagrante delicto.”

Myron frowned. “This was two months ago?”

“Yep.”

“But Greg and Emily were already separated by then,” Myron said. “The divorce was practically finalized. What would be the point?”

“The divorce, yes,” she agreed. “But the child custody battle was just starting.”

“Yeah, but so what? She was a near-single woman having a sexual encounter. That kind of thing hardly proves parental unfitness in this day and age.”

Audrey shook her head. “You are so naive.”

“What do you mean?”

“A tape of a mother getting it on with some buck at a motel, doing lord-knows-what? We still live in a sexist society. It would be bound to influence a judge.”

Myron mulled it over, but it just wouldn’t mesh. “First of all, you’re assuming the judge is both male and a Neanderthal. Second”—he sort of held up his hands and shrugged—“it’s the nineties for crying out loud. A woman separated from her husband having sex with another man? Hardly earth-shattering stuff.”

“I don’t know what else to tell you, Myron.”

“You got anything else?”

“That’s it,” she said. “But I’m working on it.”

“Do you know Fiona White?”

“Leon’s wife? Enough to say hello. Why?”

“She ever model?”

“Model?” She sort of chuckled. “Yeah, I guess you’d call it that.”

“She was a centerfold?”

“Yep.”

“You know what month?”

“No. Why?”

He told her about the e-mail. He was fairly sure now that Ms. F was Fiona White, that Sepbabe was short for September babe, the month, he bet, that she was a centerfold. Audrey listened raptly. “I can check it out,” she said when he finished. “See if she was a September playmate.”

“That would help.”

“It would explain a lot,” Audrey continued. “About the tension between Downing and Leon.”

Myron nodded.

“Look, I gotta run. Jess is getting the car around back. Keep me posted.”

“Right, have fun.”

He finished up, toweled off, started dressing. He thought about Greg’s secret girlfriend, the one who had been staying at his house. Could it possibly be Fiona White? If so, that would also explain the need for secrecy. Could Leon White have found out about it? That seemed logical based on his antagonism toward Greg. So where did that leave us? And how did this all tie in with Greg’s gambling and Liz Gorman’s blackmail scheme?

Whoa, hold the phone.

Forget gambling for a moment. Suppose Liz Gorman had something else on Greg Downing, a revelation equally if not potentially more explosive than laying down a few bets. Suppose she had somehow found out that Greg was having an affair with his best friend’s wife. Suppose she had decided to blackmail Greg and Clip with this information. How much would Greg pay to keep his fans and teammates from learning about his betrayal? How much would Clip pay to keep that particular warhead from detonating in the midst of a championship run?

It was worth looking into.

Chapter 27

Myron stopped at the traffic light that divided South Livingston Avenue and the JFK Parkway. This particular intersection had barely changed in the past thirty years. The familiar brick facade of Nero’s Restaurant was on his right. It had originally been Jimmy Johnson’s Steak House, but that had to be at least twenty-five years ago. The same Gulf station occupied another corner, a small firehouse another, undeveloped land on the last.

He turned onto Hobart Gap Road. The Bolitar family had first moved to Livingston when Myron was six weeks old. Little had changed in comparison to the rest of the world. The familiarity of seeing the same sights over so many years was less comforting now than numbing. You didn’t notice anything. You looked but you never saw.

As he turned up the same street where his dad had first taught him to ride that two-wheeler with a Batman reflector on the back, he tried to pay true heed to the homes that had surrounded him all of his life. There had been changes, of course, but in his mind it was still 1970. He and his parents still referred to the neighboring homes by their original owners, as though they were Southern plantations. The Rackins, for example, hadn’t lived in the Rackin House for over a decade. Myron didn’t know anymore who lived in the Kirschner Place or the Roth House or the Parkers’. Like the Bolitars, the Rackins and the Kirschners and the rest had moved in when the construction was new, when you could still see some remnants of the Schnectman farm, when Livingston was considered the boonies, as far away from New York City at twenty-five miles as western Pennsylvania. The Rackins and the Kirschners and the Roths had lived a big chunk of their lives here. They’d moved in with infant children, raised them, taught them how to ride bicycles on the same streets Myron had learned on, sent them to Burnet Hill elementary school, then Heritage Junior High, finally Livingston High School. The kids had gone off to college, visiting only on college breaks. Not long after, wedding invitations went out. A few started displaying photos of grandchildren, shaking their heads in disbelief at how time flew. Eventually the Rackins and the Kirschners and the Roths felt out of place. This town designed to raise kids held nothing for them anymore. Their familiar homes suddenly felt too big and too empty, so they put them on the market and sold them to new young families with infant children who would too soon go off to Burnet Hill elementary school, then Heritage Junior High, and finally Livingston High School.

Life, Myron decided, was not that different from one of those depressing life insurance commercials.

Some neighborhood old-timers had managed to hang on. You could usually tell which houses belonged to them because—in spite of the fact that the children were grown—they had built additions and nice porches and kept their lawns well groomed. The Brauns and the Goldsteins were two who had done just that. And of course, Al and Ellen Bolitar.

Myron pulled his Ford Taurus into the driveway, his headlights sweeping across the front yard like searchlights during a prison break. He parked up on the blacktop not far from the basketball hoop. He turned off the ignition. For a moment he just stared at the basket. An image of his father lifting him so he could reach the basket appeared before him. If the image had come from memory or imagination, he could not say. Nor did it matter.

As he moved toward the house, outside lights came on via a motion detector. Though the detectors had been installed three years ago, they were still a source of unbridled awe for his parents, who considered this technological advance on a par with the discovery of fire. When the motion detectors were first put up, Mom and Dad spent blissful hours in disbelief testing the mechanism, seeing if they could duck under its eye or walk superslowly so that the detector would not sense them. Sometimes in life, it’s the simple pleasures.

His parents were sitting in the kitchen. When he entered, they both quickly pretended they were doing something.

“Hi,” he said.

They looked at him with tilted heads and too-concerned eyes. “Hi, sweetheart,” Mom said.

“Hi, Myron,” Dad said.

“You’re back from Europe early,” Myron said.

Both heads nodded like they were guilty of a crime. Mom said, “We wanted to see you play.” She said it gently, like she was walking on thin ice with a blowtorch.

“So how was your trip?” Myron asked.

“Wonderful,” Dad said.

“Marvelous,” Mom added. “The food they served was just terrific.”

“Small portions though,” Dad said.

“What do you mean, small portions?” Mom snapped.

“I’m just commenting, Ellen. The food was good, but the portions were small.”

“What, did you measure it or something? What do you mean small?”

“I know a small portion when I see one. These were small.”

“Small. Like he needs larger portions. The man eats like a horse. It wouldn’t kill you to lose ten pounds, Al.”

“Me? I’m not getting heavy.”

“Oh no? Your pants are getting so tight you’d think you were starring in a dance movie.”

Dad winked at her. “You didn’t seem to have any problem taking them off on the trip.”

“Al!” she shrieked, but there was a smile there too. “In front of your own child! What’s wrong with you?”

Dad looked at Myron, arms spread. “We were in Venice,” he said by way of explanation. “Rome.”

“Say no more,” Myron said. “Please.”

They laughed. When it died out his mother spoke in a hushed tone.

“You okay, sweetheart?”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I thought you did some good things out there,” Dad said. “You hit TC for a couple of nice passes on the post. Real nice passes. You showed smarts.”

Count on Dad to find the silver lining. “I bit the big one,” Myron said.

Dad gave a staunch head shake and said, “You think I’m saying this just to make you feel good?”

“I know you’re saying this just to make me feel good.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dad said. “It never mattered. You know that.”

Myron nodded. He did know. He had witnessed pushy fathers all his life, men who tried to live hollow dreams through their offspring, forcing their sons to carry a burden they themselves could never carry. But not his father. Never his father. Al Bolitar had never needed to fill his son with grandiose stories of his athletic prowess. He never pushed him, possessing the wondrous ability to appear almost indifferent while making it clear he cared intensely. Yes, this was a direct contradiction—sort of a detached attachment—but somehow Dad pulled it off. Sadly, it was unusual for Myron’s generation to admit to such wonderment. His generation had remained undefined—shoehorned between the Beat Generation of Woodstock and the Generation X of MTV, too young when thirtysomething had ruled the airwaves, too old now for Beverly Hills, 90210, or Melrose Place. Mostly, it seemed to Myron, he was part of the Blame Generation, where life was a series of reactions and counterreactions. In the same way those pushy fathers put everything on their sons, the sons came right back and blamed their future failures on the fathers. His generation had been taught to look back and pinpoint exact moments when their parents had ruined their lives. Myron never did. If he looked back—if he studied his parents’ past feats—it was only to try to unravel their secret before he had children of his own.

“I know what it looked like tonight,” he said, “but I really don’t feel that bad.”

Mom sniffled. “We know.” Her eyes were red. She sniffled again.

“You’re not crying over—”

She shook her head. “You’ve grown up. I know that. But when you ran out on the court again like that, for the first time in so long …”

Her voice died out. Dad looked away. The three of them were all the same. They were drawn to nostalgia like starlets to paparazzi.

Myron waited until he was sure his voice would be clear. “Jessica wants me to move in with her,” he said.

He expected protests, at least from his mother. Mom had not forgiven Jessica for leaving the first time; Myron doubted that she ever would. Dad, as was his way, acted like a good news reporter—neutral, but you wondered what opinion he was making under those balanced questions.

Mom looked at Dad. Dad looked back and put a hand on her shoulder. Then Mom said, “You can always come back,” she said.

Myron almost asked for a clarification, but he stopped himself and simply nodded. The three of them gathered around the kitchen table and began to talk. Myron made himself a grilled cheese. Mom didn’t do it for him. Dogs were domesticated, she believed, not people. She never cooked anymore, which Myron took as a positive thing. Her doting was all verbal, and that was all right with him.

They told him about their trip. He briefly and very vaguely sketched out why he was playing pro basketball again. An hour later he headed into his room in the basement. He had lived here since he was sixteen, the year his sister had gone off to college. The basement was subdivided into two rooms—a sitting area he almost never used except for company and hence kept clean, and a bedroom that looked very much like a teenager’s. He crawled into bed and looked at the posters on the wall. Most had been up since his adolescence, the colors faded, the corners frayed near the thumbtacks.

Myron had always loved the Celtics—his father had grown up near Boston—and so his two favorite posters were of John Havlicek, the Celtics star of the sixties and seventies, and Larry Bird, the team’s star of the eighties. He looked now from Havlicek to Bird. Myron was supposed to have been the next poster on the wall. It had been his boyhood dream. When the Celtics drafted him, it barely surprised him. A higher power was at work. It had been preordained that he would be the next Celtics legend.

Then Burt Wesson slammed into him.

Myron put his hands behind his head. His eyes adjusted to the light. When his phone rang, he reached for it absently.

“We have what you’re looking for,” an electronically altered voice said.

“Excuse me?”

“The same thing Downing wanted to buy. It’ll cost you fifty thousand dollars. Get the money together. We’ll call you with instructions tomorrow night.”

The caller hung up. Myron tried hitting star-six-nine to ring back, but the call was from out of the area. He lowered his head back to the pillow. Then he stared at the two posters and waited for sleep to claim him.

Chapter 28

Martin Felder’s office was on Madison Avenue in midtown, not far from Myron’s own. The agency was called Felder Inc., the clever name making it very apparent that Marty wasn’t on Madison Avenue as a hotshot advertising exec. A sprightly receptionist was all too happy to show Myron the way to Marty’s office.

The door was already open. “Marty, Myron is here to see you.”

Marty. Myron. It was one of those kinds of offices. Everyone was a first name. Everyone was dressed in that new, neat-casual look. Marty, who Myron guessed was in his mid-fifties, wore one of those blue jean shirts with a bright orange tie. His thinning gray hair was plastered down, almost a comb-over but not quite. His pants were Banana Republic green and crisply pressed. His orange socks matched the tie and his shoes looked like Hush Puppies.

“Myron!” he exclaimed, pumping Myron’s hand. “Great to see you.”

“Thanks for seeing me so soon, Marty.”

He waved a dismissing hand. “Myron, please. For you, anytime.” They’d met a few times at different sporting and sports representative events. Myron knew that Marty had a solid reputation as a guy who was—to coin a cliché—tough but fair. Marty also had a knack for getting great media coverage for both himself and his athletes. He’d written a couple of how-to-succeed books which helped enhance his name recognition as well as his rep. On top of that, Marty looked like your favorite, self-effacing uncle. People liked him instantly.

“Can I get you a drink?” he asked. “Caffè latte perhaps?”

“No thanks.”

He smiled, shook his head. “I’ve been planning on calling you for the longest time, Myron. Please, have a seat.”

The walls were bare except for bizarre sculptures twisted out of neon light. His desk was glass, the built-in shelves fiberglass. There were no visible papers. Everything shone like the inside of a spaceship. Felder gestured to a chair in front of the desk for Myron; then he took the other chair in front of the desk. Two equals chatting it up. No desk to use as a divider or intimidator.

Felder started right in. “I don’t have to tell you, Myron, that you are quickly making a name for yourself in this field. Your clients trust you absolutely. Owners and managers respect and fear”—he emphasized the fear part—“you. That’s rare, Myron. Very rare.” He slapped his palms on his thighs and leaned forward. “Do you enjoy being in sports representation?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said with a sharp nod. “It’s important to like what you’re doing. Choosing a profession is the most important decision you’ll ever make—more important even than choosing a spouse.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Who was it that said, You may tire of your relationship with people but never of a job you love?”

“Wink Martindale?” Myron said.

Felder chuckled and offered up a shy, caught-himself smile. “Guess you didn’t come here to hear me drone on about my own personal philosophies,” he said. “So let me put my cards on the table. Just flat out say it. How would you like to come work for Felder Inc.?”

“Work here?” Myron said. Job Interview Rule #1: Dazzle them with sparkling repartee.

“Here’s what I’d like to do,” Felder said. “I want to make you a senior vice president. Your salary would be generous. You’d still be able to give all your clients the personal Bolitar attention they’ve come to expect, plus you’ll have all the resources of Felder Inc. at your command. Think about it, Myron. We employ over one hundred people here. We have our own travel agency to handle all those arrangements for you. We have—well, let’s call them what they are, shall we?—gofers who can deal with all those details that are so necessary in our business, freeing you up to tackle important tasks.” He raised a hand as if to stop Myron, though Myron hadn’t moved. “Now I know you have an associate, Miss Esperanza Diaz. She’d come aboard too, of course. At a higher salary. Plus I understand she’s finishing up law school this year. There’ll be plenty of room for advancement here.” He gestured with his hands before adding, “So what do you think?”

“I’m very flattered—”

“Don’t be,” Felder interrupted. “It’s a sound business decision for me. I know good stock when I see it.” He leaned forward with a sincere smile. “Let someone else be the client’s errand boy, Myron. I want to free you up to do what you do best—recruit new clients and negotiate deals.”

Myron had no interest in giving up his company, but the man knew how to make it sound attractive. “May I think about it?” he asked.

“Of course,” Felder said, raising his hands in surrendered agreement. “I don’t want to pressure you, Myron. Take your time. I certainly don’t expect an answer today.”

“I appreciate that,” Myron said, “but I actually wanted to talk to you about another matter.”

“Please.” He leaned back, folded his hands in his lap, smiled. “Go right ahead.”

“It’s about Greg Downing.”

The smile didn’t budge, but the light behind it flickered a bit. “Greg Downing?”

“Yes. I have a few questions.”

Still smiling. “You realize, of course, that I cannot reveal anything that may fall under what I consider privileged.”

“Of course,” Myron agreed. “I was wondering if you could tell me where he is.”

Marty Felder waited a beat. This was no longer a sales pitch meeting. It was now a negotiation. A good negotiator is frighteningly patient. Like a good interrogator, he must above all else be a listener. He must make his opponent do the talking. After several seconds, Felder asked, “Why do you want to know that?”

“I need to speak with him,” Myron said.

“May I ask what this is about?”

“I’m afraid it’s confidential.”

They looked at each other, both faces open and friendly, but now they were two card sharks who didn’t want to show their hands. “Myron,” Felder began, “you have to understand my position here. I don’t feel comfortable divulging this type of information without having at least some hint as to why you want to see him.”

Time to jar something loose. “I didn’t join the Dragons to make a comeback,” Myron said. “Clip Arnstein hired me to find Greg.”

Felder’s eyebrows dropped to half mast. “Find him? But I thought he went into seclusion to heal an ankle injury.”

Myron shook his head. “That was the story Clip told the press.”

“I see.” Felder put a hand to his chin and nodded slowly. “And you’re trying to locate him?”

“Yes.”

“Clip hired you? He chose you himself? It was his idea?”

Myron answered in the affirmative. There was a faint smile on Felder’s face now, like he was enjoying an inside joke. “I’m sure Clip already told you that Greg had done this kind of thing before.”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“So I don’t see why you should be all that concerned,” Felder said. “Your help is appreciated, Myron, but it is really not necessary.”

“You know where he is?”

Felder hesitated. “Again, Myron, I ask you to put yourself in my position. If one of your clients wanted to stay hidden, would you go against his wishes or respect his rights?”

Myron smelled a bluff. “That would depend,” he said. “If the client was in big trouble, I’d probably do whatever I could to help him.”

“What sort of big trouble?” Felder asked.

“Gambling, for one. Greg owes a lot of money to some awfully unpleasant fellows.” Still no reaction from Felder. In this case, Myron read it as a good thing. If most people had just heard that a client owed money to mobsters, they would show some sort of surprise. “You know about his gambling, don’t you, Marty?”

Felder’s words were slow, as if he were weighing each one separately with a hand scale. “You are still new in this business, Myron. With that comes a certain enthusiasm that is not always well placed. I am Greg Downing’s sports representative. That gives me certain responsibilities. It is not a carte blanche to run his life. What he or any other client does on his own time is not, should not, and cannot be my concern. For all our sakes. We care about every client, but we are not parental substitutes or life managers. It’s important to learn this early on.”

The Cliff Notes summary: he knew about the gambling.

Myron asked, “Why did Greg withdraw fifty thousand dollars ten days ago?”

Again Felder showed no reaction. He was either beyond being surprised by what Myron knew or he had the ability to shut off any connection between his brain and facial muscles. “You know I can’t discuss that with you—or even confirm that such a withdrawal took place.” He slapped his palms against his thighs again and mounted a smile. “Do us both a favor, Myron. Think about my offer and drop this other matter. Greg will pop up soon. He always does.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Myron said. “He’s in real trouble this time.”

“If you are talking about his alleged gambling debts—”

Myron shook his head. “I’m not.”

“Then what?”

So far, the man had given Myron nothing. Letting on that he knew about the gambling problem was a lay-up. He had realized Myron knew about it. To deny it would make him look either incompetent for not knowing or dishonest for making a strong denial. Marty Felder was shrewd. He would not misstep. Myron tried shifting direction. “Why did you videotape Greg’s wife?”

He blinked. “Pardon?”

“ProTec. That’s the name of the agency you hired. They set up a videotape surveillance at the Glenpointe Hotel. I’d like to know why.”

Felder looked almost amused. “Help me understand this, Myron. First you say that my client is in deep trouble. You claim you want to help him. Then you start making allegations about a videotape. I’m having trouble following you.”

“I’m just trying to help your client.”

“The best thing you can do for Greg is to tell me all you know. I am his advocate, Myron. I am truly interested in doing what’s best for him—not what might be best for the Dragons or Clip or anybody else. You said he was in trouble. Tell me how.”

Myron shook his head. “First you tell me about the videotape.”

“No.”

There you have it. Top-notch negotiating getting down to basics. Soon they’d be sticking tongues out at each other, but for now both faces remained pleasant. They were playing the waiting game. Who would be the first to crack? Myron ran down the situation in his mind. The cardinal rule of negotiating: Don’t lose sight of what you want and what your opponent wants. Okay. So what did Felder have that Myron wanted? Information on the fifty thousand dollars, the videotape, and maybe some other stuff. What did Myron have that Felder wanted? Not much. Myron had made him curious when he mentioned big trouble. Felder might already know what trouble Greg was in, but he would still want to know what Myron knew. End analysis: Myron needed the information more. He would have to move. Time to up the ante. And no more delicacy.

“I don’t have to be the one asking you these questions,” Myron said.

“What do you mean?”

“I could have a homicide detective ask them.”

Felder barely moved, but his pupils expanded in a funny way. “What?”

“A certain homicide detective is this close”—Myron held up his thumb and index finger close together—“to putting out an APB on Greg.”

“A homicide detective?”

“Yes.”

“But who was killed?”

Myron shook his head. “First the videotape.”

Felder was not a man to jump. He refolded his hands on his lap, looked up, tapped his foot. He took his time, considering the pros and cons, the costs and benefits, all that. Myron half-expected him to start charting graphs.

“You never practiced as an attorney, did you, Myron?”

Myron shook his head. “I passed the bar. That’s about it.”

“You’re lucky,” he said. He sighed and made a tired gesture with his hands. “You know why people make all the jokes about lawyers being scum? It’s because they are. It’s not their fault. Not really. It’s the system. The system encourages cheating and lying and basic scummy behavior. Suppose you were at a Little League game. Suppose you told the kids that there were no umpires today—that they were to umpire themselves. Wouldn’t that lead to some pretty unethical behavior? Probably. But then tell the little tykes that they must win, no matter what. Tell them that their only obligation is to winning and that they should forget about things like fair play and sportsmanship. That’s what our judicial system is like, Myron. We allow for deceit in the name of an abstract greater good.”

“Bad analogy,” Myron said.

“Why’s that?”

“The part about no umpires. Lawyers have to face judges.”

“Not many of them. Most cases are settled before a judge sees it. You know that. But no matter, my point is made. The system encourages attorneys to lie and distort under the guise of the client’s best interest. That best-interest crap has become an all-purpose excuse for anything goes. It’s ruining our judicial system.”

“Fascinating, really,” Myron said. “And all this relates to the videotape …?”

“Very directly,” Felder said. “Emily Downing’s lawyer lied and distorted the truth. She did it to an unethical and unnecessary extreme.”

“Are you talking about the child custody case?” Myron asked.

“Yes.”

“What did she do?”

He smiled. “I’ll give you a hint. This particular claim is made now in one out of every three child custody cases in the United States. It has become almost standard practice, tossed about like rice was at the actual wedding, though it destroys lives.”

“Child abuse?”

Felder did not bother with an answer. “We felt that we needed to quell these malicious and dangerous untruths. To balance the scales, so to speak. I’m not proud of that. None of us are. But I’m not ashamed either. You can’t fight fair if your opponent insists on using brass knuckles. You must do what you can to survive.”

“What did you do?”

“We videotaped Emily Downing in a rather delicate situation.”

“When you say delicate, what exactly do you mean?”

Felder stood up and took a key from his pocket. He unlocked a cabinet and pulled out a videotape. Then he opened another cabinet. A TV and VCR faced them. He placed the tape in the machine and picked up the remote. “Your turn now,” he said. “You said Greg was in big trouble.”

It was time for Myron to give a little. Another cardinal rule of negotiation: don’t be a pig and just take. It’ll backfire in the long run. “We believe a woman may have been blackmailing Greg,” he said. “She has several aliases. Usually Carla but she may have used the names Sally or Liz. She was murdered last Saturday night.”

That one stunned him. Or at least he acted stunned. “Surely the police don’t suspect Greg—”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“But why?”

Myron kept it vague. “Greg was the last person seen with her the night of the murder. His fingerprints were at the murder scene. And the police found the murder weapon at his house.”

“They searched his house?”

“Yes.”

“But they can’t do that.”

Already playing the ready-to-distort lawyer. “They got a warrant,” Myron said. “Do you know this woman? This Carla or Sally?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea where Greg is?”

“None.”

Myron watched him, but he couldn’t tell if he was lying or not. Except in very rare instances, you can never tell if a person is lying by watching their eyes or their body language or any of that stuff. Nervous, fidgety people tell the truth too, and a good liar could look as sincere as Alan Alda at a telethon. So-called “students of body language” were usually just fooled with more certainty. “Why did Greg take out fifty thousand dollars in cash?” Myron asked.

“I didn’t ask,” Felder said. “As I just explained to you, such matters were not my concern.”

“You thought it was for gambling.”

Again Felder didn’t bother responding. He lifted his eyes from the floor. “You said this woman was blackmailing him.”

“Yes,” Myron said.

He looked at Myron steadily. “Do you know what she had on him?”

“Not for sure. The gambling, I think.”

Felder nodded. With his eyes looking straight ahead, he pointed the remote control at the television behind him and pressed some buttons. The screen brightened into gray static. Then a black and white image appeared. A hotel room. The camera seemed to be shooting from the ground up. No one was in the room. A digital counter showed the time. The setup reminded Myron of those tapes of Marion Barry smoking a crack pipe.

Uh oh.

Could that be it? Having sex would hardly be grounds to show unfitness as a parent, but what about drugs? What better way to balance the scales, as Felder had put it, than to show the mother smoking or snorting or shooting up in a hotel room? How would that work on a judge?

But as Myron was about to see, he was wrong.

The hotel room door opened. Emily entered alone. She looked around tentatively. She sat on the bed, but then got back up. She paced. She sat down again. She paced again. She checked the bathroom, came right back out, paced. Her fingers picked up whatever object they could find—hotel brochures, room services menus, a television guide.

“Is there any sound?” Myron asked.

Marty Felder shook his head no. He was still not looking at the screen.

Myron watched transfixed as Emily continued to go through her nervous ritual. Suddenly she froze in place and turned to the door. Must have heard a knock. She approached tentatively. Looking for Mr. Goodbar? Probably, Myron surmised. But when Emily turned the knob and let the door swing open, Myron realized he was wrong again. It was not Mr. Goodbar who entered the hotel room.

It was Ms. Goodbar.

The two women talked for a bit. They had a drink from the room’s minibar. Then they began to undress. Myron’s stomach coiled. By the time they moved to the bed, he had seen more than enough.

“Turn it off.”

Felder did so, still not looking at the screen. “I meant what I said before. I’m not proud of that.”

“What a guy,” Myron said.

So now he understood Emily’s ferocious hostility. She had indeed been taped in flagrante delicto—not with another man, but with a woman. Certainly no law against it. But most judges would be influenced. It was the way of the world. And speaking of the way of the world, Myron knew Ms. Goodbar by another nickname:

Thumper.

Chapter 29

Myron walked back to his office, wondering what it all meant. For one thing, it meant that Thumper was more than a harmless diversion in all this. But what exactly was she? Had she set up Emily or had she, too, been taped unaware? Were they steady lovers or participants in a one-night stand? Felder claimed he didn’t know. On the tape, the two women hadn’t appeared to be all that familiar with each other—at least, not in the small portion he had watched—but he was hardly an expert on the subject.

Myron cut east on 50th Street. An albino wearing a Mets cap and yellow boxer shorts on the outside of ripped jeans played an Indian sitar. He was singing the seventies classic “The Night Chicago Died” in a voice that reminded Myron of elderly Chinese women in the back of a laundromat. The albino also had a tin cup and a stack of cassettes. A sign read “The Original Benny and His Magical Sitar, only $10.” The original. Oh. Wouldn’t want that imitation albino, sitar, AM seventies music, no sir.

Benny smiled at him. When he reached the part of the song where the son learns a hundred cops are dead—maybe even the boy’s father—Benny began to weep. Moving. Myron stuffed a dollar into the cup. He crossed the street, his thoughts reverting back to the videotape of Emily and Thumper. He wondered now about the relevance. He’d felt like a dirty voyeur for watching the tape in the first place, and now he felt that way for rehashing it in his mind. It was, after all, probably no more than a bizarre aside. What possible connection could there be in all this to the murder of Liz Gorman? None that he could see; then again he still had trouble seeing how Liz Gorman fit in with Greg’s gambling or how she fit in at all.

Still, the video undoubtedly raised a few fairly major issues. For one thing, there were the abuse allegations made against Greg. Was there anything to them, or as Marty Felder had indicated, was Emily’s attorney just playing hardball? And hadn’t Emily told Myron she would do anything to keep her kids? Even kill. How did Emily react when she learned about the videotape? Spurred on by this awful violation, how far would Emily go?

Myron entered his office building on Park Avenue. He exchanged a brief elevator smile with a young woman in a business suit. The elevator reeked of drugstore cologne, the kind where some guy decides that taking a shower is too time-consuming so he opts for sprinkling himself with enough cologne to glaze a wedding cake. The young woman sniffed and looked at Myron.

“I don’t wear cologne,” he said.

She didn’t seem convinced. Or perhaps she was condemning the gender in general for this affront. Understandable under these circumstances.

“Try holding your breath,” he said.

She looked at him, her face a seaweed green.

When he entered his office, Esperanza smiled and said, “Good morning.”

“Oh no,” Myron said.

“What?”

“You’ve never said good morning to me before. Ever.”

“I have too.”

Myron shook his head. “Et tu, Esperanza?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You heard about what happened last night. You’re trying to be—dare I say it?—nice to me.”

The fire in her eyes flamed up. “You think I give a shit about that game? That you got your butt burned at every turn?”

Myron shook his head. “Too late,” he said. “You care.”

“I do not. You sucked. Get over it.”

“Nice try.”

“What, nice try? You sucked. S-U-C-K-E-D. A pitiful display. I was embarrassed to know you. I hid my head in shame when I came in.”

He bent down and kissed her cheek.

Esperanza wiped it off with the back of her hand. “Now I got to get a cootie shot.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

“Like I care. Really.”

The phone rang. She picked it up. “MB SportsReps. Why yes, Jason, he is here. Hold on a moment.” She put a hand over the receiver. “It’s Jason Blair.”

“The vermin who said you had a nice ass?”

She nodded. “Remind him about my legs.”

“I’ll take it in my office.” A photograph on the top of a stack of papers on her desk caught his eye. “What’s this?”

“The Raven Brigade file,” she said.

He picked up a grainy photo of the group taken in 1973, the only shot of the seven of them together. He quickly found Liz Gorman. He hadn’t gotten a good look at her, but from what he saw, there was no way anyone would ever imagine that Carla and Liz Gorman were one and the same. “Mind if I keep this for a few minutes?” he asked.

“Suit yourself.”

He moved into his office and picked up the phone. “What’s up, Jason?”

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Not much. How about you?”

“Don’t play smart guy with me. You put that little lady on my contract and she fucked it all up. I got half a mind to leave MB.”

“Calm down, Jason. How did she fuck it up?”

His voice cracked with incredulity. “You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Here we are, hot in the middle of negotiating with the Red Sox, right?”

“Right.”

“I want to stay in Boston. We both know that. But we have to make a lot of noise like I’m leaving. That’s what you said to do. Make them think you want to switch teams. To up the money. I’m a free agent. This is what we got to do, right?”

“Right.”

“We don’t want them to know I want to be on the team again, right?”

“Right. To a degree.”

“Fuck to a degree,” he snapped. “The other day my neighbor gets a mailing from the Sox, asking him to renew his season tickets. Guess whose picture is on the brochure saying I’m gonna be back? Go ahead. Guess.”

“Would that be yours, Jason?”

“Damn straight mine! So I call up little Miss Nice Ass—”

“She’s got great legs too.”

“What?”

“Her legs. She’s not that tall, so they’re not very long. But they’re nicely toned.”

“Will you quit fucking around here, Myron? Listen to me. She tells me the Sox called up and asked if they could use my picture in the ad, even though I wasn’t signed. She tells them to go ahead! Go right fucking ahead! Now what are those Red Sox assholes supposed to think, huh? I’ll tell you what. They think I’m gonna sign with them no matter what. We lost all our leverage because of her.”

Esperanza opened the door without knocking. “This came in this morning.” She tossed a contract on Myron’s desk. It was Jason’s. Myron began to skim through it. Esperanza said, “Put the pea brain on the speakerphone.”

Myron did.

“Jason.”

“Oh Christ, Esperanza, get the fuck off the line. I’m talking to Myron here.”

She ignored him. “Even though you don’t deserve to know, I finalized your contract. You got everything you wanted and more.”

That slowed him down. “Four hundred thou more per year?”

“Six hundred thousand. Plus an extra quarter million on the signing bonus.”

“How the … what …?”

“The Sox screwed up,” she said. “Once they printed your picture in that mailer, the deal was as good as done.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Simple,” she said. “The mailer went out with your picture on it. People bought tickets based on that. Meanwhile I called the front office and said that you’d decided to sign with the Rangers down in Texas. I told them the deal was almost final.” She shifted in the chair. “Now, Jason, pretend you are the Red Sox for a moment. What are you going to do? How are you going to explain to all those ticket holders that Jason Blair, whose picture was on your latest mailer, won’t be around because the Texas Rangers outbid them?”

Silence. Then: “To hell with your ass and legs,” Jason said. “You got the most gorgeous set of brains I ever laid eyes on.”

Myron said, “Anything else, Jason?”

“Go practice, Myron. After the way you played last night, you need it. I want to talk over the details with Esperanza.”

“I’ll take it at my desk,” Esperanza said.

Myron put him back on hold. “Nice move,” he said to her.

She shrugged. “Some kid in the Sox marketing department screwed up. It happens.”

“You read it very well.”

Her tone was an exaggerated monotone. “My heaving bosom is swelling with pride.”

“Forget I said anything. Go take the call.”

“No, really, my goal in life is to be just like you.”

Myron shook his head. “You’ll never have my ass.”

“There’s that,” she agreed before leaving.

Left alone, Myron picked up the Raven Brigade photo. He located the three members still at large—Gloria Katz, Susan Milano, and the Ravens’ enigmatic leader and most famous member, Cole Whiteman. No one had drawn the press’s attention and ire more than Cole Whiteman. Myron had been in elementary school when the Ravens went into hiding, yet he still remembered the stories. For one thing, Cole could have passed for Win’s brother—blond, patrician-featured, well-to-do family. While everyone else in the picture was scraggly and long haired, Cole was freshly shaven with a conservative haircut, his one sixties concession being sideburns that went down a tad too far. Hardly your Hollywood-cast, radical leftist. But as Myron had learned from Win, looks could often be deceiving.

He put down the photograph and dialed Dimonte’s line at One Police Plaza. After Dimonte snarled a hello, Myron asked him if he had anything new.

“You think we’re partners now, Bolitar?”

“Just like Starsky and Hutch,” Myron said.

“God, I miss those two,” Dimonte said. “That hot car. Hanging out with Fuzzy Bear.”

“Huggy Bear,” Myron said.

“What?”

“His name was Huggy Bear, not Fuzzy Bear.”

“Really?”

“Time’s short, Rolly. Let me help if I can.”

“You first. What have you got?”

Another negotiation. Myron told him about Greg’s gambling. Figuring that Rolly had the phone records too, he also told him about the suspected blackmail scheme. He didn’t tell him about the videotape. It wouldn’t be fair, not until he spoke to Emily first. Dimonte asked a few questions. When he was satisfied, he said, “Okay, what do you want to know?”

“Did you find anything else at Greg’s house?”

“Nothing,” Dimonte said. “And I mean, nothing. Remember how you told me you found some feminine doodads in the bedroom? Some woman’s clothes or lotions or something?”

“Yes.”

“Well, someone got rid of them too. No sign of any female apparel.”

So, Myron thought, the lover theory rears its ugly head once again. The lover comes back to the house and cleans up the blood to protect Greg. Then she covers her own tracks too, making sure that their relationship remains a secret. “How about witnesses?” Myron asked. “Anybody in Liz Gorman’s building see anything?”

“Nope. We canvassed the whole neighborhood. No one saw nada. Everybody was studying or something. Oh, another thing: the press picked up the murder. The story hit the morning editions.”

“You gave them her real name?”

“You crazy? Of course not. They think it’s just another breaking and entering homicide. But get this. We got an anonymous tip called in this morning. Someone suggested we check out Greg Downing’s house.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Female voice.”

“He’s being set up, Rolly.”

“No shit, Sherlock. By a chick nonetheless. And the murder didn’t exactly make a big news splash. It was stuck in the back pages like every other unspectacular homicide in this cesspool. Got a little extra juice because it was so close to a college campus.”

“Have you looked into that connection?” Myron asked.

“What connection?”

“Columbia University being so close by. Half of the sixties movements started there. They must still have some sympathizers in the ranks. Maybe someone there helped Liz Gorman.”

Dimonte gave a dramatic sigh. “Bolitar, do you think all cops are morons?”

“No.”

“You think you’re the only one who thought of that?”

“Well,” Myron said, “I have been called gifted.”

“Not in today’s sports section.”

Touché. “So what did you find out?”

“She rented the place from some whacko, fanatic, leftist, commie, pinko so-called Columbia professor named Sidney Bowman.”

“You’re so tolerant, Rolly.”

“Yeah, well, I lose touch when I keep missing those ACLU meetings. Anyway, this pinko won’t talk. He says she just rented from him and paid in cash. We all know he’s lying. The feds grilled him, but he got a team of faggot, liberal lawyers down here to spring him. Called us a bunch of Nazi pigs and stuff.”

“That’s not a compliment, Rolly. In case you don’t know.”

“Thanks for clueing me in. I got Krinsky tailing him right now, but he’s got nothing. I mean, this Bowman’s not a retard. He’s got to know we’re watching.”

“What else have you got on him?”

“Divorced. No kids. He teaches a class in existential, worthless-in-the-real-world bullshit. According to Krinsky he spends most of his time helping the homeless. That’s supposed to be his daily ritual—hanging out with hobos in parks and shelters. Like I said, a whacko.”

Win entered the office without knocking. He headed straight for the corner and opened the closet door, revealing a full-length mirror. He checked his hair. Patted it though every strand was perfect. Then he spread his legs a bit and put his arms straight down. Pretending to be gripping a golf club. Win slowly began to turn into a backswing, watching his motion in the mirror, making sure the front arm remained straight, the grip relaxed. He did this all the time, sometimes stopping in front of store windows while walking down the street. This was the golf equivalent, Myron surmised, to the weight lifters who flex whenever they happen past their reflection. It was also annoying as all hell.

“Got anything else, Rolly?”

“No. You?”

“Nothing. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Can hardly wait, Hutch,” Dimonte said. “You know something? Krinsky’s so young he doesn’t even remember the show. Sad, ain’t it?”

“Today’s youth,” Myron said. “They got no culture.”

Myron hung up. Win continued to study his shot in the mirror. “Fill me in please,” he said. Myron did. When he finished, Win said, “This Fiona, the ex-playmate. She sounds like a perfect candidate for a Windsor Horne Lockwood III interrogation.”

“Uh huh,” Myron said. “But why don’t you first tell me about the Windsor Horne Lockwood III interrogation of Thumper?”

Win frowned at the mirror, adjusted his grip. “She is rather close mouthed,” he said. “So I took a distinctive tack.”

“What tack is that?”

Win told him about their conversation. Myron just shook his head. “So you followed her?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And there is not much to report. She went to TC’s house after the game. She slept over. No calls of any consequence were made from his residence. Either she was not rattled by our conversation, or she doesn’t know anything.”

“Or,” Myron added, “she knew she was being followed.”

Win frowned again. He either didn’t like Myron’s suggestion or he’d spotted a problem with his swing. Probably the latter. He turned away from the mirror and glanced at Myron’s desk. “Is that the Raven Brigade?”

“Yes. One of them looks like you.” Myron pointed to Cole Whiteman.

Win studied it for a moment. “While the man is indeed handsome, he lacks both my sense of style and my striking, debonair good looks.”

“Not to mention your humility.”

Win put out his hand. “Then you understand.”

Myron looked at the picture again. He thought again about what Dimonte said about Professor Sidney Bowman’s daily routine. Then it came to him all at once. Ice flooded his veins in a gush. In his mind he changed around Cole’s features a bit, imagined distortions from plastic surgery and twenty years of aging. It didn’t fit exactly, but it was close enough.

Liz Gorman had disguised herself by perverting her most distinguishing characteristic. Wouldn’t it make sense to assume that Cole Whiteman had done the same?

“Myron?”

He looked up. “I think I know where to find Cole Whiteman.”

Chapter 30

Hector was not thrilled to see Myron back at the Parkview Diner.

“We think we found Sally’s accomplice,” Myron said.

Hector cleaned the counter with a rag.

“His name is Norman Lowenstein. Do you know him?”

Hector shook his head.

“He’s a homeless man. He hangs out in the back and uses your pay phone.”

Hector stopped cleaning. “You think I’d let a homeless man in my kitchen?” he said. “And we don’t even have a back. Take a look.”

The answer did not surprise Myron. “He was sitting at the counter when I was here the other day,” he tried. “Unshaven. Long black hair. Tattered beige overcoat.”

Still working the rag over the Formica, Hector nodded. “I think I know who you mean. Black sneakers?”

“Right.”

“He comes in a lot. But I don’t know his name.”

“Did you ever see him talk to Sally?”

Hector shrugged. “Maybe. When she was his waitress. I really don’t know.”

“When was he here last?”

“I haven’t seen him since the day you came in,” Hector said.

“And you never met him?”

“No.”

“Or know anything about him?”

“No.”

Myron wrote down his phone number on a scrap of paper. “If you see him, please call. There’s a thousand-dollar reward.”

Hector studied the phone number. “This your work number? At AT&T?”

“No. It’s my personal phone.”

“Uh huh,” Hector said. “I called AT&T after you left last time. There’s no such thing as Y511 and there’s no employee named Bernie Worley.” He did not look particularly upset, but he wasn’t dancing the hula either. He just waited, watching Myron with steady eyes.

“I lied to you,” Myron said. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s your real name?” he asked.

“Myron Bolitar.” He gave the man one of his cards. Hector studied it for a moment.

“You’re a sports agent?”

“Yes.”

“What does a sports agent have to do with Sally?”

“It’s a long story.”

“You shouldn’t have lied like that. It wasn’t right.”

“I know,” Myron said. “I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t important.”

Hector put the card in his shirt pocket. “I have customers.” He turned away. Myron debated explaining further, but there was no point.

Win was waiting for him on the sidewalk. “Well?”

“Cole Whiteman is a homeless man who calls himself Norman Lowenstein.”

Win waved down a taxi. A driver in a turban slowed down. They got in. Myron told him where to go. The driver nodded; as he did, his turban buffed the taxi’s ceiling. Sitar music blew forth from the front speakers, plucking at the air with razor-sharp nails. Awful. It made Benny and His Magical Sitar sound like Itzhak Perlman. Still it was preferable to Yanni.

“He looks nothing like that old picture,” Myron said. “He’s had plastic surgery. He grew his hair and dyed it jet black.”

They waited at a traffic light. A blue TransAm pulled up next to them, one of those souped-up models that hip-hopped up and down while playing music loud enough to crack the earth’s core. The taxi actually started shaking from the decibel level. The light turned green. The TransAm sped ahead.

“I started thinking about how Liz Gorman had disguised herself,” Myron continued. “She’d taken her defining attribute and stood it on its head. Cole was the well-bred, clean-cut rich boy. What better way to stand that on its head than to become an unkempt vagrant?”

“A Jewish unkempt vagrant,” Win corrected.

“Right. So when Dimonte told me that Professor Bowman liked to hang out with the homeless, something clicked.”

The turban barked, “Route.”

“What?”

“Route. Henry Hudson or Broadway.”

“Henry Hudson,” Win replied. He glanced over at Myron. “Continue.”

“This is what I think happened,” Myron said. “Cole Whiteman suspected Liz Gorman was in some kind of trouble. Maybe she hadn’t called him or met up with him. Something. The problem was, he couldn’t check it out himself. Whiteman hasn’t survived underground all these years by being stupid. He knew that if the police found her, they’d set a trap for him—the way they’re doing right now.”

“So,” Win said, “he gets you to go in for him.”

Myron nodded. “He hangs around the diner, hoping to hear something about ‘Sally.’ When he overhears me talking to Hector, he figures I’m his best bet. He gives me this weird story about how he knows her from using the phone at the diner. Claimed they were lovers. The story didn’t really mesh, but I didn’t bother questioning it. Anyway, he takes me to her place. Once I’m inside, he hides and waits to see what happens. He sees the cops come. He probably even sees the body being taken out—all from a safe distance. It confirms what he probably suspected all along. Liz Gorman is dead.”

Win thought about it a moment. “And now you think Professor Bowman may be contacting him when he visits with the homeless?”

“Yes.”

“So our next goal is to find Cole Whiteman.”

“Yes.”

“Amongst the wretched unbathed in some godforsaken shelter?”

“Yes.”

Win looked pained. “Oh, goodie.”

“We could try to set a trap for him,” Myron said. “But I think it’ll take too long.”

“Set a trap how?”

“I think he’s the one who called me on the phone last night,” Myron said. “Whatever blackmail scheme Liz Gorman was running, it’s natural to think that Whiteman was in on it too.”

“But why you?” Win asked. “If he has dirt on Greg Downing, why would you be the target of his extortion?”

It was a question that had been gnawing at Myron too. “I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “The best guess I can come up with is that Whiteman recognized me at the diner. He probably figures that I’m closely connected to Greg Downing. When he couldn’t reach Greg, he decided to try me.”

Myron’s cellular phone rang. He flicked it on and said hello.

“Hey, Starsky.” It was Dimonte.

“I’m Hutch,” Myron said. “You’re Starsky.”

“Either way,” Dimonte said, “I think you’ll want to get your butt over to the precinct pronto.”

“You got something?”

“Only if you call a picture of the killer leaving Gorman’s apartment something,” Dimonte said.

Myron almost dropped the phone. “For real?”

“Yep. And you’ll never guess what.”

“What?”

“It’s a she.”

Chapter 31

“Here’s the deal,” Dimonte said. They were threading their way through a veritable United Nations of cops, witnesses, and whatnots. Win was waiting outside. He didn’t like cops, and they didn’t exactly feel like taking him out for ice cream. Best for all if he kept his distance. “We got a partial image of the perp on a videotape. Problem is, it’s not enough to make an ID. I thought maybe you’d recognize her.”

“What kind of videotape?”

“There’s a shipping garage on Broadway between One Hundred Tenth and One Hundred Eleventh streets, east side of the block,” Dimonte said. He remained a pace ahead of Myron, moving briskly. He kept turning behind him to make sure Myron was keeping up. “They handle home electronics. You know how that is—every worker steals like it’s a Constitutional right. So the company set up surveillance cameras all over the place. Videotape everything.” Still moving he shook his head, awarded Myron a toothpickless smile and added, “Good old big brother. Every once in a while somebody tapes a crime instead of a bunch of cops beating up a perp, you know what I’m saying?”

They entered a small interrogation room. Myron looked into a mirror. He knew it was one-way glass—so did anybody with even a passing knowledge of cop shows or movies. Myron doubted anybody was on the other side, but he stuck his tongue out just in case. Mr. Mature. Krinsky was standing by a television and a VCR. For the second time today, Myron was going to watch a video. He trusted this one would be more tame.

“Hey, Krinsky,” Myron said.

Krinsky barely nodded. Mr. Loquacious.

Myron looked over at Dimonte. “I still don’t see how a shipping garage camera could have gotten the killer on tape.”

“One of the cameras is by the truck entrance,” Dimonte explained. “Just to make sure nothing falls off the truck as it’s leaving, if you know what I mean. The camera catches part of the sidewalk. You can see people walking by.” He leaned up against the wall and motioned Myron to sit in a chair. “You’ll see what I mean.”

Myron sat. Krinsky hit the play button. Black and white again. No sound again. But this time the shot was from above. Myron saw the front end of a truck and behind it, a glimpse of the sidewalk. Not many people walked by; the ones that did were barely more than distant silhouettes.

“How did you come up with this?” Myron asked.

“With what?”

“This tape.”

“I always check for this stuff,” Dimonte said, hitching up his pants by belt loops. “Parking garages, storage houses, any of those places. They all have surveillance cameras nowadays.”

Myron nodded. “Good work, Rolly. I’m impressed.”

“Wow,” Dimonte said, “now I can die happy.”

Everyone’s a wiseass. Myron turned his attention back to the screen. “So how long is each tape?”

“Twelve hours,” Dimonte replied. “They change them at nine A.M. and P.M. Eight camera set-up. They keep each tape for three weeks. Then they tape over them.” He pointed his fingers. “Here she comes now. Krinsky.”

Krinsky pressed a button and the tape froze.

“The woman who just entered the picture. On the right. Heading south, which would be away from the scene.”

Myron saw a blurry image. He couldn’t see a face or even gather much about her height. She wore high heels and a long overcoat with a frilly neck. Hard to tell much about her weight either. The hair however was familiar. He kept his tone neutral. “Yeah, I see her.”

“Look at her right hand,” he said.

Myron did. There was something dark and long in it. “I can’t make it out.”

“We got it blown up. Krinsky.”

Krinsky handed Myron two large black and white photographs. The woman’s head was enlarged in the first one, but you still couldn’t see any facial features. In the second picture, the long dark object in her hand was clearer.

“We think it’s a plastic garbage bag wrapped around something,” Dimonte said. “Kind of an odd shape, wouldn’t you say?”

Myron looked at the photo and nodded. “You figure it’s covering up a baseball bat.”

“Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Myron said.

“We found plastic garbage bags just like that one in Gorman’s kitchen.”

“And probably half the kitchens in New York City,” Myron added.

“True enough. Now look at the date and time on the screen.”

On the top left-hand side of the screen, a digital clock read 02:12.32 A.M. The date was early Sunday morning. Just hours after Liz Gorman had been at the Swiss Chalet bar with Greg Downing.

“Did the camera get her coming the other way?” Myron asked.

“Yeah, but it’s not too clear. Krinsky.”

Krinsky hit the rewind button. Several seconds later, he stopped and the picture came back on. The time now read 01:41.12. A little more than thirty minutes earlier.

“Coming now,” Dimonte said.

The image almost flew past. Myron only recognized the woman by the long overcoat with the frilly neck. This time, she was carrying nothing in her hand. Myron said, “Let me see the other part again. All the way through.”

Dimonte nodded at Krinsky. Krinsky found it and hit play. While Myron still couldn’t see the woman’s face, her walk was another matter. And a person’s walk could be fairly distinctive. Myron felt his heart crawl up into his throat.

Dimonte was studying him through squinting eyes. “You recognize her, Bolitar?”

Myron shook his head. “No,” he lied.

Chapter 32

Esperanza liked to make lists.

With the Raven Brigade file in front of her, she jotted down the three most important factors in chronological order:

1) The Raven Brigade robs a bank in Tucson.

2) Within days, at least one of the Ravens (Liz Gorman) was in Manhattan.

3) Soon after, Liz Gorman made contact with a high-profile professional basketball player.

It didn’t flow.

She opened the file and briefly scanned the “brigade’s” history. In 1975 the Ravens had kidnapped Hunt Flootworth, the twenty-two-year-old son of publishing giant Cooper Flootworth. Hunt had been a classmate at San Francisco State of several of the Ravens, including both Cole Whiteman and Liz Gorman. The famous Cooper Flootworth, never one to sit around idly and let others handle his affairs, hired mercenaries to rescue his son. During their raid, young Hunt was shot at point-blank range in the head by one of the Ravens. No one knew which one. Of all the brigade members at the scene, four managed to escape.

Big Cyndi skipped into the office. The vibrations rolled Esperanza’s pens off the desk.

“Sorry,” Cyndi said.

“It’s okay.”

“Timmy called me,” Cyndi said. “We’re going out Friday night.”

Esperanza made a face. “His name is Timmy?”

“Yeah,” Cyndi said. “Isn’t that sweet?”

“Adorable.”

“I’ll be in the conference room,” Cyndi said.

Esperanza turned back to the file. She flipped ahead to the Tucson bank heist—the group’s first in more than five years. The robbery took place as the bank was closing. The feds believed one of the security guards was in on it, but so far they had nothing more than the guard’s left-leaning background. About $15,000 in cash was taken, but the robbers took the time to blow the safe deposit boxes. Risky. The feds theorized that the Ravens had somehow found out that drug money was stored there. The bank cameras showed two people dressed head to toe in black with black ski masks. No fingerprints or hairs or fibers. Nada.

Esperanza read through the file again, but nothing new exploded from the pages. She tried to imagine what the past twenty years had been like for the surviving Ravens, constantly on the run, never sleeping in the same place very long, leaving and reentering the country, relying on old sympathizers you were never sure you could completely trust. She grabbed her piece of paper and made some more notes:

Liz Gorman——>Bank Robbery——>Blackmail

Okay, she thought, follow the arrows. Liz Gorman and the Ravens needed funds, so they robbed the bank. That worked out. It explained the first arrow. That was a gimme anyway. The real problem was that second connection:

Bank Robbery——>Blackmail.

Simply put, what about the bank robbery had led her to the East Coast and her scheme to blackmail Greg Downing? She tried to write down possibilities.

1) Downing was involved in the bank robbery.

She looked up. It was possible, she surmised. He needed the money for gambling debts. He might do something illegal. But this hypothesis still did not answer the biggest question in all this: how did they meet? How did Liz Gorman and Greg Downing hook up in the first place?

That, she felt, was the key.

She wrote a number two. And waited.

What other link could there be?

Nothing came to mind so she decided to try it from the opposite end. Start with the blackmail and go back. In order to blackmail Downing, Liz Gorman had to have stumbled across something incriminating. When? Esperanza drew another arrow:

Bank Robbery<——>Blackmail

Esperanza felt something like a tiny pinprick. The bank robbery. Something they found at the bank robbery led to the blackmail scheme.

She quickly shuffled through the file, but she already knew that it wasn’t there. She picked up the phone and dialed. When the man answered, she said, “Do you have a list of the people who were renting safe-deposit boxes?”

“Somewhere, I guess,” he replied. “Why, you need it?”

“Yes.”

Deep sigh. “All right, I’ll start looking. But tell Myron he owes me for this. Owes me big.”

When Emily opened the door, Myron said, “Are you alone?”

“Why, yes,” she replied with a coy smile. “What do you have in mind?”

He shoved past her. Emily stumbled back, her mouth an open circle of surprise. He headed straight for the foyer closet and opened it.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Myron did not bother answering. His hands pushed hangers left and right in a frenzy. It didn’t take long. He pulled the long overcoat with the frilly neck into view. “Next time you commit a murder,” he said, “dispose of the clothes you wore.”

She took two steps back, her hand fluttering toward her mouth. “Get out,” she hissed.

“I’m giving you one chance to tell the truth.”

“I don’t care what you’re giving. Get the fuck out of my house.”

He held up the coat. “You think I’m the only one who knows? The police have a videotape of you at the murder scene. You were wearing this coat.”

Her body slackened. Her face looked like she’d been on the receiving end of a palm strike to the solar plexus.

Myron lowered the coat to his side. “You planted the murder weapon at your old house,” he said. “You smeared blood in the basement.” He turned and half-pounced into the living room. The pile of tabloids was still there. He pointed at it. “You kept searching the papers for the story. When you read about the body being found, you made an anonymous call to the police.”

He glanced back at Emily. Her eyes were unfocused and glazed.

“I kept wondering about the playroom,” Myron said. “Why, I kept asking myself, would Greg go down there of all places after the murder? But of course that was the point. He wouldn’t. The blood could remain undetected for weeks if need be.”

Emily made two fists at her sides. She shook her head, finally finding her voice. “You don’t understand.”

“Then tell me.”

“He wanted my kids.”

“So you framed him for murder.”

“No.”

“This isn’t the time to lie, Emily.”

“I’m not lying, Myron. I didn’t frame him.”

“You planted the weapon—”

“Yes,” she interrupted, “you’re right about all that. But I didn’t frame him.” Her eyes closed and reopened, almost like she was doing a minimeditation. “You can’t frame somebody for something they did.”

Myron stiffened. Emily stared at him stone faced. Her hands were still tightened into small balls. “Are you saying Greg killed her?”

“Of course.” She moved toward him, taking her time, using the seconds the way a boxer uses an eight count after a surprise left hook. She took the coat from his hands. “Should I really destroy it, or can I trust you?”

“I think you better explain first.”

“How about some coffee?”

“No,” Myron said.

“I need some. Come on. We’ll talk in the kitchen.”

She kept her head high and walked the same walk Myron had watched on the tape. He followed her into a bright white kitchen. The kitchen gleamed in tiled splendor. Most people probably thought the decor was to die for; Myron thought it resembled a urinal at a fancy restaurant.

Emily took out one of those new coffee presses people were using. “You sure you won’t have some? It’s Starbucks. Kona Hawaiian blend.”

Myron shook his head. Emily had regained her senses now. She was back in control; he’d let her stay there. A person in control talks more and thinks less.

“I’m trying to figure out where to begin,” she said, adding hot water to the press. The rich aroma immediately filled the air. If this was a coffee commercial, one of them would be saying “Ahhhh” right about now. “And don’t tell me to begin at the beginning or I’ll scream.”

Myron held up his hands to show he would do no such thing.

Emily pushed a little on the plunger, met resistance, pushed again. “She came up to me one day in the supermarket, of all places,” she said. “Out of the blue. I’m reaching for some frozen bagels, and this woman tells me she has uncovered something that could destroy my husband. She tells me that if I don’t pay up, she’s going to call the papers.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked her if she’d need a quarter for the phone.” Emily chuckled, stopped pressing, stood upright. “I figured it was a joke. I told her to go ahead and destroy the bastard. She just nodded and said she’d be in touch.”

“That was it?”

“Yep.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. Two, three weeks ago.”

“So when did you hear from her next?”

Emily opened a cabinet and took out a coffee mug. The mug had a picture of some cartoon character. The words WORLD’S GREATEST MOM were emblazoned on the side. “I’m making enough for two,” she said.

“No thank you.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” Myron said. “What happened next?”

She bent down and peered into the coffee press like it was a crystal ball. “A few days after this, Greg did something to me.…” She stopped. Her tone was different now, the words coming slower and with more care. “It’s like I told you last time you were here. He did something awful. The details aren’t important.”

Myron nodded but said nothing. No reason to raise the videotape now and knock her off stride. Facilitate her—that was the key.

“So when she came back and told me Greg was willing to pay big for her silence, I told her I’d pay more to make her talk. She told me it would cost a lot. I told her I didn’t care how much. I tried to appeal to her as a woman. I went so far as to tell her about my situation, how Greg was trying to take my kids away from me. She seemed to sympathize, but she also made it clear that she couldn’t afford to be philanthropic. If I wanted the information, I’d have to pay up.”

“Did she tell you how much?”

“One hundred thousand dollars.”

Myron held back a whistle. Serious double dipping. Liz Gorman’s strategy was probably to keep collecting from both of them, bleeding them both for as long as she thought it was safe. Or maybe she was hitting hard and fast because she knew she would have to go underground again. Either way, it made sense from Liz Gorman’s perspective to collect from all interested parties—Greg, Clip, and Emily. Take money for silence. Take money to sing. Blackmailers have the loyalty of election-year politicians.

“Do you know what she had on Greg?” he asked.

Emily shook her head. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

“But you were prepared to pay her a hundred grand?”

“Yes.”

“Even though you didn’t know what it was for?”

“Yes.”

Myron gestured with both hands. “How did you know she wasn’t just a crackpot?”

“The truth? I didn’t know. But I was going to lose my kids, for chrissake. I was desperate.”

And, Myron thought, Emily had shown that desperation to Liz Gorman who, in turn, took full advantage of it. “So you still have no idea what she had on him?”

Emily shook her head. “None.”

“Could it have been Greg’s gambling?”

Her eyes narrowed in confusion. “What about it?”

“Did you know Greg gambled?”

“Sure. But so what?”

“Do you know how much he gambled?” Myron asked.

“Just a little,” she said. “A trip to Atlantic City once in a while. Maybe fifty dollars on a football game.”

“Is that what you thought?”

Her eyes moved over his face, trying to read it. “What are you saying?”

Myron looked out the back window. The pool was still covered, but some of the robins had returned from the yearly aliya to the south. A dozen or so crowded a bird feeder, heads down, wings flapping happily like dog tails. “Greg is a compulsive gambler,” Myron said. “He’s lost away millions over the years. Felder didn’t embezzle money—Greg lost it gambling.”

Emily gave him a little head shake. “That can’t be,” she said. “I lived with him for almost ten years. I would have seen something.”

“Gamblers learn how to hide it,” Myron said. “They lie and cheat and steal—anything to keep on betting. It’s an addiction.”

Something in her eyes seemed to spark up. “And that’s what this woman had on Greg? The fact that he gambled?”

“I think so,” Myron said. “But I can’t say for sure.”

“But Greg definitely gambled, right? To the point where he lost all his money?”

“Yes.”

The answer kindled Emily’s face with hope. “Then no judge in the world would award him custody,” she said. “I’ll win.”

“A judge is more likely to give the kids to a gambler than a murderer,” Myron said. “Or someone who plants false evidence.”

“I told you already. It’s not false.”

“So you say,” Myron said. “But let’s get back to what happened with the blackmailer. You were saying she wanted a hundred grand.”

Emily moved back to her coffee press. “That’s right.”

“How were you to pay her?”

“She told me to wait by a pay phone outside a Grand Union supermarket on Saturday night. I was supposed to get there at midnight and have the money ready. She called at midnight on the dot and gave me an address on One Hundred Eleventh Street. I was supposed to get there at two in the morning.”

“So you drove to One Hundred Eleventh Street at two in the morning with one hundred thousand dollars?” He tried not to sound too incredulous.

“I could only raise sixty thousand,” she corrected.

“Did she know that?”

“No. Look, I know this all sounds crazy, but you don’t understand how desperate I was. I would have done anything at this point.”

Myron understood. He had seen up-close how far mothers would go. Love twists; maternal love twists absolutely. “Go on,” he said.

“When I turned the corner, I saw Greg come out of the building,” Emily said. “I was stunned. He had his collar up, but I could still see his face.” She looked up at Myron. “I was married to him a long time, but I’ve never seen his face like this.”

“Like what?”

“So filled with terror,” she replied. “He practically sprinted toward Amsterdam Avenue. I waited until he turned the corner. Then I approached the door and pressed her apartment button. Nobody answered. I started pressing other buttons. Somebody finally buzzed me in. I went upstairs and knocked on her door for a while. Then I tried the knob. It was unlocked. So I opened the door.”

Emily stopped. A trembling hand brought the cup up to her lips. She took a sip.

“This is going to sound awful,” she went on, “but I didn’t see a dead human being lying there. I only saw my last hope of keeping my kids.”

“So you decided to plant evidence.”

Emily put down the cup and looked at him. Her eyes were clear. “Yes. And you were right about everything else too. I chose the playroom because I knew he’d never go down there. I figured that when Greg got back home—I didn’t know he’d run—the blood would be safe. Look, I know I went too far, but it’s not like I was lying. He killed her.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What?”

“He might have stumbled across the body the same way you did.”

“Are you serious?” Her tone was sharp now. “Of course Greg killed her. The blood on the floor was still fresh. He was the one who had everything to lose. He had motive, opportunity.”

“Just as you do,” Myron said.

“What motive?”

“You wanted to set him up for murder. You wanted to keep your children.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Do you have any proof your story is true?” Myron asked.

“Do I have what?”

“Proof. I don’t think the police are going to buy it.”

“Do you buy it?” she asked him.

“I’d like to see proof.”

“What do you mean, proof?” she snapped. “Like what? It’s not like I took pictures.”

“Any facts that back up your story?”

“Why would I kill her, Myron? What possible motive could I have? I needed her alive. She was my best chance of keeping my kids.”

“But let’s assume for a moment that this woman did indeed have something on Greg,” Myron said. “Something concrete. Like a letter he wrote or a videotape”—he watched for a reaction—“or something like that.”

“All right,” she said with a nod. “Go ahead.”

“And suppose she double-crossed you. Suppose she sold the incriminating evidence to Greg. You admit Greg was there before you. Maybe he paid her enough so that she’d back out of your agreement. Then you go into her apartment. You find out what she’s done. You realize your one chance at keeping your kids is gone. So you kill her and pin it on the man who had seemed to have the most to gain from her death: Greg.”

Emily shook her head. “That’s nuts.”

“You hated Greg enough,” Myron continued. “He played dirty with you; you’d play dirty back.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

Myron took another look at the robins, but they were gone. The yard looked barren now, stripped of any life. He waited a few seconds before he turned back toward her. “I know about the videotape of you and Thumper.”

A quick bolt of anger hit Emily’s eyes. Her fingers clutched the coffee mug. Myron half-expected her to throw it at him. “How the hell …?” Then her grip suddenly slackened. She backed away. She sort of shrugged into a slouch. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It must have made you furious,” he said.

She shook her head. A small sound like a chuckle escaped from her lips. “You just don’t get it, do you, Myron?”

“Don’t get what?”

“I wasn’t looking for revenge. The only thing that mattered was that the tape could take away my kids.”

“No, I do get it,” Myron countered. “You’d do anything to keep your kids.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

Myron shifted gears. “Tell me about you and Thumper,” he said.

Emily snorted a derisive laugh. “I didn’t think you were that type, Myron.”

“I’m not.”

She picked up her coffee mug and took a deep sip. “Did you watch the whole tape from beginning to end?” she asked in a tone somewhere between flirtatious and furious. “Did you hit the slow motion button a few times, Myron? Rewind and replay certain parts over and over? Drop your pants to your knees?”

“No to all of the above.”

“How much did you see?”

“Just enough to know what was going on.”

“Then you stopped?”

“Then I stopped.”

She regarded him from behind the mug. “You know something? I actually believe you. You’re that kind of Goody Two-shoes.”

“Emily, I’m trying to help.”

“Help me or Greg?”

“Help get to the truth. I assume you want that too.”

She shrugged noncommittally.

“So when did you and Thumper …?” He made vague coming-together motions with his hand.

She laughed at his discomfort. “It was the first time,” she replied. “In all respects.”

“I’m not judging—”

“I don’t care if you are or not. You want to know what happened, right? It was my first time. That little whore set me up.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how?” she countered. “You want me to go into details—how many drinks I had, how I was feeling lonely, how her hand started up my leg?”

“I guess not.”

“Then let me give you the quick capsule: she seduced me. We’d flirted innocently a few times in the past. She invited me to the Glenpointe for drinks. It was like a dare on myself—I was drawn and repelled, but I knew I wouldn’t go through with it. One thing led to another. We went upstairs. End of capsule.”

“So you’re saying Thumper knew you were being filmed?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? Did she say anything?”

“She didn’t say anything. But I know.”

“How?”

“Myron, please stop asking so many goddamn questions. I just know, okay? How else would anyone know to set up a camera in that room? She set me up.”

That made sense, Myron thought. “But why would she do it?”

Her face registered her exasperation. “Christ, Myron, she’s the team whore. Didn’t she fuck you yet? Or no, let me guess. You refused, right?”

Emily stormed away into the living room and collapsed on a couch. “Get me the aspirin,” she said. “They’re in the bathroom. In the medicine chest.”

Myron shook out two tablets and filled a cup with water. When he came back, he said, “I have to ask you about one more thing.”

She sighed. “What?”

“I understand you made allegations against Greg,” he said.

“My attorney made allegations.”

“Were they true?”

She put the pills on her tongue, took some water, swallowed. “Some of them.”

“How about the ones about him abusing the children?”

“I’m tired, Myron. Can we talk more later?”

“Were they true?”

Emily looked into Myron’s eyes, and a cold gust of air blew across his heart. “Greg wanted to take my kids away from me,” she said slowly. “He had money, power, prestige on his side. We needed something.”

Myron broke the eye contact. He walked toward the door. “Don’t destroy that coat.”

“You have no right to judge me.”

“Right now,” he said, “I don’t want to be near you.”

Chapter 33

Audrey was leaning against his car. “Esperanza told me you’d be here.”

Myron nodded.

“Jesus, you look like hell,” she said. “What happened?”

“Long story.”

“And one that you will soon tell me in riveting detail,” Audrey added. “But I’ll go first. Fiona White was indeed a Miss September in 1992—or as that particular rag calls it, the September Babe-A-Rama.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Fiona’s turn-ons include moonlit walks on the beach and cozy nights by a fireplace.”

He smiled in spite of himself. “My, what originality.”

“Her turn-offs include shallow men who only care about looks. And men with back hair.”

“Did they list her favorite movies?”

“Schindler’s List,” Audrey said. “And Cannonball Run II.”

He laughed. “You’re making this up.”

“All except the part about being the September Babe-A-Rama in 1992.”

Myron shook his head. “Greg Downing and his best friend’s wife,” he sighed. In a way, the news sort of buoyed him. Myron’s ten-year-old indiscretion with Emily no longer seemed quite so bad. He knew that he shouldn’t find comfort in such logic, but man takes solace where he can find it.

Audrey motioned toward the house. “So what’s up with the ex?”

“Long story.”

“You said that already. I got time.”

“I don’t.”

She held up her palm like a cop directing traffic. “Not fair, Myron. I’ve been a good girl. I’ve been running your errands and keeping my big mouth shut. Not to mention the fact that I got zippo from you for my birthday. Please don’t make me start with the exposure threats again.”

She was right. Myron gave her an abbreviated update, leaving out two parts: the Thumper videotape (no reason anyone had to know about that) and the fact that Carla was the infamous Liz Gorman (it was simply too big a story; no reporter could be trusted to keep it off the record).

Audrey listened intently. Her page-boy cut had grown a little too long in the front. Hairs dangled close to her eyes. She kept sticking out her lower lip and blowing strands off her forehead. Myron had never before seen this particular gesture done by anybody over the age of eleven. It was kind of sweet.

“Do you believe her?” Audrey asked, motioning again to Emily’s house.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “Her story sort of makes sense. She had no motive to kill the woman, except to frame Greg and that’s reaching.”

Audrey tilted her head as if to say, maybe yes—maybe no.

“What?” he asked.

“Well,” she began, “isn’t there’s a chance that we’re looking at this from the wrong perspective?”

“What do you mean?”

“We assume that this blackmailer had dirt on Downing,” Audrey said. “But maybe she had dirt on Emily.”

Myron stopped, looked back at the house as though it held some answers, looked back at Audrey.

“According to Emily,” Audrey went on, “the blackmailer approached her. But why? She and Greg aren’t together anymore.”

“Carla didn’t know that,” Myron replied. “She figured Emily was his wife and would want to protect him.”

“That’s one possibility,” Audrey agreed. “But I’m not sure it’s the best one.”

“Are you saying that they were blackmailing her, not Greg?”

Audrey turned her palms skyward. “All I’m saying is that it could work the other way too. The blackmailer might have had something on Emily—something Greg would want to use against her in the child custody case.”

Myron folded his arms and leaned against the car. “But what about Clip?” he asked. “If they had something on Emily, why would he be interested?”

“I don’t know.” Audrey shrugged. “Maybe she had dirt on both of them.”

“Both of them?”

“Sure. Something that could destroy them both. Or maybe Clip thought whatever it was—even if it was about Emily—would distract Greg.”

“Any guesses?”

“Not a one,” Audrey said.

Myron mulled it over for a few seconds, but nothing came to him. “There’s a chance,” he said, “we’ll find out tonight.”

“How?”

“The blackmailer called. He wants to sell me the information.”

“Tonight?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet. He’s going to call. I got my home line forwarded to the cellular.”

As if on cue, the cellular rang. Myron took it out of his pocket.

It was Win. “The dear professor’s schedule was posted on his office door,” he said. “He is in class for another hour. After that, he has open office hours so the kiddies can whine about grades.”

“Where are you?”

“On Columbia’s campus,” Win replied. “By the way, Columbia women are fairly attractive. I mean, for the Ivy Leagues and all.”

“Glad you haven’t lost your powers of observation.”

“Indeed,” Win said. “Have you finished speaking to our girl?”

Our girl was Emily. Win did not trust cellular phones with names. “Yes,” he said.

“Goodie. What time should I expect you then?”

“I’m on my way.”

Chapter 34

Win was sitting on a bench near the Columbia gate on 116th Street. He was wearing Eddie Bauer khakis, Top-Siders without socks, a blue button-down Oxford, and a power tie.

“I’m blending in,” Win explained.

“Like a Hasid at Christmas mass,” Myron agreed. “Is Bowman still in class?”

Win nodded. “He should be exiting that door in ten minutes.”

“Do you know what he looks like?”

Win handed him a faculty handbook. “Page two ten,” he said. “So tell me about Emily.”

Myron did. A tall brunette dressed in a black, skintight cat suit strolled by with her books pressed up against her chest. Julie Newmar on Batman. Win and Myron watched her closely. Meow.

When Myron finished, Win didn’t bother with any questions. “I have a meeting at the office,” he said as he stood. “Do you mind?”

Myron shook his head and sat down. Win left. Myron kept his eye on the door. Ten minutes later students began to file out the door. Two minutes after that, Professor Sidney Bowman followed suit. He had the same unkempt, academic beard as in the photo. He was bald but kept his fringe hair ridiculously long. He wore jeans, Timberland boots, and a red flannel shirt. He was either trying to look like a working stiff or Jerry Brown on the campaign trail.

Bowman pushed up his spectacles and kept walking. Myron waited until he was out of sight before following. No rush. The good professor was indeed heading for his office. He crossed the grassy commons and disappeared into yet another brick building. Myron found a bench and sat down.

An hour passed. Myron watched the students and felt very old. He should have brought a newspaper. Sitting for an hour without reading material meant he had to think. His mind kept conjuring up new possibilities and then dismissing them. He knew he was missing something, could see it bobbing in the distance, but every time he reached out it ducked back down below the surface.

He suddenly remembered that he had not checked Greg’s answering machine today. He took out his cellular phone and dialed the number. When Greg’s voice came on, he pressed 317, the code numbers Greg had programmed into the machine. There was only one message on the tape, but it was a doozy.

“Don’t fuck with us,” the electronically altered voice said. “I’ve spoken to Bolitar. He’s willing to pay. Is that what you want?”

End of message.

Myron sat very still. He stared at a brick, ivyless wall. He listened to a tone for a few seconds and did nothing. What the hell …?

“… He’s willing to pay. Is that what you want?”

Myron pressed the star button to have the message replayed. Then he did it again. He probably would have listened for a fourth time, had Professor Bowman not suddenly appeared at the door.

Bowman stopped to chat with a couple of students. The conversation grew animated, all three displaying fervent, academic earnest. College. Continuing their undoubtedly weighty discourse, they walked off campus and down Amsterdam Avenue. Myron pocketed the phone and kept his distance. At 112th Street, the group separated. The two students continued south. Bowman crossed the street and headed toward the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

St. John the Divine’s was a massive structure and interestingly enough, the largest cathedral in the world in terms of cubic square feet (St. Peter’s in Rome is considered a basilica by this statistic, not a cathedral). The edifice was like the city that housed it: awe-inspiring yet worn. Towering columns and gorgeous stained-glass windows were surrounded by signs like HARD HAT AREA (though it dated back to 1892, St. John the Divine’s has never been completed) and THE CATHEDRAL IS PATROLLED AND ELECTRONICALLY MONITORED FOR YOUR PROTECTION. Wooden planks plugged holes in the granite facade. On the left side of this architectural wonder were two prefab aluminum storage barracks that brought back memories of the opening credits of Gomer Pyle. On the right was the Children’s Sculpture Garden featuring the Peace Fountain, an enormous sculpture that inspired several moods, none of them peaceful. Images of severed heads and limbs, lobster claws, hands reaching out from the dirt as though trying to escape hell, a man twisting the neck of a deer all whirled together to create an atmosphere that was more Dante meets Goya than languid tranquillity.

Bowman headed down the driveway on the cathedral’s right. Myron knew that there was a homeless shelter down that way. He crossed the street and tried to keep his distance. Bowman passed a group of apparently homeless men—all dressed in threadbare synthetics and pants with plunging butt-lines. Some waved and called out to Bowman. Bowman waved back. Then he disappeared through a door. Myron debated what to do. There was no choice really. Even if it meant blowing his cover, he had to go in.

He passed the men, nodded, smiled. They nodded and smiled back. The shelter entrance was a double black door with chintzy lace curtains. Not far from it were two signs—one reading SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY and the other CATHEDRAL SCHOOL. A homeless shelter and a children’s school side by side—an interesting yet working combo. Only in New York.

Myron entered. The room was packed with frayed mattresses and men. A smell like a used bong after an all-nighter singed his nostril hairs. Myron tried not to make a face. He spotted Bowman talking to several men in one corner. None of them was Cole Whiteman aka Norman Lowenstein. Myron glanced about the unshaven faces and hollow eyes, his gaze swinging left to right.

They spotted each other at exactly the same time.

From across the room, their eyes locked for perhaps a second, but that was long enough. Cole Whiteman turned and ran. Myron followed, threading his way through the throngs. Professor Bowman spotted the disturbance. Eyes afire, he jumped in Myron’s path. Myron lowered his shoulder and flattened him without breaking stride. Just like Jim Brown. Except Jim Brown had to do it against guys like Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke opposed to a fifty-year-old college professor who probably didn’t weigh 180 even with the soft gut. Still.

Cole Whiteman disappeared out a back door, slamming it behind him. Myron went through it not long after. They were outside now, but only briefly. Whiteman disappeared up a metal stairway and back into the main chapel. Myron followed. The inside was very much like the outside—spectacular examples of art and architecture mixed in with the tattered and tacky. The pews, for example, were cheap folding chairs. Lush tapestries hung upon granite walls with seemingly no organization. Ladders were melded into thick columns.

Myron spotted Cole heading back out a nearby door. He sprinted after him, his heels echoing up through the giant arched ceiling. They were back outside. Cole headed down below the cathedral and through heavy fire doors. A sign read A.C.T. PROGRAM. It looked like a basement school or daycare center. Both men raced down a hallway lined with beat-up, metallic lockers. Cole turned right and disappeared behind a wooden door.

When Myron pushed the door open, a darkened stairway greeted him. He heard footsteps below him. He trotted down, the light from above dwindling with each step. He was descending deep into the cathedral’s subdwelling now. The walls were cement and clammy to the touch. He wondered if he was entering a crypt or tomb or something equally creepy, if indeed there was equally creepy. Did American cathedrals have crypts, or was that only in Europe?

By the time he reached the bottom step, Myron was bathed in darkness, the light from above little more than a distant glint. Great. He stepped into a black hole of a room. He cocked his head, listening for a sound like a dog on a hunt. Nothing. He felt for a light switch. Again nothing. The room had a bone-chilling, windless cold. A damp smell permeated his surroundings. He didn’t like it down here. He didn’t like it at all.

He inched forward blindly, his arms outstretched like Frankenstein’s monster. “Cole,” he called out. “I just want to talk to you.”

His words echoed hard before fading out like a song on the radio.

He kept going. The room was still as … well, as a tomb. He had moved about five feet when his outstretched fingers hit something. Myron kept his hand on the smooth, cold surface. Like marble, he thought. He traced down. It was a statue of some sort. He felt the arm, the shoulder, to the back, down a marble wing. He wondered if it was some kind of tombstone decoration and quickly withdrew his hand.

He stayed perfectly still and tried to listen again. The only sound was a rushing in his ears, like seashells were pressed against them. He debated going back upstairs, but there was no way he could do that. Cole knew now that his identity was in danger. He would go into hiding again and not resurface. This was Myron’s only chance.

He took another step, leading now with his foot. His toe hit something hard and unyielding. Marble again, he figured. He circled around it. Then a sound—a scurrying sound—made him freeze in his tracks. It had come from the ground. Not a mouse. Too big for a mouse. He cocked his head again and waited. His pulse raced. His eyes were just beginning to adjust to the darkness, and he could make out a few shadowy, tall figures. Statues. Lowered heads. He imagined the serene expressions of religious art on their faces, looking down at him with the knowledge they were embarking on a journey to a better place than the one in which they dwelled.

He took another step, and cold fingers of flesh grabbed his ankle.

Myron screamed.

The hand pulled and Myron fell hard against the cement. He kicked his leg loose and scrambled backward. His back slammed into more marble. A man giggled madly. Myron felt the hairs on the nape of his neck stand up. Another man giggled. Then another. Like a group of hyenas were encircling him.

Myron tried to get to his feet, but midway up, the men suddenly pounced. He didn’t know how many. Hands dragged him back to the floor. He threw a blind fist and connected square into a face. Myron heard a crunching sound and a man fell. But others reached their target. He found himself sprawled on the wet cement, fighting blindly and frantically. He heard grunts. The stench of body odor and alcohol was suffocating, inescapable. The hands were everywhere now. One ripped off his watch. One grabbed his wallet. Myron threw another punch. It hit ribs. Another grunt and another man fell.

Somebody turned on a flashlight and shone it into his eyes. It looked like a train heading toward him.

“Okay,” a voice said, “back off him.”

The hands slid off like wet snakes. Myron tried to sit up.

“Before you get any cute ideas,” the voice behind the flashlight said, “take a look at this.”

The voice put a gun in front of the flashlight.

Another voice said, “Sixty bucks? That’s fuckin’ all? Shit.”

Myron felt the wallet hit him in the chest.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

He did as the voice asked. Someone grabbed the forearms, pulling them closer together, tearing at the shoulder tendons. A pair of handcuffs were snapped on his wrists.

“Leave us,” the voice said. Myron heard the rustling movements. The air cleared. Myron heard a door open, but the flashlight in his eyes prevented him from seeing anything. Silence followed. After some time passed, the voice said, “Sorry to do this to you, Myron. They’ll let you go in a few hours.”

“How long you going to keep running, Cole?”

Cole Whiteman chuckled. “Been running a long time,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

“I’m not here to stop you.”

“Imagine my relief,” he said. “So how did you figure out who I was?”

“It’s not important,” Myron said.

“It is to me.”

“I don’t have any interest in bringing you down,” Myron said. “I just want some information.”

There was a pause. Myron blinked into the light. “How did you get involved in all this?” Cole asked.

“Greg Downing vanished. I was hired to find him.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

Cole Whiteman laughed deep and hearty. The sound bounced around like balls of Silly Putty, the volume reaching a frightening crescendo before mercifully fading away.

“What’s so funny?” Myron asked.

“Inside joke.” Cole stood, the flashlight rising with him. “Look, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

More silence. Cole flicked off the flashlight, plunging Myron back into total blackness. He heard footsteps receding.

“Don’t you want to know who killed Liz Gorman?” Myron called out.

The footsteps continued unimpeded. Myron heard a switch and a dim lightbulb came on. Maybe forty watts. It didn’t come close to fully illuminating the place, but it was a hell of an improvement. Myron blinked away black spots left over from the flashlight assault and examined his surroundings. The room was jammed with marble statues, lined and piled up without reason or logic, some tilted over. It wasn’t a tomb, after all. It was some bizarre, church-art storage room.

Cole Whiteman came back over to him. He sat cross-legged directly in front of Myron. The white stubble was still there—thick in some spots, completely missing in others. His hair jutted up and out in every direction. He lowered the gun to his side.

“I want to know how Liz died,” he said softly.

“She was bludgeoned with a baseball bat,” Myron said.

Cole’s eyes closed. “Who did it?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Right now, Greg Downing is the main suspect.”

Cole Whiteman shook his head. “He wasn’t there long enough.”

Myron felt a knot in his stomach. He tried to lick his lips but his mouth was too dry. “You were there?”

“Across the street behind a garbage can. Like Oscar the fucking Grouch.” His lips smiled, but there was nothing behind it. “You want no one to notice you? Pretend you’re homeless.” He stood up in one fluid motion, like some kind of yoga master. “A baseball bat,” he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose, turned away, and lowered his chin to his chest. Myron could hear small sobs.

“Help me find her killer, Cole.”

“Why the fuck should I trust you?”

“Me or the police,” Myron said. “It’s up to you.”

That slowed him. “The cops won’t do shit. They think she’s a murderer.”

“Then help me,” Myron said.

He sat back down on the floor and inched a bit closer to Myron. “We’re not murderers, you know. The government labeled us that and now everyone believes it. But it’s not true. You understand?”

Myron nodded. “I understand.”

Cole gave him a hard look. “You patronizing me?”

“No.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Cole said. “You want me to stay and talk, don’t you dare patronize me. You stay honest—I’ll stay honest.”

“Fine,” Myron said. “But then don’t hand me the ‘we’re not killers, we’re freedom fighters’ line. I’m not in the mood for a verse of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ ”

“You think that’s what I’m talking about?”

“You’re not being prosecuted by a corrupt government,” Myron said. “You kidnapped and killed a man, Cole. You can dress it up in all the fancy language you want, but that’s what you did.”

Cole almost smiled. “You really believe that.”

“Wait, don’t tell me; let me guess,” Myron said. He feigned looking up in thought. “The government brainwashed me, right? This whole thing has been a CIA plot to crush a dozen college students who threatened to undermine our government.”

“No,” he said. “But we didn’t kill Hunt.”

“Who did?”

Cole hesitated. He looked up and blinked back what looked like tears. “Hunt shot himself.”

His reddening eyes looked to Myron for a reaction. Myron remained still.

“The kidnapping was a hoax,” Cole went on. “The whole thing was Hunt’s idea. He wanted to hurt his old man so he figured what better way than to take his money and then embarrass the shit out of him? But then those assholes surprised us and Hunt chose another revenge.” Cole’s breathing grew deep and erratic. “He ran outside with the gun. He screamed, ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ Then he blew his own head off.”

Myron said nothing.

“Look at our history,” Cole Whiteman said, his voice a semi-plea. “We were a harmless group of stragglers. We protested at antiwar rallies. We got stoned a lot. We never committed one act of violence. None of us even had a gun, except for Hunt. He was my roommate and best friend. I could never hurt him.”

Myron didn’t know what to believe; more to the point, he didn’t have time now to worry about a twenty-year-old homicide. He waited for Cole to continue, to let him talk out the past, but Cole remained still. Finally, Myron tried to update the subject. “You saw Greg Downing go into Liz Gorman’s building?”

Cole nodded slowly.

“She was blackmailing him?”

“Not just her,” he corrected. “It was my idea.”

“What did you have on Greg?”

Cole shook his head. “Not important.”

“She was probably killed over it.”

“Probably,” Cole agreed. “But you don’t need to know the specifics. Trust me.”

Myron was in no position to push it. “Tell me about the night of the murder.”

Cole scratched at his stubble hard, like a cat on a post. “Like I said,” he began, “I was across the street. When you live underground, you have certain rules you live by—rules that have kept us alive and free for the last twenty years. One of them is that after we commit a crime, we never stay together. The feds look for us in groups, not individuals. Since we’ve been in the city, Liz and I have made sure we were never together. We only communicated by pay phone.”

“What about Gloria Katz and Susan Milano?” Myron asked. “Where are they?”

Cole smiled without mirth or humor. Myron saw the missing teeth and wondered if they were part of the disguise or something more sinister. “I’ll tell you about them another time,” he said.

Myron nodded. “Go on,” he said.

The lines in Cole’s face seemed to deepen and darken in the bare light. He took his time before continuing. “Liz was all packed and ready to go,” he said finally. “We were going to score the cash and get out of the city, just like I planned. I was just waiting across the street for her signal.”

“What signal?”

“After all the money was collected, she’d flicker the lights three times. That meant she’d be down in ten minutes. We were going to meet at One Hundred Sixteenth Street and take the One train out of here. But the signal never came. In fact, her light never went off at all. I was afraid to go check on her for obvious reasons. We got rules about that too.”

“Who was Liz supposed to collect from that night?”

“Three people,” Cole said, holding up the pointer, middle man, and ring man. “Greg Downing”—he dropped ring man—“his wife what’s-her-name—”

“Emily.”

“Right, Emily.” The middle finger went down. “And the old guy who owns the Dragons.” His hand made a fist now.

Myron’s heart contracted. “Wait a second,” he said. “Clip Arnstein was supposed to show up?”

“Not supposed to,” Cole corrected. “He did.”

A black coldness seeped into Myron’s bones. “Clip was there?”

“Yes.”

“And the other two?”

“All three showed up. But that wasn’t the plan. Liz was supposed to meet Downing at a bar downtown. They were going to make the transaction there.”

“A place called the Swiss Chalet?”

“Right.”

“But Greg showed up at the apartment too?”

“Later on, yeah. But Clip Arnstein arrived first.”

Win’s warning about Clip came back to him. You like him too much. You’re not being objective. “How much was Clip supposed to pay?”

“Thirty thousand dollars.”

“The police only found ten thousand in her apartment,” Myron said. “And those bills were from the bank robbery.”

Cole shrugged. “Either the old man didn’t pay her or else the killer took the money.” Then, thinking it through a little more he added, “Or maybe Clip Arnstein killed her. But he seems kind of old, don’t you think?”

Myron didn’t answer. “How long was he inside?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Who came by next?”

“Greg Downing. I remember he had a satchel. I figured it had the money in it. He was in and out fast—couldn’t have been more than a minute. And he still had the satchel on him when he came out. That’s when I started to worry.”

“Greg could have killed her,” Myron said. “It doesn’t take long to hit someone with a baseball bat.”

“But he wasn’t carrying a bat,” Cole said. “The satchel wasn’t big enough for one. And Liz had a bat in her apartment. She hated guns, so she kept it for protection.”

Myron knew that no bat had been found at Gorman’s apartment. That meant the killer must have used Liz’s. Could Greg have gone upstairs, entered her apartment, found the bat, killed her with it, ran out—all in such a short time?

It seemed doubtful.

“What about Emily?” Myron asked.

“She came in last,” Cole said.

“How long was she there?”

“Five minutes. Something like that.”

Time enough to gather the evidence to plant. “Did you see anybody else go in and out of the building?”

“Sure,” Cole said. “Lot of students live there.”

“But we can assume that Liz was already dead by the time Greg Downing arrived, right?”

“Right.”

“So the question is, who do you remember going in between the time she got back from the Swiss Chalet and the time Greg arrived? Besides Clip Arnstein.”

Cole thought about it and shrugged. “Mostly students, I guess. There was a real tall guy—”

“How tall?”

“I don’t know. Very.”

“I’m six-four. Taller than me?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Was he black?”

“I don’t know. I was across the street and the light wasn’t too good. I wasn’t watching that closely. He might have been black. But I don’t think he’s our man.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I watched the building until the next morning. He never came back out. He must have lived there or at least stayed with someone overnight. I doubt the killer would’ve hung around like that.”

Tough to argue, Myron thought. He tried to process what he was hearing in a cold, computerlike way, but the circuits were starting to overload. “Who else did you remember seeing? Anybody stand out?”

Cole thought again, his eyes wandering aimlessly. “There was one woman who went in not long before Greg got there. Now that I think of it, she left before he got there too.”

“What did she look like?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Blond, brunette?”

Cole shook his head. “I only remember her because she wore a long coat. The students all wear windbreakers or sweatshirts or something like that. I remember thinking she looked like an adult.”

“Was she carrying anything? Did she—”

“Look, Myron, I’m sorry. I gotta get moving.” He stood and looked down at Myron with a hollow, lost expression. “Good luck finding the son of a bitch,” he said. “Liz was a good person. She never hurt anyone. None of us did.”

Before he could turn away, Myron asked, “Why did you call me last night? What were you going to sell me?”

Cole smiled sadly and began to walk away. He stopped before he reached the door and turned back around. “I’m alone now,” he said. “Gloria Katz was shot in the initial attack. She died three months later. Susan Milano died in a car crash in 1982. Liz and I kept their deaths a secret. We wanted the feds searching for four of us, not two. We thought it would help us stay hidden. So you see, there is only one of us left now.”

He had the bone-weary look of a survivor who wasn’t so sure the dead weren’t the lucky ones. He rambled back over toward Myron and unlocked the handcuffs. “Go,” he said.

Myron rose, rubbing his wrists. “Thank you,” he said.

Cole merely nodded.

“I won’t tell anyone where you are.”

“Yeah,” Cole said. “I know.”

Chapter 35

Myron sprinted to his car and dialed Clip’s number. Clip’s secretary answered and told him that Mr. Arnstein was not in at the moment. He asked her to transfer the call to Calvin Johnson. She put him on hold. Ten seconds later, the call was put through.

“Hey, Myron,” Calvin said, “what’s up?”

“Where’s Clip?”

“He should be here in a couple of hours. By game time anyway.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find him,” Myron said. “When you do, call me back.”

“What’s going on?” Calvin asked.

“Just find him.”

Myron disconnected the call. He opened the car window and took deep breaths. It was a few minutes after six. Most of the guys would already be at the arena warming up. He headed up Riverside Drive and crossed the George Washington Bridge. He dialed Leon White’s number. A woman answered.

“Hello?”

Myron disguised his voice. “Is this Mrs. Fiona White?” he asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“Would you like to subscribe to Popular Mechanics? We have a special going on for a limited time.”

“No, thank you.” She hung up.

Conclusion: Fiona White, the Sepbabe and promisor of night ecstasy, was home. Time to pay her a little visit.

He took Route 4 and got off at Kindermack Road. Five minutes later, he was there. The house was a semi-nouveau ranch with orange-tinged brick and diamond-shaped windows. This particular architectural look was all the rage for maybe a two-month span in 1977, and it had aged about as well as the leisure suit. Myron parked in the driveway. On either side of the cement walkway were low-rise iron fences with plastic ivy snaked through them. Classy.

He rang the bell. Fiona White opened the door. Her green, flower-print blouse hung open over a white leotard. Her bleached-blonde hair was tied in a bun that was falling apart, spare strands dangling down over her eyes and ears. She looked at Myron and frowned. “Yes?”

“Hi, Fiona. I’m Myron Bolitar. We met the other night at TC’s house.”

The frown was still there. “Leon isn’t here.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

Fiona sighed and crossed her arms under the ample bosom. “What about?”

“Can I come inside?”

“No. I’m busy right now.”

“I think it would be better in private.”

“This is private,” she said, her face unyielding. “What do you want?”

Myron shrugged, conjured up his most charming smile, saw it would take him nowhere. “I want to know about you and Greg Downing.”

Fiona White’s arms dropped to her sides. She suddenly looked horror-stricken. “What?”

“I know about your e-mail to him. Sepbabe. You were supposed to meet last Saturday for the”—Myron made quote marks with his fingers—“ ‘greatest night of ecstasy imaginable.’ Do you recall that?”

Fiona White went to close the door. Myron stuck his foot in the way.

“I’ve got nothing to say to you,” she said.

“I’m not trying to expose you.”

She pushed the door against his foot. “Get out.”

“I’m just trying to find Greg Downing.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Were you having an affair with him?”

“No. Now leave.”

“I saw the e-mail, Fiona.”

“Think what you want. I’m not talking to you.”

“Fine,” Myron said, moving back and throwing up his hands. “I’ll talk to Leon instead.”

Her cheeks flushed. “Do whatever you want,” she said. “I did not have an affair with him. I did not see him last Saturday night. I don’t know where he is.”

She slammed the door.

Gee, that went well.

Myron headed back to his car. As he reached the door, a black BMW with tinted windows rocketed up the street and screeched to a halt in the driveway. The driver’s door opened and Leon flew out like an escaped bird.

“What the fuck you doing here?” he snapped.

“Take it easy, Leon.”

“Fuck take it easy,” he shouted. Leon ran up and stuck his face within an inch of Myron’s. “What the fuck you doing around here, huh?”

“I came by to see you.”

“Bullshit.” The spittle hit Myron’s cheeks. “We’re supposed to be at the arena in twenty minutes.” He pushed Myron in the chest. Myron stumbled back. “Why you here, huh?” Leon pushed again. “What are you sniffing after?”

“Nothing.”

“You think you’d find my wife alone?”

“It’s nothing like that.”

Leon lined himself up for another push. Myron was ready. When Leon’s hand reached him, Myron’s right forearm shot across his body, pinning Leon’s hands helplessly against Myron’s chest. Myron bent at the waist, bending Leon’s wrists back the wrong way. The pressure forced Leon to drop to one knee. Myron’s right hand slid until it met Leon’s left. He grabbed it and quickly executed an elbow lock. Leon winced.

“You calm?” Myron asked.

“Motherfucker.”

“That doesn’t sound like calm, Leon.” Myron applied a little pressure to the elbow. Joint locks were about controlled pain. They worked by bending joints in ways they were never intended to bend. The more the bend, the more the pain. But go too far and the joint dislocated or a bone broke. Myron was careful.

“Greg is missing again,” Myron said. “That’s why I’m on the team. I’m supposed to find him.”

Leon was still on his knees, his arm locked and upright. “So what does that have to do with me?”

“You two have had a falling out,” Myron said. “I want to know why.”

Leon looked up at him. “Let go of me, Myron.”

“If you attack me again—”

“I won’t. Just let go already.”

Myron waited another second or two, then did as Leon asked. Leon rubbed his arm and stood. Myron eyed him.

Leon said, “You’re here because you think Greg and Fiona were getting it on.”

“Were they?”

He shook his head. “Not from a lack of trying though.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s supposed to be my best friend. But he’s not. He’s just another fucking superstar who takes what he wants.”

“Including Fiona.”

“He tried. Tried like hell. But she’s not like that.”

Myron said nothing. Not his place.

“Guys are always hitting on Fiona,” he went on. “Because of the way she looks. And the whole racial thing. So when I saw you here when you figured I wouldn’t be around …” He shrugged into silence.

“Did you ever confront Greg?” Myron asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “A couple of weeks ago.”

“What did you say to him?”

Leon’s eyes narrowed, suddenly wary. “What does this have to do with finding him?” he asked, suspicious now. “You trying to pin this on me?”

“Pin what on you?”

“You said he’s disappeared. You trying to pin that on me?”

“I’m just trying to find out where he is.”

“I got nothing to do with it.”

“I didn’t say you did. I just want to know what happened when you confronted him.”

“What do you think happened?” Leon countered. “The motherfucker denied it. He made this big point of swearing he’d never sleep with any married woman—especially his best friend’s wife.”

Myron sort of gulped at that one. “But you didn’t believe him.”

“He’s a superstar, Myron.”

“That doesn’t make him a liar.”

“No, but it makes him something different. Guys like Greg and Michael Jordan and Shaq and TC … they ain’t like the rest of us. They got their own thing going. Everyone else is a fucking underling to them. The whole planet is set up to cater to their whims, you know what I’m saying?”

Myron nodded. In college he had been one of those who got to breathe the rarefied air of superstardom. He thought again about the bonds superstars shared. He and Greg had not exchanged more than five words before Greg visited him in the hospital, but there had been a bond. They both knew. Superstars share that rarefied air with very few. As TC had told him, it does indeed isolate in a very bizarre, often unhealthy way.

And with that thought came something of a revelation. Myron took a step back.

He’d always thought that if Greg was in trouble, he’d go to his closest friend for help. But that wasn’t the case. If Greg had indeed stumbled across the dead body and panicked, if he had seen all his problems—the gambling debts, the threat of exposure, the divorce, the child custody case, the blackmail, the probability of being a suspect in a murder—closing in on him, who would he go to for help?

He’d go to the guy who understood him best.

He’d go to the guy who could best relate to the unique troubles of superstardom.

He’d go to the guy who shared that rarefied air with him.

Chapter 36

Myron wasn’t sure what to do next.

In truth, he had nothing more than a suspicion. There was no proof. No real evidence. But it could potentially answer a lot of questions. Why, for example, had Thumper helped set up Emily on videotape? By all accounts, she was not particularly close to Greg.

But she was to TC.

Again the superstar bond. Greg had feared losing his kids in a custody battle. That’s about as big a worry as a person can have. So whom did he turn to for help?

TC.

When Win had leaned on Thumper last night, letting her know that he was searching for Greg, whom had she warned?

TC.

No proof, of course. But it felt very right.

Myron could now put a lot of it together. Greg was under incredible strain—not the best situation for a man of his questionable mental fortitude to be ensnared. What had gone through his mind when he saw Liz Gorman dead on the floor? He’d have to have known that he would be the prime suspect in her murder. As Emily had pointed out, Greg had motive, opportunity, and was at the murder scene. Emily saw that. It was why she set him up. Greg must have seen it too.

So what did he do?

He ran.

Seeing Liz Gorman dead had been the final straw. But Greg had also known that he could not do it alone. People would be looking for him this time. He needed help. He needed time and space.

So whom did Greg reach out to?

The guy who understood him best. Who could relate to the unique troubles of superstardom. Who shared that rarefied air with him.

Myron stopped at a red light. He was close, so goddamn close. TC was helping Greg hide; he was sure of it. But of course, TC was only part of the solution. None of this answered the central question in all this:

Who killed Liz Gorman?

He put his mind on rewind and reviewed the night of the murder. He thought about Clip being the first of the three to arrive. In many ways, Clip was now his best suspect. But Myron still saw big problems with that scenario. What was Clip’s motive, for example? Yes, Liz Gorman’s information may have been detrimental to the team. The information may have even been potent enough for him to lose the vote. But would Clip pick up a baseball bat and murder a woman over that? People kill for money and power all the time. Would Clip?

But there was still a larger problem at work here, one that Myron could not get around no matter how hard he tried. Emily was the one who planted the blood and murder weapon at Greg’s house. That was established and that made sense. Okay, fine. We know who planted the evidence …

… but who cleaned it up?

There were only three logical choices: 1) Greg Downing, 2) someone trying to protect Greg, or 3) the killer.

But it couldn’t have been Greg. Even if you accept the semi-impossible premise that Greg went back into his house after going into hiding, how did he find the blood? Did he just happen to go down into his playroom? No. It was too ridiculous. The only way Greg would have gone down there was if he’d known the blood had been planted.

Myron froze.

That was it. Whoever had cleaned up the blood had known what Emily had done. They didn’t just stumble across it by accident. So how did they find out? From Emily? Uh uh, no way. Emily would be the last person to say anything. Could she have been spotted in the act? Again, the answer was a resounding no. If that had been the case, the bat would have been removed too. More to the point, the blood would have been cleaned up right away—before Myron and Win found it. The timing of the clean-up was crucial—it’d happened after Myron and Win had revealed their discovery. That meant Myron and Win were the leak.

So who had they told?

The finger pointed back to Clip.

He turned on Route 3 and entered the Meadowlands complex. The arena loomed before him like a large UFO on a white landing pad. Did Clip Arnstein murder Liz Gorman and clean up the blood? Myron wrestled with the possibility, but he didn’t like it. How had Clip gotten inside Greg’s house? There were no signs of forced entry. Had he picked the lock? Doubtful. Did he have a key? Doubtful. Did he hire a professional? Still doubtful. Clip hadn’t even let a private investigator do a simple credit card check on Greg for fear word would get out. Whom would he trust to clean up the blood of a person he murdered?

And something else still jabbed at Myron with a sharpened, steel point: the woman’s clothes in the bedroom. They had been packed away too. Why would Clip remove all traces of a secret girlfriend? Why would anybody?

The different scenarios swirled in Myron’s head like rubber ducks in a whirlpool. He concentrated again on the mystery girlfriend. Could it have been Fiona White? She wasn’t talking, but Myron firmly believed that she was not the one. How could Fiona have lived with Greg and kept it hidden from a husband as obsessively jealous as Leon? Perhaps there had been some entanglement between Greg and Fiona—a casual fling in a motel room or something—but Myron no longer believed even that. The more he thought about it, the “greatest night of sexual ecstasy” epistle was more of a come-on than the talk of two familiar lovers. It seemed more logical that Greg was telling Leon the truth when he said he would never sleep with another man’s wife. The thought gave Myron’s old shame new life.

A commercial came on the radio. A very hip man and a very hip woman were enjoying a Molson’s Golden far too much. They spoke in low voices and laughed at each other’s lame jokes. Myron switched it off.

He still had more questions than answers. But when he picked up his cellular phone to check Greg’s answering machine, his fingers began to tremble. Something tightened his chest, making it hard to breathe. This feeling, however, was not like pregame jitters. In fact, it was the furthest thing from them.

Chapter 37

Myron rushed by Clip’s secretary.

“He’s not in there,” she cried.

Ignoring her, he opened the office door. The lights were off and the room was empty. He spun back toward the secretary. “Where is he?”

The secretary, a classic battle-ax who had probably been with Clip since the Coolidge Administration, put her hands on her hips. “I don’t have the slightest idea,” she huffed.

Calvin Johnson came out of the adjoining office. Myron approached him. He waited until they were inside Calvin’s office and the door was closed. “Where is he?”

Calvin held up his hands. “I don’t know. I tried his house, but there was no answer.”

“Does he have a car phone?”

“No.”

Myron shook his head and began pacing. “He lied to me,” Myron said. “The son of a bitch lied.”

“What?”

“He met with the blackmailer.”

Calvin raised an eyebrow. He moved to the chair behind his desk and sat down. “What are you talking about?”

“The night she was murdered,” Myron said, “Clip went to her apartment.”

“But she wasn’t supposed to meet with us until Monday,” Calvin said.

“Did you hear her say that?”

Calvin plucked at his chin with his thumb and pointer. The track lights from above his desk reflected off the receding forehead. His face remained the ever placid pool. “No,” he said slowly. “Clip told me.”

“He lied to you.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s hiding something.”

“Do you know what?”

“No,” Myron said. “But I intend to find out tonight.”

“How?”

“The blackmailer still wants to sell,” Myron said. “I’m his new buyer.”

Calvin tilted his head. “I thought you said the blackmailer was dead.”

“She had a partner.”

“I see,” Calvin said with a slow nod. “And you’re meeting tonight?”

“Yep. But I don’t know when or where. He’s supposed to call.”

“I see,” Calvin said again. He made a neat fist and coughed into it. “If it’s something damaging. I mean, something that could affect the outcome of the vote tomorrow.…”

“I’ll do whatever is right, Calvin.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

Myron rose. “Let me know when he gets here.”

“Sure.”

Myron entered the locker room. TC was in his pregame pose—sprawled on a chair in the corner with a Walkman plugged into his ears, his eyes blazing straight ahead and unmoving. He did not acknowledge Myron. Leon was also there. He, too, studiously avoided Myron’s gaze. Not surprising.

Audrey approached. “How did it go with—?”

Myron shook his head to silence her. She nodded, understanding. “You okay?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“You think they can hear us?”

“I’m not taking any chances.”

Audrey looked left, then right. “You find something new?”

“Plenty,” Myron said. “You should have your story tonight. And then some.”

The gleam in her eye expanded. “You know where he is?”

Myron nodded. The locker room door opened. Calvin popped his head in. He leaned over and spoke to the Kipper for a moment. When he left, Myron noticed that he turned right, which led to the exit, as opposed to left which would have taken him back to his office.

The cellular phone in Myron’s pocket rang. He looked up at Audrey. Audrey looked back. He moved closer to the corner and picked it up.

“Hello?”

An electronically altered voice said, “You got the money?”

“You got lousy timing,” Myron said.

“Answer my question.”

Leon pulled up his gym shorts. TC stood and bobbed his head in rhythm to the music.

“I have it,” Myron said. “I also have a game tonight.”

“Forget the game. Do you know Overpeck Park?”

“The one in Leonia? Yeah, I know it.”

“Turn in the right side off Route Ninety-five. Then go down a quarter mile and make another right. You’ll see a cul-de-sac. Park there and look for a flashlight. Approach with both your hands raised.”

“Do I get to say a password?” Myron asked. “I loves passwords.”

“Fifteen minutes. Don’t be late. And for the record, I know your superhero partner is in his Park Avenue office. I have a man watching it. If he leaves between now and then, the deal is off.”

Myron turned off the phone. It was coming to a head now. In fifteen minutes it would all be over—one way or another. “Could you hear?” he asked.

Audrey nodded. “Most of it.”

“There’s going to be some weird stuff going down,” Myron said. “I need an unbiased journalist to record it. You want to come along?”

She smiled. “That was a rhetorical question, right?”

“You’ll have to keep on the floor in the backseat,” he went on. “I can’t risk having you spotted.”

“No problem,” she said. “It’ll remind me of my high school dates.”

Myron turned toward the door. His nerves were as frayed as an old horse whip. He tried to look nonchalant as they exited. Leon was lacing up his sneakers. TC remained still, but this time his eyes followed them out.

Chapter 38

Rain beat down, blackening the pavement. Cars were just starting to enter the arena lot in force. Myron took the back exit over the New Jersey Turnpike and onto the northbound lanes just past the final toll booth. He veered to the right, staying on Route 95.

“So what’s going on?” Audrey asked.

“The man I am about to meet,” he said, “killed Liz Gorman.”

“Who’s Liz Gorman?”

“The blackmailer who was murdered.”

“I thought her name was Carla.”

“That was an alias.”

“Wait a minute. Isn’t Liz Gorman the name of some sixties radical?”

Myron nodded. “It’s a long story; I don’t have time to go into details. Suffice to say the guy we’re about to meet was part of the blackmail scheme. Something went awry. She ended up dead.”

“Do you have evidence?” Audrey asked.

“Not really. That’s what I need you for. You have your microcassette player?”

“Sure.”

“Let me have it.”

Audrey reached into her purse and handed it up front.

“I’m going to try to get him to talk,” Myron said.

“How?”

“By pushing the right buttons.”

She frowned. “You think he’ll fall for that?”

“Yeah, I do. If I push the right ones.” He picked up the car phone. “I have two separate phones here: the car phone and the cellular in my pocket. I’m going to dial the car phone with the cellular and keep the line open. This way, you can listen in. I want you to take down every word. If something happens to me, go to Win. He’ll know what to do.”

She leaned forward and nodded. The windshield wipers whipped shadows across her face. The rain picked up its tempo, glistening the road in front of them. Myron took the next exit. A sign reading Overpeck Park greeted them a quarter mile later.

“Get down,” he said.

She disappeared from view. He made the right turn. Another sign told him the park was closed. He ignored it and proceeded ahead. It was too dark to see anything, but he knew there were woods on his left and a horse stables straight ahead. He made the first right. The car’s headlights danced across a picnic area, illuminating tables, benches, garbage cans, a swing set, a sliding board. He reached the cul-de-sac and stopped the car. He killed the lights, turned off the engine, and dialed the car’s number on his cellular. He answered with the car’s speakerphone so Audrey could listen in. Then he waited.

For several minutes nothing happened. The rain pelted down on the roof like tiny pebbles. Audrey remained still in the back. Myron put his hands back on the wheel and felt his grip tighten. He could hear his heart thumping in his chest.

Without warning, a beacon of light sliced through the night like a reaper’s scythe. Myron shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted. He slowly opened the car door. The wind had picked up now, spraying the rain into his face. He hefted himself out of the car.

A male voice, distorted by the elements, shouted, “Put your hands up.”

Myron raised them above his head.

“Open your coat. I know you’re carrying a gun in a shoulder holster. Take it out with two fingers and toss it onto the seat of the car.”

Keeping one hand in the air, Myron unbuttoned his coat. He was already drenched from the rain, his hair matted against his forehead. He took out the gun and put it on his car seat.

“Close the door.”

Again Myron obeyed the voice.

“Do you have the money?”

“First I want to see what you brought,” Myron said.

“No.”

“Hey, be reasonable here. I don’t even know what I’m buying.”

A brief hesitation. “Come closer.”

Myron stepped toward the light, ignoring the symbolism. “Whatever you’re selling,” he said, “how do I know you haven’t made copies?”

“You don’t,” the voice said. “You’ll have to trust me.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“I’m the only one,” the voice said, “who is still alive.”

Myron picked up the pace. His hands were still in the air. The wind whipped into his face. His clothes were sopping. “How do I know you won’t talk?”

“Again, you don’t. Your money buys my silence.”

“Until someone ups the bid.”

“No. I’m leaving after this. You won’t hear from me again.” The flashlight flickered. “Please stop.”

Ten feet in front of him stood a man wearing a ski mask. He had a flashlight in one hand and a box in the other. He nodded at Myron and lifted the box. “Here.”

“What is it?”

“First, the money.”

“For all I know, the box is empty.”

“Fine. Go back to your car and leave then.” The man in the ski mask turned around.

“No, wait,” Myron said. “I’ll get the money.”

The ski mask faced Myron again. “No games.”

Myron headed back to the car. He had moved about twenty paces when he heard the gunshots. Three of them. The noises did not startle him. He slowly turned around. The man with the ski mask was down. Audrey was running toward the still body. She was carrying Myron’s gun.

“He was going to kill you,” Audrey cried. “I had to shoot.”

Audrey kept running. When she reached the still body, she ignored it and scooped up the box. Myron slowly walked toward her.

“Open it,” he said.

“Let’s get out of this rain first. The police—”

“Open it.”

She hesitated. No thunder bellowed. No lightning struck.

“You were right before,” Myron said.

Audrey looked puzzled. “About what?”

“I was looking at this the wrong way.”

“What are you talking about?”

Myron took another step toward her. “When I asked myself who knew about the blood in the basement,” he began, “I only remembered Clip and Calvin. I forgot I told you. When I wondered why Greg’s lover would have to keep her identity a secret, I thought about Fiona White and Liz Gorman. Again I forgot about you. It’s hard enough for a woman to get respect as a female sports reporter. Your career would be ruined if anybody found out you were dating one of the players you covered. You had to keep it quiet.”

She looked at him, her face a wet, white blank.

“You’re the only one who fits, Audrey. You knew about the blood in the basement. You had to keep a relationship with Greg a secret. You had a key to his house so access would be no problem. And you were the one who had a motive to clean up the blood in order to protect him. After all, you killed to protect him. What’s cleaning up some blood?”

She brushed her hair away from her eyes and blinked into the rain. “You can’t seriously believe that I—”

“That night after TC’s party,” Myron interrupted, “when you told me how you had put it all together. I should have wondered then. Sure, my joining the team was unusual. But only somebody with a personal connection—somebody who truly knew that Greg had vanished and why—would have been able to come up with it so fast. You were the mystery lover, Audrey. And you don’t know where Greg is either. You cooperated with me not because you wanted the story, but because you wanted to find Greg. You’re in love with him.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said.

“The police will comb the house, Audrey. They’ll find hairs.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I interviewed him a couple of times—”

“In his bedroom? In his bathroom? In his shower?” Myron shook his head. “They’ll also comb the murder scene now that they know about you. There’ll be evidence there too. A hair or something.” He took another step toward her. Audrey raised the gun with a quivering hand.

“Beware the Ides of March,” Myron said.

“What?”

“You were the one who pointed it out to me. The ides are the fifteenth of March. Your birthday was the seventeenth. March seventeenth. Three-one-seven. The code Greg set on his answering machine.”

She pointed the gun at his chest. “Turn off the tape recorder,” she said. “And the phone.”

Myron reached into his pocket and did as she asked.

Tears and rain mixed together and cascaded down her cheeks. “Why couldn’t you just keep your mouth shut?” she wailed. She pointed to the still body on the wet grass. “You heard what he said: no one else knows. All the blackmailers are dead. I could have destroyed this thing”—she held up the box—“once and for all. I wouldn’t have had to hurt you. It would have finally been over.”

“And what about Liz Gorman?”

Audrey made a scoffing noise. “That woman was nothing more than a conniving blackmailer,” she said. “She couldn’t be trusted. I told Greg that. What was to stop her from making copies and bleeding him dry? I even went to her house that night and pretended I was an ex-girlfriend with an ax to grind. I told her I wanted to buy a copy. She said sure. Don’t you see? Paying her off would do no good. There was only one way to keep her quiet.”

He nodded. “You had to kill her.”

“She was just a low-life criminal, Myron. She’d robbed a bank, for chrissake. Greg and I … we were perfect together. You were right about my career. I had to keep our relationship a secret. But not much longer. I was going to get transferred to another beat. Baseball. The Mets or Yankees. Then we could be open about it. It was going so well, Myron, and then this low-life bitch comes along.…” Her voice drifted off with a hard shake of the head. “I had to think about our future,” she said. “Not just Greg’s. Not just mine. But our baby’s too.”

Myron’s eyes closed in pain. “You’re pregnant,” he said softly.

“Now do you see?” Her wide-eyed enthusiasm was back, though it took on a more twisted dimension now. “She wanted to destroy him. Destroy us. What choice did I have? I’m not a killer but it was either us or her. And I know how it looks—Greg running off and not telling me. But it’s just the way he is. We’ve been together for more than six months. I know he loves me. He just needed time.”

Myron swallowed. “It’s over now, Audrey.”

She shook her head and held the gun with both hands. “I’m sorry, Myron. I don’t want to do it. I’d almost rather die first.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Myron took another step. She moved back. The gun trembled in her hand. “They’re blanks,” he said.

Her eyes squinted in confusion. The man in the ski mask sat up like Bela Lugosi in an old Dracula film. He pulled off the mask and showed his badge. “Police,” Dimonte shouted. Win and Krinsky came over the crest. Audrey’s mouth formed a perfect circle. Win had made the fake blackmailer call; Myron had set his cellular phone’s volume on high to be sure Audrey overheard it. The rest was easy.

Dimonte and Krinsky made the arrest. Myron watched, no longer feeling the rain. After Audrey was put into the back of a cruiser, he and Win walked toward the car.

“Superhero partner?” Myron said.

Win shrugged.

Chapter 39

Esperanza was still in the office when the fax machine rang. She crossed the room and watched the machine begin to spew out paper. The facsimile was addressed to her attention, from the FBI:

Re: FIRST CITY NATIONAL BANK—TUCSON, ARIZONA

Subject: Renters of Safe-Deposit Boxes.

She’d been waiting for this transmission all day.

Esperanza’s theory on the blackmail plot had gone something like this: The Raven Brigade robbed the bank. They hit the safe-deposit boxes. People keep all kinds of things in those. Money, jewelry, important documents. That was what hooked the timing together. Simply put, the Raven Brigade had found something in one of those boxes that was damaging to Greg Downing. Then they hatched their little blackmail scheme.

The names came out in alphabetical order. Esperanza read down the list while the paper was still being transmitted. The first page ended in the Ls. No name was familiar. The second page ended in the Ts. No name was familiar. On the third page, when she reached the Ws, her heart leaped into her throat. Her hand fluttered to her mouth, and for a moment she feared that she might scream.

It took several hours to sort through the mess. Statements had to be taken. Explanations made. Myron told Dimonte practically the whole story. He left out the videotape of Thumper and Emily. Again, it was nobody’s business. He also left out the part about meeting up with Cole Whiteman. Myron somehow felt he owed him. For her part, Audrey would not talk at all, except to ask for a lawyer.

“Do you know where Downing is?” Dimonte asked Myron.

“I think so.”

“But you don’t want to tell me.”

Myron shook his head. “He’s not your business.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Dimonte agreed. “Go on. Get out of here.”

They were downtown at One Police Plaza. Myron and Win walked out in the city night. Large municipal structures consumed the neighboring area. Modern bureaucracy in its most extreme and intimidating form. Even this late at night, you could visualize lines of people heading out the door.

“It was a good plan,” Win said.

“Audrey is pregnant.”

“I heard.”

“Her baby will be born in jail.”

“Not your doing.”

“She thought it was her only way out,” Myron said.

Win nodded. “She saw a blackmailer who stood in the way of all her dreams. I’m not so sure I would have behaved any differently.”

“You don’t commit murder to stave off life’s inconveniences,” Myron said.

Win didn’t argue, but he didn’t agree either. They kept walking. When they reached the car, Win said, “So where does that leave us?”

“With Clip Arnstein,” Myron said. “He has some explaining to do.”

“You want me to come along?”

“No. I want to talk to him alone.”

Chapter 40

By the time Myron arrived at the arena, the game was over. Cars tapped the exits, making it hard to go the opposite way. Myron managed to weave through. He showed his ID to the guard and drove into the players’ lot.

He ran to Clip’s office. Someone called his name. He ignored it. When he reached the outer office door, he tried the knob. It was locked. He was tempted to break it down.

“Yo, Myron.”

It was one of the towel boys. Myron forgot the kid’s name. “What’s up?” he said.

“This came for you.”

The kid handed Myron a manila envelope.

“Who dropped this off?” Myron asked.

“Your uncle.”

“My uncle?”

“That’s what the guy said.”

Myron looked at the envelope. His name was scrawled across the front in giant block letters. He tore it open and turned it upside down. First, a letter slid out. He shook again and a black cassette tape fell into the palm of his hand. He put the cassette down and unfolded the letter:

Myron,

I should have given this to you at the cathedral. I’m sorry I didn’t, but I got too caught up in Liz’s murder. I wanted you to concentrate on catching the killer, not on this tape. I was afraid it would distract you. I still think it will, but that doesn’t give me the right to keep it from you. I just hope you stay focused enough to find the bastard who killed Liz. She deserves justice.

I also wanted to tell you that I’m thinking about turning myself in. Now that Liz is gone, there’s no reason to keep hiding. I spoke to some old lawyer buddies about it. They’ve already started reaching out to all the mercenaries Hunt’s father hired. They’re sure one of them will corroborate my story. We’ll see.

Don’t listen to this tape alone, Myron. Listen to it with a friend.

Cole

Myron folded the letter. He had no idea what to think. He glanced down the corridor. No sign of Clip. He jogged toward the exit. Most of the players had already left the arena. TC, of course. Last in, first out. Myron got in his car and turned the key. Then he stuck the tape into the car’s player and waited.

Esperanza tried dialing Myron’s car phone. No answer. Then his cellular. Same deal. He always carried his cellular. If he wasn’t picking up, it was because he didn’t want to. She quickly dialed Win’s cellular. He picked up on the second ring.

“Do you know where Myron is?” she asked.

“He went to the arena.”

“Go find him, Win.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“The Raven Brigade robbed the safe-deposit boxes. That’s where they got the information they used to blackmail Downing.”

“What did they find?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I have a list of the people who rented the boxes.”

“So?”

“One was rented to a Mr. and Mrs. B. Wesson.”

Silence.

Win said, “Are you sure it’s the same B. Wesson who injured Myron?”

“I already checked,” she said. “The B stands for Burt, listed on his application as a thirty-three-year-old high school basketball coach. It’s him, Win. It’s the same Burt Wesson.”

Chapter 41

Nothing.

Myron fiddled with the volume knob. Static feedback screeched through the car speakers. He turned it down a second, then back up. He heard muffled sounds, but he had no idea what they were. Then the sounds faded away.

Silence.

Two minutes of blank tape passed before Myron finally heard voices. His ears perked up, but he couldn’t make out much. Then the voices grew a little louder, a little clearer. He leaned closer to the speaker and suddenly he heard a gruff voice with frightening clarity:

“You have the money?”

A hand reached into Myron’s chest, grabbed his heart, and squeezed. He hadn’t heard the voice in ten years, but recognition was instantaneous. It was Burt Wesson. What the hell—?

Then the second voice jarred him like a body blow:

“I got half now. A thousand dollars now. You get the other half when he goes down.…”

Myron’s entire body shuddered. A flash of rage unlike anything he had ever known warmed and then engulfed him. His hands tightened into fists. Tears forced their way forward. He remembered wondering why the blackmailers had contacted him to buy the dirt on Greg; he remembered Cole Whiteman’s laugh and Marty Felder’s ironic smile when they’d learned that he’d been hired to find Greg Downing; he remembered the voice on Greg’s answering machine saying, “He’s willing to pay. Is that what you want?” and most of all, he remembered Greg’s pained face at the hospital all those years ago. It hadn’t been a bond that brought Greg to Myron’s bedside.

It’d been guilt.

“Don’t hurt him too bad, Burt. I just want Bolitar banged up for a few games …”

Something in the deep recesses of Myron’s mind snapped like a dry twig. Without conscious thought, Myron shifted into reverse.

“Look, I really need the money. Can’t you give me another five hundred? They’re going to cut me soon. It’s my last scrimmage and then I’m unemployed …”

He straightened out his car and shifted into drive. His foot pressed down upon the pedal. The speedometer climbed. Myron’s face twisted into a mask of incognizant fury. Tears sheeted down his cheeks but no sound came with them. He drove without really seeing.

When he reached the Jones Road exit, Myron wiped his face with his sleeve. He turned into TC’s driveway. The security gate blocked his path.

The guard stepped out of his little hut. Myron waved him closer to the car. When the guard was fully out of the box, Myron showed the gun.

“Move and I’ll blow your head off.”

The guard’s hands went up. Myron got out of the car and opened the gate. He ordered the guard inside the car. The car roared up the driveway. Myron slammed on the brake just feet before the front door. He jumped out on the run and without hesitating, he kicked in TC’s front door. He ran into the den.

The television was on. TC looked up, startled. “What the fuck—?”

Myron bounded across the room, grabbed TC’s arm, twisted it behind his back.

“Hey—”

“Where is he?” Myron demanded.

“I don’t know what—”

Myron pulled up on the arm. “Don’t make me break it, TC. Where is he?”

“What the fuck are you—?”

Myron silenced him by pushing the arm farther up his back. TC cried out, his huge frame bent at the waist to lessen the pressure. “Last time I ask,” Myron said. “Where’s Greg?”

“I’m here.”

Myron let go and spun toward the voice. Greg Downing stood in the doorway. Myron did not hesitate. Letting out a guttural scream, he pounced.

Greg put up his hands, but it was like quieting a volcano with a squirt gun. Myron’s fist landed square in Greg’s face. Greg toppled back from the assault. Myron fell on him, his knee landing in his ribs. Something cracked. He straddled Greg’s chest and threw another punch.

“Stop!” TC shouted, “You’re gonna kill him.”

Myron barely heard him.

He cocked his other fist, but TC was on him before he could throw it. Myron rolled with the tackle, digging his elbow into TC’s solar plexus. When they hit the wall, the air whooshed out of TC, his eyes bulging as he gasped for air. Myron rose. Greg was scrambling away. Myron vaulted over the couch. He grabbed Greg by the leg and pulled him toward him.

“You fucked my wife!” Greg shouted. “You think I didn’t know? You fucked my wife!”

The words slowed Myron, but they didn’t stop him. Through his tears, he threw another punch. Greg’s mouth filled with blood. Myron cocked his fist again. A hand of iron reached out and grabbed his arm, holding it in place.

“Enough,” Win said.

Myron looked up, his face distorted by confusion and rage. “What?”

“He’s had enough.”

“But it’s like you said,” Myron pleaded. “Wesson did do it on purpose. Greg hired him.”

“I know,” Win said. “But he’s had enough.”

“What the hell are you talking about? If it was you—”

“I’d probably kill him,” Win finished for him. He looked down and something flickered in his eyes. “But you wouldn’t.”

Myron swallowed. Win nodded again and let go of Myron’s wrist. Myron let his arm fall to his side. He got off Greg Downing.

Greg sat up, coughing blood into his hand. “I followed Emily that night,” Greg managed through the hacks. “I saw you two … I just wanted payback, that’s all. You weren’t supposed to get hurt that bad.”

Myron swallowed and breathed deeply. The adrenaline rush would soon ebb, but for now it was still there. “You been hiding here since the beginning?”

Greg touched part of his face, winced, then nodded. “I was afraid they’d think I killed that woman,” he said. “And I had the mob chasing me and the custody battle and my girlfriend is pregnant.” He looked up. “I just needed some time.”

“Do you love Audrey?”

Greg said, “You know?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah,” Greg said, “I love her a lot.”

“Then give her a call,” Myron said. “She’s in jail.”

“What?”

Myron didn’t elaborate. He’d hoped throwing that in Greg’s face would give him some sort of perverse pleasure, but it didn’t. All it did was remind him that he was far from blameless in this.

He turned and walked away.

Myron found Clip alone in that same corporate skybox they’d met in when this all began. He was looking down at the empty court, his back to Myron. He didn’t move when Myron cleared his throat.

“You knew all along,” Myron said.

Clip said nothing.

“You went to Liz Gorman’s apartment that night,” Myron continued. “She played the tape for you, didn’t she?”

Clip clasped his hands behind his back. Then he nodded.

“That’s why you hired me. This wasn’t all a coincidence. You wanted me to find out the truth.”

“I didn’t know how else to tell you.” Clip finally turned and faced Myron. His eyes were dazed and hazy. All color was gone from his face. “It wasn’t an act, you know. The emotion at the press conference …” He lowered his head, gathered himself, raised it again. “You and I lost touch after your injury. I wanted to call you a thousand times, but I understood. You wanted to stay away. The injury never leaves the great ones, Myron. I knew it would never leave you.”

Myron opened his mouth but nothing came out. His entire being felt exposed and raw. Clip came closer. “I thought this would be a way for you to learn the truth,” Clip said. “I also hoped this would be something of a catharsis. Not a complete one. Like I said, it never leaves the great ones.”

For several moments, they both just stood and stared.

“You told Walsh to play me the other night,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“You knew I wouldn’t be able to match up.”

Clip nodded slowly.

Myron felt the tears come back to his eyes. He blinked them down.

Clip set his jaw. There were tiny tremors in his face, but he stood rigid. “I wanted to help you,” he said, “but my reasons for hiring you were not all altruistic. I knew, for example, that you’d always been a team player. You loved that aspect of basketball, Myron—being part of a team.”

“So?”

“My plan included making you feel like a member of the team. A real member. So much so that you would never hurt us.”

Myron understood. “You figured that if I bonded with my teammates, I wouldn’t blow the whistle when I learned the truth.”

“It’s not in your nature,” Clip said.

“But it will come out,” Myron said. “There’s no way to avoid it now.”

“I know that.”

“You could lose the team.”

Clip smiled, shrugged. “There are worse things,” he said. “Just as you now know there are worse things than never being able to play again.”

“I always knew,” Myron said. “I just maybe needed a reminder.”

Chapter 42

He and Jessica sat on the couch in her loft. He told her everything. Jess hugged her knees and rocked back and forth. Her eyes looked pained.

“She was my friend,” Jessica said.

“I know.”

“I wonder.”

“What?”

“What would I have done in the same situation? To protect you.”

“You wouldn’t have killed.”

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

Myron watched her. She looked on the verge of tears. He said, “I think I learned something about us in all this.”

She waited for him to elaborate.

“Win and Esperanza didn’t want me to play again. But you never tried to stop me. I was afraid that maybe you didn’t understand me as well as they do. But that wasn’t the case at all. You saw what they couldn’t.”

Jessica studied his face with a penetrating gaze. She let go of her knees and slid her feet to the floor. “We’ve never really talked about this before,” she said.

He nodded.

“The truth is, you never mourned the end of your career,” Jessica went on. “You never showed weakness. You stuffed it all in some internal suitcase and moved on. You tackled everything else in your life with a smothering desperation. You didn’t wait. You seized whatever was left and pressed it against you, afraid your whole world was as fragile as that knee. You rushed off to law school. You ran off and helped Win. You frantically clung to whatever you could.” She stopped.

“Including you,” he finished.

“Yes. Including me. Not just because you loved me. Because you were afraid of losing more than you already had.”

“I did love you,” he said. “I still do.”

“I know. I’m not trying to put this all on you. I was an idiot. It was mostly my fault. I admit that. But your love back then bordered on the desperate. You channeled your grief into a grasping need. I was afraid of suffocating. I don’t want to sound like an amateur shrink, but you needed to mourn. You needed to put it behind you, not suppress it. But you wouldn’t face it.”

“You thought my playing again would make me face it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s not like this was a cure-all.”

“I know,” she said. “But I think it helped you let go a little.”

“And that’s why you think now is a good time for me to move in.”

Jessica swallowed hard. “If you want,” she said. “If you feel ready.”

He looked up in the air and said, “I’ll need more closet space.”

“Done,” she whispered. “Whatever you want.”

She snuggled into him. He put his arms around her, pulled her close, and felt very much at home.

It was a sweltering morning in Tucson, Arizona. A big man opened his front door.

“Are you Burt Wesson?”

The big man nodded. “Can I help you with something?”

Win smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I think you can.”

For Larry and Craig,
the coolest brothers a guy could ever have.
If you don’t believe me, just ask them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank the following for their help: Anne Armstrong-Coben, M.D.; James Bradbeer, Jr., of Lilly Pulitzer; David Gold, M.D.; Maggie Griffin; Jacob Hoye; Lindsay Koehler; David Pepe of Pro Agents, Inc.; Peter Roisman of Advantage International; and, of course, Dave Bolt. Any errors—factual or otherwise—are totally their fault. The author is not to blame.

Back Spin is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 by Harlan Coben

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DELACORTE PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1997.

eISBN: 978-0-307-56716-1
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1_r2

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Back Spin

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1

Myron Bolitar used a cardboard periscope to look over the suffocating throngs of ridiculously clad spectators. He tried to recall the last time he’d actually used a toy periscope, and an image of sending in proof-of-purchase seals from a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal flickered in front of him like headache-inducing sunspots.

Through the mirrored reflection, Myron watched a man dressed in knickers—knickers, for crying out loud—stand over a tiny white sphere. The ridiculously clad spectators mumbled excitedly. Myron stifled a yawn. The knickered man crouched. The ridiculously clad spectators jostled and then settled into an eerie silence. Sheer stillness followed, as if even the trees and shrubs and well-coiffed blades of grass were holding their collective breath.

Then the knickered man whacked the white sphere with a stick.

The crowd began to murmur in the indistinguishable syllables of backstage banter. As the ball ascended, so did the volume of the murmurs. Words could be made out. Then phrases. “Lovely golf stroke.” “Super golf shot.” “Beautiful golf shot.” “Truly fine golf stroke.” They always said golf stroke, like someone might mistake it for a swim stroke, or—as Myron was currently contemplating in this blazing heat—a sunstroke.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

Myron took the periscope away from his eyes. He was tempted to yell “Up periscope,” but feared some at stately, snooty Merion Golf Club would view the act as immature. Especially during the U.S. Open. He looked down at a ruddy-faced man of about seventy.

“Your pants,” Myron said.

“Pardon me?”

“You’re afraid of getting hit by a golf cart, right?”

They were orange and yellow in a hue slightly more luminous than a bursting supernova. To be fair, the man’s clothing hardly stood out. Most in the crowd seemed to have woken up wondering what apparel they possessed that would clash with, say, the free world. Orange and green tints found exclusively in several of your tackiest neon signs adorned many. Yellow and some strange shades of purple were also quite big—usually together—like a color scheme rejected by a Midwest high school cheerleading squad. It was as if being surrounded by all this God-given natural beauty made one want to do all in his power to offset it. Or maybe there was something else at work here. Maybe the ugly clothes had a more functional origin. Maybe in the old days, when animals roamed free, golfers dressed this way to ward off dangerous wildlife.

Good theory.

“I need to speak with you,” the elderly man whispered. “It’s urgent.”

The rounded, jovial cheeks belied his pleading eyes. He suddenly gripped Myron’s forearm. “Please,” he added.

“What’s this about?” Myron asked.

The man made a movement with his neck, like his collar was on too tight. “You’re a sports agent, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re here to find clients?”

Myron narrowed his eyes. “How do you know I’m not here to witness the enthralling spectacle of grown men taking a walk?”

The old man did not smile, but then again, golfers were not known for their sense of humor. He craned his neck again and moved closer. His whisper was hoarse. “Do you know the name Jack Coldren?” he asked.

“Sure,” Myron said.

If the old man had asked the same question yesterday, Myron wouldn’t have had a clue. He didn’t follow golf that closely (or at all), and Jack Coldren had been little more than a journeyman over the past twenty years or so. But Coldren had been the surprise leader after the U.S. Open’s first day, and now, with just a few holes remaining in the second round, Coldren was up by a commanding eight strokes. “What about him?”

“And Linda Coldren?” the man asked. “Do you know who she is?”

This one was easier. Linda Coldren was Jack’s wife and far and away the top female golfer of the past decade. “Yeah, I know who she is,” Myron said.

The man leaned in closer and did the neck thing again. Seriously annoying—not to mention contagious. Myron found himself fighting off the desire to mimic the movement. “They’re in deep trouble,” the old man whispered. “If you help them, you’ll have two new clients.”

“What sort of trouble?”

The old man looked around. “Please,” he said. “There are too many people. Come with me.”

Myron shrugged. No reason not to go. The old man was the only lead he’d unearthed since his friend and business associate Windsor Horne Lockwood III—Win, for short—had dragged his sorry butt down here. Being that the U.S. Open was at Merion—home course of the Lockwood family for something like a billion years—Win had felt it would be a great opportunity for Myron to land a few choice clients. Myron wasn’t quite so sure. As near as he could tell, the major component separating him from the hordes of other locust-like agents swarming the green meadows of Merion Golf Club was his naked aversion for golf. Probably not a key selling point to the faithful.

Myron Bolitar ran MB SportsReps, a sports representation firm located on Park Avenue in New York City. He rented the space from his former college roommate, Win, a Waspy, old-money, big-time investment banker whose family owned Lock-Horne Securities on the same Park Avenue in New York. Myron handled the negotiations while Win, one of the country’s most respected brokers, handled the investments and finances. The other member of the MB team, Esperanza Diaz, handled everything else. Three branches with checks and balances. Just like the American government. Very patriotic.

Slogan: MB SportsReps—the other guys are commie pinkos.

As the old man ushered Myron through the crowd, several men in green blazers—another look sported mostly at golf courses, perhaps to camouflage oneself against the grass—greeted him with whispered, “How do, Bucky,” or “Looking good, Buckster,” or “Fine day for golf, Buckaroo.” They all had the accent of the rich and preppy, the kind of inflection where mommy is pronounced “mummy” and summer and winter are verbs. Myron was about to comment on a grown man being called Bucky, but when your name is Myron, well, glass houses and stones and all that.

Like every other sporting event in the free world, the actual playing area looked more like a giant billboard than a field of competition. The leader board was sponsored by IBM. Canon handed out the periscopes. American Airlines employees worked the food stands (an airline handling food—what think tank came up with that one?). Corporate Row was jam-packed with companies who shelled out over one hundred grand a pop to set up a tent for a few days, mostly so that company executives had an excuse to go. Travelers Group, Mass Mutual, Aetna (golfers must like insurance), Canon, Heublein. Heublein. What the hell was a Heublein? They looked like a nice company. Myron would probably buy a Heublein if he knew what one was.

The funny thing was, the U.S. Open was actually less commercialized than most tourneys. At least they hadn’t sold their name yet. Other tournaments were named for sponsors and the names had gotten a little silly. Who could get up for winning the JC Penney Open or the Michelob Open or even the Wendy’s Three-Tour Challenge?

The old man led him to a primo parking lot. Mercedeses, Caddies, limos. Myron spotted Win’s Jaguar. The USGA had recently put up a sign that read MEMBERS PARKING ONLY.

Myron said, “You’re a member of Merion.” Dr. Deduction.

The old man twisted the neck thing into something approaching a nod. “My family dates back to Merion’s inception,” he said, the snooty accent now more pronounced. “Just like your friend Win.”

Myron stopped and looked at the man. “You know Win?”

The old man sort of smiled and shrugged. No commitment.

“You haven’t told me your name yet,” Myron said.

“Stone Buckwell,” he said, hand extended. “Everyone calls me Bucky.”

Myron shook the hand.

“I’m also Linda Coldren’s father,” he added.

Bucky unlocked a sky-blue Cadillac and they slid inside. He put the key in the ignition. The radio played Muzak—worse, the Muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” Myron quickly opened the window for air, not to mention noise.

Only members were allowed to park on the Merion grounds, so it wasn’t too much of a hassle getting out. They made a right at the end of the driveway and then another right. Bucky mercifully flipped off the radio. Myron stuck his head back in the car.

“What do you know about my daughter and her husband?” Bucky asked.

“Not much.”

“You are not a golf fan, are you, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Not really.”

“Golf is truly a magnificent sport,” he said. Then he added, “Though the word sport does not begin to do it justice.”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said.

“It’s the game of princes.” Buckwell’s ruddy face glowed a bit now, the eyes wide with the same type of rapture one saw in the very religious. His voice was low and awed. “There is nothing quite like it, you know. You alone against the course. No excuses. No teammate. No bad calls. It’s the purest of activities.”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said again. “Look, I don’t want to appear rude, Mr. Buckwell, but what’s this all about?”

“Please call me Bucky.”

“Okay. Bucky.”

He nodded his approval. “I understand that you and Windsor Lockwood are more than business associates,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“I understand you two go back a long way. College roommates, am I correct?”

“Why do you keep asking about Win?”

“I actually came to the club to find him,” Bucky said. “But I think it’s better this way.”

“What way?”

“Talking to you first. Maybe after … well, we’ll see. Shouldn’t hope for too much.”

Myron nodded. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Bucky turned onto a road adjacent to the course called Golf House Road. Golfers were so creative.

The course was on the right, imposing mansions on the left. A minute later, Bucky pulled into a circular driveway. The house was fairly big and made of something called river rock. River rock was big in this area, though Win always referred to it as “Mainline Stone.” There was a white fence and lots of tulips and two maple trees, one on each side of the front walk. A large porch was enclosed on the right side. The car came to a stop, and for a moment neither of them moved.

“What’s this all about, Mr. Buckwell?”

“We have a situation here,” he said.

“What kind of situation?”

“I’d rather let my daughter explain it to you.” He grabbed the key out of the ignition and reached for the door.

“Why come to me?” Myron asked.

“We were told you could possibly help.”

“Who told you that?”

Buckwell started rolling his neck with greater fervor. His head looked like it’d been attached by a loose ball socket. When he finally got it under control, he managed to look Myron in the eyes.

“Win’s mother,” he said.

Myron stiffened. His heart plummeted down a dark shaft. He opened his mouth, closed it, waited. Buckwell got out of the car and headed for the door. Ten seconds later, Myron followed.

“Win won’t help,” Myron said.

Buckwell nodded. “That’s why I came to you first.”

They followed a brick path to a door slightly ajar. Buckwell pushed it open. “Linda?”

Linda Coldren stood before a television in the den. Her white shorts and sleeveless yellow blouse revealed the lithe, toned limbs of an athlete. She was tall with short spunky black hair and a tan that accentuated the smooth, long muscles. The lines around her eyes and mouth placed her in her late thirties, and he could see instantly why she was a commercial darling. There was a fierce splendor to this woman, a beauty derived from a sense of strength rather than delicacy.

She was watching the tournament on the television. On top of the set were framed family photographs. Big, pillowy couches formed a V in one corner. Tactfully furnished, for a golfer. No putting green, AstroTurf carpet. None of that golf artwork that seemed a step or two below the aesthetic class of, say, paintings of dogs playing poker. No cap with a tee and ball on the brim hanging from a moose head.

Linda Coldren suddenly swung her line of vision toward them, firing a glare past Myron before settling on her father. “I thought you were going to get Jack,” she snapped.

“He hasn’t finished the round yet.”

She motioned to the television. “He’s on eighteen now. I thought you were going to wait for him.”

“I got Mr. Bolitar instead.”

“Who?”

Myron stepped forward and smiled. “I’m Myron Bolitar.”

Linda Coldren flicked her eyes at him, then back to her father. “Who the hell is he?”

“He’s the man Cissy told me about,” Buckwell said.

“Who’s Cissy?” Myron asked.

“Win’s mother.”

“Oh,” Myron said. “Right.”

Linda Coldren said, “I don’t want him here. Get rid of him.”

“Linda, listen to me. We need help.”

“Not from him.”

“He and Win have experience with this type of thing.”

“Win,” she said slowly, “is psychotic.”

“Ah,” Myron said. “Then you know him well?”

Linda Coldren finally turned her attention to Myron. Her eyes, deep and brown, met his. “I haven’t spoken to Win since he was eight years old,” she said. “But you don’t have to leap into a pit of flames to know it’s hot.”

Myron nodded. “Nice analogy.”

She shook her head and looked back at her father. “I told you before: no police. We do what they say.”

“But he’s not police,” her father said.

“And you shouldn’t be telling anyone.”

“I only told my sister,” Bucky protested. “She’d never say anything.”

Myron felt his body stiffen again. “Wait a second,” he said to Bucky. “Your sister is Win’s mother?”

“Yes.”

“You’re Win’s uncle.” He looked at Linda Coldren. “And you’re Win’s first cousin.”

Linda Coldren looked at him like he’d just peed on the floor. “With smarts like that,” she said, “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

Everyone’s a wiseass.

“If it’s still unclear, Mr. Bolitar, I could break out some poster board and sketch a family tree for you.”

“Could you use lots of pretty colors?” Myron said. “I like pretty colors.”

She made a face and turned away. On the television, Jack Coldren lined up a twelve-foot putt. Linda stopped and watched. He tapped it; the ball took off and arched right into the hole. The gallery applauded with modest enthusiasm. Jack picked up the ball with two fingers and then tipped his hat. The IBM leader board flashed on the screen. Jack Coldren was up by a whopping nine strokes.

Linda Coldren shook her head. “Poor bastard.”

Myron kept still. So did Bucky.

“He’s waited twenty-three years for this moment,” she continued. “And he picks now.”

Myron glanced at Bucky. Bucky glanced back, shaking his head.

Linda Coldren stared at the television until her husband exited to the clubhouse. Then she took a deep breath and looked at Myron. “You see, Mr. Bolitar, Jack has never won a professional tournament. The closest he ever came was in his rookie year twenty-three years ago, when he was only nineteen. It was the last time the U.S. Open was held at Merion. You may remember the headlines.”

They were not altogether unfamiliar. This morning’s papers had rehashed it a bit. “He lost a lead, right?”

Linda Coldren made a scoffing sound. “That’s a bit of an understatement, but yes. Since then, his career has been completely unspectacular. There were years he didn’t even make the tour.”

“He picked a hell of a time to snap his streak,” Myron said. “The U.S. Open.”

She gave him a funny look and folded her arms under her chest. “Your name rings a bell,” she said. “You used to play basketball, right?”

“Right.”

“In the ACC. North Carolina?”

“Duke,” he corrected.

“Right, Duke. I remember now. You blew out your knee after the draft.”

Myron nodded slowly.

“That was the end of your career, right?”

Myron nodded again.

“It must have been tough,” she said.

Myron said nothing.

She made a waving motion with her hand. “What happened to you is nothing compared to what happened to Jack.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You had an injury. It may have been tough, but at least you weren’t at fault. Jack had a six-stroke lead at the U.S. Open with only eight holes left. Do you know what that’s like? That’s like having a ten-point lead with a minute left in the seventh game of the NBA finals. It’s like missing a wide-open slam dunk in the final seconds to lose the championship. Jack was never the same man after that. He never recovered. He has spent his whole life since just waiting for the chance of redemption.” She turned back to the television. The leader board was back up. Jack Coldren was still up by nine strokes.

“If he loses again …”

She did not bother finishing the thought. They all stood in silence. Linda staring at the television. Bucky craning his neck, his eyes moist, his face quivering near tears.

“So what’s wrong, Linda?” Myron asked.

“Our son,” she said. “Somebody has kidnapped our son.”

2

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Linda Coldren said. “He said he’d kill him.”

“Who said?”

Linda Coldren took several deep breaths, like a child atop the high board. Myron waited. It took some time, but she finally took the plunge.

“I got a call this morning,” she said. Her large indigo eyes were wide and everywhere now, settling down on no one spot for more than a second. “A man said he had my son. He said if I called the police, he would kill him.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Just that he’d call back with instructions.”

“That’s it?”

She nodded.

“What time was this?” Myron asked.

“Nine, nine-thirty.”

Myron walked over to the television and picked up one of the framed photographs. “Is this a recent photograph of your son?”

“Yes.”

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen. His name is Chad.”

Myron studied the photograph. The smiling adolescent had the fleshy features of his father. He wore a baseball cap with the brim curled the way kids like to nowadays. A golf club rested proudly on his shoulder like a minuteman with a bayonet. His eyes were squinted as though he were looking into the sun. Myron looked over Chad’s face, as if it might give him a clue or some rare insight. It didn’t.

“When did you first notice that your son was missing?”

Linda Coldren gave her father a quick glance, then straightened up, holding her head high as if she were readying herself for a blow. Her words came slow. “Chad had been gone for two days.”

“Gone?” Myron Bolitar, Grand Inquisitor.

“Yes.”

“When you say gone—”

“I mean just that,” she interrupted. “I haven’t seen him since Wednesday.”

“But the kidnapper just called today?”

“Yes.”

Myron started to speak, stopped himself, softened his voice. Tread gently, fair Myron. Ever gently. “Did you have any idea where he was?”

“I assumed he was staying with his friend Matthew,” Linda Coldren replied.

Myron nodded, as if this statement showed brilliant insight. Then nodded again. “Chad told you that?”

“No.”

“So,” he said, aiming for casual, “for the past two days, you didn’t know where your son was.”

“I just told you: I thought he was staying with Matthew.”

“You didn’t call the police.”

“Of course not.”

Myron was about to ask another follow-up question, but her posture made him rethink his words. Linda took advantage of his indecisiveness. She walked to the kitchen with an upright, fluid grace. Myron followed. Bucky seemed to snap out of a trance and trailed.

“Let me make sure I’m following you,” Myron said, approaching from a different angle now. “Chad vanished before the tournament?”

“Correct,” she said. “The Open started Thursday.” Linda Coldren pulled the refrigerator handle. The door opened with a sucking pop. “Why? Is that important?”

“It eliminates a motive,” Myron said.

“What motive?”

“Tampering with the tournament,” Myron said. “If Chad had vanished today—with your husband holding such a big lead—I might think that someone was out to sabotage his chances of winning the Open. But two days ago, before the tournament had begun …”

“No one would have given Jack a snowball’s chance in hell,” she finished for him. “Oddsmakers would have put him at one in five thousand. At best.” She nodded as she spoke, seeing the logic. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Dad?”

Bucky shook his head. Linda Coldren bent down into the refrigerator.

“Okay,” Myron said, clapping his hand together, trying his best to sound casual. “We’ve ruled out one possibility. Let’s try another.”

Linda Coldren stopped and watched him. A gallon glass pitcher was gripped in her hand, her forearm bunching easily with the weight. Myron debated how to approach this. There was no easy way.

“Could your son be behind this?” Myron asked.

“What?”

“It’s an obvious question,” Myron said, “under the circumstances.”

She put the pitcher down on a wooden center block. “What the hell are you talking about? You think Chad faked his own kidnapping?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I wanted to check out the possibility.”

“Get out.”

“He was gone two days, and you didn’t call the police,” Myron said. “One possible conclusion is that there was some sort of tension here. That Chad had run away before.”

“Or,” Linda Coldren countered, her hands tightening into fists, “you could conclude that we trusted our son. That we gave him a level of freedom compatible with his level of maturity and responsibility.”

Myron looked over at Bucky. Bucky’s head was lowered. “If that’s the case—”

“That’s the case.”

“But don’t responsible kids tell their parents where they’re going? I mean, just to make sure they don’t worry.”

Linda Coldren took out a glass with too much care. She set it on the counter and slowly poured herself some lemonade. “Chad has learned to be very independent,” she said as the glass filled. “His father and I are both professional golfers. That means, quite frankly, that neither one of us is home very often.”

“Your being away so much,” Myron said. “Has it led to tension?”

Linda Coldren shook her head. “This is useless.”

“I’m just trying—”

“Look, Mr. Bolitar, Chad did not fake this. Yes, he’s a teenager. No, he’s not perfect, and neither are his parents. But he did not fake his own kidnapping. And if he did—I know he didn’t, but let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that he did—then he is safe and we do not need you. If this is some kind of cruel deception, we’ll learn it soon enough. But if my son is in danger, then following this line of thought is a waste of time I can ill afford.”

Myron nodded. She had a point. “I understand,” he said.

“Good.”

“Have you called his friend since you heard from the kidnapper? The one you thought he might’ve been staying with?”

“Matthew Squires, yes.”

“Did Matthew have any idea where he was?”

“None.”

“They’re close friends, right?”

“Yes.”

“Very close?”

She frowned. “Yes, very.”

“Does Matthew call here a lot?”

“Yes. Or they talk by E-mail.”

“I’ll need Matthew’s phone number,” Myron said.

“But I just told you I spoke to him already.”

“Humor me,” Myron said. “Okay, now let’s back up a second. When was the last time you saw Chad?”

“The day he disappeared.”

“What happened?”

She frowned again. “What do you mean, what happened? He left for summer school. I haven’t seen him since.”

Myron studied her. She stopped and looked back at him a little too steadily. Something here was not adding up. “Have you called the school,” he asked, “to see if he was there that day?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

Myron checked his watch. Friday. Five P.M. “I doubt anyone will still be there, but give it a shot. Do you have more than one phone line?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t call on the line the kidnapper called in on. I don’t want the line tied up in case he calls back.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Does your son have any credit cards or ATM cards or anything like that?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll need a list. And the numbers, if you have them.”

She nodded again.

Myron said, “I’m going to call a friend, see if I can get an override Caller ID put in on this line. For when he calls back. I assume Chad has a computer?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“Up in his room.”

“I’m going to download everything on it to my office via his modem. I have an assistant named Esperanza. She’ll comb through it and see what she can find.”

“Like what?”

“Frankly I have no idea. E-mails. Correspondence. Bulletin boards he participates in. Anything that might give us a clue. It’s not a very scientific process. You check out enough stuff and maybe something will click.”

Linda thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” she said.

“How about you, Mrs. Coldren? Do you have any enemies?”

She sort of smiled. “I’m the number one–rated woman golfer in the world,” she said. “That gives me a lot of enemies.”

“Anyone you can imagine doing this?”

“No,” she said. “No one.”

“How about your husband? Anybody who hates your husband enough?”

“Jack?” She forced out a chuckle. “Everyone loves Jack.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She just shook her head and waved him off.

Myron asked a few more questions, but there was little left for him to excavate. He asked if he could go up to Chad’s room and she led him up the stairs.

The first thing Myron saw when he opened Chad’s door were the trophies. Lots of them. All golf trophies. The bronze figure on the top was always a man coiled in postswing position, the golf club over his shoulder, his head held high. Sometimes the little man wore a golf cap. Other times he had short, wavy hair like Paul Hornung in old football reels. There were two leather golf bags in the right corner, both jammed past capacity with clubs. Photographs of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Tom Watson blanketed the walls. Issues of Golf Digest littered the floor.

“Does Chad play golf?” Myron asked.

Linda Coldren just looked at him. Myron met her gaze and nodded sagely.

“My powers of deduction,” he said. “They intimidate some people.”

She almost smiled. Myron the Alleviator, Master Tension-Easer. “I’ll try to still treat you the same,” she said.

Myron stepped toward the trophies. “Is he any good?”

“Very good.” She turned away suddenly and stood with her back to the room. “Do you need anything else?”

“Not right now.”

“I’ll be downstairs.”

She didn’t wait for his blessing.

Myron walked in. He checked the answering machine on Chad’s phone. Three messages. Two from a girl named Becky. From the sound of it, she was a pretty good friend. Just calling to say, like, hi, see if he wanted to, like, do anything this weekend, you know? She and Millie and Suze were going to, like, hang out at the Heritage, okay, and if he wanted to come, well, you know, whatever. Myron smiled. Times they might be a-changin’, but her words could have come from a girl Myron had gone to high school with or his father or his father’s father. Generations cycle in. The music, the movies, the language, the fashion—they change. But that’s just outside stimuli. Beneath the baggy pants or the message-cropped hair, the same adolescent fears and needs and feelings of inadequacy remained frighteningly constant.

The last call was from a guy named Glen. He wanted to know if Chad wanted to play golf at “the Pine” this weekend, being that Merion was off-limits because of the Open. “Daddy,” Glen’s preppy taped voice assured Chad, “can get us a tee time, no prob.”

No messages from Chad’s close buddy Matthew Squires.

He snapped on the computer. Windows 95. Cool. Myron used it too. Chad Coldren, Myron immediately saw, used America Online to get his E-mail. Perfect. Myron hit FLASHSESSION. The modem hooked on and screeched for a few seconds. A voice said, “Welcome. You have mail.” Dozens of messages were automatically downloaded. The same voice said, “Good-bye.” Myron checked Chad’s E-mail address book and found Matthew Squires’s E-mail address. He skimmed the downloaded messages. None were from Matthew.

Interesting.

It was, of course, entirely possible that Matthew and Chad were not as close as Linda Coldren thought. It was also entirely possible that even if they were, Matthew had not contacted his friend since Wednesday—even though his friend had supposedly vanished without warning. It happens.

Still, it was interesting.

Myron picked up Chad’s phone and hit the redial button. Four rings later a taped voice came on. “You’ve reached Matthew. Leave a message or don’t. Up to you.”

Myron hung up without leaving a message (it was, after all, “up to him”). Hmm. Chad’s last call was to Matthew. That could be significant. Or it could have nothing to do with anything. Either way, Myron was quickly getting nowhere.

He picked up Chad’s phone and dialed his office. Esperanza answered on the second ring.

“MB SportsReps.”

“It’s me.” He filled her in. She listened without interrupting.

Esperanza Diaz had worked for MB SportReps since its inception. Ten years ago, when Esperanza was only eighteen years old, she was the Queen of Sunday Morning Cable TV. No, she wasn’t on any infomercial, though her show ran opposite plenty of them, especially that one with the abdominal exerciser that bore a striking resemblance to a medieval instrument of torture; rather, Esperanza had been a professional wrestler named Little Pocahontas, the Sensual Indian Princess. With her petite, lithe figure bedecked in only a suede bikini, Esperanza had been voted FLOW’s (Fabulous Ladies Of Wrestling) most popular wrestler three years running—or, as the award was officially known, the Babe You’d Most Like to Get in a Full Nelson. Despite this, Esperanza remained humble.

When he finished telling her about the kidnapping, Esperanza’s first words were an incredulous, “Win has a mother?”

“Yep.”

Pause. “There goes my spawned-from-a-satanic-egg theory.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Or my hatched-in-an-experiment-gone-very-wrong theory.”

“You’re not helping.”

“What’s to help?” Esperanza replied. “I like Win, you know that. But the boy is—what’s the official psychiatric term again?—cuckoo.”

“That cuckoo saved your life once,” Myron said.

“Yeah, but you remember how,” she countered.

Myron did. A dark alley. Win’s doctored bullets. Brain matter tossed about like parade confetti. Classic Win. Effective but excessive. Like squashing a bug with a wrecking ball.

Esperanza broke the long silence. “Like I said before,” she began softly, “cuckoo.”

Myron wanted to change the subject. “Any messages?”

“About a million. Nothing that can’t wait, though.” Then she asked, “Have you ever met her?”

“Who?”

“Madonna,” she snapped. “Who do you think? Win’s mother.”

“Once,” Myron said, remembering. More than ten years ago. He and Win had been having dinner at Merion, in fact. Win hadn’t spoken to her on that occasion. But she had spoken to him. The memory made Myron cringe anew.

“Have you told Win about this yet?” she asked.

“Nope. Any advice?”

Esperanza thought a moment. “Do it over the phone,” she said. “At a very safe distance.”

3

They got a quick break.

Myron was still sitting in the Coldrens’ den with Linda when Esperanza called back. Bucky had gone back to Merion to get Jack.

“The kid’s ATM card was accessed yesterday at 6:18 P.M.,” Esperanza said. “He took out $180. A First Philadelphia branch on Porter Street in South Philly.”

“Thanks.”

Information like that was not difficult to obtain. Anybody with an account number could pretty much do it with a phone by pretending they were the account holder. Even without one, any semi-human who had ever worked in law enforcement had the contacts or the access numbers or at least the wherewithal to pay off the right person. It didn’t take much anymore, not with today’s overabundance of user-friendly technology. Technology did more than depersonalize; it ripped your life wide open, gutted you, stripped away any pretense of privacy.

A few keystrokes revealed all.

“What is it?” Linda Coldren asked.

He told her.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean what you think,” she said. “The kidnapper could have gotten the PIN number from Chad.”

“Could have,” Myron said.

“But you don’t believe it, do you?”

He shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m more than a little skeptical.”

“Why?”

“The amount, for one thing. What was Chad’s max?”

“Five hundred dollars a day.”

“So why would a kidnapper only take $180?”

Linda Coldren thought a moment. “If he took too much, someone might get suspicious.”

Myron sort of frowned. “But if the kidnapper was that careful,” he began, “why risk so much for $180? Everyone knows that ATMs are equipped with security cameras. Everyone also knows that even the simplest computer check can yield a location.”

She looked at him evenly. “You don’t think my son is in danger.”

“I didn’t say that. This whole thing may look like one thing and be another. You were right before. It’s safest to assume that the kidnapping is real.”

“So what’s your next step?”

“I’m not sure. The ATM machine was on Porter Street in South Philadelphia. Is that someplace Chad likes to hang out?”

“No,” Linda Coldren said slowly. “In fact, it’s a place I would never imagine him going.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s a dive. One of the sleaziest parts of the city.”

Myron stood. “You got a street map?”

“In my glove compartment.”

“Good. I’ll need to borrow your car for a little while.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going to drive around this ATM.”

She frowned. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Myron admitted. “Like I said before, investigating is not very scientific. You do some legwork and you push some buttons and you hope something happens.”

Linda Coldren reached into a pocket for her keys. “Maybe the kidnappers grabbed him there,” she said. “Maybe you’ll see his car or something.”

Myron almost slapped himself in the head. A car. He had forgotten something so basic. In his mind, a kid disappearing on his way to or from school conjured up images of yellow buses or strolling sprightly with a book bag. How could he have missed something as obvious as a car trace?

He asked her the make and model. Gray Honda Accord. Hardly a car that stands out in a crowd. Pennsylvania license plate 567 AHJ. He called it in to Esperanza. Then he gave Linda Coldren his cellular phone number.

“Call me if anything happens.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be back soon,” he said.

The ride wasn’t far. He traveled, it seemed, from green splendor to concrete crap instantaneously—like on Star Trek where they step through one of those time portals.

The ATM was a drive-through located in what would generously be labeled a business district. Tons of cameras. No human tellers. Would a kidnapper really risk this? Very doubtful. Myron wondered where he could get a copy of the bank’s videotape without alerting the police. Win might know somebody. Financial institutions were usually anxious to cooperate with the Lockwood family. The question was, would Win be willing to cooperate?

Abandoned warehouses—or at least, they looked abandoned—lined the road. Eighteen-wheelers hurried by like something out of an old convoy movie. They reminded Myron of the CB craze from his childhood. Like everyone else, his dad had bought one—a man born in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn who grew up to own an undergarment factory in Newark, barking “breaker one nine” with an accent he had picked up watching the movie Deliverance. Dad would be driving on Hobart Gap Road between their house and the Livingston Mall—maybe a one-mile drive—asking his “good buddies” if there was any sign of “smokeys.” Myron smiled at the memory. Ah, CBs. He was sure that his father still had his someplace. Probably next to the eight-track player.

On one side of the ATM was a gas station so generic that it didn’t even bother having a name. Rusted cars stood upon crumbling cinder blocks. On the other side, a dirt-bag, no-tell motel called the Court Manor Inn greeted customers with green lettering that read: $19.99 PER HOUR.

Myron Bolitar Traveling Tip #83: You may not be dealing with a five-star deluxe property when they prominently advertise hourly rates.

Under the price, in smaller black print, the sign read, MIRRORED CEILINGS AND THEME ROOMS SLIGHTLY EXTRA. Theme rooms. Myron didn’t even want to know. The last line, back in the green big print: ASK ABOUT OUR FREQUENT VISITORS CLUB. Jesus.

Myron wondered if it was worth a shot and decided, why not? It probably wouldn’t lead to anything, but if Chad was hiding out—or even if he’d been kidnapped—a no-tell was as good a place as any to disappear.

He parked in the lot. The Court Manor was a textbook two-level dump. The outer stairs and walkway terraces were made of rotting wood. The cement walls had that unfinished, swirling look that could cut your hand if you leaned against it wrong. Small chunks of concrete lay on the ground. An unplugged Pepsi machine guarded the door like one of the Queen’s guards. Myron passed it and entered.

He’d expected to find the standard no-tell lobby interior—that is, an unshaven Neanderthal in a sleeveless, too-short undershirt chewing on a toothpick while sitting behind bullet-proof glass burping up a beer. Or something like that. But that was not the case. The Court Manor Inn had a high wooden desk with a bronze sign reading CONCIERGE on top of it. Myron tried not to snicker. Behind the desk, a well-groomed, baby-faced man in his late twenties stood at attention. He wore a pressed shirt, starched collar, dark tie tied in a perfect Windsor knot. He smiled at Myron.

“Good afternoon, sir!” he exclaimed. He looked and sounded like a John Tesh substitute on Entertainment Weekly. “Welcome to the Court Manor Inn!”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “Hi.”

“May I be of some service to you today, sir?”

“I hope so.”

“Great! My name is Stuart Lipwitz. I’m the new manager of the Court Manor Inn.” He looked at Myron expectantly.

Myron said, “Congrats.”

“Well, thank you, sir, that’s very kind. If there are any problems—if anything at the Court Manor does not meet your expectations—please let me know immediately. I will handle it personally.” Big smile, puffed-out chest. “At the Court Manor, we guarantee your satisfaction.”

Myron just looked at him for a minute, waiting for the full-wattage smile to dim a bit. It didn’t. Myron took out the photograph of Chad Coldren.

“Have you seen this young man?”

Stuart Lipwitz did not even look down. Still smiling, he said, “I’m sorry, sir. But are you with the police?”

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m very sorry.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but here at the Court Manor Inn we pride ourselves on our discretion.”

“He’s not in any trouble,” Myron said. “I’m not a private eye trying to catch a cheating husband or anything like that.”

The smile did not falter or sway. “I’m sorry, sir, but this is the Court Manor Inn. Our clientele use our services for a variety of activities and often crave anonymity. We at the Court Manor Inn must respect that.”

Myron studied the man’s face, searching for some signal that this was a put-on. Nothing. His whole persona glowed like a performer in an Up with People halftime show. Myron leaned over the desk and checked out the shoes. Polished like twin mirrors. The hair was slicked back. The sparkle in the eye looked real.

It took Myron some time, but he finally saw where this was leading. He took out his wallet and plucked a twenty from the billfold. He slid it across the counter. Stuart Lipwitz looked at it but made no move.

“What’s this for, sir?”

“It’s a present,” Myron said.

Stuart Lipwitz did not touch it.

“It’s for one piece of information,” Myron continued. He plucked out another and held it in the air. “I have another, if you’d like.”

“Sir, we have a credo here at the Court Manor Inn: The guest must come first.”

“Isn’t that a prostitute’s credo?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Never mind,” Myron said.

“I am the new manager of the Court Manor Inn, sir.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I also own ten percent.”

“Your mom must be the envy of her mah-jongg group.”

Still the smile. “In other words, sir, I am in it for the long term. That’s how I look at this business. Long term. Not just today. Not just tomorrow. But into the future. For the long term. You see?”

“Oh,” Myron said flatly. “You mean long term?”

Stuart Lipwitz snapped his fingers. “Precisely. And our motto is this: There are many places you can spend your adultery dollar. We want it to be here.”

Myron waited a moment. Then he said, “Noble.”

“We at the Court Manor Inn are working hard to earn your trust, and trust has no price. When I wake up in the morning, I have to look at myself in the mirror.”

“Would that mirror be on the ceiling?”

Still smiling. “Let me explain it another way,” he said. “If the client knows that the Court Manor Inn is a place he can feel safe to commit an indiscretion, he or she will be more likely to return.” He leaned forward, his eyes wet with excitement. “Do you see?”

Myron nodded. “Repeat business.”

“Precisely.”

“Referrals too,” Myron added. “Like, ‘Hey Bob, I know a great place to get some ass on the side.’ ”

A nod added to the smile. “So you understand.”

“That’s all very nice, Stuart, but this kid is fifteen years old. Fifteen.” Actually, Chad was sixteen, but what the hey. “That’s against the law.”

The smile stayed, but now it signaled disappointment in the favorite pupil. “I hate to disagree with you, sir, but the statutory rape law in this state is fourteen. And secondly, there is no law against a fifteen-year-old renting a motel room.”

The guy was dancing too much, Myron thought. No reason to go through this rigmarole if the kid had never been here. Then again, let’s face facts. Stuart Lipwitz was probably enjoying this. The guy was several french fries short of a Happy Meal. Either way, Myron thought, it was time to shake the tree a bit.

“It is when he is assaulted in your motel,” Myron said. “It is when he claims that someone got an extra key from the front desk and used it to break into the room.” Mr. Bluff Goes to Philadelphia.

“We don’t have extra keys,” Lipwitz said.

“Well, he got in somehow.”

Still the smile. Still the polite tone. “If that were the case, sir, the police would be here.”

“That’s my next stop,” Myron said, “if you don’t cooperate.”

“And you want to know if this young man”—Lipwitz gestured to the photograph of Chad—“stayed here?”

“Yes.”

The smile actually brightened a bit. Myron almost shaded his eyes. “But, sir, if you are telling the truth, then this young man would be able to tell if he was here. You wouldn’t need me for that, correct?”

Myron’s face remained neutral. Mr. Bluff had just been outsmarted by the new manager of the Court Manor Inn. “That’s right,” he said, changing tactics on the fly. “I already know he was here. It was just an opening question. Like when the police ask you to state your name even though they already know it. Just to get the ball rolling.” Mr. Improvision Takes Over for Mr. Bluff.

Stuart Lipwitz took out a piece of paper and began to scribble. “This is the name and telephone number of the Court Manor Inn’s attorney. He will be able to help you with any problems you may have.”

“But what about that handling it personally stuff? What about the satisfaction guarantee?”

“Sir.” He leaned forward, maintaining eye contact. Not a hint of impatience had crept into his voice or face. “May I be bold?”

“Go for it.”

“I don’t believe a word you’re saying.”

“Thanks for the boldness,” Myron said.

“No, thank you, sir. And do come again.”

“Another prostitution credo.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing,” Myron said. “May I too be bold?”

“Yes.”

“I may punch you in the face very hard if you don’t tell me if you’ve seen this kid.” Mr. Improvisation Loses His Cool.

The door swung open hard. A couple entwined about one another stumbled in. The woman was openly rubbing the man’s crotch. “We need a room pronto,” the man said.

Myron turned to them and said, “Do you have your frequent visitor card?”

“What?”

Still the smile from Stuart Lipwitz. “Good-bye, sir. And have a nice day.” Then he rejuvenated the smile and moved toward the writhing mound. “Welcome to the Court Manor Inn. My name is Stuart Lipwitz. I’m the new manager.”

Myron headed out to his car. He took a deep breath in the parking lot and looked back behind him. The whole visit already had an unreal feeling, like one of those descriptions of alien abductions sans the anal probe. He got in the car and dialed Win’s cellular. He just wanted to leave him a message on the machine. But to Myron’s surprise, Win answered.

“Articulate,” he drolled.

Myron was momentarily taken aback. “It’s me,” he said.

Silence. Win hated the obvious. “It’s me,” was both questionable grammar (at best) and a complete waste. Win would know who it was by the voice. If he didn’t, hearing “It’s me” would undeniably not help.

“I thought you didn’t answer the phone on the course,” Myron said.

“I’m driving home to change,” Win said. “Then I’m dining at Merion.” Mainliners never ate; they dined. “Care to join me?”

“Sounds good,” Myron said.

“Wait a second.”

“What?”

“Are you properly attired?”

“I don’t clash,” Myron said. “Will they still let me in?”

“My, my, that was very funny, Myron. I must write that one down. As soon as I stop laughing, I plan on locating a pen. However, I am so filled with mirth that I may wrap my precious Jag around an upcoming telephone pole. Alas, at least I will die with jocularity in my heart.”

Win.

“We have a case,” Myron said.

Silence. Win made this so easy.

“I’ll tell you about it at dinner.”

“Until then,” Win said, “it’ll be all I can do to douse my mounting excitement and anticipation with a snifter of cognac.”

Click. Gotta love that Win.

Myron hadn’t driven a mile when the cellular phone rang. Myron switched it on.

It was Bucky. “The kidnapper called again.”

4

“What did he say?” Myron asked.

“They want money,” Bucky said.

“How much?”

“I don’t know.”

Myron was confused. “What do you mean, you don’t know? Didn’t they say?”

“I don’t think so,” the old man said.

There was noise in the background. “Where are you?” Myron asked.

“I’m at Merion. Look, Jack answered the phone. He’s still in shock.”

“Jack answered?”

“Yes.”

Doubly confused. “The kidnapper called Jack at Merion?”

“Yes. Please, Myron, can you get back over here? It’ll be easier to explain.”

“On my way.”

He drove from the seedy motel to a highway and then into green. Lots of green. The Philadelphia suburbs were lush lawns and high bushes and shady trees. Amazing how close it was—at least in a geographic sense—to the meaner streets of Philly. Like most cities, there was tremendous segregation in Philadelphia. Myron remembered driving with Win to Veterans Stadium for an Eagles game a couple of years back. They’d gone through an Italian block, a Polish block, an African American block; it was as if some powerful, invisible force field—again, like on Star Trek—isolated each ethnicity. The City of Brotherly Love could almost be called Little Yugoslavia.

Myron turned down Ardmore Avenue. Merion was about a mile away. His thoughts turned to Win. How, he wondered, would his old friend react to the maternal connection in this case?

Probably not well.

In all the years they had been friends, Myron had heard Win mention his mother on only one occasion.

It had been during their junior year at Duke. They were college roommates, just back from a wild frat party. The beer had flowed. Myron was not what you’d call a good drinker. Two drinks and he’d usually end up trying to French-kiss a toaster. He blamed this on his ancestry—his people had never handled spirits well.

Win, on the other hand, seemed to have been weaned on schnapps. Liquor never really affected him much. But at this particular party, the grain alcohol–laced punch made even his steps wobble a bit. It took Win three tries to unlock their dorm room door.

Myron quickly collapsed on his bed. The ceiling spun counterclockwise at a seemingly death-defying speed. He closed his eyes. His hands gripped the bed and held on in terror. His face had no color. Nausea clamped down painfully on his stomach. Myron wondered when he would vomit and prayed it would be soon.

Ah, the glamour of college drinking.

For a while neither of them said anything. Myron wondered if Win had fallen asleep. Or maybe Win was gone. Vanished into the night. Maybe he hadn’t held on to his spinning bed tightly enough and the centrifugal force had hurled him out the window and into the great beyond.

Then Win’s voice cut through the darkness. “Take a look at this.”

A hand reached out and dropped something on Myron’s chest. Myron risked letting go of the bed with one hand. So far, so good. He fumbled for whatever it was, found it, lifted it into view. A streetlight from outside—campuses are lit up like Christmas trees—cast enough illumination to make out a photograph. The color was grainy and faded, but Myron could still make out what looked to be an expensive car.

“Is that a Rolls-Royce?” Myron asked. He knew nothing about cars.

“A Bentley S Three Continental Flying Spur,” Win corrected, “1962. A classic.”

“Is it yours?”

“Yes.”

The bed spun silently.

“How did you get it?” Myron asked.

“A man who was fucking my mother gave it to me.”

The end. Win had shut down after that. The wall he put up was not only impenetrable but unapproachable, filled with land mines and a moat and lots of high-voltage electric wires. Over the ensuing decade and a half, Win had never again mentioned his mother. Not when the packages came to the dorm room every semester. Not when the packages came to Win’s office on his birthday even now. Not even when they saw her in person ten years ago.

The plain dark wood sign merely read MERION GOLF CLUB. Nothing else. No “For Members Only.” No “We’re Elitist and We Don’t Want You.” No “Ethnics Use Service Entrance.” No need. It was just a given.

The last U.S. Open threesome had finished a while back and the crowd was mostly gone now. Merion could hold only seventeen thousand for a tournament—less than half the capacity of most courses—but parking was still a chore. Most spectators were forced to park at nearby Haverford College. Shuttle buses ran constantly.

At the top of the driveway a guard signaled him to stop.

“I’m here to meet Windsor Lockwood,” Myron said.

Instant recognition. Instant wave-through.

Bucky ran over to him before he had the car in park. The rounded face was more jowly now, as if he were packing wet sand in his cheeks.

“Where is Jack?” Myron asked.

“The western course.”

“The what?”

“Merion has two courses,” the older man explained, stretching his neck again. “The east, which is the more famous one, and the west. During the Open, the western course is used as a driving range.”

“And your son-in-law is there?”

“Yes.”

“Driving balls?”

“Of course.” Bucky looked at him, surprised. “You always do that after a round. Every golfer on the tour knows that. You played basketball. Didn’t you used to practice your shot after a game?”

“No.”

“Well, as I told you earlier, golf is very special. Players need to review their play immediately after a round. Even if they’ve played well. They focus in on their good strokes, see if they can figure out what went wrong with the bad strokes. They recap the day.”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said. “So tell me about the kidnapper’s call.”

“I’ll take you to Jack,” he said. “This way.”

They walked across the eighteenth fairway and then down the sixteenth. The air smelled of freshly cut grass and pollen. It’d been a big year for pollen on the East Coast; nearby allergists swooned with greedy delight.

Bucky shook his head. “Look at these roughs,” he said. “Impossible.”

He pointed to long grass. Myron had no idea what he was talking about so he nodded and kept walking.

“Damn USGA wants this course to bring the golfers to their knees,” Bucky ranted on. “So they grow the rough way out. Like playing in a rice paddy, for chrissake. Then they cut the greens so close, the golfers might as well be putting on a hockey rink.”

Myron remained silent. The two men kept walking.

“This is one of the famed stone-quarry holes,” Bucky said, calmer now.

“Uh-huh.” The man was babbling. People do that when they’re nervous.

“When the original builders reached sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen,” Bucky continued, sounding not unlike a tour guide in the Sistine Chapel, “they ran across a stone quarry. Rather than giving up then and there, they plowed ahead, incorporating the quarry into the hole.”

“Gosh,” Myron said softly, “they were so brave back then.”

Some babble when nervous. Some grow sarcastic.

They reached the tee and made a right, walking along Golf House Road. Though the last group had finished playing more than an hour ago, there were still at least a dozen golfers hitting balls. The driving range. Yes, professional golfers hit balls here—practicing with a wide array of woods and irons and big clubs, nay, warheads, they called Bertha and Cathy and the like—but that was only part of what went on. Most touring pros used the range to work out strategies with their caddies, check on equipment with their sponsors, network, socialize with fellow golfers, smoke a cigarette (a surprising amount of pros chain-smoke), even talk to agents.

In golf circles, the driving range was called the office.

Myron recognized Greg Norman and Nick Faldo. He also spotted Tad Crispin, the new kid on the block, the latest next Jack Nicklaus—in a phrase, the dream client. The kid was twenty-three, good-looking, quiet, engaged to an equally attractive, happy-just-to-be-here woman. He also did not yet have an agent. Myron tried not to salivate. Hey, he was as human as the next guy. He was, after all, a sports agent. Cut him some slack.

“Where is Jack?” Myron asked.

“Down this way,” Bucky said. “He wanted to hit alone.”

“How did the kidnapper reach him?”

“He called the Merion switchboard and said it was an emergency.”

“And that worked?”

“Yes,” Bucky said slowly. “Actually it was Chad on the phone. He identified himself as Jack’s son.”

Curious. “What time did the call come in?”

“Maybe ten minutes before I called you.” Bucky stopped, gestured with his chin. “There.”

Jack Coldren was a touch pudgy and soft in the middle, but he had forearms like Popeye’s. His flyaway hair did just that in the breeze, revealing bald spots that had started off the day better covered. He whacked the ball with a wood club and an uncommon fury. To some this might all seem very strange. You have just learned your son is missing and you go out and hit golf balls. But Myron understood. Hitting balls was comfort food. The more stress Myron was under, the more he wanted to go in his driveway and shoot baskets. We all have something. Some drink. Some do drugs. Some like to take a long drive or play a computer game. When Win needed to unwind, he often watched videotapes of his own sexual exploits. But that was Win.

“Who’s that with him?” Myron asked.

“Diane Hoffman,” Bucky said. “Jack’s caddie.”

Myron knew that female caddies were not uncommon on the men’s pro tour. Some players even hired their wives. Saves money. “Does she know what’s going on?”

“Yes. Diane was there when the call came in. They’re pretty close.”

“Have you told Linda?”

Bucky nodded. “I called her right away. Do you mind introducing yourself? I’d like to go back to the house and check up on her.”

“No problem.”

“How will I reach you if something comes up?”

“Call my cellular.”

Bucky nearly gasped. “Cellular phones are forbidden at Merion.” Like it was a papal command.

“I walk on the wild side,” Myron said. “Just call.”

Myron approached them. Diane Hoffman stood with her feet shoulder-width apart, her arms folded, her face intent on Coldren’s backswing. A cigarette dangled from her lips almost vertically. She didn’t even glance at Myron. Jack Coldren coiled his body and then let go, snapping like a released spring. The ball rocketed over the distant hills.

Jack Coldren turned, looked at Myron, smiled tightly, nodded a hello. “You’re Myron Bolitar, right?”

“Right.”

He shook Myron’s hand. Diane Hoffman continued to study her player’s every move, frowning as if she’d spotted a flaw in his hand-shaking technique. “I appreciate your helping us out,” he said.

Face-to-face now—no more than a few feet away—Myron could see the devastation on the man’s face. The jubilant glow after nailing the putt on eighteen had been snuffed out by something more pasty and sickly. His eyes had the surprised, uncomprehending look of a man who’d just been sucker punched in the stomach.

“You tried making a comeback recently,” Jack said. “With New Jersey.”

Myron nodded.

“I saw you on the news. Gutsy move, after all these years.”

Stalling. Not sure how to begin. Myron decided to help. “Tell me about the call.”

Jack Coldren’s eyes swerved over the expanse of green. “Are you sure it’s safe?” he asked. “The guy on the phone told me no police. To just act normal.”

“I’m an agent seeking clients,” Myron said. “Talking to me is about as normal as it gets.”

Coldren thought about that for a moment then nodded. He still hadn’t introduced Diane Hoffman. Hoffman didn’t seem to mind. She remained about ten feet away, rock-still. Her eyes remained narrow and suspicious, her face weathered and pinched. The cigarette ash was incredibly long now, almost defying gravity. She wore a cap and one of those caddie vests that looked like a jogger’s night reflector.

“The club president came up to me and whispered that there was an emergency call from my son. So I went inside the clubhouse and picked it up.”

He stopped suddenly and blinked several times. His breathing became heavier. He was wearing a tad-too-tight, yellow V-necked golf shirt. You could see his body expand against the cotton blend with each inhale. Myron waited.

“It was Chad,” he finally spat out. “All he could say was ‘Dad,’ before someone grabbed the phone away from him. Then a man with a deep voice came on the line.”

“How deep?” Myron asked.

“Pardon?”

“How deep was the voice?”

“Very.”

“Did it sound funny to you? A little robotic?”

“Now that you mention it, yes, it did.”

Electronic altering, Myron guessed. Those machines could make Barry White sound like a four-year-old girl. Or vice versa. They weren’t hard to get. Even Radio Shack sold them now. The kidnapper or kidnappers could be any sex. Linda and Jack Coldren’s description of a “male voice” was irrelevant. “What did he say?”

“That he had my son. He told me that if I called the police or anybody like that, Chad would pay. He told me that someone would be watching me all the time.” Jack Coldren accentuated the point by looking around again. No one suspicious lurked about, though Greg Norman waved and gave them a smiling thumbs-up. G’day, mate.

“What else?” Myron asked.

“He said he wanted money,” Coldren said.

“How much?”

“He just said a lot. He wasn’t sure yet how much, but he wanted me to get it ready. He said he’d call back.”

Myron made a face. “But he didn’t tell you how much?”

“No. Just that it would be a lot.”

“And that you should get it ready.”

“Right.”

This made no sense. A kidnapper who wasn’t sure how much ransom to extort? “May I be blunt, Jack?”

Coldren stood a little taller, tucked in his shirt. He was what some would call boyishly and disarmingly handsome. His face was big and unthreatening with cottony, malleable features. “Don’t sugarcoat anything for me,” he said. “I want the truth.”

“Could this be a hoax?”

Jack shot a quick glance at Diane Hoffman. She moved slightly. Might have been a nod. He turned back to Myron. “What do you mean?”

“Could Chad be behind this?”

The longer flyaway hairs got caught up in a cross-breeze and fell down into his eyes. He pushed them away with his fingers. Something came across his face. Rumination, maybe? Unlike Linda Coldren, the idea had not snapped him into a defensive stance. He was pondering the possibility, or perhaps merely grasping at an option that meant safety for his son.

“There were two different voices,” Coldren said. “On the phone.”

“It could be a voice changer.” Myron explained what that was.

More rumination. Coldren’s face scrunched up. “I really don’t know.”

“Is it something you can imagine Chad doing?”

“No,” Coldren replied. “But who can imagine anyone’s kid doing something like this? I’m trying to remain objective here, hard as that is. Do I think my boy could do something like this? Of course not. But then again, I wouldn’t be the first parent to be wrong about my kid; now, would I?”

Fair enough, Myron thought. “Has Chad ever run away?”

“No.”

“Any trouble in the family? Anything that might make him want to do something like this?”

“Something like fake his own kidnapping?”

“It doesn’t have to be that extreme,” Myron said. “Maybe something you or your wife did that got him upset.”

“No,” he said, his voice suddenly faraway. “I can’t think of anything.” He looked up. The sun was low and not very strong anymore, but he still sort of squinted up at Myron, the side of his hand resting on his forehead in an eye-shading salute. The posture reminded Myron of the photograph of Chad he’d seen at the house.

Jack said, “You have a thought, Myron, don’t you?”

“Barely.”

“I’d still like to hear it,” Coldren said.

“How badly do you want to win this tournament, Jack?”

Coldren gave a half-smile. “You were an athlete, Myron. You know how badly.”

“Yes,” Myron said, “I do.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Your son is an athlete. He probably knows too.”

“Yes,” Coldren said. Then: “I’m still waiting for the point.”

“If someone wanted to hurt you,” Myron said, “what better way than to mess up your chance of winning the Open?”

Jack Coldren’s eyes had that sucker punched look again. He took a step back.

“I’m only theorizing,” Myron added quickly. “I’m not saying your son is doing that.…”

“But you need to explore every avenue,” Jack Coldren finished for him.

“Yes.”

Coldren recovered, but it took him a little time. “Even if what you’re saying is true, it doesn’t have to be Chad. Someone else could have done this to get at me.” Again he glanced over at his caddie. Still looking at her, he said, “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“What do you mean?”

Jack Coldren didn’t answer right away. He turned away from both of them and squinted out toward where he’d been hitting balls. There was nothing to see. His back was to Myron. “You probably know I lost the Open a long time ago.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t elaborate.

“Did something happen back then?” Myron asked.

“Maybe,” Jack Coldren said slowly. “I don’t know anymore. The point is, someone else might be out to get me. It doesn’t have to be my son.”

“Maybe,” Myron agreed. He didn’t go into the fact that he’d pretty much dismissed this possibility because Chad had vanished before Coldren had his lead. No reason to go into it now.

Coldren turned back to Myron. “Bucky mentioned something about an ATM card,” he said.

“Your son’s ATM card was accessed last night. At Porter Street.”

Something crossed his face. Not for long. Not for more than a second. A flash and then it was gone. “On Porter Street?” he repeated.

“Yep. A First Philadelphia Bank on Porter Street in South Philadelphia.” Silence.

“Are you familiar with that part of town?”

“No,” Coldren said. He looked over at his caddie. Diane Hoffman remained the statue. Arms still folded. Feet still shoulder-width apart. Ash finally gone.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I am.”

“I visited there today” Myron said.

His face remained steady. “Did you learn anything?”

“No.”

Silence.

Jack Coldren gestured behind him. “You mind if I take a few more swings while we talk?”

“Not at all.”

He put on his glove. “Do you think I should play tomorrow?”

“That’s up to you,” Myron said. “The kidnapper said to act normal. Your not playing would certainly draw suspicion.”

Coldren bent down to put a ball on the tee. “Can I ask you something, Myron?”

“Sure.”

“When you played basketball, how important was winning to you?”

Odd question. “Very.”

Jack nodded like he’d been expecting that. “You won the NCAA championship one year, right?”

“Yes.”

Coldren shook his head. “Must have been something.”

Myron did not reply.

Jack Coldren picked up a club and flexed his fingers around the grip. He lined up next to the ball. Again the smooth coil-and-release movement. Myron watched the ball sail away. For a moment no one spoke. They just looked off into the distance and watched the final streaks of sun color the sky purple.

When Coldren finally spoke, his voice was thick. “You want to hear something awful?”

Myron moved closer to him. Coldren’s eyes were wet.

“I still care about winning this thing,” Coldren said. He looked at Myron. The pain on his face was so naked, Myron almost reached out and hugged him. He imagined that he could see the reflection of the man’s past in his eyes, the years of torment, of thinking of what might have been, of finally having the chance at redemption, of having that chance suddenly snatched away.

“What kind of man still thinks about winning at a time like this?” Coldren asked.

Myron didn’t say anything. He didn’t know the answer. Or maybe he feared that he did.

5

Merion’s clubhouse was an expanded white farmhouse with black shutters. The only splash of color came from the green awnings shading the famed back porch and even that was muted by the surrounding green of the golf course. You expected something more awe-inspiring or intimidating at one of the country’s most exclusive clubs, and yet the simplicity seemed to say, “We’re Merion. We don’t need more.”

Myron walked past the pro shop. Golf bags were lined up on a metal stand. The men’s locker room door was on his right. A bronze sign read that Merion had been designated a historic landmark. A bulletin board listed members’ handicaps. Myron skimmed the names for Win’s. Three handicap. Myron didn’t know much about golfing, but he knew that was pretty damn good.

The outside porch had a stone floor and about two dozen tables. The legendary dining area did more than overlook the first tee—it actually seemed perched right over it. From here, members watched golfers tee off with the practiced glares of Roman senators at the Colosseum. Powerful businessmen and community leaders often crumbled under such century-old scrutiny. Even professionals were not immune—the porch’s dining facility was kept open during the Open. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer and Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones and Sam Snead had all been subjected to the small restaurant noises, the grating tinkling of glass and silverware blending most disharmoniously with golf’s hushed crowds and distant cheers.

The porch was packed with members. Most were men—elderly and red-faced and well fed. They wore blue or green blazers with different crests on them. Their ties were loud and usually striped. Many had floppy white or yellow hats on their heads. Floppy hats. And Win had been worried about Myron’s “attire.”

Myron spotted Win at a corner table with six chairs. He sat alone. His expression was both glacial and serene, his body completely at ease. A mountain lion patiently waiting for prey. One would think that the blond hair and patrician good looks would be life assets for Win. In many ways, they were; in many more ways, they branded him. His entire appearance reeked of arrogance, old money, and elitism. Most people did not respond well to that. A specific, seething hostility frothed and boiled over when people looked at Win. To look at such a person was to hate him. Win was used to it. People who judged purely on looks did not concern him. People who judged purely on looks were oft surprised.

Myron greeted his old friend and sat down.

“Would you care for a drink?” Win said.

“Sure.”

“If you ask for a Yoo-Hoo,” Win said, “I’ll shoot you in the right eye.”

“Right eye,” Myron repeated with a nod. “Very specific.”

A waiter who must have been a hundred years old materialized. He wore a green jacket and pants—green, Myron surmised, so that even the help would blend into the famed milieu. Didn’t work, though. The old waiter looked like the Riddler’s grandfather. “Henry,” Win said, “I’ll have an iced tea.”

Myron was tempted to ask for a “Colt 45, like Billy Dee,” but decided against it. “I’ll have the same.”

“Very good, Mr. Lockwood.” Henry left. Win looked over at Myron. “So tell me.”

“It’s a kidnapping,” Myron said.

Win arched an eyebrow.

“One of the players’ sons is missing. The parents have gotten two calls.” Myron quickly told him about them. Win listened in silence.

When Myron finished, Win said, “You left something out.”

“What?”

“The name of the player.”

Myron kept his voice steady. “Jack Coldren.”

Win’s face betrayed nothing, but Myron still felt a cold gust blow across his heart.

Win said, “And you’ve met Linda.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that she is related to me.”

“Yes.”

“Then you must have realized that I will not help.”

“No.”

Win sat back, steepled his fingers. “Then you realize it now.”

“A boy might be in real danger,” Myron said. “We have to help.”

“No,” Win said. “I do not.”

“You want me to drop it?”

“What you do is your affair,” Win said.

“Do you want me to drop it?” Myron repeated.

The iced teas came. Win took a gentle sip. He looked off and tapped his chin with his index finger. His signal to end the topic. Myron knew better than to push it.

“So who are the other seats for?” Myron asked.

“I am mining a major lead.”

“A new client?”

“For me, almost definitely. For you, a barely remote possibility.”

“Who?”

“Tad Crispin.”

Myron’s chin dropped. “We’re having dinner with Tad Crispin?”

“As well as our old friend Norman Zuckerman and his latest rather attractive ingenue.”

Norm Zuckerman was the owner of Zoom, one of the largest sneaker and sporting apparel companies in the country. He was also one of Myron’s favorite people. “How did you get to Crispin? I heard he was agenting himself.”

“He is,” Win said, “but he still wants a financial adviser.” Barely in his mid-thirties, Win was already something of a Wall Street legend. Reaching out to Win made sense. “Crispin is quite a shrewd young man, actually,” he went on. “Unfortunately, he believes that all agents are thieves. That they have the morals of a prostitute practicing politics.”

“He said that? A prostitute practicing politics?”

“No, I came up with that one myself.” Win smiled. “Pretty good, no?”

Myron nodded. “No.”

“Anyway, the Zoom folks here are tailing him like a lapdog. They’re introducing a whole new line of men’s clubs and clothing on the back of young Mr. Crispin.”

Tad Crispin was in second place, a goodly distance behind Jack Coldren. Myron wondered how happy Zoom was about Coldren possibly stealing their thunder. Not very, he supposed.

“So what do you make of Jack Coldren’s good showing?” Myron asked. “You surprised?”

Win shrugged. “Winning was always very important to Jack.”

“Have you known him long?”

Flat eyes. “Yes.”

“Did you know him when he lost here as a rookie?”

“Yes.”

Myron calculated the years. Win would have been in elementary school. “Jack Coldren hinted that he thought someone tried to sabotage his chances back then.”

Win made a noise. “Guff,” he said.

“Guff?”

“You don’t recall what happened?”

“No.”

“Coldren claims his caddie gave him the wrong club on sixteen,” Win said. “He asked for a six iron and supposedly his caddie handed him an eight. His shot landed short. More specifically, in one of the rock quarry bunkers. He never recovered.”

“Did the caddie admit the error?”

“He never commented, as far as I know.”

“What did Jack do?”

“He fired him.”

Myron chewed on that tidbit. “Where is the caddie now?”

“I do not have the slightest idea,” Win said. “He wasn’t a young man at the time and this was more than twenty years ago.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No. And this conversation is officially terminated.”

Before Myron could ask why, a pair of hands covered his eyes. “Guess who?” came a familiar sing-song. “I’ll give you a couple of hints: I’m smart, good-looking, and loaded with talent.”

“Gee,” Myron said, “before that hint, I would have thought you were Norm Zuckerman.”

“And with the hint?”

Myron shrugged. “If you add ‘adored by women of all ages,’ I’d think it was me.”

Norman Zuckerman laughed heartily. He bent down and gave Myron a big, loud smack on the cheek. “How are you, meshuggener?”

“Good, Norm. You?”

“I’m cooler than Superfly in a new Coupe de Ville.”

Zuckerman greeted Win with a loud hello and an enthusiastic handshake. Diners stared in distaste. The stares did not quiet Norman Zuckerman. An elephant gun could not quiet Norman Zuckerman. Myron liked the man. Sure, a lot of it was an act. But it was a genuine act. Norm’s zest for everything around him was contagious. He was pure energy; the kind of person who made you examine yourself and left you feeling just a little wanting.

Norm brought forward a young woman who’d been standing behind him. “Let me introduce you to Esme Fong,” he said. “She’s one of my marketing vee-pees. In charge of the new golf line. Brilliant. The woman is absolutely brilliant.”

The attractive ingenue. Early-to-mid twenties, Myron guessed. Esme Fong was Asian with perhaps a hint of Caucasian. She was petite with almond eyes. Her hair was long and silky, a black fan with an earthy auburn tinge. She wore a beige business suit and white stockings. Esme nodded a hello and stepped closer. She wore the serious face of an attractive young woman who was afraid of not being taken seriously because she was an attractive young woman.

She stuck out her hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Bolitar,” she said crisply. “Mr. Lockwood.”

“Doesn’t she have a firm handshake?” Zuckerman asked. Then turning to her: “What’s with all the misters? This is Myron and Win. They’re practically family for crying out loud. Okay Win’s a little goyish to be in my family. I mean, his people came over on the Mayflower, while most of mine fled a czar pogrom in a cargo ship. But we’re still family, right, Win?”

“As rain,” Win said.

“Sit down already, Esme. You’re making me nervous with all the seriousness. Try a smile, okay?” Zuckerman demonstrated, pointing at his teeth. Then he turned to Myron, spread his hands. “The truth, Myron. How do I look?”

Norman was over sixty. His customary loud clothing, matching the man’s personality, hardly stood out after what Myron had seen today. His skin was dark and rough; his eyes dropped inside black circles; his features jutted out in classical Semitism; his beard and hair were too long and somewhat unkempt.

“You look like Jerry Rubin at the Chicago Seven trial,” Myron said.

“Just the look I wanted,” Norm said. “Retro. Hip. Attitude. That’s what’s in nowadays.”

“Hardly Tad Crispin’s look,” Myron said.

“I’m talking about the real world, not golf. Golfers don’t know from hip or attitude. Hasidim are more open to change than golfers, you know what I’m saying? I’ll give you an example: Dennis Rodman is not a golfer. You know what golfers want? The same thing they’ve wanted since the dawn of sports marketing: Arnold Palmer. That’s what they want. They wanted Palmer, then Nicklaus, then Watson—always good ol’ boys.” He pointed a thumb at Esme Fong. “Esme is the one who signed Crispin. He’s her boy.”

Myron looked at her. “Quite a coup,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“We’ll see how big a coup it is,” Zuckerman said. “Zoom is moving into golf in a very big way. Huge. Humongous. Gigantic.”

“Enormous,” Myron said.

“Mammoth,” Win added.

“Colossal.”

“Titantic.”

“Bunyanesque.”

Win smiled. “Brobdingnagian,” he said.

“Oooo,” Myron said. “Good one.”

Zuckerman shook his head. “You guys are funnier than the Three Stooges without Curly. Anyway, it’s a helluva campaign. Esme is running it for me. Male and female lines. Not only have we got Crispin, but Esme’s landed the numero uno female golfer in the world.”

“Linda Coldren?” Myron asked.

“Whoa!” Norm clapped his hands once. “The Hebrew hoopster knows his golf! By the way, Myron, what kind of name is Bolitar for a member of the tribe?”

“It’s a long story,” Myron said.

“Good, I wasn’t interested anyway. I was just being polite. Where was I?” Zuckerman threw one leg over the other, leaned back, smiled, looked about. A ruddy-faced man at a neighboring table glared. “Hi, there,” Norm said with a little wave. “Looking good.”

The man made a huffing noise and looked away.

Norm shrugged. “You’d think he never saw a Jew before.”

“He probably hasn’t,” Win said.

Norm looked back over at the ruddy-faced man. “Look!” Zuckerman said, pointing to his head. “No horns!”

Even Win smiled.

Zuckerman turned his attention back to Myron. “So tell me, you trying to sign Crispin?”

“I haven’t even met him yet,” Myron said.

Zuckerman put his hand to his chest, feigning surprise. “Well then, Myron, this is some eerie coincidence. You being here when we’re about to break bread with him—what are the odds? Wait.” Norm stopped, put his hand to his ear. “I think I hear Twilight Zone music.”

“Ha-ha,” Myron said.

“Oh, relax, Myron. I’m teasing you. Lighten up, for crying out loud. But let me be honest for a second, okay? I don’t think Cripsin needs you, Myron. Nothing personal, but the kid signed the deal with me himself. No agent. No lawyer. Handled it all on his own.”

“And got robbed,” Win added.

Zuckerman put a hand to his chest. “You wound me, Win.”

“Crispin told me the numbers,” Win said. “Myron would have gotten him a far better deal.”

“With all due respect to your centuries of upper-crust inbreeding, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The kid left a little money in the till for me, that’s all. Is that a crime nowadays—for a man to make a profit? Myron’s a shark, for crying out loud. He rips off my clothes when we talk. He leaves my office, I don’t even have undies left. I don’t even have furniture. I don’t even have an office. I start out with this beautiful office and Myron comes in and I end up naked in some soup kitchen someplace.”

Myron looked at Win. “Touching.”

“He’s breaking my heart,” Win said.

Myron turned his attention to Esme Fong. “Are you happy with how Crispin’s been playing?”

“Of course,” she said quickly. “This is his first major, and he’s in second place.”

Norm Zuckerman put a hand on her arm. “Save the spinning for those morons in the media. These two guys are family.”

Esme Fong shifted in her seat. She cleared her throat. “Linda Coldren won the U.S. Open a few weeks ago,” she said. “We’re running dual television, radio, and print ads—they’ll both be in every spot. It’s a new line, completely unknown to golf enthusiasts. Naturally, if we could introduce Zoom’s new line with two U.S. Open winners, it would be helpful.”

Norm pointed his thumb again. “Ain’t she something? Helpful. Nice word. Vague. Look, Myron, you read the sports section, am I right?”

“As rain.”

“How many articles did you see on Crispin before the tournament began?”

“A lot.”

“How much coverage has he gotten in the past two days?”

“Not much.”

“Try none. All anybody is talking about is Jack Coldren. In two days that poor son of a bitch is either going to be a miracle man of messianic proportions or the most pitiful loser in the history of the world. Think about it for a second. A man’s entire life—both his past and his future—will be shaped by a few swings of a stick. Nuts, when you think about it. And you know what the worst part is?”

Myron shook his head.

“I hope like hell he messes up! I feel like a major son of a bitch, but that’s the truth. My guy comes back and wins, you wait and see the way Esme spins it. The brilliant play of newcomer Tad Crispin forces a veteran to crack. The new kid stares down the pressure like Palmer and Nicklaus combined. You know what it’ll mean to the launch of the new line?” Zuckerman looked over at Win and pointed. “God, I wish I looked like you. Look at him, for crying out loud. He’s beautiful.”

Win, in spite of himself, laughed. Several ruddy-faced men turned and stared. Norman waved at them, friendly-like. “Next time I come,” Norm said to Win, “I’m wearing a yarmulke.”

Win laughed harder. Myron tried to remember the last time he’d seen his friend laugh so openly. It’d been a while. Norm had that effect on people.

Esme Fong glanced at her watch and rose. “I only stopped by to say hello,” she explained. “I really must be going.”

All three men stood. Norm bussed her cheek. “Take care, Esme, okay? I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, Norm.” She gave Myron and Win demure smiles accompanied by a shy lowering of the head. “Nice meeting you, Myron. Win.”

She left. The three men sat. Win steepled his fingers. “How old is she?” Win asked.

“Twenty-five. Phi Beta Kappa from Yale.”

“Impressive.”

Norm said, “Don’t even think it, Win.”

Win shook his head. He wouldn’t. She was in the business. Harder to disentangle. When it came to the opposite sex, Win liked quick and absolute closure.

“I stole her from those sons of bitches at Nike,” Norm said. “She was a bigwig in their basketball department. Don’t get me wrong. She was making a ton of dough, but she smartened up. Hey, it’s like I told her: There’s more to life than money. You know what I’m saying?”

Myron refrained from rolling his eyes.

“Anyway, she works like a dog. Always checking and rechecking. In fact, she’s on her way to Linda Coldren’s right now. They’re going to have a late-night tea party or something girly-girl.”

Myron and Win exchanged a glance. “She’s going to Linda Coldren’s house?”

“Yeah, why?”

“When did she call her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was this appointment made a long time ago?”

“What, now, I look like a receptionist?”

“Forget it.”

“Forgotten.”

“Excuse me a second,” Myron said. “Do you mind if I go make a call?”

“Am I your mother?” Zuckerman made a shooing motion. “Go already.”

Myron debated using his cellular phone but decided not to piss off the Merion gods. He found a phone booth in the men’s locker room foyer and dialed the Coldrens’ house. He used Chad’s line. Linda Coldren answered.

“Hello?”

“Just checking in,” Myron said. “Anything new?”

“No,” Linda said.

“Are you aware that Esme Fong is coming over?”

“I didn’t want to cancel,” Linda Coldren explained. “I didn’t want to do anything that would draw attention.”

“You’ll be okay then?”

“Yes,” she said.

Myron watched Tad Crispin walk by in the direction of Win’s table. “Were you able to reach the school?”

“No; nobody was there,” she said. “So what do we do next?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said. “I have the override Caller ID on your phone. If he calls again, we should be able to get the number.”

“What else?”

“I’ll try to speak to Matthew Squires. See what he can tell me.”

“I already spoke to Matthew,” Linda said impatiently. “He doesn’t know anything. What else?”

“I could get the police involved. Discreetly. There’s not much else I can do on my own.”

“No,” she said firmly. “No police. Jack and I are both adamant on that point.”

“I have friends in the FBI—”

“No.”

He thought about his conversation with Win. “When Jack lost at Merion, who was his caddie?”

She hesitated. “Why would you want to know that?”

“I understand Jack blamed his caddie for the loss.”

“In part, yes.”

“And that he fired him.”

“So?”

“So I asked about enemies. How did the caddie feel about what happened?”

“You’re talking about something that happened over twenty years ago,” Linda Coldren said. “Even if he did harbor a deep hatred for Jack, why would he wait so long?”

“This is the first time the Open has been at Merion since then. Maybe that’s reawakened dormant anger. I don’t know. Chances are there’s nothing to this, but it might be worth checking out.”

He could hear talking on the other end of the line. Jack’s voice. She asked Myron to hold on a moment.

A few moments later, Jack Coldren came on the line. Without preamble, he said, “You think there’s a connection between what happened to me twenty-three years ago and Chad’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

His tone was insistent. “But you think—”

“I don’t know what I think,” he interrupted. “I’m just checking out every angle.”

There was a stony silence. Then: “His name was Lloyd Rennart,” Jack Coldren said.

“Do you know where he lives?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since the day the Open ended.”

“The day you fired him.”

“Yes.”

“You never bumped into him again? At the club or a tournament or something?”

“No,” Jack Coldren said slowly. “Never.”

“Where did Rennart live back then?”

“In Wayne. It’s the neighboring town.”

“How old would he be now?”

“Sixty-eight.” No hesitation.

“Before this happened, were you two close?”

Jack Coldren’s voice, when he finally spoke, was very soft. “I thought so,” he said. “Not on a personal level. We didn’t socialize. I never met his family or visited his home or anything like that. But on the golf course”—he paused—“I thought we were very close.”

Silence.

“Why would he do it?” Myron asked. “Why would he purposely ruin your chances of winning?”

Myron could hear him breathing. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and scratchy. “I’ve wanted to know the answer to that for twenty-three years.”

6

Myron called in Lloyd Rennart’s name to Esperanza. It probably wouldn’t take much. Again modern technology would simplify the feat. Anyone with a modem could type in the address www.switchboard.com—a Web site that was virtually a telephone directory of the entire country. If that site didn’t work, there were others. It probably wouldn’t take long, if Lloyd Rennart was still among the living. If not, well, there were sites for that too.

“Did you tell Win?” Esperanza asked.

“Yes.”

“How did he react?”

“He won’t help.”

“Not surprising,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

Esperanza said, “You don’t work well alone, Myron.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “You looking forward to graduation?”

Esperanza had been going to NYU Law School at night for the past six years. She graduated on Monday.

“I probably won’t go.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not big on ceremony,” she said.

Esperanza’s only close relative, her mother, had died a few months back. Myron suspected that her death had more to do with Esperanza’s decision than not being big on ceremony.

“Well, I’m going,” Myron said. “Sitting front row center. I want to see it all.”

Silence.

Esperanza broke it. “Is this the part where I choke back tears because someone cares?”

Myron shook his head. “Forget I said anything.”

“No, really, I want to get it right. Should I break down in loud sobs or just sniffle a little? Or better yet, I could get a little teary, like Michael Landon on Little House on the Prairie.”

“You’re such a wiseass.”

“Only when you’re being patronizing.”

“I’m not being patronizing. I care. Sue me.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Any messages?”

“About a million, but nothing that I can’t handle until Monday,” she said. “Oh, one thing.”

“What?”

“The bitch asked me out to lunch.”

“The bitch” was Jessica, the love of Myron’s life. Putting it kindly, Esperanza did not like Jessica. Many assumed that this had something to do with jealousy, with some sort of latent attraction between Esperanza and Myron. Nope. For one thing, Esperanza liked, er, flexibility in her love life. For a while she had dated a guy named Max, then a woman named Lucy, and now another woman named Hester. “How many times have I asked you not to call her that?” Myron said.

“About a million.”

“So are you going?”

“Probably,” she said. “I mean, it’s a free meal. Even if I do have to look at her face.”

They hung up. Myron smiled. He was a bit surprised. While Jessica did not reciprocate Esperanza’s animosity, a lunch date to thaw out their personal cold war was not something Myron would have anticipated. Perhaps now that they were living together, Jess figured it was time to offer an olive branch. What the hell. Myron dialed Jessica.

The machine picked up. He heard her voice. When the beep came on, he said, “Jess? Pick up.”

She did. “God, I wish you were here right now.” Jessica had a way with openings.

“Oh?” He could see her lying on the couch, the phone cord twisted in her fingers. “Why’s that?”

“I’m about to take a ten-minute break.”

“A full ten minutes?”

“Yup.”

“Then you’d be expecting extended foreplay?”

She laughed. “Up for it, big guy?”

“I will be,” he said, “if you don’t stop talking about it.”

“Maybe we should change the subject,” she said.

Myron had moved into Jessica’s Soho loft a few months ago. For most people, this would be a somewhat dramatic change—moving from a suburb in New Jersey to a trendy section of New York, moving in with a woman you love, etc.—but for Myron, the change rivaled puberty. He had spent his entire life living with his mom and dad in the classic suburban town of Livingston, New Jersey. Entire life. Age zero to six in the upstairs bedroom on the right. Age six to thirteen in the upstairs bedroom on the left. Age thirteen to thirty-something in the basement.

After that long, the apron strings become steel bands.

“I hear you’re taking Esperanza out for lunch,” he said.

“Yup.”

“How come?”

“No reason.”

“No reason?”

“I think she’s cool. I want to go to lunch. Stop being so nosy.”

“You realize, of course, that she hates you.”

“I can handle it,” Jessica said. “So how’s the golf tournament?”

“Very strange,” he said.

“How so?”

“Too long a story to tell now, sweetcakes. Can I call you later?”

“Sure.” Then: “Did you say ‘sweetcakes’?”

When they hung up, Myron frowned. Something was amiss. He and Jessica had never been closer, their relationship never stronger. Moving in together had been the right move, and a lot of their past demons had been exorcised away of late. They were loving toward each other, considerate of each other’s feelings and needs, and almost never fought.

So why did Myron feel like they were standing on the cusp of some deep abyss?

He shook it off. All of this was just the by-product of an over-stimulated imagination. Just because a ship is sailing upon smooth waters, he surmised, does not mean it is heading for an iceberg.

Wow, that was deep.

By the time he got back to the table, Tad Crispin was sipping an iced tea too. Win made the introductions. Crispin was dressed in yellows, lots of yellows, kind of like the man with the yellow hat from the Curious George books. Everything was yellow. Even his golf shoes. Myron tried not to make a face.

As if reading his mind, Norm Zuckerman said, “This isn’t our line.”

“Good to hear,” Myron said.

Tad Crispin stood. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

Myron offered up a great big smile. “It’s a true honor to meet you, Tad.” His voice reeked with the sincerity of, say, a chain-store appliance salesman. The two men shook hands. Myron kept on smiling. Crispin began to look wary.

Zuckerman pointed a thumb at Myron and leaned toward Win. “Is he always this smooth?”

Win nodded. “You should see him with the ladies.”

Everyone sat.

“I can’t stay long,” Crispin said.

“We understand, Tad,” Zuckerman said, doing the shooing thing again with both hands. “You’re tired, you need to concentrate on tomorrow. Go already, get some sleep.”

Crispin sort of smiled a little and looked at Win. “I want you to have my account,” he said.

“I don’t ‘have’ accounts,” Win corrected. “I advise on them.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Most definitely,” Win said. “You are in control of your money at all times. I will make recommendations. I will make them to you directly. No one else. We will discuss them. You will then make a final decision. I will not buy or sell or trade anything without you being fully aware of what is going on.”

Crispin nodded. “That sounds good.”

“I thought it might,” Win said. “From what I see, you plan on watching your money carefully.”

“Yes.”

“Savvy,” Win said with a nod. “You’ve read about too many athletes retiring broke. Of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous money managers and the like.”

“Yes.”

“And it will be my job to help you maximize your return, correct?”

Crispin leaned forward a bit. “Correct.”

“Very well, then. It will be my task to help maximize your investment opportunities after you earn it. But I would not be serving your best interests if I did not also tell you how to make more.”

Crispin’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure I follow.”

Zuckerman said, “Win.”

Win ignored him. “As your financial consultant, I would be remiss if I did not make the following recommendation: You need a good agent.”

Crispin’s line of vision slid toward Myron. Myron remained still, looking back at him steadily. He turned back to Win. “I know you work with Mr. Bolitar,” Crispin said.

“Yes and no,” Win said. “If you decide to use his services I do not make one penny more. Well, that’s not exactly true. If you choose to use Myron’s services, you will make more money and subsequently I will have more of your money to invest. So in that way, I will make more.”

“Thanks,” Crispin said, “but I’m not interested.”

“That’s up to you,” Win said, “but let me just explain a little further what I meant by yes and no. I manage assets worth approximately four hundred million dollars. Myron’s clients represent less than three percent of that total. I am not employed by MB SportsReps. Myron Bolitar is not employed by Lock-Horne Securities. We do not have a partnership. I have not invested in his enterprise and he is not invested in mine. Myron has never looked at, asked about, or in any way discussed the financial situation of any of my clients. We are totally separate. Except for one thing.”

All eyes were on Win. Myron, not famous for knowing when to keep his mouth shut, knew now.

“I am the financial consultant for every one of his clients,” Win said. “Do you know why?”

Crispin shook his head.

“Because Myron insists upon it.”

Crispin looked confused. “I don’t understand. If he gets nothing out of it—”

“I didn’t say that. He gets plenty out of it.”

“But you said—”

“He, too, was an athlete; did you know that?”

“I heard something about it.”

“He knows what happens to athletes. How they get cheated. How they squander their earnings, never fully accepting the fact that their careers can be over in a heartbeat. So he insists—insists, mind you—that he does not handle their finances. I’ve seen him refuse clients because of this. He further insists that I handle them. Why? For the same reason you sought me out. He knows I am the best. Immodest but true. Myron further insists that they see me in person at least once every quarter. Not just phone calls. Not just faxes or E-mails or letters. He insists that I go over every item in the account personally with them.”

Win leaned farther back and steepled his fingers. The man loved to steeple his fingers. It looked good on him. Gave him an air of wisdom. “Myron Bolitar is my best friend. I know he’d give his life for me and I for him. But if he ever thought that I was not doing what was in a client’s best interest, he would take away their portfolios without a second thought.”

Norm said, “Beautiful speech, Win. Got me right there.” He pointed to his stomach.

Win gave him the look. Norm stopped smiling.

“I made the deal with Mr. Zuckerman on my own,” Crispin said. “I could make others.”

“I won’t comment on the Zoom deal,” Win said. “But I will tell you this. You are a bright young man. A bright man knows not only his strengths but equally important, he knows his weaknesses. I do not, for example, know how to negotiate an endorsement contract. I may know the basics, but it is not my business. I’m not a plumber. If a pipe in my house broke, I would not be able to fix it. You are a golfer. You are one of the greatest talents I have ever seen. You should concentrate on that.”

Tad Crispin took a sip of iced tea. He crossed his ankle on his knee. Even his socks were yellow. “You are making a hard sale for your friend,” he said.

“Wrong,” Win said. “I would kill for my friend, but financially I owe him nothing. You, on the other hand, are my client, and thus I have a very serious fiscal responsibility with regard to you. Stripping it bare, you have asked me to increase your portfolio. I will suggest several investment sources to you. But this is the best recommendation I can make.”

Crispin turned to Myron. He looked him up and down, studying him hard. Myron almost brayed so he could examine his teeth. “He makes you sound awfully good,” Crispin said to Myron.

“I am good,” Myron said. “But I don’t want him to give you the wrong impression. I’m not quite as altruistic as Win might have made me sound. I don’t insist clients use him because I’m a swell guy. I know that having him handle my clients is a major plus. He improves the value of my services. He helps keep my clients happy. That’s what I get out of it. Yes, I insist on having clients heavily involved in the decision-making on money matters, but that’s as much to protect me as them.”

“How so?”

“Obviously you know something about managers or agents robbing athletes.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why so much of that occurs?”

Crispin shrugged. “Greed, I suppose.”

Myron tilted his head in a yes-and-no gesture. “The main culprit is apathy. An athlete’s lack of involvement. They get lazy. They decide it’s easier to fully trust their agent, and thats bad. Let the agent pay the bills, they say. Let the agent invest the money. That kind of thing. But that won’t ever happen at MB SportsReps. Not because I’m watching. Not because Win’s watching. But because you are watching.”

“I’m watching now,” Crispin said.

“You’re watching your money, true. I doubt you’re watching everything else.”

Crispin considered that for a moment. “I appreciate the talk,” he said, “but I think I’m okay on my own.”

Myron pointed at Tad Crispin’s head. “How much are you getting for that hat?” he asked.

Excuse me?

“You’re wearing a hat with no company logo on it,” Myron explained. “For a player of your ilk, that’s a loss of at least a quarter of a million dollars.”

Silence.

“But I’m going to be working with Zoom,” Crispin said.

“Did they purchase hat rights from you?”

He thought about it. “I don’t think so.”

“The front of the hat is a quarter million. We can also sell the sides if you want. They’ll go for less. Maybe we’ll total four hundred grand. Your shirt is another matter.”

“Now just wait one minute here,” Zuckerman interjected. “He’s going to be wearing Zoom shirts.”

“Fine, Norm,” Myron said. “But he’s allowed to wear logos. One on the chest, one on either sleeve.”

“Logos?”

“Anything. Coca-Cola maybe. IBM. Even Home Depot.”

“Logos on my shirt?”

“Yep. And what do you drink out there?”

“Drink? When I play?”

“Sure. I can probably get you a deal with Powerade or one of the soda companies. How about Poland Spring water? They might be good. And your golf bag. You have to negotiate a deal for your golf bag.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re a billboard, Tad. You’re on television. Lots of fans see you. Your hat, your shirt, your golf bag—those are all places to post ads.”

Zuckerman said, “Now hold on a second. He can’t just—”

A cell phone began to sound, but it never made it past the first ring. Myron’s finger reached the ringer and turned it off with a speed that would have made Wyatt Earp retire. Fast reflexes. They came in handy every once in a while.

Still, the brief sound had drawn the ire of nearby club members. Myron looked around. He was on the receiving end of several dagger-glares, including one from Win.

“Hurry around behind the clubhouse,” Win said pointedly. “Let no one see you.”

Myron gave a flippant salute and rushed out like a man with a suddenly collapsing bladder. When he reached a safe area near the parking lot, he answered the call.

“Hello.”

“Oh, God …” It was Linda Coldren. Her tone struck the marrow of his bone.

“What’s wrong?”

“He called again,” she said.

“Do you have it on tape?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be right ov—”

“No!” she shouted. “He’s watching the house.”

“You saw him?”

“No. But … Don’t come here. Please.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“The fax line in the basement. Oh God, Myron, you should have heard him.”

“Did the number come up on the Caller ID?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to me.”

She did. Myron took out a pen from his wallet and wrote the number down on an old Visa receipt.

“Are you alone?”

“Jack is right here with me.”

“Anybody else? What about Esme Fong?”

“She’s upstairs in the living room.”

“Okay,” Myron said. “I’ll need to hear the call.”

“Hold on. Jack is plugging the machine in now. I’ll put you on the speaker so you can hear.”

7

The tape player was snapped on. Myron heard the phone ringing first. The sound was surprisingly clear. Then he heard Jack Coldren: “Hello?”

“Who’s the chink bitch?”

The voice was very deep, very menacing, and definitely machine-altered. Male or female, young or old, it was anyone’s guess.

“I don’t know what—”

“You trying to fuck with me, you dumb son of a bitch? I’ll start sending you the fucking brat in little pieces.”

Jack Coldren said, “Please—”

“I told you not to contact anyone.”

“We haven’t.”

“Then tell me who that chink bitch is who just walked into your house.”

Silence.

“You think we’re stupid, Jack?”

“Of course not.”

“So who the fuck is she?”

“Her name is Esme Fong,” Coldren said quickly. “She works for a clothing company. She’s just here to set up an endorsement deal with my wife, that’s all.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s the truth, I swear.”

“I don’t know, Jack.…”

“I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Well, Jack, we’ll just see about that. This is gonna cost you.”

“What do you mean?”

“One hundred grand. Call it a penalty price.”

“For what?”

“Never you fucking mind. You want the kid alive? It’s gonna cost you one hundred grand now. That’s in—”

“Now hold on a second.” Coldren cleared his throat. Trying to gain some footing, some degree of control.

“Jack?”

“Yes?”

“You interrupt me again and I’m going to stick your kid’s dick in a vise.”

Silence.

“You get the money ready, Jack. One hundred grand. I’ll call you back and let you know what to do. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t fuck up, Jack. I enjoy hurting people.”

The brief silence was shattered by a sharp, sudden scream, a scream that jangled nerve endings and raised hackles. Myron’s hand tightened on the receiver.

The phone disconnected. Then a dial tone. Then nothing.

Linda Coldren took him off the speaker. “What are we going to do?”

“Call the FBI,” Myron said.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“I think it’s your best move.”

Jack Coldren said something in the background. Linda came back on the line. “Absolutely not. We just want to pay the ransom and get our son back.”

No point in arguing with them. “Sit tight. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

Myron disconnected the call and dialed another number. Lisa at New York Bell. She’d been a contact of theirs since the days he and Win had worked for the government.

“A Caller ID came up with a number in Philadelphia,” he said. “Can you find an address for me?”

“No problem,” Lisa said.

He gave her the number. People who watch too much television think this sort of thing takes a long time. Not anymore. Traces are instantaneous now. No “keep him on a little longer” or any of that stuff. The same is true when it comes to finding the location of a phone number. Any operator almost anywhere can plug the number into her computer or use one of those reverse directories, and whammo. Heck, you don’t even need an operator. Computer programs on CD-ROM and Web sites did the same thing.

“It’s a pay phone,” she said.

Not good news, but not unexpected either. “Do you know where?”

“The Grand Mercado Mall in Bala-Cynwyd.”

“A mall?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Where in the mall?”

“I have no idea. You think they list it ‘between Sears and Victoria’s Secret’?”

This made no sense. A mall? The kidnapper had dragged Chad Coldren to a mall and made him scream into a phone?

“Thanks, Lisa.”

He hung up and turned back toward the porch. Win was standing directly behind him. His arms were folded, his body, as always, completely relaxed.

“The kidnapper called,” Myron said.

“So I overheard.”

“I could use your help tracking this down.”

“No,” Win said.

“This isn’t about your mother, Win.”

Win’s face did not change, but something happened to his eyes. “Careful” was all he said.

Myron shook his head. “I have to go. Please make my excuses.”

“You came here to recruit clients,” Win said. “You claimed earlier that you agreed to help the Coldrens in the hopes of representing them.”

“So?”

“So you are excruciatingly close to landing the world’s top golf protégé. Reason dictates that you stay.”

“I can’t.”

Win unfolded his arms, shook his head.

“Will you do one thing for me? To let me know if I’m wasting time or not?”

Win remained still.

“You know how I told you about Chad using his ATM card?”

“Yes.”

“Get me the security videotape of the transaction,” he said. “It may tell me if this whole thing is just a hoax on Chad’s part.”

Win turned back to the porch. “I’ll see you at the house tonight.”

8

Myron parked at the mall and checked his watch. Seven forty-five. It had been a very long day and it was still relatively early. He entered through a Macy’s and immediately located one of those big table blueprints of the mall. Public telephones were marked with blue locators. Eleven altogether. Two at the south entrance downstairs. Two at the north entrance upstairs. Seven at the food court.

Malls were the great American geographical equalizer. Between shiny anchor stores and beneath excessively floodlit ceilings, Kansas equaled California, New Jersey equaled Nevada. No place was truly more Americana. Some of the stores inside might be different, but not by much. Athlete’s Foot or Foot Locker, Rite Aid or CVS, Williams-Sonoma or Pottery Barn, the Gap or Banana Republic or Old Navy (all, coincidentally, owned by the same people), Waldenbooks or B. Dalton, several anonymous shoe stores, a Radio Shack, a Victoria’s Secret, an art gallery with Gorman, McKnight, and Behrens, a museum store of some kind, two record stores—all wrapped up in some Orwellian, sleek-chrome neo-Roman Forum with chintzy fountains and overstated marble and dentist-office sculptures and unmanned information booths and fake ferns.

In front of a store selling electric organs and pianos sat an employee dressed in an ill-fitting navy suit and a sailor’s cap. He played “Muskrat Love” on an organ. Myron was tempted to ask him where Tenille was, but he refrained. Too obvious. Organ stores in malls. Who goes to the mall to buy an organ?

He hurried past the Limited or the Unlimited or the Severely Challenged or something like that. Then Jeans Plus or Jeans Minus or Shirts Only or Pants Only or Tank Top City or something like that. They all looked pretty much the same. They all employed lots of skinny, bored teenagers who stocked shelves with the enthusiasm of a eunuch at an orgy.

There were lots of high school kids draped about—just hanging, man—and looking very, er, rad. At the risk of sounding like a reverse racist, all the white boys looked the same to him. Baggie shorts. White T-shirts. Unlaced black hundred-dollar high-top sneakers. Baseball cap pulled low with the brim worked into a nifty curve, covering a summer buzzcut. Thin. Lanky. Long-limbed. Pale as a Goya portrait, even in the summer. Poor posture. Eyes that never looked directly at another human being. Uncomfortable eyes. Slightly scared eyes.

He passed a hair salon called Snip Away, which sounded more like a vasectomy clinic than a beauty parlor. The Snip Away beauticians were either reformed mall girls or guys named Mario whose fathers were named Sal. Two patrons sat in a window—one getting a perm, the other a bleach job. Who wanted that? Who wanted to sit in a window and have the whole world watch you get your hair done?

He took an escalator up past a plastic garden complete with plastic vines to the crowned jewel of the mall: the food court. It was fairly empty now, the dinner crowd long since gone. Food courts were the final outpost of the great American melting pot. Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Middle Eastern (or Greek), a deli, a chicken place, one fast food chain like McDonald’s (which had the biggest crowd), a frozen yogurt place, and then a few strange offshoots—the ones started by people who dream of franchising themselves into becoming the next Ray Kroc. Ethiopian Ecstasy. Sven’s Swedish Meatballs. Curry Up and Eat.

Myron checked for numbers on the seven phones. All had been whited out. Not surprising, the way people abused them nowadays. No problemo either. He took out his cellular phone and punched in the number from the Caller ID. A phone starting ringing immediately.

Bingo.

The one on the far right. Myron picked it up to make sure. “Hello?” he said. He heard the hello in his cellular phone. Then he said to himself through the cellular, “Hello, Myron, nice to hear from you.” He decided to stop talking to himself. Too early in the evening to be this goofy.

He hung up the phone and looked around. A group of mall girls inhabited a table not far away. They sat in a closed circle with the protectiveness of coyotes during mating season.

Of the food stands, Sven’s Swedish Meatballs had the best view of the phone. Myron approached. Two men worked the booth. They both had dark hair and dark skin and Saddam Hussein mustaches. One’s name tag read Mustafa. The other Achmed.

“Which one of you is Sven?” he asked.

No smiles.

Myron asked about the phone. Mustafa and Achmed were less than helpful. Mustafa snapped that he worked for a living, and didn’t watch phones. Achmed gestured and cursed him in a foreign tongue.

“I’m not much of a linguist,” Myron said, “but that didn’t sound like Swedish.”

Death glares.

“Bye now. I’ll be sure to tell all my friends.”

Myron turned toward the table of mall girls. They all quickly looked down, like rats scurrying in the glare of a flashlight. He stepped toward them. Their eyes darted to and fro with what they must have thought were surreptitious glances. He heard a low cacophony of “ohmygod!ohmygod!ohmygod!he’scomingover!”

Myron stopped directly at their table. There were four girls. Or maybe five or even six. Hard to say. They all seemed to blend into one another, into one hazy indistinct mesh of hair and black lipstick and Fu Manchu–length fingernails and earrings and nose rings and cigarette smoke and too-tight halter tops and bare midriffs and popping gum.

The one sitting in the middle looked up first. She had hair like Elsa Lancaster in The Bride of Frankenstein and what looked like a studded dog collar around her neck. The other faces followed suit.

“Like, hi,” Elsa said.

Myron tried his most gentle, crooked smile. Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

The girls all looked at one another. A few giggles escaped. Myron felt his face redden, though he wasn’t sure why. They elbowed one another. No one answered. Myron proceeded.

“How long have you been sitting here?” he asked.

“Is this, like, one of those mall surveys?”

“No,” Myron said.

“Good. Those are, like, so lame, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s like, get away from me already, Mr. Polyester Pants, you know?”

Myron said “uh-huh” again. “Do you remember how long you’ve been sitting here?”

“Nah. Amber, you know?”

“Like, we went to the Gap at four.”

“Right, the Gap. Fab sale.”

“Ultra sale. Love that blouse you bought, Trish.”

“Isn’t it, like, the total package, Mindy?”

“Totally. Ultra.”

Myron said, “It’s almost eight now. Have you been here for the past hour?”

“Like, hello, anybody home? At least.”

“This is, like, our spot, you know?”

“No one else, like, sits here.”

“Except that one time when those gross lame-os tried to move in.”

“But, like, whoa, don’t even go there, ’kay?”

They stopped and looked at Myron. He figured the answer to his prior question was yes, so he plowed ahead. “Have you seen anybody use that pay phone?”

“Are you, like, a cop or something?”

“As if.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“He’s too cute to be a cop.”

“Oh, right, like Jimmy Smits isn’t cute.”

“That’s, like, TV, dumb wad. This is real life. Cops aren’t cute in real life.”

“Oh, right, like Brad isn’t totally cute? You, like, love him, remember?”

“As if. And he’s not a cop. He’s, like, some rent-a-uniform at Florsheim.”

“But he’s so hot.”

“Totally.”

“Ultra buff.”

“He likes Shari.”

“Eeeuw. Shari?”

“I, like, hate her, you know?”

“Me too. Like, does she only shop at Sluts ‘R’ Us, or what?”

“Totally.”

“It’s, like, ‘Hello, Dial-a-Disease, this is Shari speaking.’ ”

Giggles.

Myron looked for an interpreter. “I’m not a cop,” he said.

“Told you.”

“As if.”

“But,” Myron said, “I am dealing with something very important. Life-and-death. I need to know if you remember anyone using that phone—the one on the far right—forty-five minutes ago.”

“Whoa!” The one called Amber pushed her chair back. “Clear out, because I’m, like, gonna barf for days, you know?”

“Like, Crusty the Clown.”

“He was, like, so gross!”

“Totally gross.”

“Totally.”

“He, like, winked at Amber!”

“As if!”

“Totally eeeuw!”

“Gag city.”

“Bet that slut Shari would have Frenched him.”

“At least.”

Giggles.

Myron said, “You saw somebody?”

“Serious groatie.”

“Totally crusty.”

“He was, like, hello, ever wash your hair?”

“Like, hello, buy your cologne at the local Gas-N-Go?”

More giggles.

Myron said, “Can you describe him to me?”

“Blue jeans from, like, ‘Attention, Kmart shoppers.’ ”

“Work boots. Definitely not Timberland.”

“He was, like, so skinhead wanna-be, you know?”

Myron said, “Skinhead wanna-be?”

“Like, a shaved head. Skanky beard. Tattoo of that thing on his arm.”

“That thing?” Myron tried.

“You know, that tattoo.” She kind of drew something in the air with her finger. “It kinda looks like a funny cross from, like, the old days.”

Myron said, “You mean a swastika?”

“Like, whatever. Do I look like a history major?”

“Like, how old was he?” Like. He’d said like. If he stayed here much longer, he’d end up getting some part of him pierced. Way.

“Old.”

“Grampa-ville.”

“Like, at least twenty.”

“Height?” Myron asked. “Weight?”

“Six feet.”

“Yeah, like six feet.”

“Bony.”

“Very.”

“Like, no ass at all.”

“None.”

“Was anybody with him?” Myron asked.

“As if.”

“Him?”

“No way.”

“Who would be with a skank like that?”

“Just him by that phone for like half an hour.”

“He wanted Mindy.”

“Did not!”

“Wait a second,” Myron said. “He was there for half an hour?”

“Not that long.”

“Seemed a long time.”

“Maybe like fifteen minutes. Amber, like, always exaggerates.”

“Like, fuck you, Trish, all right? Just fuck you.”

“Anything else?” Myron asked.

“Beeper.”

“Right, beeper. Like anybody would ever call that skank.”

“Held it right up to the phone, too.”

Probably not a beeper. Probably a microcassette player. That would explain the scream. Or a voice changer. They also came in a small box.

He thanked the girls and handed out business cards that listed his cellular phone number. One of the girls actually read it. She made a face.

“Like, your name is really Myron?”

“Yes.”

They all just stopped and looked at him.

“I know,” Myron said. “Like, ultra lame-o.”

He was heading back to his car when a nagging thought suddenly resurfaced. The kidnapper on the phone had mentioned a “chink bitch.” Somehow he had known about Esme Fong arriving at the house. The question was, how?

There were two possibilities. One, they had a bug in the house.

Not likely. If the Coldren residence was bugged or under some kind of electronic surveillance, the kidnapper would also have known about Myron’s involvement.

Two, one of them was watching the house.

That seemed most logical. Myron thought a moment. If someone had been watching the house only an hour or so ago, it was fair to assume that they were still there, still hiding behind a bush or up a tree or something. If Myron could locate the person surreptitiously, he might be able to follow them back to Chad Coldren.

Was it worth the risk?

Like, totally.

9

Ten o’clock.

Myron used Win’s name again and parked in Merion’s lot. He checked for Win’s Jaguar, but it was nowhere to be seen. He parked and checked for guards. No one. They’d all been stationed at the front entrance. Made things easier.

He quickly stepped over the white rope used to hold back the galley and started crossing the golf course. It was dark now, but the lights from the houses across the way provided enough illumination to cross. For all its fame, Merion was a tiny course. From the parking lot to Golf House Road, across two fairways, was less than a hundred yards.

Myron trudged forward. Humidity hung in the air in a heavy blanket of beads. Myron’s shirt began to feel sticky. The crickets were incessant and plenteous, their swarming tune as monotonous as a Mariah Carey CD, though not quite as grating. The grass tickled Myron’s sockless ankles.

Despite his natural aversion to golf, Myron still felt the appropriate sense of awe, as if he were trespassing over sacred ground. Ghosts breathed in the night, the same way they breathed at any sight that had borne legends. Myron remembered once standing on the parquet floor at Boston Garden when no one else was there. It was a week after he had been picked by the Celtics in the first round of the NBA draft. Clip Arnstein, the Celtics’ fabled general manager, had introduced him to the press earlier that day. It had been enormous fun. Everybody had been laughing and smiling and calling Myron the next Larry Bird. That night, as he stood alone in the famed halls of the Garden, the championship flags hanging from the rafters actually seemed to sway in the still air, beckoning him forward and whispering tales of the past and promises of what was to come.

Myron never played a game on that parquet floor.

He slowed as he reached Golf House Road and stepped over the white rope. Then he ducked behind a tree. This would not be easy. Then again, it would not be easy for his quarry either. Neighborhoods like this noted anything suspicious. Like a parked car where it didn’t belong. That had been why Myron had parked in the Merion lot. Had the kidnapper done likewise? Or was his car out on the street? Or had someone dropped him off?

He kept low and darted to another tree. He looked, he assumed, rather doofy—a guy six feet four inches tall and comfortably over two hundred pounds darting between bushes like something left on the cutting room floor of The Dirty Dozen.

But what choice did he have?

He couldn’t just casually walk down the street. The kidnapper might spot him. His whole plan relied on the fact that he could spot the kidnapper before the kidnapper spotted him. How to do this? He really did not have a clue. The best he could come up with was to keep circling closer and closer to the Coldren house, looking out for, er, uh, something.

He scanned the surroundings—for what, he wasn’t sure. Someplace for a kidnapper to use as a lookout spot, he guessed. A safe place to hide, maybe, or a perch where a man with binoculars could survey the scene. Nothing. The night was absolutely windless and still.

He circled the block, dashing haphazardly from one bush to another, feeling now very much like John Belushi breaking into Dean Wormer’s office in Animal House.

Animal House and The Dirty Dozen. Myron watched too many movies.

As he continued to spiral closer to the Coldrens’ residence, Myron realized that there was probably a good chance that he’d be the “spottee” rather than the “spotter.” He tried to hide himself better, to concentrate on making himself become part of the night, to blend in to the background and become invisible.

Myron Bolitar, Mutant Ninja Warrior.

Lights twinkled from spacious homes of stone and black shutters. They were all imposing and rather beautiful with a tutelary, stay-away coziness about them. Solid homes. The third-little-piggie homes. Settled and staying and proud homes.

He was getting very close to the Coldren house now. Still nothing—not even a single car parked on the roads. Sweat coated him like syrup on a stack of pancakes. God, he wanted to take a shower. He hunched down and watched the house.

Now what?

Wait. Be on the lookout for movement of some kind. Surveillance and the like was not Myron’s forte. Win usually handled that kind of stuff. He had the body control and the patience. Myron was already getting fidgety. He wished he’d brought a magazine or something to read.

The three minutes of monotony was broken when the front door opened. Myron sat up. Esme Fong and Linda Coldren appeared in the door frame. They said their good-byes. Esme gave Linda the firm handshake and headed to her car. Linda Coldren shut the front door. Esme Fong started her car and left.

A thrill a second, this surveillance stuff.

Myron settled back behind a shrub. There were lots of shrubs around here. Everywhere one looked, there were shrubs of various sizes and shapes and purposes. Rich blue bloods must really like shrubs, Myron decided. He wondered if they had had any on the Mayflower.

His legs were beginning to cramp from all this crouching. He straightened them out one at a time. His bad knee, the one that ended his basketball career, began to throb. Enough. He was hot and sticky and in pain. Time to get out of here.

Then he heard a sound.

It seemed to be coming from the back door. He sighed, creaked to his feet, and circled. He found yet another comfy shrub and hid behind it. He peered out.

Jack Coldren was in the backyard with his caddie, Diane Hoffman. Jack held a golf club in his hands, but he wasn’t hitting. He was talking with Diane Hoffman. Animatedly. Diane Hoffman was talking back. Equally animated. Neither one of them seemed very pleased. Myron could not hear them, but they were both gesturing like mad.

An argument. A rather heated argument.

Hmm.

Of course, there probably was an innocent explanation. Caddies and players argue all the time, Myron guessed. He remembered reading how Seve Ballesteros, the Spanish former Wunderkind, was always fighting with his caddie. Bound to happen. Routine stuff, a caddie and a pro having a little tiff, especially during such a pressure-filled tournament as the U.S. Open.

But the timing was curious.

Think about it a second. A man gets a terrifying call from a kidnapper. He hears his son scream in apparent fright or pain. Then, a couple of hours later, he is in his backyard arguing about his backswing with his caddie.

Did that make sense?

Myron decided to move closer, but there was no straight path. Shrubs again, like tackle dummies at a football practice. He’d have to move to the side of the house and circle in behind them. He made a quick bolt to his left and risked another glance. The heated argument continued. Diane Hoffman took a step closer to Jack.

Then she slapped him in the face.

The sound sliced through the night like a scythe. Myron froze. Diane Hoffman shouted something. Myron heard the word bastard, but nothing else. Diane flicked her cigarette at Jack’s feet and stormed off. Jack looked down, shook his head slowly, and went back inside.

Well, well, Myron thought. Must have been some trouble with that backswing.

Myron stayed behind the shrub. He heard a car start in the driveway. Diane Hoffman’s, he assumed. For a moment, he wondered if she had a role in this. Obviously she had been in the house. Could she be the mysterious lookout? He leaned back and considered the possibility. The idea was just starting to soak in and settle when Myron spotted the man.

Or at least he assumed it was a man. It was hard to tell from where he was crouched. Myron could not believe what he was seeing. He had been wrong. Dead wrong. The perpetrator hadn’t been hiding in the bushes or anything like that. Myron watched now in silence as someone dressed completely in black climbed out an upper-floor window. More specifically—if memory didn’t fail him—Chad Coldren’s bedroom window.

Hello there.

Myron ducked down. Now what? He needed a plan. Yes, a plan. Good thinking. But what plan? Did he grab the perp now? No. Better to follow him. Maybe he’d lead him back to Chad Coldren. That would be nice.

He took another peek out. The black-clad figure had scaled down a white lattice fence with entwined ivy. He jumped the last few feet. As soon as he hit the ground, he sprinted away.

Great.

Myron followed, trying to stay as far behind the figure as possible. The figure, however, was running. This made following silently rather difficult. But Myron kept back. Didn’t want to risk being seen. Besides, chances were good that the perpetrator had brought a car or was getting picked up by someone. These streets barely had any traffic. Myron would be bound to hear an engine.

But then what?

What would Myron do when the perp got to the car? Run back to get his own? No, that wouldn’t work. Follow a car on foot? Er, not likely. So what exactly was he going to do?

Good question.

He wished Win were here.

The perp kept running. And running. Myron was starting to suck air. Jesus, who the hell was he chasing anyway, Frank Shorter? Another quarter mile passed before the perp abruptly veered to the right and out of view. The turn was so sudden that for a moment Myron wondered if he’d been spotted. Impossible. He was too far back and his quarry had not so much as glanced over his shoulder.

Myron tried to hurry a bit, but the road was gravelly. Running silently would be impossible. Still, he had to make up ground. He ran high atop his tiptoes, looking not unlike Baryshnikov with dysentery. He prayed nobody would see him.

He reached the turn. The name of the street was Green Acres Road. Green Acres. The old TV show theme song started in his head, like someone had pressed buttons on a jukebox. He couldn’t stop it. Eddie Albert rode a tractor. Eva Gabor opened boxes in a Manhattan penthouse. Sam Drucker waved from behind the counter of his general store. Mr. Haney pulled his suspenders with both thumbs. Arnold the pig snorted.

Man, the humidity was definitely getting to him.

Myron wheeled to the right and looked ahead.

Nothing.

Green Acres was a short cul-de-sac with maybe five homes. Fabulous homes, or so Myron assumed. Towering shrub walls—again with the shrubs—lined either side of the street. Locked gates were on the driveways, the kind that worked by remote control or by pushing a combination in a keypad. Myron stopped and looked down the road.

So where was our boy?

He felt his pulse quicken. No sign of him. The only escape route was through the woods between two houses in the cul-de-sac. He must have gone in there, Myron surmised—if, that is, he was trying to escape and not, say, hide in the bushes. He might, after all, have spotted Myron. He might have decided to duck down somewhere and hide. Hide and then pounce when Myron walked by.

These were not comforting thoughts.

Now what?

He licked the sweat off his upper lip. His mouth felt terribly dry. He could almost hear himself sweat.

Suck it up, Myron, he told himself. He was six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds. A big guy. He was also a black belt in tae kwon do and a well-trained fighter. He could fend off any attack.

Unless the guy was armed.

True. Let’s face it. Fight training and experience were helpful, but they did not make one bullet-proof. Not even Win. Of course, Win wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get himself into this mess. Myron carried a weapon only when he thought it was absolutely necessary. Win, on the other hand, carried at least two guns and one bladed instrument at all times. Third world countries should be as well armed as Win.

So what to do?

He looked left and right, but there was no place much for anybody to hide. The shrub walls were thick and fully impenetrable. That left only the woods at the end of the road. But there were no lights down that way and the woods looked dense and forbidding.

Should he go in?

No. That would be pointless at best. He had no idea how big the woods were, what direction to head in, nothing. The odds of finding the perpetrator were frighteningly remote. Myron’s best hope was that the perp was just hiding for a while, waiting for Myron to clear out.

Clear out. That sounded like a plan.

Myron moved back to the end of Green Acres. He turned left, traveled a couple of hundred yards, and settled behind yet another shrub. He and shrubs were on a first-name basis by now. This one he named Frank.

He waited an hour. No one appeared.

Great.

He finally stood up, said good-bye to Frank, and headed back to the car. The perpetrator must have escaped through the woods. That meant that he had planned an escape route or, more probably, he knew the area well. Could mean that it was Chad Coldren. Or it could mean that the kidnappers knew what they were doing. And if that was so, it meant there was a good chance that they now knew about Myron’s involvement and the fact that the Coldrens had disobeyed them.

Myron hoped like hell it was just a hoax. But if it wasn’t, if this was indeed a real kidnapping, he wondered about repercussions. He wondered how the kidnappers would react to what he had done. And as he continued on his way, Myron remembered their previous phone call and the harrowing, flesh-creeping sound of Chad Coldren’s scream.

10

“Meanwhile, back at stately Wayne Manor …”

That voice-over from the TV Batman always came to Myron when he reached the steely gates of the Lockwood estate. In reality Win’s family home looked very little like Bruce Wayne’s house, though it did offer up the same aura. A tremendous serpentine driveway wound to an imposing stone mansion on the hill. There was grass, lots of it, all the blades kept at a consistently ideal length, like a politician’s hair in an election year. There were also lush gardens and hills and a swimming pool, a pond, a tennis court, horse stables, and a horse obstacle course of some kind.

All in all, the Lockwood estate was very “stately” and worthy of the term “manor,” whatever that meant.

Myron and Win were staying at the guest house—or as Win’s father liked to call it, “the cottage.” Exposed beams, hardwood floors, fireplace, new kitchen with a big island in the middle, pool room—not to mention five bedrooms, four and half baths. Some cottage.

Myron tried to sort through what was happening, but all he came up with was a series of paradoxes, a whole lot of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Motive, for example. On the one hand, it might make sense to kidnap Chad Coldren to throw off Jack Coldren. But Chad had been missing since before the tournament, which meant the kidnapper was either very cautious or very prophetic. On the other hand, the kidnapper had asked for one hundred grand, which pointed to a simple case of kidnapping for money. A hundred grand was a nice, tidy sum—a little low for a kidnapping, but not bad for a few days’ work.

But if this was merely a kidnapping to extort mucho dinero, the timing was curious. Why now? Why during the one time a year the U.S. Open was played? More than that, why kidnap Chad during the one time in the last twenty-three years the Open was being played at Merion—the one time in almost a quarter of a century that Jack Coldren had a chance to revisit and redeem his greatest failing?

Seemed like a hell of a coincidence.

That brought it back to a hoax and a scenario that went something like this: Chad Coldren disappears before the tournament to screw around with his dad’s mind. When that doesn’t work—when, to the contrary, Dad starts winning—he ups the ante and fakes his own kidnapping. Taking it a step further, one could assume that it had been Chad Coldren who had been climbing out of his own window. Who better? Chad Coldren knew the area. Chad Coldren probably knew how to go through those woods. Or maybe he was hiding out at a friend’s house who lived on Green Acres Road. Whatever.

It added up. It made sense.

All of this assumed, of course, that Chad truly disliked his father. Was there evidence of that? Myron thought so. Start off with the fact that Chad was sixteen years old. Not an easy age. Weak evidence for sure, but worth keeping in mind. Second—and far, far more important—Jack Coldren was an absent father. No athlete is away from home as much as a golfer. Not basketball players or football players or baseball players or hockey players. The only ones who come close are tennis players. In both tennis and golf, tournaments are taking place almost all year—there is little so-called off season—and there is no such thing as a home game. If you were lucky you hit your home course once a year.

Lastly—and perhaps most crucial of all—Chad had been gone for two days without raising eyebrows. Forget Linda Coldren’s discourse on responsible children and open child-raising. The only rational explanation for their nonchalance was that this had happened before, or at the very least, was not unexpected.

But there were problems with the hoax scenario too.

For example, how did Mr. Total Grunge from the mall fit in?

There was indeed the rub. What role was the Crusty Nazi playing in all this? Did Chad Coldren have an accomplice? Possibly, but that really didn’t fit in well with a revenge scenario. If Chad was indeed behind all this, Myron doubted that the preppy golfer would join forces with a “skinhead wanna-be,” complete with a swastika tattoo.

So where did that leave Myron?

Baffled.

As Myron pulled up to the guest house, he felt his heart constrict. Win’s Jag was there. But so was a green Chevy Nova.

Oh, Christ.

Myron got out of the car slowly. He checked the license plate on the Nova. Unfamiliar. As he expected. He swallowed and moved away.

He opened the cottage’s front door and welcomed the sudden onslaught of air-conditioning. The lights were out. For a moment he just stood in the foyer, eyes closed, the cool air tingling his skin. An enormous grandfather clock ticked.

Myron opened his eyes and flicked on a light.

“Good evening.”

He pivoted to his right. Win was seated in a high-back leather chair by the fireplace. He cupped a brandy snifter in his hand.

“You were sitting in the dark?” Myron asked.

“Yes.”

Myron frowned. “A bit theatrical, don’t you think?”

Win switched on a nearby lamp. His face was a tad rosy from the brandy. “Care to join me?”

“Sure. I’ll be right back.”

Myron grabbed a cold Yoo-Hoo from the refrigerator and sat on the couch across from his friend. He shook the can and popped it open. They drank in silence for several minutes. The clock ticked. Long shadows snaked across the floor in thin, almost smoky tendrils. Too bad it was summertime. This was the kind of setting that begged for a roaring fire and maybe some howling wind. An air conditioner just didn’t cut it.

Myron was just getting comfortable when he heard a toilet flush. He looked a question at Win.

“I am not alone,” Win said.

“Oh.” Myron adjusted himself on the couch. “A woman?”

“Your gifts,” Win said. “They never cease to amaze.”

“Anybody I know?” Myron asked.

Win shook his head. “Not even somebody I know.”

The norm. Myron looked steadily at his friend. “You want to talk about this?”

“No.”

“I’m here if you do.”

“Yes, I see that.” Win swished around the drink in the snifter. He finished it in one gulp and reached for the crystal decanter. There was a slight slur in his speech. Myron tried to remember the last time he had seen Win the vegetarian, the master of several martial arts, the transcendental meditator, the man so at ease and in focus with his surroundings, have too much to drink.

It had been a very long time.

“I have a golf question for you,” Myron said.

Win nodded for him to proceed.

“Do you think Jack Coldren can hang on to this lead?”

Win poured the brandy. “Jack will win,” he said.

“You sound pretty sure.”

“I am sure.”

“Why?”

Win raised the glass to his mouth and looked over the rim. “I saw his eyes.”

Myron made a face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He has it back. The look in the eyes.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Perhaps I am. But let me ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“What separates the great athletes from the very good? The legend from the journeyman? Simply put, what makes winners?”

“Talent,” Myron said. “Practice. Skill.”

Win gave a slight shake of the head. “You know better than that.”

“I do?”

“Yes. Many have talent. Many practice. There is more to the art of creating a true winner.”

“This look-in-the-eye thing?”

“Yes.”

Myron winced. “You’re not going to start singing ‘Eye of the Tiger,’ are you?”

Win cocked his head. “Who sang that song?”

The continuing trivia game. Win knew the answer, of course. “It was in Rocky II, right?”

“Rocky III,” Win corrected.

“That the one with Mr. T?”

Win nodded. “Who played …?” he prompted.

“Clubber Lange.”

“Very good. Now who sang the song?”

“I don’t remember.”

“The name of the group was Survivor,” Win said. “Ironic name when you think of how quickly they vanished, no?”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said. “So what is this great divider, Win? What makes a winner?”

Win took another swish and sip. “Wanting,” he said.

“Wanting?”

“Hunger.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The answer isn’t surprising,” Win said. “Look in Joe DiMaggio’s eyes. Or Larry Bird’s. Or Michael Jordan’s. Look at pictures of John McEnroe in his prime, or Chris Evert. Look at Linda Coldren.” He stopped. “Look in the mirror.”

“The mirror? I have this?”

“When you were on the court,” Win said slowly “your eyes were barely sane.”

They fell into silence. Myron took a swig of Yoo-Hoo. The cold aluminum felt good in his hand. “You make the whole ‘wanting’ thing sound like it’s all foreign to you,” Myron said.

“It is.”

“Bull.”

“I am a good golfer,” Win said. “Correction: I am a very good golfer. I practiced quite a bit in my youth. I have even won my share of tournaments. But I never wanted it bad enough to move up to that next level.”

“I’ve seen you in the ring,” Myron countered. “In martial arts tournaments. You seemed plenty ‘wanting’ to me.”

“That is very different,” Win said.

“How so?”

“I do not view a martial arts tournament as a sporting contest, whereby the winner brings home a chintzy trophy and brags to colleagues and friends—nor do I view it as a competition that will lead to some sort of empty emotion that the insecure among us perceive as glory. Fighting is not a sport to me. It’s about survival. If I could lose in there”—he motioned to an imaginary ring—“I could lose in the real world.” Win looked up in the air. “But …” His voice drifted off.

“But?” Myron repeated.

“But you may be on to something.”

“Oh?”

Win steepled his fingers. “You see, fighting is life-and-death to me. That’s how I treat it. But the athletes we’ve been talking about take it a step further. Every competition, even the most banal, is viewed by them as life-and-death—and losing is death.”

Myron nodded. He didn’t buy it, but what the hell. Keep him talking. “I don’t get something,” he said. “If Jack has this special ‘wanting,’ why hasn’t he ever won a professional tournament?”

“He lost it.”

“The wanting?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Twenty-three years ago.”

“During the Open?”

“Yes,” Win said again. “Most athletes lose it in a slow burnout. They grow weary or they win enough to quench whatever inferno rages in their bellies. But that was not the case with Jack. His fire was extinguished in one crisp, cold gust. You could almost see it. Twenty-three years ago. The sixteenth hole. The ball landing in the stone quarry. His eyes have never been the same.”

“Until now,” Myron added.

“Until now,” Win agreed. “It took him twenty-three years, but he stoked the flames back to life.”

They both drank. Win sipped. Myron guzzled. The chocolaty coldness felt wonderful sliding down his throat. “How long have you known Jack?” Myron asked.

“I met him when I was six years old. He was fifteen.”

“Did he have the ‘wanting’ back then?”

Win smiled at the ceiling. “He would sooner carve out his own kidney with a grapefruit spoon than lose to someone on the golf course.” He lowered his gaze to Myron. “Did Jack Coldren have the ‘wanting’? He was the pure definition.”

“Sounds like you admired him.”

“I did.”

“You don’t anymore?”

“No.”

“What made you change?”

“I grew up.”

“Wow.” Myron took another swig of Yoo-Hoo. “That’s heavy.”

Win chuckled. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

Win put down the brandy snifter. He leaned forward very slowly. “What is so great about winning?”

“Pardon?”

“People love a winner. They look up to him. They admire—nay, revere—him. They use terms like hero and courage and perseverance to describe him. They want to be near him and touch him. They want to be like him.”

Win spread his hands. “But why? What about the winner do we want to emulate? His ability to blind himself to anything but the pursuit of empty aggrandizement? His ego-inflating obsession with wearing a hunk of metal around his neck? His willingness to sacrifice anything, including people, in order to best another human being on a lump of AstroTurf for a cheesy statuette?” He looked up at Myron, his always serene face suddenly lost. “Why do we applaud this selfishness, this self-love?”

“Competitive drive isn’t a bad thing, Win. You’re talking about extremes.”

“But it is the extremists we admire most. By its nature, what you call ‘competitive drive’ leads to extremism and destroys all in its path.”

“You’re being simplistic, Win.”

“It is simple, my friend.”

They both settled back. Myron stared up at the exposed beams. After some time, he said, “You have it wrong.”

“How so?”

Myron wondered how to explain it. “When I played basketball,” he began, “I mean, when I really got into it and reached these levels you’re talking about—I barely thought about the score. I barely thought about my opponent or about beating somebody. I was alone. I was in the zone. This is going to sound stupid, but playing at the top of my game was almost Zen-like.”

Win nodded. “And when did you feel this way?”

“Pardon?”

“When did you feel your most—to use your word—Zen?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Was it at practice? No. Was it during an unimportant game or when your team was up by thirty points? No. What brought you to this sweat-drenched state of Nirvana, my friend, was competition. The desire—the naked need—to defeat a top-level opponent.”

Myron opened his mouth to counter. Then he stopped. Exhaustion was starting to take over. “I’m not sure I have an answer to that,” he said. “At the end of the day, I like to win. I don’t know why. I like ice cream too. I don’t know why either.”

Win frowned. “Impressive simile,” he said flatly.

“Hey, it’s late.”

Myron heard a car pull up front. A young blonde entered the room and smiled. Win smiled back. She bent down and kissed him. Win had no problem with that. Win was never outwardly rude to his dates. He was not the type to rush them out. He had no problem with them staying the night, if it made them happier. Some might mistake this for kindness or a tender spot in the soul. They’d be wrong. Win let them stay because they meant so little to him. They could never reach him. They could never touch him. So why not let them stay?

“That’s my taxi,” the blonde said.

Win’s smile was blank.

“I had fun,” she said.

Not even a blink.

“You can reach me through Amanda if you want”—she looked at Myron, then back at Win—“well, you know.”

“Yes,” Win said. “I know.”

The young woman offered up an uncomfortable smile and left.

Myron watched, trying to keep his face from registering shock. A prostitute! Christ, she was a prostitute! He knew that Win had used them in the past—in the mid-eighties, he used to order in Chinese food from Hunan Grill and Asian prostitutes from the Noble House bordello for what he called “Chinese Night”—but to still partake, in this day and age?

Then Myron remembered the Chevy Nova and his whole body went cold.

He turned to his friend. They looked at each other. Neither one of them said anything.

“Moralizing,” Win said. “How nice.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Indeed.” Win stood.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

Myron felt his heart pound. “Mind if I go with you?”

“Yes.”

“What car are you taking?”

Win did not bother responding. “Good night, Myron.”

Myron’s mind raced for solutions, but he knew it was hopeless. Win was going. There was no way to stop him.

Win stopped at the door and turned back to him. “One question, if I may.”

Myron nodded, unable to speak.

“Was Linda Coldren the one who first contacted you?” Win asked.

“No,” Myron said.

“Then who?”

“Your uncle Bucky.”

Win arched an eyebrow. “And who suggested us to Bucky?”

Myron looked back at Win steadily, but he couldn’t stop shaking. Win nodded and turned back to the door.

“Win?”

“Go to sleep, Myron.”

11

Myron did not go to sleep. He didn’t even bother trying.

He sat in Win’s chair and tried to read, but the words never registered. He was exhausted. He leaned back against the rich leather and waited. Hours passed. Disjointed images of Win’s potential handiwork wrested free in a heavy spray of dark crimson. Myron closed his eyes and tried to ride it out.

At 3:30 A.M., Myron heard a car pull up. The ignition died. A key clicked in the door and then it swung open. Win stepped inside and looked at Myron with nary a trace of emotion.

“Good night,” Win said.

He walked away. Myron heard the bedroom door close and let loose a held breath. Fine, he thought. He lifted himself into a standing position and made his way to his bedroom. He crawled under the sheets, but sleep still would not come. Black, opaque fear fluttered in his stomach. He had just begun to slide into true REM sleep when the bedroom door flew open.

“You’re still asleep?” a familiar voice asked.

Myron managed to tear his eyes open. He was used to Esperanza Diaz barging into his office without knocking; he wasn’t used to her doing it where he slept.

“What time is it?” he croaked.

“Six-thirty.”

“In the morning?”

Esperanza gave him one of her patented glares, the one road crews tried to hire out to raze large rock formations. With one finger she tucked a few spare strands of her raven locks behind her ear. Her shimmering dark skin made you think of a Mediterranean cruise by moonlight, of clear waters and puffy-sleeved peasant blouses and olive groves.

“How did you get here?” he asked.

“Amtrak red-eye,” she said.

Myron was still groggy. “Then what did you do? Catch a cab?”

“What are you, a travel agent? Yes, I took a cab.”

“Just asking.”

“The idiot driver asked me for the address three times. Guess he’s not used to taking Hispanics into this neighborhood.”

Myron shrugged. “Probably thought you were a domestic,” he said.

“In these shoes?” She lifted her foot so he could see.

“Very nice.” Myron adjusted himself in the bed, his body still craving sleep. “Not to belabor the point, but what exactly are you doing here?”

“I got some information on the old caddie.”

“Lloyd Rennart?”

Esperanza nodded. “He’s dead.”

“Oh.” Dead. As in dead end. Not that it had been much of a beginning. “You could have just called.”

“There’s more.”

“Oh?”

“The circumstances surrounding his death are”—she stopped, bit her lower lip—“fuzzy.”

Myron sat up a bit. “Fuzzy?”

“Lloyd Rennart apparently committed suicide eight months ago.”

“How?”

“That’s the fuzzy part. He and his wife were on vacation in a mountain range in Peru. He woke up one morning, wrote a brief note, then he jumped off a cliff of some kind.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I haven’t been able to get too many details yet. The Philadelphia Daily News just had a brief story on it.” There was a hint of a smile. “But according to the article, the body had not yet been located.”

Myron was starting to wake up in a big hurry. “What?”

“Apparently Lloyd Rennart took the plunge in a remote crevasse with no access. They may have located the body by now, but I couldn’t find a follow-up article. None of the local papers carried an obituary.”

Myron shook his head. No body. The questions that sprang to mind were obvious: Could Lloyd Rennart still be alive? Did he fake his own death in order to plot out his revenge? Seemed a tad out there, but you never know. If he had, why would he have waited twenty-three years? True, the U.S. Open was back at Merion. True, that could make old wounds resurface. But still. “Weird,” he said. He looked up at her. “You could have told me all this on the phone. You didn’t have to come all the way down here.”

“What the hell is the big deal?” Esperanza snapped. “I wanted to get out of the city for the weekend. I thought seeing the Open would be fun. You mind?”

“I was just asking.”

“You’re so nosy sometimes.”

“Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Forget I asked.”

“Forgotten,” she said. “You want to fill me in on what’s going on?”

He told her about the Crusty Nazi at the mall and about losing the black-clad perpetrator.

When he finished, Esperanza shook her head. “Jesus,” she said. “Without Win, you’re hopeless.”

Ms. Morale Booster.

“Speaking of Win,” Myron said, “don’t talk to him about the case.”

“Why?”

“He’s reacting badly.”

She watched him closely. “How badly?”

“He went night visiting.”

Silence.

“I thought he stopped doing that,” she said.

“I thought so too.”

“Are you sure?”

“There was a Chevy parked in the driveway,” Myron said. “He took it out of here last night and didn’t get back till three-thirty.”

Silence. Win stored a bunch of old, unregistered Chevys. Disposable cars, he called them. Completely untraceable.

Esperanza’s voice was soft. “You can’t have it both ways, Myron.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can’t ask Win to do it when it suits you, then get pissed off when he does it on his own.”

“I never ask him to play vigilante.”

“Yeah, you do. You involve him in violence. When it suits your needs, you unleash him. Like he’s a weapon of some kind.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It is like that,” she said. “It is exactly like that. When Win goes out on these night errands, he doesn’t hurt the innocent, does he?”

Myron considered the question. “No,” he said.

“So what’s the problem? He is just attacking a different type of guilty. He picks out the guilty instead of you.”

Myron shook his head. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Because you judge?”

“I don’t send him out to hurt people. I send him out to watch people or to back me up.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference.”

“Do you know what he does when he night visits, Esperanza? He walks through the worst neighborhoods he can find in the middle of the night. Old FBI buddies tell him where drug dealers or child pornographers or street gangs hang out—alleyways, abandoned buildings, whatever—and he goes strolling through those hellholes no cop would dare tread.”

“Sounds like Batman,” Esperanza countered.

“You don’t think it’s wrong?”

“Oh, I think it’s wrong,” she replied steadily. “But I’m not sure you do.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Think about it,” she said. “About why you’re really upset.”

Footsteps approached. Win stuck his head in the doorway. He was smiling like a guest star on the opening credits of the Love Boat. “Good morning, all,” he said with far too much cheer. He bussed Esperanza’s cheek. He was decked out in classic, though fairly understated, golf clothes. Ashworth shirt. Plain golf cap. Sky-blue pants with pleats.

“Will you be staying with us, Esperanza?” he asked in his most solicitous tone.

Esperanza looked at him, looked at Myron. Nodded.

“Wonderful. You can use the bedroom down the hall on the left.” Win turned to Myron. “Guess what?”

“I’m all ears, Mr. Happy Face,” Myron said.

“Crispin still wants to meet with you. It appears that your walking out last night actually made something of an impression on him.” Big smile, spread hands. “The reluctant suitor approach. I must try it sometime.”

Esperanza said, “Tad Crispin? The Tad Crispin?”

“The very,” Win replied.

She gave Myron an approving look. “Wow.”

“Indeed,” Win said. “Well, I must be going. I’ll see you at Merion. I’ll be at the Lock-Horne tent most of the day.” Renewing the smile. “Ta-ta.”

Win started to leave, stopped, snapped his fingers. “I almost forgot.” He tossed Myron a videotape. “Maybe this will save you some time.”

The videotape landed on the bed. “Is this …?”

“The bank security tape from First Philadelphia,” Win said. “Six-eighteen on Thursday afternoon. As per your request.” One more smile, one more wave. “Have a great day.”

Esperanza watched him go. “ ‘Have a great day’?” she repeated.

Myron shrugged.

“Who the hell was that guy?” she asked.

“Wink Martindale,” Myron said. “Come on. Let’s go downstairs and watch this.”

12

Linda Coldren opened the door before Myron knocked.

“What is it?” she asked.

Linda’s face was drawn, accentuating the already high cheekbones. Her eyes had a lost and hollow look. She hadn’t slept. The pressure was growing unbearable. The worrying. The not knowing. She was strong. She was trying to stand up to it. But her son’s disappearance was beginning to gnaw away at her core.

Myron held up the videotape. “Do you have a VCR?” he asked.

In something of a daze, Linda Coldren led him to the same television he had seen her watching yesterday when they first met. Jack Coldren appeared from a back room, his golf bag on his shoulder. He, too, looked worn. There were sacks under his eyes, fleshy pouches like soft cocoons. Jack tried to toss up a welcoming smile, but it sputtered up like a lighter low on fluid.

“Hey, Myron.”

“Hey, Jack.”

“What’s going on?”

Myron slid the tape into the opening. “Do you know anybody who lives on Green Acres Road?” he asked.

Jack and Linda looked at each other.

“Why do you want to know that?” Linda asked.

“Because last night I watched your house. I saw somebody crawl out a window.”

“A window?” It was Jack. He lowered his eyebrows. “What window?”

“Your son’s.”

Silence.

Then Linda asked, “What does that have to do with Green Acres Road?”

“I followed whoever it was. He turned down Green Acres Road and disappeared—either into a house or into the woods.”

Linda lowered her head. Jack stepped forward and spoke. “The Squires live on Green Acres Road,” he said. “Chad’s best friend, Matthew.”

Myron nodded. He was not surprised. He flicked on the television. “This is a bank security tape from First Philadelphia.”

“How did you get it?” Jack asked.

“It’s not important.”

The front door opened and Bucky entered. The older man, dressed today in checked pants with a yellow-and-green top, stepped into the den doing his customary neck craning bit. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

Nobody replied.

“I said—”

“Just watch the screen, Dad,” Linda interrupted.

“Oh,” Bucky said softly, moving in closer.

Myron turned the channel to Three and hit the PLAY button. All eyes were on the screen. Myron had already seen the tape. He studied their faces instead, watching for reactions.

On the television, a black-and-white image appeared. The bank’s driveway. The view was from up high and a bit distorted, a concave fish-eye effect to capture as much space as possible. There was no sound. Myron had the tape all cued up on the right spot. Almost immediately a car pulled into view. The camera was on the driver’s side.

“It’s Chad’s car,” Jack Coldren announced.

They watched in rapt silence as the car window lowered. The angle was a bit odd—above the car and from the machine’s point of view—but there was no doubt. Chad Coldren was the driver. He leaned out the window and put his card in the ATM machine slot. His fingers tripped across the buttons like an experienced stenographer’s.

Young Chad Coldren’s smile was bright and happy.

When his fingers finished their little rumba, Chad settled back into the car to wait. He turned away from the camera for a moment. To the passenger seat. Someone was sitting next to Chad. Again Myron watched for a reaction. Linda, Jack, and Bucky all squinted, all trying to make out a face, but it was impossible. When Chad finally turned back to the camera, he was laughing. He pulled the money out, grabbed his card, leaned back into the car, closed the window, and drove off.

Myron switched off the VCR and waited. Silence flooded the room. Linda Coldren slowly lifted her head. She kept her expression steady, but her jaw trembled from being so set.

“There was another person in the car,” Linda offered. “He could have had a gun on Chad or—”

“Stop it!” Jack shouted. “Look at his face, Linda! For crying out loud, just look at his goddamn smirking face!”

“I know my son. He wouldn’t do this.”

“You don’t know him,” Jack countered. “Face it, Linda. Neither one of us knows him.”

“It’s not what it looks like,” Linda insisted, speaking more to herself than anyone in the room.

“No?” Jack gestured at the television, his face reddening. “Then how the hell do you explain what we just saw? Huh? He was laughing, Linda. He’s having the time of his life at our expense.” He stopped, struggled with something. “At my expense,” he corrected himself.

Linda gave him a long look. “Go play, Jack.”

“That’s exactly what I am going to do.”

He lifted his bag. His eyes met Bucky’s. Bucky remained silent. A tear slid down the older man’s cheek. Jack tore his gaze away and started for the door.

Myron called out, “Jack?”

Coldren stopped.

“It still might not be what it looks like,” Myron said.

Again with the eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“I traced the call you got last night,” Myron explained. “It was made from a mall pay phone.” He briefly filled them in on his visit to the Grand Mercado Mall and the Crusty Nazi. Linda’s face kept slipping from hope to heartbreak and mostly confusion. Myron understood. She wanted her son to be safe. But at the same time, she did not want this to be some cruel joke. Tough mix.

“He is in trouble,” Linda said as soon as he’d finished. “That proves it.”

“That proves nothing,” Jack replied in tired exasperation. “Rich kids hang out at malls and dress like punks too. He’s probably a friend of Chad’s.”

Again Linda looked at her husband hard. Again she said in a measured tone, “Go play, Jack.”

Jack opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. He shook his head, adjusted the bag on his shoulder, and left. Bucky crossed the room. He tried to hold his daughter, but she stiffened at his touch. She moved away, studying Myron’s face.

“You think he’s faking too,” she said.

“Jack’s explanation makes sense.”

“So you’re going to stop looking?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

She straightened her back. “Stay with it,” she began, “and I promise to sign with you.”

“Linda …”

“That’s why you’re here in the first place, right? You want my business. Well, here’s the deal. You stay with me and I’ll sign whatever you want. Hoax or no hoax. It’ll be quite a coup, no? Signing the number one–ranked female golfer in the world?”

“Yes,” Myron admitted. “It would be.”

“So there you go.” She stuck out her hand. “Do we have a deal?”

Myron kept his hands by his side. “Let me ask you something.”

“What?”

“Why are you so sure it’s not a hoax, Linda?”

“You think I’m being naive?”

“Not really,” he said. “I just want to know what makes you so certain.”

She lowered her hand and turned away from him. “Dad?”

Bucky seemed to snap out of a daze. “Hmm?”

“Would you mind leaving us alone for a minute?”

“Oh,” Bucky said. Neck crane. Then another. Two of them back-to-back. Good thing he wasn’t a giraffe. “Yes, well, I wanted to get to Merion anyway.”

“You go ahead, Dad. I’ll meet you there.”

When they were alone, Linda Coldren began to pace the room. Myron was again awed by her looks—the paradoxical combination of beauty, strength, and now delicacy. The strong, toned arms, yet the long, slender neck. The harsh, pointed features, yet the soft indigo eyes. Myron had heard beauty described as “seamless”; hers was quite the opposite.

“I’m not big on”—Linda Coldren made quote marks in the air with her fingers—“woman’s intuition or any of that mother-knows-her-boy-best crap. But I know that my son is in danger. He wouldn’t just disappear like this. No matter how it looks, that’s not what happened.”

Myron remained silent.

“I don’t like asking for help. It’s not my way—to depend on someone else. But this is a situation.… I’m scared. I’ve never felt fear like this in all of my life. It’s all-consuming. It’s suffocating. My son is in trouble and I can’t do anything to help him. You want proof that this is not a hoax. I can’t provide that. I just know. And I’m asking you to please help me.”

Myron wasn’t sure how to respond. Her argument came straight from the heart, sans facts or evidence. But that didn’t make her suffering any less real. “I’ll check out Matthew’s house,” he said finally. “Let’s see what happens after that.”

13

In the light of day, Green Acres Road was even more imposing. Both sides of the street were lined with ten-foot-high shrubs so thick that Myron couldn’t tell how thick. He parked his car outside a wrought iron gate and approached an intercom. He pressed a button and waited. There were several surveillance cameras. Some remained steady. Some whirred slowly from side to side. Myron spotted motion detectors, barbed wire, Dobermans. A rather elaborate fortress, he thought.

A voice as impenetrable as the shrubs came through the speaker. “May I help you?”

“Good morning,” Myron said, offering up a friendly-but-not-a-salesman smile to the nearest camera. Talking to a camera. He felt like he was on Nightline. “I’m looking for Matthew Squires.”

Pause. “Your name, sir?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

“Is Master Squires expecting you?”

“No.” Master Squires?

“Then you do not have an appointment?”

An appointment to see a sixteen-year-old? Who is this kid, Doogie Howser? “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

“May I ask the purpose of your visit?”

“To speak to Matthew Squires.” Mr. Vague.

“I am afraid that will not be possible at this time,” the voice said.

“Will you tell him it involves Chad Coldren?”

Another pause. Cameras pirouetted. Myron looked around. All the lenses were aiming down from up high, glaring at him like hostile space aliens or lunchroom monitors.

“In what way does it involve Master Coldren?” the voice asked.

Myron squinted into a camera. “May I ask with whom I am speaking?”

No reply.

Myron waited a beat, then said, “You’re supposed to say, ‘I am the great and powerful Oz.’ ”

“I am sorry, sir. No one is admitted without an appointment. Please have a nice day.”

“Wait a second. Hello? Hello?” Myron pressed the button again. No reply. He leaned on it for several seconds. Still nothing. He looked up into the camera and gave his best caring-homespun-family-guy smile. Very Tom Brokaw. He tried a small wave. Nothing. He took a small step backward and gave a great big Jack Kemp fake-throwing-a-football wave. Nada.

He stood there for another minute. This was indeed odd. A sixteen-year-old with this kind of security? Something was not quite kosher. He pressed the button one more time. When no one responded he looked into the camera, put a thumb in either ear, wiggled his fingers and stuck out his tongue.

When in doubt, be mature.

Back at his car, Myron picked up the car phone and dialed his friend.

Sheriff Jake Courter.

“Sheriff’s office.”

“Hey, Jake. It’s Myron.”

“Fuck. I knew I shouldn’t have come in on Saturday.”

“Ooo, I’m wounded. Seriously, Jake, do they still call you the Henny Youngman of law enforcement?”

Heavy sigh. “What the fuck do you want, Myron? I just came in to get a little paperwork done.”

“No rest for those vigilantly pursuing peace and justice for the common man.”

“Right,” Jake said.

“This week, I went out on a whole twelve calls. Guess how many of them were for false burglar alarms?”

“Thirteen.”

“Pretty close.”

For more than twenty years, Jake Courter had been a cop in several of the country’s meanest cities. He’d hated it and craved a quieter life. So Jake, a rather large black man, resigned from the force and moved to the picturesque (read: lily-white) town of Reston, New Jersey. Looking for a cushy job, he ran for sheriff. Reston was a college (read: liberal) town, and thus Jake played up his—as he put it—“blackness” and won easily. The white man’s guilt, Jake had told Myron. The best vote-getter this side of Willie Horton.

“Miss the excitement of the big city?” Myron asked.

“Like a case of herpes,” Jake countered. “Okay, Myron, you’ve done the charm thing on me. I’m like Play-Doh in your paws now. What do you want?”

“I’m in Philly for the U.S. Open.”

“That’s golf, right?”

“Yeah, golf. And I wanted to know if you’ve heard of a guy named Squires.”

Pause. Then: “Oh, shit.”

“What?”

“What the fuck are you involved in now?”

“Nothing. It’s just that he’s got all this weird security around his house—”

“What the fuck are you doing by his house?”

“Nothing.”

“Right,” Jake said. “Guess you were just strolling by.”

“Something like that.”

“Nothing like that.” Jake sighed. Then: “Ah what the hell, it ain’t on my beat anymore. Squires. Reginald Squires aka Big Blue.”

Myron made a face. “Big Blue?”

“Hey, all gangsters need a nickname. Squires is known as Big Blue. Blue, as in blue blood.”

“Those gangsters,” Myron said. “Pity they don’t channel their creativity into honest marketing.”

“ ‘Honest marketing,’ ” Jake repeated. “Talk about your basic oxymoron. Anyway Squires got a kiloton of family dough and all this blue-blood breeding and schooling and shit.”

“So what’s he doing keeping such bad company?”

“You want the simple answer? The son of a bitch is a serious wacko. Gets his jollies hurting people. Kinda like Win.”

“Win doesn’t get his jollies hurting people.”

“If you say so.”

“If Win hurts someone, there’s a reason. To prevent them from doing it again or to punish or something.”

“Sure, whatever,” Jake said. “Kinda touchy though, aren’t we, Myron?”

“It’s been a long day.”

“It’s only nine in the morning.”

Myron said, “For what breeds time but two hands on a clock?”

“Who said that?”

“No one. I just made it up.”

“You should consider writing greeting cards.”

“So what is Squires into, Jake?”

“Want to hear something funny? I’m not sure. Nobody is. Drugs and prostitution. Shit like that. But very upscale. Nothing very well organized or anything. It’s more like he plays at it, you know? Like he gets involved in whatever he thinks will give him a thrill, then dumps it.”

“How about kidnapping?”

Brief pause. “Oh shit, you are involved in something again, aren’t you?”

“I just asked you if Squires was into kidnapping.”

“Oh. Right. Like it’s a hypothetical question. Kinda like, ‘If a bear shits in the forest and no one is around, does it still reek’?”

“Precisely. Does kidnapping reek like his kind of thing?”

“Hell if I know. The guy is a major league loon, no question. He blends right into all that snobbish bullshit—the boring parties, the shitty food, the laughing at jokes that aren’t remotely funny, the talking with the same boring people about the same boring worthless bullshit—”

“It sounds like you really admire them.”

“Just my point, my friend. They got it all, right? On the outside. Money, big homes, fancy clubs. But they’re all so fucking boring—shit, I’d kill myself. Makes me wonder if maybe Squires feels that way too, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said. “And Win is the scary one here, right?”

Jake laughed. “Touché. But to answer your question, I don’t know if Squires would be into kidnapping. Wouldn’t surprise me though.”

Myron thanked him and hung up. He looked up. At least a dozen security cameras lined the top of the shrubs like tiny sentinels.

What now?

For all he knew, Chad Coldren was laughing his ass off, watching him on one of those security cameras. This whole thing could be an exercise in pure futility. Of course, Linda Coldren had promised to be a client. Much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself, the idea was not wholly unpleasant. He considered the possibility and started to smile. If he could also somehow land Tad Crispin …

Yo, Myron, a kid may be in serious trouble.

Or, more likely, a spoiled brat or neglected adolescent—take your pick—is playing hooky and having some fun at his parents’ expense.

So the question remained: What now?

He thought again about the videotape of Chad at the ATM machine. He didn’t go into details with the Coldrens, but it bothered him. Why there? Why that particular ATM machine? If the kid was running away or hiding out, he might have to pick up money. Fine and dandy, that made sense.

But why would he do it at Porter Street?

Why not do it at a bank closer to home? And equally important, what was Chad Coldren doing in that area in the first place? There was nothing there. It wasn’t a stop between highways or anything like that. The only thing in that neighborhood that would require cash was the Court Manor Inn. Myron again remembered motelier extraordinaire Stuart Lipwitz’s attitude and wondered.

He started the car. It might be something. Worth looking into, at any rate.

Of course, Stuart Lipwitz had made it abundantly clear that he would not talk. But Myron thought he had just the tool to make him change his mind.

14

“Smile!”

The man did not smile. He quickly shifted the car in reverse and backed out. Myron shrugged and lowered the camera. It was on a neck strap and bounced lightly against his chest. Another car approached. Myron lifted the camera again.

“Smile!” Myron repeated.

Another man. Another no smile. This guy managed to duck down before shifting his car into reverse.

“Camera shy” Myron called out to him. “Nice to see in this age of paparazzi overkill.”

It didn’t take long. Myron had been on the sidewalk in front of the Court Manor Inn for less than five minutes when he spotted Stuart Lipwitz sprinting toward him. Big Stu was in full custom—gray tails, wide tie, a concierge key pin in the suit’s lapel. Gray tails at a no-tell motel. Like a maître d’ at Burger King. Watching Stu move closer, a Pink Floyd song came to mind: Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody out there? David Bowie joined in: Ground control to Major Tom.

Ah, the seventies.

“You there,” he called out.

“Hi, Stu.”

No smile this time. “This is private property,” Stuart Lipwitz said, a little out of breath. “I must ask you to remove yourself immediately.”

“I hate to disagree with you, Stu, but I am on a public sidewalk. I got every right to be here.”

Stuart Lipwitz stammered, then flapped his arms in frustration. With the tails, the movement kind of reminded Myron of a bat. “But you can’t just stand there and take pictures of my clientele,” he semi-whined.

“ ‘Clientele,’ ” Myron repeated. “Is that a new euphemism for john?”

“I’ll call the police.”

“Ooooo. Stop scaring me like that.”

“You are interfering with my business.”

“And you are interfering with mine.”

Stuart Lipwitz put his hands on his hips and tried to look threatening. “This is the last time I’ll ask you nicely. Leave the premises.”

“That wasn’t nice.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said it was the last time you’d ask me nicely,” Myron explained. “Then you said, ‘Leave the premises.’ You didn’t say please. You didn’t say, ‘Kindly leave the premises.’ Where’s the nice in that?”

“I see,” Lipwitz said. Beads of sweat dotted his face. It was hot and the man was, after all, in tails. “Please kindly leave the premises.”

“Nope. But now, at least, you’re a man of your word.”

Stuart Lipwitz took several deep breaths. “You want to know about the boy, don’t you? The one in the picture.”

“You bet.”

“And if I tell you if he was here, will you leave?”

“Much as it would pain me to leave this quaint locale, I would somehow tear myself away.”

“That, sir, is blackmail.”

Myron looked at him. “I would say ‘blackmail is such an ugly word,’ but that would be too cliché. So instead I’ll just say ‘Yup.’ ”

“But”—Lipwitz started stammering—“that’s against the law!”

“As opposed to, say, prostitution and drug dealing and whatever other sleazy activity goes on in this fleabag?”

Stuart Lipwitz’s eyes widened. “Fleabag? This is the Court Manor Inn, sir. We are a respectable—”

“Stuff it, Stu. I got pictures to take.” Another car pulled up. Gray Volvo station wagon. Nice family car. A man about fifty years old was neatly attired in a business suit. The young girl in the passenger seat must have shopped—as the mall girls had recently taught him—at Sluts “R” Us.

Myron smiled and leaned toward the window. “Whoa, sir, vacationing with your daughter?”

The man splashed on a classic deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. The young prostitute whooped with laughter. “Hey, Mel, he thinks I’m your daughter!” She whooped again.

Myron raised the camera. Stuart Lipwitz tried to step in his way, but Myron swept him away with his free hand. “It’s Souvenir Day at the Court Manor,” Myron said. “I can put the picture on a coffee mug if you’d like. Or maybe a decorative plate?”

The man in the business suit reversed the car. They were gone several seconds later.

Stuart Lipwitz’s face reddened. He made two fists. Myron looked at him. “Now Stuart …”

“I have powerful friends,” he said.

“Ooooo. I’m getting scared again.”

“Fine. Be that way.” Stuart turned away and stormed up the drive. Myron smiled. The kid was a tougher nut to crack than he’d anticipated, and he really didn’t want to do this all day. But let’s face it: There were no other leads and besides, playing with Big Stu was fun.

Myron waited for more customers. He wondered what Stu was up to. Something frantic, no doubt. Ten minutes later, a canary yellow Audi pulled up and a large black man slid out. The black man was maybe an inch shorter than Myron, but he was built. His chest could double as a jai alai wall and his legs resembled the trunks of redwoods. He glided when he moved—not the bulky moves one usually associated with the overmuscled.

Myron did not like that.

The black man had sunglasses on and wore a red Hawaiian shirt with blue jean shorts. His most noticeable feature was his hair. The kinks had been slicked straight and parted on the side, like old photographs of Nat King Cole.

Myron pointed at the top of the man’s head. “Is that hard to do?” he asked.

“What?” the black man said. “You mean the hair?”

Myron nodded. “Keeping it straight like that.”

“Nah, not really. Once a week I go to a guy named Ray. In an old-fashioned barbershop, as a matter of fact. The kind with the pole in front and everything.” His smile was almost wistful. “Ray takes care of it for me. Also gives me a great shave. With hot towels and everything.” The man stroked his face for emphasis.

“Looks smooth,” Myron said.

“Hey, thanks. Nice of you to say. I find it relaxing, you know? Doing something just for me. I think it’s important. To relieve the stress.”

Myron nodded. “I hear you.”

“Maybe I’ll give you Ray’s number. You could stop by and check it out.”

“Ray,” Myron repeated. “I’d like that.”

The black man stepped closer. “Seems we have a little situation here, Mr. Bolitar.”

“How did you know my name?”

He shrugged. Behind the sunglasses, Myron sensed that he was being sized up. Myron was doing the same. Both were trying to be subtle. Both knew exactly what the other was doing.

“I’d really appreciate it if you would leave,” he said very politely.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Myron said. “Even though you did ask nicely.”

The black man nodded. He kept his distance. “Let’s see if we can work something out here, okay?”

“Okeydokey.”

“I got a job to do here, Myron. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

“Sure can,” Myron said.

“And so do you.”

“That’s right.”

The black man took off his sunglasses and put them in his shirt pocket. “Look, I know you won’t be easy. And you know I won’t be easy. If push comes to shove, I don’t know which one of us will win.”

“I will,” Myron said. “Good always triumphs over evil.”

The man smiled. “Not in this neighborhood.”

“Good point.”

“I’m also not sure it’s worth it to either one of us to find out. I think we’re both probably past the proving-himself, macho-bullshit stage.”

Myron nodded. “We’re too mature.”

“Right.”

“It seems then,” Myron continued, “that we’ve hit an impasse.”

“Guess so,” the black man agreed. “Of course, I could always take out a gun and shoot you.”

Myron shook his head. “Not over something this small. Too many repercussions involved.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think you’d go for it, but I had to give it a whirl. You never know.”

“You’re a pro,” Myron agreed. “You’d feel remiss if you didn’t at least try. Hell, I’d have felt cheated.”

“Glad you understand.”

“Speaking of which,” Myron said, “aren’t you a tad high-level to be dealing with this situation?”

“Can’t say I disagree.” The black man walked closer to Myron. Myron felt his muscles tighten; a not-unpleasant anticipatory chill steeled him.

“You look like a guy who can keep his mouth shut,” the man said.

Myron said nothing. Proving the point.

“The kid you had in that picture, the one that got Leona Helmsley’s panties in a bunch? He was here.”

“When?”

The black man shook his head. “That’s all you get. I’m being very generous. You wanted to know if the kid was here. The answer is yes.”

“Nice of you,” Myron said.

“I’m just trying to make it simple. Look, we both know that Lipwitz is a dumb kid. Acts like this urinal is the Beverly Wilshire. But the people who come here, they don’t want that. They want to be invisible. They don’t even want to look at themselves, you know what I’m saying?”

Myron nodded.

“So I gave you a freebie. The kid in the picture was here.”

“Is he still here?”

“You’re pushing me, Myron.”

“Just tell me that.”

“No. He only stayed that one night.” He spread his hands. “Now you tell me, Myron. Am I being fair with you?”

“Very.”

He nodded. “Your turn.”

“I guess there’s no way you’ll tell me who you’re working for.”

The black man made a face. “Nice meeting you, Myron.”

“Same here.”

They shook hands. Myron got into his car and drove away.

He had almost reached Merion when the cellular rang. He picked up and said hello.

“Is this, like, Myron?”

Mall girl. “Hi, yes. Actually this is Myron, not just like him.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. What’s up?”

“That skank you were, like, looking for last night?”

“Right.”

“He’s, like, back at the mall.”

“Where at the mall?”

“The food court. He’s on line at the McDonald’s.”

Myron spun the car around and hit the gas pedal.

15

The Crusty Nazi was still there.

He sat at a corner table by himself, downing a burger of some sort like it had personally offended him. The girls were right. Skank was the only word to describe him, even though Myron didn’t know what the word meant or if it even existed. The punk’s face was aiming for tough-guy-unshaven, but a lack of testosterone made it land far closer to unkempt-adolescent-Hasid. He wore a black baseball cap with a skull and crossbones decal. His ripped white T-shirt was rolled all the way up to reveal milky, reedy arms, one with a swastika tattoo. Myron shook his head. Swastika. The kid was too old to be so utterly clueless.

The Crusty Nazi took another vicious bite, clearly furious with his burger now. The mall girls were there, pointing toward Crusty like Myron might not know which guy they’d been talking about. Myron signaled them to stop with a shushing finger at his lips. They obeyed, overcompensating by engaging in a too-loud, too-casual conversation, sliding furtive-to-the-point-of-totally-obvious glances in his direction. Myron looked away.

The Crusty Nazi finished his burger and stood. Good timing. As advertised, Crusty was very skinny The girls were right—the boy had no ass. None at all. Myron couldn’t tell if the kid was going for that too-big-jeans look or if it was because he lacked a true backside, but every few steps, Crusty paused to hitch up the pants. Myron suspected a bit of both.

He followed him outside into the blazing sun. Hot. Damn hot. Myron felt almost a nostalgic longing for the omnipresent mall air-conditioning. Crusty strutted cool-like into the lot. Going to his car, no doubt. Myron veered to the right so as to get ready to follow. He slid into his Ford Taurus (read: Chick Trawler) and started up the engine.

He slowly cruised the lot and spotted Crusty heading way out to the last row of cars. Only two vehicles were parked out there. One was a silver Cadillac Seville. The other was a pickup truck with those semi-monster wheels, a Confederate flag decal, and the words BAD TO THE BONE painted on the side. Using his years of investigative know-how, Myron deduced that the pickup truck was probably Crusty’s vehicle. Sure enough, Crusty opened the door and hopped up and in. Amazing. Sometimes Myron’s powers of deduction bordered on the psychic. Maybe he should get a 900 line like Jackie Stallone.

Tailing the pickup truck was hardly a challenge. The vehicle stuck out like a golfer’s clothing in a monastery, and El Crust-ola wasn’t heavy on the gas pedal. They drove for about half an hour. Myron had no idea where they were going, but up ahead he recognized Veterans Stadium. He’d gone with Win to several Eagles games there. Win always had seats on the fifty-yard line, lower tier. Being an old stadium, the “luxury” skyboxes at the Vet were too high up; Win did not care for them. So he chose instead to sit with the masses. Big of him.

About three blocks before the stadium, Crusty pulled down a side road. He threw his pickup into park and got out running. Myron once again debated calling Win for backup, but it was pointless. Win was at Merion. His phone would be off. He wondered again about last night and about Esperanza’s accusations this morning. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was, at least partially, responsible for what Win did. But that wasn’t the point. He knew that now. The truth, the one that scared Esperanza too, was far clearer:

Maybe Myron didn’t care so much.

You read the papers and you watch the news and you see what Myron has seen and your humanity, your basic faith in human beings, begins to look frighteningly Pollyanna. That was what was really eating away at him—not that he was repulsed by what Win did, but that it really didn’t bother him that much.

Win had an eerie way of seeing the world in black and white; lately, Myron had found his own gray areas blackening. He didn’t like that. He did not like the change that experience—seeing the cruelty man inflicts on man—was forcing upon him. He tried to hold on to his old values, but the rope was getting awfully slick. And why was he holding on, anyway? Was it because he truly believed in these values, or because he liked himself more as a person who believed?

He didn’t know anymore.

He should have brought a gun. Stupid. Still he was only following some grunge-ball. Of course, even a grunge-ball could fire a gun and kill him. But what choice did he have? Should he call the police? Well, that would appear a bit extreme based on what he had. Come back later with a firearm of some sort? By that time, Crusty could be gone—along with Chad Coldren maybe.

Nope, he had to follow. He’d just be careful.

Myron was not sure what to do. He stopped the car at the end of the block and got out. The street was crowded with low-rise brick dwellings that all looked the same. At one time, this might have been a nice area, but now the neighborhood looked like a man who’d lost his job and stopped bathing. There was an overgrown, faded quality to it, like a garden that no one bothered to tend anymore.

Crusty turned down an alleyway. Myron followed. Lots of plastic garbage bags. Lots of rusted fire escapes. Four legs stuck out of a refrigerator box. Myron heard snoring. At the end of the alley, Crusty turned right. Myron trailed slowly. Crusty had gone into what looked like an abandoned building through a fire door. There was no knob or anything, but the door was slightly ajar. Myron reached in with his fingers and pried it open.

As soon as he crossed the musty threshold, Myron heard a primal scream. Crusty. Right in front of him. Something swung toward Myron’s face. Fast reflexes paid off. Myron managed to duck enough so that the iron bar only clipped his shoulder blade. A quick flash of pain bolted down his arm. Myron dropped to the ground. He rolled across the cement floor and stood back up.

There were three of them now. All armed with crowbars or tire irons. All with shaved heads and tattooed swastikas. They were like sequels to the same awful movie. The Crusty Nazi was the original. Beneath the Planet of Crusty Nazi—the one on his left—was smiling with idiotic glee. The one on his right—Escape from the Planet of Crusty Nazi—looked a bit more frightened. The weak link, Myron thought.

“Changing a tire?” Myron asked.

The Crusty Nazi slapped the tire iron against his palm for emphasis. “Gonna flatten yours.”

Myron raised his hand in front of him with the palm facing down. He shook it back and forth and said, “Eh.”

“Why the fuck you following me, asshole?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. Why the fuck you following me?”

“Who says I’m following you?”

There was momentary confusion on Crusty’s face. Then: “You think I’m fucking stupid or something?”

“No, I think you’re Mr. Mensa.”

“Mister what?”

Beneath the Planet of Crusty Nazi said, “He’s just fucking with you, man.”

“Yeah,” Escape chimed in. “Fucking with you.”

Crusty’s wet eyes bulged out. “Yeah? Is that what you’re doing, asshole? You fucking with me, huh? Is that what you’re doing? Fucking with me?”

Myron looked at him. “Can we move on please?”

Beneath said, “Let’s fuck him up a little. Soften his ass up.”

Myron knew that three of them were probably not experienced fighters, but he also knew that three armed men beat one good man on almost any given day. They were also a bit too jittery, their eyes as glazed as morning doughnuts. They were constantly sniffing and rubbing their noses.

Two words: Coked up. Or Nose Candy. Or Toot Sweet. Take your pick.

Myron’s best chance was to confuse and strike. Risky. You wanted to piss them off, to upset their already-tipsy equilibrium. But at the same time, you wanted to control it, to know when to back off a bit. A delicate balance requiring Myron Bolitar, darling of the high wire, to perform high above the crowd without the benefit of a safety net.

Once again Crusty asked, “Why the fuck you following me, asshole?”

“Maybe I’m just attracted to you,” Myron said. “Even if you don’t have an ass.”

Beneath started cackling. “Oh man, oh man, let’s fuck him up. Let’s fuck him up good.”

Myron tried to give them the tough-guy look. Some mistook this for constipation, but he was getting better at it. Practice. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Oh no?” It was Crusty. “Give me one good reason why we don’t just fuck you up. Give me one good reason why I don’t break every fucking rib in your body with this.” He raised the tire iron. In case Myron thought he was being too subtle.

“You asked before if I thought you were stupid,” Myron said.

“Yeah, so?”

“So do you think I’m stupid? Do you think somebody who meant you harm would be dumb enough to follow you in here—knowing what was about to go down?”

That made all three of them pause.

“I followed you,” Myron continued, “as a test.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“I work for certain people. We won’t mention names.” Mostly, Myron thought, because he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “Let’s just say they are in a business you guys frequent.”

“Frequent?” More nose rubbing. Toot, sweet, toot, sweet.

“Frequent,” Myron repeated. “As in occurring or appearing quite often or at close intervals. Frequent.”

“What?”

Jesus. “My employer,” Myron said, “he needs someone to handle certain territory. Somebody new. Somebody who wants to make ten percent on sales and get all the free blow they can.”

Eyes went buggy.

Beneath turned to Crusty. “You hear that, man?”

“Yeah, I hear him.”

“Shit, we don’t get no commission from Eddie,” Beneath went on. “The fucker is so small-time.” He gestured at Myron with the tire iron. “This guy, man, look how fucking old he is. He’s gotta be working for somebody with juice.”

“Got to be,” Escape added.

The Crusty One hesitated, squinted suspicion. “How did you find out about us?”

Myron shrugged. “Word gets around.” Shovel, shovel.

“So you was just following me for some kinda fucking test?”

“Right.”

“Just came to the mall and decided to follow me?”

“Something like that.”

Crusty smiled. He looked at Escape and at Beneath. His grip on the tire iron tightened. Uh-oh. “Then how the fuck come you were asking about me last night, huh? How come you want to know about a call I made?”

Uh-oh.

Crusty stepped closer, eyes aglow.

Myron raised his hand. “The answer is simple.” They all hesitated. Myron took advantage. His foot moved like a piston, shooting out and landing squarely on the knee of the unprepared Escape. Escape fell. Myron was already running.

“Get the fucker!”

They chased, but Myron had already slammed his shoulder into the fire door. The “macho-bullshit” part of him, as his friend at the Court Manor Inn had described it, wanted to try to take them on, but he knew that would be foolhardy. They were armed. He wasn’t.

By the time Myron reached the end of the alley, his lead was only about ten yards. He wondered if he’d have enough time to open his car door and get in. No choice. He’d have to try.

He grabbed the handle and swung the door open. He was sliding in when a tire iron whacked his shoulder. Pain erupted. He kept rolling, closing the door. A hand grabbed it, offered resistance. Myron used his weight and leaned into the pull.

His window exploded.

Glass tinkled down into his face. Myron kicked his heel through the open window and hit face. The grip on the door released. He already had the key out and in the ignition. He turned it as the other car window exploded. Crusty leaned into the car, his eyes blazing with fury.

“Motherfucker, you’re gonna die!”

The tire iron was heading toward his face again. Myron blocked it. From behind him, he felt a sharp blow connect with his lower neck. Numbness ensued. Myron shifted into reverse and flew out of the spot, tires squealing. Crusty tried to leap into the car through the broken window. Myron elbowed him in the nose and Crusty’s grip eased. He fell hard to the pavement, but then he jumped right back up. That was the problem with fighting cokeheads. Pain often does not register.

All three men ran for the pickup, but Myron already had too big a lead. The battle was over. For now.

16

Myron called in the pickup truck’s license plate number, but that was a dead end. The plate had expired four years ago. Crusty must have taken it off a car in a dump or something. Not uncommon. Even petty crooks knew enough not to use their real plates when committing a traceable crime.

He circled back and checked the inside of the building for clues. Bent syringes and broken vials and empty bags of Doritos lay scattered about the cement. There was also an empty garbage can. Myron shook his head. Bad enough being a drug dealer. But a litterbug?

He looked around a bit more. The building was abandoned and half-burned out. There was no one inside. And no clues.

Okay so what did this all mean? Were the three cokeheads the kidnappers? Myron had a hard time picturing it. Cokeheads break into houses. Cokeheads jump people in alleyways. Cokeheads attack with tire irons. Cokeheads, by and large, do not plan elaborate kidnappings.

But on the other hand, how elaborate was this kidnapping? The first two times the kidnapper called, he didn’t even know how much money to extort. Wasn’t that a little odd? Could it be that all this was merely the work of some out-of-their-league crusty cokeheads?

Myron got into his car and headed toward Win’s house. Win had plenty of vehicles. He’d switch for a car without smashed windows. The residual damage to his body seemed to be clearing up. A bruise or two but nothing broken. None of the blows had landed flush, except the ones to his car windows.

He ran several possibilities through his head and eventually managed to come up with a pretty decent scenario. Let’s say that for some reason Chad Coldren decided to check into the Court Manor Inn. Maybe to spend some time with a girl. Maybe to buy some drugs. Maybe because he enjoyed the friendly service. Whatever. As per the bank surveillance camera, Chad grabbed some dough at a local ATM. Then he checked in for the night. Or the hour. Or whatever.

Once at the Court Manor Inn, something went awry. Stu Lipwitz’s denials notwithstanding, the Court Manor is a sleazy joint patronized by sleazy people. It wouldn’t be hard to get in trouble there. Maybe Chad Coldren tried to buy drugs from Crusty. Maybe he witnessed a crime. Maybe the kid just talked too much and some nasty people realized that he came from money. Whatever. The life orbits of Chad Coldren and the Crusty Nazi’s crew dovetailed. The end result was a kidnapping.

It kinda fit.

The key word here: kinda.

On the road toward Merion, Myron helped deflate his own scenario with several well-placed puncture holes. First of all, the timing. Myron had been convinced that the kidnapping had something to do with Jack’s return to playing the U.S. Open at Merion. But in his Crusty-orbit scenario, the nagging timing question had to be written off as mere coincidence. Okay, maybe Myron could live with that. But then how, for example, had the Crusty Nazi—stationed at a mall pay phone—known that Esme Fong was in the Coldren house? How did the man who climbed out the window and disappeared on Green Acres Road—a person Myron had been sure was either Matthew Squires or Chad Coldren—fit into all this? Was the well-shielded Matthew Squires in cahoots with the Crusties? Or was it just a coincidence that the window man disappeared down Green Acres Road?

The scenario balloon was going ssssss in a very big way.

By the time Myron got to Merion, Jack Coldren was on the fourteenth hole. His partner for today’s round was none other than Tad Crispin. No surprise there. First place and second place were normally the final twosome of the day.

Jack was still playing well, though not spectacularly. He’d lost only one stroke off his lead, remaining a very comfortable eight strokes ahead of Tad Crispin. Myron trudged toward the fourteenth green. Green—that word again. Everything was so dang green. The grass and trees, naturally, but also tents, overhangs, scoreboards, the many television towers and scaffolds—everything was lush green to blend in with the picturesque natural surroundings, except, of course, for the sponsors’ boards, which drew the eye with all the subtlety of Vegas hotel signs. But hey, the sponsors paid Myron’s salary. Be kinda hypocritical to complain.

“Myron, sweetheart, get your wiggly ass over here.”

Norm Zuckerman beckoned Myron forward with a big wave. Esme Fong stood next to him. “Over here,” he said.

“Hey, Norm,” Myron said. “Hi, Esme.”

“Hi, Myron,” Esme said. She was dressed a bit more casual today, but she still clutched at her briefcase like it was a favorite stuffed animal.

Norm threw his arm around Myron’s back, draping the hand over the sore shoulder. “Myron, tell me the truth here. The absolute truth. I want the truth, okay?”

“The truth?”

“Very funny. Just tell me this. Nothing more, just this. Am I not a fair man? The truth, now. Am I a fair man?”

“Fair,” Myron said.

“Very fair, am I right? I am a very fair man.”

“Let’s not push it, Norm.”

Norm put up both hands, palms out. “Fine, be that way. I’m fair. Good enough, I’ll take it.” He looked over toward Esme Fong. “Keep in mind, Myron is my adversary. My worst enemy. We’re always on opposite sides. Yet he is willing to admit that I’m a fair man. We straight on that?”

Esme rolled her eyes. “Yes, Norm, but you’re preaching to the converted. I already told you that I agreed with you on this—”

“Whoa,” Norm said, as though reining in a frisky pony. “Just hold the phone a sec, because I want Myron’s opinion too. Myron, here’s the deal. I bought a golf bag. Just one. I wanted to test it out. Cost me fifteen grand for the year.”

Buying a golf bag meant pretty much what it said. Norm Zuckerman had bought the rights to advertise on a golf bag. In other words, he put a Zoom logo on it. Most of the golf bags were bought by the big golf companies—Ping, Titleist, Golden Bear, that kind of thing. But more and more often, companies that had nothing to do with golf advertised on the bags. McDonald’s, for example. Spring-Air mattresses. Even Pennzoil oil. Pennzoil. Like someone goes to a golf tournament, sees the Pennzoil logo, and buys a can of oil.

“So?” Myron said.

“So, look at it!” Norm pointed at a caddie. “I mean, just look at it!”

“Okay, I’m looking.”

“Tell me, Myron, do you see a Zoom logo?”

The caddie held the golf bag. Like on every golf bag, there were towels draped over the top in order to clean off the clubs.

Norm Zuckerman spoke in a first-grade-teacher singsong. “You can answer orally, Myron, by uttering the syllable ‘no.’ Or if that’s too taxing on your limited vocabulary, you can merely shake your head from side to side like this.” Norm demonstrated.

“It’s under the towel,” Myron said.

Norm dramatically put his hand to his ear. “Pardon?”

“The logo is under the towel.”

“No shit it’s under the towel!” Norm railed. Spectators turned and glared at the crazy man with the long hair and heavy beard. “What good does that do me, huh? When I film an advertisement for TV, what good would it do me if they stick a towel in front of the camera? When I pay all those schmucks a zillion dollars to wear my sneakers, what good would it do me if they wrapped their feet in towels? If every billboard I had was covered with a great big towel—”

“I get the picture, Norm.”

“Good. I’m not paying fifteen grand for some idiot caddie to cover my logo. So I go over to the idiot caddie and I kindly tell him to move the towel away from my logo and the son of a bitch gives me this look. This look, Myron. Like I’m some brown stain he couldn’t rinse out of the toilet. Like I’m this little ghetto Jew who’s gonna take his goy crap.”

Myron looked over at Esme. Esme smiled and shrugged.

“Nice talking to you, Norm,” Myron said.

“What? You don’t think I’m right?”

“I see your point.”

“So if it was your client, what would you do?”

“Make sure the caddie kept the logo in plain view.”

“Exactamundo.” He swung his arm back around Myron’s shoulder and lowered his head conspiratorially. “So what’s going on with you and golf, Myron?” he whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not a golfer. You don’t have any golf clients. All of a sudden I see you with my very own eyes closing in on Tad Crispin—and now I hear you’re hanging out with the Coldrens.”

“Who told you that?”

“Word gets around. I’m a man with tremendous sources. So what’s the deal? Why the sudden interest in golf?”

“I’m a sports agent, Norm. I try to represent athletes. Golfers are athletes. Sort of.”

“Okay, but what’s up with the Coldrens?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, Jack and Linda are lovely people. Connected, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“LBA represents Linda Coldren. Nobody leaves LBA. You know that. They’re too big. Jack, well, Jack hasn’t done anything in so long, he hasn’t even bothered with an agent. So what I’m trying to figure out is, why are the Coldrens suddenly hot to trot with you?”

“Why do you want to figure that out?”

Norm put his hand on his chest. “Why?”

“Yeah, why would you care?”

“Why?” Norm repeated, incredulous now. “I’ll tell you why. Because of you, Myron. I love you, you know that. We’re brothers. Tribe members. I want nothing but the best for you. Hand to God, I mean that. You ever need a recommendation, I’ll give it to you, you know that.”

“Uh-huh.” Myron was less than convinced. “So what’s the problem?”

Norm threw up both hands. “Who said there’s a problem? Did I say there was a problem? Did I even use the word problem? I’m just curious, that’s all. It’s part of my nature. I’m a curious guy. A modern-day yenta. I ask a lot of questions. I stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong. It’s part of my makeup.”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said again. He looked over at Esme Fong, who was now comfortably out of earshot. She shrugged at him. Working for Norm Zuckerman probably meant you did a lot of shrugging. But that was part of Norm’s technique, his own version of good-cop, bad-cop. He came across as erratic, if not totally irrational, while his assistant—always young, bright, attractive—was the calming influence you grabbed on to like a life preserver.

Norm elbowed him and nodded toward Esme. “She’s a looker, huh? Especially for a broad from Yale. You ever see what that school matriculates? No wonder they’re known as the Bulldogs.”

“You’re so progressive, Norm.”

“Ah, screw progressive. I’m an old man, Myron. I’m allowed to be insensitive. On an old man, insensitive is cute. A cute curmudgeon, that’s what they call it. By the way, I think Esme is only half.”

“Half?”

“Chinese,” Norm said. “Or Japanese. Or whatever. I think she’s half white too. What do you think?”

“Good-bye, Norm.”

“Fine, be that way. See if I care. So tell me, Myron, how did you hook up with the Coldrens? Win introduce you?”

“Good-bye, Norm.”

Myron walked off a bit, stopping for a moment to watch a golfer hit a drive. He tried to follow the ball’s route. No go. He lost sight of it almost immediately. This shouldn’t be a surprise really—it is, after all, a tiny white sphere traveling at a rate of over one hundred miles per hour for a distance of several hundred yards—except that Myron was the only person in attendance who couldn’t achieve this ophthalmic feat of hawklike proportions. Golfers. Most of them can’t read an exit sign on an interstate, but they can follow the trajectory of a golf ball through several solar systems.

No question about it. Golf is a weird sport.

The course was packed with silent fans, though fan didn’t exactly feel like the right word to Myron. Parishioners was a hell of a lot closer. There was a constant reverie on a golf course, a hushed, wide-eyed respect. Every time the ball was hit, the crowd release was nearly orgasmic. People cried sweet bliss and urged the ball with the ardor of Price Is Right contestants: Run! Sit! Bite! Grab! Grow teeth! Roll! Hurry! Get down! Get up!—almost like an aggressive mambo instructor. They lamented over a snap hook and a wicked slice and a babied putt and goofy greens and soft greens and waxed greens and the rub of the green and the pursuit of a snowman and being stymied and when the ball traveled off the fairway and on the fringe and in the rough and deep lies and rough lies and bad lies and good lies. They showed admiration when a player got all of that one or ripped a drive or banged it home and gave dirty looks when someone loudly suggested that a certain tee-shot made a certain player “da man.” They accused a putter who did not reach the hole of hitting the ball “with your purse, Alice.” Players were constantly playing shots that were “unplayable.”

Myron shook his head. All sports have their own lexicons, but speaking golfese was tantamount to mastering Swahili. It was like rich people’s rap.

But on a day like today—the sun shining, the blue sky unblemished, the summer air smelling like a lover’s hair—Myron felt closer to the chalice of golf. He could imagine the course free of spectators, the peace and tranquillity, the same aura that drew Buddhist monks to mountaintop retreats, the double-cut grass so rich and green that God Himself would want to run barefoot. This did not mean Myron got it—he was still a nonbeliever of heretic proportions—but for a brief moment he could at least envision what it was about this game that ensnared and swallowed so many whole.

When he reached the fourteenth green, Jack Coldren was lining up for a fifteen-foot putt. Diane Hoffman took the pin out of the hole. At almost every course in the world, the “pin” had a flag on the top. But that would just not do at Merion. Instead, the pole was topped with a wicker basket. No one seemed to know why. Win came up with this story about how the old Scots who invented golf used to carry their lunch in baskets on sticks, which could then double as hole markers, but Myron smelled the pungent odor of lore in Win’s rationale rather than fact. Either way, Merion’s members made a big fuss over these wicker baskets on the end of a big stick. Golfers.

Myron tried to move in closer to Jack Coldren, looking for Win’s “eye of the tiger.” Despite his protestations, Myron knew very well what Win had meant the previous night, the intangibles that separated raw talent from on-field greatness. Desire. Heart. Perseverance. Win spoke about these things as though they were evil. They were not. Quite the opposite, in fact. Win, of all people, should know better. To paraphrase and completely abuse a famous political quote: Extremism in the pursuit of excellence is no vice.

Jack Coldren’s expression was smooth and unworried and distant. Only one explanation for that: the zone. Jack had managed to squeeze his way into the hallowed zone, that tranquil room in which no crowd or big payday or famous course or next hole or knee-bending pressure or hostile opponent or successful wife or kidnapped son may reside. Jack’s zone was a small place, comprising only his club, a small dimpled ball, and a hole. All else faded away now like the dream sequence in a movie.

This, Myron knew, was Jack Coldren stripped to his purest state. He was a golfer. A man who wanted to win. Needed to. Myron understood. He had been there—his zone consisting of a large orange ball and a metallic cylinder—and a part of him would always be enmeshed in that world. It was a fine place to be—in many ways, the best place to be. Win was wrong. Winning was not a worthless goal. It was noble. Jack had taken life’s hits. He had striven and battled. He had been battered and bloodied. Yet here he stood, head high, on the road to redemption. How many people are awarded this opportunity? How many people truly get the chance to feel this vibrant, to reside for even a short time on such a plateau, to have their hearts and dreams stirred with such unquenchable inner passion?

Jack Coldren stroked the putt. Myron found himself watching the ball slowly arc toward the hole, lost in that vicarious rush that so fiercely drew spectators to sports. He held his breath and felt something like a tear well up in his eye when the ball dropped in. A birdie. Diane Hoffman made a fist and pumped it. The lead was back up to nine strokes.

Jack looked up at the applauding galley. He acknowledged them with a tip of his hat, but he saw nothing. Still in the zone. Fighting to stay there. For a moment, his eyes locked on Myron’s. Myron nodded back, not wanting to nudge him back to reality. Stay in that zone, Myron thought. In that zone, a man can win a tournament. In that zone, a son does not purposely sabotage a father’s lifelong dream.

Myron walked past the many portable toilets—they’d been provided by a company with the semiaccurate name Royal Flush—and headed toward Corporate Row. Golf matches had an unprecedented hierarchy for ticket holders. True, at most sporting arenas there was a grading of one sort or another—some had better seats, obviously, while some had access to skyboxes or even courtside seats. But in those cases, you handed a ticket to an usher or ticket collector and took your place. In golf, you displayed your entrance pass all day. The general-admission folk (read: serfs) usually had a sticker plastered on their shirt, not unlike, say, a scarlet letter. Others wore a plastic card that dangled from a metal chain wrapped around their neck. Sponsors (read: feudal lords) wore either red, silver, or gold cards, depending on how much money they spent. There were also different passes for players’ family and friends, Merion club members, Merion club officers, even steady sports agents. And the different cards gave you different access to different places. For example, you had to have a colored card to enter Corporate Row. Or you needed a gold card if you wanted to enter one of those exclusive tents—the ones strategically perched on hills like generals’ quarters in an old war movie.

Corporate Row was merely a row of tents, each sponsored by one enormous company or another. The theoretical intention of spending at least one hundred grand for a four-day tent rental was to impress corporate clients and gain exposure. The truth, however, was that the tents were a way for the corporate bigwigs to go to the tournament for free. Yes, a few important clients were invited, but Myron also noticed that the company’s major officers always managed to show too. And the hundred grand rental fee was just a start. It didn’t include the food, the drinks, the employees—not to mention the first-class flights, the deluxe hotel suites, the stretch limos, et cetera, for the bigwigs and their guests.

Boys and girls, can you say, “Chu-ching goes the cash register”? I thought you could.

Myron gave his name to the pretty young woman at the Lock-Horne tent. Win was not there yet, but Esperanza was sitting at a table in the corner.

“You look like shit,” Esperanza said.

“Maybe. But at least I feel awful.”

“So what happened?”

“Three crackheads adorned with Nazi memorabilia and crowbars jumped me.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Only three?”

The woman was constant chuckles. He told her about his run-in and narrow escape. When he was finished, Esperanza shook her head and said, “Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless.”

“Don’t get all dewy-eyed on me. I’ll be fine.”

“I found Lloyd Rennart’s wife. She’s an artist of some kind, lives on the Jersey shore.”

“Any word on Lloyd Rennart’s body?”

Esperanza shook her head. “I checked the NVI and Treemaker Web sites. No death certificate has been issued.”

Myron looked at her. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. But it might not be on the Web yet. The other offices are closed until Monday. And even if one hasn’t been issued, it might not mean anything.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“A body is supposed to be missing for a certain amount of time before the person can be declared dead,” Esperanza explained. “I don’t know—five years or something. But what often happens is that the next of kin files a motion in order to settle insurance claims and the estate. But Lloyd Rennart committed suicide.”

“So there’d be no insurance,” Myron said.

“Right. And assuming everything was held jointly between Rennart and his wife, then there would be no need for her to press it.”

Myron nodded. It made sense. Still it was yet another nagging hangnail that needed to be clipped. “You want something to drink?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I’ll be right back.” Myron grabbed a Yoo-Hoo. Win had made sure the Lock-Horne tent stocked them. What a pal. A television monitor in the upper corner had a scoreboard. Jack had just finished the fifteenth hole. Both he and Crispin had parred it. Barring a sudden collapse, Jack was going to take a huge lead into tomorrow’s final round.

When Myron got settled again, Esperanza said, “I want to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s about my graduating law school.”

“Okay,” Myron said, dragging out the word.

“You’ve been avoiding the subject,” she said.

“What are you talking about? I’m the one who wants to go to your graduation, remember?”

“That’s not what I mean.” Her fingers found and began to fiddle with a straw wrapper. “I’m talking about what happens after I graduate. I’m going to be a full-fledged attorney soon. My role in the company should change.”

Myron nodded. “Agreed.”

“For one thing, I’d like an office.”

“We don’t have the space.”

“The conference room is too large,” she countered. “You can slice a little out of there and a little out of the waiting room. It won’t be a huge office, but it’ll be good enough.”

Myron nodded slowly. “We can look into that.”

“It’s important to me, Myron.”

“Okay, it sounds possible.”

“Second, I don’t want a raise.”

“Don’t?”

“That’s right.”

“Odd negotiating technique, Esperanza, but you convinced me. Much as I might like to give you a raise, you will not receive one penny more. I surrender.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Joking around when I’m serious. You don’t like change, Myron. I know that. It’s why you lived with your parents until a few months ago. It’s why you still keep Jessica around when you should have forgotten about her years ago.”

“Do me a favor,” he said wearily. “Spare me the amateur analysis, okay?”

“Just stating the facts. You don’t like change.”

“Who does? And I love Jessica. You know that.”

“Fine, you love her,” Esperanza said dismissively. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Good. Are we done?”

“No.” Esperanza stopped playing with the straw wrapper. She crossed her legs and folded her hands in her lap. “This isn’t easy for me to talk about,” she said.

“Do you want to do it another time?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t want to do it another time. I want you to listen to me. Really listen.”

Myron stayed silent, leaned forward a little.

“The reason I don’t want a raise is because I don’t want to work for someone. My father worked his whole life doing menial jobs for a variety of assholes. My mother spent hers cleaning other people’s houses.” Esperanza stopped, swallowed, took a breath. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to spend my life working for anyone.”

“Including me?”

“I said anyone, didn’t I?” She shook her head. “Jesus, you just don’t listen sometimes.”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it. “Then I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

“I want to be a part owner,” she said.

He made a face. “Of MB SportsReps?”

“No, of AT&T. Of course MB.”

“But the name is MB,” Myron said. “The M is for Myron. B for Bolitar. Your name is Esperanza Diaz. I can’t make it MBED. What kind of name is that?”

She just looked at him. “You’re doing it again. I’m trying to have a serious conversation.”

“Now? You pick now when I just got hit over the head with a tire iron—”

“Shoulder.”

“Whatever. Look, you know how much you mean to me—”

“This isn’t about our friendship,” she interrupted. “I don’t care what I mean to you right now. I care about what I mean to MB SportsReps.”

“You mean a lot to MB. A hell of a lot.” He stopped.

“But?”

“But nothing. You just caught me a little off balance, that’s all. I was just jumped by a group of neo-Nazis. That does funny things to the psyche of people of my persuasion. I’m also trying to solve a possible kidnapping. I know things have to change. I planned on giving you more to do, letting you handle more negotiations, hiring someone new. But a partnership … that’s a different kettle of gefilte.”

Her voice was unyielding. “Meaning?”

“Meaning I’d like to think about it, okay? How do you plan on becoming a partner? What percentage do you want? Do you want to buy in or work your way in or what? These are things we’ll have to go over, and I don’t think now is the time.”

“Fine.” She stood up. “I’m going to hang around the players’ lounge. See if I can strike up a conversation with one of the wives.”

“Good idea.”

“I’ll see you later.” She turned to leave.

Esperanza? She looked at him.

“You’re not mad, right?”

“Not mad,” she repeated.

“We’ll work something out,” he said.

She nodded. “Right.”

“Don’t forget. We’re meeting with Tad Crispin an hour after they finish. By the pro shop.”

“You want me there?”

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “Okay.” Then she left.

Myron leaned back and watched her go. Great. Just what he needed. His best friend in the world as a business partner. It never worked. Money screwed up relationships; it was simply one of life’s givens. His father and his uncle—two closer brothers you never saw—had tried it. The outcome had been disastrous. Dad finally bought Uncle Morris out, but the two men didn’t speak to each other for four years. Myron and Win had labored painstakingly to keep their businesses separate while maintaining the same interests and goals. It worked because there was no cross-interference or money to divide up. With Esperanza things had been great, but that was because the relationship had always been boss and employee. Their roles were well defined. But at the same time, he understood. Esperanza deserved this chance. She had earned it. She was more than an important employee to MB. She was a part of it.

So what to do?

He sat back and chugged the Yoo-Hoo, waiting for an idea. Fortunately, his thoughts were waylaid when someone tapped his shoulder.

17

“Hello.”

Myron turned around. It was Linda Coldren. Her head was wrapped in a semi-babushka and she wore dark sunglasses. Greta Garbo circa 1984. She opened her purse. “I forwarded the home phone here,” she whispered, pointing to a cellular phone in the purse. “Mind if I sit down?”

“Please do,” Myron said.

She sat facing him. The sunglasses were big, but Myron could still see a hint of redness around the rims of her eyes. Her nose, too, looked like it had been rubbed raw by a Kleenex overdose. “Anything new?” she asked.

He told her about the Crusty Nazis jumping him. Linda asked several follow-up questions. Again the internal paradox tore at her: She wanted her son to be safe, yet she did not want it all to be a hoax. Myron finished by saying, “I still think we should get in touch with the feds. I can do it quietly.”

She shook her head. “Too risky.”

“So is going on like this.”

Linda Coldren shook her head again and leaned back. For several moments they sat in silence. Her gaze was cast somewhere over his shoulder. Then she said, “When Chad was born, I took off nearly two years. Did you know that?”

“No,” Myron said.

“Women’s golf,” she muttered. “I was at the height of my game, the top female golfer in the world, and yet you never read about it.”

“I don’t follow golf much,” Myron said.

“Yeah, right,” she snorted. “If Jack Nicklaus took two years off, you would have heard about it.”

Myron nodded. She had a point. “Was it tough coming back?” he asked.

“You mean in terms of playing or leaving my son?”

“Both.”

She took a breath and considered the question. “I missed playing,” she said. “You have no idea how much. I regained the number one spot in a couple of months. As for Chad, well, he was still an infant. I hired a nanny to travel with us.”

“How long did that last?”

“Until Chad was three. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t drag him around anymore. It wasn’t fair to him. A child needs some sort of stability. So I had to make a choice.”

They fell into silence.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I’m not into the self-pity thing and I’m glad women are given choices. But what they don’t tell you is that when you have choices, you have guilt.”

“What kind of guilt?”

“A mother’s guilt, the worst kind there is. The pangs are constant and ceaseless. They haunt your sleep. They point accusatory fingers. Every joyous swing of the golf club made me feel like I was forsaking my own child. I flew home as often as I could. I missed some tournaments that I really wanted to play in. I tried damn hard to balance career and motherhood. And every step of the way, I felt like a selfish louse.” She looked at him. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But you don’t really sympathize,” she added.

“Of course I do.”

Linda Coldren gave him a skeptical glance. “If I had been a stay-at-home mother, would you have been so quick to suspect that Chad was behind this? Didn’t the fact that I was an absent mother sway your thinking?”

“Not an absent mother,” Myron corrected. “Absent parents.”

“Same thing.”

“No. You were making more money. You were by far the more successful parent business-wise. If anyone should have stayed home, it was Jack.”

She smiled. “Aren’t we politically correct?”

“Nope. Just practical.”

“But it’s not that simple, Myron. Jack loves his son. And during the years he didn’t qualify for the tour, he did stay home with him. But let’s face facts: Like it or not, it’s the mother who bears that burden.”

“Doesn’t make it right.”

“Nor does it let me off the hook. Like I said, I made my choices. If I had to do it all over again, I still would have toured.”

“And you still would have felt guilty.”

She nodded. “With choice comes guilt. No escaping it.”

Myron took a sip of his Yoo-Hoo. “You said that Jack stayed home some of the time.”

“Yes,” she said. “When he failed Q school.”

“Q school?”

“Qualifying school,” she said. “Every year the top 125 moneymakers get their PGA Tour card automatically. A couple of other players get sponsor exemptions. The rest are forced to go to Q school. Qualifying school. If you don’t do well there, you don’t play for the year.”

“One tournament decides all that?”

She tilted the glass at him as though making a toast. “That’s right.”

Talk about pressure. “So when Jack failed Q school, he’d stay home for the year?”

She nodded.

“How did Jack and Chad get along?”

“Chad used to worship his father,” Linda said.

“And now?”

She looked off, her face vaguely pained. “Now Chad is old enough to wonder why his father keeps losing. I don’t know what he thinks anymore. But Jack is a good man. He tries very hard. You have to understand what happened to him. Losing the Open that way—it might sound overly melodramatic, but it killed something inside him. Not even having a son could make him whole.”

“It shouldn’t matter so much,” Myron said, hearing the echo of Win in his words. “It was just one tournament.”

“You were involved in a lot of big games,” she said. “Ever choke away a victory like Jack did?”

“No.”

“Neither have I.”

Two gray-haired men sporting matching green ascots made their way down the buffet table. They leaned over each food selection and frowned like it had ants. Their plates were still piled high enough to cause the occasional avalanche.

“There’s something else,” Linda said.

Myron waited.

She adjusted the sunglasses and put her hands on the table palms down. “Jack and I are not close. We haven’t been close in many years.”

When she didn’t continue, Myron said, “But you’ve stayed married.”

“Yes.”

He wanted to ask why, but the question was so obvious, just hanging out there within easy view, that to voice it would be redundant.

“I am a constant reminder of his failures,” she continued. “It’s not easy for a man to live with that. We’re supposed to be life partners, but I have what Jack longs for most.” Linda tilted her head. “It’s funny.”

“What?”

“I never allow mediocrity on the golf course. Yet I allowed it to dominate my personal life. Don’t you find that odd?”

Myron made a noncommittal motion with his head. He could feel Linda’s unhappiness radiating off her like a breaking fever. She looked up now and smiled at him. The smile was intoxicating, nearly breaking his heart. He found himself wanting to lean over and hold Linda Coldren. He felt this almost uncontrollable urge to press her against him and feel the sheen of her hair in his face. He tried to remember the last time he had held such a thought for any woman but Jessica; no answer came to him.

“Tell me about you,” Linda suddenly said.

The change of subject caught him off guard. He sort of shook his head. “Boring stuff.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” she said, almost playfully. “Come on now. It’ll distract me.”

Myron shook his head again.

“I know you almost played pro basketball. I know you hurt your knee. I know you went to law school at Harvard. And I know you tried to make a comeback a few months ago. Want to fill in the blanks?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“No, I don’t think so, Myron. Aunt Cissy didn’t say that you could help us because you were good at basketball.”

“I worked a bit for the government.”

“With Win?”

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

Again he shook his head.

“Top secret, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“And you date Jessica Culver?”

“Yes.”

“I like her books.”

He nodded.

“Do you love her?”

“Very much.”

“So what do you want?”

“Want?”

“Out of life. What are your dreams?”

He smiled. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Just getting to the heart of the matter,” Linda said. “Humor me. What do you want, Myron?” She looked at him with keen interest. Myron felt flushed.

“I want to marry Jessica. I want to move to the suburbs. I want to raise a family.”

She leaned back as though satisfied. “For real?”

“Yes.”

“Like your parents?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “I think that’s nice.”

“It’s simple,” he said.

“Not all of us are built for the simple life,” she said, “even if it’s what we want.”

Myron nodded. “Deep, Linda. I don’t know what it means, but it sounded deep.”

“Me neither.” She laughed. It was deep and throaty and Myron liked the sound of it. “Tell me where you met Win.”

“At college,” Myron said. “Freshman year.”

“I haven’t seen him since he was eight years old.” Linda Coldren took a swallow of her seltzer. “I was fifteen then. Jack and I had already been dating a year, believe it or not. Win loved Jack, by the way. Did you know that?”

“No,” Myron said.

“It’s true. He followed Jack everywhere. And Jack could be such a prick back then. He bullied other kids. He was mischievous as all hell. At times he was downright cruel.”

“But you fell for him?”

“I was fifteen,” she said, as if that explained everything. And maybe it did.

“What was Win like as a kid?” Myron asked.

She smiled again, the lines in the corners of her eyes and lips deepening. “Trying to figure him out, eh?”

“Just curious,” Myron said, but the truth in her words stung. He suddenly wanted to withdraw the question, but it was too late.

“Win was never a happy kid. He was always”—Linda stopped, searching for the word—“off. I don’t know how else to put it. He wasn’t crazy or flaky or aggressive or anything like that. But something was not right with him. Always. Even as a child, he had this strange ability to detach.”

Myron nodded. He knew what she meant.

“Aunt Cissy is like that too.”

“Win’s mother?”

Linda nodded. “The woman can be pure ice when she wants to be. Even when it comes to Win. She acts as though he doesn’t exist.”

“She must talk about him,” Myron said. “To your father, at least.”

Linda shook her head. “When Aunt Cissy told my father to contact Win, it was the first time she’d mentioned his name to him in years.”

Myron said nothing. Again the obvious question hung in the air unasked: What had happened between Win and his mother? But Myron would never voice it. This conversation had already gone too far. Asking would be an unforgivable betrayal; if Win wanted him to know, he’d tell him.

Time passed, but neither one of them noticed. They talked, mostly about Chad and the kind of son he was. Jack had held on and still led by eight strokes. A gigantic lead. If he blew it this time, it would be worse than twenty-three years ago.

The tent began to empty out, but Myron and Linda stayed and talked some more. A feeling of intimacy began to warm him; he found it hard to breathe when he looked at her. For a moment he closed his eyes. Nothing, he realized, was really going on here. If there was an attraction of some sort, it was simply a classic case of damsel-in-distress syndrome—and there was nothing less politically correct (not to mention Neanderthal) than that.

The crowd was gone now. For a long time nobody came into view. At one point, Win stuck his head into the tent. Seeing them together, he arched an eyebrow and then slipped back out.

Myron checked his watch. “I have to go. I have an appointment.”

“With whom?”

“Tad Crispin.”

“Here at Merion?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you’ll be long?”

“No.”

She started fiddling with her engagement ring, studying it as though making an appraisal. “Do you mind if I wait?” she asked. “We can catch dinner together.” She took off her glasses. The eyes were puffy, but they were also strong and focused.

“Okay.”

He met up with Esperanza at the clubhouse. She made a face at him.

“What?” he said.

“You thinking about Jessica?” Esperanza asked suspiciously. “No, why?”

“Because you’re making your nauseating, lovesick-puppy face. You know. The one that makes me want to throw up on your shoes.”

“Come on,” he said. “Tad Crispin is waiting.”

The meeting ended with no deal. But they were getting close.

“That contract he signed with Zoom,” Esperanza said. “A major turkey.”

“I know.”

“Crispin likes you.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Myron said.

He excused himself and walked quickly back to the tent. Linda Coldren was in the same seat, her back to him, her posture still queenlike.

“Linda?”

“It’s dark now,” she said softly. “Chad doesn’t like the dark. I know he’s sixteen, but I still leave the hall light on. Just in case.”

Myron remained still. When she turned toward him—when he first saw her smile—it was like something corkscrewed into his heart. “When Chad was little,” she began, “he always carried around this red plastic golf club and Wiffle ball. It’s funny. When I think about him now, that’s how I see him. With that little red club. For a long time I hadn’t been able to picture him like that. He’s so much like a man now. But since he’s been gone, all I see is that little, happy kid in the backyard hitting golf balls.”

Myron nodded. He stretched out his hand toward hers. “Let’s go, Linda,” he said gently.

She stood. They walked together in silence. The night sky was so bright it looked wet. Myron wanted to reach out and hold her hand. But he didn’t. When they got to her car, Linda unlocked it with a remote control. Then she opened the door as Myron began circling for the passenger side. He stopped suddenly.

The envelope was on her seat.

For several seconds, neither of them moved. The envelope was manila, big enough for an eight-by-ten photograph. It was flat except for an area in the middle that puffed up a bit.

Linda Coldren looked up at Myron. Myron reached down, and using his palms, he picked up the envelope by the edges. There was writing on the back. Block letters:

I WARNED YOU NOT TO SEEK HELP

NOW CHAD PAYS THE PRICE

CROSS US AGAIN AND IT WILL GET MUCH WORSE.

Dread wrapped Myron’s chest in tight steel bands. He slowly reached out and tentatively touched the puffy part with just a knuckle. It felt claylike. Carefully, Myron slit the seal open. He turned the envelope upside down and let the contents fall to the car seat.

The severed finger bounced once and then settled onto the leather.

18

Myron stared, unable to speak.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod …

Raw terror engulfed him. He started shivering, and his body went numb. He looked down at the note in his hand. A voice inside his head said, Your fault, Myron. Your fault.

He turned to Linda Coldren. Her hand fluttered near her mouth, her eyes wide.

Myron tried to step toward her, but he staggered like a boxer who didn’t take advantage of a standing eight count. “We have to call someone,” he managed, his voice sounding distant even to him. “The FBI. I have friends—”

“No.” Her tone was strong.

“Linda, listen to me.…”

“Read the note,” she said.

“But—”

“Read the note,” she repeated. She lowered her head grimly. “You’re out of this now, Myron.”

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“Oh no?” Her head snapped up. Her hands tightened into fists. “I’m dealing with a sick monster,” she said. “The kind of monster who maims at the slightest provocation.” She stepped closer to the car. “He cut off my son’s finger just because I talked to you. What do you think he’d do if I went directly against his orders?”

Myron’s head swirled. “Linda, paying off the ransom doesn’t guarantee—”

“I know that,” she interrupted.

“But …” His mind flailed about helplessly and then said something exceedingly dumb. “You don’t even know if it’s his finger.”

She looked down now. With one hand, she held back a sob. With the other, she caressed the finger lovingly, without a trace of repulsion on her face. “Yes,” Linda said softly. “I do.”

“He may already be dead.”

“Then it makes no difference what I do, does it?”

Myron stopped himself from saying any more. He had sounded asinine enough. He just needed a moment or two to gather himself, to figure out what the next step should be.

Your fault, Myron. Your fault.

He shook it off. He had, after all, been in worse scrapes. He had seen dead bodies, taken on some very bad people, caught and brought killers to justice. He just needed—

All with Win’s help, Myron. Never on your own.

Linda Coldren lifted the finger into view. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her face remained a placid pool.

“Good-bye, Myron.”

“Linda …”

“I’m not going to disobey him again.”

“We have to think this through—”

She shook her head. “We should never have contacted you.”

Cupping her son’s severed finger like a baby chick, Linda Coldren slid into the car. She put the finger down carefully and started the car. Then she shifted it into gear and drove away.

Myron made his way to his car. For several minutes he sat and took deep breaths, willing himself to calm down. He had studied martial arts since Win had first introduced him to tae kwon do when they were college freshmen. Meditation was a big part of what they’d learned, yet Myron never quite grasped the critical nuances. His mind had a habit of drifting. Now he tried to practice the simple rules. He closed his eyes. He breathed in through the nose slowly forcing it down low, letting only his stomach, not his chest, expand. He released it through the mouth, even slower, draining his lungs fully.

Okay, he thought, what is your next step?

The first answer to float to the surface was the most basic: Give up. Cut your losses. Realize that you are very much out of your element. You never really worked for the feds. You only accompanied Win. You were way out of your league on this and it cost a sixteen-year-old boy his finger and maybe more. As Esperanza had said, “Without Win, you’re hopeless.” Learn your lesson and walk away.

And then what? Let the Coldrens face this crisis alone?

If he had, maybe Chad Coldren would still have ten fingers.

The thought made something inside of him crumble. He opened his eyes. His heart started trip-hammering again. He couldn’t call the Coldrens. He couldn’t call the feds. If he pursued this on his own, he would be risking Chad Coldren’s life.

He started up the car, still trying to regain his balance. It was time to be analytical. It was time to be cold. He had to look at this latest development as a clue for a moment. Forget the horror. Forget the fact that he might have screwed up. The finger was just a clue.

One: The placement of the envelope was curious—inside Linda Coldren’s locked (yes, it had been locked—Linda had used the remote control to open it) car. How had it gotten there? Had the kidnapper simply broken into the vehicle? Good possibility, but would he have had time in Merion’s parking lot? Wouldn’t someone have reported it? Probably. Did Chad Coldren have a key that the kidnapper could have used? Hmm. Very good possibility, but one he couldn’t confirm unless he spoke to Linda, which was out of the question.

Dead end. For now.

Two: More than one person was involved in this kidnapping. This hardly took brilliant detective work. First off, you have the Crusty Nazi. The phone call at the mall proved that he had something to do with this—not to mention his subsequent behavior. But there was no way a guy like Crusty could sneak into Merion and plant the envelope in Linda Coldren’s car. Not without drawing suspicion. Not during the U.S. Open. And the note had warned the Coldrens not to “cross” them again. Cross. Did that sound like a Crusty word?

Okay good. What else?

Three: The kidnappers were both vicious and dumb. Vicious was again obvious—the dumb part maybe less so. But look at the facts. For example, making a large ransom demand over a weekend when you know that the banks won’t be open until Monday—was that bright? Not knowing how much to ask for the first two times they called—didn’t that say ding-a-ling? And lastly was it really prudent to cut off a kid’s finger just because his parents happened to talk to a sports agent? Did that even make sense?

No.

Unless, of course, the kidnappers knew that Myron was more than a sports agent.

But how?

Myron pulled into Win’s long driveway. Unfamiliar people were taking horses out of the stable. As he approached the guest house, Win appeared in the doorway. Myron pulled into a spot and got out.

“How did your meeting with Tad Crispin go?” Win asked.

Myron hurried over to him. “They chopped off his finger,” he managed, breathy to the point of almost hyperventilating. “The kidnappers. They cut off Chad’s finger. Left it in Linda’s car.”

Win’s expression did not change. “Did you discover this before or after your meeting with Tad Crispin?”

Myron was puzzled by the question. “After.”

Win nodded slowly. “Then my original question remains: How did your meeting go with Tad Crispin?”

Myron stepped back as though slapped. “Jesus Christ,” he said in an almost reverent tone. “You can’t be serious.”

“What happens to that family does not concern me. What happens to your business dealings with Tad Crispin does.”

Myron shook his head, stunned. “Not even you could be that cold.”

“Oh please.”

“Please what?”

“There are far greater tragedies in this world than a sixteen-year-old boy losing his finger. People die, Myron. Floods wipe out entire villages. Men do horrible things to children every day.” He paused. “Did you, for example, read this afternoon’s paper?”

“What are you rambling about?”

“I’m just trying to make you understand,” Win continued in too slow, too measured a voice. “The Coldrens mean nothing to me—no more than any other stranger and perhaps less. The newspaper is filled with tragedies that hit me on a more personal level. For example …”

Win stopped and looked at Myron very steadily.

“For example what?” Myron asked.

“There was a new development in the Kevin Morris case,” Win replied. “Are you familiar with that one?”

Myron shook his head.

“Two seven-year-old boys—Billy Waters and Tyrone Duffy—have been missing for nearly three weeks. They disappeared while riding their bikes home from school. The police questioned one Kevin Morris, a man with a long record of perversion, including molestation, who had been hanging around the school. But Mr. Morris had a very sharp attorney. There was no physical evidence and despite a fairly convincing circumstantial case—they found the boys’ bikes in a Dumpster not far from his home—Mr. Morris was set free.”

Myron felt something cold press against his heart. “So what was the new development, Win?”

“The police received a tip late last night.”

“How late?”

Again Win looked at him steadily. “Very late.”

Silence.

“It seems,” Win went on, “that someone had witnessed Kevin Morris burying the bodies off a road in the woods near Lancaster. The police dug them up last night. Do you know what they found?”

Myron shook his head again, afraid to even open his mouth.

“Billy Waters and Tyrone Duffy were both dead. They’d been sexually molested and mutilated in ways that even the media couldn’t report. The police also found enough evidence at the burial site to arrest Kevin Morris. Fingerprints on a medical scalpel. Plastic bags that matched ones in his kitchen. Semen samples that offer a preliminary match in both boys.”

Myron flinched.

“Everyone seems quite confident that Mr. Morris will be convicted,” Win finished.

“What about the person who called in the tip? Will he be a witness?”

“Funny thing,” Win said. “The man called from a pay phone and never gave his name. No one, it seems, knows who he was.”

“But the police captured Kevin Morris?”

“Yes.”

The two men stared at each other.

“I’m surprised you didn’t kill him,” Myron said.

“Then you really don’t know me.”

A horse whinnied. Win turned and looked at the magnificent animal. Something strange came across his face, a look of loss.

“What did she do to you, Win?”

Win kept staring. They both knew whom Myron was talking about.

“What did she do to make you hate so much?”

“Don’t engage in too much hyperbole, Myron. I am not that simple. My mother is not solely responsible for shaping me. A man is not made up of one incident, and I am a far cry from crazy, as you suggested earlier. Like any other human being, I choose my battles. I battle quite a bit—more than most—and usually on the right side. I battled for Billy Waters and Tyrone Duffy. But I do not wish to battle for the Coldrens. That is my choice. You, as my closest friend, should respect that. You should not try to prod or guilt me into a battle I do not wish to fight.”

Myron was not sure what to say. It was scary when he could understand Win’s cold logic. “Win?”

Win wrested his gaze from the horse. He looked at Myron.

“I’m in trouble,” Myron said, hearing the desperation in his tone. “I need your help.”

Win’s voice was suddenly soft, his face almost pained. “If that were true, I’d be there. You know that. But you are not in any trouble from which you cannot easily disentangle. Just back away, Myron. You have the option of ending your involvement. To draw me into this against my will—using our friendship in that way—is wrong. Walk away this time.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

Win nodded and headed toward his car. “Like I said, we all choose our battles.”

When he entered the guest house, Esperanza was screaming, “Bankrupt! Lose a turn! Bankrupt!”

Myron came up behind her. She was watching Wheel of Fortune.

“This woman is so greedy,” Esperanza said, gesturing at the screen. “She’s got over six thousand dollars and she keeps spinning. I hate that.”

The wheel stopped, landing on the glittery $1,000. The woman asked for a B. There were two of them. Esperanza groaned. “You’re back early,” she said. “I thought you were going out to dinner with Linda Coldren.”

“It didn’t work out.”

Esperanza finally turned around and looked at his face. “What happened?”

He told her. Her dark complexion lost a bit of color along the way. When he finished, Esperanza said, “You need Win.”

“He won’t help.”

“Time to swallow your macho pride and ask him. Beg him if you have to.”

“Been there, done that. He’s out.” On the television, the greedy woman bought a vowel. This always baffled Myron. Why do contestants who clearly know the puzzle’s solution still buy vowels? To waste money? To make sure their opponents know the answer too?

“But,” he said, “you’re here.”

Esperanza looked at him. “So?”

It was, he knew, the real reason she had come down in the first place. On the phone she had told him that he didn’t work well alone. The words spoke volumes about her true motivation for fleeing the Big Apple.

“Do you want to help?” he asked.

The greedy woman leaned forward, spun the wheel, and then started clapping and shouting, “Come on, a thousand!” Her opponents clapped too. Like they wanted her to do well. Right.

“What do you want me to do?” Esperanza asked.

“I’ll explain on the way. If you want to come.”

They both watched the wheel decelerate. The camera moved in for a close-up. The arrow slowed and slowed before settling on the word BANKRUPT. The audience groaned. The greedy woman kept the smile, but now she looked like someone had just punched her hard in the stomach.

“That’s an omen,” Esperanza said.

“Good or bad?” Myron asked.

“Yes.”

19

The girls were still at the mall. Still at the food court. Still at the same table. It was amazing, when you thought about it. The long summer days beckoned with sunny skies and chirping birds. School was out, and yet so many teenagers spent all their time inside a glorified school cafeteria, probably lamenting the day they would have to return to school.

Myron shook his head. He was complaining about teenagers. A sure sign of lost youth. Soon he’d be screaming at someone for turning up the thermostat.

As soon as he entered the food court, the girls all turned in his direction. It was like they had people-we-know detectors at every entrance. Myron did not hesitate. Making his expression as stern as possible, he rushed toward them. He studied each face as he approached. These were, after all, just teenagers. The guilty one, Myron was sure, would show it.

And she did. Almost instantly.

She was the one who had been teased yesterday, the one they taunted for being the recipient of a Crusty smile. Missy or Messy or something. It all made sense now. Crusty hadn’t spotted Myron’s tail. He’d been tipped off. In fact, the whole thing had been arranged. That was how Crusty had known that Myron had been asking questions about him. That explained the seemingly fortuitous timing—that is, Crusty hanging around the food court just long enough for Myron to arrive.

It had all been a big setup.

The one with Elsa Lancaster hair screwed up her face and said, “Like, what’s the matter?”

“That guy tried to kill me,” Myron said.

Lots of gasps. Faces lit up with excitement. To most of them, this was like a television show come to life. Only Missy or Messy or some name with an M remained rock-still.

“Not to worry though,” Myron continued. “We’ve just about got him. In an hour or two, he’ll be under arrest. The police are on their way to find him right now. I just wanted to thank you all for your cooperation.”

The M girl spoke: “I thought you weren’t a cop.”

A sentence without the word like. Hmm. “I’m undercover,” Myron said.

“Oh. My. God.”

“Get out!”

“Whoa!”

“You mean like on New York Undercover?”

Myron, no stranger to TV, had no idea what she was talking about. “Exactly,” he said.

“This is so cool.”

“Are we, like, going to be on TV?”

“The six o’clock news?”

“That guy on Channel Four is so cute, you know?”

“My hair totally sucks.”

“No way, Amber. But mine is like a total rat nest.”

Myron cleared his throat. “We have this pretty much all wrapped up. Except for one thing. The accomplice.”

Myron waited for one of them to say, “Accomplice?” No one did. Myron elaborated. “Someone in this very mall helped that creep set me up.”

“In, like, here?”

“In our mall?”

“Not our mall. No way.”

They said the word mall like some people said the word synagogue.

“Someone helped that skank?”

“Our mall?”

“Eeeuw.”

“I can’t, like, believe it.”

“Believe it,” Myron said. “In fact, he or she is probably here right now. Watching us.”

Heads swirled about. Even M managed to get into the act, though it was an uninspired display.

Myron had shown the stick. Now the carrot. “Look, I want you ladies to keep your eyes and ears open. We’ll catch the accomplice. No question about it. Guys like that always talk. But if the accomplice was just a hapless dupe …”

Blank faces.

“If she, like, didn’t really know the score”—not exactly hip-hop lingo, but they nodded now—“and she came to me right away, before the cops nail her, well, then I’d probably be able to help her out. Otherwise, she could be charged with attempted murder.”

Nothing. Myron had expected that. M would never admit this in front of her friends. Jail was a great fear-inducer, but it was little more than a wet match next to the bonfire that was teenage peer pressure.

“Good-bye, ladies.”

Myron moved to the other side of the food court. He leaned against a pillar, putting himself in the path between the girls’ table and the bathroom. He waited, hoping she’d make an excuse and come over. After about five minutes, M stood up and began walking toward Myron. Just as he planned. Myron almost smiled. Maybe he should have been a high school guidance counselor. Mold young minds, change lives for the better.

The M girl veered away from him and toward the exit.

Damn.

Myron quickly trotted over, the smile on full blast. “Mindy?” He had suddenly remembered her name.

She turned to him but said nothing.

He put on the soft voice and the understanding eyes. A male Oprah. A kinder, gentler Regis. “Whatever you say to me is confidential,” he said. “If you’re involved in this—”

“Just stay away from me, okay? I’m not, like, involved in anything.”

She pushed past him and hurried past Foot Locker and the Athlete’s Foot—two stores Myron had always assumed were the same, alter egos if you will, like you never saw Batman and Bruce Wayne in the same room.

Myron watched her go. She hadn’t cracked, which was a bit of a surprise. He nodded and his backup plan went into action. Mindy kept hurrying away, glancing behind her every few steps to make sure Myron wasn’t following her. He wasn’t.

Mindy, however, did not notice the attractive, jean-clad Hispanic woman just a few feet to her left.

Mindy found a pay phone by the record store that looked exactly like every other mall record store. She glanced about, put a quarter into the slot, and dialed a number. Her finger had just pressed the seventh digit when a small hand reached over her shoulder and hung up the phone.

She spun toward Esperanza. “Hey!”

Esperanza said, “Put down the phone.”

“Hey!”

“Right, hey. Now put down the phone.”

“Like, who the fuck are you?”

“Put down the phone,” Esperanza repeated, “or I’ll shove it up a nostril.”

Wide-eyed with confusion, Mindy obeyed. Several seconds later, Myron appeared. He looked at Esperanza. “Up a nostril?”

She shrugged.

Mindy shouted, “You can’t, like, do that.”

“Do what?” Myron said.

“Like”—Mindy stopped, struggled with the thought—“like, make me hang up a phone?”

“No law against that,” Myron said. He turned to Esperanza. “You know any law against that?”

“Against hanging up a phone?” Esperanza emphatically shook her head. “No, señor.”

“See, no law against it. On the other hand, there is a law against aiding and abetting a criminal. It’s called a felony. It means jail time.”

“I didn’t aid nothing. And I don’t bet.”

Myron turned to Esperanza. “You get the number?”

She nodded and gave it to him.

“Let’s trace it.”

Again, the cyber-age made this task frighteningly easy. Anybody can buy a computer program at their local software store or hop on certain Web sites like Biz, type in the number, and voilà, you have a name and address.

Esperanza used a cellular phone to dial the home number of MB SportsReps’ new receptionist. Her name was, fittingly, Big Cyndi. Six-five and over three hundred pounds, Big Cyndi had wrestled professionally under the moniker Big Chief Mama, tag-team partner of Esperanza “Little Pocahontas” Diaz. In the ring, Big Cyndi wore makeup like Tammy Faye on steroids; spiked hair that would have been the envy of Sid and Nancy; ripped muscle-displaying T-shirts; and an awful, sneering glare complete with a ready growl. In real life, well, she was exactly the same.

Speaking Spanish, Esperanza gave Cyndi the number.

Mindy said, “Hey, I’m, like, outta here.”

Myron grabbed her arm. “ ’Fraid not.”

“Hey! You can’t, like, hold me here.”

Myron maintained his grip.

“I’ll scream rape.”

Myron rolled his eyes. “At a mall pay phone. In broad fluorescent light. When I’m standing here with my girlfriend.”

Mindy looked at Esperanza. “She’s your girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

Esperanza began whistling “Dream Weaver.”

“But you can’t, like, make me stay with you.”

“I don’t get it, Mindy. You look like a nice girl.” Actually. she was wearing black leggings, too-high pumps, a red halter top, and what looked like a dog choker around her neck. “Are you trying to tell me that this guy is worth going to jail over? He deals drugs, Mindy. He tried to kill me.”

Esperanza hung up. “It’s a bar called the Parker Inn.”

“You know where it is?” he asked Mindy.

“Yeah.”

“Come on.”

Mindy pulled away. “Let go,” she said, stretching out the last word.

“Mindy, this isn’t fun and games here. You helped someone try to kill me.”

“So you say.”

“What?”

Mindy put her hands on her hips, chewed gum. “So, like, how do I know that you’re not the bad one, huh?”

“Excuse me?”

“You, like, come up to us yesterday, right, all mysterious and stuff, right? You don’t, like, have a badge or nothing. How do I know that you aren’t, like, after Tito? How do I know that you aren’t another drug dealer trying to take over his turf?”

“ ‘Tito?’ ” Myron repeated, looking at Esperanza. “A neo-Nazi named Tito?”

Esperanza shrugged.

“None of his friends, like, call him Tito,” Mindy went on. “It’s way too long, you know? So they call him Tit.”

Myron and Esperanza exchanged a glance, shook their heads. Too easy.

“Mindy,” Myron said slowly, “I wasn’t kidding back there. Tito is not a nice fellow. He may, in fact, be involved in kidnapping and maiming a boy about your age. Somebody cut off the boy’s finger and sent it to his mother.”

Her face pinched up. “Oh, that’s, like, so gross.”

“Help me, Mindy.”

“You a cop?”

“No,” Myron said. “I’m just trying to save a boy.”

She waved her hands dismissively. “Then, like, go. You don’t need me.”

“I’d like you to come with us.”

“Why?”

“So you don’t try to warn Tito.”

“I won’t.”

Myron shook his head. “You also know how to get to Parker Inn. It’ll save us time.”

“Uh-uh, no way. I’m not going with you.”

“If you don’t,” Myron said, “I’ll tell Amber and Trish and the gang all about your new boyfriend.”

That snared her attention. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she insisted. “We just, like, hung out a couple of times.”

Myron smiled. “So I’ll lie,” he said. “I’ll tell them you slept with him.”

“I did not!” she screamed. “That’s, like, so unfair.” Myron shrugged helplessly.

She crossed her arms and chewed her gum. Her version of defiance. It didn’t last long. “Okay, okay, I’ll go.” She pointed a finger at Myron. “But I don’t want Tit to see me, okay? I stay in the car.”

“Deal,” Myron said. He shook his head. Now they were after a man named Tit. What next?

The Parker Inn was a total redneck, biker, skeezer bar. The parking lot was packed with pickup trucks and motorcycles. Country music blared from the constantly opening door. Several men in John Deere baseball caps were using the side of the building as a urinal. Every once in a while one would turn and piss on another. Curses and laughter spewed forward. Fun city.

From his car parked across the street, Myron looked at Mindy and said, “You used to hang out here?”

She shrugged. “I, like, came here a couple of times,” she said. “For excitement, you know?”

Myron nodded. “Why didn’t you just douse yourself with gasoline and light matches?”

“Fuck you, all right? You my father now?”

He held his hands up. She was right. None of his business. “Do you see Tito’s truck?” Myron just couldn’t call him Tit. Maybe if he got to know him better.

Mindy scanned the lot. “No.”

Neither did Myron. “Do you know where he lives?”

“No.”

Myron shook his head. “He deals drugs. He wears a swastika tattoo. And he has no ass. But don’t tell me … underneath all that, Tito is really sweet.”

Mindy shouted, “Fuck you, all right? Just fuck you.”

“Myron,” Esperanza said by way of warning.

Again Myron put his hands up. They all sat back and watched. Nothing happened.

Mindy sighed as audibly as possible. “So, like, can I go home now?”

Esperanza said, “I have a thought.”

“What?” Myron asked.

Esperanza pulled the tail of her blouse out of her jeans. She tied it up, making a knot under her rib cage and revealing plenty of flat, dark stomach. Then she unbuttoned her top to a daring low. A black bra was now visible, Myron noticed, trained detective that he was. She pulled down the visor mirror and began to apply makeup. Lots of makeup. Far too much makeup. She mussed up her hair a bit and rolled up her jeans cuffs. When she finished she smiled at Myron.

“How do I look?” she asked.

Even Myron felt a little weak at the knees. “You’re going to walk in there looking like that?”

“That’s how everyone in there dresses.”

“But everyone doesn’t look like you,” he said.

“Oh, my, my,” Esperanza said. “A compliment.”

“I meant, like a chorus dancer in West Side Story.”

“ ‘A boy like that,’ ” Esperanza sang, “ ‘he keel your brother, forget that boy, go find another—’ ”

“If I do make you a partner,” Myron said, “don’t dress like this at board meetings.”

“Deal,” Esperanza said. “Can I go now?”

“First call me on the cellular now. I want to make sure I can hear everything that goes on.”

She nodded, dialed the phone. He picked it up. They tested the connection.

“Don’t go playing hero,” he said. “Just find out if he’s there. Something gets out of hand, you get out of there pronto.”

“Okay.”

“And we should have a code word. Something you say if you need me.”

Esperanza nodded, feigning seriousness. “If I say the words premature ejaculation, it means I want you to come.”

“So to speak.”

Esperanza and even Mindy groaned.

Myron reached into his glove compartment. He snapped it open and pulled out a gun. He was not going to be caught unprepared again. “Go,” he said.

Esperanza hopped out of the car and crossed the street. A black Corvette with flame decals on the hood and an extravrooming engine pulled up. A gold-chain-enmeshed primate raced the engine and leaned his head out the window. He smiled greasily at Esperanza. He hit the gas again, giving off a few more deep vrooms. Esperanza looked at the car, then at the driver. “Sorry to hear about your penis,” she deadpanned.

The car drove off. Esperanza shrugged and waved at Myron. It wasn’t an original line, but it never failed her.

“God, I love that woman,” Myron said.

“She’s, like, totally hot,” Mindy agreed. “I wish I looked like her.”

“You should wish to be like her,” he corrected.

“What’s the difference? She must, like, really work out, right?”

Esperanza entered the Parker Inn. The first thing that hit her was the smell—a pungent combination of dried vomit and body odor, only less olfactorily pleasing. She wrinkled her nose and continued inside. The floor was hardwood with lots of sawdust. The light was dingy, coming off the pool table ceiling fixtures that were supposed to look like imitation Tiffany lamps. The crowd was probably two-to-one men over women. Everyone was dressed—in a word—cheesy.

Esperanza looked around the room. Then she spoke out loud so that Myron would hear her through the phone. “About a hundred guys in here fit your description,” she said. “It’s like asking me to find an implant in a strip club.”

Myron’s phone was on mute, but she’d bet he was laughing. An implant at a strip club. Not bad, she thought. Not bad at all.

So now what?

People were staring at her, but she was used to that. Three seconds passed before a man approached her. He had a long, kinky beard; bits of coagulated food were lodged in it. He smiled toothlessly, looked her up and down unapologetically.

“I’ve got a great tongue,” he said to her.

“Now all you need is some teeth.”

She pushed past him and made her way to the bar. Two seconds later, a guy jumped toward her. He wore a cowboy hat. Cowboy hat. Philadelphia. What’s wrong with this picture?

“Hey, sweetheart, don’t I know you?”

Esperanza nodded. “Another line that smooth,” she said, “and I may start to undress.”

The cowboy whooped it up like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “No, little darling, I’m not handing you a line. I’m serious here.…” His voice sort of drifted off. “Holy shit!” the man cried. “It’s Little Pocahontas! The Indian Princess! You’re Little Pocahontas, right? Don’t deny it now, darling. It’s you! I can’t believe it!”

Myron was probably laughing his ass off right now.

“Nice to see you,” Esperanza said. “Thank you very much for remembering.”

“Shit, Bobby, take a lookie here. It’s Little Pocahontas! Remember? That hot little vixen on FLOW?”

FLOW, of course, stood for the “Fabulous Ladies Of Wrestling.” The organization’s original name had been the “Beautiful Ladies Of Wrestling,” but once they became popular enough for television, the networks insisted on a new acronym.

“Where?” Another man approached, eyes wide and drunk and happy “Holy shit, you’re right! It’s her! It’s really her!”

“Hey, thanks for the memories, fellas, but—”

“I remember this one time, you were fighting Tatiana the Siberian Husky? Remember that one? Shit, my hard-on nearly poked a hole clean through my bedroom window.”

Esperanza hoped to file that little tidbit under Too Much Information.

An enormous bartender came over. He looked like the pullout centerfold for Leather Biker Monthly. Extra big and extra scary. He had long hair, a long scar, and tattoos of snakes slithering up both arms. He shot the two men a glare and—poof—they were gone. Like the glare had evaporated them. Then he turned his eyes toward Esperanza. She met the glare and gave him one back. Neither backed down.

“Lady, what the fuck are you?” he asked.

“Is that a new way of asking what I’m drinking?”

“No.” The mutual glaring continued. He leaned two massive snake-arms on the bar. “You’re too good-looking to be a cop,” he said. “And you’re too good-looking to be hanging out in this toilet.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Esperanza said. “And you are?”

“Hal,” he said. “I own this toilet.”

“Hi, Hal.”

“Hi back. Now what the fuck do you want?”

“I’m trying to score some blow,” she said.

“Nah,” Hal said with a shake of his head. “You’d go to Spic City for that. Buy it from one of your own kind, no offense.” He leaned even closer now. Esperanza couldn’t help but wonder if Hal would be a good match for Big Cyndi. She liked big biker guys. “Let’s cut the crap, sweetheart. What do you want?”

Esperanza decided to try the direct approach. “I’m looking for a sliver of scum named Tito. People call him Tit. Skinny, shaved head—”

“Yeah, yeah, I might know him. How much?”

“Fifty bucks.”

Hal made a scoffing sound. “You want me to sell out a customer for fifty bucks?”

“A hundred.”

“Hundred and fifty. The deadbeat sack of shit owes me money.”

“Deal,” she said.

“Show me the money.”

Esperanza took the bills out of her wallet. Hal reached it for it, but she pulled back. “You first,” she said.

“I don’t know where he lives,” Hal said. “He and his goose-stepping faggots come in every night except Wednesdays and Saturdays.”

“Why not Wednesdays and Saturdays?” she asked.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know? Bingo night and Saturday night mass maybe. Or maybe they all do a circle jerk crying ‘Heil, Hitler’ when they shoot off. How the fuck do I know?”

“What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked around the bar. “Any of the boys here know?”

“Nah,” Hal said. “Tit always comes in with the same limpdicked crew and they leave together. They don’t talk to no one else. It’s verboten.”

“Sounds like you don’t like him.”

“He’s a stupid punk. They all are. Assholes who blame the fact that they’re genetic mutations on other people.”

“So why do you let them hang out here?”

“Because unlike them, I know that this is the U.S. of A. You can do what you want. Anyone is welcome here. Black, white, Spic, Jap, whatever. Even stupid punks.”

Esperanza almost smiled. Sometimes you find tolerance in the strangest places. “What else?”

“That’s all I know. It’s Saturday night. They’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Esperanza said. She ripped the bills in half. “I’ll give you the other half of the bills tomorrow.”

Hal reached out his big hand and closed it over her forearm. His glare grew a little meaner. “Don’t be too smart, hot legs,” he said slowly. “I can yell gang bang and have you on your back on a pool table in five seconds. You give the hundred and fifty now. Then you rip another hundred in half to keep my mouth shut. You got it?”

Her heart was beating wildly in her chest. “Got it,” she said. She handed him the other half of the bills. Then she took out another hundred, ripped it, and handed it to him.

“Get out, sweet buns. Like now.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice.

20

There was nothing else they could do tonight. To approach the Squires estate would be foolhardy at best. He couldn’t call or contact the Coldrens. It was too late to try to reach Lloyd Rennart’s widow. And lastly—and perhaps most important—Myron was bone-tired.

So he spent the evening at the guest house with his two best friends in the world. Myron, Win, and Esperanza lay sprawled on separate couches like Dalí clocks. They wore T-shirts and shorts and buried themselves deep within puffy pillows. Myron drank too much Yoo-Hoo; Esperanza drank too much diet Coke; Win drank almost enough Brooklyn Lager (Win drank only lager, never beer). There were pretzels and Fritos and Ruffles and freshly delivered pizza. The lights were out. The big-screen television was on. Win had recently taped a whole bunch of Odd Couple episodes. They were on the fourth in a row. The best thing about the Odd Couple, Myron surmised, was the consistency. They never had a weak episode—how many shows could say that?

Myron bit into a slice of pizza. He needed this. He had barely slept in the millennium since he’d first encountered the Coldrens (in reality, it only had been yesterday). His brain was fried; his nerves were fraying like overused floss. Sitting with Win and Esperanza, their faces blue-lit by the picture tube, Myron felt true contentment.

“It’s simply not true,” Win insisted.

“No way,” Esperanza agreed, tossing down a Ring-Ding.

“I’m telling you,” Myron said. “Jack Klugman is wearing a hairpiece.”

Win’s voice was firm. “Oscar Madison would never wear a rug. Never, I say. Felix, maybe. But Oscar? It simply cannot be.”

“It is,” Myron said. “That’s a hairpiece.”

“You’re still thinking of the last episode,” Esperanza said. “The one with Howard Cosell.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Win agreed with a snap of his fingers. “Howard Cosell. He wore a hairpiece.”

Myron looked up at the ceiling, exasperated. “I’m not thinking of Howard Cosell. I know the difference between Howard Cosell and Jack Klugman. I’m telling you. Klugman is sporting a rug.”

“Where’s the line?” Win challenged, pointing at the screen. “I cannot see a break or a line or a discoloration. And I’m usually quite good at spotting lines.”

“I don’t see it either,” Esperanza added, squinting.

“That’s two against one,” Win said.

“Fine,” Myron said. “Don’t believe me.”

“He had his own hair on Quincy,” Esperanza said.

“No,” Myron said, “he didn’t.”

“Two against one,” Win repeated. “Majority rules.”

“Fine,” Myron repeated. “Wallow in ignorance.”

On the screen, Felix fronted for a band called Felix Unger and the Sophisticatos. They rambled through an up-tempo number with the repeated phrase “Stumbling all around.” Kinda catchy.

“What makes you so sure it’s a rug?” Esperanza asked.

“The Twilight Zone,” Myron said.

“Come again?”

“The Twilight Zone. Jack Klugman was in at least two episodes.”

“Ah, yes,” Win said. “Now, don’t tell me, let me see if I remember.” He paused, tapping his lip with his index finger. “The one with the little boy Pip. Played by …?” Win knew the answer. Life with his friends was an ever-continuing game of Useless Trivia.

“Bill Mumy.” It was Esperanza.

Win nodded. “Whose most famous role was …?”

“Will Robinson,” Esperanza said. “Lost in Space.”

“Remember Judy Robinson?” Win sighed. “Quite the Earth babe, no?”

“Except,” Esperanza interjected, “what was up with her clothes? Kmart velour sweaters for space travel? Who came up with that one?”

“And we cannot forget the effervescent Dr. Zachery Smith,” Win added. “The first gay character on series TV.”

“Scheming, conniving, gutless—with a hint of pedophilia,” Esperanza said with a shake of her head. “He set back the movement twenty years.”

Win grabbed another slice of pizza. The pizza box was white with red-and-green lettering and had the classic caricature of a heavy-set chef twirling a thin mustache with his finger. The box read—and this is absolutely true:

Whether it’s a pizza or submarine,
We buy the best,
To prepare the best,
And leave it to you for the rest.

Wordsworth.

“I don’t recall Mr. Klugman’s second Twilight Zone,” Win said.

“The one with the pool player,” Myron answered. “Jonathan Winters was in it too.”

“Ah, yes,” Win said with a serious nod. “Now I remember. Jonathan Winters’s ghost shoots pool against Mr. Klugman’s character. For bragging rights or some such thing.”

“Correct answer.”

“So what do those two Twilight Zone episodes have to do with Mr. Klugman’s hair?”

“You got them on tape?”

Win paused. “I believe that I do. I taped the last Twilight Zone marathon. One of those episodes is bound to be on it.”

“Let’s find it,” Myron said.

It took the three of them almost twenty minutes of sifting through his vast video collection before they finally found the episode with Bill Mumy. Win put it in the VCR and reclaimed his couch. They watched in silence.

Several minutes later, Esperanza said, “I’ll be damned.”

A black-and-white Jack Klugman was calling out “Pip,” the name of his dead son, his tormented cries chasing a tender apparition from his past. The scene was quite moving, but also very much beside the point. The key factor, of course, was that even though this episode predated the Odd Couple by some ten years, Jack Klugman’s hairline was in a serious state of retreat.

Win shook his head. “You are good,” he said in a hushed voice. “So very good.” He looked at Myron. “I am truly humbled to be in your presence.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Myron said. “You’re special in your own way.”

This was about as heavy as the conversation got.

They laughed. They joked. They made fun of one another. No one talked about a kidnapping or the Coldrens or business or money matters or landing Tad Crispin or the severed finger of a sixteen-year-old boy.

Win dozed off first. Then Esperanza. Myron tried to call Jessica again, but there was no answer. No surprise. Jessica often didn’t sleep well. Taking walks, she claimed, inspired her. He heard her voice on the machine and felt something inside him plunge. When the beep came on, he left a message:

“I love you,” he said. “I will always love you.”

He hung up. He crawled back onto the couch and pulled the cover up to his neck.

21

When Myron arrived at Merion Golf Club the next morning, he wondered briefly if Linda Coldren had told Jack about the severed finger. She had. By the third hole, Jack had already dropped three strokes off his lead. His complexion was cartoon Casper. His eyes were as vacant as the Bates Motel, his shoulders slumped like bags of wet peat moss.

Win frowned. “Guess that finger thing is bothering him.”

Mr. Insight.

“That sensitivity workshop,” Myron said, “it’s really starting to pay off.”

“I did not expect Jack’s collapse to be so total.”

“Win, his son’s finger was chopped off by a kidnapper. That’s the kind of thing that could distract someone.”

“I guess.” Win didn’t sound convinced. He turned away and started heading up the fairway. “Did Crispin show you the numbers in his Zoom deal?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“And?”

“And he got robbed.”

Win nodded. “Not much you can do about it now.”

“Plenty I can do about it,” Myron said. “It’s called renegotiate.”

“Crispin signed a deal,” Win said.

“So?”

“Please do not tell me that you want him to back out of it.”

“I didn’t say I wanted him to back out. I said I wanted to renegotiate.”

“ ‘Renegotiate,’ ” Win repeated as though the word tasted vinegary. He continued trudging up the fairway. “How come an athlete who performs poorly never renegotiates? How come you never see a player who has a terrible season restructure his deal downward?”

“Good point,” Myron said. “But, you see, I have this job description. It reads something like this: Get the most money I can for a client.”

“And ethics be damned.”

“Whoa, where did that come from? I may search for legal loopholes, but I always play by the rules.”

“You sound like a criminal defense attorney,” Win said.

“Ooo, now that’s a low blow,” Myron said.

The crowd was getting caught up in the unfolding drama in an almost disturbing way. The whole experience was like watching a car crash in super slow motion. You were horrified; you stared; and part of you almost cheered the misfortune of a fellow human being. You gaped, wondering about the outcome, almost hoping the crash would be fatal. Jack Coldren was slowly dying. His heart was crumbling like brown leaves caught in a closed fist. You saw it all happening. And you wanted it to continue.

On the fifth hole Myron and Win met up with Norm Zuckerman and Esme Fong. They were both on edge, especially Esme, but then again she had a hell of a lot riding on this round. On the eighth hole they watched Jack miss an easy putt. Stroke by stroke, the lead shrank from insurmountable to comfortable to nail-biting.

On the back nine Jack managed to control the hemorrhaging a bit. He continued to play poorly, but with only three holes left to play, Jack was still hanging on to a two-stroke lead. Tad Crispin was applying pressure, but it would still take a fairly major gaffe on Jack Coldren’s part for Tad to win.

Then it happened.

The sixteenth hole. The same hazard that had laid waste to Jack’s dream twenty-three years ago. Both men started off fine. They hit good tee-shots to what Win called “a slightly offset fairway.” Uh-huh. But on Jack’s second shot, disaster struck. He came over the top and left the sucker short. Way short.

The ball landed in the stone quarry.

The crowd gasped. Myron watched in horror. Jack had done the unthinkable. Again.

Norm Zuckerman nudged Myron. “I’m moist,” he said giddily. “Swear to God, I’m moist in my nether regions. Go ahead, feel for yourself.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Norm.”

Myron turned to Esme Fong. Her face lit up. “Me too,” she said.

A more intriguing proposal but still no sale.

Jack Coldren barely reacted, as if some internal wiring had shorted out. He was not waving a white flag, but it looked like he should have been.

Tad Crispin took advantage. He hit a fine approach shot and was left with an eight-foot putt that would give him the lead. As young Tad stood over the ball, the silence in the gallery was overwhelming—not just the crowd, but it was as if the nearby traffic and overhead planes and even the grass, the trees, the very course had all aligned themselves against Jack Coldren.

This was big-time pressure. And Tad Crispin responded in a big way.

When the putt dropped into the cup, there was no polite golf clap. The crowd erupted like Vesuvius in the last days. The sound spilled forward in a powerful wave, warming the young newcomer and sweeping aside the dying warhorse. Everyone seemed to want this. Everyone wanted to crown Tad Crispin and behead Jack Coldren. The young handsome man against the ruffled veteran—it was like the golf equivalent of the Nixon-Kennedy debates.

“What a yip master,” someone said.

“A major case of the yips,” another agreed.

Myron looked a question at Win.

“Yip,” Win said. “The latest euphemism for choke.”

Myron nodded. There was nothing worse you could call an athlete. It was okay to be untalented or to screw up or to have an off day—but not to choke. Never to choke. Chokers were gutless. Chokers had their very manhood questioned. Being called a choker was tantamount to standing naked in front of a beautiful woman while she pointed and laughed.

Er, or so Myron imagined.

He spotted Linda Coldren in a private grandstand tent overlooking the eighteenth hole. She wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low. Myron looked up at her. She did not look back. Her expression was one of mild confusion, like she was working on a math word problem or trying to recall the name behind a familiar face. For some reason, the expression troubled Myron. He stayed in her line of vision, hoping she’d signal to him. She didn’t.

Tad Crispin took a one-stroke lead into the final hole. The other golfers were finished for the day, many coming out and standing around the eighteenth green to watch the final act of golf’s greatest collapse.

Win started playing Mr. Merion. “The eighteenth hole is a four hundred and sixty-five yard, par four,” he began. “The tee is in the stone quarry. You need to hit it up the hill—a two-hundred-yard carry.”

“I see,” Myron said. Huh?

Tad was up first. He hit what looked like a good, solid drive. The gallery did that polite golf-clap thing. Jack Coldren took his turn. His shot climbed higher, seemingly pulling itself against the elements.

“Very nice golf shot,” Win said. “Super.”

Myron turned to Esme Fong. “What happens if it ends in a tie? Sudden death?”

Esme shook her head. “Other tournaments, yes. But not at the Open. They make both players come back tomorrow and play a whole round.”

“All eighteen holes?”

“Yes.”

Tad’s second shot left him just short of the green.

“A solid golf shot,” Win informed him. “Sets him up nicely for the par.”

Jack took out an iron and approached the ball.

Win smiled at Myron. “Recognize this?”

Myron squinted. Déjà vu swarmed in. He was no golf fan, but from this angle even he recognized the spot. Win kept the picture on his credenza at the office. Almost every golf book or golf pub or golf whatever had the photograph. Ben Hogan had stood exactly where Jack Coldren now stood. In 1950 or thereabouts. Hogan had stroked the famous one-iron that had made him the U.S. Open champion. It was the golf equivalent of “Havlicek stole the ball!”

As Jack took his practice swing, Myron could not help but wonder about old ghosts and strange possibilities.

“He has an almost impossible task,” Win said.

“Why’s that?”

“The pin placement is brutal today. Behind that yawning bunker.”

A yawning bunker? Myron did not bother asking.

Jack fired a long iron at the green. He reached it, but as Win had predicted, he still left himself a good twenty-plus feet away. Tad Crispin took his third shot, a beautiful little chip that came to rest within six inches of the hole. Tad tapped it in for par. That meant that Jack had no chance of winning in regulation. The best he could do was force a tie. If he made this putt.

“A twenty-two-foot putt,” Win said with a grim shake of the head. “No chance.”

He had said twenty-two feet—not twenty-one feet or twenty-three feet. Twenty-two feet. Win could tell from a quick glance from over fifty yards away. Golfers. Go figure.

Jack Coldren strolled to the green. He bent down, picked up his ball, put down a marker, picked up the marker, put down the ball again in the exact same spot. Myron shook his head. Golfers.

Jack looked very far away, like he was putting from New Jersey. Think about it. He was twenty-two feet away from a hole four-and-a-quarter inches in diameter. Break out a calculator. Do the math.

Myron, Win, Esme, and Norm waited. This was it. The coup de grâce. The part where the matador finally drives the long, thin blade home.

But as Jack studied the break in the green, some sort of transformation seemed to take place. The fleshy features hardened. The eyes became focused and steely and—though it was probably Myron’s imagination—a hint of yesterday’s “eye” seemed to flint up in them. Myron looked behind him. Linda Coldren had spotted the change too. For a brief moment she let her attention slip and her eyes sought out Myron’s, as if for confirmation. Before Myron could do more than meet her gaze, she looked away.

Jack Coldren took his time. He read the green from several angles. He squatted down, his club pointing in front of him the way golfers do. He talked to Diane Hoffman at some length. But once he addressed the ball, there was no hesitation. The club went back like a metronome and kissed the ball hard on the way down.

The tiny white sphere carrying all of Jack Coldren’s dreams circled toward the hole like an eagle seeking its prey. There was no question in Myron’s mind. The pull was almost magnetic. Several seemingly infinite seconds later, the tiny white sphere dropped to the bottom of the hole with an audible clink. For a moment there was silence and then another eruption, this one more from surprise than exhilaration. Myron found himself applauding wildly.

Jack had done it. He’d tied the score.

Over the crowd’s cacophony, Norm Zuckerman said, “This is beautiful, Esme. The whole world will be watching tomorrow. The exposure will be incredible.”

Esme looked stunned. “Only if Tad wins.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if Tad loses?”

“Hey, second place at the U.S. Open?” Norm said, palms up to the sky. “Not bad, Esme. Not bad at all. That’s where we were this morning. Before all this happened. Nothing lost, nothing gained.”

Esme Fong shook her head. “If Tad loses now, he doesn’t come in second place. He’s just a loser. He would have gone one-on-one with a famed choke-artist and lost. Outchoked the ultimate choker. It’ll be worse than the Buffalo Bills.”

Norm made a scoffing noise. “You worry too much, Esme,” he said, but his usual bluster had tapered off.

The crowd began to dissipate, but Jack Coldren just stood in the same position, still holding his putter. He did not celebrate. He did not move, even when Diane Hoffman began to pound his back. His features seemed to lose their tone again, his eyes suddenly more glazed than ever. It was as if the effort of that one stroke had drained every ounce of energy, karma, strength, life force right out of him.

Or maybe, Myron wondered, there was something else at work here. Something deeper. Maybe that last moment of magic had given Jack some new insight—some new life clarity—as to the relative, long-term importance of this tournament. Everyone else saw a man who had just sunk the most important putt of his life. But maybe Jack Coldren saw a man standing alone wondering what the big deal was and if his only son was still alive.

Linda Coldren appeared on the fringe of the green. She tried to look enthusiastic as she approached her husband and dutifully kissed him. A television crew followed her. Long-lensed cameras clicked and their flashes strobed. A sportscaster came up to them, microphone at the ready. Linda and Jack both managed to smile.

But behind the smiles, Linda looked almost wary. And Jack looked positively terrified.

22

Esperanza had come up with a plan. “Lloyd Rennart’s widow’s name is Francine. She’s an artist.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know. Painting, sculpture—what’s the difference?”

“Just curious. Go ahead.”

“I called her up and said that you were a reporter for the Coastal Star. It’s a local paper in the Spring Lake area. You are doing a lifestyle piece on several local artists.”

Myron nodded. It was a good plan. People rarely refuse the chance to be interviewed for self-promoting puff pieces.

Win had already gotten Myron’s car windows fixed. How, Myron had no idea. The rich. They’re different.

The ride took about two hours. It was eight o’clock Sunday night. Tomorrow Linda and Jack Coldren would drop off the ransom money. How would it be done? A meeting in a public place? A go-between? For the umpteenth time, he wondered how Linda and Jack and Chad were faring. He took out the photograph of Chad. He imagined what Chad’s young, carefree face must have looked like when his finger was being severed off. He wondered if the kidnapper had used a sharp knife or a cleaver or an axe or a saw or what.

He wondered what it felt like.

Francine Rennart lived in Spring Lake Heights, not Spring Lake. There was a big difference. Spring Lake was on the Atlantic Ocean and about as beautiful a shore town as you could hope to find. There was plenty of sun, very little crime, and almost no ethnics. It was a problem, actually. The wealthy town was nicknamed the Irish Riviera. That meant no good restaurants. None. The town’s idea of haute cuisine was food served on a plate rather than in a basket. If you craved exotic, you drove to a Chinese take-out place whose eclectic menu included such rare delicacies as chicken chow mein, and for the especially adventurous, chicken lo mein. This was the problem with some of these towns. They needed some Jews or gays or something to spice things up, to add a bit of theater and a couple of interesting bistros.

One man’s opinion.

If Spring Lake was an old movie, then Spring Lake Heights would be the other side of the tracks. There weren’t slums or anything like that. The area where the Rennarts lived was a sort of tract-house suburbia—the middle ground between a trailer park and circa 1967 split-level colonials. Solid Americana.

Myron knocked on the door. A woman he guessed was Francine Rennart pushed open the screen. Her ready smile was shadowed by a daunting beak of a nose. Her burnt-auburn hair was wavy and undisciplined, like she’d just taken out her curlers but hadn’t had time to comb it out.

“Hi,” Myron said.

“You must be from the Coastal Star.”

“That’s right.” Myron stuck out his hand. “I’m Bernie Worley.” Scoop Bolitar uses a disguise.

“Your timing is perfect,” Francine said. “I’ve just started a new exhibit.”

The living room furniture didn’t have plastic on it, but it should have. The couch was off-green. The BarcaLounger—a real, live BarcaLounger—was maroon with duct tape mending rips. The console television had rabbit ears on top. Collectors’ plates Myron had seen advertised in Parade were neatly hung on a wall.

“My studio’s in the back,” she said.

Francine Rennart led him to a big addition off the kitchen. It was a sparsely furnished room with white walls. A couch with a spring sticking out of it sat in the middle of the room. A kitchen chair leaned against it. So did a rolled-up carpet. There was something that looked like a blanket draped over the top in a triangular pattern. Four bathroom wastepaper baskets lined the back wall. Myron guessed that she must have a leak.

Myron waited for Francine Rennart to ask him to sit down. She didn’t. She stood with him in the entranceway and said, “Well?”

He smiled, his brain stuck in a cusp where he was not dumb enough to say, “Well what?” but not smart enough to know what the hell she was talking about. So Myron froze there with his anchorman-waiting-to-go-to-commercial grin.

“You like it?” Francine Rennart asked.

Still the grin. “Uh-huh.”

“I know it’s not for everybody.”

“Hmm.” Scoop Bolitar engages in sparkling repartee.

She watched his face for a moment. He kept up the idiot grin. “You don’t know anything about installation art, do you?”

He shrugged. “Got me.” Myron shifted gears on the fly. “Thing is, I don’t do features normally. I’m a sports writer. That’s my beat.” Beat. Note the authentic reporter lingo. “But Tanya—she’s my boss—she needed somebody to handle a lifestyle piece. And when Jennifer called in sick, well, the job fell to me. It’s a story on a variety of local artists—painters, sculptors …” He couldn’t think of any other kind of artist, so he stopped. “Anyway, maybe you could explain a little bit about what it is you do.”

“My art is about space and concepts. It’s about creating a mood.”

Myron nodded. “I see.”

“It’s not art, per se, in the classic sense. It goes beyond that. It’s the next step in the artistic evolutionary process.”

More nods. “I see.”

“Everything in this exhibit has a purpose. Where I place the couch. The texture of the carpeting. The color of the walls. The way the sunlight shines in through the windows. The blend creates a specific ambience.”

Oh, boy.

Myron motioned at the, uh, art. “So how do you sell something like this?”

She frowned. “You don’t sell it.”

“Pardon?”

“Art is not about money, Mr. Worley. True artists do not put a monetary value on their work. Only hacks do that.”

Yeah, like Michelangelo and Da Vinci, those hacks. “But what do you do with this?” he asked. “I mean, do you just keep the room like this?”

“No. I change it around. I bring in other pieces. I create something new.”

“And what happens to this?”

She shook her head. “Art is not about permanence. Life is temporary. Why shouldn’t art be the same?”

Oooookay.

“Is there a name for this art?”

“Installation art. But we do not like labels.”

“How long have you been an, uh, installation artist?”

“I’ve been working on my masters at the New York Art Institute for two years.”

He tried not to look shocked. “You go to school for this?”

“Yes. It’s a very competitive program.”

Yeah, Myron thought, like a TV/VCR repair course advertised by Sally Struthers.

They finally moved back into the living room. Myron sat on the couch. Gently. Might be art. He waited to be offered a cookie. Might be art too.

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

Myron shrugged. “Maybe if you threw in a poker table and some dogs.”

She laughed. Mr. Self-Deprecation strikes again. “Fair enough,” she said.

“Let me shift gears for a moment, if I may,” Myron said. “How about a little something on Francine Rennart, the person?” Scoop Bolitar mines the personal angle.

She looked a bit wary, but she said, “Okay, ask away.”

“Are you married?”

“No.” Her voice was like a slamming door.

“Divorced?”

“No.”

Scoop Bolitar loves a garrulous interviewee. “I see,” he said. “Then I guess you have no children.”

“I have a son.”

“How old is he?”

“Seventeen. His name is Larry.”

A year older than Chad Coldren. Interesting. “Larry Rennart?”

“Yes.”

“Where does he go to school?”

“Right here at Manasquan High. He’s going to be a senior.”

“How nice.” Myron risked it, nibbled on a cookie. “Maybe I could interview him too.”

“My son?”

“Sure. I’d love a quote from the prodigal son on how proud he is of his mom, of how he supports what she’s doing, that kinda thing.” Scoop Bolitar grows pathetic.

“He’s not home.”

“Oh?”

He waited for her to elaborate. Nothing.

“Where is Larry?” Myron tried. “Is he staying with his father?”

“His father is dead.”

Finally. Myron put on the big act. “Oh, sheesh, I’m sorry. I didn’t … I mean, you being so young and all. I just didn’t consider the possibility that …” Scoop Bolitar as Robert DeNiro.

“It’s okay,” Francine Rennart said.

“I feel awful.”

“No need to.”

“Have you been widowed long?”

She tilted her head. “Why do you ask?”

“Background,” he said.

“Background?”

“Yes. I think it’s crucial to understanding Francine Rennart the artist. I want to explore how being widowed affected you and your art.” Scoop Bolitar shovels it good.

“I’ve only been a widow a short time.”

Myron motioned toward the, uh, studio. “So when you created this work, did your husband’s death have any bearing on the outcome? On the color of the wastebaskets maybe. Or the way you rolled up that rug.”

“No, not really.”

“How did your husband die?”

“Why would you—”

“Again, I think it’s important for digesting the entire artistic statement. Was it an accident, for example? The kind of death that makes you ponder fickle fate. Was it a long illness? Seeing a loved one suffer—”

“He committed suicide.”

Myron feigned aghast. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

Her breathing was funny now, her chest giving off short hitches. As Myron watched her, an awful pang struck him deep in the chest. Slow down, he told himself. Stop focusing solely on Chad Coldren and remember that this woman, too, has suffered. She had been married to this man. She had loved him and lived with him and built a life with him and had a child with him.

And after all that, he had chosen to end his life rather than spend it with her.

Myron swallowed. Fiddling with her pathos like this was, at best, unfair. Belittling her artistic expression because he did not understand it was cruel. Myron did not like himself much right now. For a moment he debated just going away—the odds that any of this had anything to do with the case were so remote—but then again, he couldn’t simply forget a sixteen-year-old boy with a missing finger, either.

“Were you married long?”

“Almost twenty years,” she said softly.

“I don’t mean to intrude, but may I ask you his name?”

“Lloyd,” she said. “Lloyd Rennart.”

Myron narrowed his eyes as though scanning for a memory. “Why does that name ring a bell?”

Francine Rennart shrugged. “He co-owned a tavern in Neptune City. The Rusty Nail.”

“Of course,” Myron said. “Now I remember. He hung out there a lot, right?”

“Yes.”

“My God, I met the man. Lloyd Rennart. Now I remember. He used to teach golf, right? Was in the big time for a while.”

Francine Rennart’s face slid closed like a car window. “How do you know that?”

“The Rusty Nail. And I’m a huge golf fan. A real duffer, but I follow it like some people follow the Bible.” He was flailing, but maybe he was getting somewhere. “Your husband caddied Jack Coldren, right? A long time ago. We talked about it a bit.”

She swallowed hard. “What did he say?”

“Say?”

“About being a caddie.”

“Oh, not much. We mostly talked about some of our favorite golfers. Nicklaus, Trevino, Palmer. Some great courses. Merion mostly.”

“No,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

Her voice was firm. “Lloyd never talked about golf.”

Scoop Bolitar steps in it in a big way.

Francine Rennart skewered him with her eyes. “You can’t be from the insurance company. I didn’t even try to make a claim.” She pondered that for a moment. Then: “Wait a second. You said you’re a sports writer. That’s why you’re here. Jack Coldren is making a comeback, so you want to do a where-are-they-now story.”

Myron shook his head. Shame flushed his face. Enough, he thought. He took a few deep breaths and said, “No.”

“Then who are you?”

“My name is Myron Bolitar. I’m a sports agent.”

She was confused now. “What do you want with me?”

He searched for the words, but they all sounded lame. “I’m not sure. It’s probably nothing, a complete waste of time. You’re right. Jack Coldren is making a comeback. But it’s like … it’s like the past is haunting him. Terrible things are happening to him and his family. And I just thought—”

“Thought what?” she snapped. “That Lloyd came back from the dead to claim vengeance?”

“Did he want vengeance?”

“What happened at Merion,” she said. “It was a long time ago. Before I met him.”

“Was he over it?”

Francine Rennart thought about that for a while. “It took a long time,” she said at last. “Lloyd couldn’t get any golf work after what happened. Jack Coldren was still the fair-haired boy and no one wanted to cross him. Lloyd lost all his friends. He started drinking too much.” She hesitated. “There was an accident.”

Myron stayed still, watching Francine Rennart draw breaths.

“He lost control of his car.” Her voice was robot-like now. “It slammed into another car. In Narberth. Near where he used to live.” She stopped and then looked at him. “His first wife died on impact.”

Myron felt a chill rush through him. “I didn’t know,” he said softly.

“It was a long time ago, Mr. Bolitar. We met not long after that. We fell in love. He stopped drinking. He bought the tavern right away—I know, I know, it sounds weird. An alcoholic owning a bar. But for him, it worked. We bought this house too. I—I thought everything was okay.”

Myron waited a beat. Then he asked, “Did your husband give Jack Coldren the wrong club on purpose?”

The question did not seem to surprise her. She plucked at the buttons on her blouse and took her time before answering. “The truth is, I don’t know. He never talked about this incident. Not even with me. But there was something there. It may have been guilt, I don’t know.” She smoothed her skirt with both hands. “But all of this is irrelevant, Mr. Bolitar. Even if Lloyd did harbor ill feelings toward Jack, he’s dead.”

Myron tried to think of a tactful way of asking, but none came to him. “Did they find his body, Mrs. Rennart?”

His words landed like a heavyweight’s hook. “It—it was a deep crevasse,” Francine Rennart stammered. “There was no way … the police said they couldn’t send anyone down there. It was too dangerous. But Lloyd couldn’t have survived. He wrote a note. He left his clothes there. I still have his passport.…” Her voice faded away.

Myron nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I understand.”

But as he showed himself out, he was pretty sure that he understood nothing.

23

Tito the Crusty Nazi never showed at the Parker Inn.

Myron sat in a car across the street. As usual, he hated surveillance. Boredom didn’t set in this time, but the devastated face of Francine Rennart kept haunting him. He wondered about the long-term effects of his visit. The woman had been privately dealing with her grief, locking her private demons in a back closet, and then Myron had gone and blown the hinges off the door. He had tried to comfort her. But in the end what could he say?

Closing time. Still no sign of Tito. His two buddies—Beneath and Escape—were another matter. They’d arrived at ten-thirty. At one A.M. they both exited. Escape was on crutches—the aftertaste, Myron was sure, of the nasty side kick to the knee. Myron smiled. It was a small victory, but you take them where you can.

Beneath had his arm slung around a woman’s neck. She had a dye job from the planet Bad Bottle and basically looked like the type of woman who might go for a tattoo-infested skinhead—or to say the same thing in a slightly different way, she looked like a regular on the Jerry Springer show.

Both men stopped to urinate on the outside wall. Beneath actually kept his arm around the girl while emptying his bladder. Jesus. So many men peed on that wall that Myron wondered if there was a bathroom inside. The two men broke off. Beneath got into the passenger side of a Ford Mustang. Bad Bleach drove. Escape hobbled onto his own chariot, a motorcycle of some kind. He strapped the crutches onto the side. The two vehicles drove off in separate directions.

Myron decided to follow Escape. When in doubt, tail the one that’s lame.

He kept far back and remained extra careful. Better to lose him than risk in the slightest way the possibility of being spotted. But the tail didn’t last long. Three blocks down the road, Escape parked and headed into a shabby excuse for a house. The paint was peeling off in flakes the size of manhole covers. One of the support columns on the front porch had completely given way, so the front lip of the roof looked like it’d been ripped in half by some giant. The two upstairs windows were shattered like a drunk’s eyes. The only possible reason that this dump hadn’t been condemned was that the building inspector had not been able to stop laughing long enough to write up a summons.

Okay, so now what?

He waited an hour for something to happen. Nothing did. He had seen a bedroom light go on and off. That was it. The whole night was fast turning into a complete waste of time.

So what should he do?

He had no answer. So he changed the question around a bit.

What would Win do?

Win would weigh the risks. Win would realize that the situation was desperate, that a sixteen-year-old boy’s finger had been chopped off like a bothersome thread. Rescuing him imminently was paramount.

Myron nodded to himself. Time to play Win.

He got out of the car. Making sure he kept out of sight, Myron circled around to the back of the dump. The yard was bathed in darkness. He trampled through grass long enough to hide Viet Cong, occasionally stumbling across a cement block or rake or a garbage can top. His shin got whacked twice; Myron had to bite down expletives.

The back door was boarded up with plywood. The window to its left, however, was open. Myron looked inside. Dark. He carefully climbed into the kitchen.

The smell of spoilage assaulted his nostrils. Flies buzzed about. For a moment, Myron feared that he might find a dead body, but this stink was different, more like the odor of a Dumpster at a 7-Eleven than anything in the rotting flesh family. He checked the other rooms, walking on tiptoes, avoiding the several spots on the floor where there was no floor. No sign of a kidnap victim. No sixteen-year-old boy tied up. No one at all. Myron followed the snoring to the room he had seen the light in earlier. Escape was on his back. Asleep. Without a care.

That was about to change.

Myron leapt into the air and landed hard on Escape’s bad knee. Escape’s eyes widened. His mouth opened in a scream that Myron cut off with a snap punch in the mouth. He moved quickly, straddling Escape’s chest with his knees. He put his gun against the punk’s cheek.

“Scream and die,” Myron said.

Escape’s eyes stayed wide. Blood trickled out of his mouth. He did not scream. Still, Myron was disappointed in himself. Scream and die? He couldn’t come up with anything better than scream and die?

“Where is Chad Coldren?”

“Who?”

Myron jammed the gun barrel into the bleeding mouth. It hit teeth and nearly gagged the man. “Wrong answer.”

Escape stayed silent. The punk was brave. Or maybe, just maybe, he couldn’t talk because Myron had stuck a gun in his mouth. Smooth move, Bolitar. Keeping his face firm, Myron slowly slid the barrel out.

“Where is Chad Coldren?”

Escape gasped, caught his breath. “I swear to God, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“Give me your hand.”

Escape lifted his hand into view. Myron grabbed the wrist, turned it, and plucked out the middle finger. He curled it inward and flattened the folded digit against the palm. The kid bucked in pain. “I don’t need a knife,” Myron said. “I can just grind it into splinters.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the kid managed. “I swear!”

Myron squeezed a little harder. He did not want the bone to snap. Escape bucked some more. Smile a little, Myron thought. That’s how Win does it. He has just a hint of a smile. Not much. You want your victim to think you are capable of anything, that you are completely cold, that you might even enjoy it. But you don’t want him thinking you are a complete lunatic, out of control, a nut who would hurt you no matter what. Mine that middle ground.

“Please …”

“Where is Chad Coldren?”

“Look, I was there, okay? When he jumped you. Tit said he’d give me a hundred bucks. But I don’t know no Chad Coldren.”

“Where is Tit?” That name again.

“At his crib, I guess. I don’t know.”

Crib? The neo-Nazi was using dated urban street lingo. Life’s ironies. “Doesn’t Tito usually hang out with you guys at the Parker Inn?”

“Yeah, but he never showed.”

“Was he supposed to?”

“I guess. It’s not like we talk about it.”

Myron nodded. “Where does he live?”

“Mountainside Drive. Right down the street. Third house on the left after you make the turn.”

“If you’re lying to me, I will come back here and slice your eyes out.”

“I ain’t lying. Mountainside Drive.”

Myron pointed at the swastika tattoo with the barrel of the gun. “Why do you have this?”

“What?”

“The swastika, moron.”

“I’m proud of my race, that’s why.”

“You want to put all the ‘kikes’ in gas chambers? Kill all the ‘niggers’?”

“That ain’t what we’re about,” he said. More confidence in his voice now that he was on well-rehearsed ground. “We’re for the white man. We’re tired of being overrun by niggers. We’re sick of being trampled on by the Jews.”

Myron nodded. “Well, by this Jew anyway,” he said. In life, you take satisfaction where you can. “You know what duct tape is?”

“Yeah.”

“Gee, and I thought all neo-Nazis were dumb. Where is yours?”

Escape’s eyes kinda narrowed. Like he was actually thinking. You could almost hear rusty gears churning. Then: “I don’t have none.”

“Too bad. I was going to use it to tie you up, so you couldn’t warn Tito. But if you don’t have any, I’ll just have to shoot both your kneecaps.”

“Wait!”

Myron used up almost the entire roll.

Tito was in the driver’s seat of his pickup truck with the monster wheels.

He was also dead.

Two shots in the head, probably from very close range. Very bloody. There wasn’t much of a head left anymore. Poor Tito. No head to match his no ass. Myron didn’t laugh. Then again, gallows humor was not his forte.

Myron remained calm, probably because he was still in Win mode. No lights were on in the house. Tito’s keys were still in the ignition. Myron took them and unlocked the front door. His search confirmed what he’d already guessed: No one was there.

Now what?

Ignoring the blood and brain matter, Myron went back to the truck and did a thorough search. Talk about not his forte. Myron reclicked the Win icon. Just protoplasm, he told himself. Just hemoglobin and platelets and enzymes and other stuff he’d forgotten since ninth-grade biology. The blocking worked enough to allow him to dig his hands under the seats and into the cushion crevices. His fingers located lots of crud. Old sandwiches. Wrappers from Wendy’s. Crumbs of various shapes and sizes.

Fingernail clippings.

Myron looked at the dead body and shook his head. A little late for a scolding, but what the hell.

Then he hit pay dirt.

It was gold. It had a golf insignia on it. The initials C.B.C. were engraved lightly on the inside—Chad Buckwell Coldren.

It was a ring.

Myron’s first thought was that Chad Coldren had cleverly taken it off and left it behind as a clue. Like in a movie. The young man was sending a message. If Myron was playing his part correctly he would shake his head, toss the ring in the air, and mutter admiringly, “Smart kid.”

Myron’s second thought, however, was far more sobering.

The severed finger in Linda Coldren’s car had been the ring finger.

24

What to do?

Should he contact the police? Just leave? Make an anonymous call? What?

Myron had no idea. He had to think first and foremost of Chad Coldren. What risk would calling the police put the kid in?

No idea.

Christ, what a mess. He wasn’t even supposed to be involved in this anymore. He was supposed to have—should have—stayed out. But now the proverbial doo-doo was hitting a plethora of proverbial fans. What should he do about finding a dead body? And what about Escape? Myron couldn’t just leave him tied and gagged indefinitely. Suppose he vomited into the duct tape, for chrissake?

Okay, Myron, think. First, you should not—repeat, not—call the police. Someone else will discover the body. Or maybe he should make an anonymous call from a pay phone. That might work. But don’t the police tape all incoming calls nowadays? They’d have his voice on tape. He could change it maybe. The rhythm and tempo. Make the tone a little deeper. Add an accent or something. Oh, right, like Meryl Streep. Tell the dispatcher to hurry because “the dingo’s got ma baby.”

Wait, hold the phone.

Think about what had just happened. Rewind to about an hour ago and see how it looks. Without provocation, Myron had broken into a man’s house. He had physically assaulted the man, threatened him in terrible ways, left him tied and gagged—all in the pursuit of Tito. Not long after this incident, the police get an anonymous call. They find Tito dead in his pickup.

Who is going to be the obvious suspect?

Myron Bolitar, sports agent of the terminally troubled.

Damn.

So now what? No matter what Myron did at this stage—call or not call—he was going to be a suspect. Escape would be questioned. He would tell about Myron, and then Myron would look like the killer. Very simple equation when you thought about it.

So the question remained: What to do?

He couldn’t worry about what conclusions the police might leap upon. He also couldn’t worry about himself. The focus must be on Chad Coldren. What would be best for him? Hard to say. The safest bet, of course, would be to upset the apple cart as little as possible. Try not to make his presence in all this known.

Okay, good, that made sense.

So the answer was: Don’t report it. Let the body lay where it was. Put the ring back in the seat cushion in case the police need it as evidence later. Good, this looked like a plan—a plan that seemed the best way of keeping the kid safe and also obeying the Coldrens’ wishes.

Now, what about Escape?

Myron drove back to Escape’s shack. He found Escape right where he left him—on his bed, hog-tied and gagged with gray duct tape. He looked half dead. Myron shook him. The punk started to, his face the green of seaweed. Myron ripped off the gag.

Escape retched and did a few dry heaves.

“I have a man outside,” Myron said, removing more duct tape. “If he sees you move from this window, you will experience an agony very few have been forced to endure. Do you understand?”

Escape nodded quickly.

Experience an agony very few have been forced to endure. Jesus.

There was no phone in the house, so he didn’t have to worry about that. With a few more harsh warnings lightly sprinkled with torture clichés—including Myron’s personal favorite, “Before I’m finished, you’ll beg me to kill you”—he left the neo-Nazi alone to quake in his goose-stepping black boots.

No one was outside. The proverbial coast was clear. Myron got in the car, wondering yet again about the Coldrens. What was going on with them right now? Had the kidnapper already called? Had he given them instructions? How did Tito’s death affect what was happening? Had Chad suffered more bloodshed or had he escaped? Maybe he’d gotten hold of the gun and shot someone.

Maybe. But doubtful. More likely, something had gone awry. Someone had lost control. Someone had gone nuts.

He stopped the car. He had to warn the Coldrens.

Yes, Linda Coldren had clearly instructed him to stay away. But that was before he’d found a dead body. How could he sit back now and leave them blind? Someone had chopped off their son’s finger. Someone had murdered one of the kidnappers. A “simple” kidnapping—if there is such a thing—had spun off its axis. Blood had been splattered about freely.

He had to warn them. He had to contact the Coldrens and let them know what he had learned.

But how?

He pulled onto Golf House Road. It was very late now, almost two in the morning. Nobody would be up. Myron flicked off his lights and cruised silently. He glided the car into a spot on the property line between two houses—if by some chance one of the occupants was awake and looked out the window, he or she might believe the car belonged to someone visiting a neighbor. He stepped out and slowly made his way on foot toward the Coldren house.

Keeping out of sight, Myron moved closer. He knew, of course, that there was no chance the Coldrens would be asleep. Jack might give it a token effort; Linda wouldn’t even sit down. But right now, that didn’t much matter.

How was he going to contact them?

He couldn’t call on the phone. He couldn’t walk up and knock on the door. And he couldn’t throw pebbles at the window, like some clumsy suitor in a bad romantic comedy. So where did that leave him?

Lost.

He moved from shrub to shrub. Some of the shrubs were familiar from his last sojourn into these parts. He said hello to them, chatted, offered up his best cocktail-party banter. One shrub gave him a stock tip. Myron ignored it. He circled closer to the Coldren house, slowly, still careful not to be seen. He had no idea what he was going to do, but when he got close enough to see a light on in the den, an idea came to him.

A note.

He would write a note, telling them of his discovery, warning them to be extra careful, offering up his services. How to get the note close to the house? Hmm. He could fold the note into a paper airplane and fly it in. Oh, sure, with Myron’s mechanical skills, that would work. Myron Bolitar, the Jewish Wright Brother. What else? Tie the note to a rock maybe? And then what? Smash a window?

As it happened, he didn’t have to do any of that.

He heard a noise to his right. Footsteps. On the street. At two in the morning.

Myron quickly dove back down behind a shrub. The footsteps were moving closer. Faster. Someone approaching. Running.

He kept down, his heart beating wildly in his chest. The footsteps grew louder and then suddenly stopped. Myron peeked around the side of the shrub. His view was blocked by still more hedges.

He held his breath. And waited.

The footsteps started up again. Slower this time. Unhurried. Casual. Taking a walk now. Myron craned his neck around the other side of the shrub. Nothing. He moved into a crouch now. Slowly he raised himself, inch by inch, his bad knee protesting. He fought through the pain. His eyes reached the top of the shrub. Myron looked out and finally saw who it was.

Linda Coldren.

She was dressed in a blue sweat suit with running sneakers. Out for a jog? Seemed like a very strange time for it. But you never know. Jack drove golf balls. Myron shot baskets. Maybe Linda was into late-night jogging.

He didn’t think so.

She neared the top of the driveway. Myron had to reach her. He clawed a rock out of the dirt and skimmed it toward her. Linda stopped and looked up sharply, like a deer interrupted while drinking. Myron threw another rock. She looked toward the bush. Myron waved a hand. Christ, this was subtle. But if she had felt safe enough to leave the house—if the kidnapper had not minded her taking a little night stroll—then walking toward a bush shouldn’t cause a panic either. Bad rationale, but it was getting late.

If not out for a jog, why was Linda out so late? Unless …

Unless she was paying off the ransom.

But no, it was still Sunday night. The banks wouldn’t be open. She couldn’t raise one hundred grand without going to a bank. She had made that clear, hadn’t she?

Linda Coldren slowly approached the bush. Myron was almost tempted to light the bush on fire, deepen his voice, and say, “Come forward, Moses.” More gallows humor. More not-funny.

When she was about ten feet away, Myron raised his head into view. Linda’s eyes nearly leaped out of their sockets.

“Get out of here!” Linda whispered.

Myron wasted no time. Whispering back, he said, “I found the guy from the pay phone dead. Shot twice in the head. Chad’s ring was in his car. But no sign of Chad.”

“Get out!”

“I just wanted to warn you. Be careful. They’re playing for keeps.”

Her eyes darted about the yard. She nodded and turned away.

“When’s the drop-off?” Myron tried. “And where’s Jack? Make sure you see Chad with your own eyes before you hand over anything.”

But if Linda heard him, she gave no indication. She hurried down the driveway, opened the door, and disappeared from sight.

25

Win opened the bedroom door. “You have visitors.”

Myron kept his head on the pillow. Friends not knocking hardly fazed him anymore. “Who is it?”

“Law enforcement officials,” Win said.

“Cops?”

“Yes.”

“Uniformed?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea what it’s about?”

“Oooo, sorry. That would be a no. Let’s move on to Kitty Carlisle.”

Myron picked the sleep out of his eyes and threw on some clothes. He slipped into a pair of Top-Siders without socks. Very Win-like. A quick brush of the teeth, for the sake of breath rather than long-term dental health. He opted for a baseball cap rather than taking the time to wet his hair. The baseball cap was red and said TRIX CEREAL in the front and SILLY RABBIT on the back. Jessica had bought it for him. Myron loved her for it.

The two uniforms waited with cop-patience in the living room. They were young and healthy-looking. The taller one said, “Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes.”

“We’d appreciate it if you would accompany us.”

“Where?”

“Detective Corbett will explain when we arrive.”

“How about a hint?”

Two faces of stone. “We’d rather not, sir.”

Myron shrugged. “Let’s go then.”

Myron sat in the back of the squad car. The two uniforms sat in the front. They drove at a pretty good clip but kept their siren off. Myron’s cell phone rang.

“Do you guys mind if I take a call?”

Taller said, “Of course not, sir.”

“Polite of you.” Myron hit the on switch. “Hello.”

“Are you alone?” It was Linda Coldren.

“Nope.”

“Don’t tell anyone I’m calling. Can you please get here as soon as possible? It’s urgent.”

“What do you mean you can’t deliver it until Thursday?” Mr. Throw Them Off Track.

“I can’t talk right now either. Just get here as soon as you can. And don’t say anything until you do. Please. Trust me on this.”

She hung up.

“Fine, but then I better get free bagels. You hear me?”

Myron turned off the cell phone. He looked out the window. The route the cops were taking was overly familiar. Myron had taken the same one to Merion. When they reached the club entranceway on Ardmore Avenue, Myron saw a plethora of media vans and cop cars.

“Dang,” the taller cop said.

“You knew it wouldn’t stay quiet for long,” Shorter added.

“Too big a story,” Taller agreed.

“You fellas want to clue me in?”

The shorter cop twisted his head toward Myron. “No, sir.” He turned back around.

“Okeydokey,” Myron said. But he didn’t have a good feeling about this.

The squad car drove steadily through the press gauntlet. Reporters pushed against the windows, peering in. Flashes popped in Myron’s face. A policeman waved them through. The reporters slowly peeled off the car like dandruff flakes. They parked in the club lot. There were at least a dozen other police cars, both marked and unmarked, nearby.

“Please come along,” Taller said.

Myron did so. They walked across the eighteenth fairway. Lots of uniformed officers were walking with their heads down, picking up pieces of lord-knows-what and putting them in evidence bags.

This was definitely not good.

When they reached the top of the hill, Myron could see dozens of officers making a perfect circle in the famed stone quarry. Some were taking photos. Crime scene photos. Others were bent down. When one stood up, Myron saw him.

He felt his knees buckle. “Oh no …”

In the middle of the quarry—sprawled in the famed hazard that had cost him the tournament twenty-three years ago—lay the still, lifeless body of Jack Coldren.

The uniforms watched him, gauging his reaction. Myron showed them nothing. “What happened?” he managed.

“Please wait here, sir.”

The taller cop walked down the hill; the shorter stayed with Myron. Taller spoke briefly to a man in plainclothes Myron suspected was Detective Corbett. Corbett glanced up at Myron as the man spoke. He nodded to the shorter cop.

“Please follow me, sir.”

Still dazed, Myron trudged down the hill into the stone quarry. He kept his eye on the corpse. Coagulated blood coated Jack’s head like one of those spray-on toupees. The body was twisted into a position it was never supposed to achieve. Oh, Christ. Poor, sad bastard.

The plainclothes detective greeted him with an enthusiastic handshake. “Mr. Bolitar, thank you so much for coming. I’m Detective Corbett.”

Myron nodded numbly. “What happened?”

“A groundskeeper found him this morning at six.”

“Was he shot?”

Corbett smiled crookedly. He was around Myron’s age and petite for a cop. Not just short. Plenty of cops were on the short side. But this guy was small-boned to the point of being almost sickly. Corbett covered up the small physique with a trench coat. Not a great summer look. Too many episodes of Columbo, Myron guessed.

“I don’t want to be rude or anything,” Corbett said, “but do you mind if I ask the questions?”

Myron glanced at the still body. He felt light-headed. Jack dead. Why? How did it happen? And why had the police decided to question him? “Where is Mrs. Coldren?” Myron asked.

Corbett glanced at the two officers, then at Myron. “Why would you want to know that?”

“I want to make sure she’s safe.”

“Well then,” Corbett began, folding his arms under his chest, “if that’s the case, you should have asked, ‘How is Mrs. Coldren?’ or ‘Is Mrs. Coldren all right?’—not ‘Where is Mrs. Coldren?’ I mean, if you’re really interested in how she is.”

Myron looked at Corbett for several seconds. “God. You. Are. Good.”

“No reason for sarcasm, Mr. Bolitar. You just seem very concerned about her.”

“I am.”

“You a friend?”

“Yes.”

“A close friend?”

“Pardon me?”

“Again, I don’t want to appear rude or anything,” Corbett said, spreading his hands, “but have you been—you know—porking her?”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Is that a yes?”

Calm down, Myron. Corbett was trying to keep him off balance. Myron knew the game. Dumb to let it get to him. “The answer is no. We’ve had no sexual contact whatsoever.”

“Really? That’s odd.”

He wanted Myron to bite with a “What’s odd?” Myron did not oblige him.

“You see, a couple of witnesses saw you two together several times over the past few days. At a tent in Corporate Row, mostly. You sat alone for several hours. Very snuggly. Are you sure you weren’t playing a little kissy-face?”

Myron said, “No.”

“No, you weren’t playing a little kissy-face, or no—”

“No, we weren’t playing kissy-face or anything like that.”

“Uh-huh, I see.” Corbett feigned chewing over this little tidbit. “Where were you last night, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Am I a suspect, Detective?”

“We’re just chatting amicably, Mr. Bolitar. That’s all.”

“Do you have an estimated time of death?” Myron asked.

Corbett offered up another cop-polite smile. “Once again, far be it from me to be obtuse or rude, but I would rather concentrate on you right now.” His voice gathered a little more muster. “Where were you last night?”

Myron remembered Linda’s call on the cell phone. Undeniably the police had already questioned her. Had she told them about the kidnapping? Probably not. Either way, it was not his place to mention it. He didn’t know where things stood. Speaking out of turn could jeopardize Chad’s safety. Best to get out of here pronto.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Coldren.”

“Why?”

“To make sure she’s okay.”

“That’s sweet, Mr. Bolitar. And very noble. But I’d like you to answer my question.”

“I’d like to see Mrs. Coldren first.”

Corbett gave him the narrow cop-eyes. “Are you refusing to answer my questions?”

“No. But right now my priority is my potential client’s welfare.”

“Client?”

“Mrs. Coldren and I have been discussing the possibility of her signing on with MB SportsReps.”

“I see,” Corbett said, rubbing his chin. “So that explains your sitting together in the tent.”

“I’ll answer your questions later, Detective. Right now I’d like to check up on Mrs. Coldren.”

“She’s fine, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I’d like to see for myself.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“It’s not that. But if I am going to be her agent, then I must be at her disposal first and foremost.”

Corbett shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “That’s some crock of shit you’re peddling, Bolitar.”

“May I go now?”

Corbett gave the big hand spread again. “You’re not under arrest. In fact”—he turned to the two officers—“please escort Mr. Bolitar to the Coldren residence. Make sure nobody bothers him on the way.”

Myron smiled. “Thank you, Detective.”

“Think nothing of it.” As Myron began to walk away, Corbett called out, “Oh, one more thing.” The man had definitely watched too much Columbo. “That call you got in the squad car just now. Was that from Mrs. Coldren?”

Myron said nothing.

“No matter. We can check the phone records.” He gave the Columbo wave. “Have a special day.”

26

There were four more cop cars outside the Coldren house. Myron walked to the door on his own and knocked. A black woman Myron did not recognize opened it.

Her eyes flicked at the top of his head. “Nice hat,” she said without inflection. “Come on in.”

The woman was about fifty years old and wore a nicely tailored suit. Her coffee skin looked leathery and worn. Her face was kind of sleepy, her eyes half-closed, her expression perpetually bored. “I’m Victoria Wilson,” she said.

“Myron Bolitar.”

“Yes, I know.” Bored voice too.

“Is anybody else here?”

“Just Linda.”

“Can I see her?”

Victoria Wilson nodded slowly; Myron half expected her to stifle a yawn. “Maybe we should talk first.”

“Are you with the police?” Myron asked.

“The opposite,” she said. “I’m Mrs. Coldren’s attorney.”

“That was fast.”

“Let me put this plainly,” she ho-hummed, sounding like a diner waitress reading off the specials in the last hour of a double shift. “The police believe that Mrs. Coldren killed her husband. They also think that you’re involved in some way.”

Myron looked at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

The same sleepy expression. “Do I look like a prankster, Mr. Bolitar?”

Rhetorical question.

“Linda does not have a solid alibi for late last night,” she went on, still with the flat tone. “Do you?”

“Not really.”

“Well, let me tell you what the police already know.” The woman took blasé and raised it to an art form. “First”—raising a finger in the air seemed to take great effort—“they have a witness, a groundskeeper, who saw Jack Coldren enter Merion at approximately one in the morning. The same witness also saw Linda Coldren do likewise thirty minutes later. He also saw Linda Coldren leave the grounds not long after that. He never saw Jack Coldren leave.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Second”—another finger in the air, making a peace sign—“the police received a report last night at approximately two in the morning that your car, Mr. Bolitar, was parked on Golf House Road. The police will want to know what you were doing parking in such a strange spot at such a strange time.”

“How do you know all this?” Myron asked.

“I have good connections with the police,” she said. Again bored. “May I continue?”

“Please.”

“Third”—yep, another finger—“Jack Coldren had been seeing a divorce attorney. He had, in fact, begun the process of filing papers.”

“Did Linda know this?”

“No. But one of the allegations Mr. Coldren made concerned his wife’s recent infidelity.”

Myron put both hands to his chest. “Don’t look at me.”

“Mr. Bolitar?”

“What?”

“I am just stating facts. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt. Fourth”—final finger—“on Saturday at the U.S. Open golf tournament, several witnesses described you and Mrs. Coldren as being a bit more than chummy.”

Myron waited. Victoria Wilson lowered the hand, never showing the thumb.

“Is that it?” Myron asked.

“No. But that’s all we’ll discuss for now.”

“I met Linda for the first time on Friday.”

“And you can prove that?”

“Bucky can testify to it. He introduced us.”

Another big sigh. “Linda Coldren’s father. What a perfect, unbiased witness.”

“I live in New York.”

“Which is less than two hours by Amtrak from Philadelphia. Go on.”

“I have a girlfriend. Jessica Culver. I live with her.”

“And no man has ever cheated on his girlfriend before. Stunning testimony.”

Myron shook his head. “So you’re suggesting—”

“Nothing,” Victoria Wilson interrupted him with the monotone. “I am suggesting absolutely nothing. I am telling you what the police believe—that Linda killed Jack. The reason why there are so many police officers surrounding this house is because they want to make sure that we do not remove anything before a search warrant is issued. They have made it crystal clear that they want no Kardashians on this one.”

Kardashian. As in O.J. The man had changed law lexicon forever. “But …” Myron stopped. “This is ridiculous. Where is Linda?”

“Upstairs. I’ve informed the police that she is too grief-stricken to speak to them at this time.”

“You don’t understand. Linda shouldn’t even be a suspect. Once she tells you the whole story, you’ll see what I mean.”

Another near yawn. “She has told me the whole story.”

“Even about …?”

“The kidnapping,” Victoria Wilson finished for him. “Yes.”

“Well, don’t you think that kind of exonerates her?”

“No.”

Myron was confused. “Do the police know about the kidnapping?”

“Of course not. We are saying nothing at this time.” Myron made a face. “But once they hear about the kidnapping, they’ll focus on that. They’ll know Linda couldn’t be involved.” Victoria Wilson turned away. “Let’s go upstairs.”

“You don’t agree?”

She didn’t respond. They began to climb the staircase. Victoria said, “You are an attorney.”

It didn’t sound like a question, but Myron still said, “I don’t practice.”

“But you passed the bar.”

“In New York.”

“Good enough. I want you to be co-counsel in this case. I can get you an immediate dispensation.”

“I don’t do criminal law,” Myron said.

“You don’t have to. I just want you to be an attorney of record for Mrs. Coldren.”

Myron nodded. “So I can’t testify,” he said. “So everything I hear falls under privilege.”

Still bored. “You are a smart one.” She stopped next to a bedroom door and leaned against a wall. “Go in. I’m going to wait out here.”

Myron knocked. Linda Coldren told him to come in. He opened the door. Linda stood by the far window looking out onto her backyard.

“Linda?”

Her back still faced him. “I’m having a bad week, Myron.” She laughed. It was not a happy sound.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Me? Never better. Thanks for asking.”

He stepped toward her, unsure what to say. “Did the kidnappers call about the ransom?”

“Last night,” Linda said. “Jack spoke to them.”

“What did they say?”

“I don’t know. He stormed out after the call. He never told me.”

Myron tried to picture this scene. A call comes in. Jack answers it. He runs out without saying anything. It didn’t exactly mesh.

“Have you heard from them again?” he tried.

“No, not yet.”

Myron nodded, even though she wasn’t facing him. “So what did you do?”

“Do?”

“Last night. After Jack stormed out.”

Linda Coldren folded her arms across her chest. “I waited a few minutes for him to calm down,” she said. “When he didn’t come back, I went out looking for him.”

“You went to Merion,” Myron said.

“Yes. Jack likes to stroll the grounds. To think and be alone.”

“Did you see him there?”

“No. I looked around for a while. Then I came back here. That’s when I ran into you.”

“And Jack never came back,” Myron said.

With her back still to him, Linda Coldren shook her head. “What tipped you off, Myron? The dead body in the stone quarry?”

“Just trying to help.”

She turned to him. Her eyes were red. Her face was drawn. She was still incredibly beautiful. “I just need someone to take it out on.” She shrugged, tried a smile. “You’re here.”

Myron wanted to step closer. He refrained. “You’ve been up all night?”

She nodded. “I’ve been standing right here, waiting for Jack to come home. When the police knocked on the door, I thought it was about Chad. This is going to sound awful, but when they told me about Jack, I was almost relieved.”

The phone rang.

Linda spun around with enough speed to start up a wind tunnel. She looked at Myron. He looked at her.

“It’s probably the media,” he said.

Linda shook her head. “Not on that line.” She reached for the phone, pressed the lit-up button, picked up the receiver.

“Hello,” she said.

A voice replied. Linda gasped and bit down in mid-scream. Her hand flew to her mouth. Tears pushed their way out of her eyes. The door flew open. Victoria Wilson stepped into the room, looking like a bear stirred from a power nap.

Linda looked up at them both. “It’s Chad,” she said. “He’s free.”

27

Victoria Wilson took control. “Well go pick him up,” she said. “You stay on the line with him.”

Linda started shaking her head. “But I want—”

“Trust me on this, honey. If you go, every cop and news reporter will follow. Myron and I can lose them if we have to. I don’t want the police talking to your son until I have. You just stay here. You say nothing. If the police come in with a warrant, you let them in. You don’t say a word. No matter what. Do you understand?”

Linda nodded.

“So where is he?”

“On Porter Street.”

“Okay, tell him Aunt Victoria is on the way. We’ll take care of him.”

Linda grabbed her arm, her face pleading. “Will you bring him back here?”

“Not right away, hon.” The voice was still matter-of-fact. “The police will see. I can’t have that. It’ll raise too many questions. You’ll see him soon enough.”

Victoria Wilson turned away. There was no debate with this woman.

In the car, Myron asked, “How do you know Linda?”

“My mother and father were servants for the Buckwells and Lockwoods,” she replied. “I grew up on their estates.”

“But somewhere along the line you went to law school?”

She frowned. “You writing my biography?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Why? You surprised that a middle-aged black woman is the attorney for rich WASPs?”

“Frankly,” Myron said, “yes.”

“Don’t blame you. But we don’t have time for that now. You got any important questions?”

“Yes,” Myron said. He was doing the driving. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing that you need to know.”

“I’m an attorney of record on the case. I need to know everything.”

“Later. Let’s concentrate on the boy first.”

Again the no-argument monotone.

“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” Myron continued. “Not telling the police about the kidnapping?”

“We can always tell them later,” Victoria Wilson replied. “That’s the mistake most defendants make. They think they have to talk their way out of it right away. But that’s dangerous. There is always time to talk later.”

“I’m not sure I agree.”

“Tell you what, Myron. If we need some expertise on negotiating a sneaker deal, I’ll put you in charge. But while this thing is still a criminal case, let me take the lead, okay?”

“The police want to question me.”

“You say nothing. That is your right. You don’t have to say a word to the police.”

“Unless they subpoena me.”

“Even then. You are Linda Coldren’s attorney. You don’t say anything.”

Myron shook his head. “That only works for what was said after you asked me to be co-counsel. They can ask me about anything that happened before.”

“Wrong.” Victoria Wilson gave a distracted sigh. “When Linda Coldren first asked you to help, she knew you were a bar-appointed attorney. Therefore everything she told you fell under attorney-client.”

Myron had to smile. “That’s reaching.”

“But that’s the way it is.” He could feel her eyes on him now. “No matter what you might want to do, morally and legally you are not allowed to talk to anyone.”

She was good.

Myron drove a bit faster. No one was tailing them; the police and the reporters had stuck to the house. The story was all over the radio. The anchorman kept repeating a one-line statement issued by Linda Coldren: “We are all saddened by this tragedy. Please allow us to grieve in peace.”

“You issue that statement?” Myron asked.

“No. Linda did it before I got there.”

“Why?”

“She thought it would keep the media off her back. She knows better now.”

They pulled up on Porter Street. Myron scanned the sidewalks.

“Up there,” Victoria Wilson said.

Myron saw him. Chad Coldren was huddled on the ground. The telephone receiver was still gripped in one hand, but he wasn’t talking. The other hand was heavily bandaged. Myron felt a little queasy. He hit the gas pedal. The car jerked forward. They pulled up to the boy. Chad stared straight ahead.

Victoria Wilson’s indifferent expression finally melted a bit. “Let me handle this,” she said.

She got out of the car and walked over to the boy. She bent down and cradled him. She took the receiver away from him, talked into it, hung up. She helped Chad to his feet, stroking his hair, whispering comforts. They both got into the backseat. Chad leaned his head against her. She made soothing shushing noises. She nodded at Myron. Myron put the car in drive.

Chad did not speak during the drive. Nobody asked him to. Victoria gave Myron directions to her office building in Bryn Mawr. The Coldren family doctor—a gray-haired, old family friend named Henry Lane—had his office there too. He unwrapped Chad’s bandage and examined the boy while Myron and Victoria waited in another room. Myron paced. Victoria read a magazine.

“We should take him to a hospital,” Myron said.

“Dr. Lane will decide if that’s necessary.” Victoria yawned and flipped a page.

Myron tried to take it all in. With all the activity surrounding the police accusation and Chad’s safe recovery, he had almost forgotten about Jack Coldren. Jack was dead. It was almost impossible for Myron to comprehend. The irony did not escape him: The man finally has the chance at redemption and he ends up dead in the same hazard that altered his life twenty-three years ago.

Dr. Lane appeared in the doorway. He was everything you wanted a doctor to look like—Marcus Welby without the receding hairline. “Chad is better now. He’s talking. He’s alert.”

“How’s his hand?” Myron asked.

“It’ll need to be looked at by a specialist. But there’s no infection or anything like that.”

Victoria Wilson stood. “I’d like to talk to him.”

Lane nodded. “I would warn you to go easy on him, Victoria, but I know you never listen.”

Her mouth almost twitched. Not a smile. Not even close. But there was a sign of life. “You’ll have to stay out here, Henry. The police may ask you what you heard.”

The doctor nodded again. “I understand.”

Victoria looked at Myron. “I’ll do the talking.”

“Okay.”

When Myron and Victoria entered the room, Chad was staring down at his bandaged hand like he expected the missing finger to grow back.

“Chad?”

He slowly looked up. There were tears in his eyes. Myron remembered what Linda had said about the kid’s love of golf. Another dream lay in ashes. The kid did not know it, but right now he and Myron were kindred spirits.

“Who are you?” Chad asked Myron.

“He’s a friend,” Victoria Wilson replied. Even with the boy the tone was completely detached. “His name is Myron Bolitar.”

“I want to see my parents, Aunt Vee.”

Victoria sat across from him. “A lot has happened, Chad. I don’t want to go into it all now. You’ll have to trust me, okay?”

Chad nodded.

“I need to know what happened to you. Everything. From the beginning.”

“A man car-jacked me,” Chad said.

“Just one man?”

“Yeah.”

“Go on. Tell me what happened.”

“I was at a traffic light, and this guy just opens the passenger door and gets in. He’s wearing a ski mask and sticks this gun in my face. He told me to keep driving.”

“Okay. What day was this?”

“Thursday.”

“Where were you Wednesday night?”

“At my friend Matt’s house.”

“Matthew Squires?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, fine.” Victoria Wilson’s eyes did not wander from the boy’s face. “Now where were you when this man got into your car?”

“A couple of blocks from school.”

“Did this happen before or after summer school?”

“After. I was on my way home.”

Myron kept quiet. He wondered why the boy was lying.

“Where did the man take you?”

“He told me to drive around the block. We pulled into this parking lot. Then he put something over my head. A burlap bag or something. He made me lie down in the back. Then he started driving. I don’t know where we went. I never saw anything. Next thing I knew I was in a room someplace. I had to keep the bag on my head all the time so I didn’t see anything.”

“You never saw the man’s face?”

“Never.”

“Are you sure it was a man? Could it have been a woman?”

“I heard his voice a few times. It was a man. At least, one of them was.”

“There was more than one?”

Chad nodded. “The day he did this …” He lifted his bandaged hand into view. His face went totally blank. He looked straight ahead, his eyes unfocused. “I had that burlap bag over my head. My hands were handcuffed behind my back.” His voice was as detached as Victoria’s now. “That bag was so itchy. I used to rub my chin against my shoulder. Just for relief. Anyway, the man came in and unlocked the handcuffs. Then he grabbed my hand and put it flat on the table. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t warn me. The whole thing took less than ten seconds. He just put my hand on the table. I never saw a thing. I just heard a whack. Then I felt this weird sensation. Not even pain at first. I didn’t know what it was. Then I felt a warm wetness. From the blood, I guess. The pain came a few seconds later. I passed out. When I woke up, my hand was wrapped. The throbbing was awful. The burlap bag was back over my head. Someone came in. Gave me some pills. It dulled the pain a little. Then I heard voices. Two of them. It sounded like they were arguing.”

Chad Coldren stopped as though out of breath. Myron watched Victoria Wilson. She did not go over and comfort him.

“Were the voices both male?”

“Actually, one sounded like a female. But I was pretty out of it. I can’t say for sure.”

Chad looked back down at his bandages. He moved his fingers a bit. Testing them out.

“What happened next, Chad?”

He kept his eyes on the bandages. “There’s not a lot to tell, Aunt Vee. They kept me that way for a few days. I don’t know how many. They fed me mostly pizza and soda. They brought a phone in one day. Made me call Merion and ask for my dad.”

The ransom call at Merion, Myron thought. The kidnapper’s second call.

“They also made me scream.”

“Made you scream?”

“The guy came in. He told me to scream and to make it scary. Otherwise, he would make me scream for real. So I tried different screams for, like, ten minutes. Until he was satisfied.”

The scream from the call at the mall, Myron thought. The one where Tito demanded a hundred grand.

“That’s about it, Aunt Vee.”

“How did you escape?” Victoria asked.

“I didn’t. They let me go. A little while ago someone led me to a car. I still had the burlap bag on my head. We drove a little. Then the car stopped. Someone opened the door and pulled me out. Next thing I knew, I was free.”

Victoria looked over at Myron. Myron looked back. Then she nodded slowly. Myron took that as his cue.

“He’s lying.”

Chad said, “What?”

Myron turned his attention to him. “You’re lying, Chad. And worse, the police will know you’re lying.”

“What are you talking about?” His eyes sought Victoria’s. “Who is this guy?”

“You used your ATM card at 6:18 P.M. on Thursday on Porter Street,” Myron said.

Chad’s eyes widened. “That wasn’t me. It was the asshole who grabbed me. He took my wallet—”

“It’s on videotape, Chad.”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Then: “They made me.” But his voice was weak.

“I saw the tape, Chad. You were smiling. You were happy. You were not alone. You also spent an evening at the sleazy motel next door.”

Chad lowered his head.

“Chad?” It was Victoria. She did not sound pleased. “Look at me, boy.”

Chad slowly raised his eyes.

“Why are you lying to me?”

“It has nothing to do with what happened, Aunt Vee.”

Her face was unyielding. “Start talking, Chad. And now.”

He looked down again, studying the bandaged hand. “It’s just like I said—except the man didn’t grab me in my car. He knocked on my door at that motel. He came in with a gun. Everything else I told you is the truth.”

“When was this?”

“Friday morning.”

“So why did you lie to me?”

“I promised,” he said. “I just wanted to keep her out of this.”

“Who?” she asked.

Chad looked surprised. “You don’t know?”

“I have the tape,” Myron said, giving a little bluff here. “I haven’t shown it to her yet.”

“Aunt Vee, you have to keep her out of it. This could really hurt her.”

“Honey, listen to me now. I think it’s sweet that you’re trying to protect your girlfriend. But I don’t have time for that.”

Chad looked from Myron to Victoria. “I want to see my mom please.”

“You will, honey. Soon. But first you have to tell me about this girl.”

“I promised that I would keep her out of it.”

“If I can keep her name out of this, I will.”

“I can’t, Aunt Vee.”

“Forget it, Victoria,” Myron said. “If he won’t tell, we can all just watch the tape together. Then we can call the girl on her own. Or maybe the police will find her first. They’ll have a copy of the tape too. They won’t be so worried about her feelings.”

“You don’t understand,” Chad said, looking from Victoria Wilson to Myron, then back at Victoria again. “I promised her. She can get in serious trouble.”

“We’ll talk to her parents, if need be,” Victoria said. “We’ll do what we can.”

“Her parents?” Chad looked confused. “I’m not worried about her parents. She’s old enough.…” His voice died away.

“Who were you with, Chad?”

“I swore I’d never say anything, Aunt Vee.”

“Fine,” Myron said. “We can’t waste time on this, Victoria. Let the police track her down.”

“No!” Chad looked down. “She had nothing to do with it, okay? We were together. She went out for a little while and that’s when they grabbed me. It wasn’t her fault.”

Victoria shifted in her seat. “Who, Chad?”

His words came out slow and grudging. But they were also quite clear. “Her name is Esme Fong. She works for a company called Zoom.”

28

It was all starting to make awful, horrible sense.

Myron did not wait for permission. He stormed out of the office and down the corridor. It was time to confront Esme.

A scenario was fast taking shape in Myron’s mind. Esme Fong meets Chad Coldren while negotiating the Zoom deal with his mother. She seduces him. Why? Hard to say. For kicks maybe. Not important.

Anyway, Chad spends Wednesday night with his buddy Matthew. Then on Thursday he meets up with Esme for a romantic tryst at the Court Manor Inn. They pick up some cash at an ATM. They have their fun. And then things get interesting.

Esme Fong has not only signed Linda Coldren, but she has managed to land Wunderkind Tad Crispin. Tad is playing wonderfully well in his first U.S. Open. After one round, he is in second place. Amazing. Great publicity. But if Tad could somehow win—if he could catch the veteran with a gigantic lead—it would give Zoom’s launch into the golf business a nuclear boost. It would be worth millions.

Millions.

And Esme had the leader’s son right in front of her.

So what does the ambitious Esme Fong do? She hires Tito to grab the boy. Nothing complicated. She wants to distract Jack big-time. Make him lose that edge. What better way than kidnapping his kid?

It all kinda fit together.

Myron turned his attention to some of the case’s more bothersome aspects. First of all, not demanding the ransom for so long suddenly made sense. Esme Fong is no expert at this and she doesn’t want a payoff—that would just complicate matters—so the first few calls are awkward. She forgets to demand a ransom. Second, Myron remembered Tito’s “chink bitch” call. How had he known Esme was there? Simple. Esme had told him when she would be there—to scare the hell out of the Coldrens and make them think they were being watched.

Yep. It fit. Everything had been going according to Esme Fong’s plan. Except for one thing.

Jack continued to play well.

He maintained his insurmountable lead through the next round. The kidnapping may have stunned him a bit, but he had regained his footing. His lead was still huge. Drastic action was necessary.

Myron got into the elevator and headed down to the ground-floor lobby. He wondered how it had happened. Maybe it had been Tito’s idea. Maybe that was why Chad had heard two voices arguing. Either way, someone decided to do something that was guaranteed to throw Jack off his game.

Cut off Chad’s finger.

Like it or not—Tito’s idea or hers—Esme Fong took advantage. She had Linda’s car keys. She knew what her car looked like. It wouldn’t take much. Just a turn of the key, a quick drop on the car seat. Easy for her. Nothing suspicious. Who would notice an attractive, well-dressed woman unlocking a car with a key?

The severed finger did the trick, too. Jack’s game was left in shambles. Tad Crispin stormed back. It was everything she wanted. But, alas, Jack had one more trick up his sleeve. He managed to land a big putt on the eighteenth hole, forcing a tie. This was a nightmare for Esme. She could not take the risk of Tad Crispin losing to Jack, the ultimate choker, in a one-on-one situation.

A loss would be disastrous.

A loss would cost them millions. Maybe destroy her entire campaign.

Man, did it fit.

When Myron thought about it, hadn’t he heard Esme voice that very viewpoint with Norm Zuckerman? Her Buffalo Bill analogy—hadn’t he been standing right there when she said it? Now that she was trapped, was it so hard to believe that she’d go the extra mile? That she would call Jack on the phone last night? That she would set up a rendezvous at the course? That she would insist he come alone—right now—if he wanted to see his son alive?

Ka-bang.

And once Jack was dead, there was no reason to hold on to the kid anymore. She let him go.

The elevator slid open. Myron stepped out. Okay, there were holes. But maybe after confronting Esme, he would be able to plug a few of them up. Myron pushed open the glass door. He headed into the parking lot. There were taxis waiting near the street. He was midway through the lot when a voice reached out and pulled him to a stop.

“Myron?”

An icy nerve-jangle punctured a hole through his heart. He had heard the voice only once before. Ten years ago. At Merion.

29

Myron froze.

“I see you’ve met Victoria,” Cissy Lockwood said.

He tried a nod, but it wouldn’t happen.

“I called her as soon as Bucky told me about the murder. I knew she’d be able to help. Victoria is the best lawyer I know. Ask Win about her.”

He tried the nod again. Got a little motion going this time.

Win’s mother stepped closer. “I’d like a word with you in private, Myron.”

He found his voice. “It’s not a good time, Ms. Lockwood.”

“No, I imagine not. Still, this won’t take long.”

“Really, I should go.”

She was a beautiful woman. Her ash-blond hair was streaked with gray, and she had the same regal bearing as her blood niece Linda. The porcelain face, however, she had given almost verbatim to Win. The resemblance was uncanny.

She took one more step forward, her eyes never off him. Her clothes were a bit odd. She wore a man’s oversize shirt, untucked, and stretch pants. Annie Hall goes maternity shopping. It was not what he’d have expected, but then again, he had bigger worries than fashion right now.

“It’s about Win,” she said.

Myron shook his head. “Then it’s none of my business.”

“True enough. But that does not make you immune to responsibility, does it? Win is your friend. I count myself lucky that my son has a friend who cares like you do.”

Myron said nothing.

“I know quite a bit about you, Myron. I’ve had private investigators keep tabs on Win for years now. It was my way of staying close. Of course, Win knew about it. He never said anything, but you can’t keep something like that from Win, now can you?”

“No,” Myron said. “You can’t.”

“You’re staying at the Lockwood estate,” she said. “In the guest cottage.”

He nodded.

“You’ve been there before.”

Another nod.

“Have you ever seen the horse stables?”

“Only from a distance,” Myron said.

She smiled Win’s smile. “You’ve never been inside?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised. Win doesn’t ride anymore. He used to love horses. More than golf even.”

“Ms. Lockwood—”

“Please call me Cissy.”

“I really don’t feel comfortable hearing this.”

Her eyes hardened a bit. “And I do not feel comfortable telling you this. But it must be done.”

“Win wouldn’t want me to hear it,” Myron said.

“That’s too bad, but Win cannot always have what he wants. I should have learned that long ago. He did not want to see me as a child. I never forced it. I listened to the experts, who told me that my son would come around, that compelling him to see me would be counterproductive. But they did not know Win. By the time I stopped listening to them it was too late. Not that it mattered. I don’t think ignoring them would have changed anything.”

Silence.

She stood proud and tall, her slender neck high. But something was going on. Her fingers kept flexing, as if she were fighting off the desire to make fists. Myron’s stomach knotted up. He knew what was coming next. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

“The story is simple,” she began, her voice almost wistful. She was no longer looking at Myron. Her gaze rose above his shoulder, but he had no idea what she was actually seeing. “Win was eight years old. I was twenty-seven at the time. I married young. I never went to college. It was not as though I had a choice. My father told me what to do. I had only one friend—one person I could confide in. That was Victoria. She is still my dearest friend, not unlike what you are to Win.”

Cissy Lockwood winced. Her eyes closed.

“Ms. Lockwood?”

She shook her head. The eyes slowly opened. “I am getting off track,” she said, catching her breath. “I apologize. I’m not here to tell you my life story. Just one incident in it. So let me just state it plainly.”

A deep breath. Then another.

“Jack Coldren told me that he was taking Win out for a golf lesson. But it never happened. Or perhaps they had finished far earlier than expected. Either way, Jack was not with Win. His father was. Somehow Win and his father ended up going into the stables. I was there when they entered. I was not alone. More specifically, I was with Win’s riding instructor.”

She stopped. Myron waited.

“Do I need to spell this out for you?”

Myron shook his head.

“No child should see what Win saw that day,” she said. “And worse, no child should ever see his father’s face under those circumstances.”

Myron felt tears sting his eyes.

“There is more to it, of course. I won’t go into it now. But Win has never spoken to me since that moment. He also never forgave his father. Yes, his father. You think he hates only me and loves Windsor the Second. But it is not so. He blames his father, too. He thinks that his father is weak. That he allowed it to happen. Utter nonsense, but that is the way it is.”

Myron shook his head. He didn’t want to hear any more. He wanted to run and find Win. He wanted to hug his friend and shake him and somehow make him forget. He thought of the lost expression on Win’s face as he watched the horse stables yesterday morning.

My God. Win.

When Myron spoke, his voice was sharper than he’d expected. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I am dying,” she replied.

Myron slumped against a car. His heart ripped anew.

“Again, let me put this simply,” she said in too calm a voice. “It has reached the liver. It is eleven centimeters long. My abdomen is swelling from liver and kidney failure.” That explained the wardrobe—the untucked, oversize shirt and the stretch pants. “We are not talking months. We are talking perhaps weeks. Probably less.”

“There are treatments,” Myron tried lamely. “Procedures.”

She simply dismissed this with a shake of her head. “I am not a foolish woman. I do not have delusions of engaging in a moving reunion with my son. I know Win. That will not happen. But there is still unfinished business here. Once I am dead, there will be no chance for him to disentangle himself again. It will be over. I do not know what he will do with this opportunity. Probably nothing. But I want him to know. So that he can decide. It is his last chance, Myron. I do not believe he will take it. But he should.”

With that, she turned away and left. Myron watched her walk away. When she was out of sight, Myron hailed a taxi. He got in the back.

“Where to, bud?”

He gave the man the address where Esme Fong was staying. Then he settled back in the seat. His eyes stared blankly out the window. The city passed by in a misty, silent blur.

30

When he thought that his voice would not betray him, Myron called Win on the cell phone.

After a quick hello, Win said, “Bummer about Jack.”

“From what I hear, he used to be your friend.”

Win cleared his throat. “Myron?”

“What?”

“You know nothing. Remember that.”

True enough. “Can we have dinner tonight?”

Win hesitated. “Of course.”

“At the cottage. Six-thirty.”

“Fine.”

Win hung up. Myron tried to put it out of his mind. He had other things to worry about.

Esme Fong paced the sidewalk outside the entrance to the Omni Hotel on the corner of Chestnut Street and Fourth. She wore a white suit and white stockings. Killer legs. She kept wringing her hands.

Myron got out of the taxi. “Why are you waiting out here?” he asked.

“You insisted on talking privately,” Esme answered. “Norm is upstairs.”

“You two live in the same room?”

“No, we have adjoining suites.”

Myron nodded. The no-tell motel was making more sense now. “Not much privacy, huh?”

“No, not really.” She gave him a tentative smile. “But it’s okay. I like Norm.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“What’s this about, Myron?”

“You heard about Jack Coldren?”

“Of course. Norm and I were shocked. Absolutely shocked.”

Myron nodded. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk.”

They headed up Fourth Street. Myron was tempted to stay on Chestnut Street, but that would have meant strolling past Independence Hall and that would have been a tad too cliché for his liking. Still, Fourth Street was in the colonial section. Lots of brick. Brick sidewalk, brick walls and fence, brick buildings of tremendous historical significance that all looked the same. White ash trees lined the walk. They turned right into a park that held the Second Bank of the United States. There was a plaque with a portrait of the bank’s first president. One of Win’s ancestors. Myron looked for a resemblance but could not find one.

“I’ve tried to reach Linda,” Esme said. “But the phone is busy.”

“Did you try Chad’s line?”

Something hit her face, then fled. “Chad’s line?”

“He has his own phone in the house,” he said. “You must have known that.”

“Why would I know that?”

Myron shrugged. “I thought you knew Chad.”

“I do,” she said, but her voice was slow, careful. “I mean, I’ve been over to the house a number of times.”

“Uh-huh. And when was the last time you saw Chad?”

She put her hand to her chin. “I don’t think he was there when I went over Friday night,” she said, the voice still slow. “I don’t really know. I guess a few weeks ago.”

Myron made a buzzing noise. “Incorrect answer.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t get it, Esme.”

“What?”

Myron continued walking, Esme stayed in step. “You’re what,” he said, “twenty-four years old?”

“Twenty-five.”

“You’re smart. You’re successful. You’re attractive. But a teenage boy—what’s up with that?”

She stopped. “What are you talking about?”

“You really don’t know?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

His eyes bore into hers. “You. Chad Coldren. The Court Manor Inn. That help?”

“No.”

Myron gave her skeptical. “Please.”

“Did Chad tell you that?”

“Esme …”

“He’s lying, Myron. My God, you know how teenage boys are. How could you believe something like that?”

“Pictures, Esme.”

Her face went slack. “What?”

“You two stopped at an ATM machine next door to the motel, remember? They have cameras. Your face was clear as day.” It was a bluff. But it was a damn good one. She caved a little piece at a time. She looked around and then collapsed on a bench. She turned and faced a colonial building with a lot of scaffolding. Scaffolding, Myron thought, ruined the effect—like armpit hair on a beautiful woman. It shouldn’t really matter, but it did.

“Please don’t tell Norm,” she said in a faraway voice. “Please don’t.”

Myron said nothing.

“It was dumb. I know that. But it shouldn’t cost me my job.”

Myron sat next to her. “Tell me what happened.”

She looked back at him. “Why? What business is this of yours?”

“There are reasons.”

“What reasons?” Her voice was a little sharper now. “Look, I’m not proud of myself. But who appointed you my conscience?”

“Fine. I’ll go ask Norm then. Maybe he can help me.”

Her mouth dropped. “Help you with what? I don’t understand. Why are you doing this to me?”

“I need some answers. I don’t have time to explain.”

“What do you want me to say? That I was dumb? I was. I could tell you that I was lonely being in a nice place. That he seemed like a sweet, handsome kid and that at his age, I figured there’d be no fear of disease or attachments. But at the end of the day, that does not change much. I was wrong. I’m sorry, okay?”

“When was the last time you saw Chad?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” Esme insisted.

“Just answer my questions or I’ll go to Norm, I swear it.”

She studied his face. He put on his most impermeable face, the one he’d learned from really tough cops and toll collectors on the New Jersey Turnpike. After a few seconds she said, “At that motel.”

“The Court Manor Inn?”

“Whatever it was called. I don’t remember the name.”

“What day was that?” Myron asked.

She thought a moment. “Friday morning. Chad was still sleeping.”

“You haven’t seen or spoken to him since?”

“No.”

“You didn’t have any plans to rendezvous for another tryst?”

She made an unhappy face. “No, not really. I thought he was just out for some fun, but once we were there, I could see he was developing a crush. I didn’t count on that. Frankly I was worried.”

“Of what exactly?”

“That he’d tell his mother. Chad swore he wouldn’t, but who knew what he’d do if I hurt him? When I didn’t hear from him again, I was relieved.”

Myron searched her face and her story for lies. He couldn’t find one. Didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Esme shifted on the bench, crossing her legs. “I still don’t understand why you’re asking me all this.” She thought about it a moment and then something seemed to spark in her eyes. She squared her shoulders toward Myron. “Does this have something to do with Jack’s murder?”

Myron said nothing.

“My God.” Her voice quaked. “You can’t possibly think that Chad has something to do with it.”

Myron waited a beat. All-or-nothing time. “No,” he said. “But I’m not so sure about you.”

Confusion set camp on her face. “What?”

“I think you kidnapped Chad.”

She raised both hands. “Are you out of your mind? Kidnapped? It was completely consensual. Chad was more than willing, believe me. Okay, he was young. But do you think I took him to that motel at gunpoint?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Myron said.

Confusion again. “Then what the hell do you mean?”

“After you left the motel on Friday. Where did you go?”

“To Merion. I met you there that night, remember?”

“How about last night? Where were you?”

“Here.”

“In your suite?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“From eight o’clock on.”

“Anybody who can verify that?”

“Why would I need someone to verify that?” she snapped. Myron put on the impermeable face again—not even gases could get through. Esme sighed. “I was with Norm until midnight. We were working.”

“And after that?”

“I went to bed.”

“Would the hotel’s nightman be able to verify that you never left your suite after midnight?”

“I think so, yes. His name is Miguel. He’s very nice.”

Miguel. He’d have Esperanza track down that one. If her alibi stuck, his neat little scenario went down the toilet. “Who else knew about you and Chad Coldren?”

“No one,” she said. “At least, I told no one.”

“How about Chad? Did he tell anyone?”

“It sounds to me like he told you,” she said pointedly. “He might have told someone else, I don’t know.”

Myron thought about it. The black-clad man crawling out Chad’s bedroom window. Matthew Squires. Myron remembered his own teenage years. If he had somehow managed to bed an older woman who looked like Esme Fong, he would have been busting to tell someone—especially if he’d been staying at his best friend’s house the night before.

Once again, things circled back to the Squires kid.

Myron asked, “Where will you be if I need to reach you?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a card. “My cell phone number is on the bottom.”

“Good-bye, Esme.”

“Myron?”

He turned to her.

“Are you going to tell Norm?”

She seemed only worried about her reputation and her job, not a murder rap. Or was this just a clever diversion? No way of knowing for sure.

“No,” he said. “I won’t tell.”

At least, not yet.

31

Episcopal Academy. Win’s high school alma mater.

Esperanza had picked him up in front of Esme Fong’s and driven him here. She parked across the street. She turned off the ignition and faced him.

“Now what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Matthew Squires is in there. We can wait for a lunch break. Try to get in then.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Esperanza said with a nod. “A really bad one.”

“You have a better idea?”

“We can go in now. Pretend we’re touring parents.”

Myron thought about it. “You think that’ll work?”

“Better than hanging out here doing nothing.”

“Oh, before I forget. I want you to check out Esme’s alibi. The hotel nightman named Miguel.”

“Miguel,” she repeated. “It’s because I’m Hispanic, right?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

She had no problem with that. “I put a call in to Peru this morning.”

“And?”

“I spoke to some local sheriff. He says Lloyd Rennart committed suicide.”

“What about the body?”

“The cliff is called El Garganta del Diablo—in English, Throat of the Devil. No bodies are ever located. It’s actually a fairly common suicide plunge.”

“Great. Think you can do a little more background stuff on Rennart?”

“Like what?”

“How did he buy the bar in Neptune? How did he buy the house in Spring Lake Heights? Stuff like that.”

“Why would you want to know that?”

“Lloyd Rennart was a caddie for a rookie golfer. That isn’t exactly loads of dough.”

“So?”

“So maybe he had a windfall after Jack blew the U.S. Open.”

Esperanza saw where he was going. “You think somebody paid Rennart off to throw the Open?”

“No,” Myron said. “But I think it’s a possibility.”

“It’s going to be hard to trace after all this time.”

“Just give it a shot. Also, Rennart got into a serious car accident twenty years ago in Narberth. It’s a small town right around here. His first wife was killed in the crash. See what you can find out about it.”

Esperanza frowned. “Like what?”

“Like was he drunk. Was he charged with anything. Were there other fatalities.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he pissed off someone. Maybe his first wife’s family wants vengeance.”

Esperanza kept the frown. “So they—what?—waited twenty years, followed Lloyd Rennart to Peru, pushed him off a cliff, came back, kidnapped Chad Coldren, killed Jack Coldren.… Are you getting my point?”

Myron nodded. “And you’re right. But I still want you to run down everything you can on Lloyd Rennart. I think there’s a connection somewhere. We just have to find what it is.”

“I don’t see it,” Esperanza said. She tucked a curl of black hair behind her ear. “Seems to me that Esme Fong is still a much better suspect.”

“Agreed. But I’d still like you to look into it. Find out what you can. There’s also a son. Larry Rennart. Seventeen years old. See if we can find out what he’s been up to.”

She shrugged. “A waste of time, but okay.” She gestured toward the school. “You want to go in now?”

“Sure.”

Before they moved, a giant set of knuckles gently tapped on Myron’s window. The sound startled him. Myron looked out his window. The large black man with the Nat King Cole hair—the one from the Court Manor Inn—was smiling at him. “Nat” made a cranking motion with his hand, signaling Myron to lower the window. Myron complied.

“Hey, I’m glad we ran into you,” Myron said. “I never got the number of your barber.”

The black man chuckled. He made a frame with his large hands—thumbs touching, arms outstretched—and tilted it back and forth the way a movie director does. “You with my doo,” he said with a shake of his head. “Somehow I just don’t see it.”

He leaned into the car and stuck his hand across Myron toward Esperanza. “My name is Carl.”

“Esperanza.” She shook his hand.

“Yes, I know.”

Esperanza squinted at him. “I know you.”

“Indeed you do.”

She snapped her fingers. “Mosambo, the Kenyan Killer, the Safari Slasher.”

Carl smiled. “Nice to see Little Pocahontas remembers.”

Myron said, “The Safari Slasher?”

“Carl used to be a professional wrestler,” Esperanza explained. “We were in the ring together once. In Boston, right?”

Carl climbed into the backseat of the car. He leaned forward so his head was between Esperanza’s right shoulder and Myron’s left. “Hartford,” he said. “At the Civic Center.”

“Mixed tag-team,” Esperanza said.

“That’s right,” Carl said with his easy smile. “Be a sweetheart, Esperanza, and start up the car. Head straight until the third traffic light.”

Myron said, “You mind telling us what’s going on?”

“Sure thing. See that car behind you?”

Myron used the passenger-side mirror. “The one with the two goons?”

“Yep. They’re with me. And they are bad men, Myron. Young. Far too violent. You know how the kids are today. Bam, bam, no talk. The three of us are supposed to escort you to an unknown destination. In fact, I’m supposed to be holding a gun on you now. But hell, we’re all friends here, right? No need, the way I see it. So just start heading straight. The goons will follow.”

“Before we take off,” Myron said, “do you mind if we let Esperanza go?”

Carl chuckled. “Kinda sexist, don’t you think?”

“Excuse me?”

“If Esperanza were a man—like, say, your buddy Win—would you be making this gallant gesture?”

“I might,” he said. But even Esperanza was shaking her head.

“Me thinks not, Myron. And trust me here: It would be the wrong move. The young goons back there, they’d want to know what’s up. They’d see her get out of the car and they got those itchy fingers and those crazy eyes and they like hurting people. Especially women. And maybe, just maybe, Esperanza here is an insurance policy. Alone, you might try something dumb; with Esperanza right there, you might not be so inclined.”

Esperanza glanced at Myron. Myron nodded. She started the car.

“Make a left at the third light,” Carl said.

“Tell me something,” Myron said. “Is Reginald Squires as big a nut-job as I hear?”

Still leaning forward, Carl turned to Esperanza. “Am I supposed to be wowed by his sharp deductive reasoning skills?”

“Yes,” Esperanza replied. “He’ll be terribly disappointed if you aren’t.”

“Figured that. And to answer your question, Squires is not that big a nut-job—when he stays on his medication.”

“Very comforting,” Myron said.

The young goons stayed right on their tail for the entire fifteen-minute drive. Myron was not surprised when Carl told Esperanza to turn down Green Acres Road. When they approached the ornate front entrance, the iron gates swung open like on the closing credits of Get Smart. They continued up a windy driveway through the heavily wooded property. After about a half mile, they hit a clearing with a building. The building was big and plain and rectangular, like a high school gym.

The only entrance Myron could see was a garage door. As if on cue, the door slid open. Carl told Esperanza to pull into it. Once far enough inside, he told her to park and kill the engine. The goon car came in behind them and did likewise.

The garage door came back down, slowly slicing out the sun. No lights were on inside; the room was submerged in total darkness.

“This is just like the haunted house at Six Flags,” Myron said.

“Give me your gun, Myron.”

Carl had his game face on. Myron handed him the gun.

“Step out of the car.”

“But I’m afraid of the dark,” Myron said.

“You too, Esperanza.”

They all stepped out of the car. So did the two goons behind them. Their movements echoed off the cement floor, hinting to Myron that they were in a very large room. The interior car lights provided a modicum of illumination, but that didn’t last long. Myron made out nothing before the doors were closed.

Absolute blackness.

Myron made his way around the car and found Esperanza. She took his hand in hers. They remained still and waited.

A beacon, the kind used at a lighthouse or a movie premiere, snapped on in their faces. Myron’s eyes slammed shut. He shaded them with his hand and slowly squinted them open. A man stepped in front of the bright light. His body cast a giant shadow on the wall behind Myron. The effect reminded Myron of the Bat Signal.

“No one will hear your screams,” the man said.

“Isn’t that a line from a movie?” Myron asked. “But I think the line was, ‘No one will hear you scream.’ I could be wrong about that.”

“People have died in this room,” the voice boomed. “My name is Reginald Squires. You will tell me everything I want to know. Or you and your friend will be next.”

Oh, boy. Myron looked at Carl. Carl’s face remained stoic. Myron turned back toward the light. “You’re rich, right?”

“Very rich,” Squires corrected.

“Then maybe you could afford a better scriptwriter.”

Myron glanced back at Carl. Carl slowly shook his head no. One of the two young goons stepped forward. In the harsh light, Myron could see the man’s psychotic, happy smile. Myron tensed, waited.

The goon cocked a fist and threw it at Myron’s head. Myron ducked, and the punch missed. As the fist flew by him, Myron grabbed the goon’s wrist. He put his forearm against the back of the man’s elbow and pulled the joint back in a way it was never intended to bend. The goon had no choice. He dropped to the ground. Myron added a bit more pressure. The goon tried to squirm free. Myron snapped his knee straight into the goon’s nose. Something splattered. Myron could actually feel the nose cartilage give way and fan out.

The second goon took out his gun and pointed it at Myron.

“Stop,” Squires shouted.

Myron let the goon go. He slid to the floor like wet sand through a torn bag.

“You will pay for that, Mr. Bolitar.” Squires liked to project his voice. “Robert?”

The goon with the gun said, “Yes, Mr. Squires.”

“Hit the girl. Hard.”

“Yes, Mr. Squires.”

Myron said, “Hey, hit me. I’m the one who smarted off.”

“And this is your punishment,” Squires said calmly. “Hit the girl, Robert. Now.”

Goon Robert moved toward Esperanza.

“Mr. Squires?” It was Carl.

“Yes, Carl.”

Carl stepped into the light. “Allow me to do it.”

“I did not think you were the type, Carl.”

“I’m not, Mr. Squires. But Robert might do serious damage to her.”

“But that’s my intent.”

“No, I mean, he’ll leave bruising or break something. You want her to feel pain. That’s my area of expertise.”

“I realize that, Carl. It’s why I pay you what I do.”

“So then let me do my job. I can hit her without leaving a mark or permanent injury. I know control. I know the right spots.”

The shadowy Mr. Squires considered this a moment. “Will you make it painful?” he asked. “Very painful?”

“If you insist.” Carl sounded reluctant but resolved.

“I do. Right now. I want it to hurt her a great deal.”

Carl walked up to Esperanza. Myron start to move toward him, but Robert placed the gun against his head. There was nothing he could do. He tried fire-throwing a warning glare at Carl.

“Don’t,” Myron said.

Carl ignored him. He stood in front of Esperanza now. She looked at him defiantly. Without preamble he punched her deep in the stomach.

The power of the blow lifted Esperanza off her feet. She made an oofing noise and folded at the waist like an old wallet. Her body landed on the floor. She curled up into a protective ball, her eyes wide, her chest heaving for air. Carl looked down at her without emotion. Then he looked at Myron.

“You son of a bitch,” Myron said.

“It’s your fault,” Carl said.

Esperanza continued to roll on the ground in obvious agony. She still couldn’t get any air into her lungs. Myron’s whole body felt hot and red. He moved toward her, but Robert again stopped him by pressing the gun hard against his neck.

Reginald Squires did the big voice-projection again. “You will listen now, won’t you, Mr. Bolitar?”

Myron took deep breaths. His muscles bunched. Every part of him fumed. Every part of him craved vengeance. He watched in silence as Esperanza writhed on the floor. After a while she managed to get to all fours. Her head was down. Her body heaved. A retching noise came out of her. Then another retching noise.

The sound made Myron pause.

Something about the sound … Myron searched his memory banks. Something about the whole scenario, the way she doubled up, the way she rolled on the floor—it was strangely familiar. As though he’d seen it before. But that was impossible. When would he …? He stopped as the answer came to him.

In the wrestling ring.

My God, Myron thought. She was faking it!

Myron looked over at Carl. There was a hint of a smile on his face.

Son of a bitch. It was an act!

Reginald Squires cleared his throat. “You have taken an unhealthy interest in my son, Mr. Bolitar,” he continued, voice thundering. “Are you some sort of pervert?”

Myron almost flew off another wisecrack, but he bit it back. “No.”

“Then tell me what you want with him.”

Myron squinted into the light. He still couldn’t see anything but the shadowy outline of Squires. What should he say? The guy was a major loony tune. No question about that. So how to play this …?

“You’ve heard about Jack Coldren’s murder,” Myron said. “Of course.”

“I’m working on the case.”

“You’re trying to find out who murdered Jack Coldren?”

“Yes.”

“But Jack was murdered last night,” Squires countered. “You were asking about my son Saturday.”

“It’s a long story,” Myron said.

The shadows hands spread. “We have all the time in the world.”

How did Myron know he was going to say that?

With nothing much to lose, Myron told Squires about the kidnapping. Most of it anyway. He emphasized several times that the actual abduction had happened at the Court Manor Inn. There was a reason for that. It had to do with the egocentricity. Reginald Squires—the ego in question—reacted in predictable fashion.

“Are you telling me,” he shouted, “that Chad Coldren was kidnapped at my motel?”

His motel. Myron had figured that out by now. It was the only explanation for why Carl had run interference for Stuart Lipwitz.

“That’s right,” Myron said.

“Carl?”

“Yes, Mr. Squires?”

“Did you know anything about this kidnapping?”

“No, Mr. Squires.”

“Well, something has to be done,” Squires shouted. “No one does something like that on my turf. You hear me? No one.”

This guy had seen waaaaaay too many gangster films.

“Whoever did this is dead,” he ranted on. “Do you hear me? I want them dead. D-E-A-D. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Dead,” Myron said with a nod.

The shadow pointed a long finger at Myron. “You find him for me. You find who did this and then you call me. You let me handle it. Do you understand, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Call you. You handle.”

“Go then. Find the wretched bastard.”

Myron said, “Sure thing, Mr. Squires. Sure thing.” Hey, two can play the Bad Movie Dialogue game. “But the thing is, I need some help.”

“What sort of help?”

“With your permission, I’d like to speak with your son Matthew. Find out what he knows about all this.”

“What makes you think he knows anything?”

“He’s Chad’s best friend. He may have heard or seen something. I don’t know, Mr. Squires, but I’d like to check it out.”

There was a brief silence. Then Squires snapped, “Do it. Carl will take you back to the school. Matthew will speak freely to you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Squires.”

The light went off, bathing them again in thick darkness. Myron felt his way to the car door. The “recovering” Esperanza managed to do likewise. So did Carl. The three of them got in.

Myron turned around and looked at Carl. Carl shrugged his shoulders and said, “Guess he forgot to take his medication.”

32

“Chad, like, told me he was hooking up with an older babe.”

“Did he tell you her name?” Myron asked.

“Nah, man,” Matthew Squires said. “Just that she was take-out.”

“Take-out?”

“You know. Chinese.”

Jesus.

Myron sat facing Matthew Squires. The kid was pure Yah Dude. His long, stringy hair was parted in the middle and hung past his shoulders. The coloring and texture reminded Myron of Cousin It from the Addams Family. He had acne, a fair amount of it. He was over six feet and weighed maybe one hundred twenty pounds. Myron wondered what it had been like for this kid growing up with Mr. Spotlight as a father.

Carl was on his right. Esperanza had taken a taxi to check out Esme Fong’s alibi and look into Lloyd Rennart’s past.

“Did Chad tell you where he was meeting her?”

“Sure, dude. That hot sheet is, like, my dad’s haunt, you know.”

“Did Chad know your father owned the Court Manor?”

“Nah. We don’t, like, talk daddy’s dinero or anything. Not righteous, you know what I’m saying?”

Myron and Carl exchanged a glance. The glance bemoaned today’s youth.

“Did you go with him to the Court Manor?”

“Nah. I went later, you know. I figured the dude would want to party after getting a little, you know. Kinda celebrate and shit.”

“So what time did you go to the Court Manor?”

“Ten-thirty, eleven, something like that.”

“Did you see Chad?”

“Nah. Things got, like, so weird right away. Never got the chance.”

“What do you mean, weird?”

Matthew Squires hesitated a bit. Carl leaned forward. “Its okay, Matthew. Your father wants you to tell him the whole story.”

The kid nodded. When the chin went down, the stringy hair slid across the face. It was like a tasseled curtain opening and closing in rapid succession. “Okay, like, here’s the deal: When I pulled my Benz into the parking lot, I saw Chad’s old man.”

Myron felt a queasy surge. “Jack Coldren? You saw Jack Coldren? At the Court Manor Inn?”

Squires nodded. “He was just, like, sitting in his car,” he said. “Next to Chad’s Honda. He looked really pissed off, man. I wanted no part of it, you know? So I took a hike.”

Myron tried not to look too stunned. Jack Coldren at the Court Manor Inn. His son inside a room screwing Esme Fong. The next morning Chad Coldren would be kidnapped.

What the hell was going on?

“Friday night,” Myron continued, “I saw someone climb out the window of Chad’s room. Was that you?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to tell me what you were doing?”

“Seeing if Chad was home. That’s what we do. I climb through his window. Like Vinny used to do with Doogie Howser. Remember that show?”

Myron nodded. He did know. Kinda sad when you thought about it.

There was not much more to extract from young Matthew. When they finished up, Carl walked Myron to his car.

“Strange shit,” Carl said.

“Yep.”

“You’ll call when you learn something?”

“Yep.” Myron didn’t bother telling him that Tito was already dead. No point. “Nice move, by the way. The fake punch with Esperanza.”

Carl smiled. “We’re professionals. I’m disappointed you spotted it.”

“If I hadn’t seen Esperanza in the ring, I wouldn’t have. It was very nice work. You should be proud.”

“Thanks.” Carl stuck out his hand. Myron shook it. He got in the car and drove away. Now where?

Back to the Coldren house, he guessed.

His mind still reeled from this latest revelation: Jack Coldren had been at the Court Manor Inn. He had seen his son’s car there. How the heck did that fit into this? Was Jack Coldren following Chad? Maybe. Was he just there by coincidence? Doubtful. So what other options were there? Why would Jack Coldren be following his own son? And where had he followed him from—Matthew Squires’s house? Did that make sense? The man plays in the U.S. Open, has a great opening round, and then goes parking in front of the Squires estate waiting for his kid to pull out?

Nope.

Hold the phone.

Suppose Jack Coldren had not been following his son. Suppose he had been following Esme Fong.

Something in his brain went “click.”

Maybe Jack Coldren had been having an affair with Esme Fong too. His marriage was on the rocks. Esme Fong was probably a bit of a kinkster. She had seduced a teenage boy—what would have stopped her from seducing his father? But did this make sense either? Was Jack stalking her? Had he somehow found out about the tryst? What?

And the larger question: What does any of this have to do with Chad Coldren’s kidnapping and Jack Coldren’s murder?

He pulled up to the Coldren house. The media had been kept back, but there were now at least a dozen cops on hand. They were hauling out cardboard boxes. As Victoria Wilson had feared, the police had gotten a search warrant.

Myron parked around the corner and walked toward the house. Jack’s caddie, Diane Hoffman, sat alone on the curb across the street. He remembered the last time he had seen her at the Coldren house: in the backyard, fighting with Jack. He also realized that she had been one of the very few people who knew about the kidnapping—hadn’t she been standing right there when Myron first talked about it with Jack at the driving range?

She was worth a conversation.

Diane Hoffman was smoking a cigarette. The several stubs by her feet indicated that she had been there for more than a few minutes. Myron approached.

“Hi,” he said. “We met the other day.”

Diane Hoffman looked up at him, took a deep drag of the cigarette, released it into the still air. “I remember.” Her hoarse voice sounded like old tires on rough pavement.

“My condolences,” Myron said. “You and Jack must have been very close.”

Another deep drag. “Yeah.”

“Caddy and golfer. Must be a tight relationship.”

She looked up at him, squinting suspiciously. “Yeah.”

“Almost like husband and wife. Or business partners.”

“Uh-huh. Something like that.”

“Did you two ever fight?”

She glared at him for a second, then she broke into a laugh that ended in a hacking cough. When she could talk again, she asked, “Why the hell do you want to know that?”

“Because I saw you two fighting.”

“What?”

“Friday night. You two were in the backyard. You called him names. You threw down your cigarette in disgust.”

Diane Hoffman crushed out the cigarette. There was the smallest smile on her face. “You some kinda Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Bolitar?”

“No. I’m just asking you a question.”

“And I can tell you to go mind your own fucking business, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Then you go do that.” The smile became fuller now. It was not a particularly pretty smile. “But first—to save you some time—I’ll tell you who killed Jack. And also who kidnapped the kid, if you like.”

“I’m all ears.”

“The bitch in there.” She pointed to the house behind her with a thumb. “The one you got the hots for.”

“I don’t have the hots for her.”

Diane Hoffman sneered. “Right.”

“What makes you so sure it was Linda Coldren?”

“Because I know the bitch.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

“Tough luck, cowpoke. Your girlfriend did it. You want to know why Jack and me was fighting? I’ll tell you. I told him he was being an asshole for not calling the police about the kidnapping. He said he and Linda thought it best.” She sneered. “He and Linda, my ass.”

Myron watched her. Something wasn’t meshing again.

“You think it was Linda’s idea not to call the police?”

“Damn straight. She’s the one who grabbed the kid. The whole thing was a big setup.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Ask her.” An awful smile. “Maybe she’ll tell you.”

“I’m asking you.”

She shook her head. “Not that easy, cowpoke. I told you who did it. That’s enough, don’t you think?”

Time to approach from another angle. “How long have you been Jack’s caddie?” he asked.

“A year.”

“What’s your qualifications, if I may ask? Why did Jack choose you?”

She snorted a chuckle. “Don’t matter none. Jack didn’t listen to caddies. Not since ol’ Lloyd Rennart.”

“Did you know Lloyd Rennart?”

“Nope.”

“So why did Jack hire you?”

She did not answer.

“Were you two sleeping together?”

Diane Hoffman gave another cough-laugh. A big one. “Not likely.” More hacking laughter. “Not likely with ol’ Jack.”

Somebody called his name. Myron turned around. It was Victoria Wilson. Her face was still sleepy but she beckoned him with some urgency. Bucky stood next to her. The old man looked like a window draft would send him skittering.

“Better head on down there, cowpoke,” she mocked. “I think your girlfriend is gonna need some help.”

He gave her a last look and turned toward the house. Before he moved three steps, Detective Corbett was on him. “Need a word with you, Mr. Bolitar.”

Myron brushed past him. “In a minute.”

When he reached Victoria Wilson, she made herself very clear: “Do not talk to the cops,” she said. “In fact, go to Win’s and stay put.”

“I’m not crazy about taking orders,” Myron said.

“Sorry if I’m bruising your male ego,” she said in a tone that made it clear she was anything but. “But I know what I’m doing.”

“Have the police found the finger?”

Victoria Wilson crossed her arms. “Yes.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

Myron looked at Bucky. Bucky looked away. He turned his attention back to Victoria Wilson. “They didn’t ask you about it?”

“They asked. We refused to answer.”

“But the finger could exonerate her.”

Victoria Wilson sighed and turned away. “Go home, Myron. I’ll call you if anything new turns up.”

33

It was time to face Win.

Myron rehearsed several possible approaches in the car. None felt right, but that really did not matter much. Win was his friend. When the time came, Myron would deliver the message and Win would adhere to it or not.

The trickier question was, of course, should the message be delivered at all? Myron knew that repression was unhealthy and all that—but did anybody really want to risk unbottling Win’s suppressed rage?

The cell phone rang. Myron picked it up. It was Tad Crispin.

“I need your help,” Tad said.

“What’s up?”

“The media keep hounding me for a comment. I’m not sure what to say.”

“Nothing,” Myron told him. “Say nothing.”

“Yeah, okay, but it’s not that easy. Learner Shelton—he’s the Commissioner of the USGA—called me twice. He wants to have a big trophy ceremony tomorrow. Name me U.S. Open champion. I’m not sure what to do.”

Smart kid, Myron thought. He knows that if this is handled poorly it could seriously wound him. “Tad?”

“Yes?”

“Are you hiring me?” Business was still business. Agenting was not charity work.

“Yeah, Myron, you’re hired.”

“Okay then, listen up. There’ll be details to work out first. Percentages, that kinda thing. Most of it is fairly standard.” Kidnapping, limb-severing, murder—nothing stopped the almighty agent from trying to turn a buck. “In the meantime, say nothing. I’ll have a car come by to pick you up in a couple of hours. The driver will call up to your room before he gets there. Go straight to the car and say nothing. No matter what the press yells at you, keep silent. Do not smile or wave. Look grim. A man has just been murdered. The driver will bring you to Win’s estate. We’ll discuss strategy then.”

“Thanks, Myron.”

“No, Tad, thank you.”

Profiting from a murder. Myron had never felt so much like a real agent in all his life.

The media had set up camp outside Win’s estate.

“I’ve hired extra guards for the evening,” Win explained, empty brandy snifter in hand. “If anybody approaches the gate, they’ve been instructed to shoot to kill.”

“I appreciate that.”

Win gave a quick head bow. He poured some Grand Marnier into the snifter. Myron grabbed a Yoo-Hoo from the fridge. The two men sat.

“Jessica called,” Win said.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t she call me on the cellular?”

“She wanted to speak with me,” Win said.

“Oh.” Myron shook his Yoo-Hoo, just like the side of the can said. SHAKE! IT’S GREAT! Life is poetry. “What about?”

“She was worried about you,” Win said.

“Why?”

“For one thing, Jessica claimed that you left a cryptic message on the answering machine.”

“Did she tell you what I said?”

“No. Just that your voice sounded strained.”

“I told her that I loved her. That I’d always love her.”

Win took a sip and nodded as though that explained everything.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Win said.

“No, tell me. What?”

Win put down the snifter and steepled his fingers. “Who were you trying to convince?” he asked. “Her or you?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Bouncing the fingers now instead of steepling. “Nothing.”

“You know how much I love Jessica.”

“Indeed I do,” Win said.

“You know what I’ve gone through to get her back.”

“Indeed I do.”

“I still don’t get it,” Myron said. “That’s why Jess called you? Because my voice sounded strained?”

“Not entirely, no. She’d heard about Jack Coldren’s murder. Naturally, she was upset. She asked me to watch your back.”

“What did you tell her?”

“No.”

Silence.

Win lifted the snifter in the air. He swirled around the liquid and inhaled deeply. “So what did you wish to discuss with me?”

“I met your mother today.”

Win took a slow sip. He let the liquid roll over his tongue, his eyes studying the bottom of the glass. After he swallowed, he said, “Pretend I just gasped in surprise.”

“She wanted me to give you a message.”

A small smile came to Win’s lips. “I assume that dear ma-ma told you what happened.”

“Yes.”

A bigger smile now. “So now you know it all, eh, Myron?”

“No.”

“Oh come, come, don’t make it so easy. Give me some of that pop psychology you’re so fond of expounding. An eight-year-old boy witnessing his grunting mother on all fours with another man—surely that scarred me emotionally. Can we not trace back everything I’ve become to that one dastardly moment? Isn’t this episode the reason why I treat women the way I do, why I build an emotional fortress around myself, why I choose fists where others choose words? Come now, Myron. You must have considered all this. Tell me all. I am sure it will all be oh-so-insightful.”

Myron waited a beat. “I’m not here to analyze you, Win.”

“No?”

“No.”

Win’s eyes hardened. “Then wipe that pity off your face.”

“It’s not pity,” Myron said. “It’s concern.”

“Oh please.”

“It may have happened twenty-five years ago, but it had to hurt. Maybe it didn’t shape you. Maybe you would have ended up the exact same person you are today. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.”

Win relaxed his jaw. He picked up the snifter. It was empty. He poured himself more. “I no longer wish to discuss this,” he said. “You know now why I want nothing to do with Jack Coldren or my mother. Let us move on.”

“There’s still the matter of her message.”

“Ah, yes, the message,” Win repeated. “You are aware, are you not, that dear ma-ma still sends me presents on my birthday and assorted holidays?”

Myron nodded. They had never discussed it. But he knew.

“I return them unopened,” Win said. He took another sip. “I think I will do the same with this message.”

“She’s dying, Win. Cancer. She has maybe a week or two.”

“I know.”

Myron sat back. His throat felt dry.

“Is that the entire message?”

“She wanted you to know that it’s your last chance to talk to her,” Myron said.

“Well, yes, that’s true. It would be very difficult for us to chat after she’s dead.”

Myron was flailing now. “She’s not expecting any kind of big reconciliation. But if there are any issues you want to resolve …” Myron stopped. He was being redundant and obvious now. Win hated that.

“That’s it?” Win asked. “That’s your big message?”

Myron nodded.

“Fine, then. I’m going to order some Chinese. I hope that will be suitable with you.”

Win rose from his seat and strolled toward the kitchen.

“You claim it didn’t change you,” Myron said. “But before that day, did you love her?”

Win’s face was a stone. “Who says I don’t love her now?”

34

The driver brought Tad Crispin in through the back entrance.

Win and Myron had been watching television. A commercial came on for Scope. A married couple in bed woke up and turned their heads in disgust. Morning breath, the voice-over informed them. You need Scope. Scope cures morning breath.

Myron said, “So would, say, brushing your teeth?”

Win nodded.

Myron opened the door and led Tad into the living room. Tad sat on a couch across from Myron and Win. He glanced about, his eyes searching for a spot to settle on but not having any luck. He smiled weakly.

“Would you care for a beverage?” Win asked. “A croissant or a Pop Tart perhaps?” The Host with the Most.

“No, thank you.” Another weak smile.

Myron leaned forward. “Tad, tell us about Learner Shelton’s call.”

The kid dove right in. “He said that he wanted to congratulate me on my victory. That the USGA had officially declared me the U.S. Open champion.” For a moment, Tad stopped. His eyes hazed over, the words hitting him anew. Tad Crispin, U.S. Open champion. The stuff of dreams.

“What else did he say?”

Crispin’s eyes slowly cleared. “He’s holding a press conference tomorrow afternoon. At Merion. They’ll give me the trophy and a check for $360,000.”

Myron did not waste time. “First of all, we tell the media that you do not consider yourself the U.S. Open champion. If they want to call you that, fine. If the USGA wants to call you that, fine. You, however, believe that the tournament ended in a tie. Death should not rob Jack Coldren of his magnificent accomplishment or his claim to the title. A tie it ended. A tie it is. From your vantage point, you two are co-winners. Do you understand?”

Tad was hesitant. “I think so.”

“Now, about that check.” Myron strummed the end table with his fingers. “If they insist on giving you the full winner’s purse, you’ll have to donate Jack’s portion to charity.”

“Victims’ rights,” Win said.

Myron nodded. “That would be good. Something against violence—”

“Wait a second,” Tad interrupted. He rubbed the palms of his hands on his thighs. “You want me to give away $180,000?”

“It’ll be a tax write-off,” Win said. “That knocks the value down to half that.”

“And it’ll be chicken feed compared to the positive press you’ll get,” Myron added.

“But I was charging back,” Tad insisted. “I had the momentum. I would have won.”

Myron leaned in a little closer. “You’re an athlete, Tad. You’re competitive and confident. That’s good—heck, that’s great. But not in this situation. This murder story is huge. It transcends sports. For most of the world’s population, this will be their first look at Tad Crispin. We want them to see someone likable. Someone decent and trustworthy and modest. If we brag now about what a great golfer you are—if we dwell on your comeback rather than this tragedy—people are going to see you as cold, as another example of what’s wrong with today’s athletes. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Tad nodded. “I guess so.”

“We have to present you in a certain light. We have to control the story as much as possible.”

“So we do interviews?” Tad asked.

“Very few.”

“But if we want publicity—”

“We want carefully orchestrated publicity,” Myron corrected. “This story is so big, the last thing we need to do is create more interest. I want you to be reclusive, Tad. Thoughtful. You see, we have to maintain the right balance. If we toot our horn, it looks like we’re grandstanding. If we do a lot of interviews, it looks like we’re taking advantage of a man’s murder.”

“Disastrous,” Win added.

“Right. What we want to do is control the flow of information. Feed the press a few tiny morsels. No more.”

“Perhaps one interview,” Win said. “One where you will be at your most contrite.”

“With Bob Costas maybe.”

“Or even Barbara Walters.”

“And we don’t announce your big donation.”

“Correct, no press conference. You are far too magnanimous for such bravado.”

That confused Tad. “How are we supposed to get good press if we don’t announce it?”

“We leak it,” Myron said. “We get someone at the charity to tell a nosy reporter, maybe. Something like that. The key is, Tad Crispin must remain far too modest a fellow to publicize his own good deeds. Do you see what we’re aiming for here?”

Tad’s nod was more enthusiastic now. He was warming up. Myron felt like a heel. Spin-doctoring—just another hat today’s sports representative must wear. Being an agent was not always pretty. You had to get dirty sometimes. Myron did not necessarily like it, but he was willing. The media would portray events one way; he would present them another. Still he felt like a grinning political strategist after a debate, and you cannot get much lower than that.

They discussed details for a few more minutes. Tad started to look off again. He was rubbing the famed palms against the pants again. When Win left the room for a minute, Tad whispered, “I saw on the news that you’re Linda Coldren’s attorney.”

“I’m one of them.”

“Are you her agent?”

“I might be,” Myron said. “Why?”

“Then you’re a lawyer too, right? You went to law school and everything?”

Myron was not sure he liked where this was going. “Yes.”

“So I can hire you to be my lawyer too, right? Not just my agent?”

Myron really didn’t like where this was going. “Why would you need a lawyer, Tad?”

“I’m not saying I do. But if I did—”

“Whatever you tell me is confidential,” Myron said.

Tad Crispin stood. He put his arms out straight and gripped an imaginary golf club. He took a swing. Air golf. Win played it all the time. All golfers do. Basketball players don’t do that. It’s not like Myron stops at every store window and checks the reflection of his shot in the mirror.

Golfers.

“I’m surprised you don’t know about this already,” Tad said slowly.

But the creeping feeling in the pit of Myron’s stomach told him that maybe he did. “Don’t know about what, Tad?”

Tad took another swing. He stopped his movement to check his backswing. Then his expression changed to one of panic. He dropped the imaginary club to the floor. “It was only a couple of times,” he said, his words pouring out like silver beads. “It was no big deal really. I mean, we met while we were filming those ads for Zoom.” He looked at Myron, his eyes pleading. “You’ve seen her, Myron. I mean, I know she’s twenty years older than me, but she’s so good-looking and she said her marriage was dead.…”

Myron did not hear the rest of his words; the ocean was crashing in his ears. Tad Crispin and Linda Coldren. He could not believe it, yet it made perfect sense. A young guy obviously charmed by a stunning older woman. The mature beauty trapped in a loveless marriage finding escape in young, handsome arms. Nothing really wrong with it.

Yet Myron felt his cheeks go scarlet. Something inside of him began to fume.

Tad was still droning on. Myron interrupted him.

“Did Jack find out?”

Tad stopped. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I think maybe he did.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It was just the way he acted. We played two rounds together. I know we were competitors and that he was trying to intimidate me. But I kind of got the impression he knew.”

Myron lowered his head into his hands. He felt sick to his stomach.

Tad asked, “Do you think it’ll get out?”

Myron held back a chuckle. This would be one of the biggest news stories of the year. The media would attack like old women at a Loehmann’s clearance sale. “I don’t know, Tad.”

“What do we do?”

“We hope it doesn’t get out.”

Tad was scared. “And if it does?”

Myron faced him. Tad Crispin looked so damn young—check that, he was young. Most kids his age are happily pulling fraternity pranks. And when you thought about it, what had Tad really done that was so bad? Slept with an older woman who for some odd reason remained in a dead marriage. Hardly unnatural. Myron tried to picture himself at Tad’s age. If a beautiful older woman like Linda Coldren had come on to him, would he have stood a chance?

Like, duh. He probably did not stand a chance now.

But what about Linda Coldren? Why did she stay in this dead marriage? Religion? Doubtful. For the sake of her son? The kid was sixteen years old. It might not be easy, but he’d survive.

“Myron, what’ll happen if the media find out?”

But Myron was suddenly no longer thinking about the media. He was thinking about the police. He was thinking about Victoria Wilson and reasonable doubt. Linda Coldren had probably told her ace attorney about her affair with Tad Crispin. Victoria would have seen it too.

Who is declared U.S. Open champion now that Jack Coldren is dead?

Who doesn’t have to worry about out-choking the choker in front of a massive audience?

Who has all the same motives to kill Jack Coldren that Myron had earlier assigned to Esme Fong?

Whose squeaky-clean image might get soiled by a Coldren divorce, especially one where Jack Coldren would name his wife’s indiscretion?

Who was having an affair with the deceased’s wife?

The answer to all the above was sitting in front of him.

35

Tad Crispin left not long after that.

Myron and Win settled into the couch. They put on Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, one of Woody’s most underrated masterpieces. What a flick. Rent it sometime.

During the scene where Mia drags Woody to the fortune-teller, Esperanza arrived.

She coughed into her fist. “I, ahem, don’t want to sound didactic or fictitious in any manner,” she began, doing a great Woody impression. She had his timing, the speech delay tactics. She had the hand mannerisms. She had the New York accent. It was her best work. “But I may have some important information.”

Myron looked up. Win kept his eyes on the screen.

“I located the man Lloyd Rennart bought the bar from twenty years ago,” Esperanza said, returning to her own voice. “Rennart paid him in cash. Seven grand. I also checked on the house in Spring Lake Heights. Bought at the same time for $21,000. No mortgage.”

“Lots of expenses,” Myron said, “for a washed-up caddie.”

“Sí, señor. And to make matters more interesting, I also found no indication that he worked or paid taxes from the time he was fired by Jack Coldren until he purchased the Rusty Nail bar.”

“Could be an inheritance.”

“I would doubt it,” Esperanza said. “I managed to go back to 1971 and found no record of him paying any inheritance tax.”

Myron looked at Win. “What do you think?”

Win’s eyes were still on the screen. “I’m not listening.”

“Right, I forgot.” He looked back at Esperanza. “Anything else?”

“Esme Fong’s alibi checks out. I spoke to Miguel. She never left the hotel.”

“Is he solid?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Strike one. “Anything else?”

“Not yet. But I found the office for the local paper in Narberth. They have the back editions in a storage room. I’ll go through them tomorrow, see what I can dig up on the car accident.”

Esperanza grabbed a take-out container and a pair of chopsticks from the kitchen and then she plopped down on the open couch. A mafioso hit man was calling Woody a cheesehead. Woody commented that he had no idea what that meant, but he was confident it wasn’t a good thing. Ah, the Woodman.

Ten minutes into Love and Death, not long after Woody wondered how old Nahampkin could be younger than young Nahampkin, exhaustion overtook Myron. He fell asleep on the couch. A deep sleep. No dreams. No stirring. Nothing but the long fall down the deep well.

He woke up at eight-thirty. The television was off. A clock ticked and then chimed. Someone had laid a comforter over Myron while he’d been sleeping. Win probably. He checked the other bedrooms. Win and Esperanza were both gone.

He showered and dressed and put on some coffee. The phone rang. Myron picked it up and said, “Hello.”

It was Victoria Wilson. She still sounded bored. “They arrested Linda.”

Myron found Victoria Wilson in an attorney waiting area.

“How is she?”

“Fine,” Victoria replied. “I brought Chad home last night. That made her happy.”

“So where is Linda?”

“In a holding cell awaiting arraignment. Well see her in a few minutes.”

“What do they have?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” Victoria said. She sounded almost impressed. “First, they have the guard who saw her entering and leaving an otherwise abandoned golf course at the time of the murder. With the exception of Jack, nobody else was seen going in or out all night.”

“Doesn’t mean nobody did. It’s an awfully big area.”

“Very true. But from their standpoint it gives Linda opportunity. Second, they found hairs and fibers on Jack’s body and around the murder scene that preliminary tests link to Linda. Naturally, this one should be no problem to discredit. Jack is her husband; of course he’d have hair and fibers from her on his body. He could have spread them around the scene.”

“Plus she told us she went to the course to look for Jack,” Myron added.

“But we’re not telling them that.”

“Why not?”

“Because right now we are saying and admitting to nothing.”

Myron shrugged. Not important. “What else?”

“Jack owned a twenty-two-caliber handgun. The police found it in a wooded area between the Coldren residence and Merion last night.”

“It was just sitting out?”

“No. It was buried in fresh dirt. A metal detector picked it up.”

“They’re sure it’s Jack’s gun?”

She nodded. “The serial numbers match. The police ran an immediate ballistics test. It’s the murder weapon.”

Myron’s veins iced up.

“Fingerprints?” he asked.

Victoria Wilson shook her head. “Wiped clean.”

“Are they running a powder test on her?” The police run a test on the hands, see if there are any powder burns.

“It’ll take a few days,” Victoria said, “and it’ll probably be negative.”

“You had her scrub her hands?”

“And treat them, yes.”

“Then you think she did it.”

Her tone remained unruffled. “Please don’t say that.”

She was right. But it was starting to look bad. “Is there more?” he asked.

“The police found your tape machine still hooked up to the phone. They were obviously curious as to why the Coldrens found it necessary to tape all incoming calls.”

“Did they find any tapes of the conversations with the kidnapper?”

“Just the one where the kidnapper refers to the Fong woman as a “chink bitch” and demands one hundred grand. And to answer your next two questions, no, we did not elaborate on the kidnapping and yes, they are pissed off.”

Myron pondered that for a moment. Something was not right. “That was the only tape they found?”

“That’s it.”

He frowned. “But if the machine was still hooked up, it should have taped the last call the kidnapper made to Jack. The one that got him to storm out of the house and head to Merion.”

Victoria Wilson looked at him steadily. “The police found no other tapes. Not in the house. Not on Jack’s body. Nowhere.”

Again the ice in the veins. The implication was obvious: The most reasonable explanation for there being no tape was that there was no call. Linda Coldren had made it up. The lack of a tape would have been viewed as a major contradiction if she had said anything to the cops. Fortunately for Linda, Victoria Wilson had never let her tell her story in the first place.

The woman was good.

“Can you get me a copy of the tape the police found?” he asked.

Victoria Wilson nodded. “There is still more,” she said.

Myron was almost afraid to hear it.

“Let’s take the severed finger for a moment,” she continued as though ordering it as an appetizer. “You found it in Linda’s car in a manila envelope.”

Myron nodded.

“The envelope is the type sold only at Staples—their brand, the number ten size. The writing was done by a red Flair pen, medium-point. Three weeks ago, Linda Coldren visited Staples. According to the receipt found at her house yesterday, she purchased numerous office supplies, including a box of Staples’ number ten manila envelopes and a red Flair medium-point pen.”

Myron could not believe what he was hearing.

“On the positive side, their handwriting analyst could not tell if the writing on the envelope came from Linda.”

But something else was dawning on Myron. Linda had waited around for him at Merion. The two of them had gone to the car together. They had found the finger together. The district attorney would pounce upon that story. Why had she waited for Myron? The answer, the DA would claim, was obvious: She needed a witness. She had planted the finger in her own car—she could certainly do that without drawing suspicion—and she needed a hapless dupe to be with her when she found it.

Enter Myron Bolitar, the dupe du jour.

But of course, Victoria Wilson had neatly arranged it so that the DA would never hear that story. Myron was Linda’s attorney. He could not tell. No one would ever know.

Yep, the woman was good—except for one thing.

“The severed finger,” Myron said. “That has to be the kicker, Victoria. Who is going to believe that a mother would cut off her own son’s finger?”

Victoria looked at her watch. “Let’s go talk to Linda.”

“No, hold up here. That’s the second time you blew this off. What aren’t you telling me?”

She slung her purse over her shoulder. “Come on.”

“Hey, I’m getting a little tired of getting jerked around here.”

Victoria Wilson nodded slowly, but she did not speak or stop walking. Myron followed her into a holding room. Linda Coldren was already there. She was decked out in a bright orange prison jumpsuit. Her hands were still manacled. She looked up at Myron through hollow eyes. There were no hellos or hugs or even pleasantries.

Without preamble, Victoria said, “Myron wants to know why I don’t think the severed finger helps us.”

Linda faced him. There was a sad smile on her face. “I guess that’s understandable.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Myron said. “I know you didn’t cut off your own son’s finger.”

The sad smile remained. “I didn’t do it,” Linda said. “That part is true.”

“What do you mean, that part?”

“You said I didn’t cut off my son’s finger,” she continued. “But Chad is not my son.”

36

Something in Myron’s head clicked again.

“I’m infertile,” Linda explained. She said the words with great ease, but the pain in her eyes was so raw and naked that Myron almost flinched. “I have this condition where my ovaries cannot produce eggs. But Jack still wanted a biological child.”

Myron spoke softly. “You hired a surrogate?”

Linda looked toward Victoria. “Yes,” she said. “Though it was not quite so aboveboard.”

“It was all done to the letter of the law,” Victoria interjected.

“You handled it for them?” Myron asked.

“I did the paperwork, yes. The adoption was completely legal.”

“We wanted to keep it a secret,” Linda said. “That’s why I took off from the tour so early. I went into seclusion. The birth mother was never even supposed to know who we were.”

Something else in his head went click. “But she found out.”

“Yes.”

Another click. “It’s Diane Hoffman, isn’t it?”

Linda was too exhausted to look surprised. “How did you know?”

“Just an educated guess.” Why else would Jack hire Diane Hoffman as his caddie? Why else would she have gotten upset at the way they were handling the kidnapping? “How did she find you?”

Victoria answered that one. “As I said, it was all done legally. With all the new disclosure laws, it wasn’t that hard to do.”

Another click. “That’s why you couldn’t divorce Jack. He was the biological parent. He’d have the upper hand in a custody battle.”

Linda slumped her shoulders and nodded.

“Does Chad know about all this?”

“No,” Linda said.

“At least, not to your knowledge,” Myron said. “What?”

“You don’t know for sure. Maybe he found out. Maybe Jack told him. Or Diane. Maybe that’s how this whole thing got started.”

Victoria crossed her arms. “I don’t see it, Myron. Suppose Chad did find out. How would that have led to his own kidnapping and his father’s murder?”

Myron shook his head. It was a good question. “I don’t know yet. I need time to think it through. Do the police know all this?”

“About the adoption? Yes.”

It was beginning to make sense now. “This gives the DA their motive. They’ll say that Jack’s suing for divorce worried Linda. That she killed him to keep her son.”

Victoria Wilson nodded. “And the fact that Linda is not the biological mother could play one of two ways: either she loved her son so much that she killed Jack to keep him—or because Chad was not her own flesh and blood, she could indeed be driven to cut off his finger.”

“Either way, finding the finger doesn’t help us.”

Victoria nodded. She did not say “I told you so,” but she might as well have.

“Can I say something?” It was Linda. They turned and looked at her.

“I didn’t love Jack anymore. I told you that straight out, Myron. I doubt I would have, if I’d been planning on killing him.”

Myron nodded. Made sense.

“But I do love my son—my son—more than life itself. The fact that it’s more believable that I’d maim him because I’m an adoptive mother rather than a biological one is sick and grotesque in the extreme. I love Chad as much as any mother could love a child.”

She stopped, her chest heaving. “I want you both to know that.”

“We know,” Victoria said. Then: “Let’s all sit down.”

When they were settled in their seats, Victoria continued to take charge. “I know it’s early, but I want to start thinking about reasonable doubt. Their case will have holes. I’ll be sure to exploit them. But I’d like to hear some alternative theories on what happened.”

“In other words,” Myron said, “some other suspects.”

Victoria caught something in his tone. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Well, you already have one ace in the hole, don’t you?”

Victoria nodded coolly. “I do.”

“Tad Crispin, right?”

This time, Linda did indeed look surprised. Victoria remained unfazed. “Yes, he’s a suspect.”

“The kid hired me last night,” Myron said. “Talking about him would be a conflict of interest.”

“Then we won’t talk about him.”

“I’m not sure that’s good enough.”

“Then you’ll have to dump him as a client,” Victoria said. “Linda hired you first. Your obligation must be to her. If you feel that there is a conflict, then you’ll have to call Mr. Crispin and tell him that you cannot represent him.”

Trapped. And she knew it.

“Let’s talk about other suspects,” Myron said.

Victoria nodded. Battle won. “Go ahead.”

“First off, Esme Fong.” Myron filled them in on all the reasons that she made a good suspect. Again Victoria looked sleepy; Linda looked semi-homicidal.

“She seduced my son?” Linda shouted. “The bitch came into my house and seduced my son?”

“Apparently so.”

“I can’t believe it. That’s why Chad was at that sleazy motel?”

“Yup—”

“Okay,” Victoria interrupted. “I like it. This Esme Fong has motive. She has means. She was one of the few people who knew where Chad was.”

“She also has an alibi for the killing,” Myron added.

“But not a great one. There must be other ways in and out of that hotel. She could have worn a disguise. She could have sneaked out when Miguel took a bathroom break. I like her. Who else?”

“Lloyd Rennart.”

“Who?”

“Jack’s former caddie,” Myron explained. “The one who helped throw the Open.”

Victoria frowned. “Why him?”

“Look at the timing. Jack returns to the site of his greatest failure and suddenly all this happens. It can’t be a coincidence. Firing Rennart ruined his life. He became a drunk. He killed his own wife in a car crash.”

“What?” It was Linda.

“Not long after the Open, Lloyd totaled his car while DWI. His wife was killed.”

Victoria asked, “Did you know her?”

Linda shook her head. “We never met his family. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw Lloyd outside of our home or the golf course.”

Victoria crossed her arms and leaned back. “I still do not see what makes him a viable suspect.”

“Rennart wanted vengeance. He waited twenty-three years to get it.”

Victoria frowned again.

“I admit that it’s a bit of a stretch.”

“A bit? It’s ridiculous. Do you know where Lloyd Rennart is now?”

“That’s a little complicated.”

“Oh?”

“He may have committed suicide.”

Victoria looked at Linda, then at Myron. “Would you please elaborate?”

“The body was never found,” Myron said. “But everyone thinks he jumped off a cliff in Peru.”

Linda groaned. “Oh, no …”

“What is it?” Victoria asked.

“We got a postcard from Peru.”

“Who did?”

“It was addressed to Jack, but it was unsigned. It arrived last fall or winter.”

Myron’s pulse raced. Last fall or winter. About the time Lloyd allegedly jumped. “What did it say?”

“It only had two words on it,” Linda said. “ ‘Forgive me.’ ” Silence.

Victoria broke it. “That doesn’t sound like the words of a man out for revenge.”

“No,” Myron agreed. He remembered what Esperanza had learned about the money Rennart had used to buy his house and bar. This postcard now confirmed what he had already suspected: Jack had been sabotaged. “But it also means that what happened twenty-three years ago was no accident.”

“So what good does that do us?” Victoria asked.

“Someone paid Rennart off to throw the U.S. Open. Whoever did that would have motive.”

“To kill Rennart maybe,” Victoria countered. “But not Jack.”

Good point. Or was it? Somebody had hated Jack enough twenty-three years ago to destroy his chances of winning the Open. Maybe that hatred had not died. Or maybe Jack had learned the truth and thus had to be quieted. Either way, it was worth looking into.

“I do not want to go digging into the past,” Victoria said. “It could make things very messy.”

“I thought you liked messy. Messy is fertile land for reasonable doubt.”

“Reasonable doubt, I like,” she said. “But the unknown, I don’t. Look into Esme Fong. Look into the Squires family. Look into whatever. But stay away from the past, Myron. You never know what you might find back there.”

37

On the car phone: “Mrs. Rennart? This is Myron Bolitar.”

“Yes, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I promised that I’d call you periodically. To keep you updated.”

“Have you learned something new?”

How to proceed? “Not about your husband. So far, there is no evidence that suggests Lloyd’s death was anything other than a suicide.”

“I see.”

Silence.

“So why are you calling me, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Have you heard about Jack Coldren’s murder?”

“Of course,” Francine Rennart said. “It’s on every station.” Then: “You don’t suspect Lloyd—”

“No,” Myron said quickly. “But according to Jack’s wife, Lloyd sent Jack a postcard from Peru. Right before his death.”

“I see,” she said again. “What did it say?”

“It had only two words on it: ‘Forgive me.’ He didn’t sign it.”

There was a brief pause and then she said, “Lloyd is dead, Mr. Bolitar. So is Jack Coldren. Let it lie.”

“I’m not out to damage your husband’s reputation. But it is becoming clear that somebody either forced Lloyd to sabotage Jack or paid him to do it.”

“And you want me to help you prove that?”

“Whoever it was may have murdered Jack and maimed his son. Your husband sent Jack a postcard asking for forgiveness. With all due respect, Mrs. Rennart, don’t you think Lloyd would want you to help?”

More silence.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Bolitar? I don’t know anything about what happened.”

“I realize that. But do you have any old papers of Lloyd’s? Did he keep a journal or a diary? Anything that might give us a clue?”

“He didn’t keep a journal or a diary.”

“But there might be something else.” Gently, fair Myron. Tread gently. “If Lloyd did receive compensation”—a nice way of saying a bribe—“there may be bank receipts or letters or something.”

“There are boxes in the basement,” she said. “Old photos, some papers maybe. I don’t think there are any bank statements.” Francine Rennart stopped talking for a moment. Myron kept the receiver pushed against his ear. “Lloyd always did have a lot of cash,” she said softly. “I never really asked where it came from.”

Myron licked his lips. “Mrs. Rennart, can I look through those boxes?”

“Tonight,” she said. “You can come by tonight.”

Esperanza was not back at the cottage yet. But Myron had barely sat down when the intercom buzzed.

“Yes?”

The guard manning the front gate spoke with perfect diction. “Sir, a gentleman and a young lady are here to see you. They claim that they are not with the media.”

“Did they give a name?”

“The gentleman said his name is Carl.”

“Let them in.”

Myron stepped outside and watched the canary-yellow Audi climb the drive. Carl pulled to a stop and got out. His flat hair looked freshly pressed, like he’d just gotten it “martinized,” whatever that was. A young black woman who couldn’t have been twenty years old came out of the passenger door. She looked around with eyes the size of satellite dishes.

Carl turned to the stables and cupped his big hand over his eyes. A female rider decked out in full gear was steering a horse through some sort of obstacle course.

“That what they call steeplechasing?” Carl asked.

“Got me,” Myron said.

Carl continued to watch. The rider got off the horse. She unstrapped her black hat and patted the horse. Carl said, “You don’t see a lot of brothers dressed like that.”

“What about lawn jockeys?”

Carl laughed. “Not bad,” he said. “Not great, but not bad.”

Hard to argue. “You here to take riding lessons?”

“Not likely,” Carl said. “This is Kiana. I think she may be of help to us.”

“Us?”

“You and me together, bro.” Carl smiled. “I get to play your likable black partner.”

Myron shook his head. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

“The likable black partner always ends up dead. Usually early on, too.”

That stopped Carl a second. “Damn, I forgot about that.”

Myron shrugged a what-can-you-do. “So who is she?”

“Kiana works as a maid at the Court Manor Inn.”

Myron looked at her. She was still out of earshot. “How old is she?”

“Why?”

Myron shrugged. “Just asking. She looks young.”

“She’s sixteen. And guess what, Myron? She’s not an unwed mother, she’s not on welfare, and she’s not a junkie.”

“I never said she was.”

“Uh-huh. Guess none of that racist shit ever seeps into your color-blind cranium.”

“Hey Carl, do me a favor. Save the racial-sensitivity seminar for a less active day. What does she know?”

Carl beckoned her forward with a tight nod. Kiana approached, all long limbs and big eyes. “I showed her this photo”—he handed Myron a snapshot of Jack Coldren—“and she remembered seeing him at the Court Manor.”

Myron glanced at the photograph, and then at Kiana. “You saw this man at the motel?”

“Yes.” Her voice was firm and strong and belied her years. Sixteen. She was the same age as Chad. Hard to imagine.

“Do you remember when?”

“Last week. I saw him there twice.” Twice?

“Yes.”

“Would that have been Thursday or Friday?”

“No.” Kiana kept up with the poise. No ringing hands or happy feet or darting eyes. “It was Monday or Tuesday. Wednesday at the latest.”

Myron tried to process this tidbit. Jack had been at the Court Manor twice before his son. Why? The reason was fairly obvious: If the marriage was dead for Linda, it was probably dead for Jack. He, too, would be engaging in extramarital liaisons. Maybe that was what Matthew Squires witnessed. Maybe Jack had pulled in for his own affair and spotted his son’s car. It kinda made sense.…

But it was also a hell of a coincidence. Father and son end up at the same hot sheets at the same time? Stranger things have happened, but what were the odds?

Myron gestured to Jacks photograph. “Was he alone?”

Kiana smiled. “The Court Manor doesn’t rent out a lot of single rooms.”

“Did you see who was with him?”

“Very briefly. The guy in the photograph checked them in. His partner stayed in the car.”

“But you saw her? Briefly anyway.”

Kiana glanced at Carl, then back at Myron. “It wasn’t a her.”

“Excuse me?”

“The guy in the photograph,” she said. “He wasn’t there with a woman.”

A large boulder fell from the sky and landed on Myron’s head. It was his turn now to glance at Carl. Carl nodded. Another click. A big click. The loveless marriage. He had known why Linda Coldren stayed in it—she was afraid of losing custody of her son. But what about Jack? Why hadn’t he left? The answer was suddenly transparent: Being married to a beautiful, constantly traveling woman was the perfect cover. He remembered Diane Hoffman’s reaction when he asked her if she’d been sleeping with Jack—the way she laughed and said, “Not likely with ol’ Jack.”

Because ol’ Jack was gay.

Myron turned his focus back to Kiana. “Could you describe the man he was with?”

“Older—maybe fifty or sixty. White. He had this long dark hair and a bushy beard. That’s about all I can tell you.”

But Myron did not need more.

It was starting to come together now. It wasn’t there. Not yet anyway. But he was suddenly a quantum leap closer.

38

As Carl drove out, Esperanza drove in.

“Find anything?” Myron asked her.

Esperanza handed him a photocopy of an old newspaper clipping. “Read this.”

The headline read: CRASH FATALITY

Economy of words. He read on:

Mr. Lloyd Rennart of 27 Darby Place crashed his automobile into a parked car on South Dean Street near the intersection of Coddington Terrace. Mr. Rennart was taken into police custody under suspicion of driving while intoxicated. The injured were rushed to St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, where Lucille Rennart, Mr. Lloyd Rennart’s wife, was pronounced dead. Funeral services are to be arranged.

Myron reread the paragraph twice. “ ‘The injured were rushed,’ ” he read out loud. “As in more than one.”

Esperanza nodded.

“So who else was hurt?”

“I don’t know. There was no follow-up article.”

“Nothing on the arrest or the arraignment or the court case?”

“Nothing. At least, nothing I could find. There was no further mention of any Rennarts. I also tried to get something from St. Elizabeth’s, but they wouldn’t help. Hospital-patient confidentiality, they claimed. I doubt their computers go back to the seventies anyway.”

Myron shook his head. “This is too weird,” he said.

“I saw Carl heading out,” Esperanza said. “What did he want?”

“He came by with a maid from the Court Manor. Guess who Jack Coldren was linking up with for a little afternoon delight?”

“Tonya Harding?”

“Close. Norm Zuckerman.”

Esperanza tilted her head back and forth, as though sizing up an abstract work at the Met. “I’m not surprised. About Norm anyway. Think about it. Never married. No family. In public, he always surrounds himself with young, beautiful women.”

“For show,” Myron said.

“Right. They’re beards. Camouflage. Norm is the front man for a major sports fashion business. Being a known gay could destroy him.”

“So,” Myron said, “if it got out that he was gay …”

“It would hurt a lot,” Esperanza said.

“Is that a motive for murder?”

“Sure,” she said. “It’s millions of dollars and a man’s reputation. People kill for a lot less.”

Myron thought about it. “But how did it happen? Let’s say Chad and Jack meet up at the Court Manor by accident. Suppose Chad figures out what Daddy and Norm are up to. Maybe he mentions it to Esme, who works for Norm. Maybe she and Norm …”

“They what?” Esperanza finished. “They kidnap the kid, cut off his finger, and then let him go?”

“Yeah, it doesn’t mesh,” Myron agreed. “Not yet anyway. But we’re getting close.”

“Oh sure, we’re really narrowing down the field. Let’s see. It could be Esme Fong. It could be Norm Zuckerman. It could be Tad Crispin. It could be a still-alive Lloyd Rennart. It could be his wife or his kid. It could be Matthew Squires or his father or both. Or it could be a combination plan of any of the above—the Rennart family perhaps, or Norm and Esme. And it could be Linda Coldren. How does she explain the gun from her house being the murder weapon? Or the envelopes and the pen she bought?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said slowly. Then: “But you may be on to something here.”

“What?”

“Access. Whoever killed Jack and cut off Chad’s finger had access to the Coldren house. Barring a break-in, who could have gotten hold of the gun and the stationery supplies?”

Esperanza barely hesitated. “Linda Coldren, Jack Coldren, maybe the Squires kid, since he liked to crawl in through the window.” She paused. “I guess that’s it.”

“Okay, good. Now let’s move on a little. Who knew that Chad Coldren was at the Court Manor Inn? I mean, whoever kidnapped him had to know where he was, right?”

“Right. Okay, Jack again, Esme Fong, Norm Zuckerman, Matthew Squires again. Boy, Myron, this is really helpful.”

“So what names show up on both lists?”

“Jack and Matthew Squires. And I think we can leave Jack’s name off—his being the victim and all.”

But Myron stopped for a moment. He thought about his conversation with Win. About the naked desire to win. How far would Jack go to guarantee victory? Win had said that he would stop at nothing. Was he right?

Esperanza snapped her fingers in his face. “Yo, Myron?”

“What?”

“I said, we can eliminate Jack Coldren. Dead people rarely bury murder weapons in nearby woods.”

That made sense. “So that leaves Matthew Squires,” Myron said, “and I don’t think he’s our boy.”

“Neither do I,” Esperanza said. “But we’re forgetting someone—someone who knew where Chad Coldren was and had complete access to the gun and stationery supplies.”

“Who?”

“Chad Coldren.”

“You think he cut off his own finger?”

Esperanza shrugged. “What about your old theory? The one where the kidnapping was a hoax that went out of control. Think about it. Maybe he and Tito had a falling-out. Maybe it was Chad who killed Tito.”

Myron considered the possibility. He thought about Jack. He thought about Esme. He thought about Lloyd Rennart. Then he shook his head. “This is getting us nowhere. Sherlock Holmes warned that you should never theorize without all the facts because then you twist facts to suit theories rather than theories to suit facts.”

“That never stopped us before,” Esperanza said.

“Good point.” Myron checked his watch. “I gotta go see Francine Rennart.”

“The caddie’s wife.”

“Yup.”

Esperanza went sniff, sniff.

“What?” Myron asked.

One more big sniff. “I smell a complete waste of time,” she said.

She smelled wrong.

39

Victoria Wilson called on the car phone. What, Myron wondered, did people do before the car phone, before the cell phone, before the beeper?

Probably had a lot more fun.

“The police found the body of your neo-Nazi friend,” she said. “His last name is Marshall.”

“Tito Marshall?” Myron frowned. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I don’t joke, Myron.”

Of that he had little doubt. “Do the police have any idea he’s tied into this?” Myron asked.

“None whatsoever.”

“And I assume he died of a gunshot wound.”

“That’s the preliminary finding, yes. Mr. Marshall was shot twice in the head at close range with a thirty-eight.”

“A thirty-eight? But Jack was killed with a twenty-two.”

“Yes, Myron, I know.”

“So different guns killed Jack Coldren and Tito Marshall.”

Victoria did the bored thing again. “Hard to believe you’re not a professional ballistics expert.”

Everyone’s a smart-ass. But this new development threw a whole bunch of scenarios out of whack. If two different guns had killed Jack Coldren and Tito Marshall, did that mean there were two different killers? Or was the killer smart enough to use different weapons? Or had the killer disposed of the thirty-eight after killing Tito and was thus forced to use the twenty-two on Jack? And what kind of warped mind names a kid Tito Marshall? Bad enough to go through life with a moniker like Myron. But Tito Marshall? No wonder the kid had turned out as a neo-Nazi. Probably started out as a virulent anti-Communist.

Victoria interrupted his thoughts. “I called for another reason, Myron.”

“Oh?”

“Did you pass on the message to Win?”

“You set that up, didn’t you? You told her I’d be there.”

“Please answer the question.”

“Yes, I delivered the message.”

“What did Win say?”

“I delivered the message,” Myron said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m giving out reports on my friend’s reaction.”

“She’s getting worse, Myron.”

“I’m sorry.”

Silence.

“Where are you right now?” she asked.

“I just hit the New Jersey Turnpike. I’m on my way to Lloyd Rennart’s house.”

“I thought I told you to leave that path alone.”

“So you did.”

More silence.

“Good-bye, Myron.”

She hung up. Myron sighed. He suddenly longed for the days before the car phone, the cell phone, the beeper. Reaching out and touching someone was getting to be a real pain in the ass.

An hour later, Myron parked again in front of the Rennarts’ modest home. He knocked on the door. Mrs. Rennart opened it immediately. She studied his face for a few long seconds. Neither of them spoke. Not even a greeting or salutation.

“You look tired,” she said at last.

“I am.”

“Did Lloyd really send that postcard?”

“Yes.”

The answer had been automatic. But now he wondered—had Lloyd Rennart sent a postcard? For all he knew, Linda was simply sizing him for the title role in Big Sap: The Musical. Take the missing taped phone call, for example. If indeed the kidnapper had called Jack before his death, where was the tape of the call? Maybe the call had never occurred. Maybe Linda had lied about it. Maybe she was lying about the postcard too. Maybe she was lying about everything. Maybe Myron was simply being semi-seduced, like the hormone-driven male in one of those cheesy, unrated, direct-to-video, Body Heat rip-offs co-starring women with names like Shannon or Tawny.

Not a pleasant thought.

Francine Rennart silently led him into a dark basement. When they hit bottom, she reached up and switched on one of those swinging lightbulbs like something out of Psycho. The room was pure cement. There was a water heater, a gas heater, a washer and dryer, and storage containers of various sizes, shapes, and material. Four boxes lay on the floor in front of him.

“That’s his old stuff,” Francine Rennart said without looking down.

“Thank you.”

She tried, but she could not make herself look at the boxes. “I’ll be upstairs,” she said. Myron watched her feet disappear from view. Then he turned to the boxes and squatted down. The boxes were taped shut. He took out his key-chain penknife and slit the packing tape.

The first box had golf memorabilia. There were certificates and trophies and old tees. A golf ball was mounted to a wooden base with a rusty plaque that read:

HOLE IN ONE—15TH HOLE AT HICKORY PARK
JANUARY 17, 1972

Myron wondered what life had been like for Lloyd on that clear, crisp golf afternoon. He wondered how often Lloyd had replayed the shot in his mind, how many times he’d sat alone in that BarcaLounger and tried to recapture that pure, cold rush. Had he remembered the feel of the club’s grip, the tightness in his shoulders as he began the backswing, the clean, solid stroke of the ball, the floating follow-through.

In the second box, Myron found Lloyd’s high school diploma. He found a yearbook from Penn State. There was a picture of the golf team. Lloyd Rennart had been captain. Myron’s finger touched upon a large, felt P. Lloyd’s varsity letter. There was a recommendation letter from his golf coach at Penn State. The words bright future jumped out at Myron. Bright future. The coach may have been a great motivator, but he made a lousy soothsayer.

The third box started off with a photograph of Lloyd in Korea. It was a casual group photo, a dozen or so boys/men in unbuttoned fatigues, arms dangling loosely around neighboring necks. Lots of smiles, seemingly happy smiles. Lloyd was thinner there, but he saw nothing gaunt or drawn in the eyes.

Myron put the picture down. In the background, Betty Buckley was not singing “Memory,” but maybe she should have been. These boxes were a life—a life that in spite of these experiences and dreams and wants and hopes had chosen to terminate itself.

From the bottom of the box Myron pulled out a wedding album. The faded gold leaf read: Lloyd and Lucille, November 17, 1968, Now and Forever. More irony. The fake-leather cover was crusted with what looked like drink ringlets. Lloyd’s first marriage, neatly wrapped and packed away in the bottom of a box.

Myron was about to put the album to the side when his curiosity got the better of him. He sat all the way down, his legs splayed like a kid with a new pack of baseball cards. He placed the photo album on the cement floor and began to open it. The binding made a cracking noise from the years of disuse.

The first photograph almost made Myron scream out loud.

40

Myron’s accelerator foot never eased.

Chestnut Street near Fourth is a no-parking zone, but that did not even make Myron pause. He was out of the car before it had come to a complete stop, ignoring the chorus of honking horns. He hurried through the Omni’s lobby and into an open elevator. When he got off on the top floor, he found the right room number and knocked hard.

Norm Zuckerman opened the door. “Bubbe,” he said with a big smile. “What a nice surprise.”

“Can I come in?”

“You? Of course, sweetheart, anytime.”

But Myron had already pushed by him. The suite’s outer room was—to use hotel brochure lingo—spacious and elegantly appointed. Esme Fong sat on a couch. She looked up at him with the cornered-rabbit face. Posters and blueprints and advertisements and similar paraphernalia carpeted the floor and cascaded off the coffee table. Myron spotted blown-up images of Tad Crispin and Linda Coldren. Zoom logos were everywhere, inescapable, like vengeful ghosts or telemarketers.

“We were just doing a little strategizing,” Norm said. “But hey, we can always take a break, right, Esme?”

Esme nodded.

Norm made his way behind a wet bar. “You want something, Myron? I don’t think they have any Yoo-Hoo in here, but I’m sure—”

“Nothing,” Myron interrupted.

Norm did the mock surrender thing with his hands. “Sheesh, Myron, relax,” he said. “What’s twisting your nipple?”

“I wanted to warn you, Norm.”

“Warn me about what?”

“I don’t want to do this. As far as I’m concerned, your love life should be personal. But it’s not that easy. Not anymore. It’s going to get out, Norm. I’m sorry.”

Norm Zuckerman did not move. He opened his mouth as though readying to protest. Then he stopped. “How did you find out?”

“You were with Jack. At the Court Manor Inn. A maid saw you.”

Norm looked at Esme, who kept her head high. He turned back to Myron. “Do you know what will happen if word gets out that I’m a faygeleh?”

“I can’t help that, Norm.”

“I am the company, Myron. Zoom is about fashion and image and sports—which just so happens to be the most blatantly homophobic entity on this planet. Perception is everything in this business. If they find out I’m an old queen, you know what happens? Zoom goes plop down the septic tank.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” Myron said, “but either way, it can’t be helped.”

“Do the police know?” Norm asked.

“No, not yet.”

Norm threw up his hands. “So why does it have to come out? It was just a fling, for crying out loud. Okay, so I met Jack. So we were attracted to each other. So we both had a ton to lose if either of us opened our traps. No big whup. It’s got nothing to do with his murder.”

Myron stole a glance at Esme. She looked back at him with eyes that urged him to keep silent. “Unfortunately” Myron said, “I think it does.”

“You think? You’re going to destroy me on an ‘I think’?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t talk you out of it?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Norm moved away from the bar and half-collapsed into a chair. He put his face in the palms of his hands, his fingers sliding toward the back, meeting up in the hair, interweaving. “I’ve spent my entire life with lies, Myron,” he began. “I spent my childhood in Poland pretending I wasn’t a Jew. Can you believe that? Me, Norm Zuckerman, pretending I was some slack-jawed goy. But I survived. I came here. And then I spent my adult life pretending I was a real man, a Casanova, a guy who always had a beautiful girl on his arm. You get used to lying, Myron. It gets easier, you know what I mean? The lies become a sort of second reality.”

“I’m sorry, Norm.”

He breathed deeply and forced up a tired smile. “Maybe it’s for the best,” Norm said. “Look at Dennis Rodman. He cross-dresses, for crying out loud. Hasn’t hurt him any, has it?”

“No. It hasn’t.”

Norm Zuckerman lifted his eyes toward Myron. “Hey, once I got to this country, I became the most in-your-face Jew you ever saw. Didn’t I? Tell me the truth. Am I not the most in-your-face Jew you’ve ever met, or what?”

“In my face,” Myron said.

“Bet your skinny melinka of a butt I am. And when I first started out, everyone told me to tone it down. Stop being so Jewish, they said. So ethnic. You’ll never be accepted.” His face had true hope now. “Maybe I can do the same for us closet faygelehs, Myron. Be in the world’s face again, you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I do,” Myron said softly. Then he asked, “Who else knew about you and Jack?”

“Knew?”

“Did you tell anybody?”

“No, of course not.”

Myron gestured toward Esme. “How about one of those beautiful girlfriends on your arm? How about someone who practically lived with you? Wouldn’t it have been easy for her to find out?”

Norm shrugged. “I suppose so. You get this close to someone, you trust them. You drop your guard. So maybe she knew. So what?”

Myron looked at Esme. “You want to tell him?”

Esme’s voice was cool. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell me what?”

Myron kept his eyes on hers. “I wondered why you’d seduce a sixteen-year-old boy. Don’t get me wrong. You gave a bravo performance—all that talk about being lonely and Chad being sweet and disease-free. You waxed quite eloquent. But it still rang hollow.”

Norm said, “What the hell are you talking about, Myron?”

Myron ignored him. “And then there was the matter of the bizarre coincidence—you and Chad showing up at the same motel at the same time as Jack and Norm. Too weird. I just couldn’t buy it. But of course, we both know that it wasn’t a coincidence. You planned it that way, Esme.”

“What plan?” Norm interjected. “Myron, will you tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Norm, you mentioned that Esme used to work on Nike’s basketball campaign. That she quit that job to come to you.”

“So?”

“Did she take a cut in salary?”

“A little.” Norm shrugged. “Not much.”

“When exactly did she hook up with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Within the past eight months?”

Norm thought a moment. “Yeah, so?”

“Esme seduced Chad Coldren. She set up a liaison with him at the Court Manor Inn. But she wasn’t bringing him there for sex or because she was lonely. She brought him there as part of a setup.”

“What kind of setup?”

“She wanted Chad to see his father with another man.”

“Huh?”

“She wanted to destroy Jack. It was no coincidence. Esme knew your routine. She learned about your affair with Jack. So she tried to set it up so Chad would see what his father was really about.”

Esme remained silent.

“Tell me something, Norm. Were you and Jack supposed to meet Thursday night?”

“Yeah,” Norm said.

“What happened?”

“Jack called it off. He pulled into the lot and got spooked. He said he saw a familiar car.”

“Not just familiar,” Myron said. “His son’s. That’s where Esme screwed up. Jack spotted the car. He left before Chad had a chance to see him.”

Myron stood and walked toward Esme. She remained still. “I almost had it right from the beginning,” he told her. “Jack took the lead at the Open. His son was there, right in front of you. So you kidnapped Chad to throw Jack’s game off. It was just like I thought. Except I missed your real motive. Why would you kidnap Chad? Why would you crave such vengeance against Jack Coldren? Yes, money was part of the motive. Yes, you wanted Zoom’s new campaign to succeed. Yes, you knew that if Tad Crispin won the Open, you’d be heralded as the marketing genius of the world. All that played into it. But, of course, that never explained why you brought Chad to the Court Manor Inn in the first place—before Jack had the lead.”

Norm sighed. “So tell us, Myron. What possible reason could she have for wanting to hurt Jack?”

Myron reached into his pocket and pulled out a grainy photograph. The first page of the wedding album. Lloyd and Lucille Rennart. Smiling. Happy. Standing side by side. Lloyd in a tux. Lucille holding a bouquet of flowers. Lucille looking stunning in a long white gown. But that wasn’t what had shocked Myron to the core. What shocked him had nothing to do with what Lucille wore or held; rather, it was what she was.

Lucille Rennart was Asian.

“Lloyd Rennart was your father,” Myron said. “You were in the car that day when he crashed into a tree. Your mother died. You were rushed to the hospital too.”

Esme’s back was rod-straight, but her breathing was coming out in hitches.

“I’m not sure what happened next,” he continued. “My guess would be that your father had hit rock bottom. He was a drunk. He had just killed his own wife. He felt washed-up, useless. So maybe he realized that he couldn’t raise you. Or he didn’t deserve to raise you. Or maybe an arrangement was reached with your mother’s family. In return for not pressing charges, Lloyd would give Lucille’s family custody of you. I don’t know what happened. But you ended up being raised by your mother’s family. By the time Lloyd straightened himself out, he probably felt it would be wrong to tear you out by the roots. Or maybe he was afraid that his daughter wouldn’t take back the father who’d been responsible for killing her mother. Whatever, Lloyd kept quiet. He never even told his second wife about you.”

Tears were streaming down Esme’s cheeks now. Myron felt like crying too.

“How close am I, Esme?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“There’ll be records,” Myron said. “Birth certificates, for certain. Probably adoption papers. It won’t take the police long to trace.” He held up the photograph, his voice soft.

“The resemblance between you and your mother is almost enough.”

Tears continued to flow, but she was not crying. No sobs. No hitching. No quivering facial muscles. Just tears. “Maybe Lloyd Rennart was my father,” Esme said. “But you still have nothing. The rest is pure conjecture.”

“No, Esme. Once the police confirm your parentage, the rest will be easy. Chad will tell them that it was you who suggested you go to the Court Manor Inn. They’ll look closely into Tito’s death. There’ll be a connection there. Fibers. Hairs. It’ll all come together. But I have one question for you.”

She remained still.

“Why did you cut off Chad’s finger?”

Without warning, Esme broke into a run. Myron was caught off guard. He jumped over the couch to block her path. But he had misjudged her. She had not been heading for an exit; she was going into a bedroom. Her bedroom. Myron hurdled back over the couch. He reached her room, but he was a little late.

Esme Fong had a gun. She pointed it at Myron’s chest. He could see in her eyes that there’d be no confession, no explanations, no talk. She was ready to shoot.

“Don’t bother,” Myron said.

“What?”

He pulled out his cell phone and handed it to her. “This is for you.”

Esme did not move for a moment. Then, with her hand still on the gun, she reached out and took the phone. She pressed it against her ear, but Myron could hear just fine.

A voice said, “This is Detective Alan Corbett from the Philadelphia Police Department. We are standing outside your door listening to every word that has been said. Put down the gun.”

Esme looked back at Myron. She still had the gun aimed at his chest. Myron felt a bead of sweat run down his back. Looking into the barrel of a gun was like staring into the cavern of death. Your eyes saw the barrel, only the barrel, as though it were growing impossibly larger, preparing to swallow you whole.

“It would be dumb,” he said.

She nodded then and lowered the gun. “And pointless.”

The weapon dropped to the floor. Doors burst open. Police swarmed in.

Myron looked down at the gun. “A thirty-eight,” he said to Esme. “That the gun you killed Tito with?”

Her expression gave him the answer. The ballistics tests would be conclusive. She would be prosecutorial toast.

“Tito was a lunatic,” Esme said. “He chopped off the boy’s finger. He started making money demands. You have to believe that.”

Myron gave a noncommittal nod. She was testing out her defense, but it sort of sounded like the truth to Myron.

Corbett snapped handcuffs onto her wrists.

Her words were spilling out fast now. “Jack Coldren destroyed my entire family. He ruined my father and killed my mother. And for what? My father did nothing wrong.”

“Yes,” Myron said, “he did.”

“He pulled the wrong club out of a golf bag, if you believe Jack Coldren. He made a mistake. An accident. Should it have cost him so much?”

Myron said nothing. It was no mistake, no accident. And Myron had no idea what it should have cost.

41

The police cleaned up. Corbett had questions, but Myron was not in the mood. He left as soon as the detective was distracted. He sped to the police station where Linda Coldren was about to be released. He took the cement steps three or four at a clip, looking like a spastic Olympian timing the triple jump.

Victoria Wilson almost—the key word being almost—smiled at him. “Linda will be out in a few minutes.”

“Do you have that tape I asked you to get?”

“The phone call between Jack and the kidnapper?”

“Yes.”

“I have it,” she said. “But why—”

“Please give it to me,” Myron said.

She heard something in his tone. Without argument, she reached into her handbag and pulled it out. Myron took it. “Do you mind if I drive Linda home?” he said.

Victoria Wilson regarded him. “I think maybe that would be a good idea.”

A policeman came out. “She’s ready to leave,” he said.

Victoria was about to turn away, when Myron said, “I guess you were wrong about digging into the past. The past ended up saving our client.”

Victoria held his eye. “It’s like I said before,” she began. “You never know what you will find.”

They both waited for the other to break the eye contact. Neither did until the door behind them opened.

Linda was back in civilian clothes. She stepped out tentatively, like she’d been in a dark room and wasn’t sure her eyes could handle the sudden light. Her face broke into a wide smile when she saw Victoria. They hugged. Linda dug her face into Victoria’s shoulder and rocked in her arms. When they released, Linda turned and hugged Myron. Myron closed his eyes and felt his muscles unbunch. He smelled her hair and felt the wondrous skin of her cheek against his neck. They embraced for a long time, almost like a slow dance, neither wanting to let go, both perhaps a little bit afraid.

Victoria coughed into her fist and made her excuses. With the police leading the way, Myron and Linda made it to the car with a minimum of press fuss. They strapped on their seat belts in silence.

“Thank you,” she said.

Myron said nothing. He started the car. For a while neither of them spoke. Myron switched on the air-conditioning.

“We have something here, don’t we?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said. “You were worried about your son. Maybe that’s all it was.”

Her face said that she was not buying. “How about you?” Linda asked. “Did you feel anything?”

“I think so,” he said. “But part of that might be fear, too.”

“Fear of what?”

“Of Jessica.”

She gave a weary grin. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys who fears commitment.”

“Just the opposite. I fear how much I love her. I fear how much I want to commit.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Jessica left me once before. I don’t want to be exposed like that again.”

Linda nodded. “So you think that’s what it was? Fear of abandonment?”

“I don’t know.”

“I felt something,” she said. “For the first time in a very long time. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had affairs. Like with Tad. But that’s not the same thing.” She looked at him. “It felt nice.”

Myron said nothing.

“You’re not making this very easy,” Linda said.

“We have other things to talk about.”

“Like what?”

“Victoria filled you in on Esme Fong?”

“Yes.”

“If you remember, she had a solid alibi for Jack’s murder.”

“A night clerk at a big hotel like the Omni? I doubt that will hold up on scrutiny.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Myron said.

“Why do you say that?”

Myron did not answer. He turned right and said, “You know what always bothered me, Linda?”

“No, what?”

“The ransom calls.”

“What about them?” she asked.

“The first one was made on the morning of the kidnapping. You answered. The kidnappers told you that they had your son. But they made no demands. I always found that odd, didn’t you?”

She thought about it. “I guess so.”

“Now I understand why they did that. But back then, we didn’t know what the real motive for the kidnapping was.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Esme Fong kidnapped Chad because she wanted revenge on Jack. She wanted to make him lose the tournament. How? Well, I’d thought that she’d kidnapped Chad to fluster Jack. Make him lose his focus. But that was too abstract. She wanted to make sure Jack lost. That was her ransom demand right from the beginning. But you see, the ransom call came in a little late. Jack was already at the course. You answered the phone.”

Linda nodded. “I think I see what you’re saying. She had to reach Jack directly.”

“She or Tito, but you’re right. That’s why she called Jack at Merion. Remember the second call, the one Jack got after he finished the round?”

“Of course.”

“That was when the ransom demand was made,” Myron said. “The kidnapper told Jack plain and simple—you start losing or your son dies.”

“Hold up a second,” Linda said. “Jack said they didn’t make any demands. They told him to get some money ready and they’d call back.”

“Jack lied.”

“But …?” She stopped, and then said, “Why?”

“He didn’t want us—or more specifically, you—to know the truth.”

Linda shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

Myron took out the cassette Victoria had given him. “Maybe this will help explain.” He pushed the tape into the cassette player. There were several seconds of silence and then he heard Jack’s voice like something from beyond the grave:

“Hello?”

“Who’s the chink bitch?”

“I don’t know what—”

“You trying to fuck with me, you dumb son of a bitch? I’ll start sending you the fucking brat in little pieces.”

“Please—”

“What’s the point of this, Myron?” Linda sounded a little annoyed.

“Just hold on another second. The part I’m interested in is coming up.”

“Her name is Esme Fong. She works for a clothing company. She’s just here to set up an endorsement deal with my wife, that’s all.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s the truth, I swear.”

“I don’t know, Jack.…”

“I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Well, Jack, we’ll just see about that. This is gonna cost you.”

“What do you mean?”

“One hundred grand. Call it a penalty price.”

“For what?”

Myron hit the STOP button. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“ ‘Call it a penalty price.’ Clear as day.”

“So?”

“It wasn’t a ransom demand. It was a penalty.”

“This is a kidnapper, Myron. He’s probably not all that caught up in semantics.”

“ ‘One hundred grand,’ ” Myron repeated. “ ‘Call it a penalty price.’ As if a ransom demand had already been made. As if the hundred grand was something he’d just decided to tack on. And what about Jack’s reaction? The kidnapper asks for one hundred grand. You would figure he would just tell him fine. But instead he says, ‘For what?’ Again, because it’s in addition to what he’s already been told. Now listen to this.” Myron pushed the PLAY button.

“Never you fucking mind. You want the kid alive? It’s gonna cost you one hundred grand now. That’s in—”

“Now hold on a second.”

Myron hit the STOP button again. “ ‘It’s gonna cost you one hundred grand now.’ ” Myron repeated. “Now. That’s the key word. Now. Again as if it’s something new. As if before this call there was another price. And then Jack interrupts him. The kidnapper says, ‘That’s in—’ when Jack jumps in. Why? Because Jack doesn’t want him to finish the thought. He knew that we were listening. ‘That’s in addition.’ I’d bet anything that was the next word he was about to say. ‘That’s in addition to our original demand.’ Or ‘that’s in addition to losing the tournament.’ ”

Linda looked at him. “But I still don’t get it. Why wouldn’t Jack just tell us what they wanted?”

“Because Jack had no intention of complying with their demand.”

That stopped her. “What?”

“He wanted to win too badly. More than that—he needed to win. Had to. But if you learned the truth—you who had won so often and so easily—you would never understand. This was his chance at redemption, Linda. His chance of going back twenty-three years and making his life worth living. How badly did he want to win, Linda? You tell me. What would he have sacrificed?”

“Not his own son,” Linda countered. “Yes, Jack needed to win. But not badly enough to forfeit his own son’s life.”

“But Jack didn’t see it that way. He was looking through his own rose-tinted prism of desire. A man sees what he wants to, Linda. What he has to. When I showed you and Jack the bank videotape, you both saw something different. You didn’t want to believe your son could do something so hurtful. So you looked for explanations that would counter that evidence. Jack did just the opposite. He wanted to believe that his son was behind it. That it was only a big hoax. That way he could continue to try his hardest to win. And if by some chance he was wrong—if Chad had indeed been kidnapped—well, the kidnappers were probably bluffing anyway. They’d never really go through with it. In other words, Jack did what he had to do: He rationalized the danger away.”

“You think his desire to win clouded his thinking that much?”

“How much clouding did he need? We all had doubts after watching that bank tape. Even you. So how hard would it be for him to go the extra step?”

Linda sat back. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe I buy it. But I still don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

“Bear with me a little while longer, okay? Let’s go back to when I showed you the bank videotape. We’re at your house. I show the tape. Jack storms out. He is upset, of course, but he still plays well enough to keep the big lead. This angers Esme. He’s ignoring her threat. She realizes that she has to up the ante.”

“By cutting off Chad’s finger.”

“It was probably Tito, but that’s not really relevant right now anyway. The key thing is, the finger is severed, and Esme wants to use it to show Jack she’s serious.”

“So she plants it in my car and we find it.”

“No,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Jack finds it first.”

“In my car?”

Myron shook his head. “Remember that Chad’s key chain has Jack’s car keys on it as well as yours. Esme wants to warn Jack, not you. So she puts the finger in Jack’s car. He finds it. He’s shocked, of course, but he’s in the lie too deep now. If the truth came out, you’d never forgive him. Chad would never forgive him. And the tournament would be over for him. He has to get rid of the finger. So he puts the finger in an envelope and writes that note. Remember it? ‘I warned you not to seek help.’ Don’t you see? It’s the perfect distraction. It not only draws attention away from him, but it also gets rid of me.”

Linda chewed on her lower lip. “That would explain the envelope and pen,” she said. “I bought all the office supplies. Jack would have had some in his briefcase.”

“Exactly. But here is where things get really interesting.”

She arched an eyebrow. “They’re not interesting now?”

“Just hold on. It’s Sunday morning. Jack is about to head into the final round with an insurmountable lead. Bigger than he had twenty-three years ago. If he loses now, it would be the greatest golf collapse in history. His name would forever be synonymous with choking—the one thing Jack hated more than anything else. But on the other hand, Jack was not a complete ogre. He loved his son. He knew now that the kidnapping was not a hoax. He was probably torn, not sure what to do. But in the end he made a decision. He was going to lose the tournament.”

Linda said nothing.

“Stroke by stroke, we watched him die. Win understands the destructive side of wanting to win far better than I. He also saw that Jack had the fire back, that old need to win. But despite all that, Jack still tried to lose. He didn’t completely collapse. That would have looked too suspicious. But he started dropping strokes. He made it close. And then he purposely fumbled big-time in the stone quarry and lost his lead.

“But imagine what was going on in his head. Jack was fighting against everything that he was. They say a man can’t drown himself. Even if it means saving his own child’s life, a man cannot keep himself under water until his lungs burst. I’m not so sure that’s any different than what Jack was trying to do. He was literally killing himself. His sanity was probably ripping away like divots on the course. On the eighteenth green, the survival instinct took over. Maybe he started rationalizing again—or more likely, he just couldn’t help himself. But we both saw the transformation, Linda. We saw his face suddenly crystallize on eighteen. Jack stroked that putt home and tied the score.”

Linda’s voice was barely audible. “Yes,” she said. “I saw him change.” She sat up in her seat and let loose a long breath. “Esme Fong must have been in a panic by then.”

“Yes.”

“Jack had left her no choice. She had to kill him.”

Myron shook his head. “No.”

She looked confused again. “But it adds up. Esme was desperate. You said so yourself. She wanted vengeance for her father, and on top of that she was now worried about what would happen if Tad Crispin lost. She had to kill him.”

“One problem,” Myron said.

“What?”

“She called your house that night.”

“Right,” Linda said. “To set up the meeting at the course. She probably told Jack to come alone. To not tell me anything.”

“No,” Myron said. “That’s not what happened.”

“What?”

“If that was what happened,” Myron continued, “we’d have the call on tape.”

Linda shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

“Esme Fong did call your house. That part is true. My bet is that she just threatened him some more. Let him know that she meant business. Jack probably begged forgiveness. I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. But I’d bet he ended the call by promising to lose the next day.”

“So?” Linda said. “What does that have to do with the call being taped?”

“Jack was going through hell,” Myron went on. “The pressure was too much. He was probably close to a breakdown. So he ran out of the house—just as you said—and ended up at his favorite place in the world. Merion. The golf course. Did he go out there just to think? I don’t know. Did he bring the gun with him, maybe even contemplating suicide? Again, I don’t know. But I do know that the tape machine was still hooked up to your phone. The police confirmed that. So where did the tape of that last conversation go?”

Linda’s tone was suddenly more measured. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, Linda, you do.”

She gave him a look.

“Jack might have forgotten the call was recorded,” Myron continued. “But you didn’t. When he ran out of the house, you went down to the basement. You played the tape. And you heard everything. What I’m telling you in this car is not new to you. You knew why the kidnappers had taken your child. You knew what Jack had done. You knew where he liked to go when he took his walks. And you knew you had to stop him.”

Myron waited. He missed the turnoff, took the next one, U-turned back onto the highway. He found the right exit and put on his blinker.

“Jack did bring the gun,” Linda said too calmly. “I didn’t even know where he kept it.”

Myron gave a slight nod, silently trying to encourage.

“You’re right,” she continued. “When I played back the tape, I realized that Jack couldn’t be trusted. He knew it too. Even with the threat of his own son’s death, he had nailed that putt on eighteen. I followed him out to the course. I confronted him. He started to cry. He said he would try to lose. But”—she hesitated, weighed her words—“that drowning man example you gave. That was Jack.”

Myron tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry.

“Jack wanted to kill himself. And I knew he had to. I’d listened to the tape. I’d heard the threats. And I had no doubts: If Jack won, Chad was dead. I also knew something else.”

She stopped and looked at Myron.

“What?” he said.

“I knew Jack would win. Win was right—the fire was back in Jack’s eyes. But it was a raging inferno now. One that even he couldn’t control anymore.”

“So you shot him,” Myron said.

“I struggled to get the gun from him. I wanted to injure him. Seriously injure him. If there was the possibility he could play again, I was afraid the kidnapper might just hold on to Chad indefinitely. The voice on the phone sounded that desperate. But Jack wouldn’t surrender the gun—nor would he pull it away from me. It was weird. He just held on and looked at me. Almost like he was waiting. So I curled my finger around the trigger and pulled.” Her voice was very clear now. “It didn’t go off accidentally. I had hoped to wound him seriously, not kill him. But I fired. I fired to save my son. And Jack ended up dead.”

More silence.

“Then you headed back to the house,” Myron said. “You buried the gun. You saw me in the bushes. When you got inside, you erased the tape.”

“Yes.”

“And that was why you released that press announcement so early. The police wanted to keep it quiet, but you needed the story to go public. You wanted the kidnappers to know that Jack was dead, so they’d let Chad go.”

“It was my son or my husband,” Linda said. She turned her body to face him. “What would you have done?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think I would have shot him.”

“ ‘Don’t think’?” she repeated with a laugh. “You talk about Jack being under pressure, but what about me? I hadn’t slept. I was stressed and I was confused and I was more scared than I had ever been in my entire life—and yes, I was enraged that Jack had sacrificed our son’s chance of playing the game we all so loved. I didn’t have the luxury of an I-don’t-know, Myron. My son’s life was hanging in the balance. I only had time to react.”

They turned up Ardmore Avenue and drove in silence past the Merion Golf Club. They both looked out the window at the course’s gently sloping sea of green broken up only by the clean, white faces of sand. It was, Myron had to admit, a magnificent sight.

“Are you going to tell?” she asked.

She already knew the answer. “I’m your attorney,” Myron said. “I can’t tell.”

“And if you weren’t my attorney?”

“It wouldn’t matter. Victoria would still be able to offer up enough reasonable doubt to win the case.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” Myron said. He left it at that. She waited, but no answer was coming.

“I know you don’t care,” Linda continued, “but I meant what I said before. My feelings for you were real.”

Neither of them spoke again. Myron pulled into the driveway. The police kept the media back. Chad was outside, waiting. He smiled at his mother and ran toward her. Linda opened the car door and got out. They might have embraced, but Myron did not see it. He was already backing out the drive.

42

Victoria opened the door.

“In the bedroom. Follow me.”

“How is she?” Myron asked.

“She’s been sleeping a lot. But I don’t think the pain is that bad yet. We have a nurse and a morphine drip ready if she needs it.”

The decor was far simpler and less opulent than Myron had expected. Solid-colored furniture and pillows. Uncluttered white walls. Pine bookcases with artifacts gathered from vacations to Asia and Africa. Victoria had told him that Cissy Lockwood loved to travel.

They stopped in front of a doorway. Myron looked inside. Win’s mother lay in bed. Exhaustion emanated from her. Her head was back on the pillow as though it were too heavy to lift. An IV bag was attached to her arm. She looked at Myron and mustered a gentle smile. Myron smiled back. With his peripheral vision, he saw Victoria signal to the nurse. The nurse stood and moved past him. Myron stepped inside. The door closed behind him.

Myron moved closer to the bed. Her breathing was labored and constricted, as though she was being slowly strangled from inside. Myron did not know what to say. He had seen people die before, but those had been quick, violent deaths, the life force snuffed out in one big, powerful gust. This was different. He was actually watching a human being die, her vitality dripping out of her like the liquid in her IV bag, the light in her eyes almost imperceptibly dimming, the grinding whir of tissues and sinews and organs eroding under the onslaught of whatever manic beast had lain claim to her.

She lifted a hand and put it on his. Her grip was surprisingly strong. She was not bony or pale. Her muscles were still toned, her summer tan only slightly faded.

“You know,” she said.

Myron nodded.

She smiled. “How?”

“A lot of little things,” he said. “Victoria not wanting me to dig into the past. Jack’s mischievous past. Your too-casual comment about how Win was supposed to be playing golf with Jack that day. But mostly it was Win. When I told him about our conversation, he said that I now knew why he wanted nothing to do with you and Jack. You, I could understand. But why Jack?”

Her chest heaved a bit. She closed her eyes for a moment. “Jack destroyed my life,” she said. “I realize that he was only a teenager pulling a prank. He apologized profusely. He told me that he had not realized that my husband was on the premises. He said that he was certain I would hear Win coming and hide. It was all a joke, he said. Nothing more. But none of that made him less liable. I lost my son forever because of what he did. He had to face the consequences.”

Myron nodded. “So you paid off Lloyd Rennart to sabotage Jack at the Open.”

“Yes. It was an inadequate punishment for what he had done to my family, but it was the best I could do.”

The bedroom door opened, and Win stepped into the room. Myron felt the hand release his. A sob came out of Cissy Lockwood. Myron did not hesitate or say good-bye. He turned away and walked out the door.

She died three days later. Win never left her side. When the last pitiful breath was drawn, when the chest mercifully stopped rising and falling and her face froze in a final, bloodless death mask, Win appeared in the corridor.

Myron stood and waited. Win looked at him. His face was serene, untroubled.

“I did not want her to die alone,” he said.

Myron nodded. He tried to stop shaking.

“I am going to take a walk.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Myron asked.

Win stopped. “Actually,” he said, “there is.”

“Name it.”

They played thirty-six holes at Merion that day. And thirty-six more the next. And by the third day, Myron was starting to get it.

For the Armstrongs,
The World’s Greatest In-Laws,
Jack and Nancy
Molly, Jane, Eliza, Sara, John and Kate
Thank you all for Anne

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When an author is writing about an activity he enjoys about as much as sticking his tongue in a fan (golf), he needs help and lots of it. With that in mind the author wishes to thank the following: James Bradbeer, Jr., Peter Roisman, Maggie Griffin, Craig Coben, Larry Coben, Jacob Hoye, Lisa Erbach Vance, Frank Snyder, the rec.sports.golf board, Knitwit, Sparkle Hayter, Anita Meyer, the many golfers who regaled me with their scintillating tales (snore), and of course, Dave Bolt. While the U.S. Open is a real golf tournament and Merion is a real golf club, this book is a work of fiction. I took some liberties, combined locales and tournaments, that kind of thing. As always, any errors—factual or otherwise—are totally the fault of these people. The author is not to blame.

Myron and I tried. But we’re still not sure we get it.

Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Harlan Coben

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48906-7
v3.0_r1

CONTENTS

Master - Table of Contents

One False Move

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37

Epilogue

Dedication

Acknowledgments

SEPTEMBER 15

The cemetery overlooked a schoolyard.

Myron pushed at the loose dirt with the toe of his Rockport. There was no stone here yet, just a metal marker holding a plain index card with a name typed in capital letters. He shook his head. Why was he standing here like some cliché from a bad TV show? In his mind’s eye Myron could see how the whole scene should be played out. Torrential rain should be pounding on his back, but he would be too bereaved to notice. His head should be lowered, tears glistening in his eyes, maybe one running down his cheek, blending in with the rain. Cue the stirring music. The camera should move off his face and pull back slowly, very slowly, showing his slumped shoulders, the rain driving harder, more graves, no one else present. Still pulling back, the camera eventually shows Win, Myron’s loyal partner, standing in the distance, silently understanding, giving his buddy time alone to grieve. The TV image should suddenly freeze and the executive producer’s name should flash across the screen in yellow caps. Slight hesitation before the viewers are urged to stay tuned for scenes from next week’s episode. Cut to commercial.

But that would not happen here. The sun shone like it was the first day and the skies had the hue of the freshly painted. Win was at the office. And Myron would not cry.

So why was he here?

Because a murderer would be coming soon. He was sure of it.

Myron searched for some kind of meaning in the landscape but only came up with more clichés. It had been two weeks since the funeral. Weeds and dandelions had already begun to break through the dirt and stretch toward the heavens. Myron waited for his inner voice-over to spout the standard drivel about weeds and dandelions representing cycles and renewal and life going on, but the voice was mercifully mute. He sought irony in the radiant innocence of the schoolyard—the faded chalk on black asphalt, the multicolor three-wheelers, the slightly rusted chains for the swings—cloaked in the shadows of tombstones that watched over the children like silent sentinels, patient and almost beckoning. But the irony would not hold. Schoolyards were not about innocence. There were bullies down there too and sociopaths-in-waiting and burgeoning psychoses and young minds filled prenatally with undiluted hate.

Okay, Myron thought, enough abstract babbling for one day.

On some level, he recognized that this inner dialogue was merely a distraction, a philosophical sleight of hand to keep his brittle mind from snapping like a dry twig. He wanted so very much to cave in, to let his legs give way, to fall to the ground and claw at the dirt with his bare hands and beg forgiveness and plead for a higher power to give him one more chance.

But that too would not happen.

Myron heard footsteps coming up from behind him. He closed his eyes. It was as he expected. The footsteps came closer. When they stopped, Myron did not turn around.

“You killed her,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

A block of ice melted in Myron’s stomach. “Do you feel better now?”

The killer’s tone caressed the back of Myron’s neck with a cold, bloodless hand. “The question is, Myron, do you?”

AUGUST 30

Myron hunched his shoulders and slurred his words. “I am not a baby-sitter,” he said. “I am a sports agent.”

Norm Zuckerman looked pained. “Was that supposed to be Bela Lugosi?”

“The Elephant Man,” Myron said.

“Damn, that was awful. And who said anything about being a baby-sitter? Did I say the word baby-sitter or baby-sitting or for that matter any form of the verb to baby-sit or noun or even the word baby or the word sit or sat or—”

Myron held up a hand. “I get the point, Norm.”

They sat under a basket at Madison Square Garden in those cloth-and-wood directors’ chairs that have stars’ names on the back. Their chairs were set high so that the net from the basket almost tickled Myron’s hair. A model shoot was going on at half-court. Lots of those umbrella lights and tall, bony women-cum-children and tripods and people huffing and fluffing about. Myron waited for someone to mistake him for a model. And waited.

“A young woman may be in danger,” Norm said. “I need your help.”

Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell.

Che Guevara lives and gets a perm.

“You don’t need me,” Myron said. “You need a bodyguard.”

Norm waved a dismissing hand. “Too obvious.”

“What?”

“She’d never go for it. Look, Myron, what do you know about Brenda Slaughter?”

“Not much,” Myron said.

He looked surprised. “What do you mean, not much?”

“What word are you having trouble with, Norm?”

“For crying out loud, you were a basketball player.”

“So?”

“So Brenda Slaughter may be the greatest female player of all time. A pioneer in her sport—not to mention the pinup girl, pardon the political insensitivity, for my new league.”

“That much I know.”

“Well, know this: I’m worried about her. If something happens to Brenda Slaughter, the whole WPBA—and my substantial investment—could go right down the toilet.”

“Well, as long as it’s for humanitarian reasons.”

“Fine, I’m a greedy capitalist pig. But you, my friend, are a sports agent. There is not a greedier, sleazier, slimier, more capitalist entity in existence.”

Myron nodded. “Suck up to me,” he said. “That’ll work.”

“You’re not letting me finish. Yes, you’re a sports agent. But a damn fine one. The best, really. You and the Spanish shiksa do incredible work for your clients. Get the most for them. More than they should get really. By the time you finish with me, I feel violated. Hand to God, you’re that good. You come into my office, you rip off my clothes and have your way with me.”

Myron made a face. “Please.”

“But I know your secret background with the feds.”

Some secret. Myron was still hoping to bump into someone above the equator who didn’t know about it.

“Just listen to me for a second, Myron, okay? Hear me out. Brenda is a lovely girl, a wonderful basketball player—and a pain in my left tuchis. I don’t blame her. If I grew up with a father like that, I’d be a pain in the left tuchis too.”

“So her father is the problem?”

Norm made a yes-and-no gesture. “Probably.”

“So get a restraining order,” Myron said.

“Already done.”

“Then what’s the problem? Hire a private eye. If he steps within a hundred yards of her, call the cops.”

“It’s not that easy.” Norm looked out over the court. The workers involved in the shoot darted about like trapped particles under sudden heat. Myron sipped his coffee. Gourmet coffee. A year ago he never drank coffee. Then he started stopping into one of the new coffee bars that kept cropping up like bad movies on cable. Now Myron could not go through a morning without his gourmet coffee fix.

There is a fine line between a coffee break and a crack house.

“We don’t know where he is,” Norm said.

“Excuse me?”

“Her father,” Norm said. “He’s vanished. Brenda is always looking over her shoulder. She’s terrified.”

“And you think the father is a danger to her?”

“This guy is the Great Santini on steroids. He used to play ball himself. Pac Ten, I think. His name is—”

“Horace Slaughter,” Myron said.

“You know him?”

Myron nodded very slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I know him.”

Norm studied his face. “You’re too young to have played with him.”

Myron said nothing. Norm did not catch the hint. He rarely did.

“So how do you know Horace Slaughter?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Myron said. “Tell me why you think Brenda Slaughter is in danger.”

“She’s been getting threats.”

“What kind of threats?”

“Death.”

“Could you be a little more specific?”

The photo shoot frenzy continued to whirl. Models sporting the latest in Zoom wear and oodles of attitude cycled through poses and pouts and postures and pursed lips. Come on and vogue. Someone called out for Ted, where the hell is Ted, that prima donna, why isn’t Ted dressed yet, I swear, Ted will be the death of me yet.

“She gets phone calls,” Norm said. “A car follows her. That kind of thing.”

“And you want me to do what exactly?”

“Watch her.”

Myron shook his head. “Even if I said yes—which I’m not—you said she won’t go for a bodyguard.”

Norm smiled and patted Myron’s knee. “Here’s the part where I lure you in. Like a fish on a hook.”

“Original analogy.”

“Brenda Slaughter is currently unagented.”

Myron said nothing.

“Cat got your tongue, handsome?”

“I thought she signed a major endorsement deal with Zoom.”

“She was on the verge when her old man disappeared. He was her manager. But she got rid of him. Now she’s alone. She trusts my judgment, to a point. This girl is no fool, let me tell you. So here’s my plan: Brenda will be here in a couple of minutes. I recommend you to her. She says hello. You say hello. Then you hit her with the famed Bolitar charm.”

Myron arched one eyebrow. “Set on full blast?”

“Heavens, no. I don’t want the poor girl disrobing.”

“I took an oath to only use my powers for good.”

“This is good, Myron, believe me.”

Myron remained unconvinced. “Even if I agreed to go along with this cockamamy scheme, what about nights? You expect me to watch her twenty-four hours a day?”

“Of course not. Win will help you there.”

“Win has better things to do.”

“Tell that goy boy-toy it’s for me,” Norm said. “He loves me.”

A flustered photographer in the great Eurotrash tradition hurried over to their perch. He had a goatee and spiky blond hair like Sandy Duncan on an off day. Bathing did not appear to be a priority here. He sighed repeatedly, making sure all in the vicinity knew that he was both important and being put out. “Where is Brenda?” he whined.

“Right here.”

Myron swiveled toward a voice like warm honey on Sunday pancakes. With her long, purposeful stride—not the shy-girl walk of the too-tall or the nasty strut of a model—Brenda Slaughter swept into the room like a radar-tracked weather system. She was very tall, over six feet for sure, with skin the color of Myron’s Starbucks Mocha Java with a hefty splash of skim milk. She wore faded jeans that hugged deliciously but without obscenity and a ski sweater that made you think of cuddling inside a snow-covered log cabin.

Myron managed not to say wow out loud.

Brenda Slaughter was not so much beautiful as electric. The air around her crackled. She was far too big and broad-shouldered to be a model. Myron knew some professional models. They were always throwing themselves at him—snicker—and were ridiculously thin, built like strings with helium balloons on top. Brenda was no size six. You felt strength with this woman, substance, power, a force if you will, and yet it was all completely feminine, whatever that meant, and incredibly attractive.

Norm leaned over and whispered, “See why she’s our poster girl?”

Myron nodded.

Norm jumped down from the chair. “Brenda, darling, come over here. I want you to meet someone.”

The big brown eyes found Myron’s, and there was a hesitation. She smiled a little and strode toward them. Myron rose, ever the gentleman. Brenda headed straight for him and stuck out her hand. Myron shook it. Her grip was strong. Now that they were both standing, Myron could see he had an inch or two on her. That made her six-two, maybe six-three.

“Well, well,” Brenda said. “Myron Bolitar.”

Norm gestured as if he were pushing them closer together. “You two know each other?”

“Oh, I’m sure Mr. Bolitar doesn’t remember me,” Brenda said. “It was a long time ago.”

It took Myron only a few seconds. His brain immediately realized that had he met Brenda Slaughter before, he would have undoubtedly remembered. The fact that he didn’t meant their previous encounter was under very different circumstances. “You used to hang out at the courts,” Myron said. “With your dad. You must have been five or six.”

“And you were just entering high school,” she added. “The only white guy that showed up steadily. You made all-state out of Livingston High, became an all-American at Duke, got drafted by the Celtics in the first round—”

Her voice dovetailed. Myron was used to that. “I’m flattered you remembered,” he said. Already wowing her with the charm.

“I grew up watching you play,” she went on. “My father followed your career like you were his own son. When you got hurt—” She broke off again, her lips tightening.

He smiled to show he both understood and appreciated the sentiment.

Norm jumped into the silence. “Well, Myron is a sports agent now. A damn good one. The best, in my opinion. Fair, honest, loyal as hell—” Norm stopped suddenly. “Did I just use those words to describe a sports agent?” He shook his head.

The goateed Sandy Duncan bustled over again. He spoke with a French accent that sounded about as real as Pepe LePew’s. “Monsieur Zuckermahn?”

Norm said, “Oui.”

“I need your help, s’il vous plaît?”

“Oui,” Norm said.

Myron almost asked for an interpreter.

“Sit, both of you,” Norm said. “I have to run a sec.” He patted the empty chairs to drive home the point. “Myron is going to help me set up the league. Kinda like a consultant. So talk to him, Brenda. About your career, your future, whatever. He’d be a good agent for you.” He winked at Myron. Subtle.

When Norm left, Brenda high-stepped into the director’s chair. “So was all that true?” she asked.

“Part of it,” Myron said.

“What part?”

“I’d like to be your agent. But that’s not why I’m really here.”

“Oh?”

“Norm is worried about you. He wants me to watch out for you.”

“Watch out for me?”

Myron nodded. “He thinks you’re in danger.”

She set her jaw. “I told him I didn’t want to be watched.”

“I know,” Myron said. “I’m supposed to be undercover. Shh.”

“So why are you telling me?”

“I’m not good with secrets.”

She nodded. “And?”

“And if I’m going to be your agent, I’m not sure it pays to start our relationship with a lie.”

She leaned back and crossed legs longer than a DMV line at lunchtime. “What else did Norm tell you to do?”

“To turn on my charm.”

She blinked at him.

“Don’t worry,” Myron said. “I took a solemn oath to only use it for good.”

“Lucky me.” Brenda brought a long finger up to her face and tapped it against her chin a few times. “So,” she said at last, “Norm thinks I need a baby-sitter.”

Myron threw up his hands and did his best Norm impression. “Who said anything about a baby-sitter?” It was better than his Elephant Man, but nobody was speed-dialing Rich Little either.

She smiled. “Okay,” she said with a nod. “I’ll go along with this.”

“I’m pleasantly surprised.”

“No reason to be. If you don’t do it, Norm might hire someone else who might not be so forthcoming. This way I know the score.”

“Makes sense,” Myron said.

“But there are conditions.”

“I thought there might be.”

“I do what I want when I want. This isn’t carte blanche to invade my privacy.”

“Of course.”

“If I tell you to get lost for a while, you ask how lost.”

“Right.”

“And no spying on me when I don’t know about it,” she continued.

“Okay.”

“You keep out of my business.”

“Agreed.”

“I stay out all night, you don’t say a thing.”

“Not a thing.”

“If I choose to participate in an orgy with pygmies, you don’t say a thing.”

“Can I at least watch?” Myron asked.

That got a smile. “I don’t mean to sound difficult, but I have enough father figures in my life, thank you. I want to make sure you know that we’re not going to be hanging out with each other twenty-four a day or anything like that. This isn’t a Whitney Houston–Kevin Costner movie.”

“Some people say I look like Kevin Costner.” Myron gave her a quick flash of the cynical, rogue smile, à la Bull Durham.

She looked straight through him. “Maybe in the hairline.”

Ouch. At half-court the goateed Sandy Duncan started calling for Ted again. His coterie followed suit. The name Ted bounced about the arena like rolled-up balls of Silly Putty.

“So do we understand each other?” she asked.

“Perfectly,” Myron said. He shifted in his seat. “Now do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

From the right, Ted—it simply had to be a guy named Ted—finally made his entrance. He wore only Zoom shorts, and his abdomen was rippled like a relief map in marble. He was probably in his early twenties, model handsome, and he squinted like a prison guard. As he sashayed toward the shoot, Ted kept running both hands through his Superman blue-black hair, the movement expanding his chest and shrinking his waist and demonstrating shaved underarms.

Brenda muttered, “Strutting peacock.”

“That’s totally unfair,” Myron said. “Maybe he’s a Fulbright scholar.”

“I’ve worked with him before. If God gave him a second brain, it would die of loneliness.” Her eyes veered toward Myron. “I don’t get something.”

“What?”

“Why you? You’re a sports agent. Why would Norm ask you to be my bodyguard?”

“I used to work”—he stopped, waved a vague hand—“for the government.”

“I never heard about that.”

“It’s another secret. Shh.”

“Secrets don’t stay secret much around you, Myron.”

“You can trust me.”

She thought about it. “Well, you were a white man who could jump,” she said. “Guess if you can be that, you could be a trustworthy sports agent.”

Myron laughed, and they fell into an uneasy silence. He broke it by trying again. “So do you want to tell me about the threats?”

“Nothing much to tell.”

“This is all in Norm’s head?”

Brenda did not reply. One of the assistants applied oil to Ted’s hairless chest. Ted was still giving the crowd his tough guy squint. Too many Clint Eastwood movies. Ted made two fists and continuously flexed his pecs. Myron decided that he might as well beat the rush and start hating Ted right now.

Brenda remained silent. Myron decided to try another approach. “Where are you living now?” he asked.

“In a dorm at Reston University.”

“You’re still in school?”

“Medical school. Fourth year. I just got a deferment to play pro ball.”

Myron nodded. “Got a specialty in mind?”

“Pediatrics.”

He nodded again and decided to wade in a bit deeper. “Your dad must be very proud of you.”

A flicker crossed her face. “Yeah, I guess.” She started to rise. “I better get dressed for this shoot.”

“You don’t want to tell me what’s going on first?”

She stayed in her seat. “Dad is missing.”

“Since when?”

“A week ago.”

“Is that when the threats started?”

She avoided the question. “You want to help? Find my father.”

“Is he the one threatening you?”

“Don’t worry about the threats. Dad likes control, Myron. Intimidation is just another tool.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to understand. He’s your friend, right?”

“Your father? I haven’t seen Horace in more than ten years.”

“Whose fault is that?” she asked.

The words, not to mention the bitter tone, surprised him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you still care about him?” she asked.

Myron didn’t have to think about it. “You know I do.”

She nodded and jumped down from the chair. “He’s in trouble,” she said. “Find him.”

Brenda reappeared in Lycra Zoom shorts and what was commonly called a sports bra. She was limbs and shoulders and muscles and substance, and while the professional models glared at her size (not her height—most of them were six-footers too), Myron thought that she stood out like a bursting supernova next to, well, gaseous entities.

The poses were risque, and Brenda was clearly embarrassed by them. Not so Ted. He undulated and squinted at her in what was supposed to be a look of smoldering sexuality. Twice Brenda broke out and laughed in his face. Myron still hated Ted, but Brenda was starting to grow on him.

Myron picked up his cellular phone and dialed Win’s private line. Win was a big-time financial consultant at Lock-Horne Securities, an old-money financial firm that first sold equities on the Mayflower. His office was in the Lock-Horne Building on Park Avenue and Forty-seventh Street in midtown Manhattan. Myron rented space there from Win. A sports agent on Park Avenue—now that was class.

After three rings the machine picked up. Win’s annoyingly superior accent said, “Hang up without leaving a message and die.” Beep. Myron shook his head, smiled, and, as always, left a message.

He hit the switch and dialed his office. Esperanza answered. “MB SportsReps.”

The M was for Myron, the B for Bolitar, and the SportsReps because they Represented people in the world of Sports. Myron had come up with the name with no help from professional marketing personnel. Despite the obvious accolades, Myron remained humble.

“Any messages?” he asked.

“About a million.”

“Anything crucial?”

“Greenspan wanted your take on interest rate hikes. Outside of that, no.” Esperanza, ever the wiseass. “So what did Norm want?”

Esperanza Diaz—the “Spanish shiksa,” in Norm’s words—had been at MB SportsReps since its inception. Before that, she had wrestled professionally under the moniker Little Pocahontas; put simply, she wore a bikini reminiscent of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. and groped other women in front of a drooling horde. Esperanza considered her career shift to representing athletes as something of a step down.

“It involves Brenda Slaughter,” he began.

“The basketball player?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen her play a couple of times,” Esperanza said. “On TV she looks hot.”

“In person too.”

There was a pause. Then Esperanza said, “Think she participates in the love that dare not speaketh its name?”

“Huh?”

“Does she swing the way of the woman?”

“Gee,” Myron said, “I forgot to check for the tattoo.”

Esperanza’s sexual preference flip-flopped like a politician in a nonelection year. Currently she seemed to be on a man kick, but Myron guessed that was one of the advantages of bisexuality: love everyone. Myron had no problem with it. In high school he had dated almost exclusively bisexual girls—he’d mention sex, the girls would say “bye.” Okay, old joke, but the point remained.

“Doesn’t matter,” Esperanza said. “I really like David.” Her current beau. It wouldn’t last. “But you got to admit, Brenda Slaughter is steaming.”

“So admitted.”

“It might be fun for a night or two.”

Myron nodded into the phone. A lesser man might mentally conjure up a few choice images of the lithe, petite Hispanic beauty in the throes of passion with the ravishing black Amazon in the sports bra. But not Myron. Too worldly.

“Norm wants us to watch her,” Myron said. He filled her in. When he finished, he heard her sigh.

“What?” he said.

“Jesus Christ, Myron, are we a sports agency or Pinkertons?”

“It’s to get clients.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing. So what do you need me to do?”

“Her father is missing. His name is Horace Slaughter. See what you can dig up on him.”

“I’ll need help here,” she said.

Myron rubbed his eyes. “I thought we were going to hire someone on a permanent basis.”

“Who has the time?”

Silence.

“Fine,” Myron said. He sighed. “Call Big Cyndi. But make sure she knows it’s just on a trial basis.”

“Okey-dokey.”

“And if any client comes in, I want Cyndi to hide in my office.”

“Yeah, fine, whatever.”

She hung up the phone.

When the photo shoot ended, Brenda Slaughter approached him.

“Where does your father live now?” Myron asked.

“Same place.”

“Have you been there since he disappeared?”

“No.”

“Then let’s start there,” Myron said.

Newark, New Jersey. The bad part. Almost a redundancy.

Decay was the first word that came to mind. The buildings were more than falling apart—they actually seemed to be breaking down, melting from some sort of acid onslaught. Here urban renewal was about as familiar a concept as time travel. The surroundings looked more like a war newsreel—Frankfurt after the Allies’ bombing—than a habitable dwelling.

The neighborhood was even worse than he remembered. When Myron was a teenager, he and his dad had driven down this very street, the car doors suddenly locking as though even they sensed oncoming danger. His father’s face would tighten up. “Toilet,” he would mutter. Dad had grown up not far from here, but that had been a long time ago. His father, the man Myron loved and worshiped like no other, the most gentle soul he had ever known, would barely contain his rage. “Look what they did to the old neighborhood,” he would say.

Look what they did.

They.

Myron’s Ford Taurus slowly cruised by the old playground. Black faces glared at him. A five-on-five was going on with plenty of kids sprawled on the sidelines waiting to take on the winners. The cheap sneakers of Myron’s day—Thom McAn or Keds or Kmart—had been replaced with the hundred-dollar-plus variety these kids could ill afford. Myron felt a twinge. He would have liked to take a noble stand on the issue—the corruption of values and materialism and such—but as a sports agent who made money off sneaker deals, such perceptions paid his freight. He didn’t feel good about that, but he didn’t want to be a hypocrite either.

Nobody wore shorts anymore either. Every kid was dressed in blue or black jeans that journeyed far south of baggy, like something a circus clown might sport for an extra laugh. The waist drooped below the butt, revealing designer boxer shorts. Myron did not want to sound like an old man, grousing over the younger generation’s fashion sense, but these made bell-bottoms and platforms seem practical. How do you play your best when you’re constantly pausing to pull up your pants?

But the biggest change was in those glares. Myron had been scared when he first came down here as a fifteen-year-old high school student, but he had known that if he wanted to rise to the next level, he had to face down the best competition. That meant playing here. He had not been welcomed at first. Not even close. But the looks of curious animosity he received back then were nothing compared with the dagger-death glares of these kids. Their hatred was naked, up front, filled with cold resignation. Corny to say, but back then—less than twenty years ago—there had been something different here. More hope maybe. Hard to say.

As though reading his thoughts, Brenda said, “I wouldn’t even play down here anymore.”

Myron nodded.

“It wasn’t easy on you, was it? Coming down here to play.”

“Your father made it easy,” he said.

She smiled. “I never understood why he took such a liking to you. He usually hated white people.”

Myron feigned a gasp. “I’m white?”

“As Pat Buchanan.”

They both forced out a laugh. Myron tried again. “Tell me about the threats.”

Brenda stared out the window. They passed a place that sold hubcaps. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hubcaps gleamed in the sun. Weird business when you thought about it. The only time people need a new hubcap is when one of theirs is stolen. The stolen ones end up in a place like this. A mini fiscal cycle.

“I get calls,” she began. “At night mostly. One time they said they were going to hurt me if they didn’t find my father. Another time they told me I better keep Dad as my manager or else.” She stopped.

“Any idea who they are?”

“No.”

“Any idea why someone would want to find your father?”

“No.”

“Or why your father would disappear?”

She shook her head.

“Norm said something about a car following you.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

“The voice on the phone,” Myron said. “Is it the same one every time?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Male, female?”

“Male. And white. Or at least, he sounds white.”

Myron nodded. “Does Horace gamble?”

“Never. My grandfather gambled. Lost everything he had, which wasn’t much. Dad would never go near it.”

“Did he borrow money?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? Even with financial aid, your schooling had to cost.”

“I’ve been on scholarship since I was twelve.”

Myron nodded. Up ahead a man stumbled about the sidewalk. He was wearing Calvin Klein underwear, two different ski boots, and one of those big Russian hats like Dr. Zhivago. Nothing else. No shirt, no pants. His fist gripped the top of a brown paper bag like he was helping it cross the street.

“When did the calls start?” Myron asked.

“A week ago.”

“When your dad disappeared?”

Brenda nodded. She had more to say. Myron could see it in the way she stared off. He kept silent and waited her out.

“The first time,” she said quietly, “the voice told me to call my mother.”

Myron waited for her to say more. When it was apparent she wouldn’t, he said, “Did you?”

She smiled sadly. “No.”

“Where does your mother live?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since I was five years old.”

“When you say ‘haven’t seen her’—”

“I mean just that. She abandoned us twenty years ago.” Brenda finally turned toward him. “You look surprised.”

“I guess I am.”

“Why? You know how many of those boys back there had their fathers abandon them? You think a mother can’t do the same thing?”

She had a point, but it sounded more like hollow rationalization than true conviction. “So you haven’t seen her since you were five?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know where she lives? A city or state or anything?”

“No idea.” She tried hard to sound indifferent.

“You’ve had no contact with her?”

“Just a couple of letters.”

“Any return address?”

Brenda shook her head. “They were postmarked in New York City. That’s all I know.”

“Would Horace know where she lives?”

“No. He’s never so much as spoken her name in the past twenty years.”

“At least not to you.”

She nodded.

“Maybe the voice on the phone didn’t mean your mother,” Myron said. “Do you have a stepmother? Did your father remarry or live with someone—”

“No. Since my mother there has been no one.”

Silence.

“So why would someone be asking about your mother after twenty years?” Myron asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Any ideas?”

“None. For twenty years she’s been a ghost to me.” She pointed up ahead. “Make a left.”

“Do you mind if I get a trace put on your phone? In case they call again?”

She shook her head.

He steered the car per her instructions. “Tell me about your relationship with Horace,” he said.

“No.”

“I’m not asking to be nosy—”

“It’s irrelevant, Myron. If I loved him or hated him, you still need to find him.”

“You got a restraining order to keep him away from you, right?”

She said nothing for a moment. Then: “Do you remember how he was on the court?”

Myron nodded. “A madman. And maybe the best teacher I ever had.”

“And the most intense?”

“Yes,” Myron said. “He taught me not to play with so much finesse. That wasn’t always an easy lesson.”

“Right, and you were just some kid he took a liking to. But imagine being his own child. Now imagine that on-court intensity mixed with his fear that he would lose me. That I would run away and leave him.”

“Like your mother.”

“Right.”

“It would be,” Myron said, “stifling.”

“Try suffocating,” she corrected. “Three weeks ago we were playing a promotional scrimmage at East Orange High School. You know it?”

“Sure.”

“A couple of guys in the crowd were getting rowdy. Two high school kids. They were on the basketball team. They were drunk or high, or maybe they were just punks. I don’t know. But they started yelling things out at me.”

“What kind of things?”

“Graphic and ugly things. About what they’d like to do to me. My father stood up and went after them.”

“I can’t say I blame him,” Myron said.

She shook her head. “Then you’re another Neanderthal.”

“What?”

“Why would you have gone after them? To defend my honor? I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman. I don’t need any of that chivalry crap.”

“But—”

“But nothing. This whole thing, your being here—I’m not a radical feminist or anything, but it’s a load of sexist bullshit.”

“What?”

“If I had a penis between my legs, you wouldn’t be here. If my name was Leroy and I got a couple of weird phone calls, you wouldn’t be so hot to protect poor little me, would you?”

Myron hesitated a second too long.

“And,” she continued, “how many times have you seen me play?”

The change of subject caught him off guard. “What?”

“I was the number one collegiate player three years in a row. My team won two national championships. We were on ESPN all the time, and during the NCAA finals we were on CBS. I went to Reston University, which is only half an hour from where you live. How many of my games did you see?”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it, said, “None.”

“Right. Chicks’ basketball. It’s not worth the time.”

“That’s not it. I don’t watch much sports anymore.” He realized how lame he sounded.

She shook her head and grew quiet.

“Brenda—”

“Forget I said anything. It was dumb to raise the subject.”

Her tone left little room for follow-up. Myron wanted to defend himself, but he had no idea how. He opted for silence, an option he should probably exercise more often.

“Take your next right,” she said.

“So what happened next?” he asked.

She looked at him.

“To the punks who called you names. What happened after your father went after them?”

“The security guards broke it up before anything really happened. They threw the kids out of the gym. Dad too.”

“I’m not sure I see the point of this story.”

“It’s not over yet.” Brenda stopped, looked down, summoned up a little something, raised her head again. “Three days later the two boys—Clay Jackson and Arthur Harris—were found on the roof of a tenement building. Someone had tied them up and cut their Achilles tendon in half with pruning shears.”

Myron’s face lost color. His stomach took a nosedive. “Your father?”

Brenda nodded. “He’s been doing stuff like that my whole life. Never this bad. But he’s always made people who cross me pay. When I was a little girl with no mother, I almost welcomed the protection. But I’m not a little girl anymore.”

Myron absently reached down and touched the back of his ankle. Cut the Achilles tendon in half. With pruning shears. He tried not to look too stunned. “The police must have suspected Horace.”

“Yes.”

“So how come he wasn’t arrested?”

“Not enough evidence.”

“Couldn’t the victims identify him?”

She turned back to the window. “They’re too scared.” She pointed to the right. “Park there.”

Myron pulled over. People toddled about the street. They stared at him as though they had never seen a white man; in this neighborhood that was entirely possible. Myron tried to look casual. He nodded a polite hello. Some people nodded back. Some didn’t.

A yellow car—nay, a speaker on wheels—cruised by, blaring a rap tune. The bass was set so high that Myron felt the vibrations in his chest. He could not make out the lyrics, but they sounded angry. Brenda led him to a stoop. Two men were sprawled on the stairs like war wounded. Brenda stepped over them without a second glance. Myron followed. He suddenly realized that he had never been here before. His relationship with Horace Slaughter had been strictly basketball. They had always hung out on the playground or in a gym or maybe grabbing a pizza after a game. He had never been in Horace’s home, and Horace had never been in his.

There was no doorman, of course, no lock or buzzers or any of that. The lighting was bad in the corridor, but not bad enough to conceal the paint flaking off like the walls had psoriasis. Most of the mailboxes were doorless. The air felt like a beaded curtain.

She climbed up the cement stairs. The railing was industrial metal. Myron could hear a man coughing as if he were trying to dislodge a lung. A baby cried. Then another joined in. Brenda stopped on the second floor and turned right. Her keys were already in her hand and at the ready. The door too was made of some sort of reinforced steel. There was a peephole and three bolt locks.

Brenda unlocked the three bolts first. They jerked back noisily, like the prison scene in a movie where the warden yells, “Lockdown!” The door swung open. Myron was hit by two thoughts at exactly the same time. One was how nice Horace’s setup was. Whatever was outside this apartment, whatever grime and rot were on the streets or even in his corridor, Horace Slaughter had not allowed to sneak past the steel door. The walls were as white as a hand cream commercial. The floors looked newly buffed. The furniture was a mix of what looked like fixed-up family pieces and newer Ikea acquisitions. It was indeed a comfortable home.

The other thing Myron noticed as soon as the door was open was that someone had trashed the room.

Brenda rushed in. “Dad?”

Myron followed, wishing that he had his gun. This scene called for a gun. He would signal her to be quiet, take it out, have her stand behind him, creep through the apartment with her clutching on to his free arm in fear. He would do that gun swing thing into each room, his body crouched and prepared for the worst. But Myron did not regularly carry a gun. It was not that he disliked guns—when in trouble, in fact, he rather enjoyed their company—but a gun is bulky and chafed like a tweed condom. And let’s face it, for most prospective clients, a sports agent packing heat does not inspire confidence, and for those it does, well, Myron would rather do without them.

Win, on the other hand, always carried a gun—at least two, actually, not to mention a prodigious potpourri of concealed weaponry. The man was like a walking Israel.

The apartment consisted of three rooms and a kitchen. They hurried through them. Nobody. And no body.

“Anything missing?” Myron asked.

She looked at him, annoyed. “How the hell would I know?”

“I mean, anything noticeable. The TV is here. So is the VCR. I want to know if you think it’s a robbery.”

She glanced about the living room. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t look like a robbery.”

“Any thoughts on who did this or why?”

Brenda shook her head, her eyes still taking in the mess.

“Did Horace hide money someplace? A cookie jar or under a floorboard or something?”

“No.”

They started in Horace’s room. Brenda opened up his closet. For a long moment she stood and said nothing.

“Brenda?”

“A lot of his clothes are missing,” she said softly. “His suitcase too.”

“That’s good,” Myron said. “It means he probably ran; it makes it less likely that he met up with foul play.”

She nodded. “But it’s creepy.”

“How so?”

“It’s just like my mother. I can still remember Dad just standing here, staring at the empty hangers.”

They moved back into the living room and then into a small bedroom.

“Your room?” Myron asked.

“I’m not here very much, but yeah, this is my room.”

Brenda’s eyes immediately fell on a spot near her night table. She gave a little gasp and dived to the floor. Her hands began to paw through her effects.

“Brenda?”

Her pawing grew more intense, her eyes aflame. After a few minutes she got up and ran to her father’s room. Then the living room. Myron kept back.

“They’re gone,” she said.

“What?”

Brenda looked at him. “The letters my mother wrote me. Someone took them.”

Myron parked the car in front of Brenda’s dorm room. Except for monosyllabic directions, Brenda had not spoken during the drive. Myron did not push it. He stopped the car and turned toward her. She continued to stare ahead.

Reston University was a place of green grass and big oaks and brick buildings and Frisbees and bandannas. Professors still had long hair and unkempt beards and tweed jackets. There was such a feeling of innocence here, of make-believe, of youth, of startling passion. But that was the beauty of such a university: students debating over life-and-death issues in an environment as insulated as Disney World. Reality had nothing to do with the equation. And that was okay. In fact, that was how it should be.

“She just left,” Brenda said. “I was five years old, and she just left me alone with him.”

Myron let her speak.

“I remember everything about her. The way she looked. The way she smelled. The way she’d come home from her job so tired she could barely put her feet up. I don’t think I’ve talked about her five times in the past twenty years. But I think about her every day. I think about why she gave me up. And I think about why I still miss her.”

She put her hand to her chin then and turned away. The car stayed silent.

“You good at this, Myron?” she asked. “At investigating?”

“I think so,” he said.

Brenda grabbed the door handle and pulled. “Could you find my mother?”

She did not wait for a response. She hurried out of the car and up the steps. Myron watched her disappear into the colonial brick building. Then he started up the car and headed home.

Myron found a spot on Spring Street right outside Jessica’s loft. He still referred to his new dwelling as Jessica’s loft, even though he now lived here and paid half the rent. Weird how that worked.

Myron took the stairs to the third floor. He opened the door and immediately heard Jessica yell out, “Working.”

He did not hear any clacking on the computer keyboard, but that didn’t mean anything. He made his way into the bedroom, closed the door, and checked the answering machine. When Jessica was writing, she never answered the phone.

Myron hit the play button. “Hello, Myron? This is your mother.” Like he wouldn’t recognize the voice. “God, I hate this machine. Why doesn’t she pick up? I know she’s there. Is it so hard for a human being to pick up a phone and say hello and take a message? I’m in my office, my phone rings, I pick it up. Even if I’m working. Or I have my secretary take a message. Not a machine. I don’t like machines, Myron, you know that.” She continued on in a similar vein for some time. Myron longed for the old days when there was a time limit on answering machines. Progress was not always a good thing.

Finally Mom began to wind down. “Just calling to say hello, doll face. We’ll talk later.”

For the first thirty-plus years of his life, Myron had lived with his parents in the New Jersey suburb of Livingston. As an infant he’d started life in the small nursery upstairs on the left. From the age of three to sixteen, he lived in the bedroom upstairs on the right; from sixteen to just a few months ago, he’d lived in the basement. Not all the time, of course. He went to Duke down in North Carolina for four years, spent summers working basketball camps, stayed on occasion with Jessica or Win in Manhattan. But his true home had always been, well, with Mommy and Daddy—by choice, strangely enough, though some might suggest that serious therapy would unearth deeper motives.

That changed several months ago, when Jessica asked him to move in with her. This was a rarity in their relationship, Jessica making the first move, and Myron had been deliriously happy and heady and scared out of his mind. His trepidation had nothing to do with fear of commitment—that particular phobia plagued Jessica, not him—but there had been rough times in the past, and to put it simply, Myron never wanted to be hurt like that again.

He still saw his folks once a week or so, going out to the house for dinner or having them make the trip into the Big Apple. He also spoke to either his mom or his dad nearly every day. Funny thing is, while they were undoubtedly pests, Myron liked them. Crazy as it might sound, he actually enjoyed spending time with his parents. Uncool? Sure. Hip as a polka accordionist? Totally. But there you go.

He grabbed a Yoo-Hoo from the refrigerator, shook it, popped the top, took a big swig. Sweet nectar. Jessica yelled in, “What are you in the mood for?”

“I don’t care.”

“You want to go out?”

“Do you mind if we just order in?” he asked.

“Nope.” She appeared in the doorway. She wore his oversize Duke sweatshirt and black knit pants. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Several hairs had escaped and fell in front of her face. When she smiled at him, he still felt his pulse quicken.

“Hi,” he said. Myron prided himself on his clever opening gambits.

“You want Chinese?” she asked.

“Whatever, sure. Hunan, Szechwan, Cantonese?”

“Szechwan,” she said.

“Okay. Szechwan Garden, Szechwan Dragon, or Empire Szechwan?”

She thought a moment. “Dragon was greasy last time. Let’s go with Empire.”

Jessica crossed the kitchen and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her hair smelled like wildflowers after a summer storm. Myron gave her a quick hug and grabbed the delivery menu from the cabinet. They figured out what they’d get—the hot and sour soup, one shrimp entree, one vegetable entree—and Myron called it in. The usual language barriers applied—why don’t they ever hire a person who speaks English at least to take the phone order?—and after repeating his telephone number six times, he hung up.

“Get much done?” he asked.

Jessica nodded. “The first draft will be finished by Christmas.”

“I thought the deadline was August.”

“Your point being?”

They sat at the kitchen table. The kitchen, living room, dining room, TV room were all one big space. The ceiling was fifteen feet high. Airy. Brick walls with exposed metal beams gave the place a look that was both artsy and railroad station-like. The loft was, in a word, neat-o.

The food arrived. They chatted about their day. Myron told her about Brenda Slaughter. Jessica sat and listened in that way of hers. She was one of those people who had the ability to make any speaker feel like the only person alive. When he finished, she asked a few questions. Then she stood up and poured a glass of water from their Brita pitcher.

She sat back down. “I have to fly out to L.A. on Tuesday,” Jessica said.

Myron looked up. “Again?”

She nodded.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. A week or two.”

“Weren’t you just out there?”

“Yeah, so?”

“For that movie deal, right?”

“Right.”

“So why are you going out again?” he asked.

“I got to do some research for this book.”

“Couldn’t you have done both when you were there last week?”

“No.” Jessica looked at him. “Something wrong?”

Myron fiddled with a chopstick. He looked at her, looked away, swallowed, and just said it: “Is this working?”

“What?”

“Our living together.”

“Myron, it’s just for a couple of weeks. For research.”

“And then it’s a book tour. Or a writer’s retreat. Or a movie deal. Or more research.”

“What, you want me to stay home and bake cookies?”

“No.”

“Then what’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” Myron said. Then: “We’ve been together a long time.”

“On and off for ten years,” she added. “So?”

He was not sure how to continue. “You like traveling.”

“Hell, yes.”

“I miss you when you’re gone.”

“I miss you too,” she said. “And I miss you when you go away on business too. But our freedom—that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? And besides”—she leaned forward a little—“I give great reunion.”

He nodded. “You do at that.”

She put her hand on his forearm. “I don’t want to do any pseudoanalysis, but this move has been a big adjustment for you. I understand that. But so far I think it’s working great.”

She was, of course, right. They were a modern couple with skyrocketing careers and worlds to conquer. Separation was part of that. Whatever nagging doubts he had were a by-product of his innate pessimism. Things were indeed going so well—Jessica had come back, she had asked him to move in—that he kept waiting for something to go wrong. He had to stop obsessing. Obsession does not seek out problems and correct them; it manufactures them out of nothing, feeds them, makes them stronger.

He smiled at her. “Maybe this is all a cry for attention,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Or maybe it’s a ploy to get more sex.”

She gave him a look that curled his chopsticks. “Maybe it’s working,” she said.

“Maybe I’ll slip into something more comfortable,” he said.

“Not that Batman mask again.”

“Aw, c’mon, you can wear the utility belt.”

She thought about it. “Okay, but no stopping in the middle and shouting, ‘Same Bat Time, same Bat Channel.’ ”

“Deal.”

Jessica stood, walked over to him, and sat on his lap. She hugged him and lowered her lips toward his ear. “We’ve got it good, Myron. Let’s not fuck it up.”

She was right.

She got off his lap. “Come on, let’s clear the table.”

“And then?”

Jessica nodded. “To the Batpoles.”

As soon as Myron hit the street the next morning, a black limousine pulled in front of him. Two mammoth men—muscle-headed, neckless wonders—lumbered out of the car. They wore ill-fitted business suits, but Myron did not fault their tailor. Guys built like that always looked ill fitted. They both had Gold’s Gym tans, and though he could not confirm this by sight, Myron bet that their chests were as waxed as Cher’s legs.

One of the bulldozers said, “Get in the car.”

“My mommy told me to never get in a car with strangers,” Myron said.

“Oh,” the other bulldozer said, “we got ourselves a comedian here.”

“Yeah?” The bulldozer tilted his head at Myron. “That right? You a comedian?”

“I’m also an exciting vocalist,” Myron said. “Want to hear my much-loved rendition of ‘Volare’?”

“You’ll be singing out the other end of your ass if you don’t get in the car.”

“Other end of my ass,” Myron said. He looked up as though in deep thought. “I don’t get it. Out of the end of my ass, okay, that makes sense. But out of the other end? What does that mean exactly? I mean, technically, if we follow the intestinal tract, isn’t the other end of your ass simply your mouth?”

The bulldozers looked at each other, then at Myron. Myron was not particularly scared. These thugs were delivery boys; the package was not supposed to be delivered bruised. They would take a little needling. Plus, you never show these guys fear. They smell fear, they swarm in and devour you. Of course Myron could be wrong. They might be unbalanced psychotics who’d snap at the slightest provocation. One of life’s little mysteries.

“Mr. Ache wants to see you,” Bulldozer One said.

“Which one?”

“Frank.”

Silence. This was not good. The Ache brothers were leading mob figures in New York. Herman Ache, the older brother, was the leader, a man responsible for enough suffering to make a third world dictator envious. But next to his whacked-out brother Frank, Herman Ache was about as scary as Winnie-the-Pooh.

The muscleheads cracked their necks and smiled at Myron’s silence. “Not so funny now, are you, smart guy?”

“Testicles,” Myron said, stepping toward the car. “They shrink when you use steroids.”

It was an old Bolitar rejoinder, but Myron never got tired of the classics. He had no choice really. He had to go. He slid into the backseat of the stretch limo. There was a bar and a television tuned in to Regis and Kathie Lee. Kathie Lee was regaling the audience with Cody’s most recent exploits.

“No more, I beg you,” Myron said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

The bulldozers did not get it. Myron leaned forward and snapped the television off. No one protested.

“We going to Clancy’s?” Myron asked.

Clancy’s Tavern was the Aches’ hangout. Myron had been there with Win a couple of years back. He had hoped never to return.

“Sit back and shut up, asshole.”

Myron kept still. They took the West Side Highway north—in the opposite direction of Clancy’s Tavern. They turned right at Fifty-seventh Street. When they hit a Fifth Avenue parking garage, Myron realized where they were headed.

“We’re going to TruPro’s office,” he said out loud.

The bulldozers said nothing. Didn’t matter. He had not said it for their benefit anyway.

TruPro was one of the larger sports agencies in the country. For years it’d been operated by Roy O’Connor, a snake in a suit, who had been nothing if not an expert in how to break the rules. O’Connor was the master of illegally signing athletes when they were barely out of diapers, using payoffs and subtle extortion. But like so many who flitted in and out of the world of corruption, Roy inevitably got nuked. Myron had seen it happen before. A guy figures he can be a “little pregnant,” a tad enmeshed with the underworld. But the mob does not work that way. You give them an inch, they take the whole damn yardstick. That was what had happened to TruPro. Roy owed money, and when he couldn’t pay up, the appropriately named Ache brothers took control.

“Move it, asshole.”

Myron followed Bubba and Rocco—if those weren’t their names, they should have been—into the elevator. They got out on the eighth floor and headed past the receptionist. She kept her head down but sneaked a glance. Myron waved to her and kept moving. They stopped in front of an office door.

“Search him.”

Bulldozer One started patting him down.

Myron closed his eyes. “God,” he said. “This feels good. A little left.”

Bulldozer stopped, threw him a glare. “Go in.”

Myron opened the door and entered the office.

Frank Ache spread his arms and stepped toward him. “Myron!”

Whatever fortune Frank Ache had amassed, the man never did spend it on clothes. He favored chintzy velour sweat suits, like something the guys on Lost in Space might consider casual wear. The one Frank sported today was burnt orange with yellow trim. The top was zippered lower than a Cosmo cover, his gray chest hair so thick it looked like a natty sweater. He had a huge head, tiny shoulders, and a spare tire that was the envy of the Michelin man—an hourglass figure with all the time run out. He was big and puffy and the kind of bald where the top of the head looks like it exploded through the hair during an earthquake.

Frank gave Myron a ferocious bear hug. Myron was taken aback. Frank was usually about as cuddly as a jackal with shingles.

He pulled Myron to arm’s length. “Sheesh, Myron, you’re looking good.”

Myron tried not to wince. “Thanks, Frank.”

Frank offered him a big smile—two rows of corn-kernel teeth jam-packed together. Myron tried not to flinch. “How long’s it been?”

“A little over a year.”

“We were at Clancy’s, right?”

“No, Frank, we weren’t.”

Frank looked puzzled. “Where were we?”

“On a road in Pennsylvania. You shot out my tires, threatened to kill members of my family, and then you told me to get out of your car before you used my nuts for squirrel food.”

Frank laughed and clapped Myron on the back. “Good times, eh?”

Myron kept very still. “What can I do for you, Frank?”

“You in a rush?”

“Just wanted to get to the heart of it.”

“Hey, Myron.” Frank opened his arms wide. “I’m trying to be friendly here. I’m a changed man. It’s a whole new me.”

“Find religion, did you, Frank?”

“Something like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

Frank’s smile slowly faded. “You like my old ways better?”

“They’re more honest.”

The smile was gone completely now. “You’re doing it again, Myron.”

“What?”

“Crawling up the crack of my ass,” he said. “It cozy up there?”

“Cozy,” Myron said with a nod. “Yeah, Frank, that’s the word I’d use.”

The door behind them opened. Two men came in. One was Roy O’Connor, the figurative president of TruPro. He crept in silently, as though waiting for permission to exist. Probably was. When Frank was around, Roy probably raised his hand before going to the bathroom. The second guy was in his mid-twenties. He was immaculately dressed and looked like an investment banker fresh off his M.B.A.

Myron gave a big wave. “Hi, Roy. Looking good.”

Roy nodded stiffly, sat down.

Frank said, “This here’s my kid, Frankie Junior. Call him FJ.”

“Hi,” Myron said. FJ?

The kid gave him a hard glare and sat down.

“Roy here just hired FJ,” Frank said.

Myron smiled at Roy O’Connor. “The selection process must have been hell, Roy. Combing through all those resumes and everything.”

Roy said nothing.

Frank waddled around the desk. “You and FJ got something in common, Myron.”

“Oh?”

“You went to Harvard, right?”

“For law school,” Myron said.

“FJ got his M.B.A. there.”

Myron nodded. “Like Win.”

His name quieted the room. Roy O’Connor crossed his legs. His face lost color. He had experienced Win up close, but they all knew him. Win would be pleased by the reaction.

The room started up again slowly. Everyone took seats. Frank put two hands the size of canned hams on the desk. “We hear you’re representing Brenda Slaughter,” he said.

“Where did you hear that?”

Frank shrugged as if to say, silly question.

“Is it true, Myron?”

“No.”

“You’re not repping her?”

“That’s right, Frank.”

Frank looked at Roy. Roy sat like hardening plaster. Then he looked at FJ, who was shaking his head.

“Is her old man still her manager?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know, Frank. Why don’t you ask her?”

“You were with her yesterday,” Frank said.

“So?”

“So what were you two doing?”

Myron stretched out his legs, crossing the ankles. “Tell me something, Frank. What’s your interest in all this?”

Frank’s eyes widened. He looked at Roy, then at FJ; then he pointed a meaty finger at Myron. “Pardon my fucking French,” he said, “but do I look like I’m here to answer your fucking questions?”

“The whole new you,” Myron said. “Friendly, changed.”

FJ leaned forward and looked in Myron’s eyes. Myron looked back. There was nothing there. If the eyes were indeed the window to the soul, these read NO VACANCY. “Mr. Bolitar?” FJ’s voice was soft and willowy.

“Yes?”

“Fuck you.”

He whispered the words with the strangest smile on his face. He did not lean back after he said it. Myron felt something cold scramble up his back, but he did not look away.

The phone on the desk buzzed. Frank hit a button. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Bolitar’s associate on the line,” a female voice said. “He wanted to speak with you.”

“With me?” Frank said.

“Yes, Mr. Ache.”

Frank looked confused. He shrugged his shoulders and hit a button.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Hello, Francis.”

The room became still as a photograph.

Frank cleared his throat. “Hello, Win.”

“I trust that I am not interrupting,” Win said.

Silence.

“How is your brother, Francis?”

“He’s good, Win.”

“I must give Herman a call. We haven’t hit the links together in ages.”

“Yeah,” Frank said, “I’ll tell him you asked for him.”

“Fine, Francis, fine. Well, I must be going. Please give my best to Roy and your charming son. How rude of me not to have said hello earlier.”

Silence.

“Hey, Win?”

“Yes, Francis.”

“I don’t like this cryptic shit, you hear?”

“I hear everything, Francis.”

Click.

Frank Ache gave Myron a hard glare. “Get out.”

“Why are you so interested in Brenda Slaughter?”

Frank lifted himself out of the chair. “Win’s scary,” he said. “But he ain’t bulletproof. Say one more word, and I’ll tie you to a chair and set your dick on fire.”

Myron did not bother with good-byes.

Myron took the elevator down. Win—real name Windsor Horne Lockwood III—stood in the lobby. He was dressed this morning in Late American Prep. Blue blazer, light khakis, white button-down Oxford shirt, loud Lilly Pulitzer tie, the kind with more colors than a gallery at a golf course. His blond hair was parted by the gods, his jaw jutting in that way of his, his cheekbones high and pretty and porcelain, his eyes the blue of ice. To look at Win’s face, Myron knew, was to hate him, was to think elitism, class-consciousness, snobbery, anti-Semitism, racism, old-world money earned from the sweat of other men’s brows, all that. People who judged Windsor Horne Lockwood III solely by appearance were always mistaken. Often dangerously so.

Win did not glance in Myron’s direction. He looked out as though posing for a park statue. “I was just thinking,” Win said.

“What?”

“If you clone yourself, and then have sex with yourself, is it incest or masturbation?”

Win.

“Good to see you’re not wasting your time,” Myron said.

Win looked at him. “If we were still at Duke,” he said, “we’d probably discuss the dilemma for hours.”

“That’s because we’d be drunk.”

Win nodded. “There’s that.”

They both switched off their cellular phones and started heading down Fifth Avenue. It was a relatively new trick that Myron and Win used with great effect. As soon as the Hormonal He-Men pulled up, Myron had switched on the phone and hit the programmed button for Win’s cellular. Win had thus heard every word. That was why Myron had commented out loud on where they were heading. That was how Win knew exactly where he was and exactly when to call. Win had nothing to say to Frank Ache; he just wanted to make sure that Frank knew that Win knew where Myron was.

“Tie you to a chair and set your dick on fire,” Win repeated. “That would sting.”

Myron nodded. “Talk about having a burning sensation when you urinate.”

“Indeed. So tell me.”

Myron started talking. Win, as always, did not appear to be listening. He never glanced in Myron’s direction, his eyes searching the streets for beautiful women. Midtown Manhattan during work hours was full of them. They wore business suits and silk blouses and white Reebok sneakers. Every once in a while Win would reward one with a smile; unlike almost anybody else in New York, he was often rewarded with one in return.

When Myron told him about bodyguarding Brenda Slaughter, Win suddenly stopped and broke out in song: “AND I-I-I-I-I-I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU-OU-OU-OU-OU-OU-OU.”

Myron looked at him. Win stopped, put his face back in place, continued walking. “When I sing that,” Win said, “it’s almost like Whitney Houston is in the room.”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “Or something.”

“So what is the Aches’ interest in all this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps TruPro just wishes to represent her.”

“Doubtful. She’ll make somebody money but not enough for pulling this.”

Win thought about it, nodded his agreement. They headed east on Fiftieth Street. “Young FJ might pose a problem.”

“Do you know him?”

“A bit. He is something of an intriguing story. Daddy groomed him to go legit. He sent him to Lawrenceville, then to Princeton, finally Harvard. Now he’s setting him up in the business of representing athletes.”

“But.”

“But he resents it. He is still Frank Ache’s son and thus wants his approval. He needs to show that despite the upbringing, he’s still a tough guy. Worse, he is genetically Frank Ache’s son. My guess? If you trample through FJ’s childhood, you’ll stumble across many a legless spider and wingless fly.”

Myron shook his head. “This is definitely not a good thing.”

Win said nothing. They hit the Lock-Horne Building on Forty-seventh Street. Myron got off the elevator on the twelfth floor. Win stayed in, his office being two flights up. When Myron looked at the reception desk—the place where Esperanza usually sat—he nearly jumped back. Big Cyndi sat silently watching him. She was far too big for the desk—far too big for the building, really—and the desk actually teetered on her knees. Her makeup would be labeled “too garish” by members of Kiss. Her hair was short and seaweed green. The T-shirt she wore had the sleeves ripped off, revealing biceps the size of basketballs.

Myron gave her a tentative wave. “Hello, Cyndi.”

“Hello, Mr. Bolitar.”

Big Cyndi was six-six, three hundred pounds and had been Esperanza’s tag team wrestling partner, known in the ring as Big Chief Mama. For years Myron had only heard her growl, never speak. But her voice could be anything she wanted. When she worked as a bouncer at Leather-N-Lust on Tenth Street, she put on an accent that made Arnold Schwarzenegger sound like a Gabor sister. Right now, she was doing her perky Mary-Richards-off-decaf.

“Is Esperanza here?” he asked.

“Miss Diaz is in Mr. Bolitar’s office.” She smiled at him. Myron tried not to cringe. Forget what he’d said about Frank Ache—this smile made his fillings hurt.

He excused himself and headed into his office. Esperanza was at his desk, talking on the phone. She wore a bright yellow blouse against the olive skin that always made him think of stars shimmering off the warm water in the Amalfi bay. She looked up at him, signaled to give her a minute with a finger, and kept on talking. Myron sat down across from her. It was an interesting perspective, seeing what clients and corporate sponsors saw when they sat in his office. The Broadway musical posters behind his chair—too desperate, he decided. Like he was trying to be irreverent for irreverence sake.

When she finished the call, Esperanza said, “You’re late.”

“Frank Ache wanted to see me.”

She crossed her arms. “He need a fourth for mah-jongg?”

“He wanted to know about Brenda Slaughter.”

Esperanza nodded. “So we got trouble.”

“Maybe.”

“Dump her.”

“No.”

She looked at him with flat eyes. “Tattoo me surprised.”

“Did you get anything on Horace Slaughter?”

She grabbed a piece of paper. “Horace Slaughter. None of his credit cards have been used in the past week. He has one bank account at Newark Fidelity. Balance: zero dollars.”

“Zero?”

“He cleaned it out.”

“How much?”

“Eleven grand. In cash.”

Myron whistled and leaned back. “So he was planning on running. That fits with what we saw in his apartment.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I got a harder one for you,” Myron said. “His wife, Anita Slaughter.”

“They still married?”

“I don’t know. Maybe legally. She ran away twenty years ago. I don’t think they ever bothered with a divorce.”

She frowned. “Did you say twenty years ago?”

“Yes. Apparently no one has seen her since then.”

“And what exactly are we trying to find?”

“In a word: her.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“Not a clue. Like I said, she’s been missing for twenty years.”

Esperanza waited a beat. “She could be dead.”

“I know.”

“And if she’s managed to stay hidden this long, she could have changed her name. Or left the country.”

“Right.”

“And there’d be few records, if any, from twenty years ago. Certainly nothing on the computer.”

Myron smiled. “Don’t you hate it when I make it too easy?”

“I realize I’m only your lowly assistant—”

“You’re not my lowly assistant.”

She gave him a look. “I’m not your partner either.”

That quieted him.

“I realize that I’m only your lowly assistant,” she said again, “but do we really have time for this bullshit?”

“Just do a standard check. See if we get lucky.”

“Fine.” Her tone was like a door slamming shut. “But we got other things to discuss here.”

“Shoot.”

“Milner’s contract. They won’t renegotiate.”

They dissected the Milner situation, batted it around a bit, developed and fine-tuned a strategy, and then concluded that their strategy would not work. Behind them Myron could hear the construction starting. They were cutting space out of the waiting area and conference room to make a private office for Esperanza.

After a few minutes Esperanza stopped and stared at him.

“What?”

“You’re going to follow through with this,” she said. “You’re going to search for her parents.”

“Her father is an old friend of mine.”

“Oh Christ, please don’t say, ‘I owe him.’ ”

“It’s not just that. It’s good business.”

“It’s not good business. You’re out of the office too much. Clients want to talk to you directly. So do the sponsors.”

“I have my cellular.”

Esperanza shook her head. “We can’t keep going on like this.”

“Like what?”

“Either you make me a partner or I walk.”

“Don’t hit me with that now, Esperanza. Please.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“Stalling.”

“I’m not stalling.”

She gave him a look that was half harsh, half pity. “I know how you hate change—”

“I don’t hate change.”

“—but one way or the other, things are going to be different. So get over it.”

Part of him wanted to yell, Why? Things were good the way they were. Hadn’t he been the one who encouraged her to get a law degree in the first place? A change, sure, he expected that after her graduation. He had been slowly giving her new responsibilities. But a partnership?

He pointed behind him. “I’m building you an office,” he said.

“So?”

“So doesn’t that scream commitment? You can’t expect me to rush this. I’m taking baby steps here.”

“You took one baby step, and then you fell on your ass.” She stopped, shook her head. “I haven’t pushed you on this since we were down at Merion.” The golf U.S. Open in Philadelphia. Myron was in the midst of finding a kidnap victim when she hit him with her partnership demands. Since then, he had been, well, er, stalling.

Esperanza stood. “I want to be a partner. Not full. I understand that. But I want equity.” She walked to the door. “You have a week.”

Myron was not sure what to say. She was his best friend. He loved her. And he needed her here. She was a part of MB. A big part. But things were not that simple.

Esperanza opened the door and leaned against the frame. “You going to see Brenda Slaughter now?”

He nodded. “In a few minutes.”

“I’ll start the search. Call me in a few hours.”

She closed the door behind her. Myron went around to his chair and picked up the phone. He dialed Win’s number.

Win picked up on the first ring. “Articulate.”

“You got plans for tonight?”

“Moi? But of course.”

“Typical evening of demeaning sex?”

“Demeaning sex,” Win repeated. “I told you to stop reading Jessica’s magazines.”

“Can you cancel?”

“I could,” he said, “but the lovely lass will be very disappointed.”

“Do you even know her name?”

“What? Off the top of my head?”

One of the construction workers started hammering. Myron put a hand over his free ear. “Could we meet at your place? I need to bounce a few things off you.”

Win did not hesitate. “I am but a brick wall awaiting your verbal game of squash.”

Myron guessed that meant yes.

Brenda Slaughter’s team, the New York Dolphins, practiced at Englewood High School in New Jersey. Myron felt a tightness in his chest when he entered the gym. He heard the sweet echo of dribbling basketballs; he savored the high school gym scent, that mix of strain and youth and uncertainty. Myron had played in huge venues, but whenever he walked into a new gymnasium, even as a spectator, he felt as if he’d been dropped through a time portal.

He climbed up the steps of one of those wooden space-saving pull-out stands. As always, it shook with each step. Technology may have made advancements in our daily lives, but you wouldn’t know it from a high school gymnasium. Those velvet banners still hung from one wall, showing a variety of state or country or group championships. There was a list of track and field records down one corner. The electric clock was off. A tired janitor swept the hardwood floor, moving in a curling up-and-down pattern like a Zamboni on a hockey rink.

Myron spotted Brenda Slaughter shooting foul shots. Her face was lost in the simple bliss of this purest of motions. The ball backspun off her fingertips; it never touched the rim, but the net jumped a bit at the bottom. She wore a sleeveless white T-shirt over what looked like a black tube top. Sweat shimmered on her skin.

Brenda looked over at him and smiled. It was an unsure smile, like a new lover on that first morning. She dribbled the ball toward him and threw him a pass. He caught it, his fingers automatically finding the grooves.

“We need to talk,” he said.

She nodded and sat next to him on the bench. Her face was wide and sweaty and real.

“Your father cleared out his bank account before he disappeared,” Myron said.

The serenity fled from her face. Her eyes flicked away, and she shook her head. “This is too weird.”

“What?” Myron said.

She reached toward him and took the ball from his hands. She held on to it as though it might grow wings and fly off. “It’s so like my mother,” she said. “First the clothes gone. Now the money.”

“Your mother took money?”

“Every dime.”

Myron looked at her. She kept her eyes on the ball. Her face was suddenly so guileless, so frail, Myron felt something inside him crumble. He waited a moment before changing the subject. “Was Horace working before he disappeared?”

One of her teammates, a white woman with a ponytail and freckles, called out to her and clapped her hands for the ball. Brenda smiled and led her with a one-armed pass. The ponytail bounced up and down as the woman speed-dribbled toward the basket.

“He was a security guard at St. Barnabas Hospital,” Brenda said. “You know it?”

Myron nodded. St. Barnabas was in Livingston, his hometown.

“I work there too,” she said. “In the pediatric clinic. Sort of a work-study program. I helped him get the job. That’s how I first knew he was missing. His supervisor called me and asked where he was.”

“How long had Horace been working there?”

“I don’t know. Four, five months.”

“What’s his supervisor’s name?”

“Calvin Campbell.”

Myron took out a notecard and wrote it down.

“Where else does Horace hang out?”

“Same places,” she said.

“The courts?”

Brenda nodded. “And he still refs high school games twice a week.”

“Any close friends who might help him out?”

She shook her head. “No one in particular.”

“How about family members?”

“My aunt Mabel. If there is anyone he’d trust, it’s his sister Mabel.”

“She live near here?”

“Yeah. In West Orange.”

“Could you give her a call for me? Tell her I’d like to drop by.”

“When?”

“Now.” He looked at his watch. “If I hurry, I can be back before practice is over.”

Brenda stood. “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. I’ll call her.”

On the ride to Mabel Edwards’s house, Myron’s cellular phone rang. It was Esperanza. “Norm Zuckerman is on the line,” she said.

“Patch it through.”

There was a click.

“Norm?” Myron said.

“Myron, sweetie, how are you?”

“Fine.”

“Good, good. You learn anything yet?”

“No.”

“Good, okay, fine.” Norm hesitated. His jocular tone was a little off, forced. “Where are you?”

“In my car.”

“I see, I see, okay. Look, Myron, you going to go over to Brenda’s practice?”

“I just came from there.”

“You left her alone?”

“She’s at practice. A dozen people are there with her. She’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Look, Myron, we need to talk. When can you get back to the gym?”

“I should be back in an hour. What’s this about, Norm?”

“An hour. I’ll see you then.”

Aunt Mabel lived in West Orange, a suburb outside Newark. West Orange was one of those “changing” suburbs, the percentage of white families sinking bit by bit. It was the spreading effect. Minorities scratched their way out of the city and into the nearest suburbs; the whites then wanted out of said suburbs and moved still farther away from the city. In real estate terms this was known as progress.

Still, Mabel’s tree-lined avenue seemed a zillion light-years from the urban blight that Horace called home. Myron knew the town of West Orange well. His own hometown of Livingston bordered it. Livingston too was starting to change. When Myron was in high school, the town had been white. Very white. Snow white. It had been so white that of the six hundred kids in Myron’s graduating class, only one was black—and he was on the swim team. Can’t get much whiter than that.

The house was a one-level structure—fancier folks might call it a ranch—the kind of place that probably had three bedrooms, one and a half baths, and a finished basement with a used pool table. Myron parked his Ford Taurus in the driveway.

Mabel Edwards was probably late forties, maybe younger. She was a big woman with a fleshy face, loosely curled hair, and a dress that looked like old drapes. When she opened the door, she gave Myron a smile that turned her ordinary features into something almost celestial. A pair of half-moon reading glasses hung from a chain, resting on her enormous chest. There was a puffiness in her right eye, remnants of a contusion maybe. She gripped some sort of knitting project in her hand.

“Goodness me,” she said. “Myron Bolitar. Come in.”

Myron followed her inside. The house had the stale smell of a grandparent. When you’re a kid, the smell gives you the creeps; when you’re an adult, you want to bottle it and let it out with a cup of cocoa on a bad day. “I put coffee on, Myron. Would you like some?”

“That would be nice, thank you.”

“Sit down over there. I’ll be right back.”

Myron grabbed a seat on a stiff sofa with a flowered print.

For some reason he put his hands in his lap. As if he were waiting for a schoolteacher. Myron glanced about. There were African sculptures made of wood on the coffee table. The fireplace mantel was lined with family photographs. Almost all of them featured a young man who looked vaguely familiar. Mabel Edwards’s son, he guessed. It was the standard parental shrine—that is, you could follow the offspring’s life from infancy through adulthood with the images in these frames. There was a baby photo, those school portraits with the rainbow background, a big Afro playing basketball, a tuxedo-and-date prom, a couple of graduations, blah, blah, blah. Corny, yes, but these photo montages always touched Myron, exploiting his overtuned sensitivity like a sappy Hallmark commercial.

Mabel Edwards came back into the living room with a tray. “We met once before,” she said.

Myron nodded, trying to remember. Something played along the edges, but it wouldn’t come into focus.

“You were in high school.” She handed him a cup on a saucer. Then she pushed the tray with cream and sugar toward him. “Horace took me to one of your games. You were playing Shabazz.”

It came back to Myron. Junior year, the Essex County tournament. Shabazz was short for Malcolm X Shabazz High School of Newark. The school had no whites. Its starting five featured guys named Rhahim and Khalid. Even back then Shabazz High had been surrounded by a barbwire fence with a sign that read GUARD DOGS ON DUTY.

Guard dogs at a high school. Think about it.

“I remember,” Myron said.

Mabel burst into a short laugh. When she did, every part of her jiggled. “Funniest thing I ever saw,” she said. “All these pale boys walking in scared out of their wits, eyes as big as saucers. You were the only one at home, Myron.”

“That’s because of your brother.”

She shook her head. “Horace said you were the best he ever worked with. He said nothing would have stopped you from being great.” She leaned forward. “You two had something special, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Horace loved you, Myron. Talked about you all the time. When you got drafted, I tell you, it was the happiest I’d seen him in years. You called him, right?”

“As soon as I heard.”

“I remember. He came over and told me all about it.” Her voice was wistful. She paused and adjusted herself in the seat. “And when you got hurt, well, Horace cried. Big, tough man came to this house and sat right where you are now, Myron, and he cried like a little baby.”

Myron said nothing.

“You want to know something else?” Mabel continued. She took a sip of her coffee. Myron held his cup, but he could not move. He managed a nod.

“When you tried that comeback last year, Horace was so worried. He wanted to call you, talk you out of it.”

Myron’s voice was thick. “So why didn’t he?”

Mabel Edwards gave him a gentle smile. “When was the last time you spoke to Horace?”

“That phone call,” Myron said. “Right after the draft.”

She nodded as though that explained everything. “I think Horace knew you were hurting,” she said. “I think he figured you’d call when you were ready.”

Myron felt something well up in his eyes. Regrets and could-have-beens tried to sneak in, but he shoved them away. No time for this now. He blinked a few times and put the coffee to his lips. After he had taken a sip, he asked, “Have you seen Horace lately?”

She put her cup down slowly and studied his face. “Why do you want to know?”

“He hasn’t shown up for work. Brenda hasn’t seen him.”

“I understand that,” Mabel continued, her voice set on caution now, “but what’s your interest in this?”

“I want to help.”

“Help what?”

“Find him.”

Mabel Edwards waited a beat. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Myron,” she said, “but how does this concern you?”

“I’m trying to help Brenda.”

She stiffened slightly. “Brenda?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know she got a court order to keep her father away from her?”

“Yes.”

Mabel Edwards slipped on the half-moon glasses and picked up her knitting. The needles began to dance. “I think maybe you should stay out of this, Myron.”

“Then you know where he is?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t say that.”

“Brenda is in danger, Mrs. Edwards. Horace might be connected.”

The knitting needles stopped short. “You think Horace would hurt his own daughter?” Her voice was a little sharp now.

“No, but there might be a connection. Somebody broke into Horace’s apartment. He packed a bag and cleared out his bank account. I think he may be in trouble.”

The needles started again. “If he is in trouble,” she said, “maybe it’s best that he stay hid.”

“Tell me where he is, Mrs. Edwards. I’d like to help.”

She stayed silent for a long time. She pulled at the yarn and kept knitting. Myron looked around the room. His eyes found the photographs again. He stood and studied them.

“Is this your son?” he asked.

She looked up over her glasses. “That’s Terence. I got married when I was seventeen, and Roland and I were blessed with him a year later.” The needles picked up speed. “Roland died when Terence was a baby. Shot on the front stoop of our home.”

“I’m sorry,” Myron said.

She shrugged, managed a sad smile. “Terence is the first college graduate in our family. That’s his wife on the right. And my two grandsons.”

Myron lifted the photograph. “Beautiful family.”

“Terence worked his way through Yale Law School,” she continued. “He became a town councilman when he was just twenty-five.” That was probably why he looked familiar, Myron thought. Local TV news or papers. “If he wins in November, he’ll be in the state senate before he’s thirty.”

“You must be proud,” Myron said.

“I am.”

Myron turned and looked at her. She looked back.

“It’s been a long time, Myron. Horace always trusted you, but this is different. We don’t know you anymore. These people who are looking for Horace”—she stopped and pointed to the puffy eye—“you see this?”

Myron nodded.

“Two men came by here last week. They wanted to know where Horace was. I told them I didn’t know.”

Myron felt his face flush. “They hit you?”

She nodded, her eyes on his.

“What did they look like?”

“White. One was a big man.”

“How big?”

“Maybe your size.”

Myron was six-four, two-twenty. “How about the other guy?”

“Skinny. And a lot older. He had a tattoo of a snake on his arm.” She pointed to her own immense biceps, indicating the spot.

“Please tell me what happened, Mrs. Edwards.”

“It’s just like I said. They came into my house and wanted to know where Horace was. When I told them I didn’t know, the big one punched me in the eye. The little one, he pulled the big one away.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No. But not because I was afraid. Cowards like that don’t scare me. But Horace told me not to.”

“Mrs. Edwards,” Myron said, “where is Horace?”

“I’ve already said too much, Myron. I just want you to understand. These people are dangerous. For all I know, you’re working for them. For all I know, your coming here is just a trick to find Horace.”

Myron was not sure what to say. To protest his innocence would do little to assuage her fears. He decided to switch tracks and head in a completely different direction. “What can you tell me about Brenda’s mother?”

Mabel Edwards stiffened. She dropped the knitting into her lap, the half-moon glasses falling back to her bosom. “Why on earth would you ask about that?”

“A few minutes ago I told you that somebody broke into your brother’s apartment.”

“I remember.”

“Brenda’s letters from her mother were missing. And Brenda has been receiving threatening phone calls. One of them told her to call her mother.”

Mabel Edwards’s face went slack. Her eyes began to glisten.

After some time had passed, Myron tried again. “Do you remember when she ran away?”

Her eyes regained focus. “You don’t forget the day your brother dies.” Her voice was barely a whisper. She shook her head. “I can’t see how any of this matters. Anita’s been gone for twenty years.”

“Please, Mrs. Edwards, tell me what you remember.”

“Not much to tell,” Mabel said. “She left my brother a note and ran away.”

“Do you remember what the note said?”

“Something about how she didn’t love him anymore, how she wanted a new life.” Mabel Edwards stopped, waved her hand as though making space for herself. She took a handkerchief out of her bag and just held it in a tight ball.

“Could you tell me what she was like?”

“Anita?” She smiled now, but the handkerchief remained at the ready. “I introduced them, you know. Anita and I worked together.”

“Where?”

“The Bradford estate. We were maids. We were young girls then, barely in our twenties. I only worked there for six months. But Anita, she stayed on for six years, slaving for those people.”

“When you say the Bradford estate—”

“I mean, the Bradfords. Anita was a servant really. For the old lady mostly. That woman must be eighty by now. But they all lived there. Children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters. Like on Dallas. I don’t think that’s healthy, do you?”

Myron had no comment on that.

“Anyway, when I met Anita, I thought she was a fine young woman except”—she looked in the air as though searching for the right words, then shook her head because they weren’t there—“well, she was just too beautiful. I don’t know how else to say it. Beauty like that warps a man’s brain, Myron. Now Brenda, she’s attractive, I guess. Exotic, I think they call it. But Anita … hold on. I’ll find you a picture.”

She stood fluidly and semiglided out of the room. Despite her size, Mabel moved with the unlabored grace of a natural athlete. Horace too moved like that, blending bulk with finesse in an almost poetic way. She was gone for less than a minute, and when she returned, she handed him a photograph. Myron looked down.

A knockout. A pure, undiluted, knee-knocking, breath-stealing knockout. Myron understood the power a woman like that had over a man. Jessica had that kind of beauty. It was intoxicating and more than a little scary.

He studied the photograph. A young Brenda—no more than four or five years old—held her mother’s hand and smiled brightly. Myron tried to imagine Brenda smiling like that now, but the image would not form. There was a resemblance between mother and daughter, but as Mabel had pointed out, Anita Slaughter was certainly more beautiful—at least in the conventional sense—her features sharper and more defined where Brenda’s seemed large and almost mismatched.

“Anita put a dagger through Horace when she ran off,” Mabel Edwards continued. “He never recovered. Brenda neither. She was only a little girl when her mama left. She cried every night for three years. Even when she was in high school, Horace said she’d call out for her mama in her sleep.”

Myron finally looked up from the picture. “Maybe she didn’t run away,” he said.

Mabel’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe she met up with foul play.”

A sad smile crossed Mabel Edwards’s face. “I understand,” she said gently. “You look at that picture and you can’t accept it. You can’t believe a mother would abandon that sweet little child. I know. It’s hard. But she did it.”

“The note could have been a forgery,” Myron tried. “To throw Horace off the track.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You can’t be sure—”

“Anita calls me.”

Myron froze. “What?”

“Not often. Maybe once every two years. She’d ask about Brenda. I’d beg her to come back. She’d hang up.”

“Do you have any idea where she was calling from?”

Mabel shook her head. “In the beginning it sounded like long distance. There’d be static. I always figured she was overseas.”

“When was the last time she called you?”

There was no hesitation. “Three years ago. I told her about Brenda getting accepted to medical school.”

“Nothing since?”

“Not a word.”

“And you’re sure it was her?” Myron realized that he was reaching.

“Yes,” she said. “It was Anita.”

“Did Horace know about the calls?”

“At first I told him. But it was like ripping at a wound that wasn’t closing anyhow. So I stopped. But I think maybe she called him too.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He said something about it once when he had too much to drink. When I asked him about it later, he denied it, and I didn’t push him. You have to understand, Myron. We never talked about Anita. But she was always right there. In the room with us. You know what I’m saying?”

The silence moved in like a cloud covering. Myron waited for it to disperse, but it hung there, thick and heavy.

“I’m very tired, Myron. Can we talk more about this another time?”

“Of course.” He rose. “If your brother calls again—”

“He won’t. He thinks maybe they bugged the phone. I haven’t heard from him in almost a week.”

“Do you know where he is, Mrs. Edwards?”

“No. Horace said it’d be safer that way.”

Myron took a business card and a pen. He jotted down the number of his cellular phone. “I can be reached at this number twenty-four hours a day.”

She nodded, drained, the simple act of reaching for the card suddenly a chore.

“I wasn’t totally honest with you yesterday.”

Norm Zuckerman and Myron sat alone in the top row of the stands. Below them the New York Dolphins scrimmaged five-on-five. Myron was impressed. The women moved with finesse and strength. Being something of the semisexist Brenda had described, he had expected their movements to be more awkward, more the old stereotype of “throwing like a girl.”

“You want to hear something funny?” Norm asked. “I hate sports. Me, owner of Zoom, the sports apparel king, detests anything to do with a ball or a bat or a hoop or any of that. Know why?”

Myron shook his head.

“I was always bad at them. A major spaz, as the kids say today. My older brother, Herschel, now he was an athlete.” He looked off. When he started speaking again, his voice was throaty. “So gifted, sweet Heshy. You remind me of him, Myron. I’m not just saying that. I still miss him. Dead at fifteen.”

Myron did not need to ask how. Norm’s entire family had been slaughtered in Auschwitz. They all went in; only Norm came out. Today was warm, and Norm was wearing short sleeves. Myron could see his concentration camp tattoo and no matter how many times he saw one, he always fell into a respectful hush.

“This league”—Norm motioned toward the court—“it’s a long shot. I understood that from the start. It’s why I link so much of the league promotion with the clothing. If the WPBA goes down the tubes, well, at least Zoom athletic wear would have gotten a ton of exposure out of it. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“And let’s face it: without Brenda Slaughter, the investment is shot. The league, the endorsements, the tie-in with the clothing, the whole thing goes kaput. If you wanted to destroy this enterprise, you would go through her.”

“And you think someone wants to do that?”

“Are you kidding? Everybody wants to do that. Nike, Converse, Reebok, whoever. It’s the nature of the beast. If the sneaker were on the other foot, so to speak, I would want the same thing. It’s called capitalism. It’s Economics one-oh-one. But this is different, Myron. Have you heard of the PWBL?”

“No.”

“You aren’t supposed to. Yet. It stands for the Professional Women’s Basketball League.”

Myron sat up a bit. “A second women’s basketball league?”

Norm nodded. “They want to start up next year.”

On the court Brenda got the ball and drove hard baseline. A player jumped up to block the shot. Brenda pump-faked, glided under the basket, and made a reverse layup. Improvised ballet.

“Let me guess,” Myron said. “This other league. It’s being set up by TruPro.”

“How did you know that?”

Myron shrugged. Things were beginning to click.

“Look, Myron, it’s like I said before: Women’s basketball is a tough sell. I’m promoting it a ton of different ways—to sports nuts, women eighteen to thirty-five, families who want something more genteel, fans who want more access to athletes—but at the end of the day there is one problem that this league will never overcome.”

“What’s that?”

Again Norm motioned to the court below them. “They’re not as good as the men. I’m not being a chauvinist here. It’s a fact. The men are better. The best player on this team could never compete against the worst player in the NBA. And when people watch professional sports, they want to watch the best. I’m not saying that the problem destroys us. I think we can build a nice fan base. But we have to be realistic.”

Myron massaged his face with his hands. He felt a headache coming on. TruPro wanted to start a women’s basketball league. It made sense. Sports agencies were moving in that direction, aiming to corner markets. IMG, one of the world’s biggest agencies, ran entire golf events. If you can own an event or run a league, you can make money a dozen different ways—not to mention how many clients you’d pick up. If a young golfer, for example, wanted to qualify for the big moneymaking IMG events, wouldn’t he naturally want to have IMG as his sports rep?

“Myron?”

“Yes, Norm.”

“Do you know this TruPro well?”

Myron nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

“I got hemorrhoids older than this kid they’re making league commissioner. You should see him. He comes up to me and shakes my hand and gives me this icy smile. Then he tells me they’re going to wipe me out. Just like that. Hello, I’m going to wipe you off the face of the earth.” Norm looked at Myron. “Are they, you know, connected?” He bent his nose with his index fingers in case Myron did not get the drift.

“Oh, yeah,” Myron said again. Then he added, “Very.”

“Great. Just great.”

“So what do you want to do, Norm?”

“I don’t know. I don’t run and hide—I had enough of that in my life—but if I’m putting these girls in danger—”

“Forget they’re women.”

“What?”

“Pretend it’s a men’s league.”

“What, you think this is about sex? I wouldn’t want men in danger either, okay?”

“Okay,” Myron said. “Has TruPro said anything else to you?”

“No.”

“No threats, nothing?”

“Just this kid and his wipeout stuff. But don’t you think they’re probably the ones making the threats?”

It made sense, Myron guessed. Old gangsters had indeed moved into more legitimate enterprises—why limit yourself to prostitution and drugs and loan sharking when there were so many other ways to turn a buck?—but even with the best of intentions, it never worked out. Guys like the Aches couldn’t help themselves really. They’d start out legit, but once things got the slightest bit tough, once they lost out on a contract or a sale or something, they reverted back to their old ways. Couldn’t help it. Corruption too was a terrible addiction, but where were the support groups?

In this case TruPro would quickly realize that it needed to get Brenda away from its competition. So it started applying pressure. It put the screws to her manager—her father—and then moved on to Brenda herself. It was a classic scare tactic. But that scenario was not without problems. The phone call that mentioned Brenda’s mother, for example—how did that fit in?

The coach blew the whistle ending practice. She gathered her players around, reminded them that they needed to be back in two hours for the second session, thanked them for their hustle, dismissed them with a clap.

Myron waited for Brenda to shower and get dressed. It didn’t take her long. She came out in a long red T-shirt and black jeans, her hair still wet.

“Did Mabel know anything?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Has she heard from Dad?”

Myron nodded. “She says he’s on the run. Two men came to her house looking for him. They roughed her up a bit.”

“My God, is she okay?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “What’s he on the run from?”

“Mabel doesn’t know.”

Brenda looked at him, waited a beat. “What else?” she said.

Myron cleared his throat. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

She kept looking at him. Myron turned and headed for his car. Brenda followed.

“So where we going?” she asked.

“I thought we’d stop by St. Barnabas and talk to your father’s supervisor.”

She caught up to him. “You think he knows something?”

“Highly doubtful. But this is what I do. I go poking around and hope something stirs.”

They reached the car. Myron unlocked the doors, and they both got in.

“I should be paying you for your time,” she said.

“I’m not a private investigator, Brenda. I don’t work by the hour.”

“Still. I should be paying you.”

“Part of client recruitment,” Myron said.

“You want to represent me?”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t made much of a sales pitch or applied any pressure.”

“If I had,” he said, “would it have worked?”

“No.”

Myron nodded and started up the car.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a few minutes. Tell me why I should choose you and not one of the big boys. Personal service?”

“Depends on your definition of personal services. If you mean someone always following you around with lips firmly planted on your buttocks, then no, the big boys are better at puckering. They have the staff for it.”

“So what does Myron Bolitar offer? A little tongue with those lips?”

He smiled. “A total package designed to maximize your assets while allowing room for integrity and a personal life.”

She nodded. “What a crock.”

“Yeah, but it sounds good. In truth, MB SportsReps is a three-prong system. Prong one is earning money. I’m in charge of negotiating all contracts. I will continually seek out new endorsement deals for you and whenever possible get a bidding war going for your services. You’ll make decent money playing for the WPBA, but you’ll make a hell of a lot more on endorsements. You got a lot of pluses in that department.”

“Such as?”

“Three things off the top of my head. One, you’re the best female player in the country. Two, you’re studying to be a doctor—a pediatrician, no less—so we can play up the whole role model thing. And three, you’re not hard on the eyes.”

“You forgot one.”

“What?”

“Four, that perennial white man favorite: well spoken. You ever notice that no one ever describes a white athlete as well spoken?”

“As a matter of fact, I have. It’s why I left it off the list. But the truth is, it helps. I’m not going to get into a debate on Ebonics and the like, but if you are what is commonly referred to as well spoken, it adds revenue. Simple as that.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“In your case we need to design a strategy. Clearly you would have tremendous appeal to clothing and sneaker companies. But food products would love you too. Restaurant chains.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because I’m big?”

“Because you’re not waiflike,” Myron corrected. “You’re real. Sponsors like real—especially when it comes in an exotic package. They want someone attractive yet accessible—a contradiction, but there you go. And you have it. Cosmetic companies will want to get in on this too. We could also pick up a lot of local deals, but I would advise against it in the beginning. Try to stick with the national markets where we can. It doesn’t pay to go after every dime out there. But that will be up to you. I’ll present them to you. The final decision is always yours.”

“Okay,” she said. “Give me prong two.”

“Prong two is what you do with your money after you earn it. You’ve heard of Lock-Horne Securities?”

“Sure.”

“All of my clients are required to set up a long-term financial plan with their top man, Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third.”

“Nice name.”

“Wait till you meet him. But ask around. Win is considered one of the best financial advisers in the country. I insist that every client meet with him quarterly—not by fax or phone but in person—to go over their portfolios. Too many athletes get taken advantage of. That won’t happen here, not because Win or I am watching your money but because you are.”

“Impressive. Prong three?”

“Esperanza Diaz. She is my right hand and handles everything else. I mentioned before that I’m not the best with ass kissing. That’s true. But the reality of this business means I have to wear a lot of hats—travel agent, marriage counselor, limo driver, whatever.”

“And this Esperanza helps out with all that?”

“She’s crucial.”

Brenda nodded. “Sounds like you give her the shit detail.”

“Esperanza just graduated law school, as a matter of fact.” He tried not to sound too defensive, but her words had struck bone. “She takes on more responsibility every day.”

“Okay, one question.”

“What?” Myron asked.

“What aren’t you telling me about your visit to Mabel?”

Myron said nothing for a moment.

“It’s about my mother, isn’t it?”

“Not really. It’s just …” He let his voice drift off before starting up again. “Are you sure you want me to find her, Brenda?”

She crossed her arms and slowly shook her head. “Cut it out.”

“What?”

“I know you think protecting me is sweet and noble. But it’s not. It’s annoying and insulting. So stop it. Now. If your mother ran away when you were five, wouldn’t you want to know what happened?”

Myron thought about it, nodded. “Point taken. I won’t do it again.”

“Fine. So what did Mabel say?”

He recounted his conversation with her aunt. Brenda stayed still. She reacted only when he mentioned the phone calls Mabel and perhaps her father had received from her mother.

“They never told me,” she said. “I suspected as much, but”—she looked at Myron—“looks like you weren’t the only one who thought I couldn’t handle the truth.”

They fell into silence and continued the drive. Before making the left off Northfield Avenue, Myron noticed a gray Honda Accord in the rearview mirror. At least it looked like a Honda Accord. All cars pretty much looked the same to Myron, and there was no vehicle more unassuming than a gray Honda Accord. No way to tell for sure, but Myron thought that maybe they were being followed. He slowed down, memorized the license plate. New Jersey plate. 890UB3. When he entered the St. Barnabas Medical Center lot, the car drove on. Didn’t mean anything. If the guy doing the tailing was good, he’d never pull in behind him.

St. Barnabas was bigger than when he was a kid, but what hospital wasn’t? His dad had taken Myron here several times when he was a kid, for sprains and stitches and X rays and even one ten-day stint for rheumatic fever when he was twelve.

“Let me talk to this guy alone,” Myron said.

“Why?”

“You’re the daughter. He may speak more freely without you there.”

“Yeah, okay. I have some patients I’m following on the fourth floor anyway. I’ll meet you back down in the lobby.”

Calvin Campbell was in full uniform when Myron found him in the security office. He sat behind a high counter with several dozen TV monitors running. The pictures were in black and white and, from what Myron could see, completely uneventful. Campbell’s feet were up. He was downing a submarine sandwich slightly longer than a baseball bat. He took off his policelike cap to reveal tightly curled white hair.

Myron asked him about Horace Slaughter.

“He didn’t show for three straight days,” Calvin said. “No call, no nothing. So I fired his ass.”

“How?” Myron asked.

“What?”

“How did you fire him? In person? On the phone?”

“Well, I tried to call him. But nobody answered. So I wrote a letter.”

“Return receipt?”

“Yes.”

“Did he sign it?”

He shrugged. “Haven’t gotten it back yet, if that’s what you mean.”

“Was Horace a good worker?”

Calvin’s eyes narrowed. “You a private eye?”

“Something like that.”

“And you’re working for the daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She got juice.”

“Huh?”

“Juice,” Calvin repeated. “I mean, I never wanted to hire the man in the first place.”

“So why did you?”

He scowled. “Don’t you listen? His daughter got juice. She’s tight with some of the bigwigs here. Everybody likes her. So you start hearing things. Rumors, you know. So I figured, what the hell. Being a security guard ain’t brain surgery. I hired him.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“Hey, don’t get me in the middle here.” He held his palms as though pushing trouble back. “People talk, is all I’m saying. I’ve been here eighteen years. I ain’t one to make waves. But when a guy don’t show for work, well, I have to draw the line.”

“Anything else you can tell me?”

“Nope. He came. He did his job okay, I guess. Then he didn’t show and I fired him. End of story.”

Myron nodded. “Thank you for your time.”

“Hey, man, can you do me a favor?”

“What?” Myron asked.

“See if his daughter can clear out his locker. I got a new man coming on board, and I could use the space.”

Myron took the elevator up to the pediatric floor. He circled the nurses’ station and spotted Brenda through a big window. She was sitting on the bed of a little girl who could not have been more than seven. Myron stopped and watched for a moment. Brenda had put on a white coat, a stethoscope draped around her neck. The little girl said something. Brenda smiled and put the stethoscope on the little girl’s ears. They both laughed. Brenda beckoned behind her, and the girl’s parents joined them on the bed. The parents had gaunt faces—the sunken cheeks, hollow eyes of the terminally harrowed. Brenda said something to them. More laughter. Myron continued to watch, mesmerized.

When she finally came out, Brenda walked straight to him. “How long have you been standing here?”

“Just a minute or two,” he said. Then he added, “You like it here.”

She nodded. “It’s even better than being on the court.”

Enough said.

“So what’s up?” she asked.

“Your father has a locker here.”

They took the elevator to the basement. Calvin Campbell was waiting for them. “Do you know the combination?” he asked.

Brenda said no.

“No problem.” Calvin had a lead pipe in his hand. With practiced precision he belted the combination lock. It shattered like glass. “You can use that empty carton in the corner,” he said. Then he sauntered out.

Brenda looked at Myron. He nodded. She reached out and opened the locker. An odor like oft-soiled socks popped out. Myron made a face and looked in. Using his index finger and thumb like a pair of tweezers, he lifted a shirt into view. The shirt looked like the before picture in a Tide commercial.

“Dad wasn’t great with laundry,” Brenda said.

Or with throwing away garbage, from the looks of things. The entire locker resembled a condensed frat house. There were dirty clothes and empty cans of beer and old newspapers and even a pizza box. Brenda brought over the carton, and they began to load stuff in. Myron started with a pair of uniform pants. He wondered if Horace owned them or if they belonged to the hospital, and then he wondered why he was wondering about something so irrelevant. He searched through the pockets and pulled out a crumpled ball of paper.

Myron smoothed it out. An envelope. He plucked out a sheet of paper and began to read.

“What is it?” Brenda asked.

“A letter from an attorney,” Myron said.

He handed it to her:

Dear Mr. Slaughter:

We are in receipt of your letters and are aware of your constant communications with this office. As explained to you in person, the matter you are asking about is confidential. We ask you to kindly stop contacting us. Your behavior is fast approaching harassment.

Sincerely,
Thomas Kincaid

“Do you know what he’s talking about?” Myron asked.

She hesitated. “No,” she said slowly. “But that name—Thomas Kincaid—it rings a bell. I just can’t place it.”

“Maybe he did work for your dad before.”

Brenda shook her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember my father ever hiring a lawyer. And if he had, I doubt he would have gone to Morristown.”

Myron took out his cellular phone and dialed the office. Big Cyndi answered and transferred the call to Esperanza.

“What?” Esperanza said. Always with the pleasantries.

“Did Lisa fax over Horace Slaughter’s phone bill?”

“It’s right in front of me,” Esperanza said. “I was just working on it.”

Scary as it might sound, getting a list of someone’s long-distance calls had always been fairly easy. Almost every private investigator has a source at the phone company. All it takes is a little grease.

Myron signaled that he wanted the letter back. Brenda handed it to him. Then she knelt and extracted a plastic bag from the back of the locker. Myron looked at the phone number for Kincaid’s office on the letter.

“Is five-five-five-one-nine-zero-eight on there?” he asked.

“Yeah. Eight times. All less than five minutes.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m still tracking down all the numbers.”

“Anything stick out?”

“Maybe,” Esperanza said. “For some reason he called Arthur Bradford’s gubernatorial headquarters a couple of times.”

Myron felt a familiar, not unpleasant jolt. The Bradford name rears its ugly head yet again. Arthur Bradford, one of two prodigal sons, was running for governor in November. “Okay, good. Anything else?”

“Not yet. And I found nothing—I mean, nada—on Anita Slaughter.”

No surprise there. “Okay, thanks.”

He hung up.

“What?” Brenda asked.

“Your father has been calling this Kincaid guy a lot. He’s also called Arthur Bradford’s campaign headquarters.”

She looked confused. “So what does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Was your dad political at all?”

“No.”

“Did he know Arthur Bradford or anybody connected with the campaign?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” Brenda opened the garbage bag and peered inside. Her face went slack. “Oh Christ.”

Myron dropped down next to her. Brenda spread open the top of the bag so he could see the contents. A referee’s shirt, black and white striped. On the right breast pocket was a patch reading “New Jersey Basketball Referee Association.” On the left breast was a big crimson stain.

A bloodstain.

“We should call the police,” Myron said.

“And tell them what?”

Myron was not sure. The bloody shirt didn’t have a hole in it—there were no rips or tears visible—and the stain was a concentrated fan shape over the left breast. How had it gotten there? Good question. Not wanting to contaminate any possible clues, Myron gave the shirt a quick, gentle once-over. The stain was thick and looked a bit sticky, if not wet. Since the shirt had been wrapped in a plastic bag, it was hard to say how long the blood had been there. Probably not long, though.

Okay, good. Now what?

The position of the stain itself was puzzling. If Horace had been wearing the shirt, how could the blood have ended up on just that one spot? If, for example, he had a bloody nose, the stain would be more widespread. If he had been shot, well, there’d be a hole in the shirt. If he had hit somebody else, again the stain would probably be more like a spray or at least more dispersed than this.

Why was the stain so concentrated in that one spot?

Myron studied the shirt again. Only one scenario fit: Horace had not been wearing the shirt when the injury occurred. Strange but probably true. The shirt had been used to stave off blood flow, like a bandage. That would explain both the placement and concentration. The fan shape indicated it had probably been pressed against a bleeding nose.

Okey-dokey, we’re on a roll. It didn’t help him in any way, shape, or form. But rolling was good. Myron liked to roll.

Brenda interrupted his thoughts. “What are we going to tell the police?” she asked again.

“I don’t know.”

“You think he’s on the run, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then maybe he doesn’t want to be found.”

“Almost definitely.”

“And we know he ran away by his own volition. So what are we going to tell them? That we found some blood on a shirt in his locker? You think the police are going to give a rat’s ass?”

“Not even one cheek,” Myron agreed.

They finished clearing out the locker. Then Myron drove her to the late practice. He kept his eye on the rearview mirror, looking for the gray Honda Accord. There were many, of course, but none with the same license plate.

He dropped her off at the gym, and then he took Palisades Avenue toward the Englewood Public Library. He had a couple of hours to kill, and he wanted to do some research on the Bradford family.

The Englewood Library sat on Grand Avenue off Palisades Avenue like a clunky spaceship. When it was erected in 1968, the building had probably been praised for its sleek, futuristic design; now it looked like a rejected movie prop for Logan’s Run.

Myron quickly found a reference librarian who was straight from central casting: gray bun, glasses, pearls, boxy build. The nameplate on her desk read “Mrs. Kay.” He approached her with his boyish grin, the one that usually made such ladies pinch his cheek and offer him hot cider.

“I hope you can help me,” he said.

Mrs. Kay looked at him in that way librarians often do, wary and tired, like cops who know you’re going to lie about how fast you were driving.

“I need to look up articles from the Jersey Ledger from twenty years ago.”

“Microfiche,” Mrs. Kay said. She rose with a great sigh and led him to a machine. “You’re in luck.”

“Why’s that?”

“They just computerized an index. Before that you were on your own.”

Mrs. Kay taught him how to use the microfilm machine and the computer indexing service. It looked pretty standard. When she left him alone, Myron first typed in the name Anita Slaughter. No hits. Not a surprise, but hey, you never know. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you plug in the name, and an article comes up and says, “I ran away to Florence, Italy. You can find me at the Plaza Lucchesi hotel on the Arno River, room 218.” Well, not often. But sometimes.

Typing in the Bradford name would produce ten zillion hits. Myron was not sure what he was looking for exactly. He knew who the Bradfords were, of course. They were New Jersey aristocracy, the closest thing the Garden State had to the Kennedys. Old Man Bradford had been the governor in the late sixties, and his older son, Arthur Bradford, was the current front-runner for the same office. Arthur’s younger brother, Chance—Myron would have made fun of the name, but when your name is Myron, well, glass houses and big stones and all that—was his campaign manager and—to keep within the Kennedy metaphor—played Robert to Arthur’s Jack.

The Bradfords had started modestly enough. Old Man Bradford had come from farm stock. He had owned half the town of Livingston, considered the boonies in the sixties, and sold it in small pieces over the years to developers, who built split-levels and colonials for baby boomers escaping Newark and Brooklyn and the like. Myron in fact had grown up in a split-level that had been built on what had formerly been Bradford farmland.

But Old Man Bradford had been smarter than most. For one thing, he reinvested his money in strong local businesses, mostly malls, but more important, he sold his land slowly, over time, not immediately cashing in. By holding on a bit longer, he became a true baron as the price for land increased at an alarming rate. He married a blue blood aristocrat from Connecticut. She redid the old farmhouse and made it something of a monument to excess. They stayed in Livingston, in the original spot of the old farmhouse, fencing off an enormous chunk of real estate. They were the mansion on the hill, surrounded by hundreds of middle-class cookie-cut houses: feudal lords overlooking the serfdom. Nobody in town really knew the Bradfords. When Myron was a kid, he and his friends just referred to them as the millionaires. They were the stuff of legends. Supposedly, if you climbed their fence, armed guards shot at you. Two sixth graders gave a wide-eyed Myron this stern warning when he was seven years old. He of course believed it absolutely. Outside of the Bat Lady, who lived in a shack near the Little League field and kidnapped and then ate little boys, no one was more feared than the Bradfords.

Myron tried limiting the search on the Bradfords to 1978, the year Anita Slaughter disappeared, but there were still a ton of hits. Most, he noticed, were from March, while Anita had run off in November. A vague memory prodded him, but he couldn’t conjure up more than a glimpse. He’d been just starting high school then, but there had been something in the news about the Bradfords. A scandal of some sort. He threaded microfilm into the machine. He was a tad spastic with anything mechanical—something he blamed on his ancestry—so it took him longer than it should have. After a few screeching false starts, Myron managed to look up a couple of articles. In fairly short order he stumbled across the obituary. “Elizabeth Bradford. Age thirty. Daughter of Richard and Miriam Worth. Wife of Arthur Bradford. Mother of Stephen Bradford …”

No cause of death given. But now Myron remembered the story. It had, in fact, been rehashed a bit recently, what with the press on the gubernatorial race. Arthur Bradford was now a fifty-two-year-old widower who, if the accounts were to be believed, still pined for his dead love. He dated, sure, but the spin was that he had never gotten over the devastating heartbreak of losing his young bride; it made for a nice, too-neat contrast with his thrice-married gubernatorial opponent, Jim Davison. Myron wondered if there was any truth in the spin. Arthur Bradford was perceived as a little too mean, a little Bob Dole. Sick as it sounded, what better way to offset that image than resurrecting a dead wife?

But who knew for sure? Politics and the press: two cherished institutions that spoke with tongues so forked they could double for fine dinnerware. Arthur Bradford refused to talk about his wife, and that could reflect either genuine pain or clever media manipulation. Cynical, but there you have it.

Myron continued to review the old articles. The story had made the front page on three consecutive dates in March 1978. Arthur and Elizabeth Bradford had been college sweethearts and married six years. Everyone described them as a “loving couple,” one of those media buzz phrases that meant as much as calling a dead youth an honor student. Mrs. Bradford had fallen off a third-level balcony at the Bradford mansion. The surface below was brick, and Elizabeth Bradford had landed on her head. There was not much in the way of details. A police investigation stated unequivocally that the death had been a tragic accident. The balcony was tiled and slippery. It had been raining and dark. A wall was being replaced and thus not secure in certain spots.

Awfully clean.

The press played very fair with the Bradfords. Myron now recalled the obvious rumors that had gone around the schoolyard. What the heck was she doing out on her balcony in March? Was she drunk? Probably. How else do you fall off your own balcony? Naturally some of the guys speculated that she’d been pushed. It made for interesting high school cafeteria fodder for at least, oh, two days. But this was high school. Hormones inevitably recaptured the flag, and everybody returned to panicking about the opposite sex. Ah, the sweet bird of youth.

Myron leaned back and stared at the screen. He thought again about Arthur Bradford’s refusal to comment. Maybe it had nothing to do with genuine grief or media manipulation; maybe Bradford refused to talk because he didn’t want something brought to light after twenty years.

Hmm. Right, Myron, sure. And maybe he had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. Stick to the facts. One, Elizabeth Bradford had been dead for twenty years. Two, there was not a scintilla of evidence that her death was anything but an accident. Three—and most important to Myron—this had all happened a full nine months before Anita Slaughter ran away.

Conclusion: There was not even the flimsy hint of a connection.

At least not right then.

Myron’s throat went dry. He’d continued to read the article from the March 18, 1978, issue of the Jersey Ledger. The page one story finished up on page eight. Myron played with the knob on the microfiche machine. It screamed in protest but trudged forward.

There it was. Near the bottom right-hand corner. One line. That was all. Nothing that anybody would notice: “Mrs. Bradford’s body was first discovered on the brick back porch of the Bradford estate at 6:30 A.M. by a maid arriving for work.”

A maid arriving for work. Myron wondered what the maid’s name was.

Myron immediately called Mabel Edwards. “Do you remember Elizabeth Bradford?” he asked.

There was a brief hesitation. “Yes.”

“Did Anita find her body?”

A longer hesitation. “Yes.”

“What did she tell you about it?”

“Wait a second. I thought you were trying to help Horace.”

“I am.”

“So why are you asking about that poor woman?” Mabel sounded slightly put out. “She died more than twenty years ago.”

“It’s a little complicated.”

“I bet it is.” He heard her take a deep breath. “I want the truth now. You’re looking for her too, aren’t you? For Anita?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why?”

Good question. But when you stripped it bare, the answer was pretty simple. “For Brenda.”

“Finding Anita ain’t gonna help that girl.”

“You tell her that.”

She chuckled without humor. “Brenda can be headstrong,” Mabel said.

“I think it runs in the family.”

“Guess it does at that,” she said.

“Please tell me what you remember.”

“Not much to it, I guess. She came to work, and the poor woman was lying there like a broken rag doll. That’s all I know.”

“Anita never said anything else about it?”

“No.”

“Did she seem shaken up?”

“Of course. She worked for Elizabeth Bradford for almost six years.”

“No, I mean beyond the shock of finding the body.”

“I don’t think so. But she never talked about it. Even when the reporters called, Anita just hung up the phone.”

Myron computed this information, sorted in through his brain cells, came up with zippo. “Mrs. Edwards, did your brother ever mention a lawyer named Thomas Kincaid?”

She thought a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Were you aware of him seeking legal advice on anything?”

“No.”

They said their good-byes, and then he hung up. The phone was barely disconnected when it rang again. “Hello?”

“Got something strange here, Myron.”

It was Lisa from the phone company.

“What’s up?”

“You asked me to put a tracer on the phone in Brenda Slaughter’s dorm.”

“Right.”

“Someone beat me to it.”

Myron nearly slammed on the brake. “What?”

“There’s already a tap on her phone.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you trace it back? See who put it on?”

“Nope. And the number is blocked out.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t read anything on it. I can’t get a trace or even look at old bills on the computer. My guess is, someone in law enforcement is behind it. I can poke around, but I doubt I’ll come up with anything.”

“Please try, Lisa. And thanks.”

He hung up. A missing father, threatening phone calls, a possible car tail, and now a phone tap: Myron was starting to get nervous here. Why would someone—someone with authority—have a tap on Brenda’s phone? Was that person part of the group making the threatening phone calls? Were they tapping her phone to track down her father or—

Hold the phone.

Hadn’t one of the threatening calls told Brenda to call her mother? Why? Why would someone have said that? More important, if Brenda had obeyed the call—and if she had indeed known where her mother was hiding—the people behind the trace would have been able to find Anita too. Was that what this was really all about?

Was someone looking for Horace … or Anita?

“We have a problem,” Myron told her.

They sat in the car. Brenda turned toward him and waited.

“Your phone is bugged,” he said.

“What?”

“Someone has been listening in to your calls. You’re also being tailed by someone.”

“But—” Brenda stopped, shrugged. “Why? To find my father?”

“That’s the best bet, yes. Someone is anxious to get to Horace. They’ve already attacked your aunt. You might be next on their list.”

“So you think I’m in danger.”

“Yes.”

She watched his face. “And you have a suggested course of action.”

“I do,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“First, I’d like to have your dorm room swept for bugs.”

“I have no problem with that.”

“Second, you have to get out of your dorm room. You’re not safe there.”

She considered this for a moment. “I can stay with a friend. Cheryl Sutton. She’s the other captain of the Dolphins.”

Myron shook his head. “These people know you. They’ve been following you, listening to your phone calls.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they probably know who your friends are.”

“Including Ms. Sutton.”

“Yes.”

“And you think they’ll look for me there?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Brenda shook her head and faced forward. “This is spooky.”

“There’s more.”

He told her about the Bradford family and about her mother finding the body.

“So what does that mean?” Brenda asked when he finished.

“Probably nothing,” Myron said. “But you wanted me to tell you everything, right?”

“Right.” She leaned back and chewed at her lower lip. After some time had passed, she asked, “So where do you think I should stay?”

“Do you remember my mentioning my friend Win?”

“The guy who owns Lock-Horne Securities?”

“His family does, right. I’m supposed to go to his place tonight to discuss a business problem. I think you should come too. You can stay at his apartment.”

“You want me to stay with him?”

“Just for tonight. Win has safe houses all over. We’ll find you someplace.”

She made a face. “A preppy Mainliner who knows about safe houses?”

“Win,” Myron said, “is more than he appears.”

She crossed her arms under her chest. “I don’t want to act like a jackass and hand you that phony crap about how I’m not going to let this interfere with my life. I know you’re helping me, and I want to cooperate.”

“Good.”

“But,” she added, “this league means a lot to me. So does my team. I’m not going to just walk away from that.”

“I understand.”

“So whatever we do, will I be able to go to practice? Will I be able to play in the opener Sunday?”

“Yes.”

Brenda nodded. “Okay then,” she said. “And thank you.”

They drove to her dorm room. Myron waited downstairs while she packed a bag. She had her own room, but she wrote a note to her suite mate that she was staying with a friend for a few days. The whole enterprise took her less than ten minutes.

She came down with two bags over her shoulders. Myron relieved her of one. They were heading out the door when Myron spotted FJ standing next to his car.

“Stay here,” he told her.

Brenda ignored him and kept pace. Myron looked to his left. Bubba and Rocco were there. They waved at him. Myron did not wave back. That’ll show them.

FJ leaned against the car, completely relaxed, almost too relaxed, like an old movie drunk against a lamppost.

“Hello, Brenda,” FJ said.

“Hello, FJ.”

Then he nodded toward Myron. “And you too, Myron.”

His smile did more than lack warmth. It was the most purely physical smile Myron had ever seen, a byproduct strictly of the brain giving specific orders to certain muscles. It touched no part of him but his lips.

Myron circled the car and feigned inspecting it. “Not a bad job, FJ. But next time put a little muscle into the hubcaps. They’re filthy.”

FJ looked at Brenda. “This the famed Bolitar rapier wit I’ve heard so much about?”

She shrugged sympathetically.

Myron motioned at them with his hands. “You two know each other?”

“But of course,” FJ said. “We went to prep school together. At Lawrenceville.”

Bubba and Rocco lumbered a few steps closer. They looked like Luca Brasi Youth.

Myron eased between Brenda and FJ. The protective move would probably piss her off, but tough. “So what can we do for you, FJ?”

“I just want to make sure that Ms. Slaughter is honoring her contract with me.”

“I don’t have a contract with you,” Brenda said.

“Your father—one Horace Slaughter—is your agent, no?”

“No,” Brenda said. “Myron is.”

“Oh?” FJ’s eyes slithered toward Myron. Myron kept up the eye contact, but there was still nothing there, like looking into the windows of an abandoned building. “I’d been informed otherwise.”

Myron shrugged. “Life is change, FJ. Gotta learn to adapt.”

“Adapt,” FJ said, “or die.”

Myron nodded and said, “Oooo.”

FJ kept the stare going a few more seconds. He had skin that looked like wet clay, as if it might dissolve under heavy rains. He turned back to Brenda. “Your father used to be your agent,” he said. “Before Myron.”

Myron handled that one. “And what if he was?”

“He signed with us. Brenda was going to bow out of the WPBA and join the PWBL. It’s all spelled out in the contract.”

Myron looked at Brenda. She shook her head. “You have Ms. Slaughter’s signature on those contracts?” he asked.

“Like I said, her father—”

“Who has no legal standing in this matter whatsoever. Do you have Brenda’s signature or not?”

FJ looked rather displeased. Bubba and Rocco moved closer still. “We do not.”

“Then you have nothing.” Myron unlocked his car door. “But we’ve all enjoyed this too brief time together. I know I’m a better person for it.”

Bubba and Rocco started toward him. Myron opened the car door. His gun was under his car seat. He debated making a move. It would be dumb, of course. Someone—probably Brenda or Myron—would get hurt.

FJ lifted a hand, and the two men stopped as though they’d been sprayed by Mr. Freeze. “We’re not mobsters,” FJ said. “We’re businessmen.”

“Right,” Myron said. “And Bubba and Rocco over there—they your CPAs?”

A tiny smile came to FJ’s lips. The smile was strictly reptilian, meaning it was far warmer than his other ones. “If you are indeed her agent,” FJ said, “then it would behoove you to speak with me.”

Myron nodded. “Call my office, make an appointment,” he said.

“We’ll talk soon then,” FJ said.

“Looking forward to it. And keep using the word behoove. It really impresses people.”

Brenda opened her car door and got in. Myron did likewise. FJ came around to Myron’s window and knocked on the glass. Myron lowered the window.

“Sign with us or don’t sign with us,” FJ said quietly. “That’s business. But when I kill you, well, that will be for fun.”

Myron was about to crack wise again, but something—probably a fly-through of good sense—made him pause. FJ moved away then. Rocco and Bubba followed. Myron watched them disappear, his heart flapping in his chest like a caged condor.

They parked on a lot on Seventy-first Street and walked to the Dakota. The Dakota remains one of New York’s premier buildings, though it’s still best known for John Lennon’s assassination. A fresh bouquet of roses marked the spot where his body had fallen. Myron always felt a little weird crossing over it, as if he were trampling on a grave or something. The Dakota doorman must have seen Myron a hundred times by now, but he always pretended otherwise and buzzed up to Win’s apartment.

Introductions were brief. Win found Brenda a place to study. She broke out a medical textbook the size of a stone tablet and made herself comfortable. Win and Myron moved back into a living room semidecorated in the manner of Louis the Somethingteenth. There was a fireplace with big iron tools and a bust on the mantel. The substantial furniture looked, as always, freshly polished yet plenty old. Oil paintings of stern yet effeminate men stared down from the walls. And just to keep things in the proper decade, there was a big-screen TV and VCR front and center.

The two friends sat and put their feet up.

“So what do you think?” Myron asked.

“She’s too big for my tastes,” Win said. “But nicely toned legs.”

“I mean, about protecting her.”

“We’ll find a place,” Win said. He laced his hands behind his neck. “Talk to me.”

“Do you know Arthur Bradford?”

“The gubernatorial candidate?”

“Yes.”

Win nodded. “We’ve met several times. I played golf with him and his brother once at Merion.”

“Can you set up a meet?”

“No problem. They’ve been hitting us up for a sizable donation.” He crossed his ankles. “So how does Arthur Bradford fit into all this?”

Myron recapped the day’s developments: the Honda Accord following them, the phone taps, the bloody clothes, Horace Slaughter’s phone calls to Bradford’s office, FJ’s surprise visit, Elizabeth Bradford’s murder, and Anita’s role in finding the body.

Win looked unimpressed. “Do you really see a link between the Bradfords’ past and the Slaughters’ present?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Then let me see if I can follow your rationale. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Okey-dokey.”

Win dropped his feet to the floor and steepled his fingers, resting his indexes against his chin. “Twenty years ago Elizabeth Bradford died under somewhat murky circumstances. Her death was ruled an accident, albeit a bizarre one. You do not buy that one. The Bradfords are rich, and thus you are extra-suspicious of the official rendering—”

“It’s not just that they’re rich,” Myron interrupted. “I mean, falling off her own balcony? Come on.”

“Yes, fine, fair enough.” Win did the hand-steeple again. “Let us pretend that you are correct in your suspicions. Let us assume that something unsavory did indeed occur when Elizabeth Bradford plunged to her death. And I am further going to assume—as you no doubt have—that Anita Slaughter, in her capacity as maid or servant or what have you, happened upon the scene and witnessed something incriminating.”

Myron nodded. “Continue.”

Win spread his hands. “Well, my friend, that is where you reach an impasse. If the dear Ms. Slaughter did indeed see something that she was not supposed to, the issue would have been resolved immediately. I know the Bradfords. They are not people who take chances. Anita Slaughter would have been killed or forced to run immediately. But instead—and here is the rub—she waited a full nine months before disappearing. I therefore conclude that the two incidents are unrelated.”

Behind them Brenda cleared her throat. They both turned to the doorway. She stared straight at Myron. She did not look happy.

“I thought you two were discussing a business problem,” she said.

“We are,” Myron said quickly. “I, uh, mean we’re going to. That’s why I came here. To discuss a business problem. But we just started talking about this first, and well, you know, one thing led to another. But it wasn’t intentional or anything. I mean, I came here to discuss a business problem, right, Win?”

Win leaned forward and patted Myron’s knee. “Smooth,” he said.

She crossed her arms. Her eyes were two drill bits—say, three-sixteenths of an inch, quarter inch tops.

“How long have you been standing there?” Myron asked.

Brenda gestured toward Win. “Since he said I had nicely toned legs,” she said. “I missed the part about being too big for his tastes.”

Win smiled. Brenda did not wait to be asked. She crossed the room and grabbed an open chair. She kept her eyes on Win. “For the record, I don’t buy any of this either,” Brenda said to him. “Myron has trouble believing a mother would just abandon her little daughter. He has no trouble believing a father would do the same, just not a mother. But as I’ve explained to him, he’s something of a sexist.”

“A snorting pig,” Win agreed.

“But,” she continued, “if you two are going to sit here and play Holmes and Watson, I do see a way around your”—she made quote marks with her finger—“impasse.”

“Do tell,” Win said.

“When Elizabeth Bradford fell to her death, my mother may have seen something that appeared innocuous at first. I don’t know what. Something bothersome maybe but nothing to get excited about. She continues to work for these people, scrubbing their floors and toilets. And maybe one day she opens a drawer. Or a closet. And maybe she sees something that coupled with what she saw the day Elizabeth Bradford died leads her to conclude that it wasn’t an accident after all.”

Win looked at Myron. Myron raised his eyebrows.

Brenda sighed. “Before you two continue your patronizing glances—the ones that say, ‘Golly gee, the woman is actually capable of cogitation’—let me add that I’m just giving you a way around the impasse. I don’t buy it for a second. It leaves too much unexplained.”

“Like what?” Myron asked.

She turned to him. “like why my mother would run away the way she did. Like why she would leave that cruel note for my father about another man. Like why she left us penniless. Like why she would leave behind a daughter she theoretically loved.”

There was no quiver in the voice. Just the opposite, in fact. The tone was far too steady, straining too hard for normality.

“Maybe she wanted to protect her daughter from harm,” Myron said. “Maybe she wanted to discourage her husband from looking for her.”

She frowned. “So she took all his money and faked running away with another man?” Brenda looked at Win. “Does he really believe this crap?”

Win held his hands palms up and nodded apologetically.

Brenda turned back to Myron. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but it just doesn’t add up. My mother ran away twenty years ago. Twenty years. In all that time couldn’t she have done more than write a couple of letters and call my aunt? Couldn’t she have figured out a way to see her own daughter? To set up a meet? At least once in twenty years? In all that time couldn’t she have gotten herself settled and come back for me?”

She stopped as though out of breath. She hugged her knees to her chest and turned away. Myron looked at Win. Win kept still. The silence pressed against the windows and doors.

Win was the one who finally spoke. “Enough speculating. Let me call Arthur Bradford. He’ll see us tomorrow.”

Win left the room. With some people, you might be skeptical or at least wonder how they could be so sure a gubernatorial candidate would see them on such short notice. Not so when it came to Win.

Myron looked over at Brenda. She did not look back. A few minutes later Win returned.

“Tomorrow morning,” Win said. “Ten o’clock.”

“Where?”

“The estate at Bradford Farms. In Livingston.”

Brenda stood. “If we’re finished with this topic, I’ll leave you two alone.” She looked at Myron. “To discuss a business problem.”

“There is one more thing,” Win said.

“What?”

“The question of a safe house.”

She stopped and waited.

Win leaned back. “I am inviting both you and Myron to stay here if you’re comfortable. As you can see, I have plenty of room. You can use the bedroom at the end of the corridor. It has its own bathroom. Myron will be across the hallway. You’ll have the security of the Dakota and easy, close proximity to the two of us.”

Win glanced at Myron, who tried to hide his surprise. Myron frequently stayed overnight—he even kept clothes and a bunch of toiletries here—but Win had never made an offer like this before. He usually demanded total privacy.

Brenda nodded and said, “Thank you.”

“The only potential problem,” Win said, “is my private life.”

Uh-oh.

“I may bring in a dizzying array of ladies for a variety of purposes,” he went on. “Sometimes more than one. Sometimes I film them. Does that bother you?”

“No,” she said. “As long as I can do the same with men.”

Myron started coughing.

Win remained unfazed. “But of course. I keep the video camera in that cabinet.”

She turned to the cabinet and nodded. “Got a tripod?”

Win opened his mouth, closed it, shook his head. “Too easy,” he said.

“Smart man.” Brenda smiled. “Good night, guys.”

When she left, Win looked at Myron. “You can close your mouth now.”

Win poured himself a cognac. “So what business problem did you want to discuss?”

“It’s Esperanza,” Myron said. “She wants a partnership.”

“Yes, I know.”

“She told you?”

Win swirled the liquid in the snifter. “She consulted me. On the hows mostly. The legal setup for such a change.”

“And you never told me?”

Win did not reply. The answer was obvious. Win hated stating the obvious. “Care for a Yoo-Hoo?”

Myron shook his head. “The truth is, I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Yes, I know. You’ve been stalling.”

“Did she tell you that?”

Win looked at him. “You know her better than that.”

Myron nodded. He did know better. “Look, she’s my friend—”

“Correction,” Win interrupted. “She’s your best friend. More so, perhaps, than even I. But you must forget that for now. She is just an employee—a great one perhaps—but your friendship must be meaningless in this decision. For your sake as well as hers.”

Myron nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, forget I said that. And I do understand where she’s coming from. She’s been with me since the beginning. She’s worked hard. She’s finished law school.”

“But?”

“But a partnership? I’d love to promote her, give her her own office, give her more responsibility, even work out a profit-sharing program. But she won’t accept that. She wants to be a partner.”

“Has she told you why?”

“Yeah,” Myron said.

“And?”

“She doesn’t want to work for anyone. It’s as simple as that. Not even me. Her father worked menial jobs for scumbags his whole life. Her mother cleaned other people’s houses. She swore that one day she would work for herself.”

“I see,” Win said.

“And I sympathize. Who wouldn’t? But her parents probably worked for abusive ogres. Forget our friendship. Forget the fact that I love Esperanza like a sister. I’m a good boss. I’m fair. Even she’d have to admit that.”

Win took a deep sip. “But clearly that is not enough for her.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Give in? Business partnerships between friends or family never work. Never. It’s just that simple. Money screws up every relationship. You and I—we work hard to keep our businesses linked but separate. That’s why we get away with it. We have similar goals, but that’s it. There is no money connection. I know a lot of good relationships—and good businesses—that have been destroyed over something like this. My father and his brother still don’t talk because of a business partnership. I don’t want that to happen here.”

“Have you told Esperanza this?”

He shook his head. “But she’s given me a week to make a decision. Then she walks.”

“Tough spot,” Win said.

“Any suggestions?”

“Not a one.” Then Win tilted his head and smiled.

“What?”

“Your argument,” Win said. “I find it ironic.”

“How so?”

“You believe in marriage and family and monogamy and all that nonsense, correct?”

“So?”

“You believe in raising children, the picket fences, the basketball pole in the driveway, peewee football, dance classes, the whole suburbia scene.”

“And again I say, so?”

Win spread his arms. “So I would argue that marriages and the like never work. They inevitably lead to divorce or disillusionment or the deadening of dreams or at the very least, bitterness and resentment. I might—similar to you—point to my own family as an example.”

“It’s not the same thing, Win.”

“Oh, I recognize that. But the truth is, we all take facts and compute them through our own experiences. You had a wonderful family life; thus you believe as you do. I am of course the opposite. Only a leap of faith could change our positions.”

Myron made a face. “Is this supposed to be helping?”

“Heavens, no,” Win said. “But I do so enjoy philosophical folly.”

Win picked up the remote and switched on the television. Nick at Night. Mary Tyler Moore was on. They grabbed fresh drinks and settled back to watch.

Win took another sip, reddening his cheeks. “Maybe Lou Grant will have your answer.”

He didn’t. Myron imagined what would happen if he treated Esperanza the same way Lou treated Mary. If Esperanza were in a good mood, she’d probably tear out his hair until he looked like Murray.

Bedtime. On his way to his room, Myron checked on Brenda. She was sitting lotus style on the antique Queen Something-or-other bed. The large textbook was open in front of her. Her concentration was total, and for a moment he just watched her. Her face displayed the same serenity he’d seen on the court. She wore flannel pajamas, her skin still a little wet from a recent shower, a towel wrapped around her hair.

Brenda sensed him and looked up. When she smiled at him, he felt something tighten in his stomach.

“You need anything?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “You solve your business problem?”

“No.”

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop before.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I meant what I said earlier. I’d like you to be my agent.”

“I’m glad.”

“You’ll draw up the papers?”

Myron nodded.

“Good night, Myron.”

“Good night, Brenda.”

She looked down and turned a page. Myron watched her for another second. Then he went to bed.

They took Win’s Jaguar to the Bradford estate because, as Win explained, people like the Bradfords “don’t do Taurus.” Neither did Win.

Win dropped Brenda off at practice and headed down Route 80 to Passaic Avenue, which had finally completed a widening program that began when Myron was in high school. They finished up on Eisenhower Parkway, a beautiful four-lane highway that ran for maybe five miles. Ah, New Jersey.

A guard with enormous ears greeted them at the gate of, as the sign said, Bradford Farms. Right. Most farms are known for their electronic fences and security guards. Wouldn’t want anyone getting into the carrots and corn. Win leaned out the window, gave the guy the snooty smile, and was quickly waved through. A strange pang struck Myron as they drove through. How many times had he gone past the gate as a kid, trying to peer through the thick shrubs for a glance at the proverbial greener grass, dreaming up scenarios for the lush, adventure-filled life that lay within these manicured grounds?

He knew better now, of course. Win’s familial estate, Lockwood Manor, made this place look like a railroad shanty, so Myron had seen up close how the superrich lived. It was indeed pretty, but pretty doesn’t mean happy. Wow. That was deep. Maybe next time Myron would conclude that money can’t buy happiness. Stay tuned.

Scattered cows and sheep helped keep the farm illusion—for the purpose of nostalgia or a tax write-off, Myron could not say, though he had his suspicions. They pulled up to a white farmhouse that had undergone more renovations than an aging movie queen.

An old black man wearing gray butler’s tails answered the door. He gave them a slight bow and asked them to follow him. In the corridor were two goons dressed like Secret Service men. Myron glanced at Win. Win nodded. Not Secret Service guys. Goons. The bigger of the two smiled at them like they were cocktail franks heading back to the kitchen. One big. One skinny. Myron remembered Mabel Edwards’s descriptions of her attackers. Not much to go on if he couldn’t check for a tattoo, but worth keeping in mind.

The butler or manservant or whatever led them into the library. Rounded walls of books climbed three stories high, topped by a glass cupola that let in the proper amount of fresh light. The room might have been a converted silo, or maybe it just looked that way. Hard to tell. The books were leather and in series and untouched. Cherry mahogany dominated the scene. Paintings of old sailing vessels were framed under portrait lamps. There was a huge antique globe in the center of the room, not unlike the one Win had in his own office. Rich people like old globes, Myron surmised. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they are both expensive and utterly useless.

The chairs and couches were leather with gold buttons. The lamps were Tiffany. A book lay strategically open on a coffee table next to a bust of Shakespeare. Rex Harrison was not sitting in the corner wearing a smoking jacket, but he should have been.

As though on cue, a door on the other side of the room—a bookshelf actually—swung open. Myron half expected Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson to storm into the room calling for Alfred, maybe tilt back the head of Shakespeare, and turn a hidden knob. Instead it was Arthur Bradford, followed by his brother, Chance. Arthur was very tall, probably six-six, thin, and stooped a bit the way tall people over the age of fifty are. He was bald, his fringe hair trimmed short. Chance was under six feet with wavy brown hair and the kind of boyish good looks that made it impossible to tell his age, though Myron knew from the press clippings that he was forty-nine, three years younger than Arthur.

Playing the part of the perfect politician, Arthur beelined toward them, a fake smile at the ready, hand extended in such a way as either to shake hands or to imply that the extended hand hoped to touch more than just flesh.

“Windsor!” Arthur Bradford exclaimed, grasping Win’s hand as if he’d been searching for it all his life. “How wonderful to see you.”

Chance headed toward Myron like it was a double date and he had gotten stuck with the ugly girl and was used to it.

Win flashed the vague smile. “Do you know Myron Bolitar?”

The brothers switched handshaking partners with the practiced proficiency of experienced square dancers. Shaking Arthur Bradford’s hand was like shaking hands with an old, unoiled baseball glove. Up close, Myron could see that Arthur Bradford was big-boned and rough-hewn and large-featured and red-faced. Still the farm boy under the suit and manicure.

“We’ve never met,” Arthur said through the big smile, “but everyone in Livingston—heck, all of New Jersey—knows Myron Bolitar.”

Myron made his aw-shucks face but refrained from batting his eyes.

“I’ve been watching you play ball since you were in high school,” Arthur continued with great earnestness. “I’m a big fan.”

Myron nodded, knowing that no Bradford had ever stepped foot in Livingston High School’s gymnasium. A politician who stretched the truth. What a shock.

“Please, gentlemen, sit down.”

Everyone grabbed smooth leather. Arthur Bradford offered coffee. Everyone accepted. A Latina woman opened the door. Arthur Bradford said to her, “Café, por favor.” Another linguist.

Win and Myron were on a couch. The brothers sat across from them in matching wingback chairs. Coffee was wheeled in on something that could have doubled as a coach for a palace ball. The coffee was poured and milked and sugared. Then Arthur Bradford, the candidate himself, took over and actually handed Myron and Win their beverages. Regular guy. Man of the people.

Everyone settled back. The servant faded away. Myron raised the cup to his lips. The problem with his new coffee addiction was that he drank only coffee-bar coffee, the potent “gourmet” stuff that could eat through driveway sealant. The at-home brews tasted to his suddenly picky palate like something sucked through a sewer grate on a hot afternoon—this coming from a man who could not tell the difference between a perfectly aged Merlot and a recently stomped Manischewitz. But when Myron took a sip from the Bradfords’ fine china, well, the rich have their ways. The stuff was ambrosia.

Arthur Bradford put down his Wedgwood cup and saucer. He leaned forward, his forearms resting on his knees, his hands in a quiet clasp. “First, let me tell you how thrilled I am to have you both here. Your support means a great deal to me.”

Bradford turned toward Win. Win’s face was totally neutral, patient.

“I understand Lock-Horne Securities wants to expand its Florham Park office and open a new one in Bergen County,” Bradford went on. “If I can be of any help at all, Windsor, please let me know.”

Win gave a noncommittal nod.

“And if there are any state bonds Lock-Horne has any interest in underwriting, well, again I would be at your disposal.”

Arthur Bradford sat up on his haunches now, as though waiting for a scratch behind the ears. Win rewarded him with another noncommittal nod. Good doggie. Hadn’t taken Bradford long to start with the graft, had it? Bradford cleared his throat and turned his attention to Myron.

“I understand, Myron, that you own a sports representation company.”

He tried to imitate the Win nod, but he went too far. Not subtle enough. Must be something in the genes.

“If there is anything I can do to help, please do not hesitate to ask.”

“Can I sleep in the Lincoln bedroom?” Myron asked.

The brothers froze for a moment, looked at each other, then exploded into laughter. The laughs were about as genuine as a televangelist’s hair. Win looked over at Myron. The look said, go ahead.

“Actually, Mr. Bradford—”

Through his laugh he stuck up a hand the size of a throw pillow and said, “Please, Myron, call me Arthur.”

“Arthur, right. There is something you can do for us.”

Arthur and Chance’s laughter segued into chuckles before fading away like a song on the radio. Their faces grew harder now. Game time. They both leaned into the strike zone a bit, signaling to one and all that they were going to listen to Myron’s problem with four of the most sympathetic ears in existence.

“Do you remember a woman named Anita Slaughter?” Myron asked.

They were good, both of them thoroughbred politicians, but their bodies still jolted as if they’d been zapped with a stun gun. They recovered fast enough, busying themselves with the pretense of scouring for a recollection, but there was no doubt. A nerve had been jangled big time.

“I can’t place the name,” Arthur said, his face twisted as though he’d given this thought process an effort equal to childbirth. “Chance?”

“The name is not unfamiliar,” Chance said, “but …” He shook his head.

Not unfamiliar. You gotta love it when they speak politicianese.

“Anita Slaughter worked here,” Myron said. “Twenty years ago. She was a maid or house servant of some kind.”

Again the deep, probing thought. If Rodin were here, he’d break out the good bronze for these guys. Chance kept his eyes on his brother, waiting for his stage cue. Arthur Bradford held the pose for a few more seconds before he suddenly snapped his fingers.

“Of course,” he said. “Anita. Chance, you remember Anita.”

“Yes, of course,” Chance chimed in. “I guess I never knew her last name.”

They were both smiling now like morning anchors during a sweeps week.

“How long did she work for you?” Myron asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Arthur said. “A year or two, I guess. I really don’t remember. Chance and I weren’t responsible for household help, of course. That was more Mother’s doing.”

Already with the “plausible deniability.” Interesting. “Do you remember why she left your family’s employ?”

Arthur Bradford’s smile stayed frozen, but something was happening to his eyes. His pupils were expanding, and for a moment it looked like he was having trouble focusing. He turned to Chance. They both looked uncertain now, not sure how to handle this sudden frontal assault, not wanting to answer but not wanting to lose the potentially massive Lock-Horne Securities support either.

Arthur took the lead. “No, I don’t remember.” When in doubt, evade. “Do you, Chance?”

Chance spread his hands and gave them the boyish smile. “So many people in and out.” He looked to Win as if to say, You know how it is. But Win’s eyes, as usual, offered no solace.

“Did she quit or was she fired?”

“Oh, I doubt she was fired,” Arthur said quickly. “My mother was very good to the help. She rarely, if ever, fired anyone. Not in her nature.”

The man was pure politician. The answer might be true or not—that was pretty much irrelevant to Arthur Bradford—but under any circumstances, a poor black woman fired as a servant by a wealthy family would not play well in the press. A politician innately sees this and calculates his response in a matter of seconds; reality and truth must always take a backseat to the gods of sound bite and perception.

Myron pressed on. “According to her family, Anita Slaughter worked here until the day she disappeared.”

They both were too smart to bite and say, “Disappeared?,” but Myron decided to wait them out anyway. People hate silence and often jump in just to break it. This was an old cop trick: Say nothing and let them dig their own graves with explanations. With politicians the results were always interesting: They were smart enough to know they should keep their mouths shut, yet genetically incapable of doing so.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur Bradford said at last. “As I explained earlier, Mother handled these matters.”

“Then maybe I should talk to her,” Myron said.

“Mother is not well, I’m afraid. She’s in her eighties, poor dear.”

“I’d still like to try.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

There was just a hint of steel in his voice now.

“I see,” Myron said. “Do you know who Horace Slaughter is?”

“No,” Arthur said. “I assume he’s a relative of Anita’s?”

“Her husband.” Myron looked over at Chance. “You know him?”

“Not that I recall,” Chance said. Not that I recall. Like he was on a witness stand, needing to leave himself the out.

“According to his phone records, he’s been calling your campaign headquarters a lot lately.”

“Many people call our campaign headquarters,” Arthur said. Then he added with a small chuckle, “At least I hope they do.”

Chance chuckled too. Real yucksters, these Bradford boys.

“Yeah, I guess.” Myron looked at Win. Win nodded. Both men stood up.

“Thank you for your time,” Win said. “We’ll show ourselves out.”

The two politicians tried not to look too stunned. Chance finally cracked a bit. “What the hell is this?” Arthur silenced him with a look. He rose to shake hands, but Myron and Win were already at the door.

Myron turned and did his best Columbo. “Funny.”

“What?” Arthur Bradford said.

“That you don’t remember Anita Slaughter better. I thought you would.”

Arthur turned his palms upward. “We’ve had lots of people work here over the years.”

“True,” Myron said, stepping through the portal. “But how many of them found your wife’s dead body?”

The two men turned to marble—still and smooth and cool. Myron did not wait for more. He released the door and followed Win out.

As they drove through the gate, Win said, “What exactly did we just accomplish?”

“Two things. One, I wanted to find out if they had something to hide. Now I know they do.”

“Based on?”

“Their outright lies and evasiveness.”

“They’re politicians,” Win said. “They’d lie and evade if you asked them what they had for breakfast.”

“You don’t think there’s something there?”

“Actually,” Win said, “I do. And thing two?”

“I wanted to stir them up.”

Win smiled. He liked that idea. “So what next, Kemo Sabe?”

“We need to investigate Elizabeth Bradford’s premature demise,” Myron said.

“How?”

“Hop onto South Livingston Avenue. I’ll tell you where to make the turn.”

The Livingston Police Station sat next to the Livingston Town Hall and across the street from the Livingston Public Library and Livingston High School. A true town center. Myron entered and asked for Officer Francine Neagly. Francine had graduated from the high school across the street the same year as Myron. He’d hoped to get lucky and catch her at the station.

A stem-looking desk sergeant informed Myron that Officer Neagly was “not present at this particular time”—that’s how cops talk—but that she had just radioed in for her lunch break and would be at the Ritz Diner.

The Ritz Diner was truly ugly. The formerly workmanlike brick structure had been spray-painted seaweed green with a salmon pink door—a color scheme too gaudy for a Carnival Cruise ship. Myron hated it. In its heyday, when Myron was in high school, the diner had been a run-of-the-mill, unpretentious eatery called the Heritage. It’d been a twenty-four-hour spot back then, owned by Greeks naturally—this seemed to be a state law—and frequented by high school kids grabbing burgers and fries after a Friday or Saturday night of doing nothing. Myron and his friends would don their varsity jackets, go out to a variety of house parties, and end up here. He tried now to remember what he did at those parties, but nothing specific came to mind. He didn’t imbibe in high school—alcohol made him sick—and was prudish to the point of Pollyanna when it came to the drug scene. So what did he do at these things? He remembered the music, of course, blaring the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and Supertramp, gleaning deep meaning from the lyrics of Blue Oyster Cult songs (“Yo, man, what do you think Eric really means when he says, ‘I want to do it to your daughter on a dirt road’?”). He remembered occasionally making out with a girl, rarely more, and then their avoiding each other at all costs for the rest of their scholastic lives. But that was pretty much it. You went to the parties because you were afraid you’d miss something. But nothing ever happened. They were all an indistinguishable, monotonous blur now.

What he did remember—what, he guessed, would always remain vivid in the old memory banks—was coming home late and finding his dad feigning sleep in the recliner. It didn’t matter what time it was. Two, three in the morning. Myron did not have a curfew. His parents trusted him. But Dad still stayed up every Friday and Saturday night and waited in that recliner and worried and when Myron put his key in the lock, he faked being asleep. Myron knew he was faking. His dad knew Myron knew. But Dad still tried to pull it off every time.

Win elbowed him back to reality. “Are you going to go in, or are we just going to marvel at this monument to nouveau tackiness?”

“My friends and I used to hang out here,” Myron said. “When I was in high school.”

Win looked at the diner, then at Myron. “You guys were the balls.”

Win waited in the car. Myron found Francine Neagly at the counter. He sat on the stool next to her and fought off the desire to spin it.

“That police uniform,” Myron said, and gave a little whistle. “It’s quite the turn-on.”

Francine Neagly barely looked up from her burger. “Best part is, I can also use it to strip at bachelor parties.”

“Saves on the overhead.”

“Right-o.” Francine took a bite out of a burger so rare it screamed ouch. “As I live and breathe,” she said, “the local hero appears in public.”

“Please don’t make a fuss.”

“Good thing I’m here, though. If the women get out of control, I can shoot them for you.” She wiped very greasy hands. “I heard you moved out of town,” she said.

“I did.”

“Been the opposite around here lately.” She grabbed another napkin out of the dispenser. “Most towns, all you hear about is how people want to grow up and move away. But here, well, everyone’s coming back to Livingston and raising their own families. Remember Santola? He’s back. Three kids. And Friedy? He lives in the Weinbergs’ old house. Two kids. Jordan lives by St. Phil’s. Fixed up some old piece of shit. Three kids, all girls. I swear, half our class got married and moved back to town.”

“How about you and Gene Duluca?” Myron asked with a little smile.

She laughed. “Dumped him my freshman year of college. Christ, we were gross, huh?”

Gene and Francine had been the class couple. They spent lunch hours sitting at a table, French-kissing while eating cafeteria food, both wearing debris-enmeshed braces.

“Gross City,” Myron agreed.

She took another bite. “Wanna order something gooey and suck face? See what it was like?”

“If only I had more time.”

“That’s what they all say. So what can I do for you, Myron?”

“Remember that death at the Bradford place when we were in high school?”

She stopped mid-bite. “A little,” she said.

“Who would’ve handled it for the department?”

She swallowed. “Detective Wickner.”

Myron remembered him. Ever-present reflector sunglasses. Very active in Little League. Cared about winning waaaaay too much. Hated the kids once they got into high school and stopped worshiping him. Big on speeding tickets for young drivers. But Myron had always liked the man. Old Americana. As dependable as a good tool set.

“He still on the force?”

Francine shook her head. “Retired. Moved to a lake cabin upstate. But he still comes to town a lot. Hangs out at the fields and shakes hands. They named a backstop after him. Had a big ceremony and everything.”

“Sorry I missed that,” Myron said. “Would the case file still be at the station?”

“How long ago this happen?”

“Twenty years.”

Francine looked at him. Her hair was shorter than in high school, and the braces were gone, but other than that, she looked exactly the same. “In the basement maybe. Why?”

“I need it.”

“Just like that.”

He nodded.

“You’re serious?”

“Yep.”

“And you want me to get it for you.”

“Yep.”

She wiped her hands with a napkin. “The Bradfords are powerful folks.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You looking to embarrass him or something? He running for governor and all.”

“No.”

“And I guess you have a good reason for needing it?”

“Yep.”

“You want to tell me what it is, Myron?”

“Not if I don’t have to.”

“How about a teensy-weensy hint?”

“I want to verify that it was an accident.”

She looked at him. “You have anything that says otherwise?”

He shook his head. “I barely have a suspicion.”

Francine Neagly picked up a fry and examined it. “And if you do find something, Myron, you’ll come to me, right? Not the press. Not the bureau boys. Me.”

“Deal,” Myron said.

She shrugged. “Okay. I’ll take a look for it.”

Myron handed her his card. “Good seeing you again, Francine.”

“Likewise,” she said, swallowing another bite. “Hey, you involved with anyone?”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “You?”

“No,” she said. “But now that you mention it, I think I kinda miss Gene.”

Myron hopped back into the Jaguar. Win started it up and pulled out.

“Your Bradford plan,” Win said. “It involved prodding him into action, did it not?”

“It did.”

“Then congratulations are in order. The two gentlemen from the Bradfords’ foyer did a pass by while you were inside.”

“Any sign of them now?”

Win shook his head. “They’re probably covering the ends of the road. Someone will pick us up. How would you like to play it?”

Myron thought a moment. “I don’t want to tip them off yet. Let them follow us.”

“Where to, O wise one?”

Myron checked his watch. “What’s your schedule look like?”

“I need to get back to the office by two.”

“Can you drop me off at Brenda’s practice? I’ll get a ride back.”

Win nodded. “I live to chauffeur.”

They took Route 280 to the New Jersey Turnpike. Win turned on the radio. A commercial voice-over sternly warned people not to buy a mattress over the phone but, rather, to go to Sleepy’s and “consult your mattress professional.” Mattress professional. Myron wondered if that was a master’s program or what.

“Are you armed?” Win asked.

“I left my gun in my car.”

“Open the glove compartment.”

Myron did. There were three guns and several boxes of ammunition. He frowned. “Expecting an armed invasion?”

“My, what a clever quip,” Win said. He gestured to a weapon. “Take the thirty-eight. It’s loaded. There’s a holster under the car seat.”

Myron feigned reluctance, but the truth was, he should have been carrying all along.

Win said, “You realize, of course, that young FJ will not back down.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We have to kill him. There is no choice.”

“Kill Frank Ache’s son? Not even you could survive that.”

Win sort of smiled. “Is that a challenge?”

“No,” Myron said quickly. “Just don’t do anything yet. Please. I’ll come up with something.”

Win shrugged.

They paid a toll and drove past the Vince Lombardi rest stop. In the distance Myron could still see the Meadowlands Sports Complex. Giants Stadium and the Continental Arena floated above the vast swampland that was East Rutherford, New Jersey. Myron stared off at the arena for a moment, silent, remembering his recent shot at playing pro basketball again. It hadn’t worked out, but Myron was over that now. He had been robbed of playing the game he loved, but he’d accepted it, come to terms with reality. He’d put it behind him, had moved on, had let go of his anger.

So what if he still thought about it every day?

“I’ve done a bit of digging,” Win said. “When young FJ was at Princeton, a geology professor accused him of cheating on an exam.”

“And?”

“Na, na, na. Na, na, na. Hey, hey, hey. Good-bye.”

Myron looked at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Never found the body,” Win said. “The tongue, yes. It was sent to another professor, who’d been considering leveling the same charges.”

Myron felt something flitter in his throat. “Might have been Frank, not FJ.”

Win shook his head. “Frank is psychotic but not wasteful. If Frank had handled it, he would have used a few colorful threats perhaps punctuated by a few well-placed blows. But this kind of overkill—it’s not his style.”

Myron thought about it. “Maybe we can talk to Herman or Frank,” he said. “Get him off our back.”

Win shrugged. “Easier to kill him.”

“Please don’t.”

Another shrug. They kept driving. Win took the Grand Avenue exit. On the right was an enormous complex of town houses. During the mid-eighties, approximately two zillion such complexes had mushroomed across New Jersey. This particular one looked like a staid amusement park or the housing development in Poltergeist.

“I don’t want to sound maudlin,” Myron said, “but if FJ does manage to kill me—”

“I’ll spend several fun-filled weeks spreading slivers of his genitalia throughout New England,” Win said. “After that, I’ll probably kill him.”

Myron actually smiled. “Why New England?”

“I like New England,” Win said. Then he added, “And I would be lonely in New York without you.”

Win pushed the MODE button, and the CD player spun to life. The music from Rent. The lovely Mimi was asking Roger to light her candle. Great stuff. Myron looked at his friend. Win said nothing more. To most people, Win seemed about as sentimental as a meat locker. But the fact was, Win just cared for very few people. With those select few, he was surprisingly open; much like his lethal hands, Win struck deep and hard and then backed off, ready to elude.

“Horace Slaughter only had two credit cards,” Myron said. “Could you check them out?”

“No ATM?”

“Only off his Visa.”

Win nodded, took the card numbers. He dropped Myron off at Englewood High School. The Dolphins were running through a one-on-one defensive drill. One player dribbled in a zigzag formation up the court while the defender bent low and worked on containment. Good drill. Tiring as all hell, but it worked the quads like no other.

There were about a half dozen people in the stands now. Myron took a seat in the front row. Within seconds the coach beelined toward him. She was husky with neatly trimmed black hair, a knit shirt with the New York Dolphins logo on the breast, gray sweatpants, a whistle, and Nike high-tops.

“You Bolitar?” the coach barked.

Her spine was a titanium bar, her face as unyielding as a meter maid’s.

“Yes.”

“Name’s Podich. Jean Podich.” She spoke like a drill sergeant. She put her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels a bit. “Used to watch you play, Bolitar. Friggin’ awesome.”

“Thank you.” He almost added sir.

“Still play at all?”

“Just pickup games.”

“Good. Had a player go down with a twisted ankle. Need someone to fill in for the scrimmage.”

“Pardon me?” Coach Podich was not big on using pronouns.

“Got nine players here, Bolitar. Nine. Need a tenth. Plenty of gym clothes in the equipment room. Sneakers too. Go suit up.”

This was not a request.

“I need my knee brace,” Myron said.

“Got that too, Bolitar. Got it all. The trainer will wrap you up good and tight. Now hustle, man.”

She clapped her hands at him, turned, walked away. Myron stayed still for a second. Great. This was just what he needed.

Podich blew her whistle hard enough to squeeze out an internal organ. The players stopped. “Shoot foul shots, take ten,” she said. “Then scrimmage.”

The players drifted off. Brenda jogged toward him.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“I have to suit up.”

Brenda stifled a smile.

“What?” he said.

“The equipment room,” Brenda said. “All they have is yellow Lycra shorts.”

Myron shook his head. “Then somebody should warn her.”

“Who?”

“Your coach. I put on tight yellow shorts, no way anybody’s going to concentrate on basketball.”

Brenda laughed. “I’ll try to maintain a professional demeanor. But if you post me down low, I may be forced to pinch your butt.”

“I’m not just a plaything,” Myron said, “here for your amusement.”

“Too bad.” She followed him into the equipment room. “Oh, that lawyer who wrote to my dad,” she said. “Thomas Kincaid.”

“Yes.”

“I remember where I heard his name before. My first scholarship. When I was twelve years old. He was the lawyer in charge.”

“What do you mean, in charge?”

“He signed my checks.”

Myron stopped. “You received checks from a scholarship?”

“Sure. The scholarship covered everything. Tuition, board, schoolbooks. I wrote out my expenses, and Kincaid signed the checks.”

“What was the name of the scholarship?”

“That one? I don’t remember. Outreach Education or something like that.”

“How long did Kincaid administer the scholarship?”

“It covered through my high school years. I got an athletic scholarship to college, so basketball paid the freight.”

“What about medical school?”

“I got another scholarship.”

“Same deal?”

“It’s a different scholarship, if that’s what you mean.”

“Does it pay for the same stuff? Tuition, board, the works?”

“Yep.”

“Handled by a lawyer again?”

She nodded.

“Do you remember his name?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Rick Peterson. He works out of Roseland.”

Myron thought about this. Something clicked.

“What?” she asked.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “I got to make a couple of calls. Can you stall Frau Brucha for me?”

She shrugged. “I can try.”

Brenda left him alone. The equipment room was enormous. An eighty-year-old guy worked the desk. He asked Myron for his sizes. Myron told him. Two minutes later the old man handed Myron a pile of clothes. Purple T-shirt, black socks with blue stripes, white jockstrap, green sneakers, and, of course, yellow Lycra shorts.

Myron frowned. “I think you missed a color,” he said.

The old man gave him the eye. “I got a red sports bra, if you’re interested.”

Myron thought about it but ultimately declined.

He slipped on his shirt and jock. Pulling on the shorts was like pulling on a wet suit. Everything felt compressed—not a bad feeling, actually. He grabbed his cellular phone and hurried to the trainer’s room. On the way he passed a mirror. He looked like a box of Crayolas left too long on a windowsill. He lay on a bench and dialed the office. Esperanza answered.

“MB SportsReps.”

“Where’s Cyndi?” Myron asked.

“At lunch.”

A mental image of Godzilla snacking on Tokyo’s citizenry flashed in front of his eyes.

“And she doesn’t like to be called just Cyndi,” Esperanza added. “It’s Big Cyndi.”

“Pardon my overabundance of political sensitivity. Do you have the list of Horace Slaughter’s phone calls?”

“Yes.”

“Any to a lawyer named Rick Peterson?”

The pause was brief. “You’re a regular Mannix,” she said. “Five of them.”

Wheels were beginning to churn in Myron’s head. Never a good thing. “Any other messages?”

“Two calls from the Witch.”

“Please don’t call her that,” Myron said.

Witch was actually an improvement over what Esperanza usually called Jessica (hint: rhymes with Witch but starts with the letter B). Myron had recently hoped for a thawing between the two—Jessica had invited Esperanza to lunch—but he now recognized that nothing short of a thermonuclear meltdown would soften that particular spread of earth. Some mistook this for jealousy. Not so. Five years ago Jessica had hurt Myron. Esperanza had watched it happen. She had seen up close the devastation.

Some people held grudges; Esperanza clutched them and tied them around her waist and used cement and Krazy glue to hold them steady.

“Why does she call here anyway?” Esperanza half snapped. “Doesn’t she know your cellular number?”

“She only uses it for emergencies.”

Esperanza made a noise like she was gagging on a soup ladle. “You two have such a mature relationship.”

“Can I just have the message please?”

“She wants you to call her. At the Beverly Wilshire. Room six-one-eight. Must be the Bitch Suite.”

So much for improvement. Esperanza read off the number. Myron jotted it down.

“Anything else?”

“Your mom called. Don’t forget dinner tonight. Your dad is barbecuing. A potpourri of aunts and uncles will be in attendance.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

“Can’t wait,” she said. Then she hung up.

Myron sat back. Jessica had called twice. Hmm.

The trainer tossed Myron a leg brace. Myron strapped it on, fastening it with Velero. The trainer silently worked on the knee, starting with stretch wrap. Myron debated calling Jessica back right now and decided he still had time. Lying back with his head on a sponge pillow of some sort, he dialed the Beverly Wilshire and asked for Jessica’s room. She picked up as though she’d had her hand on the receiver.

“Hello?” Jessica said.

“Hello there, gorgeous,” he said. Charm. “What are you doing?”

“I just spread out a dozen snapshots of you on the floor,” she said. “I was about to strip naked, coat my entire body with some type of oil, and then undulate on them.”

Myron looked up at the trainer. “Er, can I have an ice pack?”

The trainer looked puzzled. Jessica laughed.

“Undulate,” Myron said. “That’s a good word.”

“Me a writer,” Jessica said.

“So how’s the left coast?” Left coast. Hip lingo.

“Sunny,” she said. “There’s too much damn sun here.”

“So come home.”

There was a pause. Then Jessica said, “I have some good news.”

“Oh?”

“Remember that production company that optioned Control Room?”

“Sure.”

“They want me to produce it and cowrite the screenplay. Isn’t that cool?”

Myron said nothing. A steel band wrapped around his chest.

“It’ll be great,” she continued, forcing pseudojocularity into the cautious tone. “I’ll fly home on weekends. Or you can fly out here sometimes. Say, you can do some recruiting out here, nab some West Coast clients. It’ll be great.”

Silence. The trainer finished up and left the room. Myron was afraid to speak. Seconds passed.

“Don’t be like that,” Jessica said. “I know you’re not happy about this. But it’ll work out. I’ll miss you like mad—you know that—but Hollywood always screws up my books. It’s too big an opportunity.”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it, started again. “Please come home.”

“Myron …”

He closed his eyes. “Don’t do this.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re running away, Jess. It’s what you do best.”

Silence.

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“Screw fair. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Then come home,” he said.

Myron’s grip on the phone was tight. His muscles were tensing. In the background he heard Coach Podich blow that damn whistle.

“You still don’t trust me,” Jessica said softly. “You’re still afraid.”

“And you’ve done so much to assuage my fears, right?” He was surprised by the edge in his voice.

The old image jarred him anew. Doug. A guy named Doug. Five years ago. Or was he a Dougie? Myron bet he was. He bet his friends called him Dougie. Yo, Dougie, wanna party, man? Probably called her Jessie. Dougie and Jessie. Five years ago. Myron had walked in on them, and his heart had crumbled as though it’d been molded in ash.

“I can’t change what happened,” Jessica said.

“I know that.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“I want you to come home. I want us to be together.”

More cellular static. Coach Podich called out his name. Myron could feel something vibrating in his chest like a tuning fork.

“You’re making a mistake,” Jessica said. “I know I’ve had some trouble with commitment before—”

“Some trouble?”

“—but this isn’t like that. I’m not running away. You’re pushing on the wrong issue.”

“Maybe I am,” he said. He closed his eyes. It was hard for him to breathe. He should hang up now. He should be tougher, show some pride, stop wearing his heart on his sleeve, hang up. “Just come home,” he said. “Please.”

He could feel their distance, a continent separating them, their voices bypassing millions of people.

“Let’s both take a deep breath,” she said. “Maybe this isn’t for the phone anyway.”

More silence.

“Look, I got a meeting,” she said. “Let’s talk later, okay?”

She hung up then. Myron held the empty receiver. He was alone. He stood. His legs were shaky.

Brenda met him at the doorway. A towel was draped around her neck. Her face was shiny from sweat. She took one look at him and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She kept her eyes on him. She didn’t believe him, but she wouldn’t push either.

“Nice outfit,” she said.

Myron looked down at his clothing. “I was going to wear a red sports bra,” he said. “It throws the whole look together.”

“Yummy,” she said.

He managed a smile. “Let’s go.”

They started heading down the corridor.

“Myron?”

“Yeah?”

“We talk a lot about me.” She continued walking, not looking at him. “Wouldn’t kill either of us to switch roles now and again. Might even be nice.”

Myron nodded, said nothing. Much as he might wish to be more like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne, Myron was not the silent type, not a macho tough guy who kept all his problems inside him. He confided to Win and Esperanza all the time. But neither one of them was helpful when it came to Jessica. Esperanza hated her so much that she could never think rationally on the subject. And in Win’s case, well, Win was simply not the man to discuss matters of the heart. His views on the subject could conservatively be called “scary.”

When they reached the edge of the court, Myron pulled up short. Brenda looked at him questioningly. Two men stood on the sidelines. Ragged brown suits, totally devoid of any sense of style or fashion. Weary faces, short hair, big guts. No doubt in Myron’s mind.

Cops.

Somebody pointed at Myron and Brenda. The two men sauntered over with a sigh. Brenda looked puzzled. Myron moved a little closer to her. The two men stopped directly in front of them.

“Are you Brenda Slaughter?” one asked.

“Yes.”

“I am Detective David Pepe of the Mahwah Police Department. This is Detective Mike Rinsky. We’d like you to come with us please.”

Myron stepped forward. “What’s this about?”

The two cops looked at him with flat eyes. “And you are?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

The two cops blinked. “And Myron Bolitar is?”

“Miss Slaughter’s attorney,” Myron said.

One cop looked at the other. “That was fast.”

Second cop: “Wonder why she called her attorney already.”

“Weird, huh?”

“I’d say.” He looked the multicolored Myron up and down. Smirked. “You don’t dress like an attorney, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I left my gray vest at home,” Myron said. “What do you guys want?”

“We would like to bring Miss Slaughter to the station,” the first cop said.

“Is she under arrest?”

First Cop looked at Second Cop. “Don’t lawyers know that when we arrest people, we read them their rights?”

“Probably got his degree at home. Maybe from that Sally Struthers school.”

“Got his law degree and VCR repairman certificate in one.”

“Right. Like that.”

“Or maybe he went to that American Bartenders Institute. They got a competitive program, I hear.”

Myron crossed his arms. “Whenever you guys are through. But please keep going. You’re both extremely amusing.”

First Cop sighed. “We’d like to bring Miss Slaughter to the station,” he said again.

“Why?”

“To talk.”

Boy, this was moving along nicely. “Why do you want to talk to her?” Myron tried.

“Not us,” Second Cop said.

“Right, not us.”

“We’re just supposed to pick her up.”

“Like escorts.”

Myron was about to make a comment on their being male escorts, but Brenda put her hand on his forearm. “Let’s just go,” she said.

“Smart lady,” First Cop said.

“Needs a new lawyer,” Second Cop added.

Myron and Brenda sat in the back of an unmarked police car that a blind man could tell was an unmarked police car. It was a brown sedan, the same brown as the cops’ suits, a Chevrolet Caprice with simply too much antenna.

For the first ten minutes of the ride nobody spoke. Brenda’s face was set. She moved her hand along the seat closer until it touched his. Then she left it there. She looked at him. The hand felt warm and nice. He tried to look confident, but he had a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

They drove down Route 4 and up Route 17. Mahwah. Nice suburb, almost on the New York border. They parked behind the Mahwah municipal building. The entrance to the station was in the back. The two cops led them into an interrogation room. There was a metal table bolted to the floor and four chairs. No hot lamp. A mirror took up half a wall. Only a moron who never, ever watched television didn’t know that it was a one-way mirror. Myron often wondered if anybody was fooled by that anymore. Even if you never watched TV, why would the police need a giant mirror in an interrogation room? Vanity?

They were left alone.

“What do you think this is about?” Brenda asked.

Myron shrugged. He had a pretty good idea. But speculating at this stage was worthless. They would find out soon enough. Ten minutes passed. Not a good sign. Another five. Myron decided to call their bluff.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“What?”

“We don’t have to wait around here. Let’s go.”

As if on cue, the door opened. A man and a woman entered. The man was big and barrellike with explosions of hair everyplace. He had a mustache so thick it made Teddy Roosevelt’s look like a limp eyelash. His hairline was low, the kind of low where you can’t tell where the eyebrow ends and the actual hairline begins. He looked like a member of the Politburo. His pants were stretched tautly in the front, creasing obscenely, yet his lack of an ass made them too big in the back. His shirt was also too tight. The collar strangled him. The rolled-up sleeves worked the forearms like tourniquets. He was red-faced and angry.

For those with a scorecard, this would be your Bad Cop.

The woman wore a gray skirt with her detective shield on the waistband and a high-neck white blouse. She was early thirties, blond with freckles and pink cheeks. Healthy-looking. If she were a veal entree, the menu would describe her as “milk-fed.”

She smiled at them warmly. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” Nice, even teeth. “My name is Detective Maureen McLaughlin. I’m with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. This is Detective Dan Tiles. He works for the Mahwah Police Department.”

Tiles did not say anything. He folded his arms and glowered at Myron like he was a vagrant urinating in his garden. Myron looked up at him.

“Tiles,” Myron repeated. “As in the porcelain things in my bathroom?”

McLaughlin kept up the smile. “Miss Slaughter—may I call you Brenda?”

Already with the friendly.

Brenda said, “Yes, Maureen.”

“Brenda, I’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s okay.”

Myron said, “What’s this all about?”

Maureen McLaughlin flashed him the smile now. With the freckles it made for a very pert look. “Can I get either of you something? A coffee maybe? A cold beverage?”

Myron stood. “Let’s go, Brenda.”

“Whoa,” McLaughlin said. “Settle down a second, okay? What’s the problem?”

“The problem is you won’t tell us why we’re here,” Myron said. “Plus you used the word beverage in casual conversation.”

Tiles spoke for the first time. “Tell them,” he said. His mouth never moved. But the shrub below his nose bounced up and down. Kinda like Yosemite Sam.

McLaughlin suddenly looked distraught. “I can’t just blurt it out, Dan. That wouldn’t—”

“Tell them,” Tiles said again.

Myron motioned at them. “You guys rehearse this?” But he was flailing now. He knew what was coming. He just did not want to hear it.

“Please,” McLaughlin said. The smile was gone. “Please sit down.”

They both slid slowly back into their seats. Myron folded his hands and put them on the table.

McLaughlin seemed to be considering her words. “Do you have a boyfriend, Brenda?”

“You running a dating service?” Myron said.

Tiles stepped away from the wall. He reached out and picked up Myron’s right hand for a moment. He dropped it and picked up his left. He studied it, looked disgusted, put it back down.

Myron tried not to look confused. “Palmolive,” he said. “More than just mild.”

Tiles moved away, recrossed his arms. “Tell them,” he said again.

McLaughlin’s eyes were only on Brenda now. She leaned forward a little and lowered her voice. “Your father is dead, Brenda. We found his body three hours ago. I’m sorry.”

Myron had steeled himself, but the words still hit like a falling meteorite. He gripped the table and felt his head spin. Brenda said nothing. Her face didn’t change, but her breathing became shallow gulps.

McLaughlin did not leave much time for condolences. “I realize that this is a very tough time, but we really need to ask you a few questions.”

“Get out,” Myron said.

“What?”

“I want you and Stalin to get the hell out of here right now. This interview is over.”

Tiles said, “You got something to hide, Bolitar?”

“Yeah, that’s it, wolf boy. Now get out.”

Brenda still had not moved. She looked at McLaughlin and uttered one word. “How?”

“How what?”

Brenda swallowed. “How was he murdered?”

Tiles almost leaped across the room. “How did you know he was murdered?”

“What?”

“We didn’t say anything about murder,” Tiles said. He looked very pleased with himself. “Just that your father was dead.”

Myron rolled his eyes. “You got us, Tiles. Two cops drag us in here, play Sipowicz and Simone, and somehow we figure that her father didn’t die of natural causes. Either we’re psychic or we did it.”

“Shut up, asshole.”

Myron stood up quickly, knocking over his chair. He went eyeball to eyeball with Tiles. “Get out.”

“Or?”

“You want a piece of me, Tiles?”

“Love it, hotshot.”

McLaughlin stepped between them. “You boys sprinkle on a little extra testosterone this morning? Back off, both of you.”

Myron kept his eyes on Tiles’s. He took several deep breaths. He was acting irrationally. He knew that. Stupid to lose control. He had to get his act together. Horace was dead. Brenda was in trouble. He had to keep calm.

Myron picked up his chair and sat back down. “My client will not talk to you until we confer.”

“Why?” Brenda said to him. “What’s the big deal?”

“They think you did it,” Myron said.

That surprised her. Brenda turned to McLaughlin. “Am I a suspect?”

McLaughlin gave a friendly, on-your-side shrug. “Hey, it’s too early to rule anybody in or out.”

“That’s cop-speak for yes,” Myron said.

“Shut up, asshole.” Tiles again.

Myron ignored him. “Answer her question, McLaughlin. How was her father killed?”

McLaughlin leaned back, weighing her options. “Horace Slaughter was shot in the head.”

Brenda closed her eyes.

Dan Tiles moved in again. “At close range,” he added.

“Right, close range. Back of the head.”

“Close range,” Tiles repeated. He put his fists on the table. Then he leaned in closer. “Like maybe he knew the killer. Like maybe it was somebody he trusted.”

Myron pointed at him. “You got some food stuck in your mustache. Looks like scrambled eggs.”

Tiles leaned in closer until their noses almost touched. He had big pores. Really big pores. Myron almost feared he’d fall into one. “I don’t like your attitude, asshole.”

Myron leaned in a bit too. Then he gently shook his head from side to side, nose tip making contact with nose tip. “If we were Eskimos,” Myron said, “we’d be engaged right now.”

That backed Tiles up. When he recovered, he said, “Your acting like an ass doesn’t change the facts: Horace Slaughter was shot at close range.”

“Which means squat, Tiles. If you were part of a real force, you’d know that most assassins for hire shoot their victims at close range. Most family members don’t.” Myron had no idea if that was true, but it sounded good.

Brenda cleared her throat. “Where was he shot?”

“Excuse me?” McLaughlin said.

“Where was he shot?”

“I just told you. In the head.”

“No, I mean where. What city?”

But of course they had known that she meant that. They did not want to tell her, hoping to trip her up.

Myron answered the question. “He was found here in Mahwah.” Then he looked at Tiles. “And before Magnum PI pounces again, I know that because we’re in the Mahwah police station. The only reason for that is that the body was found here.”

McLaughlin did not respond directly. She folded her hands in front of her. “Brenda, when was the last time you saw your father?”

“Don’t answer,” Myron said.

“Brenda?”

Brenda looked at Myron. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. She was fighting to hold it all back, and the strain was starting to show. Her voice was almost a plea. “Let’s just get through this, okay?”

“I’m advising you against it.”

“Good advice,” Tiles said. “If you got something to hide.”

Myron looked at Tiles. “I can’t tell. Is that a mustache or really long nostril hair?”

McLaughlin remained overly earnest, a perp’s dearest chum. “It’s like this, Brenda. If you can answer our questions now, we can end this. If you clam up, well, we’ll have to wonder why. It won’t look good, Brenda. It’ll look like you’ve got something to hide. And then there’s the media.”

Myron put his hand out. “What?”

Tiles handled this one. “Simple, asshole. You lawyer her up, we tell the media she’s a suspect and that she wouldn’t cooperate.” He smiled. “Miss Slaughter here will be lucky to endorse condoms.”

Momentary silence. Striking an agent where he lives.

“When did you last see your father, Brenda?”

Myron was about to interrupt, but Brenda silenced him by putting her hand on his forearm. “Nine days ago.”

“Under what circumstances?”

“We were in his apartment.”

“Please continue.”

“Continue with what?” Myron interrupted. Rule twenty-six of lawyering: Never let the interrogator—cop or fellow attorney—get a rhythm. “You asked her when she last saw her father. She told you.”

“I asked under what circumstances,” McLaughlin replied. “Brenda, please tell me what occurred during your visit.”

“You know what occurred,” Brenda said.

That put her a step ahead of Myron.

Maureen McLaughlin nodded. “I have in my possession a sworn complaint.” She slid a piece of paper across the metal table. “Is that your signature, Brenda?”

“Yes.”

Myron took the sheet and began to skim it.

“Does that accurately describe your last meeting with your father?”

Brenda’s eyes were hard now. “Yes.”

“So on this occasion at your father’s apartment—the last time you saw him—your father assaulted you both physically and verbally. Is that correct?”

Myron kept still.

“He shoved me,” Brenda said.

“Hard enough for you to want a restraining order, isn’t that correct?”

Myron tried to keep pace, but he was starting to feel like a buoy in rough waters. Horace had assaulted his own daughter and was now dead. Myron had to get a handle on this, get back into the fray.

“Stop badgering,” he said, his voice sounding weak and forced. “You have the documentation, so let’s get on with it.”

“Brenda, please tell me about your father’s assault.”

“He pushed me,” she said.

“Can you tell me why?”

“No.”

“No, you won’t tell me. Or no, you don’t know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“He just shoved you?”

“Yes.”

“You walked into his apartment. You said, ‘Hi, Dad.’ Then he cursed at you and assaulted you. Is that what you’re telling us?”

Brenda was trying to keep her face steady, but there was shaking near the fault lines. The facade was about to crack.

“That’s enough,” Myron said.

But McLaughlin moved in. “Is that what you’re trying to tell us, Brenda? Your father’s attack was completely unprovoked?”

“She’s not telling you anything, McLaughlin. Back off.”

“Brenda—”

“We’re out of here.” Myron took hold of Brenda’s arm and half dragged her to a standing position. Tiles moved to block the door.

McLaughlin kept talking. “We can help you, Brenda. But this is your last chance. You walk out of here, you’re talking a murder indictment.”

Brenda seemed to snap out of whatever trance she’d been in. “What are you talking about?”

“They’re bluffing,” Myron said.

“You know how this looks, don’t you?” McLaughlin continued. “Your father has been dead awhile. We haven’t done an autopsy yet, but I’d bet he’s been dead for close to a week. You’re a smart girl, Brenda. You put it together. The two of you had problems. We have your own list of serious grievances right here. Nine days ago he assaulted you. You went to court to get him to keep away from you. Our theory is that your father did not obey that order. He was clearly a violent man, probably angered beyond control by what he perceived as your disloyalty. Is that what happened, Brenda?”

Myron said, “Don’t answer.”

“Let me help you, Brenda. Your father didn’t listen to the court order, right? He came after you, didn’t he?”

Brenda said nothing.

“You were his daughter. You disobeyed him. You publicly humiliated him, so much so that he decided to teach you a lesson. And when he came after you—when that big, scary man was going to attack you again—you had no choice. You shot him. It was self-defense, Brenda. I understand that. I would have done the same thing. But if you walk out that door, Brenda, I can’t help you. It moves from something justifiable to coldblooded murder. Plain and simple.”

McLaughlin took her hand. “Let me help you, Brenda.”

The room went still. McLaughlin’s freckled face was totally earnest, the perfect mask of concern and trust and openness. Myron glanced over at Tiles. Tiles quickly diverted his gaze.

Myron didn’t like that.

McLaughlin had laid out a neat little theory. It made sense. Myron could see why they would believe it. There was bad blood between father and daughter. A well-documented history of abuse. A court order …

Hold the phone.

Myron looked back over at Tiles. Tiles would still not meet his eyes.

Then Myron remembered the blood on the shirt in the locker. The cops didn’t know about that, couldn’t know about it.…

“She wants to see her father,” Myron blurted out.

Everybody looked at him. “Excuse me?”

“His body. We want to see Horace Slaughter’s body.”

“That won’t be necessary,” McLaughlin said. “We’ve positively identified him through fingerprints. There’s no reason to put—”

“Are you denying Miss Slaughter the opportunity to view her father’s body?”

McLaughlin backpedaled a bit. “Of course not. If that’s what you really want, Brenda—”

“That’s what we want.”

“I’m speaking to Brenda—”

“I’m her attorney, Detective. You speak to me.”

McLaughlin stopped. Then she shook her head and turned to Tiles. Tiles shrugged.

“Okay then,” McLaughlin said. “We’ll drive you over.”

The Bergen County Medical Examiner’s Office looked like a small elementary school. It was one level, red brick, right angles, and as unassuming a building as one could construct, but then again, what did you want in a morgue? The waiting room chairs were molded plastic and about as comfortable as a pinched nerve. Myron had been here once before, not long after Jessica’s father had been murdered. The memory was not a pleasant one.

“We can go in now,” McLaughlin said.

Brenda stayed close to Myron as they all walked down a short corridor. He put his arm around her waist. She moved in a touch. He was comforting her. He knew that. He also knew that it shouldn’t have felt so right.

They entered a room of gleaming metal and tile. No big storage drawers or anything like that. Clothes—a security guard’s uniform—was in a plastic bag in one corner. All the instruments and utensils and what-have-you’s were in another corner, covered by a sheet. So was the table in the center. Myron could see right away that the body underneath it belonged to a big man.

They paused at the door before gathering around the gurney. With minimum fanfare, a man—Myron assumed he was the medical examiner—pulled the sheet back. For the briefest of moments, Myron thought that maybe the cops had screwed up the ID. It was a whimsical hope, he realized, not anything based on fact. He was sure it ran through every person’s mind who came here to identify someone, even when he knew the truth, a last gasp, a fantasy that a wonderful, beautiful mistake had been made. It was only natural.

But there was no mistake here.

Brenda’s eyes filled. She tilted her head and screwed up her mouth. Her hand reached out and brushed the still cheek.

“That’s enough,” McLaughlin said.

The medical examiner started pulling the sheet back. But Myron reached his hand out and stopped him. He looked down at the remains of his old friend. He felt tears sting his own eyes, but he forced them back. Now was not the time. He had come here for a purpose.

“The bullet wound,” Myron said, his voice thick. “It’s in the back of the head?”

The medical examiner glanced at McLaughlin. McLaughlin nodded. “Yes,” the medical examiner said. “I cleaned him up when I heard you were coming.”

Myron pointed to Horace’s right cheek. “What’s that?”

The medical examiner looked nervous. “I have not yet had the time to properly analyze the body.”

“I didn’t ask you for an analysis, Doctor. I asked you about this.”

“Yes, I understand that. But I do not wish to make any suppositions until I perform a complete autopsy.”

“Well, Doctor, it’s a bruise,” Myron said. “And it happened premortem. You can tell by the lividity and coloring.” Myron had no idea if that was true, but he ran with it. “His nose also appears to be broken, does it not, Doctor?”

“Don’t answer that,” McLauglin said.

“He doesn’t have to.” Myron starting leading Brenda away from the shell that was once her father. “Nice try, McLaughlin. Call us a taxi. We’re not saying another word to you.”

When they were alone outside, Brenda said, “Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

“They were trying to con you.”

“How?”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say you did murder your father. The police are questioning you. You’re nervous. Suddenly they give you the perfect out.”

“That self-defense stuff.”

“Right. Justifiable homicide. They pretend they’re on your side, that they understand. You as the killer would jump at the chance, right?”

“If I were the killer, yeah, I guess I would.”

“But you see, McLaughlin and Tiles knew about those bruises.”

“So?”

“So if you shot your father in self-defense, why was he beaten beforehand?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Here’s how it works. They get you to confess. You follow their lead, come up with a story about how he attacked you and how you had to shoot him. But the problem is, if that’s the case, where did the facial bruises come from? All of a sudden, McLaughlin and Tiles produce this new physical evidence that contradicts your version of the events. So what are you left with? A confession you can’t retract. With that in hand, they use the bruises to show it wasn’t self-defense. You’ve screwed yourself.”

Brenda chewed that over. “So they figure someone beat him right before he was killed?”

“Right.”

She frowned. “But do they really believe I could have beaten him up like that?”

“Probably not.”

“So how are they figuring?”

“Maybe you surprised him with a baseball bat or something. But more likely—and this is the tricky part—they think you had an accomplice. You remember how Tiles checked my hands?”

She nodded.

“He was looking for bruised knuckles or some other telltale sign of trauma. When you punch somebody, your hand usually shows it.”

“And that’s also why she asked me about a boyfriend?”

“Right.”

The sun was starting to weaken a bit. Traffic whizzed by. There was a parking lot across the street. A sprinkling of men and women in business suits trudged to their cars after a day of unnatural office light, their faces pale, their eyes blinking.

“So they believe that Dad was beaten right before he was shot,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But we know that it probably isn’t true.”

Myron nodded. “The blood in the locker. My guess is, your father was beaten a day or two before. Either he got away or the beating was just a warning. He went to his locker at St. Barnabas to clean up. He used a shirt to stop the blood flowing out of his nose. Then he ran away.”

“And someone found him and shot him.”

“Yes.”

“Shouldn’t we tell the police about the bloody shirt?”

“I’m not sure. Think about it a second. The cops firmly believe you did it. Now you produce a shirt with your dad’s blood on it. Is that going to help us or hurt us?”

Brenda nodded and suddenly turned away. Her breathing became funny again. Too much too fast, Myron thought. He stayed back and gave her a little space. His heart started swelling up. Mother and father both gone, no sisters or brothers. What must that feel like?

A taxi pulled up a few minutes later. Brenda faced him again.

“Where do you want to be dropped off?” Myron asked. “A friend’s house? Your aunt’s?”

She thought about it. Then she shook her head and met his gaze. “Actually,” she said, “I’d like to stay with you.”

The taxi pulled up to the Bolitar house in Livingston.

“We can go somewhere else,” he tried again.

She shook her head. “Just do me one favor.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell them about my father. Not tonight.”

He sighed. “Yeah, okay.”

Uncle Sidney and Aunt Selma were already there. So were Uncle Bernie and Aunt Sophie and their boys. Other cars pulled up as he paid the taxi driver. Mom sprinted down the driveway and hugged Myron as though he’d just been released by Hamas terrorists. She also hugged Brenda. So did everyone else. Dad was in the back at the barbecue. A gas grill now, thank goodness, so Dad could stop loading on the lighter fluid with a hose. He wore a chef’s hat somewhat taller than a control tower and an apron that read REFORMED VEGETARIAN. Brenda was introduced as a client. Mom quickly grabbed her away from Myron, threading her arm through Brenda’s, and led her into the house for a tour. More people came. The neighbors. Each with a pasta salad or fruit salad or something. The Dempseys and the Cohens and the Daleys and the Weinsteins. The Brauns had finally surrendered to the warm allure of Florida, and a couple younger than Myron with two kids had moved in. They came over too.

The festivities began. A Wiffle ball and bat were produced. Teams were chosen. When Myron swung and missed, everyone fell down as though from the breeze. Funny. Everyone talked with Brenda. They wanted to hear about the new women’s league, but they were far more impressed when they heard Brenda was going to be a doctor. Dad even let Brenda take over the grill for a while, a move for Dad tantamount to donating a kidney. The smell of charred foods filled the air. Chicken and burgers and hot dogs from Don’s deli (Mom bought her hot dogs only from Don) and shish kebabs and even a few salmon steaks for the health-conscious.

Myron kept meeting Brenda’s eye. Brenda kept smiling.

Kids, all dutifully wearing helmets, parked their bikes at the end of the driveway. The Cohens’ kid had gotten an earring. Everyone ribbed him about it. He slumped his head and smiled. Vic Ruskin gave Myron a stock tip. Myron nodded and promptly forgot it. Fred Dempsey grabbed a basketball from the garage. The Daley girl picked teams. Myron had to play. So did Brenda. Everyone laughed. Myron downed a cheeseburger between points. Delicious. Timmy Ruskin fell down and cut his knee. He cried. Brenda bent down and examined the cut. She put on a Band-Aid and smiled at Timmy. Timmy beamed.

Hours passed. Darkness crept in slowly as it does in suburban summer skies. People began to drift home. Cars and bikes faded away. Fathers threw their arms around sons. Little girls rode home on shoulders. Everyone kissed Mom and Dad good-bye. Myron looked at his parents. They were the only original family left in the neighborhood now, the surrogate grandparents of the block. They suddenly looked old to Myron. That scared him.

Brenda came up behind him. “This is wonderful,” she said to him.

And it was. Win might poke fun at it. Jessica did not care for scenes like these—her own family had created the perfect Rockwellian facade to hide the rot below—and rushed back to the city as though it held an antidote. Myron and Jess often drove back from such events in total silence. Myron thought about that. And he thought again what Win had said about taking leaps of faith.

“I miss your father,” Myron said. “I haven’t talked to him in ten years. But I still miss him.”

She nodded. “I know.”

They helped clean up. Not much to it. They’d used only paper plates and cups and plastic utensils. Brenda and Mom laughed the whole time. Mom kept sneaking glances at Myron. The looks were a little too knowing.

“I always wanted Myron to be a doctor,” Mom said. “Isn’t that a shock? A Jewish mother who wants her son to be a doctor?”

Both women laughed.

“But he faints at the sight of blood,” Mom continued. “Can’t stand it. Myron wouldn’t even go to an R-rated movie until he was in college. Slept with a night-light until he was—”

“Mom.”

“Oh, I’m embarrassing him. I’m your mother, Myron. I’m supposed to embarrass you. Isn’t that right, Brenda?”

“Definitely, Mrs. Bolitar.”

“For the tenth time, it’s Ellen. And Myron’s father is Al. Everyone calls us El Al. Get it? Like the Israeli airline.”

“Mom.”

“Shush, you, I’m going. Brenda, you’ll stay tonight? The guest room is all ready for you.”

“Thank you, Ellen. That would be very nice.”

Mom turned. “I’ll leave you kids alone.” Her smile was too happy.

The backyard fell silent. A full moon was the only source of illumination. Crickets hummed. A dog barked. They started walking. They talked about Horace. Not about the murder. Not about why he vanished or about Anita Slaughter or FJ or the league or the Bradfords or any of that. Just about Horace.

They reached Burnet Hill, Myron’s elementary school. A few years ago the town had closed down half the building because of its proximity to high-tension electromagnetic wires. Myron had spent three years under those wires. Might explain a few things.

Brenda sat on a swing. Her skin glistened in the moonlight. She started swinging, kicking her legs high. He sat on the swing next to her and joined her in the air. The metal apparatus was strong, but it still started swaying a bit under their onslaught.

They slowed.

“You haven’t asked about the assault,” she said.

“There will be time.”

“It’s a pretty simple story,” she said.

Myron said nothing, waited.

“I came to Dad’s apartment. He was drunk. Dad didn’t drink much. When he did, it really hit him. He was barely coherent when I opened the door. He started cursing me. He called me a little bitch. Then he pushed me.”

Myron shook his head, not sure what to say.

Brenda stopped the swing. “He also called me Anita,” she said.

Myron’s throat went dry. “He thought you were your mother?”

Brenda nodded. “He had such hate in his eyes,” she said. “I’ve never seen him look like that.”

Myron stayed still. A theory had been slowly taking shape in his mind. The blood in the locker at St. Barnabas. The call to the lawyers and to the Bradfords. Horace’s running away. His being murdered. It all sort of fit. But right now, it was just a theory based on the purest of speculation. He needed to sleep on it, marinate the whole thing in the brain fridge for a while, before he dared articulate it.

“How far is it to the Bradfords’ place?” Brenda asked.

“Half a mile maybe.”

She looked away from him. “Do you still think my mom ran away because of something that happened in that house?”

“Yes.”

She stood. “Let’s walk over there.”

“There’s nothing to see. A big gate and some shrubs.”

“My mother walked through those gates for six years. That’ll be enough. For now.”

They took the path between Ridge Drive and Coddington Terrace—Myron could not believe it was still here after all these years—and made a right. The lights on the hill were visible from here. Not much else. Brenda approached the gate. The security guard squinted at her. She stopped in front of the iron bars. She stared for several seconds.

The guard leaned out. “Can I help you, ma’am?”

Brenda shook her head and moved away.

They got back to the house late. Myron’s father was feigning sleep in the recliner. Some habits die hard. Myron “woke” him up. He startled to consciousness. Pacino never overacted this much. He smiled good night at Brenda. Myron kissed his father on the cheek. The cheek felt rough and smelled faintly of Old Spice. As it should.

The bed was made in the downstairs guest room. The maid must have been in that day because Mom stayed away from domestic chores as though they were radioactive. She had been a working mother, one of the most feared defense attorneys in the state, since the days before Gloria Steinem.

His parents saved toiletry bags from first-class flights. He gave one to Brenda. He also found her a T-shirt and pajama bottoms.

When she kissed him hard on the mouth, he felt every part of him stir. The excitement of a first kiss, the brand-newness of it, the wondrous taste and smell of her. Her body, substantial and hard and young, pressed against his. Myron had never felt so lost, so heady, so weightless. When their tongues met, Myron felt a jolt and heard himself groan.

He pulled back. “We shouldn’t. Your father just died. You—”

She shut him up with another kiss. Myron cupped the back of her head with his palm. He felt tears come to his eyes as he held on.

When the kiss ended, they held each other tightly, gasping.

“If you tell me I’m doing this because I’m vulnerable,” she said, “you’re wrong. And you know you’re wrong.”

He swallowed. “Jessica and I are going through a rough patch right now.”

“This isn’t about that either,” she said.

He nodded. He did know that. And after a decade of loving the same woman, maybe that was what scared him most of all. He stepped back.

“Good night,” he managed.

Myron rushed downstairs to his old room in the basement. He crawled under the sheets and pulled them up to his neck. He stared up at the frayed posters of John Havlicek and Larry Bird. Havlicek, the old Celtic great, had been on his wall since he was six years old. Bird had joined him in 1979. Myron sought comfort and maybe escape in his old room, in surrounding himself with familiar images.

He found none.

The ring of the phone and the muffled voices invaded his sleep, becoming part of his dream. When Myron opened his eyes, he remembered little. He’d been younger in the dream, and he felt a deep sadness as he’d floated up toward consciousness. He closed his eyes again, trying to claw back into that warm, nocturnal realm. The second ring blew away the fading images like so much cloud dust.

He reached for his cell phone. As it had for the past three years, the bedside clock blinked 12:00 A.M. Myron checked his watch. Almost seven in the morning.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

It took Myron a moment to place the voice. Officer Francine Neagly, his old high school buddy.

“Home,” he croaked.

“Remember the Halloween scare?”

“Yeah.”

“Meet me there in a half hour,” she said.

“Did you get the file?”

Click.

Myron hung up the phone. He took a few deep breaths. Great. Now what?

Through the vents he heard the muffled voices again. They were coming from the kitchen. Years down here had given him the ability to tell by the echo in what room of the house a certain sound originated—not unlike the Indian brave in an old western who puts his ear to the ground to calculate the distance of incoming hoofbeats.

Myron swung his legs out of the bed. He massaged his face with his palms. He threw on a velour bathrobe circa 1978, gave the teeth a quick brush, the hair a quick pat, and headed to the kitchen.

Brenda and Mom sipped coffee at the kitchen table. Instant coffee, Myron knew. Muy watery. Mom wasn’t big on better coffees. The wondrous smell of fresh bagels, however, jump-started his stomach. A bowlful of them along with an assortment of spreads and several newspapers adorned the tabletop. A typical Sunday morning at the Bolitar homestead.

“Good morning,” Mom said.

“Morning.”

“Want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thanks.” New Starbucks in Livingston. He’d check it out on the way to Francine.

Myron looked at Brenda. She looked back steadily. No embarrassment. He was glad.

“Good morning,” he said to her. Sparkling morning-after repartee was Myron’s forte.

She nodded a good morning back.

“There are bagels,” Mom said, in case both his eyes and olfactory nerves had shorted out. “Your father picked them up this morning. From Livingston Bagels, Myron. Remember? The one on Northfield Avenue? Near Two Gondoliers Pizzeria?”

Myron nodded. His dad had bought bagels from the same store for thirty years, yet his mother still felt a constant need to entice him with this tidbit. He joined them at the table.

Mom folded her hands in front of her. “Brenda was filling me in on her situation,” she said. Her voice was different now, more lawyerly, less maternal. She pushed a newspaper in front of Myron. The murder of Horace Slaughter had made page one, left-hand column, the spot usually reserved for whatever teen had thrown her newborn out with the morning trash.

“I’d represent her myself,” Mom continued, “but with your involvement, it might look like a conflict of interest. I was thinking of Aunt Clara.”

Clara was not really his aunt, just an old friend of the family and, like Mom, an awesome attorney.

“Good idea,” Myron said.

He picked up the paper and scanned the article. Nothing surprising. The article mentioned the fact that Brenda had recently gotten a restraining order against her father, that she had accused him of assaulting her, and that she was wanted for further questioning but could not be reached. Detective Maureen McLaughlin gave the standard spiel about its being “too early to rule anybody in or out.” Right. The police were controlling the story, leaking just enough to incriminate and put pressure on one person: Brenda Slaughter.

There was a photograph of Horace and Brenda. She was wearing her college basketball uniform, and he had his arm around her. Both were smiling, but the smiles looked more of the “say cheese” variety than anything approaching genuine joy. The caption read something about the father and daughter during “a happier time.” Media melodrama.

Myron turned to page A-9. There was a smaller photograph of Brenda and then, more interestingly, a photograph of Horace Slaughter’s nephew, Terence Edwards, candidate for state senate. According to the caption, the photograph had been taken at “a recent campaign stop.” Hmm. Terence Edwards looked pretty much as he had in the photographs at his mother’s house. With one important difference: In this picture Terence was standing next to Arthur Bradford.

Hello.

Myron showed Brenda the photograph. She looked at it a moment. “Arthur Bradford seems to pop up frequently,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But how does Terence fit into this? He was a kid when my mother ran off.”

Myron shrugged. He checked the kitchen clock. Time to meet Francine. “I have to run a quick errand,” he said vaguely. “I shouldn’t be long.”

“An errand?” Mom frowned. “What kind of errand?”

“I’ll be back soon.”

Mom magnified the frown, getting her eyebrows into the act. “But you don’t even live here anymore, Myron,” she went on. “And it’s only seven in the morning.” In the morning. In case he mistook it for being seven at night. “Nothing’s even open at seven in the morning.”

Mother Bolitar, Mossad Interrogation.

Myron stood through the grilling. Brenda and Mom weighed him with their eyes. He shrugged and said, “I’ll tell you about it when I come back.” He hurried off, showered, dressed in record time, and jumped into his car.

Francine Neagly had mentioned the Halloween scare. He surmised that this was a kind of code. When they were in high school, about a hundred of their classmates had gone to see the movie Halloween. It was a new movie then, just out, and it scared the piss out of everyone. The next day Myron and his friend Eric had dressed up like the murderous Michael Myers—i.e., in black and wearing a goalie mask—and hidden in the woods during the girls’ gym class. They never approached, just popping into sight every once in a while. A few of the kids freaked out and started screaming.

Hey, it was high school. Cut him some slack, okay?

Myron parked the Taurus near the Livingston football field. AstroTurf had replaced grass almost a decade earlier. AstroTurf at a high school. Was that necessary? He climbed through the woods. Sticky dew. His sneakers got wet. He quickly found the old path. Not far from this very spot Myron had made out—necked, to use his parents’ terminology—with Nancy Pettino. Sophomore year. Neither one of them liked the other very much, but all their friends had paired up, and they’d both been bored and figured what the hell.

Ah, young love.

Francine sat in full uniform on the same big rock the two fake Michael Myers had stood upon nearly two decades ago. Her back was to him. She did not bother to turn around when he approached. He stopped a few feet from her.

“Francine?”

She let out a deep breath and said, “What the hell is going on, Myron?”

In their high school days Francine had been something of a tomboy, the kind of fierce, spunky competitor you could not help envying. She tackled everything with energy and relish, her voice daunting and confident. Right now she was balled up on the rock, hugging her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth.

“Why don’t you tell me?” Myron said.

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I’m not playing games.”

“Why did you want to see that file?”

“I told you. I’m not sure it was an accident.”

“What makes you unsure?”

“Nothing concrete. Why? What happened?”

Francine shook her head. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said. “The whole story.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“Right. Yesterday you woke up and you said to yourself, ‘Hey, that accidental death that occurred twenty years ago, I bet it wasn’t an accident at all. So I’ll go ask my old buddy Francine to get the police file for me.’ That what happened, Myron?”

“No.”

“So start talking.”

Myron hesitated a moment. “Let’s say that I’m right, that Elizabeth Bradford’s death was not an accident. And let’s say there is something in those files that proves it. That would mean the police covered it up, right?”

She shrugged, still not looking at him. “Maybe.”

“And maybe they would want it to stay buried.”

“Maybe.”

“So maybe they would want to know what I know. Maybe they would even send an old friend to make me talk.”

Francine’s head snapped around as if someone had pulled a string. “You accusing me of something, Myron?”

“No,” he said. “But if there’s a cover-up going on, how do I know I can trust you?”

She rehugged her knees. “Because there is no cover-up,” she said. “I saw the file. A little thin, but nothing unusual. Elizabeth Bradford fell. There were no signs of a struggle.”

“They did an autopsy?”

“Yep. She landed on her head. The impact crushed her skull.”

“Tox screen?”

“They didn’t run one.”

“Why not?”

“She died from a fall, not an overdose.”

“But a tox screen would have shown if she’d been drugged,” Myron said.

“So?”

“There were no signs of a struggle, okay, but what would have prevented someone from drugging her and then dumping her over the side?”

Francine made a face. “And maybe little green men pushed her.”

“Hey, if this was a poor couple and the wife had accidentally fallen off her fire escape—”

“But this wasn’t a poor couple, Myron. It was the Bradfords. Did they get preferential treatment? Probably. But even if Elizabeth Bradford had been drugged, it still doesn’t add up to murder. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Now it was Myron’s turn to look confused. “How do you figure?”

“The fall was only three stories,” Francine said. “A short three stories.”

“So?”

“So a murderer who pushed her off that terrace could not have counted on that low a fall killing her. More likely she would have just broken a leg or something.”

Myron stopped. He had not thought of that. But it made sense. Pushing someone off a third-floor balcony with the hopes that she would land on her head and die was risky at best. Arthur Bradford did not hit Myron as a man who took risks.

So what did that mean?

“Maybe she was hit over the head beforehand,” Myron tried.

Francine shook her head. “The autopsy didn’t show any signs of an earlier blow. And they also checked the rest of the house. There was no blood anywhere. They might have cleaned it up, of course, but I doubt we’ll ever know.”

“So there’s absolutely nothing suspicious in the report?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Myron raised his hands. “So why are we out here? Trying to recapture our lost youth?”

Francine looked at him. “Somebody broke into my house.”

“What?”

“After I read the file. It was supposed to look like a burglary, but it was a search. A thorough one. The place is trashed. Then right after that Roy Pomeranz calls me. Remember him?”

“No.”

“He was Wickner’s old partner.”

“Oh, right,” Myron said, “an early musclehead?”

“That’s him. He’s chief of detectives now. So yesterday he calls me into his office, something he’s never done before. He wants to know why I was looking at the old Bradford file.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I made up some bullshit story about studying old police techniques.”

Myron made a face. “And Pomeranz bought that?”

“No, he didn’t buy it,” Francine snapped. “He wanted to slam me against a wall and shake the truth out of me. But he was afraid. He was pretending like his questions were just routine, no big deal, but you should have seen his face. He looked maybe half an egg sandwich away from a coronary. He claimed that he was worried about the implications of what I was doing because it was an election year. I nodded a lot and apologized and bought his story about as much as he bought mine. When I drove home, I spotted a tail. I shook it this morning, and here we are.”

“And they trashed your place?”

“Yup. The work of professionals.” Francine stood now and moved closer to him. “So now that I’ve stepped into a pail of snakes for you, you want to tell me why I’m taking all these bites?”

Myron considered his options, but there weren’t any. He had indeed gotten her into this mess. She had a right to know.

“You read this morning’s paper?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You see the story on the murder of Horace Slaughter?”

“Yes.” Then she held a hand out as though to silence him. “There was a Slaughter in the file. But it was a woman. A maid or something. She found the body.”

“Anita Slaughter. The victim’s wife.”

Her face lost a little color. “Oh, Christ, I don’t like the sound of this. Go on.”

So he did. He told her the whole story. When he finished, Francine looked down below them at the patch of grass where she had captained the field hockey team. She chewed on her lower lip.

“One thing,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s important or not. But Anita Slaughter had been assaulted before Elizabeth Bradford’s death.”

Myron took a step back. “What do you mean, assaulted?”

“In the report. Wickner wrote that the witness, Anita Slaughter, still displayed abrasions from the earlier assault.”

“What assault? When?”

“I don’t know. That’s all it said.”

“So how do we find out?”

“There might be a police report on it in the basement,” she said. “But—”

“Right, you can’t risk it.”

Francine checked her watch. She moved toward him. “I got some errands to run before I start my shift.”

“Be careful,” he said. “Assume your phone is tapped and your house bugged. Assume at all times you’re being followed. If you spot a tail, call me on the cell phone.”

Francine Neagly nodded. Then she looked down at the field again. “High school,” she said softly. “Ever miss it?”

Myron looked at her.

She smiled. “Yeah, me neither.”

On the ride back to his house the cell phone rang. Myron picked it up.

“I got the information on Slaughter’s credit card.” Win. Another one who loved to exchange pleasantries. It was still before eight in the morning.

Myron said, “You’re awake?”

“My God, man.” Win waited a beat. “What gave it away?”

“No, I mean, you usually sleep late.”

“I haven’t gone to bed yet.”

“Oh.” Myron almost asked what he’d been doing, but he knew better. When it came to Win and the night, ignorance was quite often bliss.

“Only one charge in the past two weeks,” Win said. “A week ago Thursday Horace used his Discover card at the Holiday Inn in Livingston.”

Myron shook his head. Livingston. Again. The day before Horace vanished. “How much?”

“Twenty-six dollars even.”

Curious amount. “Thanks.”

Click.

Livingston. Horace Slaughter had been in Livingston. Myron replayed the theory that had been rumbling in his head since last night. It was looking better and better.

By the time he got back to his house, Brenda was showered and dressed. The cornrows in her hair cascaded down her shoulders in a wondrous dark wave. The café con leche skin was luminous. She gave him a smile that corkscrewed right through his heart.

He wanted very much to hold her.

“I called Aunt Mabel,” Brenda said. “People are gathering at her house.”

“I’ll drop you off.”

They said good-bye to Mom. Mom warned them sternly not to talk to the police without an attorney present. And to wear seat belts.

When they got in the car, Brenda said, “Your parents are great.”

“Yeah, I guess they are.”

“You’re lucky.”

He nodded.

Silence. Then Brenda said, “I keep waiting for one of us to say, ‘About last night.’ ”

Myron smiled. “Me too.”

“I don’t want to forget it.”

Myron swallowed. “Neither do I.”

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Decisiveness,” she said. “I love that in a man.”

He smiled again and turned right on Hobart Gap Road.

Brenda said, “I thought West Orange was the other way.”

“I want to make a quick stop, if you don’t mind.”

“Where?”

“The Holiday Inn. According to your father’s charge cards, he was there a week ago Thursday. It was the last time he used any of his cards. I think he met someone for a meal or drinks.”

“How do you know he didn’t stay overnight?”

“The charge was for twenty-six dollars even. That’s too low for a room yet too high for a meal for one. It’s also a straight twenty-six dollars. No cents. When people tip, they often round off. Best guess is that he met someone there for lunch.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Myron gave a half shrug. “I have the photograph of Horace from the paper. I’m going to show it around and see what happens.”

On Route 10 he made a left and pulled into the Holiday Inn lot. They were less than two miles from Myron’s house. The Holiday Inn was a typical two-level highway motel. Myron had last been here four years ago. An old high school buddy’s bachelor party. Someone had hired a black hooker aptly named Danger. Danger put on a supposed “sex show” far closer to freaky than erotic. She also handed out business cards. They read: “FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL DANGER.” Original. And now that Myron thought about it, he bet that Danger was not even her real name.

“You want to wait in the car?” he asked.

Brenda shook her head. “I’ll walk around a little.”

The lobby had prints of flowers on the wall. The carpet was pale green. The reception desk was on the right. A plastic sculpture that looked like two fish tails stuck together was on the left. Serious ugly.

Breakfast was still being served. Buffet-style. Dozens of people jockeyed about the spread, moving as though choreographed—step forward, spoon food onto plate, step back, step right, step forward again. Nobody bumped into anyone else. Hands and mouths were a blur. The whole thing looked a bit like a Discovery Channel special on the anthill.

A perky hostess stepped up to him. “How many?”

Myron put on his best cop face, adding just a hint of a smile. From his Peter Jennings line—professional yet accessible. He cleared his throat and asked, “Have you seen this man?” Just like that. No preamble.

He held up the photograph from the newspaper. The perky hostess studied it. She did not ask who he was; as he had hoped, his demeanor made her assume that he was someone official.

“I’m not the one to ask,” the hostess said. “You should speak to Caroline.”

“Caroline?” Myron Bolitar, Parrot Investigator.

“Caroline Gundeck. She was the one who had lunch with him.”

Every once in a while you just get lucky.

“Would that have been last Thursday?” he asked.

The hostess thought about it a moment. “I think so, yeah.”

“Where can I find Miss Gundeck?”

“Her office is on level B. Down at the end of the corridor.”

“Caroline Gundeck works here?” He’d been told that Caroline Gundeck has an office on level B, and just like that he’d deduced that she worked here. Sherlock reincarnated.

“Caroline’s worked here forever,” the hostess said with a friendly eye roll.

“What’s her title?”

“Food and beverage manager.”

Hmm. Her occupation was not enlightening—unless Horace had been planning to throw a party before his murder. Doubtful. Nonetheless, this was a solid clue. He took the steps down to the basement and quickly found her office. But his luck did not hold. A secretary informed him that Miss Gundeck was not in today. Was she expected? The secretary would not say. Could he get her home number? The secretary frowned. Myron did not push it. Caroline Gundeck had to live in the area. Getting her phone number and address would be no problem.

Back in the corridor Myron dialed information. He asked for Gundeck in Livingston. Nothing. He asked for Gundeck in East Hanover or the area. Bingo. There was a C Gundeck in Whippany. Myron dialed the number. After four rings a machine picked up. Myron left a message.

When he came back up to the lobby, he found Brenda standing alone in a corner. Her face looked drained, her eyes wide as though someone had just poked her hard in the solar plexus. She did not move or even glance his way as he approached.

“What is it?” he asked.

Brenda gulped some air and turned to him. “I think I’ve been here before,” she said.

“When?”

“A long time ago. I don’t remember really. It’s just a feeling … or maybe I’m just imagining. But I think I was here as a little kid. With my mother.”

Silence.

“Do you remember—”

“Nothing,” Brenda interrupted him. “I’m not even sure it was here. Maybe it was another motel. It’s not like this one is special. But I think it was here. That weird sculpture. It’s familiar.”

“What were you wearing?” he tried.

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What about your mother? What was she wearing?”

“What are you, a fashion consultant?”

“I’m just trying to jar something loose.”

“I don’t remember anything. She vanished when I was five. How much do you remember from back then?”

Point taken. “Let’s walk around a little,” he suggested. “See if something comes back to you.”

But nothing surfaced, if indeed there was anything there to surface. Myron had not expected anything anyway. He was not big on repressed memory or any of that stuff. Still, the whole episode was curious, and once again it fit into his scenario. As they made their way back to Myron’s car, he decided that it was time to voice his theory.

“I think I know what your father was doing.”

Brenda stopped and looked at him. Myron kept moving. He got into the car. Brenda followed. The car doors closed.

Myron said, “I think Horace was looking for your mother.”

The words took a moment to sink in. Then Brenda leaned back and said, “Tell me why.”

He started up the car. “Okay, but remember I used the word think. I think that’s what he was doing. I don’t have any real proof.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

He took a deep breath. “Let’s start with your father’s phone records. One, he calls Arthur Bradford’s campaign headquarters several times. Why? As far as we know, there is only one connection between your father and Bradford.”

“The fact that my mother worked in his house.”

“Right. Twenty years ago. But here’s something else to consider. When I started searching for your mother, I stumbled upon the Bradfords. I thought they might somehow be connected. Your father might have come to the same conclusion.”

She looked less than impressed. “What else?”

“The phone records again. Horace called the two attorneys who handled your scholarships.”

“So?”

“So why would he call them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your scholarships are strange, Brenda. Especially the first one. You weren’t even a basketball player yet and you get a vague academic scholarship to a ritzy private school plus expenses? It doesn’t make sense. Scholarships just don’t work that way. And I checked. You are the only recipient of the Outreach Education scholarship. They only awarded it that one year.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“Somebody set up those scholarships with the sole intent of helping you, with the sole intent of funneling you money.” He made the U-turn by Daffy Dan’s, a discount clothing store, and started heading back down Route 10 toward the circle. “In other words, somebody was trying to help you out. Your father may have been trying to find out who that was.”

He glanced over at her, but she would not face him now. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was throaty. “And you think it was my mother?”

Myron tried to tread gently. “I don’t know. But why else would your father call Thomas Kincaid so many times? The man had not handled your scholarship money since you left high school. You read that letter. Why would Horace pester him to the point of near harassment? The only thing I can think of is that Kincaid had information that your father wanted.”

“Where the scholarship money originated from?”

“Right. My guess is, if we can trace that back”—again, tread gently—“we would find something very interesting.”

“Can we do that?”

“I’m not sure. The attorneys will undoubtedly claim privilege. But I’m going to put Win on it. If it involves money, he’ll have the connections to track it down.”

Brenda sat back and tried to digest all this. “Do you think my father traced it back?”

“I doubt it, but I don’t know. Either way your father was starting to make some noise. He hit up the lawyers, and he even went so far as to start questioning Arthur Bradford. That was where he probably went too far. Even if there’d been no wrongdoing, Bradford would not be happy with someone poking into his past, raising old ghosts, especially during an election year.”

“So he killed my father?”

Myron was not sure how to answer that one. “It’s too early to say for sure. But let’s assume for a second that your father did a little too much poking. And let’s also assume the Bradfords scared him off with a beating.”

Brenda nodded. “The blood in the locker.”

“Right. I keep wondering why we found the blood there, why Horace didn’t go home to change or recuperate. My guess is he was beaten near the hospital. In Livingston, at the very least.”

“Where the Bradfords live.”

Myron nodded. “And if Horace escaped from the beating or if he was just afraid they’d come after him again, he wouldn’t go home. He’d probably change at the hospital and run. In the morgue I noticed clothes in the corner—a security guard uniform. It was probably what he changed into when he got to the locker. Then he hit the road and—”

Myron stopped.

“And what?” she asked.

“Damn,” Myron said.

“What?”

“What’s Mabel’s phone number?”

Brenda gave it to him. “Why?”

Myron switched on the cell phone and dialed Lisa at Bell Atlantic. He asked her to check the number. It took Lisa about two minutes.

“Nothing official on it,” Lisa said. “But I checked the line. There’s a noise there.”

“Meaning?”

“Someone’s probably got a tap on it. Internal. You’d have to send someone by there to be sure.”

Myron thanked her and hung up. “They have Mabel’s phone tapped too. That’s probably how they found your father. He called your aunt, and they traced it.”

“So who’s behind the tap?”

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

Silence. They passed the Star-Bright Pizzeria. In Myron’s youth it was rumored that a whorehouse operated out of the back. Myron had gone several times there with his family. When his dad went to the bathroom, Myron followed. Nothing.

“There’s something else that doesn’t make sense,” Brenda said.

“What?”

“Even if you’re right about the scholarships, where would my mother get that kind of money?”

Good question. “How much did she take from your dad?”

“Fourteen thousand, I think.”

“If she invested well, that might be enough. There were seven years between the time she disappeared and the first scholarship payment, so …” Myron calculated the figures in his head. Fourteen grand to start. Hmm. Anita Slaughter would have had to score big to make the money last this long. Possible, sure, but even in the Reagan years, not likely.

Hold the phone.

“She may have found another way to get money,” he said slowly.

“How?”

Myron stayed quiet for a moment. The head gears were churning again. He checked his rearview mirror. If there was a tail, he didn’t spot it. But that did not mean much. A casual glance rarely gave it away. You had to watch the cars, memorize them, study their movements. But he could not concentrate on that. Not right now.

“Myron?”

“I’m thinking.”

She looked like she was about to say something but then thought better of it.

“Suppose,” Myron continued, “your mother did learn something about the death of Elizabeth Bradford.”

“Didn’t we already try this?”

“Just stay with me a second, okay? Before, we came up with two possibilities. One, she was scared and ran. Two, they tried to hurt her and she ran.”

“And now you have a third?”

“Sort of.” He drove past the new Starbucks on the corner of Mount Pleasant Avenue. He wanted to stop—his caffeine craving worked like a magnetic pull—but he pushed on. “Suppose your mother did run away. And suppose once she was safe, she demanded money to keep quiet.”

“You think she blackmailed the Bradfords?”

“More like compensation.” He spoke even as the ideas were still forming. Always a dangerous thing. “Your mother sees something. She realizes that the only way to guarantee her safety, and her family’s safety, is to run away and hide. If the Bradfords find her, they’ll kill her. Plain and simple. If she tries to do something cute—like hide evidence in a safety-deposit box in the event she disappears or something like that—they’ll torture her until she tells them where it is. Your mother has no choice. She has to run. But she wants to take care of her daughter too. So she makes sure that her daughter gets all the things she herself could never have provided for her. A top-quality education. A chance to live on a pristine campus instead of the bowels of Newark. Stuff like that.”

More silence.

Myron waited. He was voicing theories too fast now, not giving his brain a chance to process or even to inspect his words. He stopped now, letting everything settle.

“Your scenarios,” Brenda said. “You’re always looking to put my mother in the best light. It blinds you, I think.”

“How so?”

“I’ll ask you again: If all that is true, why didn’t she take me with her?”

“She was on the run from killers. What kind of mother would want to put her child in that kind of danger?”

“And she was so paranoid that she could never call me? Or see me?”

“Paranoid?” Myron repeated. “These guys have a tap on your phone. They have people tailing you. Your father is dead.”

Brenda shook her head. “You don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

Her eyes were watery now, but she kept her tone a little too even. “You can make all the excuses you want, but you can’t get around the fact that she abandoned her child. Even if she had good reason, even if she was this wonderful self-sacrificing mother who did all this to protect me, why would she let her daughter go on believing that her own mother would abandon her? Didn’t she realize how this would devastate a five-year-old girl? Couldn’t she have found some way to tell her the truth—even after all these years?”

Her child. Her daughter. Tell her the truth. Never I or me. Interesting. But Myron kept silent. He had no answer to that one.

They drove past the Kessler Institute and hit a traffic light. After some time had passed, Brenda said, “I still want to go to practice this afternoon.”

Myron nodded. He understood. The court was comfort.

“And I want to play in the opener.”

Again Myron nodded. It was probably what Horace would have wanted too.

They made the turn near Mountain High School and arrived at Mabel Edwards’s house. There were at least a dozen cars parked on the road, most American-made, most older and beaten up. A formally dressed black couple stood by the door. The man pressed the bell. The woman held a platter of food. When they spotted Brenda, they glared at her and then turned their backs.

“They’ve read the papers, I see,” Brenda said.

“No one thinks you did it.”

Her look told him to stop with the patronizing.

They walked her to the front door and stood behind the couple. The couple huffed and looked away. The man tapped his foot. The woman made a production out of sighing. Myron opened his mouth, but Brenda closed it with a firm shake of her head. Already she was reading him.

Someone opened the door. There were lots of people already inside. All nicely dressed. All black. Funny how Myron kept noticing that. A black couple. Black people inside. Last night at the barbecue he had not found it strange that everyone except Brenda was white. In fact, Myron could not recall a black person ever attending one of the neighborhood barbecues. So why should he be surprised to be the only white person here? And why should it make him feel funny?

The couple disappeared inside as though sucked up by a vortex. Brenda hesitated. When they finally stepped through the doorway, it was like something out of a saloon scene in a John Wayne film. The low murmurs ceased as if somebody had snapped off a radio. Everyone turned and glowered. For a half a second Myron thought it was a racial thing—he being the only white guy—but then he saw the animosity was aimed directly at the grieving daughter.

Brenda was right. They thought she did it.

The room was crowded and sweltering. Fans whirred impotently. Men were hooking fingers into collars to let in air. Sweat coated faces. Myron looked at Brenda. She looked small and alone and scared, but she would not look away. He felt her take his hand. He gripped back. She stood ramrod straight now, her head high.

The crowd parted a bit, and Mabel Edwards stepped into view. Her eyes were red and swollen. A handkerchief was balled up in her fist. They all swung their gazes toward Mabel now, awaiting her reaction. When Mabel saw her niece, she spread her hands and beckoned Brenda forward. Brenda did not hesitate. She sprinted into the thick, soft arms, lowered her head onto Mabel’s shoulder, and for the first time truly sobbed. Not cried. These were gut-wrenching sobs.

Mabel rocked her niece back and forth and patted her back and cooed comfort. At the same time, Mabel’s eyes scanned the room, mother wolf-protective, challenging and then extinguishing any glare that might be aimed in the direction of her niece.

The crowd turned away, and the murmur returned to normal. Myron felt the stomach knots begin to loosen. He scanned the room for familiar faces. He recognized a couple of the ballplayers from his past, guys he had played against on the playground or in high school. A couple nodded hellos. Myron nodded back. A little boy just past the toddler stage sprinted through the room imitating a siren. Myron recognized him from the pictures on the mantel. Mabel Edwards’s grandson. Terence Edwards’s son.

Speaking of whom, where was candidate Edwards?

Myron scanned the room again. No sign of him. In front of him Mabel and Brenda finally broke their hold. Brenda wiped her eyes. Mabel pointed her toward a bathroom. Brenda managed a nod and hurried off.

Mabel approached him, her gaze on him and unwavering. Without preamble she asked, “Do you know who killed my brother?”

“No.”

“But you’re going to find out.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a thought?”

“A thought,” Myron said. “Nothing more.”

She nodded again. “You’re a good man, Myron.”

There was a shrine of some sort on the fireplace. A photograph of a smiling Horace was surrounded by flowers and candles. Myron looked at the smile he had not seen in ten years and would never see again.

He did not feel like a good man.

“I’ll need to ask you some more questions,” Myron said.

“Whatever it takes.”

“About Anita too.”

Mabel’s eyes stayed on him. “You still think she’s connected in all this?”

“Yes. I’d also like to send a man around to check your phone.”

“Why?”

“I think it’s tapped.”

Mabel looked confused. “But who would tap my phone?”

Better not to speculate right now. “I don’t know,” Myron said. “But when your brother called, did he mention the Holiday Inn in Livingston?”

Something happened to her eyes. “Why do you want to know that?”

“Evidently Horace had lunch with a manager there the day before he disappeared. It was the last charge on his credit card. And when we stopped by, Brenda thought she recognized it. That she may have been there with Anita.”

Mabel closed her eyes.

“What?” Myron asked.

More mourners entered the house, all carrying platters of food. Mabel accepted their words of sympathy with a kind smile and a firm hand grasp. Myron waited.

When there was a free second, Mabel said, “Horace never mentioned the Holiday Inn on the phone.”

“But there’s something else,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“Did Anita ever take Brenda to the Holiday Inn?”

Brenda stepped back into the room and looked at them. Mabel put her hand on Myron’s arm. “Now is not the time for this,” Mabel said to him.

He nodded.

“Tonight maybe. Do you think you can come alone?”

“Yes.”

Mabel Edwards left him then to attend to Horace’s family and friends. Myron felt like an outsider again, but this time it had nothing to do with skin color.

He left quickly.

Once on the road Myron switched his cellular phone back on. Two incoming calls. One was from Esperanza at the office, the other from Jessica in Los Angeles. He briefly debated what to do. No question really. He dialed Jessica’s hotel suite. Was it wimpy to call her right back? Maybe. But Myron looked at it as one of his more mature moments. Call him whipped, but engaging in head games had never been his style.

The hotel operator connected him, but there was no answer. He left a message. Then he dialed the office.

“We got a big problem,” Esperanza said.

“On Sunday?” Myron said.

“The Lord may take it off, but not team owners.”

“Did you hear about Horace Slaughter?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry about your friend, but we still got a business to run. And a problem.”

“What?”

“The Yankees are going to trade Lester Ellis. To Seattle. They’ve scheduled a news conference first thing tomorrow morning.”

Myron rubbed the bridge of his nose with his pointer and thumb. “How did you hear?”

“Devon Richards.”

Reliable source. Damn. “Does Lester know?”

“Nope.”

“He’ll have a fit.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Suggestions?”

“Not a one,” Esperanza said. “A fringe benefit of being the underling.”

The call waiting clicked. “I’ll call you back.” He switched lines and said hello.

Francine Neagly said, “I’m being tailed.”

“Where are you?”

“The A and P off the circle.”

“What kind of car?”

“Blue Buick Skylark. Few years old. White top.”

“Got a plate?”

“New Jersey, four-seven-six-four-five T.”

Myron thought a moment. “When do you start your shift?”

“Half an hour.”

“You working the car or the desk?”

“Desk.”

“Good, I’ll pick him up there.”

“Pick him up?”

“If you’re staying in the station, he’s not going to waste a beautiful Sunday hanging outside it. I’m going to follow him.”

“Tail the tailer?”

“Right. Take Mount Pleasant to Livingston Avenue. I’ll pick him up there.”

“Hey, Myron?”

“Yeah.”

“If something big goes down, I want in.”

“Sure.”

They hung up. Myron backtracked to Livingston. He parked along Memorial Circle near the turnoff to Livingston Avenue. Good view of the police station and easy access to all routes. Myron kept the car running and watched the townsfolk handle Memorial Circle’s half-mile perimeter. A tremendous variety of Livingstonites frequented “the circle.” There were old ladies pacing slowly, usually in twos, some of the more adventurous swinging tiny barbells. There were couples in their fifties and sixties, many in matching sweat suits. Cute, sort of. Teenagers ambled, their mouths getting a far better workout than any extremity or cardiovascular muscle. Hard-core joggers raced past them all with nary a glance. They wore sleek sunglasses and firm faces and sported bare midriffs. Bare midriffs. Even the men. What was up with that?

He forced himself not to think about kissing Brenda. Or how it felt when she smiled at him across the picnic table. Or how her face flushed when she got excited. Or how animated she’d gotten when talking to people at the barbecue. Or how tender she’d been with Timmy when she put on that bandage.

Good thing he wasn’t thinking about her. For a brief moment he wondered if Horace would approve. Strange thought, really. But there it was. Would his old mentor approve? He wondered. He wondered what it would be like to date a black woman. Was there attraction in the taboo? Repulsion? Concern for the future? He pictured the two of them living in the suburbs, the pediatrician and the sports agent, a mixed couple with similar dreams, and then he realized how dumb it was for a man in love with a woman in Los Angeles to think such nonsense about a woman he’d only known for two days.

Dumb. Yup.

A blond hard-core jogger dressed in tight magenta shorts and a much-tested white sports bra jogged by his car. She looked inside and smiled at him. Myron smiled back. The bare midriff. You take the good with the bad.

Across the street Francine Neagly pulled into the police station driveway. Myron shifted into drive and kept his foot on the brake. The Buick Skylark passed the station without slowing down. Myron had tried to trace the license plate from his source at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but hey, it was Sunday, it was the DMV, you put it together.

He pulled onto Livingston Avenue and followed the Buick south. He kept four cars back and craned his neck. Nobody was pushing hard on the accelerator. Livingston took its time on Sunday. But that was okay. The Buick came to a stop at a traffic light at Northfield Avenue. On the right was a brick minimall of some sort. When Myron had been growing up, the same building had been Roosevelt Elementary School; twenty-some-odd years ago someone decided what New Jersey really needed were fewer schools and more malls. Foresight.

The Skylark turned right. Myron kept back and did likewise. They were heading toward Route 10 again, but before they had gone even half a mile, the Skylark made a left onto Crescent Road. Myron frowned. Small suburban street, mostly used to cut through to Hobart Gap Road. Hmm. It probably meant that Mr. Skylark knew the town fairly well and was not an outsider.

A quick right followed the left. Myron knew now where the Skylark was headed. There was only one thing nestled into this suburban landscape besides the split-level homes and a barely flowing brook. A Little League field.

Meadowbrook Little League field. Two fields actually. Sunday and sun meant the road and parking lot were packed with vehicles. So-called utility trucks and minivans had replaced the wood-paneled station wagons of Myron’s youth, but little else had changed. The lot was still unpaved gravel. The concession booth was still white cement with green trim and run by volunteer moms. The stands were still metal and rickety and filled with parents cheering a tad too loudly.

The Buick Skylark grabbed an illegal space near the backstop. Myron slowed the car and waited. When the door of the Skylark opened and Detective Wickner, the lead officer in the Elizabeth Bradford “accident,” swept out of the car in grand style, Myron was not really surprised. The retired officer took off his sunglasses with a snap and tossed them back into the car. He put on a baseball cap, green with the letter S on it. You could almost see Wickner’s lined face slacken as though the field’s sunlight were the most gentle masseur. Wickner waved to some guys standing behind the backstop—the Eli Wickner Backstop, according to the sign. The guys waved back. Wickner bounded toward them.

Myron stayed where he was for a moment. Detective Eli Wickner had hung out in the same spot since before the days Myron had frequented this field. Wickner’s Throne. People greeted him here. They came up and slapped his back and shook his hand; Myron half expected them to kiss his ring. Wickner was beaming now. At home. In paradise. In the place where he was still a big man.

Time to change that.

Myron found a parking spot a block away. He hopped out of the car and approached. His feet crunched the gravel. He traveled back to a time when he walked upon this same surface with soft kid cleats. Myron had been a good Little League player—no, he’d been a great player—until the age of eleven. It’d been right here, on Field Two. He’d led the league in home runs and seemed on the verge of breaking the all-time Livingston American League Little League record. He needed to hit two more homers with four games left. Twelve-year-old Joey Davito was pitching. Davito threw hard and with no control. The first pitch hit Myron square on the forehead, right under the brim of the helmet. Myron went down. He remembered blinking when he landed on his back. He remembered looking up into the glare of the sun. He remembered seeing the face of his coach, Mr. Farley. And then his father was there. Dad blinked back tears and scooped him up in his strong arms, gently cradling Myron’s head with his large hand. He’d gone to the hospital, but there was no lasting damage. At least not physical. But after that Myron had never been able to stop from bailing out on an inside pitch. Baseball was never the same to him. The game had hurt him, had lost its innocence.

He stopped playing for good a year later.

There were half a dozen guys with Wickner. They all wore baseball caps sitting high and straight, no breaks in the brims, like you see with the kids. White T-shirts were stretched across bellies that resembled swallowed bowling balls. Bodies by Budweiser. They leaned against the fence, elbows draped over the top like they were taking a Sunday ride in a car. They commented on the kids, inspecting them, dissecting their games, predicting their futures—as though their opinions mattered a rat’s ass.

There is a lot of pain in Little League. Much has been written in recent years criticizing the pushy Little League parents—deservedly so—but the namby-pamby, politically correct, everybody equal, semi–New Age alternative was not much better. A kid hits a weak grounder. Disappointed, he sighs and walks toward first. He is thrown out by a mile and sulks straight to the dugout. The New Age coach yells, “Good hustle!” But of course it wasn’t good hustle. So what message are you sending? The parents pretend that winning is irrelevant, that the best player on the team should not get more playing time or a better batting position than the worst. But the problem with all this—besides the obvious fact that it’s a lie—is that the kids are not fooled. Kids aren’t dumb. They know that they are being patronized with all this “as long as he’s having fun” talk. And they resent it.

So the pain remains. It probably would always be there.

Several people recognized Myron. They tapped their neighbors’ shoulders and pointed. There he is. Myron Bolitar. The greatest basketball player this town ever produced. Would have been a top pro if … If. Fate. The knee. Myron Bolitar. Half legend, half a warning to today’s youth. The athletic equivalent to the smashed-up car they used to demonstrate the dangers of drunk driving.

Myron headed straight for the men along the backstop. Livingston fans. The same guys went to all the football games and basketball games and baseball games. Some were nice. Some were blowhards. All of them recognized Myron. They greeted him warmly. Detective Wickner stayed silent, his eyes glued to the field, studying the play with a little too much intensity, especially since it was between innings.

Myron tapped Wickner on the shoulder.

“Hello, Detective.”

Wickner turned slowly. He’d always had these piercing gray eyes, but right now they were heavily tinged with red. Conjunctivitis maybe. Or allergies. Or booze. Your choice. His skin was tan to the point of rawhide. He wore a yellow collared shirt with a little zipper in the front. The zipper was down. He had on a thick gold chain. New probably. Something to jazz up retirement. It didn’t work on him.

Wickner mustered up a smile. “You’re old enough to call me Eli now, Myron.”

Myron tried it. “How are you, Eli?”

“Not bad, Myron. Retirement’s treating me good. I fish a lot. How about yourself? Saw you try that comeback. Sorry it didn’t work out.”

“Thanks,” Myron said.

“You still living at your folks’?”

“No, I’m in the city now.”

“So what brings you out this way? Visiting the family?”

Myron shook his head. “I wanted to talk to you.”

They drifted about ten feet from the entourage. No one followed, their body language working as a force field.

“What about?” Wickner asked.

“An old case.”

“A police case?”

Myron looked at him steadily. “Yes.”

“And what case would that be?”

“The death of Elizabeth Bradford.”

To Wickner’s credit, he skipped the surprise act. He took the baseball cap off his head and smoothed down the gray flyaways. Then he put the cap back on. “What do you want to know?”

“The bribe,” Myron said. “Did the Bradfords pay you off in a lump sum, or did they set up a more long-term payout with interest and stuff?”

Wickner took the blow but stayed upright. There was a quiver on the right side of his mouth like he was fighting back tears. “I don’t much like your attitude, son.”

“Tough.” Myron knew that his only chance here was a direct, no-barred frontal assault; dancing around or subtle interrogation would get him squat. “You’ve got two choices, Eli. Choice one, you tell me what really happened to Elizabeth Bradford and I try to keep your name out of it. Choice two, I start screaming to the papers about a police cover-up and destroy your reputation.” Myron gestured to the field. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be lucky to hang out in the Eli Wickner Urinal.”

Wickner turned away. Myron could see his shoulders rising and falling with the labored breaths. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Myron hesitated a beat. Then he kept his voice soft. “What happened to you, Eli?”

“What?”

“I used to look up to you,” Myron said. “I used to care what you thought.”

The words struck home. Wickner’s shoulders began to hitch a bit. He kept his face low. Myron waited. Wickner finally turned to face him. The rawhide skin looked drier now, sapped, more brittle. He was working up to saying something. Myron gave him space and waited.

From behind him Myron felt a large hand squeeze his shoulder.

“There a problem here?”

Myron spun around. The hand belonged to Chief of Detectives Roy Pomeranz, the musclehead who used to be Wickner’s partner. Pomeranz wore a white T-shirt and white shorts that rode so high it looked like someone was giving him a power wedgie. He still had the he-man physique, but he was totally bald now, his head completely smooth as though waxed.

“Get your hand off my shoulder,” Myron said.

Pomeranz ignored the request. “Everything okay here?”

Wickner spoke up. “We were just talking, Roy.”

“Talking about what?”

Myron handled that one. “About you.”

Big smile. “Oh?”

Myron pointed. “We were just saying that if you got a hoop earring, you’d be the spitting image of Mr. Clean.”

Pomeranz’s smile vanished.

Myron lowered his voice. “I’ll tell you one more time. Move your hand, or I’ll break it in three places.” Note the three-places reference. Specific threats were always the best. He’d learned that from Win.

Pomeranz kept the hand there a second or two longer—to keep face—and then he slid it off.

“You’re still on the force, Roy,” Myron said. “So you got the most to lose. But I’ll make you the same offer. Tell me what you know about the Bradford case, and I’ll try to keep your name out of it.”

Pomeranz smirked at him. “Funny thing, Bolitar.”

“What?”

“You digging into all this in an election year.”

“Your point being?”

“You’re working for Davison,” he said. “You’re just trying to drag down a good man like Arthur Bradford for that scum sucker.”

Davison was Bradford’s opponent for governor. “Sorry, Roy, that’s incorrect.”

“Yeah? Well, either way, Elizabeth Bradford died from a fall.”

“Who pushed her?”

“It was an accident.”

“Someone accidentally pushed her?”

“Nobody pushed her, wise guy. It was late at night. The terrace was slippery. She fell. It was an accident. Happens all the time.”

“Really? How many deaths has Livingston had in the past twenty years where a woman accidentally fell to her death from her own balcony?”

Pomeranz crossed his arms over his chest. His biceps bulged like baseballs. The guy was doing one of those subtle flexes, where you’re trying to look like you’re not flexing. “Accidents in the home. You know how many people die in home accidents every year?”

“No, Roy, how many?”

Pomeranz didn’t answer. Big surprise. He met Wickner’s eye. Wickner remained silent. He looked vaguely ashamed.

Myron decided to go for the whammy. “And what about the assault on Anita Slaughter? Was that an accident too?”

Stunned silence. Wickner involuntarily groaned a little. Pomeranz’s thigh-thick arms dropped back to his sides.

Pomeranz said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do, Roy. Eli even alluded to it in the police file.”

Angry smirk. “You mean the file that Francine Neagly stole from the records room?”

“She didn’t steal it, Roy. She looked at it.”

Pomeranz smiled slowly. “Well, it’s missing now. She had it last. We firmly believe that Officer Neagly stole it.”

Myron shook his head. “Not that easy, Roy. You can hide that file. You can even hide the file on the Anita Slaughter assault. But I already got my hand on the hospital file. From St. Barnabas. They keep records, Roy.”

More stunned looks. It was a bluff. But it was a good one. And it drew blood.

Pomeranz leaned very close to Myron, his breath reeking of a poorly digested meal. He kept his voice low. “You’re poking your nose where it don’t belong.”

Myron nodded. “And you’re not brushing after every meal.”

“I’m not going to let you drag down a good man with false innuendos.”

“Innuendos,” Myron repeated. “You been listening to vocabulary tapes in the squad car, Roy? Do the taxpayers know about this?”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, funny man.”

“Oooo, I’m so scared.” When short a comeback, fall back on the classics.

“I don’t have to start with you,” Pomeranz said. He leaned back a bit, the smile returning. “I got Francine Neagly.”

“What about her?”

“She had no business with that file. We believe that someone in Davison’s campaign—probably you, Bolitar—paid her to steal it. To gather any information that can be used in a distorted fashion to hurt Arthur Bradford.”

Myron frowned. “Distorted fashion?”

“You think I won’t do it?”

“I don’t even know what that means. Distorted fashion? Was that on one of your tapes?”

Pomeranz stuck a finger in Myron’s face. “You think I won’t suspend her sorry ass and ruin her career?”

“Pomeranz, not even you can be that dumb. You ever heard of Jessica Culver?”

The finger came down. “She’s your girlfriend, right?” Pomeranz said. “She’s a writer or something.”

“A big writer,” Myron said. “Very well respected. And you know what she would love to do? A big expose on sexism in police departments. You do anything to Francine Neagly, you so much as demote her or give her one shit detail or breathe on her between meals, and I promise you that when Jessica gets done, you’ll make Bob Packwood look like Betty Friedan.”

Pomeranz looked confused. Probably didn’t know who Betty Friedan was. Maybe he should have said Gloria Steinem. To his credit, Pomeranz took his time. He fought for recovery, offering up an almost sweet smile.

“Okay,” he said, “so it’s the cold war all over again. I can nuke you, you can nuke me. It’s a stalemate.”

“Wrong, Roy. You’re the one with the job, the family, the rep, and maybe a looming jail term. Me, I got nothing to lose.”

“You can’t be serious. You’re dealing with the most powerful family in New Jersey. Do you really think you’ve got nothing to lose?”

Myron shrugged. “I’m also crazy,” he said. “Or to put it another way, my mind works in a distorted fashion.”

Pomeranz looked over at Wickner. Wickner looked back. There was a crack of the bat. The crowd got to its feet. The ball hit the fence. “Go, Billy!” Billy rounded second and slid into third.

Pomeranz walked away without another word.

Myron looked at Wickner for a long time. “Are you a total sham, Detective?”

Wickner said nothing.

“When I was eleven, you spoke to my fifth-grade class and we all thought you were the coolest guy we’d ever seen. I used to look for you at games. I used to want your approval. But you’re just a lie.”

Wickner kept his eyes on the field. “Let it go, Myron.”

“I can’t.”

“Davison is a scum. He’s not worth it.”

“I’m not working for Davison. I’m working for Anita Slaughter’s daughter.”

Wickner kept his eyes on the field. His mouth was set, but Myron could see the tremor starting back up in the corner of his mouth. “All you’re going to do is hurt a lot of people.”

“What happened to Elizabeth Bradford?”

“She fell,” he said. “That’s all.”

“I’m not going to stop digging,” Myron said.

Wickner adjusted his cap again and began to walk away. “Then more people are going to die.”

There was no threat in his tone, just the stilted, pained timber of inevitability.

When Myron headed back to his car, the two goons from Bradford Farms were waiting for him. The big one and the skinny, older guy. The skinny guy wore long sleeves so Myron could not see if there was a snake tattoo, but the two looked right from Mabel Edwards’s description.

Myron felt something inside him start to simmer.

The big guy was show. Probably a wrestler in high school. Maybe a bouncer at a local bar. He thought he was tough; Myron knew that he would be no problem. The skinny, older guy was hardly a formidable physical specimen. He looked like an aged version of the puny guy who gets the sand kicked on him in the old Charles Atlas cartoon. But the face was so ferretlike, the eyes so beady that he made you pause. Myron knew better than to judge on appearance, but this guy’s face was simply too thin and too pointed and too cruel.

Myron spoke to the Skinny Ferret. “Can I see your tattoo?” Direct approach.

The big guy looked confused, but Skinny Ferret took it all in stride.

“I’m not used to guys using that line on me,” Skinny said.

“Guys,” Myron repeated. “But with your looks, the chicks must be asking all the time.”

If Skinny was offended by the crack, he was laughing his way through it. “So you really want to see the snake?”

Myron shook his head. The snake. The question had been answered. These were the right guys. The big one had punched Mabel Edwards in the eye.

The simmer flicked up a notch.

“So what can I do for you fellas?” Myron said. “You collecting donations for the Kiwanis Club?”

“Yeah,” the big guy said. “Blood donations.”

Myron looked at him. “I’m not a grandmother, tough guy.”

Big said, “Huh?”

Skinny cleared his throat. “Governor-to-be Bradford would like to see you.”

“Governor-to-be?”

The Skinny Ferret shrugged. “Confidence.”

“Nice to see. So why doesn’t he call me?”

“The next governor thought it would be best if we accompanied you.”

“I think I can manage to drive the mile by myself.” Myron looked at the big guy again and spoke slowly. “After all, I’m not a grandmother.”

The big guy sniffed and rolled his neck. “I can still beat you like one.”

“Beat me as you would a grandmother,” Myron said. “Gee, what a guy.”

Myron had read recently about self-help gurus who taught their students to picture themselves successful. Visualize it, and it will happen or some such credo. Myron was not sure, but he knew that it worked in combat. If the chance presents itself, picture how you will attack. Imagine what countermoves your opponent might make and prepare yourself for them. That was what Myron had been doing since Skinny had admitted to the tattoo. Now that he saw that no one was in sight, he struck.

Myron’s knee landed squarely in the big guy’s groin. The big guy made a noise like he was sucking through a straw that still had drops of liquid in it. He folded like an old wallet. Myron pulled out his gun and pointed it at the Skinny Ferret. The big guy’s body melted to the pavement and formed a puddle.

The Skinny Ferret had not moved. He looked slightly amused.

“Wasteful,” Skinny said.

“Yeah,” Myron agreed. “But I feel much better.” He looked at the big guy. “That was for Mabel Edwards.”

Skinny shrugged. Not a care in the world. “So now what?”

“Where’s your car?” Myron asked.

“We were dropped off. We’re supposed to go back to the house with you.”

“I don’t think so.”

The big guy writhed and tried to suck in a breath. Neither standing man cared. Myron put away his gun.

“I’ll drive myself over, if you don’t mind.”

The skinny guy spread his arms. “Suit yourself.”

Myron started to get into his Taurus.

“You don’t know what you’re up against,” Skinny said.

“I keep hearing that.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But now you’ve heard it from me.”

Myron nodded. “Consider me scared.”

“Ask your father, Myron.”

That made him pull up. “What about my father?”

“Ask him about Arthur Bradford.” The smile of a mongoose gnawing on a neck. “Ask him about me.”

Icy water flooded Myron’s chest. “What does my father have to do with any of this?”

But Skinny was not about to answer. “Hurry now,” he said. “The next governor of New Jersey is waiting for you.”

Myron put a call in to Win. He quickly told him what’d happened.

“Wasteful,” Win agreed.

“He hit a woman.”

“Then shoot him in the knee. Permanently injure him. A kick in the scrotum is wasteful.”

Proper Payback Etiquette by Windsor Horne Lockwood III. “I’m going to leave the cellular on. Can you get down here?”

“But of course. Please refrain from further violence until I am present.”

In other words: Save some for me.

The guard at Bradford Farms was surprised to see Myron alone. The gate was open, probably in expectation of a threesome. Myron did not hesitate. He drove through without stopping. The guard panicked. He jumped out of his booth. Myron gave him a little finger wave, like Oliver Hardy used to do. He even scrunched up his face into that same Hardy smile. Heck, if he had a bowler, he would have gotten that into the act too.

By the time Myron parked at the front entrance, the old butler was already standing in the doorway. He bowed slightly.

“Please follow me, Mr. Bolitar.”

They headed down a long corridor. Lots of oils on the walls, mostly of men on horses. There was one nude. A woman, of course. No horse in this one. Catherine the Great was truly dead. The butler made a right at the hallway. They entered a glass corridor that resembled a passageway in the Biosphere or maybe Epcot Center. Myron figured that they must have traveled close to fifty yards already.

The manservant stopped and opened a door. His face was perfect butler deadpan.

“Please enter, sir.”

Myron smelled the chlorine before he heard the tiny splashes.

The manservant waited.

“I didn’t bring my bathing suit,” Myron said.

The manservant looked at him blankly.

“I usually wear a thong,” Myron said. “Though I can make due with bikini mesh.”

The manservant blinked.

“I can borrow yours,” Myron continued, “if you have an extra.”

“Please enter, sir.”

“Right, well, let’s stay in touch.”

The butler or whatever left. Myron went inside. The room had that indoor-pool mustiness. Everything was done in marble. Lots of plant life. There were statues of some goddess at each corner of the pool. What goddess, Myron did not know. The goddess of indoor pools, he surmised. The pool’s sole occupant sliced through the water with nary a ripple. Arthur Bradford swam with easy, almost lazy movements. He reached the edge of the pool near Myron and stopped. He was wearing swimming goggles with dark blue lenses. He took them off and ran his hand across his scalp.

“What happened to Sam and Mario?” Bradford asked.

“Mario.” Myron nodded. “That has to be the big guy, right?”

“Sam and Mario were supposed to escort you here.”

“I’m a big boy, Artie. I don’t need an escort.” Bradford had of course sent them to intimidate; Myron needed to show him that the move had not produced the desired effect.

“Fine then,” Bradford replied, his voice crisp. “I have six more laps to go. Do you mind?”

Myron waved a dismissal. “Hey,” he said. “Please go ahead. I can think of nothing that would give me greater pleasure than watching another man swim. Hey, here’s an idea. Why not film a commercial here? Slogan: Vote for Art, He’s Got an Indoor Pool.”

Bradford almost smiled. “Fair enough.” He pushed himself out of the pool in one lax motion. His body was long and lean and looked sleek when wet. He grabbed a towel and signaled to two chaise longues. Myron sat in one but did not lean back. Arthur Bradford did likewise.

“It’s been a long day,” Arthur said. “I’ve already made four campaign stops, and I have three more this afternoon.”

Myron nodded through the small talk, encouraging Bradford to move on. Bradford picked up the hint. He slapped his thighs with his palms. “Well, then, you’re a busy man. I’m a busy man. Shall we get to it?”

“Sure.”

Bradford leaned in a bit. “I wanted to talk to you about your previous visit here.”

Myron tried to keep his face blank.

“You’ll agree, will you not, that it was all rather bizarre?”

Myron made a noise. Sort of like “Uh-huh” but more neutral.

“Put simply, I’d like to know what you and Win were up to.”

“I wanted the answers to some questions,” Myron said.

“Yes, I realize that. My question is, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why were you asking about a woman who hasn’t been in my employ for twenty years?”

“What’s the difference? You barely remember her, right?”

Arthur Bradford smiled. The smile said that they both knew better. “I would like to help you,” Bradford said. “But I must first question your motives.” He opened his arms. “This is, after all, a major election.”

“You think I’m working for Davison?”

“You and Windsor come to my home under false pretenses. You start asking bizarre questions about my past. You pay off a police officer to steal a file on my wife’s death. Yon are connected with a man who recently tried to blackmail me. And you’ve been seen conversing with known criminal associates of Davison’s.” He gave the political smile, the one that couldn’t help being a touch condescending. “If you were I, what would you think?”

“Back up,” Myron said. “One, I didn’t pay off anybody to steal a file.”

“Officer Francine Neagly. Do you deny meeting with her at the Ritz Diner?”

“No.” Too long to explain the truth, and what was the point? “Okay, forget that one for now. Who tried to blackmail you?”

The manservant entered the room. “Iced tea, sir?”

Bradford thought it over. “Lemonade, Mattius. Some lemonade would be divine.”

“Very well, sir. Mr. Bolitar?”

Myron doubted that Bradford stocked much Yoo-Hoo. “Same here, Mattius. But make mine extra divine.”

Mattius the Manservant nodded. “Very well, sir.” He slid back out the door.

Arthur Bradford wrapped a towel around his shoulders. Then he lay back on the chaise. The lounges were long so that his legs would not hang over the ends. He closed his eyes. “We both know that I remember Anita Slaughter. As you implied, a man does not forget the name of the person who found his wife’s body.”

“That the only reason?”

Bradford opened one eye. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve seen pictures of her,” Myron said simply. “Hard to forget a woman who looked like that.”

Bradford reclosed the eye. For a moment he did not speak. “There are plenty of attractive women in the world.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You think I had a relationship with her?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said she was attractive. Men remember attractive women.”

“True,” Bradford agreed. “But you see, that is the sort of false rumor Davison would love to get his hands on. Do you understand my concern? This is politics, and politics is spin. You wrongly think that my concerns for this matter prove that I have something to hide. But that’s not the case. The truth is, I am worried about perception. Just because I didn’t do anything does not mean my opponent won’t try to make it look like I did. Do you follow?”

Myron nodded. “Like a politician after graft.” But Bradford had a point. He was running for governor. Even if there were nothing there, he would snap into a defensive stance. “So who tried to blackmail you?”

Bradford waited a second, internally calculating, adding up the pros and cons of telling Myron. The internal computer worked down the scenarios. The pros won.

“Horace Slaughter,” he said.

“With what?” Myron asked.

Bradford didn’t answer the question directly. “He called my campaign headquarters.”

“And he got through to you?”

“He said he had incriminating information about Anita Slaughter. I figured it was probably a crackpot, but the fact that he knew Anita’s name bothered me.”

I bet, Myron thought. “So what did he say?”

“He wanted to know what I’d done with his wife. He accused me of helping her run away.”

“Helping her how?”

He waved his hands. “Supporting her, helping her, chasing her away. I don’t know. He was rambling.”

“But what did he say?”

Bradford sat up. He swung his legs across the side of the chaise. For several seconds he looked at Myron as if he were a hamburger he wasn’t sure it was time to flip. “I want to know your interest in this.”

Give a little, get a little. Part of the game. “The daughter.”

“Excuse me?”

“Anita Slaughter’s daughter.”

Bradford nodded very slowly. “Isn’t she a basketball player?”

“Yes.”

“Do you represent her?”

“Yes. I was also friendly with her father. You heard he was murdered?”

“It was in the newspaper,” Bradford said. In the newspaper. Never a straight yes or no with this guy. Then he added, “So what is your connection with the Ache family?”

Something in the back of Myron’s head clicked. “Are they Davison’s ‘criminal associates’?” Myron asked.

“Yes.”

“So the Aches have an interest in his winning the election?”

“Of course. That’s why I’d like to know how you’re connected to them.”

“No connection,” Myron said. “They’re setting up a rival women’s basketball league. They want to sign Brenda.” But now Myron was wondering. The Aches had been meeting with Horace Slaughter. According to FJ, he had even signed his daughter to play with them. Next thing you know, Horace was pestering Bradford about his deceased wife. Could Horace have been working with the Aches? Fodder for thought.

Mattius returned with the lemonades. Fresh squeezed. Cold. Delicious, if not divine. Again the rich. When Mattius left the room, Bradford fell into the feigning-deep-thought look he’d displayed so often at their previous meeting. Myron waited.

“Being a politician,” Bradford began, “it’s a strange thing. All creatures fight to survive. It’s instinctive, of course. But the truth is, a politician is colder about it than most. He can’t help it. A man has been murdered here, and all I see is the potential for political embarrassment. That’s the plain truth. My goal is simply to keep my name out of it.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Myron said. “No matter what you or I might want.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The police are going to link you into this the same way I did.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I came to you because Horace Slaughter called you. The police will see those same phone records. They’ll have to follow up.”

Arthur Bradford smiled. “Don’t worry about the police.”

Myron remembered Wickner and Pomeranz and the power of this family. Bradford might be right. Myron thought about this. And decided to turn it to his advantage.

“So you’re asking me to keep quiet?” Myron said.

Bradford hesitated. Chess time. Watching the board and trying to figure out Myron’s next move. “I am asking you,” he said, “to be fair.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you have no real evidence that I am involved in anything illicit.”

Myron tilted his head back and forth. Maybe yes, maybe no.

“And if you are telling the truth, if you do not work for Davison, then you would have no reason to damage my campaign.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” Myron said.

“I see.” Again Bradford tried to read the tea leaves. “I assume then that you want something in exchange for your silence.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not what you think.”

“What is it then?”

“Two things. First, I want the answer to some questions. The real answers. If I suspect you are lying or worried about how it will look, I’ll hang you out to dry. I’m not out to embarrass you. I don’t care about this election. I just want the truth.”

“And the second thing?”

Myron smiled. “We’ll get to that. First I need the answers.”

Bradford waited a beat. “But how can you expect me to agree to a condition I don’t even know?”

“Answer my questions first. If I am convinced that you are telling the truth, then I’ll give you the second condition. But if you’re evasive, the second condition becomes irrelevant.”

Bradford didn’t like it. “I don’t think I can agree to that.”

“Fine.” Myron rose. “Have a nice day, Arthur.”

His voice was sharp. “Sit down.”

“Will you answer my questions?”

Arthur Bradford looked at him. “Congressman Davison is not the only one who has unsavory friends.”

Myron let the words hang in the air.

“If you are to survive in politics,” Bradford continued, “you must align yourself with some of the state’s more sordid elements. That’s the ugly truth, Myron. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes,” Myron said. “For the third time in the past hour someone is threatening me.”

“You don’t appear too frightened.”

“I don’t scare easily.” Half truth. Showing fear was unhealthy; you show fear, you’re dead. “So let’s cut the crap. There are questions here. I can ask them. Or the press can.”

Bradford took his time again. The man was nothing if not careful. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “What’s your interest in this?”

Still stalling with questions. “I told you. The daughter.”

“And when you came here the first time, you were looking for her father?”

“Yes.”

“And you came to me because this Horace Slaughter had called my office?”

Myron nodded. Slowly.

Bradford threw on the baffled face again. “Then why on God’s green earth did you ask about my wife? If indeed you were solely interested in Horace Slaughter, why were you so preoccupied with Anita Slaughter and what happened twenty years ago?”

The room fell silent, save for the gentle whisper of the pool waves. Light reflected off the water, bouncing to and fro like an erratic screen saver. They were at the crux of it now, and both men knew it. Myron thought about it a moment. He kept his eyes on Bradford’s and wondered how much to say and how he could use it. Negotiating. Life was like being a sports agent, a series of negotiations.

“Because I wasn’t just looking for Horace Slaughter,” Myron said slowly. “I was looking for Anita Slaughter.”

Bradford wrestled to maintain control over his facial expressions and body language. But Myron’s words still caused a sharp intake of air. His complexion lost a bit of color. He was good, no doubt about it, but there was something there.

Bradford spoke slowly. “Anita Slaughter disappeared twenty years ago, did she not?”

“Yes.”

“And you think she’s still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

To get information, you had to give it. Myron knew that. You had to prime the pump. But Myron was flooding it now. Time to stop and reverse the flow. “Why would you care?”

“I don’t.” Bradford hardly sounded convincing. “But I assumed that she was dead.”

“Why?”

“She seemed like a decent woman. Why would she have run off and abandoned her child like that?”

“Maybe she was afraid,” Myron said.

“Of her husband?”

“Of you.”

That froze him. “Why would she be afraid of me?”

“You tell me, Arthur.”

“I have no idea.”

Myron nodded. “And your wife accidentally slipped off that terrace twenty years ago, right?”

Bradford did not reply.

“Anita Slaughter just came to work one morning and found your wife dead from a fall,” Myron continued. “She’d slipped off her own balcony in the rainy dark and no one noticed. Not you. Not your brother. No one. Anita just happened by her dead body. Isn’t that what happened?”

Bradford wasn’t cracking, but Myron could sense some fault lines starting to open a touch. “You don’t know anything.”

“Then tell me.”

“I loved my wife. I loved her with everything I had.”

“So what happened to her?”

Bradford took a few breaths, tried to regain control. “She fell,” he said. Then, thinking further, he asked, “Why would you think that my wife’s death has anything to do with Anita’s disappearance?” His voice was stronger now, the timbre coming back. “In fact, if I recall correctly, Anita stayed on after the accident. She left our employ well after Elizabeth’s tragedy.”

True enough. And a point that kept irritating Myron like a grain of sand in the retina.

“So why do you keep harping on my wife’s death?” Bradford pressed.

Myron had no answer, so he parried with a couple of questions. “Why is everyone so concerned about that police file? Why are the cops so worried?”

“The same reason I am,” he said. “It’s an election year. Looking into old files is suspicious behavior. That’s all there is to it. My wife died in an accident. End of story.” His voice was growing stronger still. Negotiation can have more momentum shifts than a basketball game. If so, the Big Mo’ was back on Bradford’s side. “Now you answer a question for me: Why do you think Anita Slaughter is still alive? I mean, if the family hasn’t heard from her in twenty years?”

“Who says they haven’t heard from her?”

He arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying they have?”

Myron shrugged. He had to be oh-so-careful here. If Anita Slaughter were indeed hiding from this guy—and if Bradford did indeed believe she was dead—how would he react to evidence that she was still alive? Wouldn’t he logically try to find her and silence her? Interesting thought. But at the same time, if Bradford had been secretly paying her off, as Myron had earlier theorized, he would know she was alive. At the very least he would know that she had run away instead of having met up with foul play.

So what was going on here?

“I think I’ve said enough,” Myron said.

Bradford took a long pull on his lemonade glass, draining it. He stirred the pitcher and poured himself another. He gestured toward Myron’s glass. Myron shook him off. Both men settled back.

“I would like to hire you,” Bradford said.

Myron tried a smile. “As?”

“An adviser of sorts. Security, perhaps. I want to hire you to keep me up-to-date on your investigation. Hell, I have enough morons on the payroll in charge of damage control. Who better than the inside man? You’ll be able to prepare me for a potential scandal. What do you say?”

“I think I’ll pass.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” Bradford said. “I will pledge my cooperation as well as that of my staff’s.”

“Right. And if something bad turns up, you squash it.”

“I won’t deny that I’ll be interested in making sure the facts are put in the proper light.”

“Or shade.”

He smiled. “You’re not keeping your eyes on the prize, Myron. Your client is not interested in me or my political career. She is interested in finding her mother. I’d like to help.”

“Sure, you would. After all, helping people is why you got into politics in the first place.”

Bradford shook his head. “I’m making you a serious offer, and you choose to be glib.”

“It’s not that.” Time to shift the momentum again. Myron chose his words carefully. “Even if I wanted to,” he said, “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I mentioned a second condition before.”

Bradford put a finger to his lips. “So you did.”

“I already work for Brenda Slaughter. She must remain my primary concern in this matter.”

Bradford put his hand behind his neck. Relaxed. “Yes, of course.”

“You read the papers. The police think she did it.”

“Well, you’ll have to admit,” Bradford said, “she makes a good suspect.”

“Maybe. But if they arrest her, I’ll have to act in her best interest.” Myron looked straight at him. “That means I’ll have to toss out any information that will lead the police to look at other potential suspects.”

Bradford smiled. He saw where this was going. “Including me.”

Myron turned both palms up and shrugged. “What choice would I have? My client must come first.” Slight hesitation. “But of course none of that will occur if Brenda Slaughter remains free.”

Still the smile. “Ah,” Bradford said.

Myron kept still.

Bradford sat up and put up both hands in stop position. “Say no more.”

Myron didn’t.

“It’ll be dealt with.” Bradford checked his watch. “Now I must get dressed. Campaign obligations.”

They both rose. Bradford stuck out his hand. Myron shook it. Bradford had not come clean, but Myron had not expected him to. They’d both learned a bit here. Myron was not sure who had gotten the better of the deal. But the first rule of any negotiation is not to be a pig. If you just keep taking, it will backfire in the long run.

Still he wondered.

“Good-bye,” Bradford said, still shaking the hand. “I do hope you’ll keep me up-to-date on your progress.”

The two men released their grips. Myron looked at Bradford. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking:

“Do you know my father?”

Bradford angled his head and smiled. “Did he tell you that?”

“No. Your friend Sam mentioned it.”

“Sam has worked for me a long time.”

“I didn’t ask about Sam. I asked about my father.”

Mattius opened the door. Bradford motioned to it.

“Why don’t you ask your father, Myron? Maybe it will help clarify the situation.”

As Mattius the Manservant led Myron back down the long corridor, the same two words kept rocking through Myron’s bone-dry skull:

My father?

Myron searched for a memory, a casual mention of the Bradford name in the house, a political tête-à-tête surrounding Livingston’s most prominent resident. Nothing came to him.

So how did Bradford know his father?

Big Guy Mario and Skinny Sam were in the foyer. Mario stamped back and forth as though the very floor had pissed him off. His arms and hands gestured with the subtlety of a Jerry Lewis flick. If he had been a cartoon character, smoke would have been power-shooting out of both ears.

Skinny Sam pulled on a Marlboro, leaning against the banister like Sinatra waiting for Dino. Sam had that ease. Like Win. Myron could engage in violence, and he was good at it, but there were adrenal spikes and tingling legs and postcombat cold sweats when he did so. That was normal, of course. Only a rare few had the ability to disconnect, to remain calm in the eye, to view the outbursts in slow motion.

Big Guy Mario stormed toward Myron. His fists were clenched at his sides. His face was contorted like it’d been pressed up against a glass door. “You’re dead, asshole. You hear me? Dead. Dead and buried. I’m gonna take you outside and—”

Myron snapped up the knee again. And again it found its target. Big Dope Mario landed hard on the cool marble and thrashed around like a dying fish.

“Today’s friendly tip,” Myron said. “A protective cup is a worthwhile investment, though not as a drinking receptacle.”

Myron looked over at Sam. Sam still rested on the banister. He took another drag of the cigarette and let the smoke ease out of his nostrils.

“New guy,” Sam said in way of explanation.

Myron nodded.

“Sometimes you just want to scare stupid people,” Sam said. “Stupid people are scared by big muscles.” Another drag. “But don’t let his incompetence get you cocky.”

Myron looked down. He was about to crack wise, but he stopped himself and shook his head. Cocky, a knee in the balls.

Too easy.

Win waited by Myron’s car. He was bent slightly at the waist, practicing his golf swing. He did not have a club or a ball, of course. Remember blasting rock music and jumping on your bed and playing air guitar? Golfers do the same thing. They hear some internal sounds of nature, step on imaginary first tees, and swing air clubs. Air woods usually. Sometimes, when they want more control, they take air irons out of their air bags. And like teens with air guitars, golfers like to watch themselves in mirrors. Win, for example, often checks out his reflection in store windows. He stops on the sidewalk, makes sure his grip is right, checks his backswing, recocks his wrists, whatever.

“Win?”

“A moment.”

Win had repositioned Myron’s passenger side mirror for a better full-body view. He stopped mid-swing, spotted something in the reflection, frowned.

“Remember,” Myron said, “Objects in the mirror may appear smaller than they are.”

Win ignored him. He readdressed the, uh, ball, selected an air sand wedge, and tried a little air chip. From the look on Win’s face the, uh, ball landed on the green and rolled within three feet of the cup. Win smiled and put up a hand to acknowledge the, uh, appreciative crowd.

Golfers.

“How did you get here so fast?” Myron asked.

“Batcopter.”

Lock-Horne Securities had a helicopter and a landing pad on the roof. Win had probably flown to a nearby field and jogged over.

“So you heard everything?”

Win nodded.

“What do you think?”

“Wasteful,” Win said.

“Right, I should have shot him in the knee.”

“Well, yes, there is that. But in this instance I am referring to the entire matter.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that Arthur Bradford may be on to something. You are not keeping your eyes on the prize.”

“And what is the prize?”

Win smiled. “Exactly.”

Myron nodded. “Yet again, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He unlocked the car doors, and the two men slid into their seats. The Leatherette was hot from the sun. The air conditioner sputtered out something close to warm spit.

“On occasion,” Win said, “we have performed extracurricular duties for one reason or another. But there was, for the most part, a purpose. A goal, if you will. We knew what we were trying to accomplish.”

“And you don’t think that’s the case here?”

“Correct.”

“I’ll give you three goals then,” Myron said. “One, I’m trying to find Anita Slaughter. Two, I’m trying to find Horace Slaughter’s killer. Three, I’m trying to protect Brenda.”

“Protect her from what?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Ah,” Win said. “And—let me make sure I understand you here—you feel that the best way to protect Ms. Slaughter is to agitate police officers, the most powerful family in the state, and known mobsters?”

“That can’t be helped.”

“Well, yes, of course you’re right about that. And we also have your other two goals to consider.” Win lowered the visor and checked his hair in the mirror. Not a blond hair out of place. He still patted about, frowning. When he finished, he snapped the visor back into place. “Let’s start with finding Anita Slaughter, shall we?”

Myron nodded, but he knew that he was not going to like where this was going.

“That is the core of the matter, is it not? Finding Brenda’s mother?”

“Right,” Myron said.

“So—and again let me make sure I comprehend completely—you are taking on police officers, the most powerful family in the state, and known mobsters to find a woman who ran off twenty years ago?”

“Yes.”

“And the reason for this search?”

“Brenda. She wants to know where her mother is. She has the right—”

“Bah,” Win interrupted.

“Bah?”

“What are you, the ACLU? What right? Brenda has no right here. Do you believe Anita Slaughter is being held against her will?”

“No.”

“Then what, pray tell, are you trying to accomplish here? If Anita Slaughter craved a reconciliation with her daughter, she would seek it. Clearly she has opted not to do that. We know that she ran away twenty years ago. We know that she has worked hard to stay hidden. What we don’t know, of course, is why. And instead of respecting her decision, you choose to ignore it.”

Myron said nothing.

“Under normal circumstances,” Win continued, “this search would be a close call. But when you add in the mitigating factors—the obvious danger upsetting these particular adversaries—the call is an easy one. Simply put, we are taking a tremendous risk for very little reason.”

Myron shook his head, but he saw the logic. Had he not wondered about these same issues himself? He was doing his tightrope act again, this time over a raging inferno, and he was dragging others, including Francine Neagly, with him. And for what? Win was right. He was pissing off powerful people. He might even be inadvertently helping those who wished Anita Slaughter great harm, flushing her out into the open where they could set their sights with greater ease. He knew that he had to step carefully here. One false move and ka-pow.

“There’s more to it,” Myron tried. “A crime may have been covered up.”

“Are you speaking now of Elizabeth Bradford?”

“Yes.”

Win frowned. “So is that what you’re after, Myron? You’re risking lives in order to give her justice after twenty years? Elizabeth Bradford is calling out to you from the grave or some such thing?”

“There’s also Horace to think about.”

“What about him?”

“He was my friend.”

“And you believe that finding his killer will ease your guilt over not talking to him in ten years?”

Myron swallowed at that one. “Low blow, Win.”

“No, my friend, I am merely trying to pull you back from the abyss. I am not saying that there is no value in what you are doing here. We have worked for questionable profit before. But you have to calculate some sort of cost-benefit analysis. You are trying to find a woman who does not want to be found. You are pushing against forces more powerful than you and me combined.”

“You almost sound afraid, Win.”

Win looked at him. “You know better.”

Myron looked at the blue eyes with the flecks of silver. He nodded. He did know better.

“I’m talking about pragmatism,” Win continued, “not fear. Pushing is fine. Forcing confrontation is fine. We’ve done that plenty of times before. We both know that I rarely back away from such instances, that I perhaps enjoy them too much. But there was always a goal. We were looking for Kathy to help clear a client. We were looking for Valerie’s killer for the same reason. We searched for Greg because you were well compensated monetarily. The same could be said about the Coldren boy. But the goal here is too hazy.”

The volume switch on the car radio was set low, but Myron could still hear Seal “compare” his love to “a kiss from the rose on the grave.” Romance.

“I have to stick with this,” Myron said. “For a little while longer anyway.”

Win said nothing.

“And I’d like your help.”

Still nothing.

“There were scholarships set up to help Brenda,” Myron said. “I think her mother may have been funneling money to her through them. Anonymously. I want you to try to track the money trail.”

Win reached forward and turned off the radio. Traffic was almost nonexistent. The air conditioner hummed, but otherwise the silence was heavy. After a couple of minutes, Win broke it.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

The question hit him by surprise. Myron opened his mouth, closed it. Win had never asked a question like this before; he did, in fact, all he could do to avoid the subject. Explaining love relationships to Win had always seemed akin to explaining jazz music to a lawn chair.

“I think I might be,” Myron said.

“It’s affecting your judgment,” Win said. “Emotion may be ruling over pragmatism.”

“I won’t let it.”

“Pretend you are not in love with her. Would you still pursue this?”

“Does it matter?”

Win nodded. He understood better than most. Hypotheticals had nothing to do with reality. “Fine then,” he said. “Give me the information on the scholarships. I’ll see what I can find.”

They both settled into silence. Win as always looked perfectly relaxed and in a state of total readiness.

“There is a very fine line between relentless and stupid,” Win said. “Try to stay on the right side of it.”

The Sunday afternoon traffic remained light. The Lincoln Tunnel was a breeze. Win fiddled with the buttons on Myron’s new CD player, settling on a recently purchased compilation CD of AM seventies classics. They listened to the “The Night Chicago Died.” Then “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.” Nights, Myron surmised, were a dangerous time in the seventies. Then the theme song to the movie Billy Jack blasted its peace on earth message. Remember the Billy Jack movies? Win did. A little too well, in fact.

The final song was a classic seventies tearjerker called “Shannon.” Shannon dies pretty early in the song. In a very high pitch, we are told that Shannon is gone, that she drifted out to sea. Sad. The song always moved Myron. Mother is heartbroken at the loss. Dad always seems tired now. Nothing is the same without Shannon.

“Did you know,” Win said, “that Shannon was a dog?”

“You’re kidding.”

Win shook his head. “If you listen closely to the chorus, you can tell.”

“I can only make out the part about Shannon being gone and drifting out to sea.”

“That is followed by the hopes that Shannon will find an island with a shady tree.”

“A shady tree?”

Win sang, “Just like the one in our backyard.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s a dog, Win. Maybe Shannon liked sitting under a tree. Maybe they had a hammock.”

“Perhaps,” Win said. “But there is one other subtle giveaway.”

“What’s that?”

“The CD liner notes say the song is about a dog.”

Win.

“Do you want me to drop you off at home?” Myron asked.

Win shook his head. “I have paperwork,” he said. “And I think it best if I stay close.”

Myron did not argue.

“You have the weapon?” Win asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want another?”

“No.”

They parked at the Kinney lot and took the elevator up together. The high-rise was silent today, the ants all away from the hill. The effect was sort of eerie, like one of those end-of-the-earth apocalypse movies where everything is abandoned and ghostlike. The dinging of the elevator echoed in the still air like a thunderclap.

Myron got off at the twelfth floor. Despite its being Sunday, Big Cyndi was at her desk. As always, everything around Big Cyndi looked tiny, like that episode of The Twilight Zone where the house starts shrinking or like someone had jammed a large stuffed animal into Barbie’s pink Corvette. Big Cyndi was wearing a wig today that looked like something stolen from Carol Channing’s closet. Bad hair day, Myron supposed. She stood and smiled at him. Myron kept his eyes open and was surprised when he didn’t turn to stone.

Big Cyndi was normally six-six, but she was wearing high heels today. Pumps. The heels cried out in agony as she stood. She was dressed in what some might consider a business suit. The shirt was French-Revolution frilly, the jacket solid gray with a fresh tear along the shoulder stitch.

She raised her hands and twirled for Myron. Picture Godzilla rearing back after getting nailed by a Taser gun.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Very much,” Myron said. Jurassic Park III: The Fashion Show.

“I bought it at Benny’s.”

“Benny’s?”

“Down in the Village,” Big Cyndi explained. “It’s a clothing store for transvestites. But lots of us big girls shop there too.”

Myron nodded. “Practical,” he said.

Big Cyndi sniffled once, then suddenly began to cry. She still had on waaaay too much makeup, none of it waterproof, and she quickly started to look like a lava lamp left in the microwave.

“Oh, Mr. Bolitar!”

She ran toward him, her arms spread, the floor creaking from the thumping. An image of one of those cartoon scenes where characters keep falling through floors, forming cutout silhouettes in each floor as they pass through it, came to him.

Myron put up his hands. No! Myron good! Myron like Cyndi! Cyndi no hurt Myron! But the gesture was useless.

She embraced him, wrapping both arms around him and lifting him off his feet. It felt as though a water bed had come to life and attacked him. He closed his eyes and tried to ride it out.

“Thank you,” she whispered through her tears.

Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Esperanza. She watched the scene with crossed arms, smiling slightly. The new job, Myron suddenly remembered. Rehiring her full-time.

“You’re welcome,” he managed.

“I won’t let you down.”

“Could you at least put me down?”

Big Cyndi made a noise that might have been a giggle. Children in the tristate area screamed and reached for Mommy’s hand.

She lowered him gently back to the floor like a child placing a block on the top of a pyramid. “You won’t be sorry. I’ll work night and day. I’ll work weekends. I’ll pick up your laundry. I’ll make coffee. I’ll fetch Yoo-Hoos. I’ll even give you backrubs.”

The image of a steamroller approaching a bruised peach flashed through his mind.

“Er, a Yoo-Hoo would be great.”

“Right away.” Big Cyndi bounced toward the refrigerator.

Myron moved toward Esperanza.

“She does give a great backrub,” Esperanza said.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“I told Big Cyndi you were the one who wanted to hire her full-time.”

Myron nodded. “Next time,” he said, “just let me pull a thorn out of her paw, okay?”

Big Cyndi held up the can of Yoo-Hoo. “Do you want me to shake it for you, Mr. Bolitar?”

“I’ll handle that, Cyndi, thanks.”

“Yes, Mr. Bolitar.” She hopped back over, and Myron was reminded of the scene where the boat flips over in the Poseidon Adventure. She handed him the Yoo-Hoo. Then she smiled again. And the gods shielded their eyes.

Myron spoke to Esperanza. “Any more word on Lester’s trade?”

“No.”

“Get me Ron Dixon on the phone. Try his home number.”

Big Cyndi took that one. “Right away, Mr. Bolitar.”

Esperanza shrugged. Big Cyndi dialed and used her English accent. She sounded like Maggie Smith in a Noel Coward play. Myron and Esperanza went into his office. The call was transferred.

“Ron? It’s Myron Bolitar, how are you?”

“I know who the hell this is, moron. Your receptionist told me. It’s Sunday, Myron. Sunday is my day off. Sunday is my family day. My quality time. My chance to get to know the kids better. So why are you calling me on a Sunday?”

“Are you trading Lester Ellis?”

“That’s why you’re calling me at home on a Sunday?”

“Is it true?”

“No comment.”

“You told me you wouldn’t trade him.”

“Wrong. I told you I wouldn’t actively put him on the block. If you recall, Mr. Super Agent, you wanted to put in a trade approval clause in his contract. I said, no, unless you wanted to shave fifty grand off his salary. You refused. Now it’s coming back and biting your ass cheek, ain’t it, hotshot?”

Myron shifted in his seat. Sore ass cheek and all. “Who are you getting for him?”

“No comment.”

“Don’t do this, Ron. He’s a great talent.”

“Yeah. Too bad he’s not a great baseball player.”

“You’re going to look foolish. Remember Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi? Remember Babe Ruth, uh”—Myron forgot who they got in the trade—“being traded by the Red Sox?”

“Now Lester Ellis is Babe Ruth?”

“Let’s talk about this.”

“Nothing to talk about, Myron. And now, if you’ll excuse me, the wife is calling me. It’s strange.”

“What’s that?”

“This quality time stuff. This getting to know my children better. You know what I’ve learned, Myron?”

“What?”

“I hate my kids.”

Click.

Myron looked up at Esperanza.

“Get me Al Toney at the Chicago Tribune.”

“He’s being traded to Seattle.”

“Trust me here.”

Esperanza gestured to the phone. “Don’t ask me. Ask Big Cyndi.”

Myron hit the intercom. “Big Cyndi, could you please get me Al Toney? He should be at his office.”

“Yes, Mr. Bolitar.”

A minute later Big Cyndi beeped in. “Al Toney on line one.”

“Al? Myron Bolitar here.”

“Hey, Myron, what’s up?”

“I owe you one, right?”

“At least one.”

“Well, I got a scoop for you.”

“My nipples are hardening as we speak. Talk dirty to me, baby.”

“You know Lester Ellis? He’s being traded tomorrow to Seattle. Lester is thrilled. He’s been bugging the Yankees to trade him all year. We couldn’t be happier.”

“That’s your big scoop?”

“Hey, this is an important story.”

“In New York or Seattle maybe. But I’m in Chicago, Myron.”

“Still. I thought you might want to know.”

“No good. You still owe me.”

Myron said, “You don’t want to check with your nipples first?”

“Hold on.” Pause. “Soft as overripe grapes already. But I could check again in a few minutes, if you’d like.”

“Pass, Al, thanks. Frankly I didn’t think it would fly with you, but it was worth a try. Between you and me, the Yankees are pushing hard on this trade. They want me to put on the best spin. I thought you could help.”

“Why? Who they getting?”

“I don’t know.”

“Lester’s a pretty good player. Raw but good. Why the Yankees so interested in getting rid of him?”

“You won’t print this?”

Pause. Myron could almost hear Al’s brain awhirring. “Not if you tell me not to.”

“He’s hurt. Home accident. Damaged the knee. They’re keeping it quiet, but Lester will need surgery after the season.”

Silence.

“You can’t print it, Al.”

“No problem. Hey, I gotta go.”

Myron smiled. “Later, Al.”

He hung up.

Esperanza looked at him. “Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”

“Al Toney is the master of the loophole,” Myron explained. “He promised he wouldn’t print it. He won’t. But he works by trading favors. He’s the best barterer in the business.”

“So?”

“So now he’ll call a friend at the Seattle Times and barter. The injury rumor will spread. If it gets public before the trade is announced, well, it’s doomed.”

Esperanza smiled. “Highly unethical.”

Myron shrugged. “Let’s just say it’s fuzzy.”

“I still like it.”

“Always remember the MB SportsReps credo: The client comes first.”

She nodded and added, “Even in sexual liaisons.”

“Hey, we’re a full-service agency.” Myron looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, “Can I ask you something?”

She tilted her head. “I don’t know. Can you?”

“Why do you hate Jessica?”

Esperanza’s face clouded over. She shrugged. “Habit, I guess.”

“I’m serious.”

She crossed her legs, uncrossed them. “Let me just stick to taking cheap potshots, okay?”

“You’re my best friend,” he said. “I want to know why you don’t like her.”

Esperanza sighed, crossed the legs again, tucked a loose strand behind her ear. “Jessica is bright, smart, funny, a great writer, and I wouldn’t throw her out of bed for eating crackers.”

Bisexuals.

“But she hurt you.”

“So? She’s not the first woman to commit an indiscretion.”

“True enough,” Esperanza agreed. She slapped her knees and stood. “Guess I’m wrong. Can I go now?”

“So why do you still hold a grudge?”

“I like grudges,” Esperanza said. “They’re easier than forgiveness.”

Myron shook his head, signaled her to sit.

“What do you want me to say, Myron?”

“I want you to tell me why you don’t like her.”

“I’m just being a pain in the ass. Don’t take it seriously.”

Myron shook his head again.

Esperanza put her hand to her face. She looked away for a moment. “You’re not tough enough, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“For that kind of hurt. Most people can take it. I can. Jessica can. Win certainly can. But you can’t. You’re not tough enough. You’re just not built that way.”

“Then maybe that’s my fault.”

“It is your fault,” Esperanza said. “At least in part. You idealize relationships too much, for one thing. And you’re too sensitive. You used to expose yourself too much. You used to leave yourself too open.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

She hesitated. “No. In fact, it’s a good thing, I guess. A bit naive, but it’s a lot better than those assholes who hold everything back. Can we stop talking about this now?”

“I still don’t think you’ve answered my question.”

Esperanza raised her palms. “That’s as good as I can do.”

Myron flashed back to Little League again, to being hit by Joey Davito’s pitch, to never planting his feet in the batter’s box the same again. He nodded. Used to expose, Esperanza had said. “Used to.” A curious use of words.

Esperanza took advantage of the silence and changed subjects. “I checked into Elizabeth Bradford for you.”

“And?”

“There’s nothing there that would suggest her death was anything other than an accident. You can take a run at her brother, if you want. He lives in Westport. He’s also closely aligned to his old brother-in-law, so I doubt you’ll get anywhere.”

Waste of time. “Any other family?”

“A sister who also lives in Westport. But she’s spending the summer on the Côte d’Azur.”

Strike two.

“Anything else?”

“One thing bothered me a little,” Esperanza said. “Elizabeth Bradford was clearly a social animal, a society dame of the first order. Barely a week went by when her name wasn’t in the paper for some function or other. But about six months before she fell off the balcony, mentions of her stopped.”

“When you say ‘stopped’—”

“I mean, completely. Her name was nowhere, not even in the town paper.”

Myron thought about this. “Maybe she was on the Côte d’Azur.”

“Maybe. But her husband wasn’t there with her. Arthur was still getting plenty of coverage.”

Myron leaned back and spun his chair around. He checked out the Broadway posters behind his desk again. Yep, they definitely had to go. “You said there were a lot of stories on Elizabeth Bradford before that?”

“Not stories,” Esperanza corrected. “Mentions. Her name was almost always preceded by ‘Hosting the event was’ or ‘Attendees included’ or ‘Pictured from right to left are.’ ”

Myron nodded. “Were these in some kind of column or general articles or what?”

“The Jersey Ledger used to have a social column. It was called ‘Social Soirees.’ ”

“Catchy.” But Myron remembered the column vaguely from his childhood. His mother used to skim it, checking out the boldface names for a familiar one. Mom had even been listed once, referred to as “prominent local attorney Ellen Bolitar.” That was how she wanted to be addressed for the next week. Myron would yell down, “Hey, Mom!” and she would reply, “That’s Prominent Local Attorney Ellen Bolitar to you, Mr. Smarty Pants.”

“Who wrote the column?” Myron asked.

Esperanza handed him a sheet of paper. There was a head shot of a pretty woman with an overstylized helmet of hair, à la Lady Bird Johnson. Her name was Deborah Whittaker.

“Think we can get an address on her?”

Esperanza nodded. “Shouldn’t take long.”

They looked at each other for a long moment. Esperanza’s deadline hung over them like a reaper’s scythe.

Myron said, “I can’t imagine you not in my life.”

“Won’t happen,” Esperanza replied. “No matter what you decide, you’ll still be my best friend.”

“Partnerships ruin friendships.”

“So you tell me.”

“So I know.” He had avoided this conversation long enough. To use basketball vernacular, he had gone into four corners, but the twenty-four-second clock had run down. He could no longer delay the inevitable in the hope that the inevitable would somehow turn to smoke and vanish in the air. “My father and my uncle tried it. They ended up not talking to each other for four years.”

She nodded. “I know.”

“Even now their relationship is not what it was. It never will be. I know literally dozens of families and friends—good people, Esperanza—who tried partnerships like this. I don’t know one case where it worked in the long run. Not one. Brother against brother. Daughter against father. Best friend against best friend. Money does funny things to people.”

Esperanza nodded again.

“Our friendship could survive anything,” Myron said, “but I’m not sure it can survive a partnership.”

Esperanza stood again. “I’ll get you an address on Deborah Whittaker,” she said. “It shouldn’t take long.”

“Thanks.”

“And I’ll give you three weeks for the transition. Will that be long enough?”

Myron nodded, his throat dry. He wanted to say something more, but whatever came to mind was even more inane than what preceded it.

The intercom buzzed. Esperanza left the room. Myron hit the button.

“Yes?”

Big Cyndi said, “The Seattle Times on line one.”

The Inglemoore Convalescent Home was painted bright yellow and cheerfully maintained and colorfully landscaped and still looked like a place you went to die.

The inner lobby had a rainbow on one wall. The furniture was happy and functional. Nothing too plush. Didn’t want the patrons having trouble getting out of chairs. A table in the room’s center had a huge arrangement of freshly cut roses. The roses were bright red and strikingly beautiful and would die in a day or two.

Myron took a deep breath. Settle, boy, settle.

The place had a heavy cherry smell like one of those dangling tree-shaped car fresheners. A woman dressed in slacks and a blouse—what you’d call “nice casual”—greeted him. She was in her early thirties and smiled with the genuine warmth of a Stepford Wife.

“I’m here to see Deborah Whittaker.”

“Of course,” she said. “I think Deborah is in the rec room. I’m Gayle. I’ll take you.”

Deborah. Gayle. Everyone was a first name. There was probably a Dr. Bob on the premises. They headed down a corridor lined with festive murals. The floors sparkled, but Myron could still make out fresh wheelchair streaks. Everyone on staff had the same fake smile. Part of the training, Myron supposed. All of them—orderlies, nurses, whatever—were dressed in civilian clothes. No one wore a stethoscope or beeper or name tag or anything that implied anything medical. All buddies here at Inglemoore.

Gayle and Myron entered the rec room. Unused Ping-Pong tables. Unused pool tables. Unused card tables. Oft-used television.

“Please sit down,” Gayle said. “Becky and Deborah will be with you momentarily.”

“Becky?” Myron asked.

Again the smile. “Becky is Deborah’s friend.”

“I see.”

Myron was left alone with six old people, five of whom were women. No sexism in longevity. They were neatly attired, the sole man in a tie even, and all were in wheelchairs. Two of them had the shakes. Two were mumbling to themselves. They all had skin a color closer to washed-out gray than any flesh tone. One woman waved at Myron with a bony, blue-lined hand. Myron smiled and waved back.

Several signs on the wall had the Inglemoore slogan:

INGLEMOORE—NO DAY LIKE TODAY.

Nice, Myron guessed, but he couldn’t help but think up a more appropriate one:

INGLEMOORE—BETTER THAN THE ALTERNATIVE.

Hmm. He’d drop it in the suggestion box on the way out.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

Deborah Whittaker shuffled into the room. She still had Le Helmet de Hair from the newspaper portrait—black as shoe polish and shellacked on until it resembled fiberglass—but the overall effect was still like something out of Dorian Gray, as though she had aged a zillion years in one fell swoop. Her eyes had that soldier’s thousand-yard stare. She had a bit of a shake in her face that reminded him of Katharine Hepburn. Parkinson’s maybe, but he was no expert.

Her “friend” Becky had been the one who called his name. Becky was maybe thirty years old. She too was dressed in civilian clothes rather than whites, and while nothing about her appearance suggested nursing, Myron still thought of Louise Fletcher in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

He stood.

“I’m Becky,” the nurse said.

“Myron Bolitar.”

Becky shook his hand and offered him a patronizing smile. Probably couldn’t help it. Probably couldn’t smile genuinely until she was out of here for at least an hour. “Do you mind if I join you two?”

Deborah Whittaker spoke for the first time. “Go away,” she rasped. Her voice sounded like a worn tire on a gravel road.

“Now, Deborah—”

“Don’t ‘now Deborah’ me. I got myself a handsome gentleman caller, and I’m not sharing him. So buzz off.”

Becky’s patronizing smile turned a bit uncertain. “Deborah,” she said in a tone that aimed for amiable but landed smack on, well, patronizing, “do you know where we are?”

“Of course,” Deborah snapped. “The Allies just bombed Munich. The Axis has surrendered. I’m a USO girl standing by the south pier in Manhattan. The ocean breeze hits my face. I wait for the sailors to arrive so I can lay a big, wet kiss on the first guy off the boat.”

Deborah Whittaker winked at Myron.

Becky said, “Deborah, it’s not 1945. It’s—”

“I know, dammit. For crying out loud, Becky, don’t be so damn gullible.” She sat down and leaned toward Myron. “Truth is, I go in and out. Sometimes I’m here. Sometimes I time travel. When my grandpa had it, they called it hardening of the arteries. When my mother had it, they called it senility. With me, it’s Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.” She looked at her nurse, her facial muscles still doing the quivers. “Please, Becky, while I’m still lucid, get the hell out of my face.”

Becky waited a second, holding the uncertain smile as best she could. Myron nodded at her, and she moved away.

Deborah Whittaker leaned a little closer. “I love getting ornery with her,” she whispered. “It’s the only fringe benefit of old age.” She put her hands on her lap and managed a shaky smile. “Now I know you just told me, but I forgot your name.”

“Myron.”

She looked puzzled. “No, that’s not it. Andre maybe? You look like Andre. He used to do my hair.”

Becky kept a watchful eye on the corner. At the ready.

Myron decided to dive right in. “Mrs. Whittaker, I wanted to ask you about Elizabeth Bradford.”

“Lizzy?” The eyes flared up and settled into a glisten. “Is she here?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I thought she died.”

“She did.”

“Poor thing. She threw such wonderful parties. At Bradford Farm. They’d string lights across the porch. They’d have hundreds of people. Lizzy always had the best band, the best caterer. I had such fun at her parties. I used to dress up and …” A flicker hit Deborah Whittaker’s eyes, a realization perhaps that the parties and invitations would never come again, and she stopped speaking.

“In your column,” Myron said, “you used to write about Elizabeth Bradford.”

“Oh, of course.” She waved a hand. “Lizzy made good copy. She was a social force. But—” She stopped again and looked off.

“But what?”

“Well, I haven’t written about Lizzy in months. Strange really. Last week Constance Lawrence had a charity ball for the St. Sebastian’s Children’s Care, and Lizzy wasn’t there again. And that used to be Lizzy’s favorite event. She ran it the past four years, you know.”

Myron nodded, trying to keep up with the changing eras. “But Lizzy doesn’t go to parties anymore, does she?”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

Deborah Whittaker sort of half startled. She eyed him suspiciously. “What’s your name again?”

“Myron.”

“I know that. You just told me. I mean, your last name.”

“Bolitar.”

Another spark. “Ellen’s boy?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Ellen Bolitar,” she said with a spreading smile. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s doing well.”

“Such a shrewd woman. Tell me, Myron. Is she still ripping apart opposing witnesses?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So shrewd.”

“She loved your column,” Myron said.

Her face beamed. “Ellen Bolitar, the attorney, reads my column?”

“Every week. It was the first thing she read.”

Deborah Whittaker settled back, shaking her head. “How do you like that? Ellen Bolitar reads my column.” She smiled at Myron. Myron was getting confused by the verb tenses. Bouncing in time. He’d just have to try to stay with her. “We’re having such a nice visit, aren’t we, Myron?”

“Yes, ma’am, we are.”

Her smile quivered and faded. “Nobody in here remembers my column,” she said. “They’re all very nice and sweet. They treat me well. But I’m just another old lady to them. You reach an age, and suddenly you become invisible. They only see this rotting shell. They don’t realize that this mind inside used to be sharp, that this body used to go to the fanciest parties and dance with the handsomest men. They don’t see that. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, but I remember those parties. Do you think that’s strange?”

Myron shook his head. “No, ma’am, I don’t.”

“I remember Lizzy’s final soiree like it was last night. She wore a black, strapless Halston with white pearls. She was tan and lovely. I wore a bright pink summer dress. A Lilly Pulitzer, as a matter of fact, and let me tell you, I was still turning heads.”

“What happened to Lizzy, Mrs. Whittaker? Why did she stop going to parties?”

Deborah Whittaker stiffened suddenly. “I’m a social columnist,” she said, “not a gossip.”

“I understand that. I’m not asking to be nosy. It may be important.”

“Lizzy is my friend.”

“Did you see her after that party?”

Her eyes had the faraway look again. “I thought she drank too much. I even wondered if maybe she had a problem.”

“A drinking problem?”

“I don’t like to gossip. It’s not my way. I write a social column. I don’t believe in hurting people.”

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Whittaker.”

“But I was wrong anyway.”

“Wrong?”

“Lizzy doesn’t have a drinking problem. Oh, sure, she might have a social drink, but she’s too proper a hostess to go beyond her limit.”

Again with the verb tenses. “Did you see her after that party?”

“No,” she said softly. “Never.”

“Did you talk to her on the phone maybe?”

“I called her twice. After she missed the Woodmeres’ party and then Constance’s affair, well, I knew something had to be very wrong. But I never spoke to her. She was either out or couldn’t come to the phone.” She looked up at Myron. “Do you know where she is? Do you think she’ll be all right?”

Myron was not sure how to respond. Or in what tense. “Are you worried about her?”

“Of course I am. It’s as though Lizzy just vanished. I’ve asked all her close friends from the club, but none of them has seen her either.” She frowned. “Not friends really. Friends don’t gossip like that.”

“Gossip about what?”

“About Lizzy.”

“What about her?”

Her voice was a conspiratorial whisper. “I thought she was acting strange because she drank too much. But that wasn’t it.”

Myron leaned in and matched her tone. “What was it then?”

Deborah Whittaker gazed at Myron. The eyes were milky and cloudy, and Myron wondered what reality they were seeing. “A breakdown,” she said at last. “The ladies at the club were whispering that Lizzy had a breakdown. That Arthur had sent her away. To an institution with padded walls.”

Myron felt his body go cold.

“Gossip,” Deborah Whittaker spit. “Ugly rumors.”

“You didn’t believe it?”

“Tell me something.” Deborah Whittaker licked lips so dry they looked like they might flake off. She sat up a bit. “If Elizabeth Bradford had been locked away in an institution,” she said, “how come she fell at her own home?”

Myron nodded. Food for thought.

He stayed for a while and talked with Deborah Whittaker about people and a time period he never knew. Becky finally called a halt to the visit. Myron promised that he would visit again. He said that he’d try to bring his mother. And he would. Deborah Whittaker shuffled off, and Myron wondered if she would still remember his visit by the time she got to her room. Then he wondered if it mattered.

Myron headed back to his car and called Arthur Bradford’s office. His “executive secretary” told him that the “next governor” would be in Belleville. Myron thanked her and hung up. He checked his watch and started on his way. If he didn’t hit any traffic, he’d make it in time.

When he hit the Garden State Parkway, Myron called his father’s office. Eloise, Dad’s longtime secretary, said the same thing she’d said every time he’d called for the past twenty-five years: “I’ll patch you through immediately, Myron.” It didn’t matter if Dad was busy. It didn’t matter if he was on the phone or if someone was in the office with him. Dad had left instructions long ago: When his son called, he was always to be disturbed.

“No need,” Myron said. “Just tell him I’ll be dropping by in a couple of hours.”

“Here? My God, Myron, you haven’t been here in years.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing, Eloise. I just want to talk to him. Tell him it’s nothing to worry about.”

“Oh, your father will be so pleased.”

Myron was not so sure.

Arthur Bradford’s tour bus had red and blue stripes and big white stars. “BRADFORD FOR GOVERNOR” was painted in a hip, slanted font with 3-D letters. The windows were tinted black so none of the great unwashed could look in on their leader. Quite the homespun touch.

Arthur Bradford stood by the bus door, microphone in hand. Brother Chance was behind him, smiling in that the-camera-might-be-on-me, gee-isn’t-the-candidate-brilliant mode of the political underling. On his right was Terence Edwards, Brenda’s cousin. He too beamed with a smile about as natural as Joe Biden’s hairline. Both of them were wearing those goofy political Styrofoam hats that looked like something a barbershop quartet might sport.

The crowd was sparse and mostly old. Very old. They looked distracted, glancing about as if someone had enticed them here with the promise of free food. Other people slowed and meandered over to take a look, not unlike pedestrians who stumbled across a fender bender and were now hoping a fight would break out. Bradford’s handlers blended into the crowd and passed out big signs and buttons and even those goofy Styrofoam hats, all with the same hip “BRADFORD FOR GOVERNOR” lettering. Every once in a while the interspersed handlers would break into applause, and the rest of the crowd would lazily follow suit. There was also a sprinkling of media and cable stations, local political correspondents who looked visibly pained by what they were doing, wondering what was worse: covering yet another canned political speech or losing a limb in a machinery mishap. Their expressions indicated a toss-up.

Myron eased into the crowd and slid up toward the front.

“What we need in New Jersey is a change,” Arthur Bradford bellowed. “What we need in New Jersey is daring and brave leadership. What we need in New Jersey is a governor who will not cave in to special interests.”

Oh, boy.

The handlers loved that line. They burst into applause like a porno starlet faking an orgasm (er, or so Myron imagined). The crowd was more tepid. The handlers started a chant: “Bradford … Bradford … Bradford.” Original. Another voice came over the loudspeaker. “Once again, ladies and gentlemen, the next governor of New Jersey, Arthur Bradford! What we need in New Jersey!”

Applause. Arthur waved at the common folk. Then he stepped down from his perch and actually touched a chosen few.

“I’m counting on your support,” he said after each handshake.

Myron felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around. Chance was there. He was still smiling and wearing the goofy Styrofoam hat. “What the hell do you want?”

Myron pointed at his head. “Can I have your hat?”

Still smiling. “I don’t like you, Bolitar.”

Myron mirrored the smile. “Ouch, that hurt.”

They both stayed with the frozen smiles. If one of them were female, they could have hosted one of those Hard Copy rip-offs.

“I need to talk to Art,” Myron said.

Still smiling. Best buddies. “Get on the bus.”

“Sure thing,” Myron said. “But once inside, can I stop smiling? My cheeks are starting to hurt.”

But Chance was already moving away. Myron shrugged and hopped on board. The carpet on the bus floor was thick and maroon. The regular seats had been ripped out and replaced with what looked like lounge chairs. There were several overhead televisions, a bar with a minifridge, telephones, computer terminals.

Skinny Sam was the sole occupant. He sat up front and read a copy of People magazine. He looked at Myron, then back at his magazine.

“Top fifty most intriguing people,” Sam said. “And I’m not one of them.”

Myron nodded sympathetically. “It’s based on connections, not merit.”

“Politics,” Sam agreed. He flipped the page. “Head to the back, bucko.”

“On my way.”

Myron settled into a pseudofuturistic swivel chair that looked like something from the set of Battlestar Galactica. He didn’t have to wait long. Chance hopped on first. He was still smiling and waving. Terence Edwards came in next. Then Arthur. The driver pressed a button, and the door slid closed. So did all three faces, their smiles thrown aside like itchy masks.

Arthur signaled for Terence Edwards to sit in the front. He obeyed like, well, a political underling. Arthur and Chance moved to the back of the bus. Arthur looked relaxed. Chance looked constipated.

“Nice to see you,” Arthur said.

“Yeah,” Myron said, “always a pleasure.”

“Would you care for a drink?”

“Sure.”

The bus pulled out. The crowd gathered around the bus and waved into the one-way glass. Arthur Bradford looked at them with utter disdain. Man of the people. He tossed Myron a Snapple and popped one open for himself. Myron looked at the bottle. Diet Peach Iced Tea. Not bad. Arthur sat down, and Chance sat next to him.

“What did you think of my speech?” Arthur asked.

“What we need in New Jersey,” Myron said, “is more political clichés.”

Arthur smiled. “You’d prefer a more detailed discussion on the issues, is that it? In this heat? With that crowd?”

“What can I say? I still like ‘Vote for Art, He’s Got an Indoor Pool.’ ”

Bradford waved the comment away. “Have you learned something new about Anita Slaughter?”

“No,” Myron said. “But I’ve learned something new about your late wife.”

Arthur frowned. Chance’s face reddened. Arthur said, “You’re supposed to be trying to find Anita Slaughter.”

“Funny thing that,” Myron said. “When I look into her disappearance, your wife’s death keeps popping up. Why do you think that is?”

Chance piped up. “Because you’re a goddamn idiot.”

Myron looked at Chance. Then he put his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

“Useless,” Arthur said. “Utterly useless. I have told you repeatedly that Elizabeth’s death has nothing to do with Anita Slaughter.”

“Then humor me,” Myron said. “Why did your wife stop going to parties?”

“Pardon me?”

“During the last six months of her life none of your wife’s friends saw her. She never went to parties anymore. She never even went to her club.” Whatever club that might have been.

“Who told you that?”

“I’ve spoken to several of her friends.”

Arthur smiled. “You’ve spoken,” he said, “to one senile old goat.”

“Careful, Artie. Senile goats have the right to vote.” Myron paused. “Hey, that rhymes. You may have another campaign slogan on your hands: ‘Senile Goats, We Need Your Votes.’ ”

No one reached for a pen.

“You’re wasting my time and I’m through with trying to cooperate,” Arthur said. “I’ll have the driver drop you off.”

“I can still go to the press,” Myron said.

Chance jumped on that one. “And I can put a bullet through your heart.”

Myron put his finger to his lips again. “Shhh.”

Chance was about to add something, but Arthur took the helm. “We had a deal,” he said. “I help keep Brenda Slaughter out of jail. You search for Anita Slaughter and keep my name out of the papers. But you insist on delving into peripheries. That’s a mistake. Your pointless digging will eventually draw my opponent’s attention and give him fresh fodder to use against me.”

He waited for Myron to say something. Myron didn’t.

“You leave me no choice,” Arthur continued. “I will tell you what you want to know. You will then see that it is irrelevant to the issues at hand. And then we will move on.”

Chance did not like that. “Arthur, you can’t be serious—”

“Sit up front, Chance.”

“But—” Chance was sputtering now. “He could be working for Davison.”

Arthur shook his head. “He’s not.”

“But you can’t know—”

“If he was working for Davison, they’d have ten guys following up on this by now. And if he continues to dig into this, he will most certainly be noticed by Davison’s people.”

Chance looked at Myron. Myron winked.

“I don’t like it,” Chance said.

“Sit up front, Chance.”

Chance rose with as much dignity as he could muster, which was absolutely none, and skulked to the front of the bus.

Arthur turned to Myron. “It goes without saying that what I’m about to tell you is strictly confidential. If it’s repeated …” He decided not to finish the sentence. “Have you spoken to your father yet?”

“No.”

“It will help.”

“Help with what?”

But Arthur did not reply. He sat in silence and looked out the window. The bus stopped at a traffic light. A group of people waved at the bus. Arthur looked right through them.

“I loved my wife,” he began. “I want you to understand that. We met in college. I saw her walking across the commons one day and …” The light turned green. The bus started up again. “And nothing in my life was ever the same.” Arthur glanced at Myron and smiled. “Corny, isn’t it?”

Myron shrugged. “Sounds nice.”

“Oh, it was.” He tilted his head at a memory, and for a moment the politician was replaced with a real human being. “Elizabeth and I got married a week after graduation. We had a huge wedding at Bradford Farms. You should have seen it. Six hundred people. Our families were both thrilled, though that didn’t matter a hoot to us. We were in love. And we had the certainty of the young that nothing would ever change.”

He looked off again. The bus whirred. Someone flipped on a television and then muted the sound.

“The first blow came a year after we wed. Elizabeth learned that she could not have children. Some sort of weakness in her uterine walls. She could get pregnant, but she couldn’t carry past the first trimester. It’s strange when I think about it now. You see, from the beginning Elizabeth had what I thought of as quiet moments—bouts of melancholy, some might call them. But they didn’t seem like melancholy to me. They seemed more like moments of reflection. I found them oddly appealing. Does that make any sense to you?”

Myron nodded, but Arthur was still looking out the window.

“But now the bouts came more often. And they were deeper. Natural, I suppose. Who wouldn’t be sad under our circumstances? Today, of course, Elizabeth would have been labeled a manic depressive.” He smiled. “They say it’s all physiological. That there is simply a chemical imbalance in the brain or some such thing. Some even claim that outside stimuli are irrelevant, that even without the uterine problem Elizabeth would have been equally ill in the long run.” He looked at Myron. “Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

He didn’t seem to hear. “I guess it’s possible. Mental illnesses are so strange. A physical problem we can understand. But when the mind works irrationally, well, by its very definition, the rational mind cannot truly relate. We can pity. But we cannot fully grasp. So I watched as her sanity began to peel away. She grew worse. Friends who had thought Elizabeth eccentric began to wonder. At times she got so bad that we would feign a vacation and keep her in the house. This went on for years. Slowly the woman I had fallen in love with was eaten away. Well before her death—five, six years before—she was already a different person. We tried our best, of course. We gave her the best medical care and propped her up and sent her back out. But nothing stopped the slide. Eventually Elizabeth could not go out at all.”

Silence.

“Did you institutionalize her?” Myron asked.

Arthur took a swig of his Snapple. His fingers started playing with the bottle’s label, pulling up the corners. “No,” he said at last. “My family urged me to have her committed. But I couldn’t do it. Elizabeth was no longer the woman I loved. I knew that. And maybe I could go on without her. But I could not abandon her. I still owed her that much, no matter what she’d become.”

Myron nodded, said nothing. The TV was off now, but a radio up front blasted an all-news station: You give them twenty-two minutes, they’ll give you the world. Sam read his People. Chance kept glancing over his shoulder, his eyes thin slits.

“I hired full-time nurses and kept Elizabeth at home. I continued to live my life while she continued to slide toward oblivion. In hindsight, of course, my family was right. I should have had her committed.”

The bus lurched to a stop. Myron and Arthur lurched a bit too.

“You can probably guess what happened next. Elizabeth grew worse. She was nearly catatonic by the end. Whatever evil had entered her brain now moved in and laid total claim. You were right, of course. Her fall was not accidental. Elizabeth jumped. It was not bad luck that she landed on her head. It was intentional on her part. My wife committed suicide.”

He put his hand to his face and leaned back. Myron watched him. It might be an acting job—politicians make awfully good thespians—but Myron thought that he spotted genuine guilt here, that something had indeed fled from this man’s eyes and left nothing in their wake. But you never know for sure. Those who claim they can spot a lie are usually just fooled with greater conviction.

“Anita Slaughter found her body?” Myron asked.

He nodded. “And the rest is classic Bradford. The cover-up began immediately. Bribes were made. You see, a suicide—a wife so crazy that a Bradford man had driven her to kill herself—would simply not do. We would have kept Anita’s name out of it too, but her name went over the radio dispatch. The media picked it up.”

That part certainly made sense. “You mentioned bribes.”

“Yes.”

“How much did Anita get?”

He closed his eyes. “Anita wouldn’t take any money.”

“What did she want?”

“Nothing. She wasn’t like that.”

“And you trusted her to keep quiet.”

Arthur nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I trusted her.”

“You never threatened her or—”

“Never.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Arthur shrugged. “She stayed on for nine more months. That should tell you something.”

That same point again. Myron mulled it over a bit. He heard a noise at the front of the bus. Chance had stood up. He stormed to the back and stood over them. Both men ignored him.

After several moments Chance said, “You told him?”

“Yes,” Arthur said.

Chance spun toward Myron. “If you breathe a word of this to anyone, I’ll kill—”

“Shhh.”

Then Myron saw it.

Hanging there. Just out of sight. The story was partially true—the best lies always are—but something was missing. He looked at Arthur. “You forgot one thing,” Myron said.

Arthur’s brow lines deepened. “What’s that?”

Myron pointed to Chance, then back at Arthur. “Which one of you beat up Anita Slaughter?”

Stone silence.

Myron kept going. “Just a few weeks before Elizabeth’s suicide, someone assaulted Anita Slaughter. She was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital and still had abrasions when your wife jumped. You want to tell me about it?”

Lots of things started happening seemingly all at once. Arthur Bradford gave a small head nod. Sam put down his copy of People and stood. Chance turned apoplectic.

“He knows too much!” Chance shouted.

Arthur paused, considering.

“We have to take him out!”

Arthur was still thinking. Sam started moving toward them.

Myron kept his voice low. “Chance?”

“What?”

“Your fly’s undone.”

Chance looked down. Myron already had the thirty-eight out. Now he pressed it firmly against Chance’s groin. Chance jumped back a bit, but Myron kept the muzzle in place. Sam took out his gun and pointed it at Myron.

“Tell Sam to sit down,” Myron said, “or you’ll never have trouble fitting a catheter again.”

Everybody froze. Sam kept the gun on Myron. Myron kept his gun against Chance’s groin. Arthur still seemed lost in thought. Chance started shaking.

“Don’t pee on my gun, Chance.” Tough guy talk. But Myron did not like this. He knew Sam’s type. And he knew Sam might very well take the risk and shoot.

“There’s no need for the gun,” Arthur said. “No one is going to harm you.”

“I feel better already.”

“To put it simply, you are worth more to me alive than dead. Otherwise Sam would have blown your head off by now. Do you understand?”

Myron said nothing.

“Our deal remains unchanged: You find Anita, Myron, I’ll keep Brenda out of jail. And both of us will leave my wife out of this. Do I make myself clear?”

Sam kept the gun at eye level and smiled a little.

Myron gestured with his head. “How about a show of good faith?”

Arthur nodded. “Sam.”

Sam put away the gun. He walked back to his seat and picked up his People.

Myron pressed the gun a little harder. Chance yelped. Then Myron pocketed his weapon.

The bus dropped him off back by his car. Sam gave Myron a little salute as he stepped off. Myron nodded in return. The bus continued down the street and disappeared around the corner. Myron realized that he had been holding his breath. He tried to relax and think straight.

“Fitting a catheter,” he said out loud. “Awful.”

Dad’s office was still a warehouse in Newark. Years ago they had actually made undergarments here. Not anymore. Now they shipped in finished products from Indonesia or Malaysia or someplace else that employed child labor. Everybody knew that abuses occurred and everybody still used them and every customer still bought the goods because it saved a couple of bucks, and to be fair, the whole issue was morally hazy. Easy to be against children working in factories; easy to be against paying a twelve-year-old twelve cents an hour or whatever; easy to condemn the parents and be against such exploitation. Harder when the choice is twelve cents or starvation, exploitation or death.

Easiest still not to think too much about it.

Thirty years ago, when they actually made the undergarments in Newark, Dad had lots of inner-city blacks working for him. He thought that he was good to his workers. He thought that they viewed him as a benevolent leader. When the riots broke out in 1968, these same workers burned down four of his factory buildings. Dad had never looked at them the same again.

Eloise Williams had been with Dad since before the riots. “As long as I breathe,” Dad often said, “Eloise will have a job.” She was like a second wife to him. She took care of him during his workday. They argued and fought and got grumpy with each other. There was genuine affection. Mom knew all this. “Thank God Eloise is uglier than a cow living near Chernobyl,” Mom liked to say. “Or I might wonder.”

Dad’s plant used to consist of five buildings. Only this warehouse still stood. Dad used it as a storage facility for the incoming shipments from overseas. His office was smack in the middle and raised to almost the ceiling. All four walls were made of glass, giving Dad the chance to watch over his stock like a prison guard in the main tower.

Myron trotted up the metal stairs. When he reached the top, Eloise greeted him with a big hug and a cheek pinch. He half expected her to take out a little toy from her desk drawer. When he’d visit as a child, she would always be ready for him with a popgun or one of those snap-together gliders or a comic book. But Eloise just gave him a hug this time, and Myron was only mildly disappointed.

“Go right in,” Eloise said. No buzzing in. No checking with Dad first.

Through the glass Myron could see that his father was on the phone. Animated. As always. Myron stepped in. His father held up a finger to him. “Irv, I said, tomorrow. No excuses. Tomorrow, do you hear?”

Sunday and everyone was still doing business. The shrinking leisure time of the late twentieth century.

Dad hung up the phone. He looked at Myron, and his whole being just beamed. Myron came around the desk and kissed his father’s cheek. As always, his skin felt a little like sandpaper and smelled faintly like Old Spice. Just as it should.

His father was dressed like a member of the Israeli Knesset: charcoal slacks with a white dress shirt opened at the neck and a T-shirt underneath. White chest hair popped out of the space between neck and T-shirt front collar. Dad was clearly a Semite—thick dark olive skin and a nose that polite people called prominent.

“Remember Don Rico’s?” Dad asked.

“That Portuguese place we used to go?”

Dad nodded. “Gone. As of last month. Manuel ran the place beautifully for thirty-six years. He finally had to give it up.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Dad made a scoffing noise and waved him off. “Who the hell cares? I’m just making silly small talk because I’m a little worried here. Eloise said you sounded funny on the phone.” His voice went soft. “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You need money or something?”

“No, Dad, I don’t need money.”

“But something is wrong, no?”

Myron took the plunge. “Do you know Arthur Bradford?”

Dad’s face lost color—not slowly but all at once. He started fiddling with things on his desk. He readjusted the family photographs, taking a little extra time with the one of Myron holding aloft the NCAA trophy after leading Duke to the title. There was an empty box of Dunkin’ Donuts. He picked it up and dropped it into a wastepaper basket.

Finally Dad said, “Why would you ask that?”

“I’m tangled up in something.”

“And it involves Arthur Bradford?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“Then get untangled. Fast.”

Dad lifted one of those traveling coffee cups to his lips and craned his neck. The cup was empty.

“Bradford told me to ask you about him,” Myron said. “He and this guy who works for him.”

Dad’s neck snapped back into place. “Sam Richards?” His tone was quiet, awe-filled. “He’s still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Silence. Then Myron asked, “How do you know them?”

Dad opened his drawer and fumbled about for something. Then he yelled for Eloise. She came to the door. “Where’s the Tylenol?” he asked her.

“Bottom right-hand drawer. Left side toward the back. Under the box of rubber bands.” Eloise turned to Myron. “Would you like a Yoo-Hoo?” she asked.

“Yes, please.” Stocking Yoo-Hoos. He had not been to his father’s office in almost a decade, but they still stocked his favorite drink. Dad found the bottle and played with the cap. Eloise closed the door on her way out.

“I’ve never lied to you,” Dad said.

“I know.”

“I’ve tried to protect you. That’s what parents do. They shelter their children. When they see danger coming, they try to step in the way and take the hit.”

“You can’t take this hit for me,” Myron said.

Dad nodded slowly. “Doesn’t make it any easier.”

“I’ll be okay,” Myron said. “I just need to know what I’m up against.”

“You’re up against pure evil.” Dad shook out two tablets and swallowed them without water. “You’re up against naked cruelty, against men with no conscience.”

Eloise came back in with the Yoo-Hoo. Reading their faces, she silently handed Myron the drink and slipped back out. In the distance a forklift started beeping out the backup warning.

“It was a year or so after the riots,” Dad began. “You’re probably too young to remember them, but the riots ripped this city apart. To this day the rip has never healed. Just the opposite, in fact. It’s like one of my garments.” He gestured to the boxes below. “The garment rips near the seam, and then nobody does anything so it just keeps ripping until the whole thing falls apart. That’s Newark. A shredded garment.

“Anyway, my workers finally came back, but they weren’t the same people. They were angry now. I wasn’t their employer anymore. I was their oppressor. They looked at me like I was the one who dragged their ancestors across the ocean in chains. Then troublemakers started prodding them. The writing was already on the wall, Myron. The manufacturing end of this business was going to hell. Labor costs were too high. The city was just imploding on itself. And then the hoodlums began to lead the workers. They wanted to form a union. Demanded it, actually. I was against the idea, of course.”

Dad looked out his glass wall at the endless rows of boxes. Myron wondered how many times his father had looked out at this same view. He wondered what his father had thought about when looking out, what he dreamed about over the years in this dusty warehouse. Myron shook the can and popped the top. The sound startled Dad a bit. He looked back at his son and managed a smile.

“Old Man Bradford was hooked in to the mobsters who wanted to set up the union. That’s who was involved in this: mobsters, hoodlums, punks who ran everything from prostitutes to numbers; all of a sudden they’re labor experts. But I still fought them. And I was winning. So one day Old Man Bradford sends his son Arthur to this very building. To have a chat with me. Sam Richards is with him—the son of a bitch just leans against the wall and says nothing. Arthur sits down and puts his feet on my desk. I’m going to agree to this union, he says. I’m going to support it, in fact. Financially. With generous contributions. I tell the little snotnose there’s a word for this. It’s called extortion. I tell him to get the hell out of my office.”

Beads of sweat popped up on Dad’s forehead. He took a hankie and blotted them a few times. There was a fan in the corner of the office. It oscillated back and forth, teasing you with moments of comfort followed by stifling heat. Myron glanced at the family photos, focusing in on one of his parents on a Caribbean cruise. Maybe ten years ago. Mom and Dad were both wearing loud shirts and looked healthy and tan and much younger. It scared him.

“So what happened then?” Myron asked.

Dad swallowed away something and started speaking again. “Sam finally spoke. He came over to my desk and looked over the family photos. He smiled, like he was an old friend of the family. Then he tossed these pruning shears on my desk.”

Myron started to feel cold.

His father kept talking, his eyes wide and unfocused. “ ‘Imagine what they could do to a human being,’ Sam says to me. ‘Imagine snipping away a piece at a time. Imagine not how long it would take to die but how long you could keep someone alive.’ That’s it. That’s all he said. Then Arthur Bradford started laughing, and they both left my office.”

Dad tried the cup of coffee again, but it was still empty. Myron held up the Yoo-Hoo, but Dad shook his head.

“So I go home and try to pretend that everything is hunky-dory. I try to eat. I try to smile. I play with you in the yard. But I can’t stop thinking about what Sam said. Your mother knew something was wrong, but for once even she didn’t push it. Later I go to bed. I can’t sleep at first. It was like Sam said: I kept imagining. About cutting off little pieces of a human being. Slowly. Each cut causing a new scream. And then the phone rang. I jumped up and looked at my watch. It was three in the morning. I picked up the phone, and no one spoke. They were there I could hear them breathing. But nobody spoke. So I hung up the phone and got out of bed.”

Dad’s breathing was shallow now. His eyes were welling up. Myron rose toward him, but Dad held up a hand to stop him.

“Let me just get through this, okay?”

Myron nodded, sat back down.

“I went into your room.” His voice was more monotone now, lifeless and flat. “You probably know that I used to do that a lot. Sometimes I would just sit in awe and watch you sleep.”

Tears started racing down his face. “So I stepped in the room. I could hear your deep breathing. The sound comforted me immediately. I smiled. And then I walked over to tuck you in a little better. And that’s when I saw it.”

Dad put a fist to his mouth as though stifling a cough. His chest started hitching. His words came in a sputter.

“On your bed. On top of the cover. Pruning shears. Someone had broken into your room and left pruning shears on your bed.”

A steel hand started squeezing Myron’s insides.

Dad looked at him with reddening eyes. “You don’t fight men like that, Myron. Because you can’t win. It’s not a question of bravery. It’s a question of caring. You have people you care about, that are connected to you. These men don’t even understand that. They don’t feel. How do you hurt a person who can’t feel?”

Myron had no answer.

“Just walk away,” Dad said. “There’s no shame in that.”

Myron stood up then. So did Dad. They hugged, gripping each other fiercely. Myron closed his eyes. His father cupped the back of his head and then smoothed his hair. Myron snuggled in and stayed there. He inhaled the Old Spice. He traveled back, remembering how this same hand had cradled his head after Joey Davito had hit him with a pitch.

Still comforting, he thought. After all these years, this was still the safest place to be.

Pruning shears.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. He grabbed his cellular and called the Dragons’ practice site. After a few minutes Brenda came on the line.

“Hey,” Brenda said.

“Hey.”

They both fell silent.

“I love a smooth-talking man,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” Myron said.

Brenda laughed. The sound was melodious, plucking at his heart.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Good,” she said. “Playing helps. I’ve also been thinking about you a lot. That helps too.”

“Mutual,” Myron said. Killer lines, one after another.

“Are you coming to the opener tonight?” Brenda asked.

“Sure. You want me to pick you up?”

“No, I’ll take the team bus.”

“Got a question for you,” Myron said.

“Shoot.”

“What are the names of the two boys who had their Achilles tendons sliced in half?”

“Clay Jackson and Arthur Harris.”

“They were cut with pruning shears, right?”

“Right.”

“And they live in East Orange?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t think Horace was the one who hurt them.”

“Then who?”

“Long story. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“After the game,” Brenda suggested. “I’ll have some media stuff to do, but maybe we can grab a bite and go back to Win’s.”

“I’d like that,” Myron said.

Silence.

Brenda said, “I sound too eager, don’t I?”

“Not at all.”

“I should be playing harder to get.”

“No.”

“It’s just that”—she stopped, started again—“it feels right, you know?”

He nodded into the phone. He knew. He thought about what Esperanza had said, about how he “used to” leave himself totally exposed, keeping his feet planted with nary a worry of getting beaned on the head.

“I’ll see you at the game,” he said.

Then he hung up.

He sat and closed his eyes and thought about Brenda. For a moment he didn’t push the thoughts away. He let them cascade over him. His body tingled. He started smiling.

Brenda.

He opened his eyes and came out of it. He switched on the car phone again and dialed Win’s number.

“Articulate.”

“I need some backup,” Myron said.

“Bitching,” Win said.

They met up at the Essex Green Mall in West Orange.

“How far is the ride?” Win asked.

“Ten minutes.”

“Bad area?”

“Yes.”

Win looked at his precious Jag. “We’ll take your car.”

They got into the Ford Taurus. The late-summer sun still cast long, thin shadows. Heat rose from the sidewalk in lazy tendrils, dark and smoky. The air was so thick that an apple falling from a tree would take several minutes to hit the ground.

“I looked into the Outreach Education scholarship,” Win said. “Whoever set up the fund had a great deal of financial acumen. The money was dumped in from a foreign source, more specifically the Cayman Islands.”

“So it’s untraceable?”

“Almost untraceable,” Win corrected. “But even in places like the Caymans a greased palm is a greased palm.”

“So who do we grease?”

“Already done. Unfortunately the account was in a dummy name and closed four years ago.”

“Four years ago,” Myron repeated. “That would be right after Brenda received her last scholarship. Before she started medical school.”

Win nodded. “Logical,” he said. Like he was Spock.

“So it’s a dead end.”

“Temporarily, yes. Someone could prowl through old records, but it will take a few days.”

“Anything else?”

“The scholarship recipient was to be chosen by certain attorneys rather than any educational institution. The criteria were vague: academic potential, good citizenship, that type of thing.”

“In other words, it was fixed so the attorneys would select Brenda. Like we said before, it was a way of funneling her money.”

Another nod. “Logical,” he repeated.

They started moving from West Orange into East Orange. The transformation was gradual. The fine suburban homes turned into gated condo developments. Then the houses came back—smaller now, less land, more worn and crowded together. Abandoned factories started popping up. Subsidy housing too. It was a butterfly in reverse, turning back into a caterpillar.

“I also received a call from Hal,” Win said. Hal was an electronics expert they had worked with during their days working for the government. He’d been the one Myron had sent to check for phone taps.

“And?”

“All the residences contained telephone listening devices and traces—Mabel Edwards’s, Horace Slaughter’s, and Brenda’s dorm room.”

“No surprise,” Myron said.

“Except for one thing,” Win corrected. “The devices in the two households—that is, Mabel’s and Horace’s homes—were old. Hal estimated that they had been present for at least three years.”

Myron’s head started spinning again. “Three years?”

“Yes. It’s an estimate, of course. But the pieces were old and in some cases crusted over from dirt.”

“What about the tap on Brenda’s phone?”

“More recent. But she’s only lived there a few months. And Hal also found listening devices in Brenda’s room. One under her desk in her bedroom. Another behind a sofa in the common room.”

“Microphones?”

Win nodded. “Someone was interested in more than Brenda’s telephone calls.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Win almost smiled. “Yes, I thought you might find it odd.”

Myron tried to enter the new data into his brain. “Someone has obviously been spying on the family for a long time.”

“Obviously.”

“That means that it has to be somebody with resources.”

“Indeed.”

“Then it has to be the Bradfords,” Myron said. “They’re looking for Anita Slaughter. For all we know, they’ve been looking for twenty years. It’s the only thing that makes sense. And you know what else this means?”

“Do tell,” Win said.

“Arthur Bradford has been conning me.”

Win gasped. “A less than truthful politician? Next you’ll tell me there’s no Easter Bunny.”

“It’s like we thought from the start,” Myron said. “Anita Slaughter ran because she was scared. And that’s why Arthur Bradford is being so cooperative. He wants me to find Anita Slaughter for him. So he can kill her.”

“And then he’ll try to kill you,” Win added. He studied his hair in the visor mirror. “Being this handsome. It is not easy, you realize.”

“And yet you suffer without complaint.”

“That is my way.” Win took one last look before snapping the visor back in place.

Clay Jackson lived in a row of houses whose backyards sat above Route 280. The neighborhood looked like working poor. The homes were all two-family, except for several corner residences that doubled as taverns. Tired neon Budweiser signs flickered through murky windows. Fences were all chain-link. So many overgrown weeds had popped through the sidewalk cracks that it was impossible to tell where pavement ended and lawn began.

Again all the inhabitants appeared to be black. Again Myron felt his customary and seemingly inexplicable discomfort.

There was a park across the street from Clay Jackson’s house. People were setting up for a barbecue. A softball game was going on. Loud laughter exploded everywhere. So did a boom box. When Myron and Win got out of the car, all eyes swerved in their direction. The boom box went suddenly silent. Myron forced up a smile. Win remained completely unbothered by the scrutiny.

“They’re staring,” Myron said.

“If two black men pulled up to your house in Livingston,” Win said, “what sort of reception would they receive?”

Myron nodded. “So you figure the neighbors are calling the cops and describing two ‘suspicious youths’ prowling the streets?”

Win raised an eyebrow. “Youths?”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Yes, I’d say.”

They headed up a stoop that looked like the one on Sesame Street. A man poked through a nearby garbage can, but he looked nothing like Oscar the Grouch. Myron knocked on the door. Win started with the eyes, the gliding movement, taking it all in. The softballers and barbecuers across the street were still staring. They did not seem pleased with what they saw.

Myron knocked again.

“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called.

“My name is Myron Bolitar. This is Win Lockwood. We’d like to see Clay Jackson if he’s available.”

“Could you hold on a second?”

They held on for at least a full minute. Then they heard a chain rattle. The knob turned, and a woman appeared in the doorway. She was black and maybe forty years old. Her smile kept flickering like one of those neon Budweiser signs in the tavern windows. “I’m Clay’s mother,” she said. “Please come in.”

They followed her inside. Something good was cooking on the stove. An old air-conditioning unit roared like a DC-10, but it worked. The coolness was most welcome, though short-lived. Clay’s mother quickly hustled them through a narrow corridor and back out the kitchen door. They were outside again, in the backyard now.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked. She had to yell over the sounds of traffic.

Myron looked at Win. Win was frowning. Myron said, “No, thank you.”

“Okay.” The smile flickered faster now, almost like a disco strobe light. “Let me just go get Clay. I’ll be right back.” The screen door slammed shut.

They were alone outside. The yard was tiny. There were flower boxes bursting with colors and two large bushes that were dying. Myron moved to the fence and looked down at Route 280. The four-lane highway was moving briskly. Car fumes drifted slowly in this humidity, hanging there, not dissipating; when Myron swallowed, he could actually taste them.

“This isn’t good,” Win said.

Myron nodded. Two white men show up at your house. You don’t know either one. You don’t ask for ID. You just show them in and leave them out back. Something was definitely not right here.

“Let’s just see how it plays out,” Myron said.

It did not take long. Eight large men came from three different directions. Two burst through the back door. Three circled in from the right side of the house. Three more from the left. They all carried aluminum baseball bats and let’s-kick-some-ass scowls. They fanned out, encircling the yard. Myron felt his pulse race. Win folded his arms; only his eyes moved.

These were not street punks or members of a gang. They were the softball players from across the street, grown men with bodies hardened by daily labor—dockworkers and truck loaders and the like. Some held their bats in a ready-to-swing position. Others rested them on their shoulders. Still others bounced them gently against their legs, like Joe Don Baker in Walking Tall.

Myron squinted into the sun. “You guys finish your game?” he asked.

The biggest man stepped forward. He had an enormous iron-cauldron gut, calloused hands, and the muscular yet unchiseled arms of someone who could crush Nautilus equipment like so many Styrofoam cups. His Nike baseball cap was set on the largest size, but it still fitted him like a yarmulke. His T-shirt had a Reebok logo. Nike cap, Reebok T-shirt. Confusing brand loyalties.

“Game is just beginning, fool.”

Myron looked at Win. Win said, “Decent deliver, but the line lacked originality. Plus, tagging the word fool on the end—that seemed forced. I’ll have to give him a thumbs-down, but I look forward to his next work.”

The eight men looped around Myron and Win. Nike/Reebok, the obvious leader, gestured with the baseball bat. “Hey, Wonder bread, get your ass over here.”

Win looked at Myron. Myron said, “I think he means you.”

“Must be because I help build strong bodies in twelve ways.” Then Win smiled, and Myron felt his heart stutter. People always did that. They always homed in on Win. At five-ten Win was a half foot shorter than Myron. But it was more than that. The blond, pale-faced, blue-veined, china-boned exterior brought out the worst in people. Win appeared soft, unlabored, sheltered—the kind of guy you hit and he shatters like cheap porcelain. Easy prey. Everyone likes easy prey.

Win stepped toward Nike/Reebok. He arched an eyebrow and gave him his best Lurch. “You rang?”

“What’s your name, Wonder bread?”

“Thurgood Marshall,” Win said.

That reply didn’t sit well with the crowd. Murmurs began. “You making a racist crack?”

“As opposed to, say, calling someone Wonder bread?”

Win glanced at Myron and gave him a thumbs-up. Myron returned the gesture. If this were a school debate, Win would be up a point.

“You a cop, Thurgood?”

Win frowned. “In this suit?” He pulled at his own lapels. “Puleeze.”

“So what do you want here?”

“We wish to speak with one Clay Jackson.”

“What about?”

“Solar energy and its role in the twenty-first century.”

Nike/Reebok checked his troops. The troops tightened the noose. Myron felt a rushing in his ears. He kept his eyes on Win and waited.

“Seems to me,” the leader continued, “that you white boys are here to hurt Clay again.” Moving closer. Eye to eye. “Seems to me that we have the right to use lethal force to protect him. That right, fellas?”

The troops grunted their agreement, raising their bats.

Win’s move was sudden and unexpected. He simply reached out and snatched the bat away from Nike/Reebok. The big man’s mouth formed an O of surprise. He stared at his hands as though he expected the bat to rematerialize at any moment. It wouldn’t. Win chucked the bat into the corner of the yard.

Then Win beckoned the big man forward. “Care to tango, pumpernickel bread?”

Myron said, “Win.”

But Win kept his eyes on his opponent. “I’m waiting.”

Nike/Reebok grinned. Then he rubbed his hands together and wet his lips. “He’s all mine, fellas.”

Yep, easy prey.

The big man lunged forward like a Frankenstein monster, his thick fingers reaching for Win’s neck. Win remained motionless until the last possible moment. Then he darted inside, his fingertips pressed together, transforming his hand into something of a spear. The fingertips struck deep and quick at the big man’s larynx, the movement like a bird doing a fast peck. A gagging sound not unlike a dental sucking machine forced its way out the big man’s mouth; his hands instinctively flew up to his throat. Win ducked low and whipped his foot around. The heel swept Nike/Reebok’s legs. The big man flipped midair and landed on the back of his head.

Win jammed his .44 into the man’s face. He was still smiling.

“Seems to me,” Win said, “that you just attacked me with a baseball bat. Seems to me that shooting you in the right eye would be viewed as perfectly justifiable.”

Myron had his gun out too. He ordered everyone to drop his bat. They did so. Then he had them lie on their stomachs, hands behind their heads, fingers locked. It took a minute or two, but everyone obeyed.

Nike/Reebok was now on his stomach too. He craned his neck and croaked, “Not again.”

Win cupped his ear with his free hand. “Pardon moi?”

“We ain’t gonna let you hurt that boy again.”

Win burst out laughing and nudged the man’s head with his toe. Myron caught Win’s eye and shook his head. Win shrugged and stopped.

“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Myron said. “We’re just trying to find out who attacked Clay on that rooftop.”

“Why?” a voice asked. Myron turned to the screen door. A young man hobbled out on crutches. The cast protecting the tendon looked like some puffy sea creature in the process of swallowing his entire foot.

“Because everyone thinks Horace Slaughter did it,” Myron said.

Clay Jackson balanced himself on one leg. “So?”

“So did he?”

“Why do you care?”

“Because he’s been murdered.”

Clay shrugged. “So?”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it, sighed. “It’s a long story, Clay. I just want to know who cut your tendon.”

The kid shook his head. “I ain’t talking about it.”

“Why not?”

“They told me not to.”

Win spoke to the boy for the first time. “And you have chosen to obey them?”

The boy faced Win now. “Yeah.”

“The man who did this,” Win continued. “You find him scary?”

Clay’s Adam’s apple danced. “Shit, yeah.”

Win grinned. “I’m scarier.”

No one moved.

“Would you care for a demonstration?”

Myron said, “Win.”

Nike/Reebok decided to take a chance. He started to scramble up on his elbows. Win raised his foot and slammed an ax kick into the spot where the spine met the neck. Nike/Reebok slumped back to the ground like wet sand, his arms splayed. He did not move at all. Win rested his foot on the back of the man’s skull. The Nike hat slipped off. Win pushed the still face into the muddy ground as though he were grinding out a cigarette.

Myron said, “Win.”

“Stop it!” Clay Jackson cried. He looked to Myron for help, his eyes wide and desperate. “He’s my uncle, man. He’s just looking out for me.”

“And doing a wonderful job,” Win added. He stepped up, gaining leverage. The uncle’s face sank deeper into the soft earth. His features were fully embedded in the mud now, his mouth and nose clogged.

The big man could no longer breathe.

One of the other men started to rise. Win leveled his gun at the man’s head. “Important note,” Win said. “I’m not big on warning shots.”

The man slinked back down.

With his foot still firmly planted on the man’s head, Win turned his attention to Clay Jackson. The boy was trying to look tough, but he was visibly quaking. So, quite frankly, was Myron.

“You fear a possibility,” Win said to the boy, “when you should fear a certainty.”

Win raised his foot, bending his knee. He angled himself for the proper heel strike.

Myron started to move toward him, but Win froze him with a glance. Then Win gave that smile again, the little one. It was casual, slightly amused. The smile said that he would do it. The smile hinted that he might even enjoy it. Myron had seen the smile many times, yet it never failed to chill his blood.

“I’ll count to five,” Win told the boy. “But I’ll probably crush his skull before I reach three.”

“Two white guys,” Clay Jackson said quickly. “With guns. A big guy tied us up. He was young and looked like he worked out. The little old guy—he was the leader. He was the one who cut us.”

Win turned to Myron. He spread his hands. “Can we go now?”

Back in the car, Myron said, “You went too far.”

“Uh-hmm.”

“I mean it, Win.”

“You wanted the information. I got it.”

“Not like that I didn’t.”

“Oh, please. The man came at me with a baseball bat.”

“He was scared. He thought we were trying to hurt his nephew.”

Win played the air violin.

Myron shook his head. “The kid would have told us eventually.”

“Doubtful. This Sam character had the boy scared.”

“So you had to scare him more?”

“That would be a yes,” Win said.

“You can’t do that again, Win. You can’t hurt innocent people.”

“Uh-hmm,” Win said again. He checked his watch. “Are you through now? Is your need to feel morally superior satiated?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Win looked at him. “You know what I do,” he said slowly. “Yet you always call on me.”

Silence. The echo of Win’s words hung in the air, caught in the humidity like the car fumes. Myron gripped the steering wheel. His knuckles turned white.

They did not speak again until they reached Mabel Edwards’s house.

“I know you’re violent,” Myron said. He put the car in park and looked at his friend. “But for the most part you only hurt people who deserve it.”

Win said nothing.

“If the boy hadn’t talked, would you have gone through with your threat?”

“Not an issue,” Win said. “I knew the boy would talk.”

“But suppose he hadn’t.”

Win shook his head. “You are dealing with something out of the realm of possibility.”

“Humor me then.”

Win thought about it for a moment. “I never intentionally hurt innocent people,” he said. “But I never threaten idly either.”

“That’s not an answer, Win.”

Win looked at Mabel’s house. “Go inside, Myron. Time’s awasting.”

Mabel Edwards sat across from him in a small den. “So Brenda remembers the Holiday Inn,” she said.

A small yellowish trace of the bruise remained around her eye, but hey, it would go away before the soreness in Big Mario’s groin did. Mourners were still milling about, but the house was hushed now; reality set in with the darkness. Win was outside, keeping watch.

“Very vaguely,” Myron replied. “It was more like déjà vu than anything concrete.”

Mabel nodded as though this made sense. “It was a long time ago.”

“Then Brenda was at the hotel?”

Mabel looked down, smoothed the bottom of her dress, reached for her cup of tea. “Brenda was there,” she said, “with her mother.”

“When?”

Mabel held the cup in front of her lips. “The night Anita disappeared.”

Myron tried not to look too confused. “She took Brenda with her?”

“At first, yes.”

“I don’t understand. Brenda never said anything—”

“Brenda was five years old. She doesn’t remember. Or at least that’s what Horace thought.”

“But you didn’t say anything before.”

“Horace didn’t want her knowing about it,” Mabel said. “He thought it would hurt her.”

“But I still don’t get it. Why did Anita take Brenda to a hotel?”

Mabel Edwards finally took a sip of the tea. Then she set it back down gently. She smoothed the dress again and fiddled with the chain around her neck. “It’s like I told you before. Anita wrote Horace a note saying she was running away. She cleared out all his money and took off.”

Myron saw it now. “But she planned on taking Brenda with her.”

“Yes.”

The money, Myron thought. Anita’s taking all of it had always bothered him. Running away from danger is one thing. But leaving your daughter penniless—that seemed unusually cruel. But now there was an explanation: Anita had intended to take Brenda.

“So what happened?” Myron asked.

“Anita changed her mind.”

“Why?”

A woman poked her head through the doorway. Mabel fired a glare, and the head disappeared like something in a shooting gallery. Myron could hear kitchen noises, family and friends cleaning up to prepare for another day of mourning. Mabel looked like she’d aged since this morning. Fatigue emanated from her like a fever.

“Anita packed them both up,” she managed. “She ran away and checked them into that hotel. I don’t know what happened then. Maybe Anita got scared. Maybe she realized how impossible it would be to run away with a five-year-old. No matter. Anita called Horace. She was crying and all hysterical. It was all too much for her, she said. She told Horace to come pick up Brenda.”

Silence.

“So Horace went to the Holiday Inn?” Myron asked.

“Yes.”

“Where was Anita?”

Mabel shrugged. “She’d run off already, I guess.”

“And this all happened the first night she ran away?”

“Yes.”

“So Anita could not have been gone for more than a few hours, right?”

“That’s right.”

“So what made Anita change her mind so fast?” Myron asked. “What could possibly have made her decide to give up her daughter that quickly?”

Mabel Edwards rose with a great sigh and made her way to the television set. Her normally supple, fluid movements had been stiffened by her grief. She reached out with a tentative hand and plucked a photograph off the top. Then she showed it to Myron.

“This is Terence’s father, Roland,” she said. “My husband.”

Myron looked at the black-and-white photograph.

“Roland was shot coming home from work. For twelve dollars. Right on our front stoop. Two shots in the head. For twelve dollars.” Her voice was a monotone now, dispassionate. “I didn’t handle it well. Roland was the only man I ever loved. I started drinking. Terence was only a little boy, but he looked so much like his father I could barely stand to look at his face. So I drank some more. And then I took some drugs. I stopped taking care of my son. The state came and put him in a foster home.”

Mabel looked at Myron for a reaction. He tried to keep his face neutral.

“Anita was the one who saved me. She and Horace sent me away to get clean. It took me a while, but I straightened myself out. Anita took care of Terence in the meantime, so the state wouldn’t take him away from me.” Mabel lifted the reading glasses off her chest and put them on her nose. Then she stared at the image of her dead husband. The longing in her face was so raw, so naked, that Myron felt a tear push into his own eye.

“When I needed her most,” Mabel said, “Anita was there for me. Always.”

She looked at Myron again.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.”

“Anita was there for me,” Mabel repeated. “But when she was in trouble, where was I? I knew she and Horace were having problems. And I ignored it. She disappeared, and what did I do? I tried to forget her. She ran off, and I bought this nice house away from the slums and tried to put it all behind me. If Anita had just left my brother, well, that would have been awful. But something scared Anita so bad she abandoned her own child. Just like that. And I keep asking myself what that something was. What could have scared her so bad that twenty years later she still won’t come back?”

Myron shifted in the chair. “Have you come up with any answers?”

“Not on my own,” she said. “But I asked Anita once.”

“When?”

“Fifteen years ago, I guess. When she called to check up on Brenda. I asked why she wouldn’t come back and see her own daughter.”

“What did she say?”

Mabel looked him straight in the eye. “She said, ‘If I come back, Brenda dies.’ ”

Myron felt a cold gust chill his heart. “What did she mean by that?”

“Like it was just a given. Like one and one equals two.” She put the photograph back on top of the television. “I never asked Anita again,” she said. “The way I see it, there are some things you’re just better off never knowing.”

Myron and Win took separate cars back to New York City. Brenda’s game started in forty-five minutes. Just enough time to run into the loft and change clothes.

He double-parked on Spring Street and left his key in the ignition. The car was safe: Win was waiting in the Jag for him. Myron took the elevator up. He opened the door. And Jessica was standing there.

He froze.

Jessica looked at him. “I’m not running away,” she said. “Not ever again.”

Myron swallowed, nodded. He tried to step forward, but his legs had other ideas.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“A lot,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“My friend Horace was murdered.”

Jessica closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“And Esperanza’s leaving MB.”

“You couldn’t work something out?”

“No.”

Myron’s cellular phone rang. He snapped the power off. They stood there, neither of them moving.

Then Jessica said, “What else?”

“That’s it.”

She shook her head. “You can’t even look at me.”

So he did. Myron lifted his head and stared right at her for the first time since entering the loft. Jessica was, as always, achingly beautiful. He felt something inside him start to rip.

“I almost slept with someone else,” he said.

Jessica did not move. “Almost?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” she said. Then: “So why almost?”

“Pardon?”

“Did she stop it? Or did you?”

“I did.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why?”

“Yes, Myron, why didn’t you consummate the act?”

“Jesus, that’s a hell of a question.”

“No, not really. You were tempted, right?”

“Yes.”

“More than tempted even,” she added. “You wanted to go through with it.”

“I don’t know.”

Jessica made a buzzing noise. “Liar.”

“Fine, I wanted to go through with it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m involved with another woman,” he said. “In fact, I’m in love with another woman.”

“How chivalrous. So you held back for me?”

“I held back for us.”

“Another lie. You held back for you. Myron Bolitar, the perfect guy, the one-woman wonder.”

She made a fist and put it to her mouth. Myron stepped toward her, but she backed away.

“I’ve been dumb,” Jessica said. “I admit that. I’ve done so many dumb things it’s a wonder you haven’t dumped me. Maybe I did all those dumb things because I knew I could. You’d always love me. No matter how dumb I acted, you’d always love me. So maybe I’m owed a little payback.”

“This isn’t about payback,” Myron said.

“I know, goddamn it.” She wrapped her arms around herself. As though the room had suddenly gone very cold. As though she needed a hug. “That’s what terrifies me.”

He kept still and waited.

“You don’t cheat, Myron. You don’t fool around. You don’t have flings. Hell, you don’t even get tempted much. So the question is, How much do you love her?”

Myron held up his hands. “I barely know her.”

“You think that matters?”

“I don’t want to lose you, Jess.”

“And I’m not about to give you up without a fight. But I want to know what I’m up against.”

“It’s not like that.”

“So what’s it like?”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it. Then he said, “Do you want to get married?”

Jessica blinked, but she didn’t step back. “Is this a proposal?”

“I’m asking you a question. Do you want to get married?”

“If that’s what it takes, yeah, I want to get married.”

Myron smiled. “My, what enthusiasm.”

“What do you want me to say, Myron? Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say. Yes, no, whatever will keep you here with me.”

“This isn’t a test, Jess.”

“Then why are you raising marriage all of a sudden?”

“Because I want to be with you forever,” he said. “And I want to buy a house. And I want to have kids.”

“So do I,” she said. “But life is so good right now. We’ve got our careers, our freedom. Why spoil it? There’ll be time for all that later.”

Myron shook his head.

“What?” she said.

“You’re stalling.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Having a family is not something I want to fit into a convenient time block.”

“But now?” Jessica put up her hands. “Right now? This is what you really want? A house in the suburbs like your parents? The Saturday night barbecues? The backyard hoop? The PTA meetings? The back-to-school shopping at the mall? That’s what you really want?”

Myron looked at her, and he felt something deep within him crumble. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what I want.”

They both stood and stared at each other. There was a knock on the door. Neither one of them moved. Another knock. Then Win’s voice: “Open it.”

Win was not one for casual interruptions. Myron did as he asked. Win glanced at Jessica and gave her a slight nod. He handed Myron his cellular. “It’s Norm Zuckerman,” Win said. “He’s been trying to reach you.”

Jessica turned and left the room. Quickly. Win watched her, but he kept his expression even. Myron took the phone. “Yeah, Norm.”

Norm’s voice was pure panic. “It’s almost game time.”

“So?”

“So where the hell is Brenda?”

Myron felt his heart leap into his throat. “She told me she was riding on the team bus.”

“She never got on it, Myron.”

Myron flashed back to Horace on the morgue slab. His knees almost buckled. Myron looked at Win.

“I’ll drive,” Win said.

They took the Jag. Win did not slow for red lights. He did not slow for pedestrians. Twice Win veered up on sidewalks to bypass heavy traffic.

Myron looked straight ahead. “What I said before. About your going too far.”

Win waited.

“Forget it,” Myron said.

For the rest of the ride, neither man spoke.

Win screeched the car into an illegal spot on the southeast corner of Thirty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. Myron sprinted toward the Madison Square Garden employee entrance. A police officer sauntered toward Win with major attitude. Win ripped a hundred-dollar bill and handed one half to the officer. The officer nodded and tipped his cap. No words needed to be exchanged.

The guard at the employee entrance recognized Myron and waved him through.

“Where’s Norm Zuckerman?” Myron asked.

“Press room. Other side of the—”

Myron knew where it was. As he bounded up the stairs, he could hear the pregame hum of the crowd. The sound was oddly soothing. When he reached court level, he veered to his right. The press room was on the other side of the floor. He ran out onto the playing surface. The crowd, he was surprised to see, was enormous. Norm had told him how he planned to darken and close off the top sections—that is, drape a black curtain over the unused seats so as to give the arena a more crowded yet intimate feel. But sales had far surpassed expectations. A sellout crowd was finding its seats. Many fans held up banners: DAWN OF AN ERA, BRENDA RULES, WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF BRENDA, NOW IT’S OUR TURN, SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES, YOU GO, GIRLS! Stuff like that. Sponsors’ logos dominated the landscape like the work of a mad graffiti artist. Giant images of a stunning Brenda flashed across the overhead scoreboard. A highlight reel of some kind. Brenda in her college uniform. Loud music started up. Hip music. That was what Norm wanted. Hip. He’d been generous with the comp tickets too. Spike Lee was courtside. So were Jimmy Smits and Rosie O’Donnell and Sam Waterston and Woody Allen and Rudy Giuliani. Several ex-MTV hosts, the biggest sort of has-beens, mugged for cameras, desperate to be seen. Supermodels wore wire-rimmed glasses, trying a little too hard to look both beautiful and studious.

They were all here to toast New York’s latest phenom: Brenda Slaughter.

This was supposed to be her night, her chance to shine in the pro arena. Myron had thought that he understood Brenda’s insistence on playing the opener. But he hadn’t. This was more than a game. More than her love for basketball. More than a personal tribute. This was history. Brenda had seen that. In this era of jaded superstars she relished the chance to be a role model and shape impressionable kids. Corny, but there you have it. Myron paused for a moment and looked at the Jumbo-tron screen above his head. The digitally enlarged Brenda was driving hard to the hoop, her face a mask of determination, her body and movements fiercely splendid and graceful and purposeful.

Brenda would not be denied.

Myron picked up the sprint again. He left the court and dipped down the ramp and back into a corridor. In a matter of moments he reached the press room. Win was coming up behind him. Myron opened the door. Norm Zuckerman was there. So were Detectives Maureen McLaughlin and Dan Tiles.

Tiles made a point of checking his watch. “That was fast,” he said. He may have been smirking under the hinterlands that doubled as his mustache.

“Is she here?” Myron asked.

Maureen McLaughlin gave him the on-your-side smile. “Why don’t you sit down, Myron?”

Myron ignored her. He turned to Norm. “Has Brenda shown up?”

Norm Zuckerman was dressed like Janis Joplin guest-starring on Miami Vice, “No,” he said.

Win trotted in behind Myron. Tiles didn’t like the intrusion. He crossed the room and gave Win the tough guy scrutiny. Win let him. “And who might this be?” Tiles asked.

Win pointed at Tiles’s face. “You got some food stuck in your mustache. Looks like scrambled eggs.”

Myron kept his eyes on Norm. “What are they doing here?”

“Sit down, Myron.” It was McLaughlin again. “We need to chat.”

Myron glanced over at Win. Win nodded. He moved toward Norm Zuckerman and put his arm around his shoulders. The two of them headed for a corner.

“Sit,” McLaughlin said again. There was just a hint of steel this time.

Myron slid into a chair. McLaughlin did likewise, maintaining oodles of eye contact along the way. Tiles stayed standing and glared down at Myron. He was one of those idiots who believed that head level equaled intimidation.

“What happened?” Myron asked.

Maureen McLaughlin folded her hands. “Why don’t you tell us, Myron?”

He shook his head. “I don’t have time for this, Maureen. Why are you here?”

“We’re looking for Brenda Slaughter,” McLaughlin said. “Do you know where she is?”

“No. Why are you looking for her?”

“We’d like to ask her some questions.”

Myron looked around the room. “And you figured the best time to ask them would be right before the biggest game of her life?”

McLaughlin and Tiles sneaked an obvious glance. Myron checked out Win. He was still whispering with Norm.

Tiles stepped up to the plate. “When did you last see Brenda Slaughter?”

“Today,” Myron said.

“Where?”

This was going to take too long. “I don’t have to answer your questions, Tiles. And neither does Brenda. I’m her attorney, remember? You got something, let me know. If not, stop wasting my time.”

Tiles’s mustache seemed to curl up in a grin. “Oh, we got something, smart guy.”

Myron did not like the way he said that. “I’m listening.”

McLaughlin leaned forward, again with the earnest eyes. “We got a search warrant this morning for the college dormitory of Brenda Slaughter.” Her tone was all police official now. “We found on the premises one weapon, a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight, the same caliber that killed Horace Slaughter. We’re waiting for a ballistics test to see if it’s the murder weapon.”

“Fingerprints?” Myron asked.

McLaughlin shook her head. “Wiped clean.”

“Even if it is the murder weapon,” Myron said, “it was obviously planted.”

McLaughlin looked puzzled. “How do you know that, Myron?”

“Come on, Maureen. Why would she wipe the weapon clean and then leave it where you could find it?”

“It was hidden under her mattress,” McLaughlin countered.

Win stepped away from Norm Zuckerman. He started dialing on his cell phone. Someone answered. Win kept his voice low.

Myron shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Is that all you got?”

“Don’t try to snow us, asshole.” Tiles again. “We have a motive: she feared her father enough to get a restraining order. We found the murder weapon hidden under her own mattress. And now we have the fact that she’s clearly on the lam. That’s a shitload more than enough to make an arrest.”

“So that’s why you’re here?” Myron countered. “To arrest her?”

Again McLaughlin and Tiles exchanged a glance. “No,” Mclaughlin said as though pronouncing the word took great effort. “But we would very much like to speak with her again.”

Win disconnected the call. Then he beckoned Myron with a nod.

Myron rose. “Excuse me.”

Tiles said, “What the hell!”

“I need to converse with my associate for a moment. I’ll be right back.”

Myron and Win ducked into a corner. Tiles lowered his eyebrows to half-mast and put his fists on his hips. Win stared back for a moment. Tiles kept up the scowl. Win put his thumbs in his ears, stuck out his tongue, wiggled his fingers. Tiles did not follow suit.

Win spoke softly and quickly. “According to Norm, Brenda received a call at practice. She took the call and ran out. The team bus waited awhile, but Brenda ended up being a no-show. When the bus left, an assistant coach waited with her car. The coach is still at the practice site. That’s all Norm knew. I then called Arthur Bradford. He knew about the search warrant. He claimed that by the time you two made your arrangement vis-a-vis protecting Brenda, the warrant had been acted upon and the gun had been found. He has since contacted some friends in high places, and they have agreed to move very slowly on Ms. Slaughter.”

Myron nodded. That explained the semidiplomacy going on here. McLaughlin and Tiles clearly wanted to arrest her, but the higher-ups were holding them back. “Anything else?”

“Arthur was very concerned about Brenda’s disappearance.”

“I bet.”

“He wants you to call him immediately.”

“Well, we don’t always get what we want,” Myron said. He glanced back at the two detectives. “Okay, I got to clear out of here.”

“You have a thought?”

“The detective from Livingston. A guy named Wickner. He almost cracked at the Little League field.”

“And you think perhaps he’ll crack this time?”

Myron nodded. “He’ll crack.”

“Would you like me to come along?”

“No, I’ll handle it. I need you to stay here. McLaughlin and Tiles can’t legally hold me, but they might try. Stall them for me.”

Win almost smiled. “No problem.”

“See also if you can find the guy who answered the phone at the practice. Whoever called Brenda might have identified themselves. Maybe one of her teammates or coaches saw something.”

“I’ll look into it.” Win handed Myron the ripped hundred and his car keys. He motioned toward his cell phone. “Keep the line open.”

Myron did not bother with good-byes. He suddenly bounded out of the room. He heard Tiles call after him, “Stop! Son of a—” Tiles started running after him. Win stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “What the f—” Tiles never finished the expletive. Myron continued to run. Win closed the door. Tiles would not get out.

Once out on the street, Myron tossed the bill to the waiting cop and hopped into the Jag. Eli Wickner’s lake house was listed in directory assistance. Myron dialed the number. Wickner answered on the first ring.

“Brenda Slaughter is missing,” Myron told him.

Silence.

“We need to talk, Eli.”

“Yes,” the retired detective said. “I think we do.”

The ride took an hour. Night had firmly set in by now, and the lake area seemed extra dark, the way lake areas often do. There were no streetlights. Myron slowed the car. Old Lake Drive was narrow and only partially paved. At the end of the road his headlights crossed a wooden sign shaped like a fish. The sign said THE WICKNERS. Wickners. Myron remembered Mrs. Wickner. She had overseen the food stand at the Little League field. Her scmiblond hair had been overtreated to the point where it resembled hay, her laugh a constant, deep throttle. Lung cancer had claimed her ten years ago. Eli Wickner had retired to this cabin alone.

Myron pulled into the driveway. His tires chewed the gravel. Lights came on, probably by motion detector. Myron stopped the car and stepped into the still night. The cabin was what was often called saltbox. Nice. And right on the water. There were boats in the dock. Myron listened for the sound of the lapping water, but there was none. The lake was incredibly calm, as if someone had put a glass top on it for night protection. Scattered lights shone off the glacial surface, still and without deviation. The moon dangled like a loose earring. Bats stood along a tree branch like the Queen’s Guards in miniature.

Myron hurried to the front door. Lamps were on inside, but Myron saw no movement. He knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. Then he felt the shotgun barrel against the back of his skull.

“Don’t turn around,” Eli said.

Myron didn’t.

“You armed?”

“Yes.”

“Assume the position. And don’t make me shoot you, Myron. You’ve always been a good kid.”

“There’s no need for the gun, Eli.” It was a dumb thing to say, of course, but he had not said it for Wickner’s benefit. Win was listening in on the other end. Myron did some quick calculating. It had taken him an hour to get here. It would take Win maybe half that.

He needed to stall.

As Wickner patted him down, Myron smelled alcohol. Not a good sign. He debated making a move, but this was an experienced cop, and he was, per Wickner’s request, in the position. Hard to do much from there.

Wickner found Myron’s gun immediately. He emptied the bullets onto the ground and pocketed the gun.

“Open the door,” Wickner said.

Myron turned the knob. Wickner gave him a little nudge. Myron stepped inside. And his heart dropped to his knees. Fear constricted his throat, making it very hard to breathe. The room was decorated as one might expect a fishing cabin to be decorated: taxidermy catches above a fireplace, wood-paneled walls, a wet bar, cozy chairs, firewood piled high, a worn semishag carpet of beige. What wasn’t expected, of course, were the dark red boot prints slashing a path through the beige.

Blood. Fresh blood that filled the room with a smell like wet rust.

Myron turned to look at Eli Wickner. Wickner kept his distance. The shotgun was leveled at Myron’s chest. Easiest target. Wickner’s eyes were open a bit too wide and even more red-rimmed than at the Little League field. His skin was like parchment paper. Spider veins had nestled into his right cheek. There may have been spider veins on his left cheek too, but it was hard to tell with the spray of blood on it.

“You?”

Wickner remained silent.

“What’s going on, Eli?”

“Walk into the back room,” Wickner said.

“You don’t want to do this.”

“I know that, Myron. Now just turn around and start walking.”

Myron followed the bloody prints as though they’d been painted there for this reason—a macabre Freedom Trail or something. The wall was lined with Little League team photographs, the early ones dating back some thirty-odd years. In each picture Wickner stood proudly with his young charges, smiling into the powerful sun on a clear day. A sign held by two boys in the front row read FRIENDLY’S ICE CREAM SENATORS or BURRELLES PRESS CLIPPING TIGERS or SEYMOUR’S LUNCHEONETTE INDIANS. Always sponsors. The children squinted and shifted and smiled toothlessly. But they all basically looked the same. Over the past thirty years the kids had changed shockingly little. But Eli had aged, of course. Year by year the photographs on the wall checked off his life. The effect was more than a little eerie.

They headed into the back room. An office of some kind. There were more photos on the wall. Wickner receiving Livingston’s Big L Award. The ribbon cutting when the backstop was named after him. Wickner in his police uniform with ex-Governor Brendan Byrne. Wickner winning the Raymond J. Clarke Policeman of the Year award. A smattering of plaques and trophies and mounted baseballs. A framed document entitled “What Coach Means to Me” given to him by one of his teams. And more blood.

Cold fear wrapped around Myron and drew tight.

In the corner, lying on his back, his arms extended as though readying himself for crucifixion, was Chief of Detectives Roy Pomeranz. His shirt looked like someone had squeezed out a bucket of syrup over it. His dead eyes were frozen open and sucked dry.

“You killed your own partner,” Myron said. Again for Win. In case he arrived too late. For posterity or to incriminate or some such nonsense.

“Not more than ten minutes ago,” Wickner said.

“Why?”

“Sit down, Myron. Right there, if you don’t mind.”

Myron sat in an oversize chair with wooden slats.

Keeping the gun at chest level, Wickner moved to the other side of a desk. He opened a drawer, dropped Myron’s gun in it, then tossed Myron a set of handcuffs. “Cuff yourself to the side arm. I don’t want to have to concentrate so hard on watching you.”

Myron looked at his surroundings. It was pretty much now or never. Once the cuffs were in place, there would not be another chance. He looked for a way. Nothing. Wickner was too far away, and a desk separated them. Myron spotted a letter opener on the desk. Oh, right, like maybe he would just reach out and throw it like some martial arts death star and hit the jugular. Bruce Lee would be so proud.

As though reading his mind, Wickner raised the gun a bit.

“Put them on now, Myron.”

No chance. He would just have to stall. And hope Win arrived in time. Myron clicked the cuff on his left wrist. Then he closed the other end around the heavy chair arm.

Wickner’s shoulders slumped, relaxing a bit. “I should have guessed they’d have a tap on the phone,” he said.

“Who?”

Wickner seemed not to hear him. “Thing is, you can’t approach this house without my knowing. Forget the gravel out there. I got motion sensors all over the place. House lights up like a Christmas tree if you approach from any direction. Use it to scare away the animals—otherwise they get in the garbage. But you see, they knew that. So they sent someone I would trust. My old partner.”

Myron was trying to keep up. “Are you saying Pomeranz came here to kill you?”

“No time for your questions, Myron. You wanted to know what happened. Now you will. And then …” He looked away, the rest of the sentence vaporizing before reaching his lips.

“The first time I encountered Anita Slaughter was at the bus stop on the corner of Northfield Avenue, where Roosevelt School used to be.” His voice had fallen into a cop monotone, almost as though he were reading back a report. “We’d gotten an anonymous call from someone using the phone booth at Sam’s across the street. They said a woman was cut up bad and bleeding. Check that. They said a black woman was bleeding. Only place you saw black women in Livingston was by the bus stop. They came in to clean houses, or they didn’t come here at all. Just that simple. If they were there for other reasons in those days, well, we politely pointed out the errors in their ways and escorted them back on the bus.

“Anyway, I was in the squad car. So I took the call. Sure enough, she was bleeding pretty good. Someone had given her a hell of a beating. But I tell you what struck me right away. The woman was gorgeous. Dark as coal, but even with all those scratches on her face, she was simply stunning. I asked her what happened, but she wouldn’t tell me. I figured it was a domestic dispute. A spat with the husband. I didn’t like it, but back in those days you didn’t do anything about it. Hell, not much different today. Anyway I insisted on taking her to St. Barnabas. They patched her up. She was pretty shook up, but she was basically okay. The scratches were pretty deep, like she’d been attacked by a cat. But hey, I did my bit and forgot all about it—until three weeks later, when I got the call about Elizabeth Bradford.”

A clock chimed and echoed. Eli lowered the shotgun and looked off. Myron checked his cuffed wrist. It was secure. The chair was heavy. Still no chance.

“Her death wasn’t an accident, was it, Eli?”

“No,” Wickner said. “Elizabeth Bradford committed suicide.” He reached out on his desk and picked up an old baseball. He stared at it like a Gypsy reading fortunes. A Little League ball, the awkward signature of twelve-year-olds scrawled over the surface.

“Nineteen seventy-three,” the old coach said with a pained smile. “The year we won the state championship. Hell of a team.” He put down the ball. “I love Livingston. I dedicated my life to that town. But every good place has a Bradford family in it. To add temptation, I guess. Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It starts small, you know? You let a parking ticket go. Then you see one of them speeding and you turn the other way. Like I said, small. They don’t openly bribe you, but they have ways of taking care of people. They start at the top. You drag a Bradford in for drunk driving, someone above you just springs them anyway, and you get unofficially sanctioned. And other cops get pissed off because the Bradfords gave all of us tickets to a Giants game. Or they paid for a weekend retreat. Stuff like that. But underneath we all know it’s wrong. We justify it away, but the truth is, we did wrong. I did wrong.” He motioned to the mass of flesh on the ground. “And Roy did wrong. I always knew it would come back and get us one day. Just didn’t know when. Then you tapped me on the shoulder at the ball field and well, I knew.”

Wickner stopped, smiled. “Getting off the subject a bit, aren’t I?”

Myron shrugged. “I’m not in any hurry.”

“Unfortunately I am.” Another smile that twisted Myron’s heart. “I was telling you about the second time I encountered Anita Slaughter. Like I said, it was the day Elizabeth Bradford committed suicide. A woman identifying herself as a maid called the station at six in the morning. I didn’t realize it was Anita until I arrived. Roy and I were in the midst of the investigation when the old man called us into that fancy library. You ever seen it? The library in the silo?”

Myron nodded.

“The three of them were there—the old man, Arthur, and Chance. Still in these fancy silk pajamas and bathrobes, for chrissake. The old man asked us for a little favor. That’s what he called it. A little favor like he was asking us to help him move a piano. He wanted us to report the death as an accident. For the family reputation. Old Man Bradford wasn’t crass enough to put a dollar amount on doing this, but he made it clear we would be well compensated. Roy and I figured, What’s the harm? Accident or suicide—in the long run, who really cares? That kind of stuff is changed all the time. No big deal, right?”

“Then you believed them?” Myron said.

The question nudged Wickner out of his daze. “What do you mean?”

“That it was a suicide. You took their word?”

“It was a suicide, Myron. Your Anita Slaughter confirmed it.”

“How?”

“She saw it happen.”

“You mean she found the body.”

“No, I mean she saw Elizabeth Bradford leap.”

That surprised him.

“According to Anita’s statement, she arrived at work, walked up the driveway, spotted Elizabeth Bradford standing alone on the ledge, and watched her dive on her head.”

“Anita could have been coached,” Myron said.

Wickner shook his head. “Nope.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because Anita Slaughter made this statement before the Bradfords got to her—both on the phone and when we first got there. Hell, most of the Bradfords were still getting out of bed. Once the spin control began, Anita changed her story. That’s when she came up with that stuff about finding the body when she arrived.”

Myron frowned. “I don’t get it. Why change the time of the jump? What difference could it make?”

“I guess they wanted it to be at night so it would look more like an accident. A woman inadvertently slipping off a wet balcony late at night is an easier sell than at six in the morning.”

Myron thought about this. And didn’t like it.

“There was no sign of a struggle,” Wickner continued. “There was even a note.”

“What did it say?”

“Mostly gibberish. I don’t really remember. The Bradfords kept it. Claimed it was private thoughts. We were able to confirm it was her handwriting. That’s all I cared about.”

“You mentioned in the police report that Anita still showed signs of the earlier assault.”

Wickner nodded.

“So you must have been suspicious.”

“Suspicious of what? Sure, I wondered. But I didn’t see any connection. A maid suffers a beating three weeks before the suicide of her employer. What’s one thing got to do with the other?”

Myron nodded slowly. It made sense, he guessed. He checked the clock behind Wickner’s head. Fifteen minutes more, he estimated. And then Win would have to approach carefully. Making his way around the motion detectors would take time. Myron took a deep breath. Win would make it. He always did.

“There’s more,” Wickner said.

Myron looked at him and waited.

“I saw Anita Slaughter one last time,” Wickner said. “Nine months later. At the Holiday Inn.”

Myron realized that he was holding his breath. Wickner put down the weapon on the desk—well out of Myron’s reach—and grabbed hold of a whiskey bottle. He took a swig and then picked up the shotgun again.

He aimed it at Myron.

“You’re wondering why I’m telling you all this.” Wickner’s words came out a bit more slurred now. The barrel was still pointed at Myron, growing larger, an angry dark mouth trying to swallow him whole.

“The thought crossed my mind,” Myron said.

Wickner smiled. Then he let loose a deep breath, lowered his aim a bit, and started in again. “I wasn’t on duty that night. Neither was Roy. He called me at home and said the Bradfords needed a favor. I told him the Bradfords could go to hell, I wasn’t their personal security service. But it was all bluster.

“Anyway, Roy told me to put on a uniform and meet him at the Holiday Inn. I went, of course. We hooked up in the parking lot. I asked Roy what was up. He said that one of the Bradford kids had screwed up again. I said, screwed up how? Roy said he didn’t know the details. It was girl trouble. He had gotten fresh, or they had taken too many drugs. Something like that. Understand now that this was twenty years ago. Terms like date rape didn’t exist back then. You go back to a hotel room with a guy, well, let’s just say you got what you got. I’m not defending it. I’m just saying it was the way that it was.

“So I asked him what we were supposed to do. Roy said that we just had to seal off the floor. See, there was a wedding going on and a big convention. The place was mobbed, and the room was in a fairly public spot. So they needed us to keep people away so they could clean up whatever mess there was. Roy and I positioned ourselves at either end of the corridor. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t really think I had much of a choice. What was I going to do, report them? The Bradfords already had their hooks into me. The payoff for fixing the suicide would come out. So would all the rest. And not just about me but about my buddies on the force. Cops react funny when they’re threatened.” He pointed to the floor. “Look what Roy was willing to do to his own partner.”

Myron nodded.

“So we cleared the floor. And then I saw Old Man Bradford’s so-called security expert. Creepy little guy. Scared the piss out of me. Sam something.”

“Sam Richards,” Myron said.

“Yeah, right, Richards. That’s the guy. He spewed out the same dribble I’d already heard. Girl trouble. Nothing to worry about. He’d clean it up. The girl was a little shaky, but they’d get her patched up and pay her off. It would all go away. That’s how it is with the rich. Money cleans all spills. So the first thing this Sam guy does is carry the girl out. I wasn’t supposed to see it. I was supposed to stay down at the end of the corridor. But I looked anyway. Sam had her wrapped in a sheet and carried her over his shoulder like a fireman. But for a split second I saw her face. And I knew who it was. Anita Slaughter. Her eyes were closed. She hung over his shoulder like a bag of oats.”

Wickner took a plaid handkerchief out of his pocket. He unfolded it slowly and wiped his nose as if he were buffing a fender. Then he folded it up again and put it back in his pocket. “I didn’t like what I saw,” he said. “So I ran over to Roy and told him we had to stop it. Roy said, how would we explain even being here? What would we say, that we were helping Bradford cover up a smaller crime? He was right, of course. There was nothing we could do. So I went back to the end of the corridor. Sam was back in the room by now. I heard him using a vacuum. He took his time and cleaned the entire room. I kept telling myself it was no big deal. She was just a black woman from Newark. Hell, they all did drugs, right? And she was gorgeous. Probably partying with one of the Bradford boys and it got out of hand. Maybe she OD’d. Maybe Sam was going to take her someplace and get her some help and give her money. Just like he said. So I watched Sam finish cleaning up. I saw him get in the car. And I saw him drive away with Chance Bradford.”

“Chance?” Myron repeated. “Chance Bradford was there?”

“Yes. Chance was the boy in trouble.” Wickner sat back. He stared at the gun. “And that’s the end of my tale, Myron.”

“Wait a second. Anita Slaughter checked into that hotel with her daughter. Did you see her there?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea where Brenda is now?”

“She probably got tangled up with the Bradfords. Like her mother.”

“Help me save her, Eli.”

Wickner shook his head. “I’m tired, Myron. And I got nothing more to say.”

Eli Wickner lifted the shotgun.

“It’s going to come out,” Myron said. “Even if you kill me, you can’t cover it all up.”

Wickner nodded. “I know.” He didn’t lower the weapon.

“My telephone is on,” Myron continued quickly. “My friend has heard every word. Even if you kill me—”

“I know that too, Myron.” A tear slid out of Eli’s eye. He tossed Myron a small key. For the handcuffs. “Tell everyone I’m sorry.”

Then he put the shotgun in his mouth.

Myron tried to bolt from the chair, the cuff holding him back. He yelled, “No!” But the sound was drowned out by the blast of the shotgun. Bats squealed and flew away. Then all was silent again.

Win arrived a few minutes later. He looked down at the two bodies and said, “Tidy.”

Myron did not reply.

“Did you touch anything?”

“I already wiped the place down,” Myron said.

“A request,” Win said.

Myron looked at him.

“Next time a gun is fired under similar circumstances, say something immediately. A good example might be ‘I’m not dead.’ ”

“Next time,” Myron said.

They left the cabin. They drove to a nearby twenty-four-hour supermarket. Myron parked the Taurus and got in the Jag with Win.

“Where to?” Win asked.

“You heard what Wickner said?”

“Yes.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I’m still processing,” Win said. “But clearly the answer lies within Bradford Farms.”

“So most likely does Brenda.”

Win nodded. “If she’s still alive.”

“So that’s where we should go.”

“Rescuing the fair maiden from the tower?”

“If she’s even there, which is a big if. And we can’t go in with guns blazing. Someone might panic and kill her.” Myron reached for his phone. “Arthur Bradford wants an update. I think I’ll give him one. Now. In person.”

“They may very well try to kill you.”

“That’s where you come in,” Myron said.

Win smiled. “Bitching.” His word of the week.

They turned onto Route 80 and headed east.

“Let me bounce a few thoughts off you,” Myron said.

Win nodded. He was used to this game.

“Here’s what we know,” Myron said. “Anita Slaughter is assaulted. Three weeks later she witnesses Elizabeth Bradford’s suicide. Nine months pass. Then she runs away from Horace. She empties out the bank account, grabs her daughter, and hides out at the Holiday Inn. Now here is where things get murky. We know that Chance Bradford and Sam end up there. We know they end up taking an injured Anita off the premises. We also know that sometime before that Anita calls Horace and tells him to pick up Brenda—”

Myron broke off and looked at Win. “What time would that have been?”

“Pardon?”

“Anita called Horace to pick up Brenda. That had to be before Sam arrived on the scene, right?”

“Yes.”

“But here’s the thing. Horace told Mabel that Anita called him. But maybe Horace was lying. I mean, why would Anita call Horace? It makes no sense. She’s running away from the man. She’s taken all his money. Why would she then call Horace and give away her location? She might call Mabel, for example, but never Horace.”

Win nodded. “Go on.”

“Suppose … suppose we’re looking at this all wrong. Forget the Bradfords for the moment. Take it from Horace’s viewpoint. He gets home. He finds the note. Maybe he even learns that his money is gone. He’d be furious. So suppose Horace tracked Anita down at the Holiday Inn. Suppose he went there to take back his child and his money.”

“By force,” Win added.

“Yes.”

“Then he killed Anita?”

“Not killed. But maybe he beat the hell out of her. Maybe he even left her for dead. Either way, he takes Brenda and the money back. Horace calls his sister. He tells her that Anita called him to pick up Brenda.”

Win frowned. “And then what? Anita hides from Horace for twenty years—lets him raise her daughter by himself—because she was scared of him?”

Myron didn’t like that. “Maybe,” he said.

“And then, if I follow your logic, twenty years later Anita becomes aware that Horace is looking for her. So is she the one who killed him? A final showdown? But then who grabbed Brenda? And why? Or is Brenda in cahoots with her mother? And while we’ve dismissed the Bradfords for the sake of hypothesizing, how do they factor into all this? Why would they be concerned enough to cover up Horace Slaughter’s crime? Why was Chance Bradford at the hotel that night in the first place?”

“There are holes,” Myron admitted.

“There are chasms of leviathan proportions,” Win corrected.

“There’s another thing I don’t get. If the Bradfords have had a tap on Mabel’s phone this whole time, wouldn’t they have been able to trace Anita’s calls?”

Win mulled that one over. “Maybe,” he said, “they did.”

Silence. Myron flipped on the radio. The game was in the second half. The New York Dolphins were getting crushed. The announcers were speculating on the whereabouts of Brenda Slaughter. Myron turned the volume down.

“We’re still missing something,” Myron said.

“Yes, but we’re getting close.”

“So we still try the Bradfords.”

Win nodded. “Open the glove compartment. Arm yourself like a paranoid despot. This may get ugly.”

Myron did not argue. He dialed Arthur’s private line. Arthur answered midway through the first ring. “Have you found Brenda?” Arthur asked.

“I’m on my way to your house,” Myron said.

“Then you’ve found her?”

“I’ve be there in fifteen minutes,” Myron said. “Tell your guards.”

Myron hung up. “Curious,” he said to Win.

“What?”

And then it hit Myron. Not slowly. But all at once. A tremendous avalanche buried him in one fell swoop. With a trembling hand Myron dialed another number into the cell phone.

“Norm Zuckerman, please. Yes, I know he’s watching the game. Tell him it’s Myron Bolitar. Tell him it’s urgent. And tell him I want to talk with McLaughlin and Tiles too.”

The guard at Bradford Farms shone a flashlight into the car. “You alone, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

The gate went up. “Please proceed to the main house.”

Myron drove in slowly. Per their plan, he slowed on the next curve. Silence. Then Win’s voice came through the phone: “I’m out.”

Out of the trunk. So smooth Myron had not even heard him.

“I’m going on mute,” Win said. “Let me know where you are at all times.”

The plan was simple: Win would search the property for Brenda while Myron tried not to get himself killed.

He continued up the drive, both hands on the wheel. Part of him wanted to stall; most of him wanted to get at Arthur Bradford immediately. He knew the truth now. Some of it anyway. Enough to save Brenda.

Maybe.

The grounds were silk black, the farm animals silent. The mansion loomed above him, floating almost, only tenuously connected with the world beneath it. Myron parked and got out of the car. Before he reached the door, Mattius the Manservant was there. It was ten o’clock at night, but Mattius still displayed fall butler garb and rigid spine. He said nothing, waiting with almost inhuman patience.

When Myron reached him, Mattius said, “Mr. Bradford will see you in the library.”

Myron nodded. And that was when someone hit him in the head. There was a thud, and then a thick, blackening numbness swam through him. His skull tingled. Still reeling, Myron felt a bat smash the back of his lower thighs. His legs buckled, and he dropped to his knees.

“Win,” he managed.

A boot stomped him hard between the shoulder blades. Myron crashed facefirst into the ground. He felt the air whoosh out of him. There were hands on him now. Searching. Grabbing out the weapons.

“Win,” he said again.

“Nice try.” Sam stood over him. He was holding Myron’s phone. “But I hung it up, I Spy.”

Two other men lifted Myron by the armpits and quickly dragged him into the foyer and down the corridor. Myron tried to blink out the fuzzies. His entire body felt like a thumb hit with a hammer. Sam walked in front of him. He opened a door, and the two men tossed Myron in like a sack of peat moss. He started to roll down steps, but he managed to stop his descent before he hit bottom.

Sam stepped inside. The door closed behind him.

“Come on,” Sam said. “Let’s get this done.”

Myron managed to sit up. A basement, Myron realized. He was on the steps of a basement.

Sam walked toward him. He reached out a hand. Myron took it and pulled himself to his feet. The two men walked down the steps.

“This section of the basement is windowless and cement-lined,” Sam said. Like he was giving a house tour. “So the only way in or out is through that door. Understand?”

Myron nodded.

“I got two men at the top of the steps. They’re going to spread out now. And they’re pros, not like that Mario asswipe. So no one is getting through that door. Understand?”

Another nod.

Sam took out a cigarette and put it between his lips. “Lastly, we saw your buddy jump out of the trunk. I got two marine sharpshooters hidden out there. Persian Gulf War vets. Your friend comes anywhere near the house, he’s toast. The windows are all alarmed. The motion detectors are set. I’m in radio contact with all four of my men under four different frequencies.” He showed Myron a walkie-talkie of some kind with a digital readout.

“Different frequencies,” Myron repeated. “Wow.”

“I say all this not to impress you but to stress how dumb a flight attempt would be. Do you understand?”

One more nod.

They were in a wine cellar now. It smelled as robust and oaky as, well, a perfectly aged chardonnay. Arthur was there. His face was skull-like, his skin drawn up tautly against his cheekbones. Chance was there too. He was sipping red wine, studying the color, trying very hard to look casual.

Myron glanced about the wine cellar. Lots of bottles in crisscrossed shelves, all tilted slightly forward so the corks would remain properly moist. A giant thermometer. A few wooden barrels, mostly for show. There were no windows. No doors. No other visible entranceways. In the center of the room was a hefty mahogany table.

The table was bare except for a gleaming set of pruning shears.

Myron looked back at Sam. Sam smiled, still holding a gun.

“Label me intimidated,” Myron said.

Sam shrugged.

“Where is Brenda?” Arthur demanded.

“I don’t know,” Myron said.

“And Anita? Where is she?”

“Why don’t you ask Chance?” Myron said.

“What?”

Chance sat up. “He’s crazy.”

Arthur stood. “You’re not leaving here until I’m satisfied that you’re not holding out on me.”

“Fine,” Myron said. “Then let’s get to it, Arthur. You see, I’ve been dumb about this whole thing. I mean, the clues were all there. The old phone taps. Your keen interest in all this. The earlier assault on Anita. Ransacking Horace’s apartment and taking Anita’s letters. The cryptic calls telling Brenda to contact her mother. Sam cutting those kids’ Achilles tendons. The scholarship money. But you know what finally gave it away?”

Chance was about to say something, but Arthur waved him into silence. He strummed his chin with his index finger. “What?” he asked.

“The timing of Elizabeth’s suicide,” Myron said.

“I don’t understand.”

“The timing of the suicide,” Myron repeated, “and more important, your family’s attempt to alter it. Why would Elizabeth kill herself at six in the morning—at the exact moment Anita Slaughter was coming to work? Coincidence? Possibly. But then why did you all work so hard to change the time? Elizabeth could have just as easily had her accident at six A.M. as midnight. So why the change?”

Arthur kept his back straight. “You tell me.”

“Because the timing was not incidental,” Myron said. “Your wife committed suicide when she did and how she did for a reason. She wanted Anita Slaughter to see her jump.”

Chance made a noise. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Elizabeth was depressed,” Myron continued, looking straight at Arthur. “I don’t doubt that. And I don’t doubt that you once loved her. But that was a long time ago. You said she hadn’t been herself for years. I don’t doubt that either. But three weeks before her suicide Anita was assaulted. I thought one of you beat her. Then I thought that maybe Horace did it. But the most noticeable injuries were scratches. Deep scratches. Like a cat, Wickner said.” Myron looked at Arthur. Arthur seemed to be shrinking in front of him, being sucked dry by his own memories.

“Your wife was the one who attacked Anita,” Myron said. “First she attacked her, and then three weeks later, still despondent, she committed suicide in front of her—because Anita was having an affair with her husband. It was the final mental straw that broke her, wasn’t it, Arthur? So how did it happen? Did Elizabeth walk in on you two? Did she seem so far gone that you got careless?”

Arthur cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact, yes. That’s pretty much how it happened. But so what? What does that have to do with the present?”

“Your affair with Anita. How long did it last?”

“I don’t see the relevance of that.”

Myron looked at him for a long moment. “You’re an evil man,” he said. “You were raised by an evil man, and you have much of him in you. You’ve caused great suffering. You’ve even had people killed. But this wasn’t a fling, was it? You loved her, didn’t you, Arthur?”

He said nothing. But something behind the facade began to cave in.

“I don’t know how it happened,” Myron continued. “Maybe Anita wanted to leave Horace. Or maybe you encouraged her. It doesn’t matter. Anita decided to run away and start new. Tell me what the plan was, Arthur. Were you going to set her up in an apartment? A house out of town? Surely no Bradford was going to marry a black maid from Newark.”

Arthur made a noise. Half scoff. Half groan. “Surely,” he said.

“So what happened?”

Sam kept several steps back, his gaze moving from the basement door to Myron. He whispered into his walkie-talkie every once in a while. Chance sat frozen, both nervous and comforted; nervous about what was being unearthed; comforted because he believed it would never leave this cellar. Perhaps he was right.

“Anita was my last hope,” Arthur said. He bounced two fingers off his lips and forced up a smile. “It’s ironic, don’t you think? If you come from a disadvantaged home, you can blame the environment for your sinful ways. But what about an omnipotent household? What about those who are raised to dominate others, to take what they want? What about those who are raised to believe that they are special and that other people are little more than window dressing? What about those children?”

Myron nodded. “Next time I’m alone,” he said, “I’ll weep for them.”

Arthur chuckled. “Fair enough,” he said. “But you have it wrong. I was the one who wanted to run away. Not Anita. Yes, I loved her. When I was with her, every part of me soared. I can’t explain it any other way.”

He didn’t have to. Myron thought of Brenda. And he understood.

“I was going to leave Bradford Farms,” he continued. “Anita and I were going to run away together. Start on our own. Escape this prison.” He smiled again. “Naive, wouldn’t you say?”

“So what happened?” Myron asked.

“Anita changed her mind.”

“Why?”

“There was someone else.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. We were supposed to meet up in the morning, but Anita never showed. I thought maybe her husband had done something to her. I kept an eye on him. And then I got a note from her. She said she needed to start new. Without me. And she sent back the ring.”

“What ring?”

“The one I gave her. An unofficial engagement ring.”

Myron looked over at Chance. Chance said nothing. Myron kept his eyes on him for a few more seconds. Then he turned back to Arthur.

“But you didn’t give up, did you?”

“No.”

“You searched for her. The phone taps. You’ve had the taps in place all these years. You figured Anita would call her family one day. You wanted to be able to trace the call when she did.”

“Yes.”

Myron swallowed hard and hoped he would be able to keep his voice from cracking. “And then there were the microphones in Brenda’s room,” he said. “And the scholarship money. And the severed Achilles tendons.”

Silence.

Tears welled up in Myron’s eyes. Same with Arthur’s. Both men knew what was coming. Myron pressed on, struggling to maintain an even and steady tone.

“The microphones were there so that you could keep an eye on Brenda. The scholarships were set up by someone with a great deal of money and financial expertise. Even if Anita had gotten her hands on cash, she wouldn’t have known how to funnel it through the Cayman Islands. You, on the other hand, would. And lastly the Achilles tendons. Brenda thought it was her father who did it. She thought her father was being overprotective. And she was right.”

More silence.

“I just called Norm Zuckerman and got Brenda’s blood type from the team medical records. The police had Horace’s blood type from the autopsy report. They weren’t related, Arthur.” Myron thought of Brenda’s light coffee skin next to the far darker tones of her parents. “That’s why you’ve been so interested in Brenda. That’s why you were so quick to help keep her out of prison. That’s why you’re so worried about her right now. Brenda Slaughter is your daughter.”

Tears were streaming down Arthur’s face now. He did nothing to stop it.

Myron went on. “Horace never knew, did he?”

Arthur shook his head. “Anita got pregnant early in our relationship. But Brenda still ended up dark enough to pass. Anita insisted we keep it a secret. She didn’t want our child stigmatized. She also—she also didn’t want our daughter raised in this house. I understood.”

“So what happened to Horace? Why did he call you after twenty years?”

“It was the Aches, trying to help Davison. Somehow they found out about the scholarship money. From one of the lawyers, I think. They wanted to cause mischief for me in the governor’s race. So they told Slaughter about it. They thought he’d be greedy and follow the money line.”

“But he didn’t care about the money,” Myron said. “He wanted to find Anita.”

“Yes. He called me repeatedly. He came to my campaign headquarters. He wouldn’t let go. So I had Sam discourage him.”

The blood in the locker. “He was beaten?”

Arthur nodded. “But not badly. I wanted to scare him off, not hurt him. A long time ago Anita made me promise never to harm him. I tried my best to keep that promise.”

“Sam was supposed to keep an eye on him?”

“Yes. To make sure he didn’t cause any trouble. And, I don’t know, maybe I had hopes he would find Anita.”

“But he ran.”

“Yes.”

It made sense, Myron thought. Horace had gotten a bloody nose. He had gone to nearby St. Barnabas after the beating. He cleaned himself up. Sam had scared him, yes, but only enough to convince Horace that he had to go into hiding. So he cleared out his bank account and disappeared. Sam and Mario searched. They followed Brenda. They visited Mabel Edwards and threatened her. They checked the tap on her phone. Eventually Horace called her.

And then?

“You killed Horace.”

“No. We never found him.”

A hole, Myron thought. There were still a few of them he hadn’t plugged. “But you did have your people make cryptic calls to Brenda.”

“Just to see if she knew where Anita was. The other calls—the threatening ones—came from the Aches. They wanted to find Horace and finalize the contract before the opener.”

Myron nodded. Again it made sense. He turned and stared down Chance. Chance met the gaze and held it. He had a small smile on his face.

“Are you going to tell him, Chance?”

Chance rose and went face-to-face with Myron. “You’re a dead man,” he said, almost leering. “All you’ve done here is dig your own grave.”

“Are you going to tell him, Chance?”

“No, Myron.” He gestured to the pruning shears and leaned closer. “I’m going to watch you suffer and then die.”

Myron reared back and head-butted Chance square on the nose. He held back at the last moment. If you head-butt at full strength, you could literally kill a person. The head is both heavy and hard; the face being hit is neither. Picture a wrecking ball heading for a bird’s nest.

Still, the blow was effective. Chance’s nose did the equivalent of a gymnastic split. Myron felt something warm and sticky on his hair. Chance fell back. His nose gushed. His eyes were wide and shocked. No one rushed to his aid. Sam in fact seemed to be smiling.

Myron turned to Arthur. “Chance knew about your affair, didn’t he?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And he knew about your plans to run away?”

This time the answer came slower. “Yes. But what of it?”

“Chance has been lying to you for twenty years. So has Sam.”

“What?”

“I just spoke to Detective Wickner. He was there that night too. I don’t know what happened exactly. Neither did he. But he saw Sam carry Anita out of the Holiday Inn. And he saw Chance in the car.”

Arthur glared at his brother. “Chance?”

“He’s lying.”

Arthur took out a gun and pointed it at his brother. “Tell me.”

Chance was still trying to stem the blood flow. “Who are you going to believe? Me or—”

Arthur pulled the trigger. The bullet smashed Chance’s knee, splintering the joint. Blood spurted. Chance howled in agony. Arthur aimed the gun at the other knee.

“Tell me,” he said.

“You were insane!” Chance shouted. Then he gritted his teeth. His eyes grew small yet strangely clear, as though the pain were sweeping the debris away. “Did you really think Father was going to let you just run off like that? You were going to destroy everything. I tried to make you see that. I talked to you. Like a brother. But you didn’t want to listen. So I went to see Anita. Just to talk. I wanted her to see how destructive this whole idea was. I meant her no harm. I was just trying to help.”

Chance’s face was a bloody mess, but Arthur’s was a far more horrid sight. The tears were still there, still flowing freely. But he was not crying. His skin was gray-white, his features contorted like a death mask. Something behind his eyes had been short-circuited by his rage. “What happened?”

“I found her room number. And when I got there, the door was ajar. I swear, Anita was like that when I arrived. I swear it, Arthur. I didn’t touch her. At first I thought maybe you had done it. That maybe you two had a fight. But either way, I knew it would be a mess if it leaked out. There were too many questions, too many loose ends. So I called Father. He arranged the rest. Sam came over. He cleaned the place up. We took the ring and forged that note. So you’d stop looking.”

“Where is she now?” Myron asked.

Chance looked at him, puzzled. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Did you take her to a doctor? Give her money? Did you—”

“Anita was dead,” Chance said.

Silence.

Arthur let out a harrowing, primitive wail. He collapsed to the floor.

“She was dead when I got there, Arthur. I swear it.”

Myron felt his heart sink into deep mud. He tried to speak, but no words came out. He looked over at Sam. Sam nodded. Myron met his eye. “Her body?” he managed.

“I get rid of something,” Sam said, “it’s gone for good.”

Dead. Anita Slaughter was dead. Myron tried to take it in. All these years Brenda had felt unworthy for nothing.

“So where is Brenda?” Myron asked.

The adrenaline was starting to wear off, but Chance still managed to shake his head. “I don’t know.”

Myron looked over at Sam. Sam shrugged.

Arthur sat up. He hugged his knees and lowered his head. He began to cry.

“My leg,” Chance said. “I need a doctor.”

Arthur did not move.

“We also need to kill him,” Chance said through a clenched jaw. “He knows too much, Arthur. I know you’re grief-stricken, but we can’t let him ruin everything.”

Sam nodded at that. “He’s right, Mr. Bradford.”

Myron said, “Arthur.”

Arthur looked up.

“I’m your daughter’s best hope.”

“I don’t think so,” Sam said. He aimed the gun. “Chance is right, Mr. Bradford. It’s too risky. We just admitted covering up a murder. He has to die.”

Sam’s walkie-talkie suddenly squeaked. Then a voice came through the tinny speaker: “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Win.

Sam frowned at the walkie-talkie. He turned a knob, changed frequency. The red digital readout changed numbers. Then he pressed the talk button. “Someone got to Forster,” Sam said. “Move in and take him out.”

The response was Win’s best Star Trek Scottie: “But I can’t hold her, Captain. She’s breaking up!”

Sam remained calm. “How many radios you got, buddy?”

“Collect all four, now in specially marked packages.”

Sam whistled his appreciation. “Fine,” he said. “So we got ourselves a stalemate. Let’s talk it through.”

“No.” This time it wasn’t Win speaking. It was Arthur Bradford. He fired twice. Both bullets hit Sam in the chest. Sam slumped to the floor, twitched, and then lay still.

Arthur looked at Myron. “Find my daughter,” he said. “Please.”

Win and Myron rushed back to the Jag. Win drove. Myron did not ask about the fate of the men who once possessed those four walkie-talkies. He didn’t much care.

“I searched the entire grounds,” Win said. “She’s not here.”

Myron sat and thought. He remembered telling Detective Wickner at the Little League field that he would not stop digging. And he remembered Wickner’s response: “Then more people are going to die.”

“You were right,” Myron said.

Win kept driving.

“I didn’t keep my eye on the prize. I pushed too hard.”

Win said nothing.

When Myron heard the first ring, he reached for his cellular. Then he remembered that Sam had taken it from him back at the estate. The ringing was coming from Win’s car phone. Win answered it. He said, “Hello.” He listened for a full minute without nodding or speaking or making any noise whatsoever. Then he said, “Thank you,” and hung up. He slowed the car’s speed and pulled over to the side of the road. The car glided to a stop. He shifted into park and snapped off the ignition.

Win turned toward Myron, his gaze as heavy as the ages.

For a fleeting moment Myron was puzzled. But only for a moment. Then his head fell to one side, and he let out a small groan. Win nodded. And something inside Myron’s chest dried up and blew away.

Peter Frankel, a six-year-old boy from Cedar Grove, New Jersey, had been missing for eight hours. Frantic, Paul and Missy Frankel, the boy’s parents, called the police. The Frankels’ backyard was up against a wooded water reservation area. The police and neighbors formed search parties. Police dogs were brought in. Neighbors even brought their own dogs along. Everyone wanted to help.

It did not take long to find Peter. Apparently the boy had crawled into a neighbor’s toolshed and fallen asleep. When he woke up, he pushed at the door, but it was stuck. Peter was scared, of course, but no worse for wear. Everyone was relieved. The town fire whistle blew, signaling that all searchers should return.

One dog didn’t heed the whistle. A German shepherd named Wally ran deeper into the woods and barked steadily until Officer Craig Reed, new with the canine corps, came to see what had upset Wally so.

When Reed arrived, he found Wally barking over a dead body. The medical examiner was called in. His conclusion: The victim, a female in her twenties, had been dead less than twenty-four hours. Cause of death: two contact gunshot wounds to the back of the head.

An hour later Cheryl Sutton, cocaptain of the New York Dolphins, positively identified the body as belonging to her friend and teammate Brenda Slaughter.

The car was still parked in the same place.

“I want to take a drive,” Myron said. “Alone.”

Win wiped his eyes with two fingers. Then he stepped out of the car without a word. Myron slid into the driver’s seat. His foot pressed down on the accelerator. He passed trees and cars and signs and shops and homes and even people taking late-night walks. Music came from the car speakers. Myron did not bother turning it off. He kept driving. Images of Brenda tried to infiltrate, but Myron parried and sidestepped.

Not yet.

By the time he reached Esperanza’s apartment, it was one in the morning. She sat alone on the stoop, almost as though she were expecting him. He stopped and stayed in the car. Esperanza approached. He could see that she had been crying.

“Come inside,” she said.

Myron shook his head. “Win talked about leaps of faith,” he began.

Esperanza stayed still.

“I didn’t really understand what he meant. He kept talking about his own experiences with families. Marriage led to disaster, he said. It was that simple. He had seen countless people get married, and in almost every case they ended up crippling one another. It would take a huge leap of faith to make Win believe otherwise.”

Esperanza looked at him and kept crying. “You loved her,” she said.

He closed his eyes hard, waited, opened them. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about us. Everything I know—all my past experience—tells me that our partnership is doomed. But then I look at you. You are the finest person I know, Esperanza. You are my best friend. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said.

“You’re worth taking the leap. I want you to stay.”

She nodded. “Good, because I can’t leave anyway.” She stepped closer to the car. “Myron, please come inside. We’ll talk, okay?”

He shook his head.

“I know what she meant to you.”

Again he closed his eyes tight. “I’ll be at Win’s in a few hours,” he said.

“Okay. I’ll wait for you there.”

He drove off before she could say more.

By the time Myron reached his third destination, it was almost four in the morning. A light was still on. No surprise really. He rang the doorbell. Mabel Edwards opened it. She was wearing a terry-cloth robe over a flannel nightgown. She started crying and reached out to hug him.

Myron stepped back.

“You killed them all,” he said. “First Anita. Then Horace. And then Brenda.”

Her mouth dropped open. “You don’t mean that.”

Myron took out his gun and placed it against the older woman’s forehead. “If you lie to me, I’ll kill you.”

Mabel’s gaze veered quickly from shock to cold defiance. “You wired, Myron?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t matter. You have a gun pointed to my head. I’ll say whatever you want.”

The gun nudged her back into the house. Myron closed the door. The photograph of Horace was still on the fireplace mantel. Myron looked at his old friend for a brief moment. Then he turned back to Mabel.

“You lied to me,” he said. “From the very beginning. Everything you told me was a lie. Anita never called you. She’s been dead for twenty years.”

“Who told you that?”

“Chance Bradford.”

She made a scoffing noise. “You shouldn’t believe a man like that.”

“The phone taps,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Arthur Bradford tapped your phone. For the last twenty years. He hoped Anita might call you. But we all know she never did.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Mabel said. “Maybe he just missed those calls.”

“I don’t think so. But there’s more. You told me that Horace called you last week while he was hiding. He gave you this dire warning about not trying to look for him. But again Arthur Bradford had a tap on your phone. He was looking for Horace. Why didn’t he know anything about it?”

“Guess he messed up again.”

Myron shook his head. “I just paid a visit to a dumb thug named Mario,” he went on. “I surprised him while he was sleeping, and I did some things to him I’m not proud of. By the time I was through, Mario admitted to all kinds of crimes—including trying to get information from you with his skinny partner, just like you told me. But he swears he never punched you in the eye. And I believe him. Because it was Horace who hit you.”

Brenda had called him a sexist, and he had been wondering lately about his own race issues. Now he saw the truth. His semilatent prejudices had twisted on him like a snake seizing its own tail. Mabel Edwards. The sweet old black lady. Butterfly McQueen. Miss Jane Pittman. Knitting needles and reading glasses. Big and kind and matronly. Evil could never lurk in so politically correct a form.

“You told me you moved into this house shortly after Anita disappeared. How did a widow from Newark afford it? You told me that your son worked his way through Yale Law School. Sorry, but part-time jobs do not pay that kind of money anymore.”

“So?”

He kept the gun trained on her. “You knew Horace wasn’t Brenda’s father from the beginning, didn’t you? Anita was your closest friend. You were still working at the Bradfords’ home. You must have known.”

She did not back down. “And what if I did?”

“Then you knew Anita ran away. She would have confided in you. And if she had run into a problem at the Holiday Inn, she would have called you, not Horace.”

“Could be,” Mabel said. “If you’re talking hypothetically, I guess this is all possible.”

Myron pressed the gun against her forehead, pushing her onto the couch. “Did you kill Anita for the money?”

Mabel smiled. Physically it was that same celestial smile, but now Myron thought he could see at least a hint of the decay looming beneath it. “Hypothetically, Myron, I guess I could have a bunch of motives. Money, yes—fourteen thousand dollars is a lot of money. Or sisterly love—Anita was going to leave Horace brokenhearted, right? She was going to take away the baby girl he thought was his. Maybe she was even going to tell Horace the truth about Brenda’s father. And maybe Horace would know that his only sister had helped keep the secret all those years.” She glared up at the gun. “Lots of motives, I’ll give you that.”

“How did you do it, Mabel?”

“Go home, Myron.”

Myron lifted the muzzle and poked her forehead with it. Hard. “How?”

“You think I’m scared of you?”

He poked her again with the muzzle. Harder. Then again. “How?”

“What do you mean, how?” She was spitting words now. “It would have been easy, Myron. Anita was a mother. I would have quietly shown her the gun. I would have told her if she didn’t do exactly as I said, I would kill her daughter. So Anita, the good mother, would have listened. She would have given her daughter a last hug and told her to wait in the lobby. I would have used a pillow to muffle the shot. Simple, no?”

A fresh flash of rage surged through him. “Then what happened?”

Mabel hesitated. Myron hit her with the gun again.

“I drove Brenda back to her house. Anita had left a note telling Horace she was running away and that Brenda wasn’t his child. I tore it up and wrote another.”

“So Horace never even knew that Anita had planned on taking Brenda.”

“That’s right.”

“And Brenda never said anything?”

“She was five years old, Myron. She didn’t know what was going on. She told her daddy how I picked her up and took her away from Mommy. But she didn’t remember anything about a hotel. At least that’s what I thought.”

Silence.

“When Anita’s body vanished, what did you think happened?”

“I figured that Arthur Bradford had shown up, found her dead, and did what that family always did: threw out the trash.”

Another rage flash. “And you found a way to use that. With your son, Terence, and his political career.”

Mabel shook her head. “Too dangerous,” she said. “You don’t want to stir up those Bradford boys with blackmail. I had nothing to do with Terence’s career. But truth be told, Arthur was always willing to help Terence. Terence was, after all, his daughter’s cousin.”

The anger swelled, pressing against his skull. He wanted so much simply to pull the trigger and end this. “So what happened next?”

“Oh, come now, Myron. You know the rest of the story, don’t you? Horace started looking for Anita again. After all these years. He had a lead, he said. He thought he could find her. I tried to talk him out of it, but, well, love is a funny thing.”

“Horace found out about the Holiday Inn,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“He spoke to a woman named Caroline Gundeck.”

Mabel shrugged. “I never heard the woman’s name.”

“I just woke Ms. Gundeck out of a sound sleep,” Myron said. “Scared her half to death. But she talked to me. Just like she talked to Horace. She was a maid back then, and she knew Anita. You see, Anita used to work hotel functions to make a little extra money. Caroline Gundeck remembered seeing Anita there that night. She was surprised because Anita checked in as a guest, not a worker. She also remembered seeing Anita’s little daughter. And she remembered seeing Anita’s daughter leave with another woman. A strung-out drug addict is how she described the woman. I wouldn’t have guessed it was you. But Horace would have.”

Mabel Edwards said nothing.

“Horace figured it out after hearing that. So he came charging over here. Still in hiding. Still with all that money on him—eleven grand. And he hit you. He got so angry that he punched you in the eye. And then you killed him.”

She shrugged again. “It almost sounds like self-defense.”

“Almost,” Myron agreed. “With Horace, it was easy. He was on the run already. All you had to do was continue to make it look like he was in hiding. He would be a black man on the run, not a homicide. Who would care? It was like Anita all over again. All these years you did the little things to make people think she was still alive. You wrote letters. You faked phone calls. Whatever. So you decided to do the same again. Hell, it worked once, right? But the problem was, you weren’t as good at getting rid of the dead as Sam.”

“Sam?”

“The man who worked for the Bradfords,” Myron said. “My guess is that Terence helped you move the bodies.”

She smiled. “Don’t underestimate my strength, Myron. I’m not helpless.”

He nodded. She was right. “I keep giving you these other motives, but my guess is that it was mostly about money. You got fourteen thousand from Anita. You got eleven thousand from Horace. And your own husband, dear, sweet Roland whose picture you wept over, had an insurance policy, I’d bet.”

She nodded. “Only five thousand dollars, poor soul.”

“But enough for you. Shot in the head near his very own home. No witnesses. And the police had arrested you three times the previous year—twice for petty theft and once for drug possession. Seems your downward spiral began before Roland was killed.”

Mabel sighed. “Are we done now?”

“No,” he said.

“I think we covered everything, Myron.”

He shook his head. “Not Brenda.”

“Oh, right, of course.” She leaned back a bit. “You seem to have all the answers, Myron. Why did I kill Brenda?”

“Because,” Myron said, “of me.”

Mabel actually smiled. He felt his finger tighten on the trigger.

“I’m right, aren’t I?”

Mabel just kept smiling.

“As long as Brenda didn’t remember the Holiday Inn, she wasn’t a threat. But I was the one who told you about our visit there. I was the one who told you she was having memories. And that’s when you knew you had to kill her.”

She just kept smiling.

“And with Horace’s body found and Brenda already a murder suspect, your job became easier. Frame Brenda and make her disappear. You kill two birds with one stone. So you planted the gun under Brenda’s mattress. But again you had trouble getting rid of the body. You shot her and dumped her in the woods. My guess is that you planned on coming back another day when you had more time. What you didn’t count on was the search party finding her so soon.”

Mabel Edwards shook her head. “You sure can spin a tale, Myron.”

“It’s not a tale. We both know that.”

“And we both know you can’t prove any of this.”

“There will be fibers, Mabel. Hairs, threads, something.”

“So what?” Again her smile poked his heart like a pair of knitting needles. “You saw me hug my niece right here in this very room. If her body has fibers or threads, they’d be from that. And Horace visited me before he was murdered. I told you that. So maybe that’s how he got hairs or fibers on him—if they even found any.”

A hot bolt of fury exploded inside his head, almost blinding him. Myron pressed the barrel hard against her forehead. His hand started quaking. “How did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“How did you get Brenda to leave practice?”

She didn’t blink. “I said I’d found her mother.”

Myron closed his eyes. He tried to hold the gun steady. Mabel stared at him.

“You won’t shoot me, Myron. You’re not the kind of man who shoots a woman in cold blood.”

He didn’t pull the gun away.

Mabel reached up with her hand. She pushed the barrel away from her face. Then she got up, tightened her robe, and walked away.

“I’m going to bed now,” she said. “Close the door on your way out.”

He did close the door.

He drove back to Manhattan. Win and Esperanza were waiting for him. They did not ask him where he’d been. And he did not tell them. In fact, he never told them.

He called Jessica’s loft. The machine answered. When the beep sounded, he said that he planned on staying with Win for a while. He didn’t know for how long. But awhile.

Roy Pomeranz and Eli Wickner were found dead in the cabin two days later. An apparent murder-suicide. Livingstonites speculated, but no one ever knew what had driven Eli over the edge. The Eli Wickner Little League backstop was immediately renamed.

Esperanza went back to work at MB SportsReps. Myron did not.

The homicides of Brenda Slaughter and Horace Slaughter remain unsolved.

Nothing that happened at Bradford Farms that night was ever reported. A publicist for the Bradford campaign confirmed that Chance Bradford had recently undergone knee surgery to repair a nagging tennis injury. He was recovering nicely.

Jessica did not return the phone message.

And Myron told only one person about his final meeting with Mabel Edwards.

SEPTEMBER 15
Two Weeks Later

The cemetery overlooked a schoolyard.

There is nothing as heavy as grief. Grief is the deepest pit in the blackest ocean, the bottomless ravine. It is all-consuming. It suffocates. It paralyzes as no severed nerve could.

He spent much time here now.

Myron heard footsteps coming up behind him. He closed his eyes. It was as he expected. The footsteps came closer. When they stopped, Myron did not turn around.

“You killed her,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“Do you feel better now?”

Arthur Bradford’s tone caressed the back of Myron’s neck with a cold, bloodless hand. “The question is, Myron, do you?”

He did not know.

“If it means anything to you, Mabel Edwards died slowly.”

It didn’t. Mabel Edwards had been right that night: He was not the type to shoot a woman in cold blood. He was worse.

“I’ve also decided to quit the gubernatorial race,” Arthur said. “I’m going to try to remember how I felt when I was with Anita. I’m going to change.”

He wouldn’t. But Myron didn’t care.

Arthur Bradford left then. Myron stared at the mound of dirt for a while longer. He lay down next to it and wondered how something so splendid and alive could be no more. He waited for the school’s final bell, and then he watched the children rush out of the building like bees from a poked hive. Their squeals did not comfort him.

Clouds began to blot the blue, and then rain began to fall. Myron almost smiled. Yes, rain. That was fitting. Much better than the earlier clear skies. He closed his eyes and let the drops pound him—rain on the petals of a crushed rose.

Eventually he stood and trekked down the hill to his car. Jessica was there, looming before him like a translucent specter. He had not seen or spoken to her in two weeks. Her beautiful face was wet—from the rain or tears, he could not say.

He stopped short and looked at her. Something else inside him shattered like a dropped tumbler.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Myron said.

Jessica nodded. “I know.”

He walked away from her then. Jessica stood and watched him in silence. He got in his car and turned the ignition. Still, she did not move. He started driving, keeping his eye on the rearview mirror. The translucent specter grew smaller and smaller. But it never totally disappeared.

In memory of my parents,
Corky and Carl Coben
and in celebration of their grandchildren,
Charlotte, Aleksander, Benjamin, and Gabrielle

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this book alone. Nobody helped me. But if mistakes were made, I wish to keep in the long-standing American tradition of passing the buck. So with that in mind, the author would like to thank the following wonderful people: Aaron Priest, Lisa Erbach Vance, and everyone at the Aaron Priest Literary Agency; Carole Baron, Leslie Schnur, Jacob Hoye, Heather Mongelli, and everyone at Dell Publishing; Maureen Coyle of the New York Liberty; Karen Ross, ME of the Dallas County Institute of Forensic Science; Peter Roisman of Advantage International; Sergeant Jay Vanderbeck of the Livingston Police Department; Detective Lieutenant Keith Killion of the Ridgewood Police Department; Maggie Griffin, James Bradbeer, Chip Hinshaw, and of course, Dave Bolt. Again I repeat: any errors—factual or otherwise—are totally the fault of these people. The author is not to blame.

Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Harlan Coben

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

Dell® is registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-48481-9
v3.0_r2

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

The Final Detail

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Dedication

CHAPTER 1

Myron lay sprawled next to a knee-knockingly gorgeous brunette clad only in a Class-B-felony bikini, a tropical drink sans umbrella in one hand, the aqua clear Caribbean water lapping at his feet, the sand a dazzling white powder, the sky a pure blue that could only be God’s blank canvas, the sun as soothing and rich as a Swedish masseur with a snifter of cognac, and he was intensely miserable.

The two of them had been on this island paradise for, he guessed, three weeks. Myron had not bothered counting the days. Neither, he imagined, had Terese. The island seemed as remote as Gilligan’s—no phone, some lights, no motorcar, plenty of luxury, not much like Robinson Crusoe, and well, not as primitive as can be either. Myron shook his head. You can take the boy out of the television, but you can’t take the television out of the boy.

At the horizon’s midway point, slicing toward them and ripping a seam of white in the aqua-blue fabric, came the yacht. Myron saw it, and his stomach clenched.

He did not know where they were exactly, though the island did indeed have a name: St. Bacchanals. Yes, for real. It was a small patch of planet, owned by one of those mega-cruise lines that used one side of the island for passengers to swim and barbecue and enjoy a day on their “own personal island paradise.” Personal. Just them and the other twenty-five hundred turistas squeezed onto a short stretch of beach. Yep, personal, bacchanal-like.

This side of the island, however, was quite different. There was only this one home, owned by the cruise line’s CEO, a hybrid between a thatched hut and a plantation manor. The only person within a mile was a servant. Total island population: maybe thirty, all of whom worked as caretakers hired by the cruise line.

The yacht shut off its engine and drifted closer.

Terese Collins lowered her Bolle sunglasses and frowned. In three weeks no vessel except the mammoth cruise liners—they had subtle names like the Sensation or the Ecstasy or the G Spot—had ambled past their stretch of sand.

“Did you tell anybody where we were?” she asked.

“No.”

“Maybe it’s John.”

John was the aforementioned CEO of said cruise line, a friend of Terese’s.

“I don’t think so,” Myron said.

Myron had first met Terese Collins, well, a little more than three weeks ago. Terese was “on leave” from her high-profile job as prime-time anchorwoman for CNN. They both had been bullied into going to some charity function by well-meaning friends and had been immediately drawn to each other as though their mutual misery and pain were magnetic. It started as little more than a dare: Drop everything and flee. Just disappear with someone you found attractive and barely knew. Neither backed down, and twelve hours later they were in St. Maarten. Twenty-four hours after that they were here.

For Myron, a man who had slept with a total of four women in his entire life, who had never really experienced one-night stands even in the days when they were fashionable or ostensibly disease-free, who had never had sex purely for the physical sensation and without the anchors of love or commitment, the decision to flee felt surprisingly right.

He had told no one where he was going or for how long—mostly because he didn’t have a clue himself. He’d called Mom and Dad and told them not to worry, a move tantamount to telling them to grow gills and breathe underwater. He’d sent Esperanza a fax and gave her power of attorney over MB SportsReps, the sports agency they now partnered. He had not even called Win.

Terese was watching him. “You know who it is.”

Myron said nothing. His heartbeat sped up.

The yacht came closer. A cabin door in the front opened, and as Myron feared, Win stepped out on deck. Panic squeezed the air out of him. Win was not one for casual drop-bys. If he was here, it meant something was very wrong.

Myron stood. He was still too far to yell, so he settled for a wave. Win gave a small nod.

“Wait a second,” Terese said. “Isn’t that the guy whose family owns Lock-Horne Securities?”

“Yes.”

“I interviewed him once. When the market plunged. He has some long, pompous name.”

“Windsor Horne Lockwood the third,” Myron said.

“Right. Weird guy.”

She should only know.

“Good-looking as all hell,” Terese continued, “in that old-money, country-club, born-with-a-silver-golf-club-in-his-hands kinda way.”

As though on cue, Win put a hand through the blond locks and smiled.

“You two have something in common,” Myron said.

“What’s that?”

“You both think he’s good-looking as all hell.”

Terese studied Myron’s face. “You’re going back.” There was a hint of apprehension in her voice.

Myron nodded. “Win wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

She took his hand. It was the first tender moment between them in the three weeks since the charity ball. That might sound strange—lovers alone on an island, the sex constant, who had never shared a gentle kiss or a light stroke or soft words—but their relationship had been about forgetting and surviving: two desperate souls standing in the rubble with no interest in trying to rebuild a damn thing.

Terese had spent most days taking long walks by herself; he’d spent them sitting on the beach and exercising and sometimes reading. They met up for food, sleep, and sex. Other than that, they left each other alone to—if not heal—at least stave off the blood flow. He could see that she too had been shattered, that some recent tragedy had struck her deep and hard and to the bone. But he never asked her what had happened. And she never asked him either.

An unspoken rule of their little folly.

The yacht stopped and dropped anchor. Win stepped down onto a motorized dinghy. Myron waited. He shifted his feet, bracing himself. When the dinghy was close enough to the shore, Win snapped off the motor.

“My parents?” Myron called out.

Win shook his head. “They’re fine.”

“Esperanza?”

Slight hesitation. “She needs your help.”

Win stepped gingerly into the water, almost as though he expected it to hold his weight. He was dressed in a white button-down oxford and Lilly Pulitzer shorts with colors loud enough to repel sharks. The Yacht Yuppie. His build was on the slight side, but his forearms looked like steel snakes coiling beneath the skin.

Terese stood as Win approached. Win admired the view without ogling. He was one of the few men Myron knew who could get away with that. Breeding. He took Terese’s hand and smiled. They exchanged pleasantries. Fake smiles and pointless bandies followed. Myron stood frozen, not listening. Terese excused herself and headed to the house.

Win carefully watched her saunter away. Then he said, “Quality derrière.”

“Would you be referring to me?” Myron asked.

Win kept his eyes keenly focused on the, er, target. “On television she’s always sitting behind that anchor desk,” he noted. “One would never guess that she had such a high-quality derrière.” He shook his head. “It’s a shame really.”

“Right,” Myron said. “Maybe she should stand a couple times during each broadcast. Twirl around a few times, bend over, something like that.”

“There you go.” Win risked a quick glance at Myron. “Take any action snapshots, perhaps a videotape?”

“No, that would be you,” Myron said, “or maybe an extra-perverse rock star.”

“Shame.”

“Yeah, shame, I got that.” Quality derrière? “So what’s wrong with Esperanza?”

Terese finally disappeared through the front door. Win sighed softly and turned toward Myron. “The yacht will take half an hour to refuel. We’ll leave then. Mind if I sit?”

“What happened, Win?”

He did not answer, choosing instead to sit on a chaise longue and ease back. He put his hands behind his head and crossed his ankles. “I’ll say this for you. When you decide to wig out, you do it in style.”

“I didn’t wig out. I just needed a break.”

“Uh-hmm.” Win looked off, and a realization smacked Myron in the head: He had hurt Win’s feelings. Strange but probably true. Win might be a blue-blooded, aristocratic sociopath, but hey, he was still human, sort of. The two men had been inseparable since college, yet Myron had run off without even calling. In many ways Win had no one else.

“I meant to call you,” Myron said weakly.

Win kept still.

“But I knew if there was a problem, you’d be able to find me.” That was true. Win could find a Hoffa needle in a Judge Crater haystack.

Win waved a hand. “Whatever.”

“So what’s wrong with Esperanza?”

“Clu Haid.”

Myron’s first client, a right-handed relief pitcher in the twilight of his career. “What about him?”

“He’s dead,” Win said.

Myron felt his legs buckle a bit. He let himself land on the chaise.

“Shot three times in his own abode.”

Myron lowered his head. “I thought he’d straightened himself out.”

Win said nothing.

“So what does Esperanza have to do with this?”

Win looked at his watch. “Right about now,” he said, “she is in all likelihood being arrested for his murder.”

“What?”

Win said nothing again. He hated to repeat himself.

“They think Esperanza killed him?”

“Good to see your vacation hasn’t dulled your sharp powers of deduction.” Win tilted his face toward the sun.

“What sort of evidence do they have?”

“The murder weapon, for one. Bloodstains. Fibers. Do you have any sunblock?”

“But how …?” Myron studied his friend’s face. As usual, it gave away nothing. “Did she do it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did you ask her?”

“Esperanza does not wish to speak with me.”

“What?”

“She does not wish to speak with you either.”

“I don’t understand,” Myron said. “Esperanza wouldn’t kill anyone.”

“You’re quite sure about that, are you?”

Myron swallowed. He had thought that his recent experience would help him understand Win better. Win had killed too. Often, in fact. Now that Myron had done likewise, he thought that there would be a fresh bond. But there wasn’t. Just the opposite, in fact. Their shared experienced was opening a whole new chasm.

Win checked his watch. “Why don’t you go get packed?”

“There’s nothing I need to bring.”

Win motioned to the house. Terese stood there, watching them silently. “Then say good-bye to La Derrière and let’s be on our way.”

CHAPTER 2

Terese had put on a robe. She leaned against the doorway and waited.

Myron was not sure what to say. He settled for “Thank you.”

She nodded.

“Do you want to come along?” he asked.

“No.”

“You can’t stay here forever.”

“Why not?”

Myron thought about it for a moment. “You know anything about boxing?”

Terese sniffed the air. “Do I detect the distinct odor of an upcoming sports metaphor?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

“Ugh. Go on.”

“This whole thing is sort of like a boxing match,” Myron began. “We’ve been ducking and diving and weaving and trying to keep away from our opponent. But we can only do that for so long. Eventually we have to throw a punch.”

She made a face. “Christ, that was lame.”

“Spur of the moment.”

“And inaccurate,” she added. “Try this. We’ve tasted our opponent’s power. It dropped us to the canvas. Somehow we managed to get back to our feet. But our legs are still rubbery, and our eyes are still hazed over. Another big blow and the fight will be over. Better to keep dancing. Better to avoid getting hit and hope to go the distance.”

Hard to argue.

They fell into silence.

Myron said, “If you come up to New York, give me a call and—”

“Right.”

Silence.

“We know what would happen,” Terese said. “We’d meet up for drinks, maybe hop back in the sack, but it won’t be the same. We’ll both be uncomfortable as all hell. We’ll pretend that we’ll get together again, and we won’t even exchange Christmas cards. We’re not lovers, Myron. We’re not even friends. I don’t know what the hell we are, but I’m grateful.”

A bird cawed. The small waves hummed their soft song. Win stood by the shore, his arms crossed, his body frighteningly patient.

“Have a good life, Myron.”

“You too,” he replied.

He and Win took the dinghy to the yacht. A crew member offered Myron his hand. Myron grabbed it and hoisted himself on board. The yacht took off. Myron stood on the deck and watched the shore grow smaller. He was leaning on a teakwood rail. Teakwood. Everything on this vessel was dark and rich and teak.

“Here,” Win said.

Myron turned. Win tossed him a Yoo-Hoo, Myron’s favorite drink, kind of a cross between a soda pop and chocolate milk. Myron smiled. “I haven’t had one of these in three weeks.”

“The withdrawal pains,” Win said. “They must have been agony.”

“No TV and no Yoo-Hoo. It’s a wonder I survived.”

“Yes, you practically lived like a monk,” Win said. Then, looking back at the island, he added, “Well, like a monk who gets laid a lot.”

They were both stalling.

“How long until we get back?” Myron asked.

“Eight hours on the boat,” Win said. “A chartered jet is waiting at St. Bart’s. The flight should take about four hours.”

Myron nodded. He shook the can and popped it. He took a deep swig and turned back toward the water.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Win ignored the statement. Or maybe it was enough for him. The yacht picked up speed. Myron closed his eyes and let the water and gentle spray caress his face. He thought a moment about Clu Haid. Clu hadn’t trusted agents—“a small step below pedophile” was how he put it—so he asked Myron to negotiate his contract, even though Myron was merely a first-year student at Harvard Law. Myron did it. He liked it. And MB SportsReps soon followed.

Clu was a lovable screwup. He unapologetically pursued wine, women, and song—not to mention any high he could get his hands/nose/veins on. Clu never met a party he didn’t like. He was a redheaded big guy with a teddy bear gut, handsome in a boyish way, an almost old-fashioned cad, and immensely charming. Everyone loved Clu. Even Bonnie, his long-suffering wife. Their marriage was a boomerang. She’d throw him out, he’d spin in the air for a while, and then she’d catch him on the return.

Clu had seemed to be slowing down a bit. After all the times Myron had gotten him out of trouble—drug suspensions, drunk driving charges, whatever—Clu had gone puffy, reached the end of his charm reign. The Yankees had traded for him, putting him on strict probation, giving him one last chance at redemption. Clu had stayed in rehab for the first time. He’d been attending the AA meetings. His fastball was back up in the nineties.

Win interrupted his thoughts. “Do you want to hear what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Myron said.

“Oh?”

“I screwed up last time. You warned me, but I didn’t listen. A lot of people died because of me.” Myron felt the tears come to his eyes. He pushed them back down. “You have no idea how bad it ended.”

“Myron?”

He turned to his friend. Their eyes met.

“Get over yourself,” Win said.

Myron made a noise—one part sob, two parts chuckle. “I hate when you coddle me.”

“Perhaps you would prefer it if I served up some useless platitudes,” Win said. He swirled his liquor and tasted a bit. “Please select one of the following and then we’ll move on: Life is hard; life is cruel; life is random; sometimes good people are forced to do bad things; sometimes innocent people die; yes, Myron, you screwed up, but you’ll do better this time; no, Myron, you didn’t screw up, it wasn’t your fault; everyone has a breaking point and now you know yours. Can I stop now?”

“Please.”

“Then let us begin with Clu Haid.”

Myron nodded, took another swig of Yoo-Hoo, emptied the can.

“Everything seemed to be going swimmingly for our old college chum,” Win said. “He was pitching well. Domestic bliss seemed to reign. He was passing his drug tests. He was making curfew with hours to spare. That all changed two weeks ago when a surprise drug test produced a positive result.”

“For what?”

“Heroin.”

Myron shook his head.

“Clu kept his mouth shut to the media,” Win said, “but privately he claimed the test was fixed. That someone had tampered with his food or some such nonsense.”

“How do you know that?”

“Esperanza told me.”

“He went to Esperanza?”

“Yes, Myron. When Clu failed the test, he naturally looked to his agent for help.”

Silence.

“Oh,” Myron said.

“I don’t want go into the fiasco that is MB SportsReps right now. Suffice to say that Esperanza and Big Cyndi did the best they could. But it’s your agency. Clients hired you. Many have been more than unhappy by your sudden disappearance.”

Myron shrugged. He would probably care one day. “So Clu failed the test.”

“And he was immediately suspended. The media moved in for the kill. He lost all his endorsement deals. Bonnie threw him out. The Yankees disowned him. With nowhere else to turn, Clu repeatedly visited your office. Esperanza told him that you were unavailable. His temper rose with each visit.”

Myron closed his eyes.

“Four days ago Clu confronted Esperanza outside the office. At the Kinney parking lot, to be more exact. They had words. Harsh and rather loud words. According to witnesses, Clu punched her in the mouth.”

“What?”

“I saw Esperanza the next day. Her jaw was swollen. She could barely talk, though she still managed to tell me to mind my own business. My understanding is more damage would have been inflicted had Mario and several other parking attendants not pulled them apart. Supposedly Esperanza made threats of the I’ll-get-you-for-this-you-limp-dick-son-of-a-bitch variety as they were being held back.”

Myron shook his head. This made no sense.

“The next afternoon Clu was found dead in the apartment he rented in Fort Lee,” Win continued. “The police learned about the earlier altercation. They were then issued a slew of search warrants and found the murder weapon, a nine millimeter, in your office.”

“My office?”

“MB’s office, yes.”

Myron shook his head again. “It had to be a plant.”

“Yes, perhaps. There were also fibers that matched the carpeting in Clu’s apartment.”

“The fibers are meaningless. Clu was in the office. He probably dragged them there.”

“Yes, perhaps,” Win said again. “But the specks of blood in the trunk of the company car might be harder to explain.”

Myron almost fell over. “Blood in the Taurus?”

“Yes.”

“And the police confirmed the blood as Clu’s?”

“Same blood type. The DNA test will take several weeks.”

Myron could not believe what he was hearing. “Had Esperanza been using the car?”

“That very day. According to the E-Z Pass records, the car crossed the Washington Bridge back into New York within an hour of the murder. And as I said, he was killed in Fort Lee. The apartment is maybe two miles from the bridge.”

“This is crazy.”

Win said nothing.

“What’s her motive?” Myron asked.

“The police don’t have a solid one yet. But several are being offered.”

“Such as?”

“Esperanza was a new partner at MB SportsReps. She’d been left in charge. The company’s inaugural client was about to walk out the door.”

Myron frowned. “Pretty flimsy motive.”

“He had also recently assaulted her. Perhaps Clu blamed her for all the bad things that were happening to him. Perhaps she wanted vengeance. Who knows?”

“You said something before about her not talking to you.”

“Yes.”

“So you asked Esperanza about the charges?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And she told me that she had the matter under control,” Win said. “And she told me not to contact you. That she did not wish to speak with you.”

Myron looked puzzled. “Why not?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

He pictured Esperanza, the Hispanic beauty he had met in the days when she wrestled professionally under the moniker Little Pocahontas. A lifetime ago. She had been with MB SportsReps since its inception—first as a secretary and now that she’d graduated law school, as a full-fledged partner.

“But I’m her best friend,” Myron said.

“As I am well aware.”

“So why would she say something like that?”

Win guessed the question was rhetorical. He kept silent.

The island was out of sight now. In every direction there was nothing but the churning warm blue of the Atlantic.

“If I hadn’t run away,” Myron began.

“Myron?”

“What?”

“You’re whining again. I cannot handle whining.” Myron nodded and leaned against the teakwood.

“Any thoughts?” Win asked.

“She’ll talk to me,” Myron said. “Count on it.”

“I just tried to call her.”

“And?”

“No answer.”

“Did you try Big Cyndi?”

“She now rooms with Esperanza.”

No surprise. “What’s today?” Myron asked.

“Tuesday.”

“Big Cyndi still bounces at Leather-N-Lust. She might be there.”

“During the day?”

Myron shrugged. “Sexual deviancy has no off hours.”

“Thank God,” Win said.

They fell into silence, the ship gently rocking them.

Win squinted into the sun. “Beautiful, no?”

Myron nodded.

“Must be sick of it after all this time.”

“Very,” Myron said.

“Come below deck. I think you’ll be pleased.”

CHAPTER 3

Win had stocked the yacht with videos. They watched episodes of the old Batman show (the one with Julie Newmar as Cat Woman and Lesley Gore as Pussycat—double meow!), the Odd Couple (Oscar and Felix on Password), a Twilight Zone (“To Serve Man”), and for something more current, Seinfeld (Jerry and Elaine visit Jerry’s parents in Florida). Forget pot roast. This was comfort food. But on the off chance that it wasn’t substantial enough, there were also Doritos and Cheez Doodles and more Yoo-Hoos and even rewarmed pizza from Calabria’s Pizzeria on Livingston Avenue.

Win. He might be a sociopath, but what a guy.

The effect of all this was beyond therapeutic, the time spent at sea and later in the air an emotional pressure chamber of sorts, a chance for Myron’s soul to adjust to the bends, to the sudden reemergence into the real world.

The two friends barely spoke, except to sigh over Julie Newmar as Cat Woman (whenever she came on the screen in her tight black cat suit, Win said, “Puuuurrrrfect”). They’d both been five or six years old when the show first aired, but something about Julie Newmar as Cat Woman completely blew away any Freudian notions of latency. Why, neither man could say. Her villainy perhaps. Or something more primal. Esperanza would no doubt have an interesting opinion. He tried not to think about her—useless and draining when he couldn’t do anything about it—but the last time he had done something like this was in Philadelphia with both Win and Esperanza. He missed her. Watching the videos was not the same without her running commentary.

The boat docked and they headed for the private jet.

“We’ll save her,” Win said. “We are, after all, the good guys.”

“Questionable.”

“Have confidence, my friend.”

“No, I mean us being the good guys.”

“You should know better.”

“Not anymore I don’t,” Myron said.

Win made his jutting jaw face, the one that had come over on the Mayflower. “This moral crisis of yours,” he said. “It’s très unbecoming.”

A breathy blond bombshell like something out of an old burlesque skit greeted them in the cabin of the Lock-Horne company jet. She fetched them drinks between giggles and wiggles. Win smiled at her. She smiled back.

“Funny thing,” Myron said.

“What’s that?”

“You always hire curvaceous stewardesses.”

Win frowned. “Please,” he said. “She prefers to be called a flight attendant.”

“Pardon my oafish insensitivity.”

“Try a little harder to be tolerant,” Win said. Then: “Guess what her name is.”

“Tawny?”

“Close. Candi. With an i. And she doesn’t dot it. She draws a heart over it.”

Win could be a bigger pig, but it was hard to imagine how.

Myron sat back. The pilot came over the loudspeaker. He addressed them by name, and then they took off. Private jet. Yacht. Sometimes it was nice having wealthy friends.

When they reached cruising altitude, Win opened what looked like a cigar box and pulled out a telephone. “Call your parents,” he said.

Myron stayed still for a moment. A fresh wave of guilt rolled over him, coloring his cheeks. He nodded, took the phone, dialed. He gripped the phone a bit too tightly. His mother answered.

Myron said, “Mom—”

Mom started bawling. She managed to yell for Dad. Dad picked up the downstairs extension.

“Dad—”

And then he started bawling too. Stereo bawling. Myron held the phone away from his ear for a moment.

“I was in the Caribbean,” he said, “not Beirut.”

An explosion of laughter from both. Then more crying. Myron looked at Win. Win sat impassively. Myron rolled his eyes, but of course he was also pleased. Complain all you want, but who didn’t want to be loved like this?

His parents settled into a meaningless chatter—meaningless on purpose, Myron supposed. While they could undoubtedly be pests, Mom and Dad had a wonderful ability to know when to back off. He managed to explain where he’d been. They listened in silence. Then his mother asked, “So where are you calling us from?”

“Win’s airplane.”

Stereo gasps now. “What?”

“Win’s company has a private jet. I just told you he picked me—”

“And you’re calling on his phone?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea how much that costs?”

“Mom …”

But the meaningless chatter died down in a hurry then. When Myron hung up seconds later, he sat back. The guilt came again, bathing him in something ice cold. His parents were not young anymore. He hadn’t thought about that before he ran. He hadn’t thought about a lot of things.

“I shouldn’t have done that to them,” Myron said. “Or you.”

Win shifted in his seat—major body language for him. Candi wiggled back into view. She lowered a screen and hit a switch. A Woody Allen film came on. Love and Death. Ambrosia of the mind. They watched without speaking. When it was over, Candi asked Myron if he wanted to take a shower before they landed.

“Excuse me?” Myron said.

Candi giggled, called him a “Big Silly,” and wiggled away.

“A shower?”

“There’s one in the back,” Win said. “I also took the liberty of bringing you a change of clothes.”

“You are a friend.”

“I am indeed, Big Silly.”

Myron showered and dressed, and then everyone buckled their seat belts for approach. The plane descended without delay, the landing so smooth it could have been choreographed by the Temptations. A stretch limousine was waiting for them on the dark tarmac. When they got off the plane, the air felt strange and unfamiliar, as though he’d been visiting another planet rather than another country. It was also raining hard. They ran down the steps and into the already-open limo doors.

They shook off the wet. “I assume that you’ll be staying with me,” Win said.

Myron had been living in a loft down on Spring Street with Jessica. But that was before. “If it’s okay.”

“It’s okay.”

“I could move back in with my folks—”

“I said, it’s okay.”

“I’ll find my own place.”

“No rush,” Win said. The limousine started up. Win steepled his fingers. He always did that. It looked good on him. Still holding the steeple, he bounced his forefingers against his lips. “I’m not the best one to discuss these matters with,” he said, “but if you want to talk about Jessica or Brenda or whatever …” He released the steeple, made a waving motion with his right hand. Win was trying. Matters of the heart were not his forte. His feelings on romantic entanglement could objectively be labeled “appalling.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Myron said.

“Fine then.”

“Thanks, though.”

Quick nod.

After more than a decade struggling with Jessica—years of being in love with the same woman, having one major breakup, finding each other again, taking tentative steps, growing, finally moving in together again—it was over.

“I miss Jessica,” Myron said.

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about it.”

“Sorry.”

Win shifted in his seat again. “No, go on.” Like he’d rather have an anal probe.

“It’s just that … I guess part of me will always be enmeshed in Jessica.”

Win nodded. “Like something in a machinery mishap.”

Myron smiled. “Yeah. Like that.”

“Then slice off the limb and leave it behind.”

Myron looked at his friend.

Win shrugged. “I’ve been watching Sally Jessy on the side.”

“It shows,” Myron said.

“The episode entitled ‘Mommy Took Away My Nipple Ring,’” Win said. “I’m not afraid to say it made me cry.”

“Good to see you getting in touch with your sensitive side.” As if Win had one. “So what next?”

Win checked his watch. “I have a contact at the Bergen County house of detention. He should be in by now.” He hit the speakerphone and pressed in some numbers. They listened to the phone ring. After two rings a voice said, “Schwartz.”

“Brian, this is Win Lockwood.”

The usual reverent hush when you first hear that name. Then: “Hey, Win.”

“I need a favor.”

“Shoot.”

“Esperanza Diaz. Is she there?”

Brief pause. “You didn’t hear it from me,” Schwartz said.

“Hear what?”

“Good, okay, long as we understand each other,” he said. “Yeah, she’s here. They dragged her through here in cuffs a coupla hours ago. Very hush-hush.”

“Why hush-hush?”

“Don’t know.”

“When is she being arraigned?”

“Tomorrow morning, I guess.”

Win looked at Myron. Myron nodded. Esperanza would be held overnight. This was not a good thing.

“Why did they arrest her so late?”

“Don’t know.”

“And you saw them drag her in cuffs?”

“Yep.”

“Didn’t they let her surrender on her own?”

“Nope.”

Again the two friends looked at each other. The late arrest. The handcuffs. The overnight. Someone in the DA’s office was pissed off and trying to make a point. Very not a good thing.

“What else can you tell me?” Win asked.

“Not much. Like I said, they’re being quiet on this one. The DA hasn’t even released it to the media yet. But he will. Probably before the eleven o’clock news. Quick statement, no time for questions, that kind of thing. Hell, I wouldn’t know about it if I wasn’t a big fan.”

“A big fan?”

“Of professional wrestling. See, I recognized her from her old wrestling days. Did you know Esperanza Diaz used to be Little Pocahontas, the Indian Princess?”

Win glanced at Myron. “Yes, Brian, I know.”

“Really?” Brian was big-time excited now. “Little Pocahontas was my absolute fave, bar none. An awesome wrestler. Top drawer. I mean, she used to enter the ring in this skimpy suede bikini, right, and then she’d start grappling with other chicks, bigger chicks really, writhing around on the floor and stuff—swear to God, she was so hot my fingernails would melt.”

“Thank you for the visual,” Win said. “Anything else, Brian?”

“No.”

“Do you know who her attorney of record is?”

“No.” Then: “Oh, one other thing. She’s got someone, well, sort of with her.”

“Sort of with her, Brian?”

“Outside. On the front steps of the courthouse.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you,” Win said.

“Out in the rain. Just sitting there. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was Little Pocahontas’s old tag team partner, Big Chief Mama. Did you know Big Chief Mama and Little Pocahontas were Intercontinental tag team champions three years running?”

Win sighed. “You don’t say.”

“Whatever Intercontinental means. I mean, what is that, Intercontinental? And I’m not talking about recently. Five, eight years ago, at least. But, man, they were awesome. Great wrestlers. Today, well, the league has no class anymore.”

“Grappling bikini-clad women,” Win said. “They just don’t make them like they used to.”

“Right, exactly. Too many fake, inflated breasts nowadays, at least that’s how I see it. One of them is going to land on her stomach and bam, her boob is going to blow out like a worn tire. So I don’t follow it much anymore. Oh, maybe if I’m flipping the channels and something catches my eye, I might watch a little—”

“You were talking about a woman out in the rain?”

“Right, Win, right, sorry. Anyway, she’s out there, whoever she is. Just sitting there. The cops went by before and asked her what she was doing. She said she was going to wait for her friend.”

“So she’s there right now?”

“Yep.”

“What does she look like, Brian?”

“Like the Incredible Hulk. Only scarier. And maybe greener.”

Win and Myron exchanged glances. No doubt. Big Chief Mama aka Big Cyndi.

“Anything else, Brian?”

“No, not really.” Then: “So you know Esperanza Diaz?”

“Yes.”

“Personally?”

“Yes.”

Silent awe. “Jesus, you lead some life, Win.”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Think you can get me her autograph?”

“I’ll do my best, Brian.”

“A picture autograph maybe? Of Little Pocahontas in costume? I’m a really big fan.”

“So I gather, Brian. Good-bye.”

Win hung up and sat back. He looked over at Myron. Myron nodded. Win picked up the intercom and gave the driver directions to the courthouse.

CHAPTER 4

By the time they arrived at the courthouse in Hackensack, it was nearly 10:00 P.M. Big Cyndi sat in the rain, shoulders hunched; at least Myron thought it was Big Cyndi. From a distance, it looked like someone had parked a Volkswagen Bug on the courthouse steps.

Myron stepped out of the car and approached. “Big Cyndi?”

The dark heap let loose a low growl, a lioness warning off an inferior animal who’d wandered astray.

“It’s Myron,” he said.

The growl deepened. The rain had plastered Big Cyndi’s hair spikes to her scalp, as if she were sporting an uneven Caesar coif. Today’s color was hard to decipher—Big Cyndi liked diversity in her follicular tint—but it didn’t look like any hue found in the state of nature. Big Cyndi sometimes liked to combine dyes randomly and see what happened. She also insisted on being called Big Cyndi. Not Cyndi. Big Cyndi. She had even had her name legally changed. Official documents read: Cyndi, Big.

“You can’t stay here all night,” Myron tried.

She finally spoke. “Go home.”

“What happened?”

“You ran away.” Big Cyndi’s voice was childlike, lost.

“Yes.”

“You left us alone.”

“I’m sorry about that. But I’m back now.”

He risked another step. If only he had something to placate her with. Like a half gallon of Häagen-Dazs. Or a sacrificial goat.

Big Cyndi started to cry. Myron approached slowly, semileading with his right hand in case she wanted to sniff it. But the growls were all gone now, replaced by sobs. Myron put his palm on a shoulder that felt like a bowling ball.

“What happened?” he asked again.

She sniffled. Loudly. The sound almost dented the limo’s fender. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why can’t you?”

“She said not to.”

“Esperanza?”

Big Cyndi nodded.

“She’s going to need help,” Myron said.

“She doesn’t want your help.”

The words stung. The rain continued to fall. Myron sat on the step next to her. “Is she angry about my leaving?”

“I can’t tell you, Mr. Bolitar. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

“She told me not to.”

“Esperanza can’t bear the brunt of this on her own,” Myron said. “She’s going to need a lawyer.”

“She has one.”

“Who?”

“Hester Crimstein.”

Big Cyndi gasped as though she realized she’d said too much, but Myron wondered if the slip had been intentional.

“How did she get Hester Crimstein?” Myron asked.

“I can’t say any more, Mr. Bolitar. Please don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not mad, Big Cyndi. I’m just concerned.”

Big Cyndi smiled at him then. The sight made Myron bite back a scream. “It’s nice to have you back,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She put her head on his shoulder. The weight made him teeter, but he remained relatively upright. “You know how I feel about Esperanza,” Myron said.

“Yes,” Big Cyndi said. “You love her. And she loves you.”

“So let me help.”

Big Cyndi lifted her head off his shoulder. Blood circulated again. “I think you should leave now.”

Myron stood. “Come on. We’ll give you a ride home.”

“No, I’m staying.”

“It’s raining and it’s late. Someone might try to attack you. It’s not safe out here.”

“I can take care of myself,” Big Cyndi said.

He had meant that it wasn’t safe for the attackers, but he let it pass. “You can’t stay out here all night.”

“I’m not leaving Esperanza alone.”

“But she won’t even know you’re here.”

Big Cyndi wiped the rain from her face with a hand the size of a truck tire. “She knows.”

Myron looked back at the car. Win was leaning against the door now, arms crossed, umbrella resting on his shoulder. Very Gene Kelly. He nodded at Myron.

“You’re sure?” Myron asked.

“Yes, Mr. Bolitar. Oh, and I’ll be late for work tomorrow. I hope you understand.”

Myron nodded. They stared at each other, the rain cascading down their faces. A howl of laughter made both of them turn to the right and look at the fortresslike structure that contained the holding cells. Esperanza, the person closest to them both, was incarcerated in there. Myron stepped toward the limousine. Then he turned back around.

“Esperanza wouldn’t kill anyone,” he said.

He waited for Big Cyndi to agree or at least nod her head. But she didn’t. She hunched the shoulders back up and disappeared within herself.

Myron slid back into the car. Win followed, handing Myron a towel. The driver started up.

“Hester Crimstein is her attorney,” Myron said.

“Ms. Court TV?”

“The same.”

“Ah,” Win said. “And what’s the name of her show again?”

“Crimstein on Crime,” Myron said.

Win frowned. “Cute.”

“She had a book with the same title.” Myron shook his head. “This is weird. Hester Crimstein doesn’t take many cases anymore. So how did Esperanza land her?”

Win tapped his chin with his forefinger. “I’m not positive,” he said, “but I believe Esperanza had a fling with her a couple of months back.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Well, yes, I am such a mirthful fellow. And wasn’t that just the funniest line?”

Wiseass. But it made sense. Esperanza was as perfect a bisexual as you could find—perfect because everyone, no matter what his or her sex or preference, found her immensely attractive. If you’re going to go all ways, might as well have universal appeal, right?

Myron mulled this over a few moments. “Do you know where Hester Crimstein lives?” he asked.

“Two buildings up from me on Central Park West.”

“So let’s pay her a visit.”

Win frowned. “Why?”

“Maybe she can fill us in.”

“She won’t talk to us.”

“Maybe she will.”

“What makes you say that?”

“For one thing,” Myron said, “I’m feeling particularly charming.”

“By God.” Win leaned forward. “Driver, step on the gas.”

CHAPTER 5

Win lived at the Dakota, one of Manhattan’s swankiest buildings. Hester Crimstein lived two blocks north at the San Remo, an equally swanky building. Occupants included Diane Keaton and Dustin Hoffman, but the San Remo was perhaps best known as the building that had rejected Madonna’s application for residence.

There were two entranceways, both with doormen dressed like Brezhnev strolling Red Square. Brezhnev One announced in a clipped tone that Ms. Crimstein was “not present.” He actually used the word present too; people don’t often do that in real life. He smiled for Win and looked down his nose at Myron. This was no easy task—Myron was at least six inches taller—and required Brezhnev to tilt his head way back so that his nostrils looked like the westbound entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Why, Myron wondered, do servants of the rich and famous act snootier than their masters? Was it simple resentment? Was it because they were looked down upon all day and thus needed on occasion to be the one doing the looking down? Or—more simply—were people attracted to such jobs insecure asswipes?

Life’s little mysteries.

“Are you expecting Ms. Crimstein back tonight?” Win asked.

Brezhnev opened his mouth, stopped, cast a wary eye as if he feared Myron might defecate on the Persian rug. Win read his face and led him to the side, away from the lowly member of the unwashed.

“She should be back soon, Mr. Lockwood.” Ah, so Brezhnev had recognized Win. No wonder. “Ms. Crimstein’s aerobics class concludes at eleven.”

Exercising at eleven o’clock at night. Welcome to the nineties, where leisure time is sucked away like something undergoing liposuction.

There were no waiting or sitting areas at the San Remo—most of your finer buildings did not encourage even approved guests to loiter—so they moved outside to the street. Central Park was across the roadway. Myron could see, well, trees and a stone wall, and that was about it. Lots of taxis sped north. Win’s stretch limousine had been dismissed—they both figured they could walk the two blocks to Win’s place—but there were four other stretch limousines sitting in a no parking zone. A fifth pulled up. A silver stretch Mercedes. Brezhnev rushed to the car door like he really had to pee and there was a bathroom inside.

An old man, bald except for a white crown of hair, stumbled out, his mouth twisted poststroke. A woman resembling a prune followed. Both were expensively dressed and maybe a hundred years old. Something about them troubled Myron. They looked wizened, yes. Old, certainly. But there was more to it, Myron sensed. People talk about sweet little old people, but these two were so blatantly the opposite, their eyes beady, their movements shifty and angry and fearful. Life had sapped them, sucked out all the goodness and hope of youth, leaving them with a vitality based on something ugly and hateful. Bitterness was the only thing left. Whether the bitterness was directed at God or at their fellowman, Myron could not say.

Win nudged him. He looked to his right and saw a figure he recognized from TV as Hester Crimstein coming toward them. She was on the husky side, at least by today’s warped Kate Mossian standards, and her face was fleshy and cherubic. She wore Reebok white sneakers, white socks, green stretch pants that would probably make Kate snicker, a sweatshirt, a knit hat with frosted blond hair sticking out the back. The old man stopped when he saw the attorney, grabbed the prune lady’s hand, hurried inside.

“Bitch!” the old man managed through the good side of his face.

“Up yours too, Lou,” Hester called out after him.

The old man stopped, looked like he wanted to say something more, limped off.

Myron and Win exchanged a glance and approached.

“Old adversary,” she said in way of explanation. “You ever hear the old adage that only the good die young?”

“Uh, sure.”

Hester Crimstein gestured with both hands at the old couple like Carol Merrill showing off a brand-new car. “There’s your proof. Couple years back I helped his children sue the son of a bitch. You never saw anything like it.” She tilted her head. “Ever notice how some people are like jackals?”

“Pardon?”

“They eat their young. That’s Lou. And don’t even get me started on that shriveled-up witch he lives with. Five-dollar whore who hit the jackpot. Hard to believe looking at her now.”

“I see,” Myron said, though he didn’t. He tried to push ahead. “Ms. Crimstein, my name is—”

“Myron Bolitar,” she interrupted. “By the way, that’s a horrid name. Myron. What were your parents thinking?”

A very good question. “If you know who I am, then you know why I’m here.”

“Yes and no,” Hester said.

“Yes and no?”

“Well, I know who you are because I’m a sports nut. I used to watch you play. That NCAA championship game against Indiana was a frigging classic. I know the Celtics drafted you in the first round, what, eleven, twelve years ago?”

“Something like that.”

“But frankly—and I mean no offense here—I’m not sure you had the speed to be a great pro, Myron. The shot, sure. You could always shoot. You could be physical. But what are you, six-five?”

“About that.”

“You would have had a tough time in the NBA. One woman’s opinion. But of course the fates took care of that by blowing out your knee. Only an alternate universe knows the truth.” She smiled. “Nice chatting with you.” She looked over at Win. “You too, gabby boy. Good night.”

“Wait a second,” Myron said. “I’m here about Esperanza Diaz.”

She faked a gasp of surprise. “Really? And here I thought you just wanted to reminisce about your athletic career.”

He looked at Win. “The charm,” Win whispered.

Myron turned back toward Hester. “Esperanza is my friend,” he said.

“So?”

“So I want to help.”

“Great. I’ll start sending you the bills. This case is going to cost a bundle. I’m very expensive, you know. You can’t believe the upkeep of this building. And now the doormen want new uniforms. Something in mauve, I think.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh?”

“I’d like to know what’s going on with the case.”

She scrunched up her face. “Where have you been the last few weeks?”

“Away.”

“Where away?”

“The Caribbean.”

She nodded. “Nice tan.”

“Thanks.”

“But you could have gotten it at a tanning booth. You look like the kind of guy who hangs out at tanning booths.”

Myron looked at Win again. “The charm, Luke,” Win whispered, doing his best Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. “Remember the charm.”

“Ms. Crimstein—”

“Anyone who can verify your whereabouts in the Caribbean, Myron?”

“Pardon me?”

“Hearing problems? I asked if anyone can verify your whereabouts at the time of the alleged murder.”

Alleged murder. The guy is shot three times in his home, but the murder is only “alleged.” Lawyers. “Why do you want to know that?”

Hester Crimstein shrugged. “The alleged murder weapon was allegedly found at the offices of one MB SportsReps. That’s your company, is it not?”

“It is.”

“And you use the company car where the alleged blood and alleged fibers were allegedly found.”

Win said, “The key word here is alleged.”

Hester Crimstein looked at Win. “It speaks.”

Win smiled.

Myron said, “You think I’m a suspect?”

“Sure, why not? It’s called reasonable doubt, sweet buns. I’m a defense attorney. We’re big on reasonable doubt.”

“Much as I’d like to help, there was a witness to my whereabouts.”

“Who?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Another shrug. “You’re the one who said you wanted to help. Good night.” She looked at Win. “By the way, you’re the perfect man—good-looking and nearly mute.”

“Careful,” Win said to her.

“Why?”

Win pointed at Myron with his thumb. “Any minute now he’s going to turn on the charm and reduce your willpower to rubble.”

She looked at Myron and burst out laughing.

Myron tried again. “So what happened?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m her friend.”

“Yeah, I think you already said that.”

“I’m her best friend. I care about her.”

“Fine. Tomorrow I’ll pass her a note during study hall, find out if she likes you too. Then you can meet at Pop’s and share a soda.”

“That’s not what I—” Myron stopped, gave her the slow, slightly put-out-but-here-to-help smile. Smile 18: the Michael Landon model, except he couldn’t crinkle the eyebrow. “I’d just like to know what happened. You can appreciate that.”

Her face softened, and she nodded. “You went to law school, right?”

“Yes.”

“At Harvard no less.”

“Yes.”

“So maybe you were absent the day they went over a little something we call attorney-client privilege. I can recommend some wonderful books on the subject, if you’d like. Or maybe you can watch any episode of Law & Order. They usually talk about it right before the old DA grouses to Sam Waterston that he’s got no case and should cut a deal.”

So much for charm. “You’re just covering your ass,” Myron said.

She looked behind her and down. Then she frowned. “No easy task, I assure you.”

“I thought you were supposed to be a hotshot attorney.”

She sighed, crossed her arms. “Okay, Myron, let’s hear it. Why am I covering my ass? Why am I not the hotshot attorney you thought I was?”

“Because they didn’t let Esperanza surrender. Because they dragged her in in cuffs. Because they’re holding her overnight instead of getting her through the system in the same day. Why?”

She dropped her hands to her sides. “Good question, Myron. Why do you think?”

“Because someone there doesn’t like her high-profile attorney. Someone in the DA’s office probably has a hard-on for you and is taking it out on your client.”

She nodded. “Good possibility. But I have another one.”

“What?”

“Maybe they don’t like her employer.”

“Me?”

She started for the door. “Do us all a favor, Myron. Stay out of this. Just keep away. And maybe get yourself a lawyer.”

Hester Crimstein spun around and disappeared inside then. Myron turned toward Win. Win was bent at the waist, squinting at Myron’s crotch. “What the hell are you doing?”

Still squinting. “I wanted to see if she left you with even a sliver of a testicle.”

“Very funny. What do you think she meant about them not liking her employer?”

“Not a clue,” Win said. Then: “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“What?”

“For your charm’s seemingly lackluster performance. You forgot a crucial component in all this.”

“That being?”

“Ms. Crimstein had an affair with Esperanza.”

Myron saw where he was going with this. “Of course. She must be a lesbian.”

“Precisely. It’s the only rational explanation for her ability to resist you.”

“That, or a really bizarre paranormal event.”

Win nodded. They started walking down Central Park West.

“This is also further proof of a very frightening adage,” Win said.

“What’s that?”

“Most women you encounter are lesbians.”

Myron nodded. “Almost every one.”

CHAPTER 6

They walked the two blocks to Win’s place, watched a little television, went to bed. Myron lay in the dark exhausted, but sleep remained elusive. He thought about Jessica. Then he tried to think about Brenda, but the automatic defense mechanism deflected that one. Still too raw. And he thought about Terese. She was alone on that island tonight for the first time. During the day the island’s solitude was peaceful and quiet and welcome; at night the solitude felt more like dark isolation, the island’s black walls closing in, silent and cloying as a buried coffin. He and Terese had always slept wrapped in each other’s arms. Now he pictured her lying in that deep blackness alone. And he worried about her. He woke up the next morning at seven. Win was already gone, but he’d scribbled a note that he’d meet up with Myron at the courthouse at nine. Myron grabbed a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, discerned with a digging left hand that Win had already extracted the free toy inside, showered, dressed, checked his watch. Eight o’clock. Plenty of time to reach the courthouse in time.

He took the elevator down and crossed the famed Dakota courtyard. He had just reached the corner of Seventy-second Street and Central Park West when he spotted the three familiar figures. Myron felt his pulse quicken. FJ, short for Frank Junior, was bookended by two huge guys. The two huge guys looked like lab experiments gone very wrong, as if someone had potently mixed genetic glandular excess with anabolic steroids. They wore tank tops and those drawstring weightlifting pants that looked suspiciously like ugly pajama bottoms.

Young FJ silently smiled at Myron with thin lips. He sported a purple-blue suit so shiny it looked like someone had sprayed it with a sealant. FJ didn’t move, didn’t say anything, just smiled at Myron with unblinking eyes and those thin lips.

Today’s word, boys and girls, is reptilian.

FJ finally took a step forward. “Heard you were back in town, Myron.”

Myron bit back a rejoinder—it wasn’t a very cutting one, something about the nice welcoming party—and kept his mouth shut.

“Remember our last conversation?” FJ continued.

“Vaguely.”

“I mentioned something about killing you, right?”

“It might have come up,” Myron said. “I don’t remember. So many tough guys, so many threats.”

The Bookends tried to scowl, but even their faces were overmuscled, and the movement took too much effort. They settled back into the steady frowns and lowered the eyebrows a bit.

“Actually, I was going to carry through with it,” FJ continued. “About a month ago. I followed you out to some graveyard in New Jersey. I even sneaked up behind you with my gun out. Funny thing, no?”

Myron nodded. “Like Henny Youngman wrote it.”

FJ tilted his head. “Don’t you want to know why I didn’t kill you?”

“Because of Win.”

The sound of his name was like a cold glass of water in the faces of both Bookends. The two giants actually stepped back but recovered quickly with a few flexes. FJ remained unruffled. “Win doesn’t scare me,” he said.

“Even the dumbest animal,” Myron said, “has an innate survival mechanism.”

FJ’s eyes met Myron’s. Myron tried to maintain contact, but it was hard. There was nothing behind FJ’s eyes but rot and decay; it was like staring into the broken windows of an abandoned building. “Sticks and stones, Myron. Sticks and stones. I didn’t kill you because, well, you already looked so miserable. It was as though—how to put this?—as though killing you would have been an act of mercy. Like I said before, funny, right?”

“You should consider stand-up,” Myron agreed.

FJ chuckled and waved a well-manicured hand at nothing in particular. “Anyway, bygones. My father and uncle like you, and yes, we see no reason to antagonize Win unnecessarily. They don’t want you dead, so neither do I.”

His father and uncle were Frank and Herman Ache, two of New York’s legendary leading leg breakers. The elder Aches had grown up on the streets, slaughtered more people than the next guy, moved up the ladder. Herman, the older brother and big cheese, was in his sixties now and liked to pretend he wasn’t scum by surrounding himself with the finer things in life: restricted clubs that didn’t want him, nouveau-riche art exhibits, well-coiffed charities, midtown French maître d’s who treated anyone who tipped with less than a Jackson like something they couldn’t scrape off the soles of their shoes. In other words, a higher-income scum. Herman’s younger brother, Frank, the psycho who had produced the equally psycho offspring who now stood in front of Myron, remained what he had always been: an ugly hatchet man who considered K mart velour sweatsuits haute couture. Frank had calmed down over the last few years, but it never quite worked for him. Life, it seemed, had little meaning for Frank Senior without someone to torture or maim.

“What do you want, FJ?”

“I have a business proposition for you.”

“Gee, I just know this is really going to interest me.”

“I want to buy you out.”

The Aches ran TruPro, a rather large sports representation firm. TruPro had always been devoid of any semblance of scruples, recruiting young athletes with as much moral restraint as a politician planning a fund-raiser. But then their owner stacked up debts. Bad debts. The debts that attract the wrong kind of fungus. The appropriately named Ache brothers, the fungi in question, moved in and, like the parasitic entities they were, ate away all signs of life and were now gnawing on the carcass.

Still, being a sports agent was a legit way of making a living, sort of, and Frank Senior, wanting for his son what all fathers wanted, handed young FJ the reins straight out of business school. In theory FJ was supposed to run TruPro as legitimately as possible. His father had killed and maimed so that his son wouldn’t have to—yep, the classic American dream with, granted, a rather deranged twist. But FJ seemed incapable of freeing himself from the old familial shackles. Why was a question that fascinated Myron. Was FJ’s evil genetic, passed down from his father like a prominent nose, or was he, like so many other children, simply trying to gain his father’s acceptance by proving the acorn could be as ferociously psychotic as the oak?

Nature or nurture. The argument rages on.

“MB SportsReps is not for sale,” Myron said.

“I think you’re being foolish.”

Myron nodded. “I’ll file that under ‘One Day I Might Even Care.’”

The Bookends sort of grumbled, took a step forward, and cracked their necks in unison. Myron pointed to one, then the other. “Who does your choreography?”

They wanted to be insulted—you could just tell—except neither one of them knew what the word choreography meant.

FJ asked, “Do you know how many clients MB SportsReps lost in the last few weeks?”

“A lot?”

“I’d say a quarter of your list. A couple of them went with us.”

Myron whistled, feigned nonchalant, but he was not happy to hear this. “I’ll get them back.”

“You think so?” FJ again smiled the reptilian smile; Myron almost expected a forked tongue to dart out between his lips. “Do you know how many more are going to leave when they hear about Esperanza’s arrest?”

“A lot?”

“You’ll be lucky to have one left.”

“Hey, then I’ll be like Jerry Maguire. Did you see that movie? Show me the money? I love black people?” Myron gave FJ his best Tom Cruise earnest. “You. Complete. Me.”

FJ remained cool. “I’m willing to be generous, Myron.”

“I’m sure you are, FJ, but the answer is still no.”

“I don’t care how clean your rep used to be. Nobody can survive the sort of money scandal you’re about to go through.”

It wasn’t a money scandal, but Myron was not in the mood to issue corrections. “Are we finished, FJ?”

“Sure.” FJ gave him one last scaly smile. The smile seemed to jump off his face, crawl toward Myron, and then slither its way up his back. “But why don’t we get together and have lunch?”

“Any time,” Myron said. “You have a cellular?”

“Of course.”

“Call my partner right away and set it up.”

“Isn’t she in jail?”

Myron snapped his fingers. “Drat.”

FJ found that amusing. “I mentioned that some of your old clients are now using my services.”

“So you did.”

“If you contact any of them”—he paused, thought it over—“I’d feel obliged to retaliate. Do I make myself clear?”

FJ was maybe twenty-five years old, less than a year out of Harvard Business School. He had gone undergrad to Princeton. Smart kid. Or powerful father. Either way, rumor had it that when a Princeton professor was about to accuse FJ of plagiarism, the professor disappeared and only his tongue was found—on the pillow of another professor who had considered leveling the same charges.

“Crystal, FJ.”

“Great, Myron. Then we’ll talk again.”

If Myron still had his tongue.

The three men slid into their car and drove off without another word. Myron slowed his heart rate and checked his watch. Court time.

CHAPTER 7

The courtroom in Hackensack looked very much like the ones you see on television. Shows like The Practice and Law & Order and even Judge Judy capture the physical appearance pretty well. They can’t of course capture the essence emanating from the little things: the faint, underlying stench of fear-induced sweat, the overuse of disinfectant, the slightly sticky feel to all the benches and tables and handrails—what Myron liked to call the ooze factors.

Myron had his checkbook ready so bail could be posted immediately. He and Win had gone over it last night and figured the judge would come in around fifty to seventy-five grand. Esperanza had no record and a steady job. Those factors would play in her favor. If the money was higher, no problem. Myron’s pockets might be only semideep, but Win’s net worth was on par with the GNP of a small European country.

There were droves of reporters parked outside, tons of vans with wrapped cables and satellite dishes, and of course phallic antennas, stretching toward the heavens as though in search of the elusive god of higher ratings. Court TV was there. News 2 New York. ABC News. CNN. Eyewitness News. Every city in every region of the country had an Eyewitness News. Why? What was so appealing about that name? There were also the new sleazoid TV shows, like Hard Copy, Access Hollywood, Current Affair, though the distinction between them and the local news was becoming murky to the point of nonexistent. Hey, at least Hard Copy and the like were somewhat honest about the fact that they served no redeeming social value. And they didn’t subject you to weathermen.

A couple of reporters recognized Myron and called out. Myron put on his game face—serious, unyielding, concerned, confident—and no-commented his way through them. When he entered the courtroom, he spotted Big Cyndi first—no surprise since she stuck out like Louis Farrakhan at B’nai B’rith. She was jammed into the aisle of a row empty except for Win. Not unusual. If you wanted to save seats, send Big Cyndi; people did not relish excusing themselves to squeeze past her. Most opted to stand. Or go home even.

Myron slid into Big Cyndi’s row, actually high-stepping over two knees that looked like batting helmets, and sat between his friends.

Big Cyndi had not changed from last night or even washed up. The steady rain had rinsed out some of the hair dye; purple and yellow streaks had dried on the front and back of her neck. Her makeup, always applied in amounts thick enough to make a plaster bust, had also suffered under the rain’s onslaught, her face now resembling multicolored menorah candles left too long in the sun.

In some major cities, murder arraignments were commonplace and handled in factory-line fashion. Not so here in Hackensack. This was big time—a murder case involving a celebrity. There would be no rush.

The bailiff started calling cases.

“I had a visitor this morning,” Myron whispered to Win.

“Oh?”

“FJ and two goons.”

“Ah,” Win said. “Was the cover boy for Modern Mobster voicing his usual medley of colorful threats?”

“Yes.”

Win almost smiled. “We should kill him.”

“No.”

“You’re just putting off the inevitable.”

“He’s Frank Ache’s son, Win. You just don’t kill Frank Ache’s son.”

“I see. Then you’d rather kill somebody from a better family?”

Win logic. It made sense in the scariest way possible. “Let’s just see how it plays out, okay?”

“Don’t put off until tomorrow what must be exterminated today.”

Myron nodded. “You should write one of those life-instruction books.”

They fell into silence. Cases went by—a breaking and entering, a couple of assaults, too many car thefts. Every suspect looked young, guilty, and angry. Always scowling. Tough guys. Myron tried not to make a face, tried to remember innocent until proven guilty, tried to remember that Esperanza too was a suspect. But it didn’t help much.

Finally Myron saw Hester Crimstein sweep into the courtroom, decked out in her best professional civvies: a sleek beige suit, cream blouse, and a tad overcoiffed, over-frosted hair. She took her spot at the defense table, and the room fell silent. Two guards led Esperanza through an open door. Myron saw her, and something akin to a mule kicked him in the chest.

Esperanza was dressed in a court-issued fluorescent orange jumpsuit. Forget gray or stripes—if a prisoner wanted to escape, he was going to stick out like a neon light in a monastery. Her hands were cuffed in front of her. Myron knew that Esperanza was petite—maybe five-two, a hundred pounds—but he had never seen her look so small. She kept her head high, defiant. Classic Esperanza. If she was afraid, she wasn’t showing it.

Hester Crimstein put a comforting hand on her client’s shoulder. Esperanza nodded at her. Myron tried desperately to catch her eye. It took a couple of moments, but eventually Esperanza turned his way, looking straight at him with a slight, resigned, I’m-okay smile. It made Myron feel better.

The bailiff called out, “The People versus Esperanza Diaz.”

“What’s the charge?” the judge asked.

The assistant district attorney, a fresh-faced kid who barely looked old enough to sport a pubic hair, stood by a pedestal. “Murder in the second degree, Your Honor.”

“How do you plead?”

Esperanza’s voice was strong. “Not guilty.”

“Bail?”

The fresh-faced kid said, “Your Honor, the People request that Ms. Diaz be remanded without bail.”

Hester Crimstein shouted, “What?” as if she had just heard the most irrational and dangerous words any human being had ever uttered under any circumstance.

Fresh Face was unfazed. “Miss Diaz is accused of killing a man by shooting him three times. We have strong evidence—”

“They have nothing, Your Honor. Circumstantial nothings.”

“Miss Diaz has no family and no real roots in the community,” Fresh Face continued. “We believe that she presents a substantial flight risk.”

“That’s nonsense, Your Honor. Miss Diaz is a partner in a major sports representation firm in Manhattan. She is a law school graduate who is currently studying for the bar. She has many friends and roots in the community. And she has no record whatsoever.”

“But, Your Honor, she has no family—”

“So what?” Crimstein interrupted. “Her mother and father are dead. Is that now a reason to punish a woman? Dead parents? This is outrageous, Your Honor.”

The judge, a woman in her early fifties, sat back. “Your request to deny bail does seem extreme,” she said to Fresh Face.

“Your Honor, we believe that Miss Diaz has an unusual amount of resources at her disposal and very good reasons to flee the jurisdiction.”

Crimstein kept up with the apoplectic. “What are you talking about?”

“The murder victim, Mr. Haid, has recently withdrawn cash funds in excess of two hundred thousand dollars. That money is missing from his apartment. It’s logical to assume that the money was taken during the commission of the murder—”

“What logic?” Crimstein shouted. “Your Honor, this is nonsense.”

“Counsel for the defense mentioned that Miss Diaz has friends in the community,” Fresh Face continued. “Some of them are here, including her employer, Myron Bolitar.” He pointed to Myron. All eyes turned. Myron stayed very still. “Our investigation shows that Mr. Bolitar has been missing for at least a week, perhaps in the Caribbean, even in the Cayman Islands.”

“So what?” Crimstein shouted. “Arrest him if that’s a crime.”

But Fresh Face was not done. “And next to him is Miss Diaz’s friend Windsor Lockwood of Lock-Horne Securities.” When all eyes turned to Win, he nodded and gave a small regal wave. “Mr. Lockwood was the victim’s financial adviser and held the account where the two hundred thousand dollars was withdrawn.”

“So arrest him too,” Crimstein ranted. “Your Honor, this has nothing to do with my client, except maybe to prove her innocence. Miss Diaz is a hardworking Hispanic woman who struggled her way through law school at night. She has no record and should be freed immediately. Short of that, she has a right to reasonable bail.”

“Your Honor, there’s just too much cash floating around,” Fresh Face said. “The missing two hundred thousand dollars. Miss Diaz’s possible connection with both Mr. Bolitar and, of course, Mr. Lockwood, who comes from one of the wealthiest families in the region—”

“Wait a second, Your Honor. First, the district attorney suggests that Miss Diaz has stolen and hidden away this alleged missing money and will use it to run. Then he suggests that she’ll ask Mr. Lockwood, who is no more than a business associate, for the funds. Which is it? And while the district attorney’s office is busy trying to manufacture some kind of money conspiracy, why would one of the already wealthiest men in the country deem it appropriate to conspire with a poor Hispanic woman to steal? The whole idea is ludicrous. The prosecution has no case, so they’ve come up with this money nonsense that sounds as plausible as an Elvis sighting—”

“Enough,” the judge said. She leaned back and strummed her fingers on the big desk. She stared at Win for a second, then back at the defense table. “The missing money troubles me,” she said.

“Your Honor, I assure you that my client knows nothing about any money.”

“I’d be surprised if your position were different, Ms. Crimstein. But the facts presented by the district attorney are sufficiently troublesome. Bail denied.”

Crimstein’s eyes widened. “Your Honor, this is an outrage—”

“No need to shout, Counselor. I hear you just fine.”

“I strenuously object—”

“Save it for the cameras, Ms. Crimstein.” The judge hit the gavel. “Next case?”

Suppressed mumbles broke forth. Big Cyndi started wailing like a widow in a war newsreel. Hester Crimstein put her mouth to Esperanza’s ear and whispered something. Esperanza nodded, but it didn’t look like she was listening. The guards led Esperanza toward a door. Myron tried to catch her eyes again, but she didn’t—or maybe wouldn’t—face him.

Hester Crimstein turned and shot Myron a glare so nasty it almost made him duck. She approached him and fought to keep her face neutral. “Room seven,” she said to Myron, not looking at him, barely moving her lips. “Down the hallway and to the left. Five minutes. Don’t say anything to anyone.”

Myron did not bother with a nod.

Crimstein hurried out, already starting with the no comments before she hit the door. Win sighed, took a piece of paper and a pen from his jacket pocket, began to scribble something down.

“What are you doing?” Myron asked.

“You’ll see.” It did not take long. Two plainclothes cops accompanied by the stench of cheap cologne made their approach. Homicide division, no doubt. Before they could even introduce themselves, Win said, “Are we under arrest?”

The cops looked confused. Then one said, “No.”

Win smiled and handed him the piece of paper.

“What the hell is this?”

“Our attorney’s phone number,” Win said. He rose and ushered Myron toward the door. “Have a special day.”

They arrived in the defendant’s conference room before the anointed five minutes. The room was empty.

“Clu withdrew cash?” Myron said.

“Yes,” Win said.

“You knew about it?”

“Of course.”

“How much?”

“The district attorney said two hundred thousand dollars. I have no reason to quibble with that estimate.”

“And you just let him?”

“Pardon?”

“You just let Clu withdraw two hundred grand?”

“It’s his money.”

“But that much cash?”

“It was none of my business,” Win said.

“You know Clu, Win. It could have been for drugs or gambling or—”

“Probably was,” Win agreed. “But I am his financial adviser. I instruct him on investment strategies. Period. I am not his conscience or his mommy or his baby-sitter—or even his agent.”

Ouch. But no time for that now. Once again Myron suppressed the guilt and mulled over the possibilities. “Clu okayed us receiving his financial statements, right?”

Win nodded. MB SportsReps insisted that all clients use Win’s services and meet with him in person at least quarterly to go over their accounts. This was for their sake more than Myron’s. Too many athletes get taken advantage of because of ignorance. But most of Myron’s clients had copies of their statements sent to Myron so that he too could help keep track of the ins and outs, set up some automatic bill paying, that kind of thing.

“So a withdrawal that big would have come up on our screen,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“Esperanza would have known about it.”

“Yes again.”

Myron frowned. “So that gives the DA another motive for the murder. She knew about the cash.”

“Indeed.”

Myron looked at Win. “So what did Clu do with the money?”

Win shrugged.

“Maybe Bonnie knows?”

“Doubtful,” Win said. “They’ve separated.”

“Big deal. They’re always fighting, but she always takes him back.”

“Perhaps. But this time she made the separation legal.”

That surprised Myron. Bonnie had never gone that far before. Their turmoil cycle had always been consistent: Clu does something stupid, a big fight ensues, Bonnie throws him out for a couple of nights, maybe a week, Clu begs forgiveness, Bonnie takes him back, Clu behaves for a little while, Clu does something stupid, the cycle starts anew. “She got a lawyer and filed papers?”

“According to Clu.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes, Myron. That’s what ‘According to Clu’ means.”

“When did he tell you all this?”

“Last week. When he took out the cash. He said that she had already begun divorce proceedings.”

“How did he feel about it?”

“Badly. He craved yet another reconciliation.”

“Did he say anything else when he withdrew the cash?”

“Nothing.”

“And you have no idea—”

“None.”

The conference room door flew open. Hester Crimstein came in, red-faced and fuming. “You dumb bastards. I told you to stay away.”

“Don’t put this on us,” Myron said. “This is your screwup.”

“What?”

“Getting her bail should have been a slam dunk.”

“If you weren’t in the courtroom, it would have been. You played right into the DA’s hands. He wants to show the judge that the defendant has the resources to run away, and boom, he points to a famous ex-jock and one of the country’s richest playboys sitting right in the front row.”

She started stomping about as though the industrial gray carpet contained small brushfires. “This judge is a liberal schmuck,” she said. “That’s why I started with all that hardworking Hispanic crap. She hates rich people, probably because she is one. Having the Preppy Handbook here”—she gestured with her head at Win—“sit in the front row was like waving a Confederate flag at a black judge.”

“You should drop the case,” Myron said.

Her head jerked toward him. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Your fame is playing against you. The judge may not like rich people, but she doesn’t much like celebrities either. You’re the wrong attorney for this case.”

“Bullshit. I’ve had three cases before this judge. I’m three and oh.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like that either.”

Crimstein seemed to lose a little steam. She moved back and collapsed into a chair. “Bail denied,” she said more to herself than anyone else. “I can’t believe they even had the nerve to ask for no bail.” She sat a bit straighter. “All right, here’s how we play it. I’m going to press for answers. In the meantime you guys say nothing. No talking to the cops, the DA, the press. Nobody. Not until we figure out what exactly they think the three of you did.”

“The three of us?”

“Weren’t you listening, Myron? They think it’s a money scheme.”

“Involving the three of us?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know. They mentioned your going to the Caribbean, maybe the Cayman Islands. We all know what that means.”

“Depositing cash in offshore accounts,” Myron said. “But I left the country three weeks ago—before the money was even withdrawn. And I never went anywhere near the Caymans.”

“They’re probably still grasping at straws,” Crimstein said. “But they’re going to go after you in a big way. I hope your books are in order because I guarantee you they’ll have them subpoenaed within the hour.”

Money scandal, Myron thought. Hadn’t FJ mentioned something about that?

Crimstein turned her attention to Win. “Is that stuff about a big cash withdrawal true?”

“Yes.”

“Can they prove Esperanza knew about it?”

“Probably.”

“Damn.” She thought about this a moment.

Win moved into a corner. He took out his cell phone, dialed, started talking.

Myron said, “Make me co-counsel.”

Crimstein looked up. “Excuse me?”

“As you pointed out last night, I’m a bar-appointed attorney. Make me her attorney, and anything she tells me falls under attorney-client.”

She shook her head. “One, that’ll never fly. The judge will see it for what it is, a loophole to make sure you can’t testify. Two, it’s moronic. Not only will it reek of a desperate defensive move, but it’ll look like we’re shutting you up because we have something to hide. Three, you may still be charged in all this.”

“How? I already told you. I was in the Caribbean.”

“Right. Where nobody but Preppy Boy could find you. How convenient.”

“You think—”

“I don’t think anything, Myron. I’m telling you what the DA might be thinking. For now we’re just guessing. Go back to your office. Call your accountant. Make sure your books are in order.”

“They’re in order,” Myron said. “I’ve never stolen a dime.”

She turned to Win. “How about you?”

Win hung up the phone. “What about me?”

“They’ll subpoena your books too.”

Win arched the eyebrow. “They’ll try.”

“Are they clean?”

“You could eat off them,” Win said.

“Fine, whatever. I’ll let your lawyers handle it. I got enough to worry about.”

Silence.

“So how do we get her out?” Myron asked.

“We don’t get her out. I get her out. You stay away.”

“I don’t take orders from you.”

“No? How about from Esperanza?”

“What about Esperanza?”

“This is her request as well as mine. Stay away from her.”

“I don’t believe she’d say that.”

“Believe it.”

“If she wants me out,” Myron said, “she’ll have to tell me to my face.”

“Fine,” Crimstein said with a heavy sigh. “Let’s go take care of that now.”

“What?”

“You want her to tell you herself? Give me five minutes.”

CHAPTER 8

Win said, “I have to get back to the office.”

Myron was surprised. “You don’t want to hear what Esperanza has to say?”

“No time.”

His tone slammed the door on further discussion. Win reached for the knob.

“If you need my special talents,” he said, “I’ll have the cellular.”

He hurried out as Hester Crimstein entered. She watched him disappear down the corridor. “Where’s he going?”

“His office.”

“Why’s he in such a rush all of a sudden?”

“I didn’t ask.”

Hester Crimstein raised an eyebrow. “Hmm.”

“Hmm what?”

“Win was the one in charge of the account with the missing money.”

“So?”

“So maybe he had a reason to silence Clu Haid.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Are you saying he’s incapable of murder?”

Myron did not reply.

“If even half the stories I’ve heard about Windsor Lockwood are true—”

“You know better than to listen to rumors.”

She looked at him. “So if I subpoena you to testify and if I ask if you’ve ever witnessed Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third kill someone, what would you say?”

“No.”

“Uh-huh. Guess you also missed the class on perjury.”

Myron did not bother with a comeback. “When can I see Esperanza?”

“Come on. She’s waiting for you.”

Esperanza sat at a long table. She still wore the orange prison suit, her now-uncuffed hands folded in front of her, her expression serene as a church statue’s. Hester signaled to the trooper, and they both left the room.

When the door closed, Esperanza smiled at him. “Welcome back,” she said.

“Thanks,” Myron replied.

Her eyes took him in. “If your tan was any darker, you could pass for my brother.”

“Thanks.”

“Still got the smooth tongue with the ladies, eh?”

“Thanks.”

She almost smiled. Even under these conditions, Esperanza still looked radiant. Her supple skin and ink black hair shimmered against the fluorescent orange backdrop. Her eyes still brought forth thoughts of Mediterranean moons and white peasant blouses.

“Are you feeling better now?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“Where were you anyway?”

“A private island in the Caribbean.”

“For three weeks?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“No.”

When he didn’t elaborate, Esperanza simply said, “Details.”

“I ran off with a beautiful anchorwoman I barely knew.”

Esperanza smiled. “Did she—how to put this delicately?—did she boff your brains out?”

“As it were.”

“Glad to hear it. If any guy needed to have his brain boffed out—”

“Right, I’m the guy. Voted Most Boff Needy by the senior class.”

She liked that one. She leaned back and crossed her legs cocktail-lounge casual. Odd in these surroundings, to put it mildly. “You didn’t tell anybody where you were?”

“That’s right.”

“Yet Win still found you in a matter of hours,” she said.

It surprised neither of them. They sat in silence for a moment or two. Then Myron asked, “You okay?”

“Fine.”

“Do you need anything?”

“No.”

Myron was not sure how to continue, what subject to broach or how to broach it. Once again Esperanza took the ball and started dribbling.

“So are you and Jessica through?” she asked.

“Yes.” It was the first time he had said it out loud. It felt weird.

That made her smile, big time. “Ah, the silver lining,” she said triumphantly. “So it’s really over? Queen Bitch is gone for good?”

“Don’t call her that.”

“Is she gone for good?”

“I think so.”

“Say yes, Myron. It’ll make you feel better.”

But he couldn’t. “I’m not here to talk about me.”

Esperanza crossed her arms, said nothing.

“We’ll get you out of this,” he said. “I promise.”

She nodded, still playing casual; if she were a smoker, she’d be blowing rings. “You better get back to the office. We’ve already lost too many clients.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I do.” Her voice had an edge now. “I’m a partner now.”

“I know that.”

“So I own part of MB SportsReps. If you want to self-destruct, fine. But don’t drag my lusted-after ass down with you, okay?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant we’ve got bigger worries right now.”

“No.”

“What?”

“We don’t have bigger worries. I want you to stay out of this.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I have one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the country working on my case. Let her handle it.”

Myron tried to let her words settle in, but they were like unruly children after a sugar fix. He leaned forward a bit.

“What’s going on here?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“What?”

“Hester told me I shouldn’t talk about the case with anyone, even you. Our conversations are not protected.”

“You think I’d tell?”

“You can be forced to testify.”

“So I’d lie.”

“You won’t have to.”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “Win and I can help here. We’re good at this.”

“No offense, Myron, but Win is psycho. I love him, but his kind of help I don’t need. And you”—Esperanza stopped, looked up, unfolded her arms, lowered her gaze back to his—“you’re damaged goods. I don’t blame you for running away. It was probably the right thing to do. But let’s not pretend you’re back to normal.”

“Not normal,” he agreed. “But I’m ready for this.”

She shook her head. “Concentrate on MB. It’s going to take all your efforts to keep her afloat.”

“You’re not going to tell me what happened?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I just spelled out the reasons—”

“You’re really afraid I’d testify against you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So what is it? If you think I’m not up for this, okay, maybe I buy it. But that wouldn’t stop you from talking to me. In fact, you’d probably tell me just to keep me from poking around. So what’s going on here?”

Her face slid closed. “Go to the office, Myron. You want to help? Save our business.”

“Did you kill him?”

He regretted it the moment the words came out of his mouth. She looked at him as if he’d just reached across the table and slapped her face.

“I don’t care if you did,” he pressed on. “I’ll stand by you no matter what. I want you to know that.”

Esperanza regained her composure. She slid her chair back and stood. For a few moments she stared at him, studying his face as though searching for something that was normally there. Then she turned away, called for the guard, and left the room.

CHAPTER 9

Big Cyndi was already manning the reception desk when Myron reached the offices of MB SportsReps. They had a prime location, right smack on Park Avenue in midtown. The Lock-Horne high-rise had been owned by Win’s family since Great-Great-Et-Cetera Grandpa Horne (or was it Lockwood?) had torn down a tepee and started building it. Myron rented space at a premium discount from Win. In return Win handled all the finances for Myron’s clients. This deal was a bargain for Myron. Between the primo address and the ability to guarantee his clients the financial services of the near-legendary Windsor Horne Lockwood III, MB SportsReps had an air of legitimacy few small firms could boast.

MB SportsReps was on the twelfth floor. An elevator opened directly into their reception room. Muy classy. The phones were beeping. Big Cyndi put people on hold and looked up at him. She looked even more ridiculous than usual. No easy task. In the first place, the furniture was too small for her, the desk legs actually teetering on her knees like something a father might experience when visiting his child’s elementary school. In the second place, she still had not washed up or changed from last night. Normally Myron, the image-conscious entrepreneur, would comment on this, but now did not seem an appropriate (or safe) time.

“The press is pulling out all the tricks to get up here, Mr. Bolitar.” Big Cyndi always called him Mr. Bolitar. She liked formalities. “Two of them even pretended to be prospective clients coming out of Division One schools.”

Myron was hardly surprised. “I told the guard downstairs to be extra wary.”

“A lot of clients are calling too. They’re concerned.”

“Patch them through. Get rid of everybody else.”

“Yes, Mr. Bolitar.” Like she wanted to salute. Big Cyndi handed him a pile of blue slips. “These are this morning’s calls from clients.”

He started thumbing through the stack.

“For your information,” Big Cyndi continued, “we told everyone you were just gone for a day or two at first. Then a week or two. Then we started faking emergencies for you: family illnesses, helping a sick client, that sort of thing. But some clients got tired of the excuses.”

He nodded. “You have a list of who left us?”

It was already in her hand. She handed it to him, and he started toward his office.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

He turned. “Yes?”

“Will Esperanza be okay?”

Again the tiny, distant voice belied her bulk, as though the looming form in front of him had swallowed a small child and the small child were now calling for help. “Yes, Big Cyndi. She’ll be fine.”

“You’ll help her, won’t you? Even though she doesn’t want you to?”

Myron gave her a half nod. That didn’t seem to satisfy her. So he said, “Yes.”

“Good, Mr. Bolitar. That’s the right thing to do.”

He had nothing to add to that so he entered his inner office. Myron had not been to MB in six weeks. Strange. He had worked so hard and so long to build up MB SportsReps—M for Myron, B for Bolitar, snappy name, no?—and he had just abandoned her. Just like that. Abandoned his business. And his clients. And Esperanza.

The renovations had been completed—they’d sliced a bit of space out of the conference room and reception area so that Esperanza could have an office of her own—but the new room remained unfurnished. So Esperanza had been using his office. He sat at his desk and immediately the phone started ringing. He ignored it for a few seconds, his eyes latched on the client wall, the one with action photos of all the athletes MB represented. He zeroed in on Clu Haid’s image. Clu was on the pitcher’s mound, leaning forward, about to go into a stretch, his cheek bulging with tobacco chaw, his eyes squinting at a sign he would undoubtedly shake off.

“What did you do this time, Clu?” he said out loud.

The photo didn’t reply, which was probably a good thing. But Myron continued to stare. He had pulled Clu out of so many jams over the years that he had to wonder: If he had not run off to the Caribbean, would he have been able to pull Clu out of this one too?

Useless introspection—one of Myron’s many talents.

Big Cyndi buzzed him. “Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes.”

“I know you told me to only patch through clients, but Sophie Mayor is on the line.”

Sophie Mayor was the new owner of the Yankees.

“Put her through.” He heard a click and said hello.

“Myron, my God. What the hell is going on here?” Sophie Mayor wasn’t big on chitchat.

“I’m still trying to sort it out myself.”

“They think your secretary killed Clu.”

“Esperanza is my partner,” he corrected, though he was not sure why. “And she didn’t kill anyone.”

“I’m sitting here with Jared.” Jared was her son and the “co-general manager” of the Yankees—co meaning shares the title with someone who knows what he’s doing because he got the job through nepotism. Jared meaning born after 1973. “We need to tell the press something.”

“I’m not sure how I can help, Ms. Mayor.”

“You told me Clu was past all this, Myron.”

He said nothing.

“The drugs, the drinking, the partying, the trouble,” Sophie Mayor continued. “You said it was in the past.”

He was about to defend himself but thought better of it. “I think it’s better if we talk about all this in person,” Myron said.

“Jared and I are on the road with the team. We’re in Cleveland right now. We’re flying home tonight.”

“How about tomorrow morning then?”

“We’ll be at the stadium,” she said. “Eleven o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

He hung up the phone. Big Cyndi immediately put through a client call.

“Myron here.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

It was Marty Towey, a defensive tackle for the Vikings. Myron took a deep breath and let loose his semiprepared oration: he was back, things were great, don’t worry, the financials are terrific, got the new contract right here, busy securing new endorsements, blah, blah, soothe, soothe.

Marty was a tough sell. “Dammit, Myron, I chose MB because I didn’t want underlings handling me. I wanted to deal with the big boss. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, Marty.”

“Esperanza’s nice and all. But she ain’t you. I hired you. Do you understand?”

“I’m back now, Marty. Everything is going to be fine, I promise. Look, you guys are in town in a couple of weeks, right?”

“We play the Jets in two weeks.”

“Great. So I’ll meet you at the game and we’ll go out to dinner afterward.”

When Myron hung up, it dawned on him that he’d been so uninvolved in his clients’ affairs that he didn’t even know if Marty was playing at an All-Pro level or nearly waived. Christ, he had a lot of catching up to do.

The calls went on in a similar vein for the next two hours. Most clients were assuaged. Some sat on the fence. No additional ones left him. He had not fixed anything, but he had managed to lessen the blood flow to a serious trickle.

Big Cyndi knocked and opened the office door. “Trouble, Mr. Bolitar.”

An awful, though not unfamiliar, stench started emanating from the doorway.

“What the hell …?” Myron began.

“Out of the way, hot stuff.” The gruff voice came from behind Big Cyndi. Myron tried to see who it was, but Big Cyndi blocked his line of vision like a solar eclipse. Eventually she yielded, and the same two plainclothes officers from the courthouse hurried past her. The big one was fiftyish, bleary-eyed, world-weary and had the kind of face that looked unshaven even after a shave. He wore a trench coat with sleeves that barely reached his elbows and shoes that had more scuff marks than a Gaylord Perry baseball. The smaller guy was younger and really, well, ugly. His face reminded Myron of a magnified photo of head lice. He wore a light gray suit with vest—the Sears Casual Law Enforcer—and one of those Looney Tunes ties that screamed 1992.

The awful smell started permeating the walls.

“A warrant,” the big guy groused. He wasn’t chewing on a cigar, but he should have been. “And before you tell me we’re out of our jurisdiction, we’re still working with Michael Chapman, Manhattan North. Call him, you got a problem. Now get out of the chair, asshole, so we can search this place.”

Myron crinkled his nose. “Jesus, which one of you is wearing the cologne?”

Head Lice gave a quick look toward his partner. The look said, Hey, I’ll take a bullet for this guy, but I’m not taking the fall for that smell. Understandable.

“Listen up, dip shit,” the big one said. “My name is Detective Winters—”

“Really? Your mother named you Detective?”

Barely a sigh. “—and this is Detective Martinez. Move out here now, dim wad.”

The smell was getting to him. “Yo, Winters, you got to stop borrowing cologne from male flight attendants.”

“Keep at it, funnyman.”

“Seriously, does the label include the words glaze liberally!”

“You’re a real comedian, Bolitar. So many bad asses are funny it’s a pity they don’t televise Sing Sing.”

“I thought you already searched the place.”

“We did. Now we’re back for the financials.”

Myron pointed to Head Lice. “Can’t he do it alone?”

“What?”

“I’ll never get the smell out of here.”

Winters took out a pair of latex gloves, this so as not to mess up possible fingerprints. He snapped them on in dramatic fashion, including finger wiggling, and grinned.

Myron winked. “You want me to bend down and grab my ankles?”

“No.”

“Dang, and me needing a date.” Want to needle a cop? Use gay humor. Myron had yet to meet one who wasn’t a complete homophobe.

Winters said, “We’re going to trash this place, funnyman.”

“Doubtful,” Myron countered.

“Oh?”

Myron stood, reached into the file cabinet behind him.

“Hey, you can’t touch anything in here.”

Myron ignored him, pulled out a small videocamera. “Just keeping a record of your doings, officer. In today’s climate of false police corruption charges, we wouldn’t want any misunderstandings”—Myron snapped on the camera and aimed the lens at the big guy—“would we?”

“No,” the big guy said, staring straight into the lens. “We wouldn’t want any misunderstandings.”

Myron kept his eye in the viewer. “The camera captures the real you, Detective. I bet if we played it back, we’d still smell your cologne.”

Head Lice hid a smile.

“Please get out of our way, Mr. Bolitar,” Winters said.

“Sure thing. Cooperation is my middle name.”

They began the search, which basically consisted of packing every document they could lay their hands on in crates and carrying them out. The gloved hands touched everything, and it felt to Myron like they were touching him. He tried to look innocent—whatever that looked like—but he couldn’t help being nervous. Guilt was a funny thing. He knew that there was nothing amiss in any of the files, but he still felt oddly defensive.

Myron gave the video camera to Big Cyndi and started making calls to clients who had left MB. Most didn’t pick up. The few who did tried to defect. Myron played it soft, figuring that any overaggression would backfire. He merely told them that he was back and would like very much to speak with them at their earliest convenience. A lot of hemming and hawing from those who actually spoke to him. Not unexpected. If he were to regain their confidence, it would take time.

The cops finished up and left without so much as a good-bye. Manners. Big Cyndi and Myron watched the elevators close.

“This is going to be very difficult,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Working without any files.”

Big Cyndi opened her purse and showed him computer disks. “Everything is on these.”

“Everything?”

“Yes.”

“You backed up everything on these?”

“Yes.”

“Letters and correspondences, okay, but I need the contracts—”

“Everything,” she said. “I bought a scanner and ran every paper in the office through it. There’s a backup set in a safety-deposit box at Citibank. I update the disks every week. In case of fire or other emergency.”

When she smiled this time, Myron’s cringe was barely perceptible.

“Big Cyndi, you are a surprising woman.”

It was hard to tell under the melted Masque de Crayola, but it almost looked like she was blushing.

The intercom buzzed. Big Cyndi picked up the phone.

“Yes?” Pause. Then her voice grew grave.

“Yes, send her up.” She replaced the receiver.

“Who is it?”

“Bonnie Haid is here to see you.”

Big Cyndi showed the Widow Haid into his office. Myron stood behind his desk, not sure what to do. He waited for her to make the first move, but she didn’t. Bonnie Haid had let her hair grow out, and for a moment he was back at Duke. Clu and Bonnie were sitting on the couch in the basement of the frat house, another major kegger behind them, his arm draped over her shoulder, she wearing a gray sweatshirt, her legs tucked under her.

He swallowed and moved toward her. She took a step back and closed her eyes. She put a hand up to stop him as though she could not bear the pain of his intimacy. Myron stayed where he was.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Thank you.”

They both stood there, two dancers waiting for the music to begin.

“Can I sit down?” Bonnie asked.

“Of course.”

She sat. Myron hesitated and then chose to go back around his desk.

“When did you get back?” she asked.

“Last night,” he said. “I didn’t know about Clu before then. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you.”

Bonnie cocked her head. “Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why are you sorry you weren’t here? What could you have done?”

Myron shrugged. “Help maybe.”

“Help how?”

He shrugged again, spread his arms. “I don’t know what to say, Bonnie. I’m flailing here.”

She looked at him a moment, challenging, then dropped her eyes. “I’m just lashing out at whoever’s in front of me,” she said. “Don’t pay any attention.”

“I don’t mind; lash away.”

Bonnie almost managed a smile. “You’re a good guy, Myron. You always were. Even at Duke there was something about you that was—I don’t know—noble, I guess.”

“Noble?”

“Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

“Very,” he said. “How are the boys?”

She shrugged. “Timmy is only eighteen months old so he doesn’t have a clue. Charlie is four so he’s just pretty confused right now. My parents are taking care of them.”

“I don’t want to keep sounding like a bad cliché,” Myron said, “but if there’s anything at all I can do …”

“One thing.”

“Name it.”

“Tell me about the arrest.”

Myron cleared his throat. “What about it?”

“I’ve met Esperanza a few times over the years. I guess I find it hard to believe she’d kill Clu.”

“She didn’t do it.”

Bonnie squinted a bit. “What makes you so sure?”

“I know Esperanza.”

“That’s it?”

He nodded. “For now.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I can’t talk about specifics”—mostly because he didn’t know any; Myron was almost grateful that Esperanza had not told him anything—“but she didn’t do it.”

“What about all the evidence the police found?”

“I can’t answer that yet, Bonnie. But Esperanza is innocent. We’ll find the real killer.”

“You sound so sure.”

“I am.”

They fell into silence. Myron waited, mapping out an approach. There were questions that needed to be asked, but this woman had just lost her husband. One had to tread gently lest one trip an emotional land mine.

“I’m going to look into the murder,” Myron said.

She looked confused. “What do you mean, look into?”

“Investigate.”

“But you’re a sports agent.”

“I have some background in this.”

She studied his face. “Win too?”

“Yes.”

She nodded as if something suddenly made sense. “Win always scared the crap out of me.”

“That’s only because you’re sane.”

“And now you’re going to try to figure out who killed Clu?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” she said. She shifted in her chair. “Tell me something, Myron.”

“Anything.”

“What’s your priority here: finding the murderer or getting Esperanza off?”

“One and the same.”

“And if they’re not? If you learn Esperanza killed him?”

Time to lie. “Then she’ll be punished.”

Bonnie started smiling as though she could see the truth. “Good luck,” she said.

Myron put an ankle up on a knee. Gentle now, he thought. “Can I ask you something?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

Gently, gently. “I don’t mean any disrespect, Bonnie. I’m not asking this to be nosy—”

“Subtlety is not your strong suit, Myron; Just ask your question.”

“Were you and Clu having problems?”

A sad grin. “Weren’t we always?”

“I hear this was something more serious.”

Bonnie folded her arms below her chest. “My, my. Back less than a day and already you’ve learned so much. You work fast, Myron.”

“Clu mentioned it to Win.”

“So what do you want to know?”

“Were you suing him for divorce?”

“Yes.” No hesitation.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

In the distance the fax machine started its primordial screech. The phone continued beeping. Myron had no fear that they’d be interrupted. Big Cyndi had worked for years as a bouncer at an S&M bar; when the situation called for it, she could be as nasty as a rabid rhino with a bad case of piles. Er, even when the situation didn’t call for it.

“Why do you want to know?” Bonnie asked.

“Because Esperanza didn’t kill him.”

“That’s becoming something of a mantra for you, Myron. Say it often enough and you start to believe it, right?”

“I believe it.”

“So?”

“So if she didn’t kill him, someone else did.”

Bonnie looked up. “If she didn’t kill him, someone else did,” she repeated. Pause. “You weren’t just bragging before. You really do have a background in this.”

“I’m just trying to find out who killed him.”

“By asking about our marriage?”

“By asking about anything turbulent in his life.”

“Turbulent?” She let out a stab of a laugh. “This is Clu we’re talking about here, Myron. Everything was turbulent. The hard thing to find would be patches of calm.”

“How long were you two together?” Myron asked.

“You know the answer to that.”

He did. Junior year at Duke. Bonnie had come bopping down to the frat house basement dressed in a monogram sweater and pearls and, yep, ponytail. Myron and Clu had been working the keg. Myron liked working the keg because it kept him so busy he didn’t drink as much. Don’t get the wrong idea here. Myron drank. It was pretty much a college requirement in those days. But he wasn’t a very good drinker. He always seemed to miss that cusp of fun, that floaty buzz between sobriety and vomiting. It was almost nonexistent for him. Something in his ancestry, he assumed. It had actually helped him in recent months. Before running away with Terese, Myron had tried the old-fashioned approach of drowning one’s sorrows. But, put bluntly, he usually threw up before reaching oblivion.

Nice way to prevent alcohol abuse.

Anyway, Clu and Bonnie’s meeting was pretty simple. Bonnie walked in. Clu looked up from the keg and it was as if Captain Marvel had zapped him with a thunderbolt. “Wow,” Clu muttered, the beer overflowing onto a floor so coated with beer that rodents often got stuck on it and died. Then Clu leaped over the bar, staggered toward Bonnie, dropped to one knee, and proposed. Three years later they tied the knot for real.

“So after all these years what happened?”

Bonnie looked down. “It had nothing to do with his murder,” she said.

“That’s probably true, but I need to get the full picture of his life, travel down any possible avenue—”

“Bullshit, Myron. I said it had nothing to do with the murder, okay? Leave it at that.”

He licked his lips, folded his hands, put them on the desktop. “In the past you’ve thrown him out because of another woman.”

“Not woman. Women. Plural.”

“Is that what happened again this time?”

“He swore off women. He promised me that there’d be no more.”

“And he broke that promise?”

Bonnie didn’t answer.

“What was her name?”

Her voice was soft. “I never knew.”

“But there was someone else?”

Again she didn’t answer. No need. Myron tried to put on his attorney skin for a moment. Clu’s having an affair was a very good thing for Esperanza’s defense. The more motives you can find, the more reasonable doubt you can create. Did the girlfriend kill him because he still wanted to be with his wife? Did Bonnie do it out of jealousy? And then there was the missing money. Wouldn’t the girlfriend and/or Bonnie have known about it? Couldn’t that be an added motive for murder? Yep, Hester Crimstein would like this. Throw enough possibilities into a trial, muddy the waters enough, and an acquittal is almost inevitable. It was a simple equation: Confusion equals reasonable doubt equals a not-guilty verdict.

“He’s had affairs before, Bonnie. What was different this time?”

“Give it a rest, Myron, okay? Clu isn’t even in the ground yet.”

He pulled back. “I’m sorry.”

She looked away. Her chest rose and fell, her voice fighting to stay steady. “I know you’re just trying to help,” she said. “But the divorce stuff … it hurts too much right now.”

“I understand.”

“If you have other questions …”

“I heard Clu failed a drug test.” So much for backing off.

“I only know what I read in the papers.”

“Clu told Win it was a fix.”

“What?”

“Clu claimed he was clean. What do you think?”

“I think Clu was a marvelous screwup. We both know that.”

“So he was taking again?”

“I don’t know.” She swallowed and locked eyes with him. “I hadn’t seen him in weeks.”

“And before that?”

“He seemed clean, actually. But he was always good at hiding it. Remember that intervention we tried three years ago?”

Myron nodded.

“We all cried. We all begged him to stop. And finally Clu broke down too. He sobbed like a baby, said he was ready turn his life around. Two days later he paid off a guard and sneaked out of rehab.”

“So you think he was just masking the symptoms?”

“He could have been. He was good at that.” She hesitated. “But I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Wishful thinking, I guess, but I really thought he was clean this time. In the past you could almost see he was going through the motions. He was playing a part for me or the kids. But this time he seemed more determined. Like he knew this trade was his last chance to start fresh. He worked at it like I’ve never seen him work at anything. I thought he was beating it too. But something must have pushed him back off.…”

Bonnie’s voice tailed off, and now her eyes filled. She was wondering, no doubt, if she had been that push, if Clu had indeed been clean and if she had thrown him out of their house and plunged him back into the world of his addictions. Myron almost told her not to blame herself, but good sense kept the grating cliché at bay.

“Clu always needed someone or something,” she went on. “He was the most dependent person I ever knew.”

Myron nodded, encouraging her.

“At first I found that attractive, that he needed me so much. But it got weary.” Bonnie looked at him. “How many times did someone pull his ass out of the fire?”

“Too many,” Myron admitted.

“I wonder, Myron.” She sat up a bit, more clear-eyed now. “I wonder if we all did him a disservice. Maybe if we weren’t always there to save him, he would have had to change. Maybe if I had dumped him years ago, he would have straightened himself out and survived all this.”

Myron said nothing, not bothering to point out the inherent contradiction in her statement: She finally did dump him and he ended up dead.

“Did you know about the two hundred thousand dollars?” Myron asked.

“I heard about it from the police.”

“Do you have any idea where it might be?”

“No.”

“Or why he might have needed it?”

“No.” Her voice was far away now, her gaze drifting over his shoulder.

“Do you think it was for drugs?”

“The papers said he tested positive for heroin,” she said.

“That’s my understanding.”

“That would be a new one for Clu. I know it’s an expensive addiction, but two hundred thousand seems extreme.”

Myron agreed. “Was he in any trouble?”

She looked at him.

“I mean, besides the usual. Loan sharks or gambling or something like that?”

“It’s possible, I guess.”

“But you don’t know.”

Bonnie shook her head, still looking off at nothing. “You know what I was thinking about?”

“What?”

“Clu’s first year as a pro. Class A with the New England Bisons. Right after he asked you to negotiate his contract. Do you remember that?”

Myron nodded.

“And again, I wonder.”

“Wonder what?”

“That was the first time we all banded together to save his ass.”

The late-night phone call. Myron swimming out of sleep and clutching the receiver. Clu crying, almost incoherent. He had been driving with Bonnie and his old Duke roommate, Billy Lee Palms, the Bisons’ catcher. Drunk driving, to be more precise. He had smashed the car into a pole. Billy Lee’s injuries were minor, but Bonnie had been rushed to the hospital. Clu, not a scratch on him, of course, had been arrested. Myron had hurried out to western Massachusetts, plenty of cash in hand.

“I remember,” Myron said.

“You’d just signed Clu to that big chocolate milk endorsement. Drunk driving was bad enough, but with an injury to boot, well, it would have destroyed him. But we took care of him. The right people were bought off. Billy Lee and I made a statement about some pickup truck cutting us off. We saved him. And now I wonder if we did the right thing. Maybe if Clu had paid a price right then and there, maybe if he’d gone to jail instead of skating by …”

“He wouldn’t have gone to jail, Bonnie. A suspended license maybe. Some community service.”

“Whatever. Life is about ripples, Myron. There are some philosophers who think that everything we do changes the world forever. Even simple acts. Like if you left your house five minutes later, if you took a different route to work—it changes everything for the rest of your life. I don’t necessarily buy that, but when it comes to the big things, yeah, sure, I think the ripples last. Or maybe it started before that. When he was a child. The first time he learned that because he could throw a white sphere with amazing velocity, people treated him special. Maybe we just continued the conditioning that day. Or brought it up to an adult level. Clu learned that someone would always save him. And we did. We got him off that night, and then there were the assault charges and the lewd behavior and the failed drug tests and whatever else.”

“And you think his murder was the inevitable result?”

“Don’t you?”

“No,” Myron said. “I think the person who shot him three times is responsible. Period.”

“Life is rarely that simple, Myron.”

“But murder usually is. In the end someone shot him. That’s how he died. He didn’t die because we helped him through some self-destructive excesses. Someone murdered him. And that person—not you or me or those who cared about him—is to blame.”

She thought about it. “Maybe you’re right.” But she didn’t look convinced.

“Do you know why Clu would strike Esperanza?”

She shook her head. “The police asked me that too. I don’t know. Maybe he was high.”

“Did he get violent when he got high?”

“No. But it sounds like he was under a lot of pressure. Maybe he was just frustrated that she wouldn’t tell him where you were.”

Another wave of guilt. He waited for it to recede.

“Who else would he have gone to, Bonnie?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said he was needy. I wasn’t around. You weren’t talking to him. So where would Clu go next?”

She thought about it. “I’m not sure.”

“Any friends, teammates?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How about Billy Lee Palms?”

She shrugged an I-don’t-know.

Myron tossed out a few more questions, but nothing of consequence was batted back to him. After a while Bonnie feigned a check at the time. “I have to get back to the kids,” she said.

He nodded, rose from his chair. This time she did not stop him. He hugged her and she hugged him back, gripping him fiercely.

“Do me one favor,” she said.

“Name it.”

“Clear your friend,” she said. “I understand why you need to do that. And I wouldn’t want her to go to jail for something she didn’t do. But then let it be.”

Myron pulled back a bit. “I don’t understand.”

“Like I said before, you’re a noble guy.”

He thought about the Slaughter family and how it all ended; something inside him was crushed anew. “College was a long time ago,” he said softly.

“You haven’t changed.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“You still need justice and neat endings and to do the right thing.”

He said nothing.

“Clu can’t give you that,” Bonnie said. “He wasn’t a noble man.”

“He didn’t deserve to be murdered.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Save your friend, Myron. Then let Clu go.”

CHAPTER 10

Myron took the elevator up two floors to the nerve center of Lock-Horne Securities and Investments. Exhausted white men—there were women and minorities too, more and more each year, but the overall numbers were still woefully inadequate—darted about, particles under blaring heat, gray phones tethered to their ears like life-sustaining umbilical cords. The noise level and the open space reminded Myron of a Vegas casino, though the toupees were better. People cried out in joy and agony. Money was won and lost. Dice were rolled and wheels were spun and cards were dealt. The men constantly glanced up at an electronic ticker, awe in their faces, ardently watching the stock prices like gamblers waiting for the wheel to settle on a number or ancient Israelites peering up at Moses and his new stone tablets.

These were the trenches of finance, armed soldiers crowded together, each trying to survive in a world where earning low six figures meant cowardice and probably death. Computer terminals twinkled through an onslaught of yellow Post-It notes. The warriors drank coffee and buried framed family photos under a volcanic outpouring of stock analyses and financial statements and corporate reviews. They wore white button-down shirts and Windsor-knotted ties, their suit jackets neatly arrayed on the backs of chairs as though the chairs were a tad chilly or preparing for lunch at Le Cirque.

Win did not sit out here, of course. The generals in this war—the rainmakers, big producers, heavy hitters, what have you—were tented on the perimeter, their offices running along the windows, cutting off from the foot soldiers any hint of blue sky or fresh air or any element endemic to human beings.

Myron headed up a carpeted incline and toward the left corner suite. Win was usually alone in his office. Not today. Myron stuck his head in the door, and a bunch of suitheads swiveled toward him. Lots of suits. Myron couldn’t say how many. Might have been six, maybe eight. They were a lumpy blur of gray and blue with streaks of tie-and-hankie red, like the aftermath of a Civil War reenactment. The older ones, distinguished white-haired guys with manicures and cuff links, sat in the burgundy leather chairs closest to Win’s desk and nodded a lot. The younger ones were squeezed onto the couches against the wall, heads down, scratching notes on legal pads as though Win were divulging the secret of eternal life. Every once in a while the younger men would peer up at the older men, glimpsing their glorious future, which would basically consist of a more comfortable chair and less note taking.

The legal pads gave it away. These were attorneys. The older men probably over four hundred bucks an hour, the younger ones two-fifty. Myron didn’t bother with the math, mostly because it would take too much effort to count how many suits were in the room. Didn’t matter. Lock-Horne Securities could afford it. Redistributing wealth—that is, the act of moving money around without creation or production or making anything new—was incredibly profitable.

Myron Bolitar, Marxist Sports Agent.

Win clapped his hands and the men were dismissed. They rose as slowly as possible—attorneys billed by the minute, sort of like 900 sex lines minus the guaranteed, er, payoff—and filed out the office door. The older men departed first, the younger men trailing not unlike Japanese brides.

Myron stepped inside. “What’s going on?”

Win signaled for Myron to sit. Then he leaned back and did the steeple thing with his hands. “This situation,” he said, “has me troubled.”

“You mean Clu’s cash withdrawal?”

“In part, yes,” Win said. He bounced the fingertips before resting the indexes on his lower lip. “I become very unhappy when I hear the words subpoena and Lock-Horne in the same sentence.”

“So? You have nothing to hide.”

Win smiled thinly. “Your point being?”

“Let them look at your records. You’re a lot of things, Win. Honest being chief among them.”

Win shook his head. “You are so naive.”

“What?”

“My family runs a financial securities firm.”

“So?”

“So even the whiff of innuendo can destroy said firm.”

“I think you’re overreacting,” Myron said.

Win arched an eyebrow, put a hand to his ear. “Pardon moi?”

“Come on, Win. There’s always some Wall Street scandal or other going on. People barely notice anymore.”

“Those are insider trading scandals mostly.”

“So?”

Win paused, looked at him. “Are you being purposely obtuse?”

“No.”

“Insider trading is a completely different animal.”

“How so?”

“Do you really need me to explain this to you?”

“Guess so.”

“Fine then. Stripping it bare, insider trading is cheating or stealing. My clients do not care if I cheat or steal—as long it is done for their benefit. In fact, if a certain illegal act were to increase their portfolios, most clients would probably encourage it. But if their financial adviser is playing games with their personal accounts—or equally awful, if his banking institution is merely involved in something that will give the government the right to subpoena records—clients become understandably nervous.”

Myron nodded. “I can see where there might be a problem.”

Win strummed the top of his desk with his fingers. For him, this was major agitation. Hard to believe, but for the first time Win actually appeared a touch unnerved. “I have three law firms and two publicity firms working on the matter,” he continued.

“Working on it how?”

“The usual,” Win said. “Calling in political favors, preparing a lawsuit against the Bergen County DA’s office for libel and slander, planting positive spins in the media, seeing what judges will be running for reelection.”

“In other words,” Myron said, “who can you pay off.”

Win shrugged. “You say tomato, I say tomahto.”

“The files haven’t been subpoenaed yet?”

“No. I plan on quashing the possibility before any judge even thinks of issuing them.”

“So maybe we should take the offensive.”

Win resteepled. His big mahogany desk was polished to the point where his reflection was near-mirror clear, like something out of an old dish detergent commercial where a housewife gets waaaaay too excited about seeing herself in a dinner plate. “I’m listening.”

He recounted his conversation with Bonnie Haid. The red phone on Win’s credenza—his Batphone, so enamored with the old Adam West vehicle that he actually kept it under what looked like a glass cake cover—interrupted him several times. Win had to take the calls. They were mostly from attorneys. Myron could hear the lawyerly panic travel through the earpiece and all the way across the desk. Understandable. Windsor Horne Lockwood III was not the kind of guy you wanted to disappoint.

Win remained calm. His end of the conversation could basically be broken down into two words: How. And much.

When Myron finished, Win said, “Let’s make a list.” He didn’t reach for a pen. Neither did Myron. “One, we need Clu’s phone records.”

“He was staying at an apartment in Fort Lee,” Myron said.

“The murder scene.”

“Right. Clu and Bonnie rented the apartment when he first got traded in May.” To the Yankees. A huge deal that gave Clu, an aging veteran, one last chance to squander. “They moved into the house in Tenafly in July, but the apartment’s lease ran for another six months. So when Bonnie threw him out, that’s where he ended up.”

“You have the address?” Win asked.

“Yep.”

“Fine then.”

“Send the records down to Big Cyndi. I’ll have her check through it.”

Getting a phone record was frighteningly easy. Don’t believe it? Open your local yellow pages. Choose a private investigator at random. Offer to pay him or her two grand for anyone’s monthly phone bill. Some will simply say yes, but most will try to up you to three thousand, half the fee going to whatever phone company minion they bribe.

Myron said, “We also need to check out Clu’s credit cards, his checkbook, ATM, whatever, see what he’s been up to lately.”

Win nodded. In Clu’s case, this would be doubly easy. His entire financial portfolio was held by Lock-Horne Securities. Win had set up a separate management account for Clu so that he could manage his finances easier. It included a Visa debit card, electronic payments of monthly bills, and a checkbook.

“We also need to find this mystery girlfriend,” Myron said.

“Shouldn’t be too difficult,” Win said.

“No.”

“And as you suggested earlier, our old fraternity brother Billy Lee Palms might know something.”

“We can track him down,” Myron said.

Win raised a finger. “One thing.”

“I’m listening.”

“You will have to do the majority of the legwork on your own.”

“Why’s that?”

“I have a business to run.”

“So do I,” Myron said.

“You lose your business, you hurt two people.”

“Three,” Myron corrected. “You forgot Big Cyndi.”

“No. I am speaking of Big Cyndi and Esperanza. I left you out for all the obvious reasons. Again if you require the prerequisite cliché, please choose one of the following: You made your bed, now lie in it—”

“I get the point,” Myron interrupted. “But I still have a business to protect. For their sakes, if not my own.”

“No question.” Win motioned toward the trenches. “But at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I am responsible for those people out there. For their jobs and financial security. They have families and mortgages and tuition payments.” He pierced Myron with the ice blues. “That’s not something I take lightly.”

“I know.”

Win leaned back. “I’ll stay involved, of course. And again if my particular talents are needed—”

“Let’s hope they aren’t,” Myron interrupted.

Win shrugged again. Then he said, “Funny, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“We haven’t even mentioned Esperanza in all this. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps,” Win said, “we have some doubt about her innocence.”

“No.”

Win arched the eyebrow but said nothing.

“I’m not just being emotional,” Myron said. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

“And it makes no sense. First off, why would Esperanza kill Clu? What’s her motive?”

“The DA seems to think she killed him for the money.”

“Right. And I think it’s fair to say we both know better.”

Win paused, nodded. “Esperanza would not kill for money, no.”

“So we have no motive.”

Win frowned. “I’d say that conclusion is at best premature.”

“Okay, but now let’s look at the evidence. The gun, for example.”

“Go on,” Win said.

“Think this through for a second. Esperanza has a major altercation with Clu in front of witnesses, right?”

“Yes.”

Myron held up a finger. “One, would Esperanza be dumb enough to kill Clu so soon after a public fight?”

“Fair point,” Win conceded. “But perhaps the battle in the garage just raised the stakes. Perhaps after that Esperanza realized that Clu was out of control.”

“Fine, let’s say that Esperanza was still dumb enough to kill him after the fight. She’d have to know she’d be a suspect, right? I mean, there were witnesses.”

Win nodded slowly. “I’ll go with that.”

“So why was the murder weapon in the office? Esperanza isn’t that stupid. She’s worked with us before. She knows the ins and out. Hell, anybody with a television set would have known you’re supposed to dump the gun.”

Win hesitated. “I see what you’re saying.”

“So the gun had to be planted. And if the gun was planted, then it follows that the blood and the fibers were planted too.”

“Logical.” Win doing his best Mr. Spock. The Bat-phone rang again. Win picked up the receiver and dispatched the matter in seconds. They went back to thinking.

“On the other hand,” Win said, “I have never encountered a perfectly logical murder.”

“What do you mean?”

“Reality is messy and full of contradictions. Take the O.J. case.”

“The what?”

“The O.J. case,” Win repeated. “If all that blood was spilled and the Juice was drenched in it, why was so little found?”

“He changed clothes.”

“So? Even if he did, you’d expect to find more than a few dashboard splatters, wouldn’t you? If the Juice drove home and showered, why was no blood found on the tiles or in the pipes or what have you?”

“So you think O.J. was innocent?”

Win frowned again. “You are missing my point.”

“Which is?”

“Murder investigations never make complete sense. There are always rips in the fabric of logic. Unexplainable flaws. Perhaps Esperanza made a mistake. Perhaps she did not believe the police would suspect her. Perhaps she thought the weapon would be safer in the office than, say, her house.”

“She didn’t kill him, Win.”

Win spread his hands. “Who amongst us is incapable—given the right circumstances—of murder?”

Heavy silence.

Myron swallowed hard. “For the sake of argument, let’s assume the weapon was planted.”

Win nodded slowly, keeping his eyes on Myron’s.

“The question is, who set her up?”

“And why,” Win added.

“So we need to make a list of her enemies,” Myron said.

“And ours.”

“What?”

“This murder charge is seriously wounding both of us,” Win said. “We thus have to look at several possibilities.”

“For example?”

“First,” Win said, “we may be reading too much into the frame-up.”

“How so?”

“This may not be a personal vendetta at all. Perhaps the murderer heard about the garage altercation and concluded that Esperanza would make a convenient patsy.”

“So then this is all just a way of deflecting attention from the real killer? Nothing personal?”

“It’s a possibility,” Win said. “No more or less.”

“Okay,” Myron agreed, “what else?”

“The murderer wants to do Esperanza great harm.”

“The obvious choice.”

“For whatever that’s worth, yes,” Win said. “And possibility number three: The murderer wants to do one of us great harm.”

“Or,” Myron said, “our businesses.”

“Yes.”

Something like a giant cartoon anvil landed on Myron’s head. “Someone like FJ.”

Win merely smiled.

“And,” Myron went on, “if Clu was doing something illicit, something that needed large amounts of cash—”

“Then FJ and his family would be a prime possible recipient,” Win finished for him. “And of course, if we forget the money for a moment, FJ would relish any opportunity to crush you. What better way than decimating your business and incarcerating your best friend?”

“Two birds, one stone.”

“Precisely.”

Myron sat back, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t relish the idea of tangling with the Aches.”

“Neither do I,” Win said.

“You? Before, you wanted to kill FJ.”

“That’s just my point. I can’t anymore. If young FJ is behind this, we have to keep him alive in order to prove it. Trapping vermin is chancy. Simple extermination is the preferred course of action.”

“So we’ve now eliminated your favorite option.”

Win nodded. “Sad, no?”

“Tragic.”

“But it gets worse, old friend.”

“How’s that?”

“Innocent or guilty,” Win said, “Esperanza is concealing something from us.”

Silence.

“We have no choice,” Win said. “We need to investigate her too. Delve into her personal life a bit.”

“I don’t relish the idea of tangling with the Aches,” Myron said, “but I really don’t relish the idea of invading Esperanza’s privacy.”

“Be afraid,” Win agreed. “Be very afraid.”

CHAPTER 11

The first potential clue did two things to Myron: It scared the hell out of him, and it reminded him of The Sound of Music.

Myron liked the old Julie Andrews musical well enough—who didn’t?—but he always found one song particularly dumb. One of the classics actually. “My Favorite Things.” The song made no sense. Ask a zillion people to list their absolute favorite things, and how many of them are going to list doorbells, for crying out loud? You know what, Millie? I love doorbells! To hell with strolling on a quiet beach or reading a great book or making love or seeing a Broadway musical. Doorbells, Millie. Doorbells punch my ticket. Sometimes I just run up to people’s houses and press their doorbells and well, I think I’m man enough to admit I shudder.

Another puzzling “favorite” was brown paper packages tied up with string, mostly because it sounded like something sent by a mail-order pornographer (er, not that Myron would know that from personal experience). But that was what Myron found in the large stack of mail. Plain brown packaging. Typed address label with the word Personal across the bottom. No return address. Postmarked New York City.

Myron slit open the brown paper package, shook it, and watched a floppy disk drop to his desktop.

Hello.

Myron picked it up, turned it over, turned it back. No label on it. No writing. Just a plain black square with the metal across the top. Myron studied it for a moment, shrugged, popped it into his computer, hit some keys. He was about to hit Windows Explorer and see what kind of file it was when something started to happen. Myron sat back and frowned. He hoped that the diskette didn’t contain a computer virus of some sort. He should, after all, know better than to just stick a strange diskette into his computer. He didn’t know where it had been, what sleazy computer drive it had been inserted into before, if it wore a condom or had a blood test. Nothing. His poor computer. Just “Wham, bam, thank you, RAM.”

Groan.

The screen went black.

Myron tugged his ear. His finger stretched forward to strike the escape button—the escape button being the last refuge of a desperate computerphobe—when an image appeared on the screen. Myron froze.

It was a girl.

She had long, semistringy hair with two flips in front and an awkward smile. He guessed her age at around sixteen, braces fresh off, the eyes looking to the side, the backdrop a fading swirl of school-portrait rainbow. Yep, the picture belonged in a frame on Mommy and Daddy’s mantel or a suburban high school yearbook circa 1985, the kind of thing with a life-summing write-up underneath it, a life-defining quote from James Taylor or Bruce Springsteen followed by So-So enjoyed being secretary/treasurer of the Key Club, her fondest memories including hanging out with Jenny and Sharon T at the Big W, popcorn in Mrs. Kennilworth’s class, band practice behind the parking lot, that kind of apple-pie stuff. Typical. Kind of an obituary to adolescence.

Myron knew the girl.

Or at least he’d seen her before. He couldn’t put his finger on where or when or if he’d seen her in person or in a photograph or what. But there was no doubt. He stared hard, hoping to conjure up a name or even a fleeting memory. Nothing. He kept staring. And that was when it happened.

The girl began to melt.

It was the only way to describe it. The girl’s hair flips fell and blended into her flesh, her forehead sloped down, her nose dissolved, her eyes rolled back and then closed. Blood began to run down from the eye sockets, coating the face in crimson.

Myron bolted his chair back, nearly screaming.

The blood blanketed the image now, and for a moment Myron wondered if it would actually start coming out of the screen. A laughing noise came from the computer speakers. Not a psycho laugh or cruel laugh but the healthy, happy laugh of a teenage girl, a normal sound that raised the hairs on the back of Myron’s neck as no howl ever could.

Without warning, the screen went mercifully black. The laughter stopped. And then the Windows 98 main menu reappeared.

Myron gulped down a few breaths. His hands gripped the edge of the desk to the point of white knuckles.

What the hell?

His heart beat against his rib cage as though it wanted to break free. He reached back and grabbed the brown paper wrappings. The postmark was almost three weeks old. Three weeks. This awful diskette had been sitting in his pile of mail since he’d run away. Why? Who had sent this to him? And who was the girl?

Myron’s hand was still shaking when he picked up the phone. He dialed. Even though Myron had call block on his phone, a man answered by saying, “What’s up, Myron?”

“I need your help, PT.”

“Jesus, you sound like hell. This about Esperanza?”

“No.”

“So what have you got?”

“A computer diskette. Three-and-half-inch floppy. I need it analyzed.”

“Go to John Jay. Ask for Dr. Czerski. But if you’re looking for a trace, it’s pretty unlikely. What’s this about?”

“I got this diskette in the mail. It contains a graphic of a teenage girl. In an AVI file of some sort.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll call Czerski. You head over.”

Dr. Kirstin Czerski sported a white lab coat and a frown as yielding as a former East German swimmer’s. Myron tried Smile Patent 17—moist Alan Alda, post-M*A*S*H.

“Hi,” Myron said. “My name is—”

“The diskette.” She held out her hand. He handed it to her. She looked at it for a second and headed for a door. “Wait here.”

The door opened. Myron got a brief view of a room that looked like the bridge on Battlestar Galactica. Lots of metal and wires and lights and monitors and reel-to-reel tapes. The door closed. Myron stood in a sparsely decorated waiting room. Linoleum floor, three molded plastic chairs, brochures on a wall.

Myron’s cellular phone rang again. He stared at it for a second. Six weeks ago he had turned the phone off. Now that it was back on, the contraption seemed to be making up for lost time. He pressed a button and brought it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Myron.”

Pow. The voice walloped him like a palm blast to the sternum. A rushing noise filled his ears, as though the phone were a seashell clamped against him. Myron slid into a yellow plastic chair.

“Hello, Jessica,” he managed.

“I saw you on the news,” she said, her voice a tad too controlled. “So I figured you’d turn your phone back on.”

“Right.”

More silence.

“I’m in Los Angeles,” Jessica continued.

“Uh-huh.”

“But I needed to tell you a few things.”

“Oh?” Myron’s Smooth-Lines Fountain—he just couldn’t turn it off.

“First off, I’ll be gone for at least another month. I didn’t change the locks or anything so you can stay at the loft—”

“I’m, uh, bunking at Win’s.”

“Yeah, I figured. But if you need anything or if you want to clear your stuff out—”

“Right.”

“Don’t forget the TV too. That’s yours.”

“You can keep it,” he said.

“Fine.”

More silence.

Jessica said, “We’re being so adult about this, aren’t we?”

“Jess—”

“Don’t. I called for a reason.”

Myron kept quiet.

“Clu called you several times. At the loft, I mean.” Myron had guessed that.

“He sounded pretty desperate. I told him I didn’t know where you were. He said that he had to find you. That he was worried about you.”

“About me?”

“Yes. He came by once, looking like absolute shit. He grilled me for twenty minutes.”

“About what?”

“About where you were. He said that he had to reach you—for your sake more than his. When I insisted that I didn’t know where you were, he started scaring me.”

“Scaring you how?”

“He asked how I knew you weren’t dead.”

“Clu said those words? About my being dead?”

“Yes. I actually called Win when he left.”

“What did Win say?”

“That you were safe and that I shouldn’t worry.”

“What else?”

“I’m talking about Win here, Myron. He said—and I quote—‘he’s safe, don’t worry.’ Then he hung up. I let it drop. I figured that Clu was engaging in a little hyperbole to get my attention.”

“That was probably it,” Myron said.

“Yeah.”

More silence.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m good. And you?”

“I’m trying to get over you,” she said.

He could barely breathe. “Jess, we should talk—”

“Don’t,” she said again. “I don’t want to talk, okay? Let me put it simply: If you change your mind, call me. You know the number. If not, have a nice life.”

Click.

Myron put down the phone. He took several deep breaths. He looked at the phone. So simple. He did indeed know the number. How easy it would be to dial it.

“Worthless.”

He looked up at Dr. Czerski. “Pardon?”

She held up the diskette. “You said there was graphic on it?”

Myron quickly explained what he had seen.

“It’s not there now,” she said. “It must have deleted itself.”

“How?”

“You say the program ran automatically?”

“Yes.”

“It probably self-extracted, self-ran, and then self-deleted. Simple.”

“Aren’t there special programs so you can undelete a file?”

“Yes. But this file did more than that. It reformatted the whole diskette. Probably the final command in the chain.”

“Meaning?”

“Whatever you saw is gone forever.”

“Is there anything else on the diskette?”

“No.”

“Nothing we can trace? No unique characteristics or anything?”

She shook her head. “Typical diskette. Sold in every software store in the country. Standard formatting.”

“How about fingerprints?”

“That’s not my department.”

And, Myron knew, it would be a waste of time. If someone had gone to the trouble of destroying any computer evidence, chances were pretty good that all fingerprints had been wiped off too.

“I’m busy.” Dr. Czerski handed him back the diskette and left without so much as a back glance. Myron stared at it and shook his head.

What the hell was going on here?

The cell phone rang again. Myron picked it up.

“Mr. Bolitar?” It was Big Cyndi.

“Yes.”

“I am going through Mr. Clu Haid’s phone records, as you requested.”

“And?”

“Are you coming back to the office, Mr. Bolitar?”

“I’m on the way there now.”

“There is something here you might find bizarre.”

CHAPTER 12

When the elevator opened, Big Cyndi was waiting for him. She’d finally scrubbed her face clean. All the makeup was gone. Must have used a sand blaster. Or a jackhammer.

She greeted him by saying, “Very bizarre, Mr. Bolitar.”

“What’s that?”

“Per your instructions, I was checking through Clu Haid’s phone records,” she said. Then she shook her head. “Very bizarre.”

“What’s bizarre?”

She handed him a sheet of paper. “I highlighted the number in yellow.”

Myron looked at it while walking into this office. Big Cyndi followed, closing the door behind her. The number was in the 212 area code. That meant Manhattan. Other than that, it was totally unfamiliar. “What about it?”

“It’s for a nightclub.”

“Which one?”

“Take A Guess.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s the name of the place,” Big Cyndi said. “Take A Guess. It’s two blocks down from Leather-N-Lust.” Leather-N-Lust was the S&M bar that employed Big Cyndi as a bouncer. Motto: Hurt The Ones You Love.

“You know this place?” he asked.

“A little.”

“What kind of club is it?”

“Cross-dressers and transvestites, mostly. But they have a varied crowd.”

Myron rubbed his temples. “When you say varied …”

“It’s sort of an interesting concept really, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I’m sure.”

“When you go to Take A Guess, you never know for sure what you’re getting. You know what I mean?”

Myron didn’t have a clue. “Pardon my sexual naiveté, but could you explain?”

Big Cyndi scrunched her face in thought. It was not a pretty sight. “In part, it’s what you might expect: men dress like women, women dress like men. But then sometimes a woman is just a woman and a man is just a man. Follow?”

Myron nodded. “Not even a little.”

“That’s why it’s called Take A Guess. You never know for sure. For instance, you might see a beautiful woman who is unusually tall with a platinum wig. So you figure it’s a he-she. But—and this is what makes Take A Guess special—maybe it’s not.”

“Not what?”

“A he-she. A transvestite or transsexual. Maybe it is indeed a beautiful woman who put on extra-high heels and a wig to confuse you.”

“And the reason for this is?”

“That’s the fun of the place. The doubt. There’s a sign inside, TAKE A GUESS: IT’S ABOUT AMBIGUITY, NOT ANDROGYNY.”

“Catchy.”

“But that’s the idea. It’s a place of mystery. You bring someone home. You think it’s a beautiful woman or a handsome man. But until the pants are all the way down, you’re never sure. People come dressed to fool. You just never know until—well, you saw The Crying Game.”

Myron made a face. “And this is a desirable thing?”

“If you’re into that, sure.”

“Into what?”

She smiled. “Exactly.”

Myron rubbed the temples again. “So the patrons don’t have a problem with”—he searched for the right word, but there wasn’t one—“so a gay guy, for example, doesn’t get pissed off when he finds out he brought home a woman?”

“It’s why you go. The thrill. The uncertainty. The mystery.”

“Sort of the sexual equivalent of a grab bag.”

“Right.”

“Except in this case, you can really be surprised by what you grab.”

Big Cyndi considered that. “If you really think about it, Mr. Bolitar, there can be only one of two things.”

He was no longer so sure.

“But I like your grab bag analogy,” Big Cyndi continued. “You know what you’re bringing to the party, but you have no idea what you’re going to take home. One time a guy left with what he thought was an overweight woman. It turned out that it was a guy with a midget hiding under the dress.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

Big Cyndi just looked at him.

“So,” Myron continued, “you, uh, frequent this place?”

“I’ve been a couple of times. But not recently.”

“Why not?”

“Two reasons. First, they compete with Leather-N-Lust. It’s a different crowd, but we still draw from similar markets.”

Myron nodded. “The pervert pool.”

“They’re not hurting anybody.”

“At least nobody who doesn’t want to be hurt.”

She pouted, not a great look on a three-hundred-pound wrestler, especially without her mortarlike makeup. “Esperanza is right.”

“About?”

“You can be very closed-minded.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular Jerry Falwell. So what’s the second reason?”

She hesitated. “I’m obviously for sexual freedom. I don’t care what you’re doing as long as it’s consensual. And I’ve done some wild things myself, Mr. Bolitar.” She looked straight at him. “Very wild.”

Myron cringed, fearing she might share details.

“But Take A Guess started drawing the wrong kind of crowd,” she said.

“Gee, that’s surprising,” Myron said. “You’d think a place like that would be a natural for vacationing families.”

She shook her head. “You are so repressed, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Because I like to know my partner’s gender before getting naked?”

“Because of your attitude. People like you cause sexual hang-ups. Society becomes sexually repressed—so repressed, in fact, that they cross the line between sex and violence, between playacting and real danger. They reach a stage where they get off by hurting people who do not want to be hurt.”

“And Take A Guess attracts that kind of crowd?”

“More than most.”

Myron sat back and rubbed his face with both hands. He started hearing brain clicks. “This might explain a few things,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Why Bonnie finally threw Clu out for good. It’s one thing to have a string of girlfriends. But if Clu was frequenting a place like this, if he started leaning toward”—again, what would be the word?—“toward whatever. And if Bonnie found out, well, it would explain the legal separation.” He nodded to himself as he heard more internal clicks. “And it would explain her odd behavior today.”

“How so?”

“She made a point of asking me not to dig too deeply. She just wanted me to clear Esperanza and then drop the investigation.”

Big Cyndi nodded. “She was afraid this would get out.”

“Right. If something like this went public, what would it do to her kids?”

Another thought floating through Myron’s brain got snagged on some jagged rock. He looked at Big Cyndi. “I assume that Take A Guess appeals mostly to bisexuals. I mean, if you’re not sure what you’re getting, who better than someone who wouldn’t care?”

“More like ambisexuals,” Big Cyndi said. “Or people who want some mystery. Who want something new.”

“But bisexuals too.”

“Yes, of course.”

“How about Esperanza?”

Big Cyndi bristled. “What about her?”

“Did she frequent this place?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Bolitar. And I don’t see the relevance.”

“I’m not asking because it gives me jollies. You want me to help her, right? That means digging where we don’t want to dig.”

“I understand that, Mr. Bolitar. But you know her better than I do.”

“Not this side of her,” Myron said.

“Esperanza is a private person. I really don’t know. She usually has a steady, but I don’t know if she’s gone there or not.”

Myron nodded. Didn’t matter much. If Clu had been hanging out in such a place, it would give Hester Crimstein more reasonable doubt. A rough trade place complete with a reputation for violence—it was a natural recipe for disaster. Clu could have brought home the wrong package. Or been the wrong package. And there was the cash to consider. Blackmail money? Did a customer recognize him? Threaten him? Videotape him?

Yep, lots of murky reasonable doubt.

And a good place to search for the elusive girlfriend. Or boyfriend. Or in-between friend. He shook his head. It was not a question of the ethics or moral dilemma for Myron; deviancy simply confused him. Repugnancy aside, he didn’t get it. Lack of imagination, he supposed.

“I’ll have to pay the Take A Guess a visit,” he said.

“Not alone,” Big Cyndi said. “I’ll go with you.”

Subtle surveillance was out. “Fine.”

“And not now. Take A Guess doesn’t open until eleven.”

“Okay. We’ll go tonight then.”

“I have just the outfit,” she said. “What are you going to go as?”

“A repressed heterosexual man,” he said. “All I’ll have to do is slip on my Rockports.” He looked at the phone record again. “You have another number highlighted in blue.”

She nodded. “You mentioned an old friend named Billy Lee Palms.”

“This his number?”

“No. Mr. Palms doesn’t exist anywhere. No phone listing. And he hasn’t paid taxes in four years.”

“So whose number is this?”

“Mr. Palms’s parents. Mr. Haid called them twice in the past month.”

Myron checked the address. Westchester. He vaguely remembered meeting Billy Lee’s parents during a Family Day at Duke. He looked at his watch. It would take an hour to get there. He grabbed his coat and headed for the elevator.

CHAPTER 13

Myron’s car, the business’s Ford Taurus, had been confiscated by the police, so he rented a maroon Mercury Cougar. He hoped the women would be able to resist. When he started the car, the radio was tuned to Lite FM 106.7. Patti LaBelle and Michael McDonald were crooning a sad lite staple entitled “On My Own.” This once blissfully happy couple were breaking up. Tragic. So tragic that, as Michael McDonald put it, “Now we’re up to talking divorce … and we weren’t even married.”

Myron shook his head. For this Michael McDonald left the Doobie Brothers?

In college Billy Lee Palms had been the quintessential party boy. He had sneaky good looks, jet black hair, and a magnetic, albeit oily, combination of charisma and machismo, the kind of thing that played well with young coeds away from home for the first time. At Duke the frat brothers had dubbed him Otter, the pseudosuave character in the movie Animal House. It fitted. Billy Lee was also a great baseball player, a catcher who managed to reach the major leagues for a half season, riding the bench for the Baltimore Orioles the year they won the World Series.

But that was years ago.

Myron knocked on the door. Seconds later the door swung open fast and wide. No warning, nothing. Strange. In this day and age people looked through peepholes or cracks in chain-held doors or at the very least asked who it was.

A woman he vaguely recognized as Mrs. Palms said, “Yes?” She was small with a squirrel mouth and eyes that bulged like something behind them was pushing to get out. Her hair was tied back, but several strands escaped and drooped in front of her face. She pushed them back with splayed fingers.

“Are you Mrs. Palms?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“My name is Myron Bolitar. I went to Duke with Billy Lee.”

Her voice dropped an octave or two. “Do you know where he is?”

“No, ma’am. Is he missing?”

She frowned and stepped back. “Come in, please.”

Myron moved into the foyer. Mrs. Palms was already heading down a corridor. She pointed to her right without turning around or breaking stride. “Just go into Sarah’s wedding room. I’ll be there in a second.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Sarah’s wedding room?

He followed where she had pointed. When he turned the corner, he heard himself give a little gasp. Sarah’s wedding room. The decor was run-of-the-mill living room, something out of a furniture store circular. An off-white couch and matching love seat formed a broken L, probably the monthly special, $695 for both, the couch might fold out into a Serta sleeper, something like that. The coffee table was a semi oak square, a short stack of attractive, unread magazines on one end, silk flowers in the middle, a couple of coffee books on the other end. The wall-to-wall carpeting was light beige, and there were two torchere lamps à la the Pottery Barn.

But the walls were anything but ordinary.

Myron had seen plenty of houses with photographs on the walls. They were hardly uncommon. He had even been in a house or two where the photographs dominated rather than complemented the surroundings. That too would hardly give him reason to pause. But this was beyond surreal. Sarah’s Wedding Room—heck, it should be capitalized—was a re-creation of that event. Literally. Color wedding photographs had been blown up to life size and pasted on as a wallpaper substitute. The bride and groom smiled at him invitingly from the right. On the left, Billy Lee in a tux, probably the best man or maybe just an usher, smiled at him. Mrs. Palms, dressed in a summer gown, danced with her husband. In front of him were the wedding tables, lots of them. Guests looked up and smiled at him—all life size. It was as though a panoramic wedding photo had been blown up to the size of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. People slow-danced. A band played. There was a minister of sorts and floral arrangements and a wedding cake and fine china and white linen—again, all life size.

“Please sit down.”

Myron turned to Mrs. Palms. Was it the real Mrs. Palms or one of the reproductions? No, she was casually dressed. The real McCoy. He almost reached out and touched her to make sure. “Thank you,” he said.

“This is our daughter Sarah’s wedding. She was married four years ago.”

“I see.”

“It was a very special day for us.”

“I’m sure.”

“We had it at the Manor in West Orange. You know it?”

“I was bar mitzvahed there,” Myron said.

“Really? Your parents must have very fond memories of the day.”

“Yes.” But now he wondered. I mean, Mom and Dad kept most of the photos in an album.

Mrs. Palms smiled at him. “It’s odd, I know, but … oh, I’ve explained this a thousand times. What’s one more?” She sighed, signaled to a couch. Myron sat. She did likewise.

Mrs. Palms folded her hands and looked at him with the blank stare of a woman who sat too close to life’s big screen. “People take pictures of their most special times,” she began too earnestly. “They want to capture the important moments. They want to enjoy them and savor them and relive them. But that’s not what they do. They take the picture, they look at it once, and then they stick it in a box and forget about it. Not me. I remember the good times. I wallow in them—re-create them, if I can. After all, we live for those moments, don’t we, Myron?”

He nodded.

“So when I sit in this room, it warms me. I’m surrounded by one of the happiest moments in my life. I’ve created the most positive aura imaginable.”

He nodded again.

“I’m not a big art fan,” she continued. “I don’t relish the idea of hanging impersonal lithographs on the walls. What’s the point of looking at images of people and places I don’t know? I don’t care that much about interior design. And I don’t like antiques or phony-baloney Martha Stewart stuff. But do you know what I do find beautiful?” She stopped and looked at him expectantly.

Myron picked up his cue. “What?”

“My family,” she replied. “My family is beautiful to me. My family is art. Does that make sense to you, Myron?”

“Yes.” Oddly enough, it did.

“So I call this Sarah’s Wedding Room. I know that’s silly. Naming rooms. Blowing up old photographs and using them as wallpaper. But all the rooms are like this. Billy Lee’s bedroom upstairs I call the Catcher’s Mitt. It’s where he still stays when he’s here. I think it comforts him.” She raised her eyebrows. “Would you like to see it?”

“Sure.”

She practically leaped off the couch. The stairwell was plastered with giant, seemingly old black and whites. A stern-faced couple in wedding gear. A soldier in full uniform. “This is the Generational Wall. That’s my great-grandparents over there. And Hank’s. My husband. He died three years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “This stairwell goes back three generations. I think it’s a nice way of remembering our ancestors.”

Myron didn’t argue. He looked at the photograph of the young couple, just starting out their life together, probably a little scared. Now they were dead.

Deep Thoughts by Myron Bolitar.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But is it any stranger than hanging oils of dead relatives? Just more lifelike.”

Hard to argue.

The walls in the upstairs corridor featured some sort of costume party from the seventies. Lots of leisure suits and bell-bottoms. Myron didn’t ask, and Mrs. Palms didn’t explain. Just as well. She turned left and Myron trailed her into the Catcher’s Mitt. It lived up to its billing. Billy Lee’s baseball life was laid out like a Hall of Fame display room. It started with Billy Lee in Little League, squatting in his catcher’s stance, his smile huge and strangely confident for so young a child. The years flashed by. Little League to Babe Ruth League to high school to Duke, ending with his one glorious year with the Orioles, Billy Lee proudly showing off his World Series ring. Myron studied the Duke photographs. One had been taken out in front of Psi U, their frat house. A uniformed Billy Lee had his arm around Clu, plenty of frat brothers in the background, including, he saw now, him and Win. Myron remembered when the picture had been taken. The baseball team had just beaten Florida State to win the national championship. The party had lasted three days.

“Mrs. Palms, where is Billy Lee?”

“I don’t know.”

“When you say you don’t know—”

“He ran off,” she interrupted. “Again.”

“He’s done this before?”

She stared at the wall. Her eyes were glassy now. “Maybe Billy Lee doesn’t find this room comforting,” she said softly. “Maybe it reminds him of what could have been.” She turned to him. “When was the last time you saw Billy Lee?”

Myron tried to remember. “It’s been a long time.”

“How come?”

“We were never that close.”

She pointed to the wall. “That’s you? In the background?”

“That’s right.”

“Billy Lee spoke about you.”

“Really?”

“He said you were a sports agent. Clu’s agent, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yes.”

“You stayed friendly with Clu then?”

“Yes.”

She nodded as though this explained everything. “Why are you looking for my son, Myron?”

He was not sure how to explain. “You’ve heard about Clu’s death?”

“Yes, of course. That poor boy. A lost soul. Like Billy Lee in many ways. I think that’s why they were drawn to each other.”

“Have you seen Clu lately?”

“Why do you want to know?”

In for a penny and all that. “I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

Her body stiffened as though his words held a small electric shock. “And you think Billy Lee had something to do with it?”

“No, of course not.” But even as he said it, he began to wonder. Clu is murdered; maybe his killer runs away. More reasonable doubt. “It’s just that I know how close they were. I thought maybe Billy Lee could help me out.”

Mrs. Palms was staring at the image of the two ballplayers in front of Psi U. She reached out as though to stroke her son’s face. But she pulled back. “Billy Lee was handsome, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“The girls,” she said. “They all loved my Billy Lee.”

“I’d never seen anybody better with them,” he said. That made her smile. She kept staring at the image of her son. It was kinda creepy. Myron remembered the old episode of The Twilight Zone where the aging movie queen escapes reality by stepping into one of her old movies. It looked like Mrs. Palms craved doing likewise.

She finally tore her eyes away. “Clu came by a few weeks ago.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Funny.”

“What?”

“That’s just what the police asked.”

“The police were here?”

“Sure.”

They must have gone through the phone records too, Myron thought. Or found another link.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. I can’t be more specific.”

“Do you know what Clu wanted?”

“He came to see Billy Lee.”

“Billy Lee was here?”

“Yes.”

“He lives here then?”

“On and off. The past few years have not been very good to my son.”

Silence.

“I don’t mean to pry,” Myron began, “but—”

“What happened to Billy Lee?” she finished. “Life caught up with him, Myron. The drinking, the drugs, the womanizing. He had stints in rehab. Are you familiar with Rockwell?”

“No, ma’am.”

“It’s a private clinic. He finished his fourth trip to Rockwell not two months ago. But he couldn’t stay clean. When you’re in college or even in your twenties, you can survive it. When you’re a big star and people are looking out for you, you can get away with it. But Billy Lee wasn’t good enough to reach that level. So he had no one to fall back upon. Except me. And I’m not that strong.”

Myron swallowed. “Do you know why Clu came to see Billy Lee?”

“For old times’ sake, I guess. They went out. Maybe they had a few beers and chased women. I really don’t know.”

“Did Clu visit Billy Lee a lot?”

“Well, Clu’s been out of town,” she said, a little too defensively. “He was only traded back to this area a few months ago. But of course, you know that.”

“So this was just a casual visit?”

“I thought so at the time.”

“And now?”

“Now my son is missing and Clu is dead.”

Myron thought about it. “Where does he usually go when he runs off like this?”

“Wherever. Billy Lee is a bit of a nomad. He goes off, he does whatever horrible thing he does to himself, and when he hits rock bottom, he comes back here.”

“So you don’t know where he is?”

“That’s right.”

“Any idea at all?”

“No.”

“No favorite haunts?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend maybe?”

“No one I know about anyway.”

“Any close friends he might stay with?”

“No,” she said slowly. “He has no friends like that.” Myron took out his card and handed it to her. “If you hear from him, Mrs. Palms, could you please let me know?”

She studied the card as they moved out of the room and back down the stairs.

Before she opened the door, Mrs. Palms said, “You were the basketball player.”

“Yes.”

“The one who hurt his knee.”

First preseason game as a pro. Myron had been the Boston Celtics’ first-round draft pick. A terrible collision and his career was over. Just like that. Finished before it started. “Yes.”

“You managed to put it behind you,” she said. “You managed to get on with your life and be happy and productive.” She cocked her head. “Why couldn’t Billy Lee?”

Myron had no answer—in part because he was not sure her supposition was entirely accurate. He said his good-byes and left her alone with her ghosts.

CHAPTER 14

Myron checked his watch. Dinnertime. Mom and Dad were expecting him. He’d hit the Garden State Parkway when the cell phone rang again.

“Are you in the car?” Win asked. Always with the pleasantries.

“Yes.”

“Flip on 1010 WINS. I’ll call back.”

One of New York’s all-news radio stations. Myron did as he was told. The guy in the helicopter was finishing up the traffic report. He handed it back to the woman at the news desk. She provided the teaser: “The latest bombshell in the murder of baseball superstar Clu Haid. In sixty seconds.”

It was a long sixty seconds. Myron had to put up with a truly annoying Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, and then some excited bozo had a way of turning five thousand dollars into twenty thousand dollars, though a softer, fast-speaking voice added that it didn’t work all the time and in fact you could lose money too and probably would and you’d have to be a major moron to take investment advice from a radio ad. Finally the woman at the news desk came back on. She told the audience her name—like anyone cared—the name of her male counterpart, and the time. Then:

“ABC is reporting from an anonymous source in the Bergen County district attorney’s office that hairs and quote other bodily materials unquote matching the murder suspect Esperanza Diaz have been found at the murder scene. According to the source, DNA tests are pending, but preliminary tests show a clear match with Ms. Diaz. The source also says that the hairs, some small, were found in various locations throughout the house.”

Myron felt a flutter beneath his heart. Small hairs, he thought. Euphemism for pubic.

“No further details are available, but the district attorney’s office clearly believes that Mr. Clu Haid and Ms. Esperanza Diaz were having a sexual relationship. Stay tuned to 1010 WINS for all the details.”

The cell phone rang. Myron picked it up. “Jesus Christ.”

“Not even close,” Win said.

“I’ll call you right back.” Myron hung up. He called Hester Crimstein’s office. The secretary said that Ms. Crimstein was unavailable. Myron stressed that this was urgent. Ms. Crimstein was still unavailable. But, Myron asked, doesn’t Ms. Crimstein have a cell phone? The secretary disconnected the call. Myron hit the memory button. Win picked up.

“What’s your take on this?” Myron asked.

“Esperanza was sleeping with him,” Win said.

“Maybe not.”

“Yes, of course,” Win said. “Perhaps someone planted Esperanza’s pubic hairs at the murder scene.”

“It could be a false leak.”

“Could be.”

“Or maybe she visited his apartment. To talk business.”

“And left stray pubic hairs behind?”

“Maybe she used the bathroom. Maybe she—”

“Myron?”

“What?”

“Please don’t go into further detail, thank you. There is something else to consider.”

“What?”

“The E-Z Pass records.”

“Right,” Myron said. “She crossed the Washington Bridge an hour after the murder. We know that. But maybe that fits now. Esperanza and Clu have a big argument at the parking garage. Esperanza wants to clear the air. So she drives out to his apartment.”

“And when she gets there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she saw the body and panicked.”

“Yes, of course,” Win said. “So she ripped out a few pubic hairs and ran.”

“I didn’t say it was her first visit out there.”

“Indeed not.”

“What do you mean?”

“The E-Z Pass records for the Ford Taurus. According to the bill that arrived last week, the car crossed the bridge eighteen times in the past month.”

Myron frowned. “You’re kidding.”

“Yes, I am a mirthful fellow. I also took the liberty of checking the month before. Sixteen crosses of the Washington Bridge.”

“Maybe she had another reason for going out to North Jersey.”

“Yes, of course. The malls in Paramus are quite an attraction.”

“Okay,” Myron said. “Let’s assume they were having an affair.”

“That would seem most prudent, especially since it offers a reasonable explanation for much that has happened.”

“How’s that?”

“It would explain Esperanza’s silence.”

“How?”

“Lovers always make wonderful suspects,” Win said. “If, for example, Esperanza and Clu were dancing the sheet mambo, then we can assume that the altercation in the parking garage was something of a lovers’ tiff. All in all, this development looks bad for her. She would want to hide it.”

“But from us?” Myron countered.

“Yes.”

“Why? She trusts us.”

“Several reasons come to mind. Her attorney probably ordered her not to say anything.”

“That wouldn’t stop her.”

“It might. But more important, Esperanza was probably embarrassed. You have recently promoted her to partner. She was in charge of the entire operation. I know that you believe Esperanza is too tough to care about such things, but I do not think she would relish your disapproval.”

Myron mulled that one over. It made some sense, but he wasn’t sure he bought it entirely. “I still think we’re missing something.”

“That’s because we’re ignoring the strongest motive for her keeping silent.”

“That being?”

“She killed him.”

Win hung up on that cheery note. Myron took Northfield Avenue toward Livingston. The familiar landmarks of his hometown popped into view. He thought about the news report and what Win had said. Could Esperanza be the mystery woman, the reason for Clu and Bonnie’s breakup? If so, why wouldn’t Bonnie say that? Maybe she didn’t know. Or maybe—

Hold the phone.

Maybe Clu and Esperanza met up at Take A Guess. Did they go there together or just bump into each other? Is that how the affair started? Did they go there and participate in—in whatever? Maybe it was an accident. Maybe they both arrived there in disguise and didn’t realize who they were until, well, it was too late to stop? Did that make sense?

He made the right at Nero’s Restaurant and onto Hobart Gap Road. Not far now. He was in the land of his childhood—check that, his entire life. He had lived here with his parents until a year or so ago, when he finally severed the apron strings and moved in with Jessica. Psychologists and psychiatrists and the like, he knew, would have a field day with the fact that he had lived with his parents into his thirties, theorizing all kinds of unnatural preoccupations that kept him so close to Mom and Dad. Maybe they’d be right. But for Myron, the answer had been far simpler. He liked them. Yes, they could be pests—what parents weren’t?—and they liked to pry. But most of the pestering and prying were over the incidentals. They had given him privacy yet made him feel cared for and wanted. Was that unhealthy? Maybe. But it seemed a damn sight better than his friends who thrived on blaming their parents for any unhappiness in their lives.

He turned onto his street. The old neighborhood was wholly unspectacular. There were thousands like it in New Jersey, hundreds of thousands throughout the US of A. This was suburbia, the backbone of this country, the battleground of the fabled American Dream. Corny to say, but Myron loved it here. Sure, there was unhappiness and dissatisfaction and fights and all that, but he still thought that this was the “realest” place he had ever been. He loved the basketball court in the driveway and the training wheels on the new two-wheelers and the routine and the walking to school and the caring too much about the color of the grass. This was living. This was what it was all about.

In the end Myron guessed that he and Jessica had broken up for all the classic reasons, albeit with a gender twist. He wanted to settle down, buy a house in the ’burbs, raise a family; Jessica, fearing commitment, did not. He pulled into the driveway now, shaking his head. Too simple an explanation. Too pat. The commitment stuff had been an ongoing source of tension, no question, but there was more to it. There was the recent tragedy, for one thing.

There was Brenda.

Mom rushed out the door, sprinting toward him with her arms spread wide. She always greeted him like he was a recently released POW, but today was something extra special. She threw her arms around him, nearly knocking him over. Dad trailed behind, equally excited but playing it cool. Dad had always been about balance, the total love without the smothering, the caring without pushing. An amazing man, his father. When Dad reached him, there was no handshake. The two men hugged fiercely and without any hint of embarrassment. Myron kissed his father’s cheek. The familiar feel of Dad’s rough skin made him understand a bit what Mrs. Palms was trying to accomplish with the wallpapered images.

“Are you hungry?” Mom asked. Always her opening gambit.

“A little.”

“You want me to fix something?”

Everyone froze. Dad made a face. “You’re going to cook?”

“What’s the big deal?”

“Let me make sure I have the number of poison control.”

“Oh, Al, that’s so funny. Ha-ha, I can’t stop laughing. What a funny man your father is, Myron.”

“Actually, Ellen, go ahead and cook something. I need to drop a few pounds.”

“Wow, what a knee slapper, Al. You’re killing me here.”

“Better than a fat farm.”

“Ho-ho.”

“Just the thought is better than an appetite suppressor.”

“It’s like being married to Shecky Greene.” But she was smiling.

They were in the house now. Dad took Mom’s hand. “Let me show you something, Ellen,” Dad said. “See that big metal box over there? That’s called an oven. O-v-e-n. Oven. See that knob, the one with all the numbers on it? That’s how you turn it on.”

“You’re funnier than a sober Foster Brooks, Al.”

But they were all smiling now. Dad was speaking the truth. Mom didn’t cook. Almost never did. Her culinary skills could cause a prison riot. When he was a kid, Myron’s favorite home-cooked dinner was Dad’s scrambled eggs. Mom was an early career woman. The kitchen was a place to read magazines.

“What do you want to eat, Myron?” Mom asked. “Chinese maybe. From Fong’s?”

“Sure.”

“Al, call Fong’s. Order something.”

“Okay.”

“Make sure you get shrimp with lobster sauce.”

“I know.”

“Myron loves Fong’s shrimp with lobster sauce.”

“I know, Ellen. I raised him too, remember?”

“You might forget.”

“We’ve been ordering from Fong’s for twenty-three years. We always order shrimp with lobster sauce.”

“You might forget, Al. You’re getting old. Didn’t you forget to pick up my blouse at the laundry two days ago?”

“It was closed.”

“So you never picked up my blouse, am I right?”

“Of course not.”

“I rest my case.” She looked at her son. “Myron, sit. We need to talk. Al, call Fong’s.”

The men obeyed her orders. As always. Myron and Mom sat at the kitchen table.

“Listen to me closely,” Mom said. “I know Esperanza is your friend. But Hester Crimstein is a fine lawyer. If she told Esperanza not to talk to you, it’s the right thing.”

“How do you know—”

“I’ve known Hester for years.” Mom was a defense attorney, one of the best in the state. “We’ve worked cases together before. She called me. She said you’re interfering.”

“I’m not interfering.”

“Actually she said you’re bothering her and to butt out.”

“She talked to you about this?”

“Of course. She wants you to leave her client alone.”

“I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

Myron squirmed a bit. “I have some information that might be important.”

“Such as?”

“According to Clu’s wife, he was having an affair.”

“And you think Hester doesn’t know that? The DA thinks he was having an affair with Esperanza.”

“Wait a second.” It was Dad. “I thought Esperanza was a lesbian.”

“She’s a bisexual, Al.”

“A what?”

“Bisexual. It means she likes both boys and girls.”

Dad thought about that. “I guess that’s a good thing to be.”

“What?”

“I mean, it gives you double the options of everyone else.”

“Great, Al, thanks for the insight.” She rolled her eyes and turned back to Myron. “So Hester already knows that. What else?”

“Clu was desperate to find me before he was killed,” Myron said.

“Most logically, bubbe, to say something incriminating about Esperanza.”

“Not necessarily. Clu came to the loft. He told Jessica that I was in danger.”

“And you think he meant it?”

“No, he was probably exaggerating. But shouldn’t Hester Crimstein judge the significance?”

“She already has.”

“What?”

“Clu came here too, darling.” Her voice was suddenly soft. “He told your father and me the same thing he told Jessica.”

Myron didn’t push it. If Clu had told his parents the same thing he told Jessica, if he had used all that death talk when Mom and Dad didn’t know where Myron was …

As though reading his mind, Dad said, “I called Win. He said you were safe.”

“Did he tell you where I was?”

Mom took that one. “We didn’t ask.”

Silence.

She reached over and put a hand on his arm. “You’ve been through a lot, Myron. Your father and I know that.”

They both looked at him with the deep-caring eyes. They knew part of what happened. About his breakup with Jessica. About Brenda. But they would never know it all.

“Hester Crimstein knows what’s she doing,” Mom went on. “You have to let her do her job.”

More silence.

“Al?”

“What?”

“Hang up the phone,” she said. “Maybe we should go out to eat.”

Myron checked his watch. “It’ll have to be quick. I have to get back to the city.”

“Oh?” Mom raised an eyebrow. “You have a date already?”

He thought about Big Cyndi’s description of Take A Guess.

“Not likely,” he said. “But you never know.”

CHAPTER 15

From the outside Take A Guess looked pretty much like your standard Manhattan cantina-as-pickup-joint. The building was brick, the windows darkened to highlight the neon beer signs. Above the door, faded lettering spelled out Take A Guess. That was it. No “Bring Your Perversions.” No “The Kinkier the Better.” No “You Better Like Surprises.” Nothing. A suit trudging home might happen by here, stop in, lay down his briefcase, spot something attractive, buy it a drink, make a few quasi-smooth moves warmed over from college mixers, take it home. Surprise, surprise.

Big Cyndi met him at the front door dressed like Earth, Wind, and Fire—not so much any one member as the entire group. “Ready?”

Myron hesitated, nodded.

When Big Cyndi pushed open the door, Myron held his breath and ducked in behind her. The interior too was not what he’d visualized. He had expected something … blatantly wacko, he guessed. Like the bar scene in Star Wars maybe. Instead Take A Guess just had the same neodesperate feel and stench of a zillion other singles’ joints on a Friday night. A few patrons were colorfully dressed, but most wore khakis and business suits. There were also a handful of outrageously clad cross-dressers and leather devotees and one babe-a-rama packed into a vinyl catsuit, but nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find a Manhattan nightspot that didn’t have any of that. Sure, some folks were in disguise, but when it came right down to it, who didn’t wear a facade at a singles’ bar?

Whoa, that was deep.

Heads and eyes swerved in their direction. For a moment Myron wondered why. But only for a moment. He was, after all, standing next to Big Cyndi, a six-six three-hundred-pound multihued mass blanketed with more sparkles than a Siegfried and Roy costume party. She drew the eye.

Big Cyndi seemed flattered by the attention. She lowered her eyes, playing demure, which was like Ed Asner playing coquettish. “I know the head bartender,” she said. “His name is Pat.”

“Male or female?”

She smiled, punched him on the arm. “Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

A jukebox played the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.” Myron tried to count how many times Sting repeated the words every little. He lost count at a million.

They found two stools at the bar. Big Cyndi looked for Pat. Myron cased the joint, very detectivelike. He turned his back to the bar, eased his elbows against it, bobbed his head slightly to the music. Señor Slick. The babe-a-rama in the black catsuit caught his eye. She slithered to the seat next to him and curled into it. Myron flashed back to Julie Newmar as Cat Woman circa 1967, something he did far too often. This woman was dirty blond but otherwise frighteningly comparable.

Catsuit gave him a look that made him believe in telekinesis. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi back.” The Lady Slayer awakens.

She slowly reached for her neck and started toying with the catsuit’s zipper. Myron managed to keep his tongue in the general vicinity of his mouth. He took a quick peek at Big Cyndi.

“Don’t be too sure,” Big Cyndi warned.

Myron frowned. There was cleavage here, for crying out loud. He stole another look—for the sake of science. Yep, cleavage. And plenty of it. He looked back at Big Cyndi and whispered, “Bosoms. Two of them.”

Big Cyndi shrugged.

“My name is Thrill,” Catsuit said.

“I’m Myron.”

“Myron,” she repeated, her tongue circling as though testing the word for taste. “I like that name. It’s very manly.”

“Er, thanks, I guess.”

“You don’t like your name?”

“Actually, I’ve always sort of hated it,” he said. Then he gave her the big-guy look, cocking the eyebrow like Fabio going for deep thought. “But if you like it, maybe I’ll reconsider.”

Big Cyndi made a noise like a moose coughing up a turtle shell.

Thrill gave him another smoldering glance and picked up her drink. She did something that could roughly be called “taking a sip,” but Myron doubted the Motion Picture Association would give it less than an R rating. “Tell me about yourself, Myron.”

They started chatting. Pat, the bartender, was on break, so Myron and Thrill kept at it for a good fifteen minutes. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was sort of having fun. Thrill turned toward him, full body. She slid a little closer. Myron again looked for telltale gender signs. He checked for the two Five O’clocks: Shadow and Charlie. Nothing. He checked the cleavage again. Still there. Damn if he wasn’t a trained detective.

Thrill put her hand on his thigh. It felt hot through his jeans. Myron stared at the hand for a moment. Was the size odd? He tried to figure out if it was big for a woman or maybe small for a man. His head started spinning.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Myron finally said, “but you’re a woman, right?”

Thrill threw her head back and laughed. Myron looked for an Adam’s apple. She had a black ribbon tied around the neck. Made it hard to tell. The laugh was a touch hoarse, but oh, come on now. This couldn’t be a guy. Not with that cleavage. Not when the catsuit was so tight about the, er, nether region, if you catch the drift.

“What’s the difference?” Thrill asked.

“Pardon?”

“You find me attractive, don’t you?”

“What I see.”

“So?”

Myron raised his hands. “So—and let me just state this plainly—if, during a moment of passion, there is a second penis in the room … well, it definitely kills the mood for me.”

She laughed. “No other penises, eh?”

“That’s right. Just mine. I’m funny that way.”

“Are you familiar with Woody Allen?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Then let me quote him.” Myron stayed still. Thrill was about to quote the Woodman. If she was a she, Myron was close to proposing. “ ‘Sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five it’s fantastic.’ ”

“Nice quote,” Myron said.

“Do you know what it’s from?”

“His old nightclub act. When Woody did stand-up comedy in the sixties.”

Thrill nodded, pleased that the pupil had passed the test.

“But we’re not talking group sex here,” Myron said.

“Have you ever had group sex?” she asked.

“Well, uh, no.”

“But if you did—if there were, say, five people—would it be a problem if one of them had a penis?”

“We’re talking hypothetically here, right?”

“Unless you want me to call some friends.”

“No, that’s okay, really, thanks.” Myron took a deep breath. “Yeah, okay, hypothetically, I guess it wouldn’t be a huge problem, as long as the man kept his distance.”

Thrill nodded. “But if I had a penis—”

“A major mood killer.”

“I see.” Thrill made small circles on Myron’s thigh. “Admit you’re curious.”

“I am.”

“So?”

“So I’m also curious about what goes through a person’s mind when he jumps out of a skyscraper. Before he goes splat on the sidewalk.”

She arched an eyebrow. “It’s probably a hell of a rush.”

“Yeah, but then there’s that splat at the end.”

“And in this case …”

“The splat would be a penis, yes.”

“Interesting,” Thrill said. “Suppose I’m a transsexual.”

“Pardon?”

“Suppose I had a penis, but now it’s gone. You’d be safe, right?”

“Wrong.”

“Why?”

“Phantom penis,” Myron said.

“Pardon?”

“Like in a war when a guy loses his limb and still thinks it’s there. Phantom penis.”

“But it’s not your penis that would be missing.”

“Still. Phantom penis.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Exactly.”

Thrill showed him nice, even white teeth. Myron looked at them. Can’t tell much about gender from teeth. Better to check the cleavage again. “You realize that you’re massively insecure about your sexuality,” she said.

“Because I like to know if a potential partner has a penis?”

“A real man wouldn’t worry about being thought of as a fag.”

“It’s not what people think that bothers me.”

“It’s just the penis issue,” she finished for him.

“Bingo.”

“I still say you’re sexually insecure.”

Myron shrugged, palms raised. “Who isn’t?”

“True.” She shifted her rear. Vinyl on vinyl. Grrrr sound. “So why don’t you ask me out on a date?”

“I think we just went over this.”

“You find me attractive, right? What you see, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re having a nice talk?”

“Yes.”

“You find me interesting? Fun to be with?”

“Yes and yes.”

“And you’re single and unattached?”

He swallowed. “Two more yesses.”

“So?”

“So—and again, don’t take this personally—”

“But it’s that penis thing again.”

“Bingo.”

Thrill leaned back, fiddled with the neckline zipper, pulled it up a bit. “Hey, it’s a first date. We don’t have to end up naked.”

Myron thought about that. “Oh.”

“You sound surprised.”

“No … I mean—”

“Maybe I’m not that easy.”

“My mistake for presuming … I mean, you’re hanging out in this bar.”

“So?”

“So I didn’t think most of the patrons in here played hard to get. To quote Woody Allen, ‘How did I misread those signs?’ ”

Thrill didn’t hesitate. “Play It Again, Sam.”

“If you are a woman,” Myron said, “I may be falling in love.”

“Thank you. And if we’re reading signs from being in this bar, what are you doing here? You with your penis issue.”

“Good point.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“So why don’t you ask me out?” Again with the smolder. “We could hold hands. Maybe kiss. You might even sneak a hand under my shirt, go for a little second base. The way you’ve been ogling, it’s almost like you’re there anyway.”

“I’m not ogling,” Myron said.

“No?”

“If I’ve been looking—and note I said if—it would be purely for the sake of gender clarification, I assure you.”

“Thanks for straightening that out. But my point is, we can just go and have dinner. Or go to a movie. We don’t have to have any genital contact.”

Myron shook his head. “I’d still be wondering.”

“Ah, but don’t you like a little mystery?”

“I like mystery in lots of arenas. But when it comes to trouser content, well, I’m a pretty traditional guy.”

Thrill shrugged. “I still don’t understand why you’re here.”

“I’m looking for someone.” He took out a photograph of Clu Haid and showed it to her. “Do you know him?”

Thrill looked at the photograph and frowned. “I thought you said you’re a sports agent.”

“I am. He was a client.”

“Was?”

“He was murdered.”

“He’s the baseball player?”

Myron nodded. “Have you seen him here?”

Thrill grabbed a piece of paper and wrote something down. “Here’s my phone number, Myron. Call me sometime.”

“What about the guy in the photograph?”

Thrill handed him the scrap of paper, jumped off the stool, and undulated away. Myron watched her movements closely, looking for, umm, a concealed weapon. Big Cyndi elbowed him. He almost fell off the stool.

“This is Pat,” Big Cyndi said.

Pat the bartender looked like someone Archie Bunker might have hired to work his place. He was mid-fifties, short, gray-haired, slouch-shouldered, world-weary. Even his mustache—one of those gray-turning-to-yellow models—drooped as though it’d seen it all. Pat’s sleeves were rolled up, revealing Popeye-size forearms covered with hair. Myron hoped like hell Pat was a guy. This place was giving him a headache.

Behind Pat was a giant mirror. Next to that, a wall with the words Customer Hall of Fame painted in pink. The wall was covered with framed head shots of big-time right-wingers. Pat Buchanan. Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson. Newt Gingrich. Jesse Helms.

Pat saw him looking at the photographs. “Ever notice that.”

“Notice what?”

“How all the big antifags have sexually ambiguous first names? Pat, Chris, Jesse, Jerry. Could be a guy, could be a girl. See what I’m saying?”

Myron said, “Uh-huh.”

“And what kind of name is Newt?” Pat added. “I mean, how the hell do you grow up with a healthy sexual attitude with a name like Newt?”

“I don’t know.”

“My theory?” Pat shrugged, wiped the bar with a dishrag. “These narrow assholes were all teased a lot as children. Makes them hostile on the whole gender issue.”

“Interesting theory,” Myron said. “But isn’t your name Pat?”

“Yeah, well, I hate fags too,” Pat said. “But they tip well.”

Pat winked at Big Cyndi. Big Cyndi winked back. The jukebox changed songs. Lou Rawls crooned “Love Is in the Air.” Timing.

The right-wing head shots were all “autographed.” Jesse Helms’s read: “I’m sore all over, Love and kisses, Jesse.” Blunt. Several Xs and Os followed. There was also a big lipstick kiss impression as though Jesse himself had puckered up and laid down a wet one. Eeeuw.

Pat started cleaning out a beer mug with the dishrag. Casually. Myron half expected him to spit in it like in an old western. “So what can I get you?”

“Are you a sports fan?” Myron asked.

“You taking a poll?”

That line. It was always such a riot. Myron tried again.

“Does the name Clu Haid mean anything to you?”

Myron watched for a reaction but didn’t get one. Meant nothing. The guy looked like a lifetime bartender. They show about as much range as a Baywatch regular. Hmm.

Now why was that show on his mind?

“I asked you—”

“Name means nothing to me.”

Big Cyndi said, “Please, Pat.”

He shot her a look. “You heard me, Big C. I don’t know him.”

Myron pressed it. “Never heard of Clu Haid?”

“That’s right.”

“How about the New York Yankees?”

“I haven’t followed them since the Mick retired.”

Myron put the photograph of Clu Haid on the bar. “Ever seen him in here?”

Someone called out for a draft. Pat drew it. When he came back, he spoke to Big Cyndi. “This guy a cop?”

“No,” Big Cyndi said.

“Then the answer is no.”

“And if I was a cop?” Myron asked.

“Then the answer would be no … sir.” Myron noticed that Pat had never so much as glanced at the photograph. “I might also add a little song and dance about how I’m too busy to notice faces in here. And how most people, especially celebrities, don’t show their real faces in here anyway.”

“I see,” Myron said. He reached into his wallet, took out a fifty. “And if I showed you a photograph of Ulysses S. Grant?”

The jukebox changed songs. The Flying Machine started crooning for Rosemarie to “smile a little smile for me, Rosemarie.” The Flying Machine. Myron had remembered the group’s name. What did that say about a man?

“Keep your money,” Pat said. “Keep your picture. Keep your questions. I don’t like trouble.”

“And this guy means trouble?”

“I haven’t even looked at the picture, pal. And I don’t plan to. Take a hike.”

Big Cyndi stepped in. “Pat,” she said, “please can’t you help”—she batted her eyelashes; picture two crabs on their backs in the blazing sun—“for me?”

“Hey, Big C, I love you, you know that. But suppose I came into Leather-N-Lust with pictures? You gonna be anxious to help?”

Big Cyndi thought about that. “I guess not.”

“There you go. I got customers.”

“Fine,” Myron said. He picked up the photograph. “Then maybe I’ll stick around. Pass the picture around the room. Ask some questions. Maybe I’ll stake this place out. Indiscreetly. Take photos of people entering and leaving this fine establishment.”

Pat shook his head, smiled a bit. “You’re one dumb son of a bitch, you know that.”

“I’ll do it,” Myron said. “I don’t want to, but I’ll camp out on your doorstep with a camera.”

Pat gave Myron a long look. Hard to read. Part hostile maybe. Mostly bored. “Big C, head out of here for a few minutes.”

“No.”

“Then I don’t talk.”

Myron turned to her, nodded. Big Cyndi shook her head. Myron pulled her aside. “What’s the problem?”

“You shouldn’t make threats in here, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“I warned you about this place. I can’t leave you alone.”

“You’ll be right outside. I can take care of myself.”

When Big Cyndi frowned, her face resembled a freshly painted totem pole. “I don’t like it.”

“We have no choice.”

She sighed. Picture Mount Vesuvius bubbling up a bit of lava. “Be careful.”

“I will.”

She lumbered toward the exit. The place was packed and Big Cyndi took up a wide berth. Still, people parted with a speed that would have made Moses jot notes. When she was all the way out the door, Myron turned back to Pat. “Well?”

“Well, you’re a dumb asshole.”

It happened without warning. Two hands snaked under Myron’s arms, the fingers locking behind his neck. A classic full nelson. The hold was tightened, pushing back his arms like chicken wings. Myron felt something hot rip across his shoulder blades.

A voice near his ear whispered, “Care to dance, dream-boat?”

When it came to hand-to-hand combat, Myron was no Win, but he was no slouch either. He thus knew that if the perpetrator was good, there was no way to break a full nelson. That was why they were illegal in real wrestling matches. If you were standing, you could try to stomp on the person’s instep. But only a moron fell for that, and a moron would not have had the speed or the strength to get this far. And Myron was not standing.

Myron’s elbows were high up in the air, marionette fashion, his face helplessly exposed. The powerful arms locking him were covered in cardigan. Soft yellow cardigan, as a matter of fact. As in a soft yellow cardigan sweater. Jesus. Myron struggled. Nothing doing. The cardigan-clad arms pulled Myron’s head back and then snapped it toward the bar, face first. Myron could do nothing but close his eyes. He tucked his chin just enough to keep his nose from taking the brunt of the blow. But his head bounced off the varnished teak in a way it was never intended to, jarring his skull. Something on his forehead split open. His head swam. He saw stars.

Another set of hands scooped up Myron’s feet. He was in the air now and moving and very dizzy. Hands emptied his pockets. A door opened. Myron was carried through it into a dark room. The grip was released, and Myron fell like a potato sack onto his tailbone. The whole process, from the onset of the full nelson to the moment he was dumped on the floor, took all of eight seconds.

A light was snapped on. Myron touched his forehead and felt something sticky. Blood. He looked up at his attackers.

Two women.

No, cross-dressers. Both with blond wigs. One had gone with early-eighties Mall Girl hair—lots of height and teased more than a bed-wetter. The other one—the one with the soft yellow cardigan sweater (monogrammed, for those who cared)—had hair like Veronica Lake on a particularly nasty bender.

Myron started to get to his feet. Veronica Lake let out a squeal and threw a side kick. The kick was fast and landed hard on his chest. Myron heard himself make a noise like “pluuu” and landed back on his rear. His hand automatically reached for his cellular. He’d hit the memory button and call Win. Then stall.

The phone was gone.

He looked up. Mall Girl had it. Damn. He took in his surroundings. There was a great view of the bar and Pat the bartender’s back. He remembered the mirror. Of course. One-way glass. The patrons saw a mirror. The people back here saw, well, everything. Hard to steal from the till when you never knew who was watching.

The walls were corked and thus soundproof. The floor was cheap linoleum. Easier to clean, he guessed. Despite that, there were specks of blood on it. Not his. These specks were old and dried. But they were there. No mistaking them for something else. And Myron knew why. In a word: intimidation.

This was a classic pounding room. Lots of places have them. Especially sports arenas. Not so much now as in the old days. There was a time when an unruly fan was more than just escorted out of the stadium. The security guards took him into a back room and pounded on him a bit. It was fairly safe. What could the unruly fan claim after the fact? He was drunk off his rocker, had probably gotten into a fight in the stands, whatever. So the security boys added a few extra bruises for good measure. Who’s to say where the bruises came from? And if the unruly fan threatened to press charges or make noise, stadium officials could whack him back with charges of public drunkenness and assault and whatever else they could dream up. They could also produce a dozen security guards to back their story and none to back the unruly fan’s.

So the fan let it drop. And the pounding rooms remained. Probably still do in some places.

Veronica Lake giggled. It was not a pretty sound. “Care to dance, dreamboat?” he-she asked again.

“Let’s wait for a slow song,” Myron said.

A third cross-dresser stepped into the room. A redhead. He-she looked a lot like Bonnie Franklin, the plucky mother on the old sitcom One Day at a Time. The resemblance was, in fact, rather uncanny—the perfect mix of determination and cutes. Spunky. Scrappy.

“Where’s Schneider?” Myron asked.

No reply.

Veronica Lake said, “Stand up, dreamboat.”

“The blood on the floor,” Myron said.

“What?”

“It’s a nice touch, but it’s overkill, don’t you think?”

Veronica Lake lifted her right foot and pulled on her heel. It came off. Sort of. The heel was a covering actually. A sheath. For a steel blade. Veronica showed it to Myron with an impressive display of martial art high kicks, the blade gleaming in the light.

Bonnie Franklin and Mall Girl started giggling.

Myron kept the fear at bay and looked steadily at Veronica Lake. “Are you new at cross-dressing?” he asked.

Veronica stopped kicking. “What?”

“I mean, aren’t you taking the whole stiletto heel thing too far?”

Not his best joke, but anything to stall. Veronica looked at Mall Girl. Mall Girl looked at Bonnie Franklin. Then Veronica suddenly threw a sweep kick, leading with the blade heel. Myron saw the glint of steel shoot toward him. He rolled back, but the blade still sliced through his shirt and into his skin. He let out a little cry and looked down wide-eyed. The cut wasn’t deep, but he was bleeding.

The three spread out, making fists. Bonnie Franklin had something in her hand. A black club maybe. Myron did not like this. He tried to spring to his feet, but again Veronica threw a kick. He leaped high, but the blade still hit his lower leg. He actually felt the blade get caught on the shin bone before scraping itself off.

Myron’s heart was pounding now. More blood. Jesus Christ. Something about seeing your own blood. His breathing was too fast. Keep cool, he reminded himself. Think.

He faked left to the spot where Bonnie Franklin stood with the baton. Then he coiled right, his fist at the ready. Without hesitating, he threw a punch at the advancing Mall Girl. His knuckles landed flush below the eye and Mall Girl went down.

That was when Myron felt his heart stop.

There was a zapping sound and the back of his knee exploded. Myron spun in pure agony. His body jolted. Searing pain burst out of the nerve bundle behind the knee and traveled everywhere in an electric surge. He looked behind him. Bonnie Franklin had merely touched him with the baton. His legs seized up, lost power. He collapsed back to the floor and writhed fish-on-boat-deck fashion. His stomach clenched. Nausea consumed him.

“That was the lowest setting,” Bonnie Franklin said, voice high-pitched little girl. “Just gets the cow’s attention.”

Myron looked up, trying to stop his body from quaking. Veronica lifted his leg and placed the heel blade near his face. One quick stomp and he was done. Bonnie showed him the cattle prod again. Myron felt a fresh shiver go through him. He looked through the one-way glass. No sign of Big Cyndi or any cavalry.

Now what?

Bonnie Franklin did the talking. “Why are you here?”

He focused on the cattle prod and how to avoid experiencing its wrath again. “I was asking about someone,” he said.

Mall Girl had recovered. She-he stood up over him holding her-his face. “He hit me!” Her tone was a little deeper now, the shock and hurt dropping the feminine facade a bit.

Myron stayed still.

“You bitch!”

Mall Girl grimaced and threw a kick as though Myron’s rib cage were a football. Myron saw the kick coming, saw the heel blade, saw the cattle prod, closed his eyes, and let it land.

He fell back.

Bonnie Franklin continued with the questions. “Who were you asking about?”

No secret. “Clu Haid.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to know if he’d been here.”

“Why?”

Telling them he was looking for his killer might not be the wisest course of action, especially if said killer was in the room. “He was a client of mine.”

“So?”

“Bitch!” It was Mall Girl again. Another kick. It again landed on the bottom tip of the rib cage and hurt like hell. Myron swallowed away some bile that had worked its way up. He looked through the one-way glass again. Still no Big Cyndi. Blood flowed from the knife wounds to his chest and leg. His insides still trembled from the electric shock. He looked into the eyes of Veronica Lake. The calm eyes. Win had them too. The great ones always do.

“Who do you work for?” Bonnie asked.

“No one.”

“Then why would you care if he came here?”

“I’m just trying to put some things together,” he said.

“What things?”

“Just general stuff.”

Bonnie Franklin looked at Veronica Lake. Both nodded. Then Bonnie Franklin made a show of turning up the cattle prod. “‘General stuff’ is an unacceptable response.”

Panic squeezed Myron’s gut. “Wait—”

“No, I think not.” Bonnie reached toward him with the cattle prod.

Myron’s eyes widened. No choice really. He had to try it now. If the prod hit him again, he’d have nothing left. He just had to hope Veronica would not kill him.

He had been planning the move for the past ten seconds. Now he rolled all the way back over his neck and head. He landed on his feet and without warning shot himself forward as though from a cannon. The three cross-dressers backed off, prepared for the attack. But an attack would be suicide. Myron knew that. There were three of them, two armed, at least one very good. Myron could never beat them. He needed to surprise them. So he did. By not going for them.

He went instead for the one-way glass.

His legs had pushed off full throttle, propelling him rocket-ship fashion toward the glass. By the time his three captors realized what he was doing, it was too late. Myron squeezed his eyes shut, made two fists, and hit the glass with his full weight, Superman style. He held nothing back. If the glass did not give, he was a dead man.

The glass shattered on impact.

The sound was enormous, all-consuming. Myron flew through it, glass clattering to the floor around him. When he landed, he tucked himself into a tight ball. He hit the floor and rolled. Tiny shards of mirror bit into his skin. He ignored the pain, kept rolling, crashing hard into the bar. Bottles fell.

Big Cyndi had talked about the place’s reputation. Myron was counting on that. And the Take A Guess clientele did not disappoint.

A pure New York melee ensued.

Tables were thrown. People screamed. Someone flew over the bar and landed on top of Myron. More glass shattered. Myron tried to get to his feet, but it wasn’t happening. From his right, he saw a door open. Mall Girl emerged.

“Bitch!”

Mall Girl started toward him, carrying Bonnie’s cattle prod. Myron tried to scramble away, but he couldn’t get his bearings. Mall Girl kept coming, drawing closer.

And then Mall Girl disappeared.

It was like a scene from a cartoon, where the big dog punches Sylvester the Cat, and Sylvester flies across the room and the oversize fist stays there for a few seconds.

In this case the oversize fist belonged to Big Cyndi.

Bodies flew. Glasses flew. Chairs flew. Big Cyndi ignored it all. She scooped Myron up and threw him over her shoulder like a firefighter. They rushed outside as police sirens clawed through the milky night air.

CHAPTER 16

Back at the Dakota, Win tsk-tsked and said, “You let a couple of girls beat you up?”

“They weren’t girls.”

Win took a sip of cognac. Myron gulped some Yoo-Hoo. “Tomorrow night,” Win said, “we’ll go back to this bar. Together.”

It was not something Myron wanted to think about right now. Win called a doctor. It was after two in the morning, but the doctor, a gray-haired man straight from central casting, arrived in fifteen minutes. Nothing broken, he declared with a professional chuckle. Most of the medical treatment consisted of cleaning out the cuts from the heel blade and window bits. The two heel slices—the one on his stomach was shaped like a Z—required stitches. All in all, painful but relatively harmless.

The doctor tossed Myron some Tylenol with codeine, closed up his medical bag, tipped his hat, departed. Myron finished his Yoo-Hoo and stood slowly. He wanted to take a shower, but the doctor had told him to wait until the morning. He swallowed a couple of tablets and hit the sheets. When he fell asleep, he dreamed about Brenda.

In the morning he called Hester Crimstein at her apartment. The machine picked up. Myron said it was urgent. Midway through his message Hester took the call.

“I need to see Esperanza,” he told the attorney. “Now.”

Surprisingly, the attorney hesitated for only a moment before saying, “Okay.”

“I killed someone,” Myron said.

Esperanza sat across from him.

“I don’t mean I actually fired a gun. But I might as well have. In many ways what I did was worse.”

Esperanza kept her eyes on him. “This happened right before you ran away?”

“Within a couple of weeks, yes.”

“But that’s not why you left.”

His mouth felt dry. “I guess not.”

“You ran away because of Brenda.”

Myron did not answer.

Esperanza crossed her arms. “So why are you sharing this little tidbit with me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I am,” she said.

“Oh?”

“It’s something of a ploy. You hoped that your big confession would help me open up.”

“No,” Myron said.

“Then?”

“You’re the one I talk to about things like this.”

She almost smiled. “Even now?”

“I don’t understand why you’re shutting me out,” he said. “And okay, maybe I do hold out some hope that talking about this will help us return to—I don’t know—some kind of sense of normalcy. Or maybe I just need to talk about this. Win wouldn’t understand. The person I killed was evil incarnate. It would have presented him with a moral dilemma no more complex than choosing a tie.”

“And this moral dilemma haunts you?”

“The problem is,” Myron said, “it doesn’t.”

Esperanza nodded. “Ah.”

“The person deserved it,” he went on. “The courts had no evidence.”

“So you played vigilante.”

“In a sense.”

“And that bothers you? No, wait, it doesn’t bother you.”

“Right.”

“So you’re losing sleep over the fact that you’re not losing sleep.”

He smiled, spread his hands. “See why I come to you?”

Esperanza crossed her legs and looked up in the air. “When I first met you and Win, I wondered about your friendship. About what first attracted you to each other. I thought maybe Win was a latent homosexual.”

“Why does everyone say that? Can’t two men just—”

“I was wrong,” she interrupted. “And don’t get all defensive, it’ll make people wonder. You guys aren’t gay. I realized that early on. Like I said, it was just a thought. Then I wondered if it was simply the old adage ‘Opposites attract.’ Maybe that’s part of it.” She stopped.

“And?” Myron prompted.

“And maybe you two are more alike than either one of you wants to believe. I don’t want to get too deep here, but Win sees you as his humanity. If you like him, he reasons, how bad can he be? You, on the other hand, see him as a cold dose of reality. Win’s logic is scary, but it’s oddly appealing. There is a little part in all of us that likes what he does, the same side of us that thinks the Iranians might be on to something when they cut off a thief’s hand. You grew up with all that suburban liberal crap about the disadvantaged. But now real-life experience is teaching you that some people are just plain evil. It shifts you a little closer to Win.”

“So you’re saying I’m becoming like Win? Gee, that’s comforting.”

“I’m saying your reaction is human. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s right. You may indeed be sinking into a quagmire. Bending the rules is getting easier and easier for you. Maybe the person you killed deserved it, but if you want to hear that, if you want absolution, go to Win.”

Silence.

Esperanza’s fingers fluttered near her mouth, debating between biting the nails and plucking her lower lip. “You’ve always been the finest person I know,” she said. “Don’t let anybody change that, okay?”

He swallowed, nodded.

“You’re not bending the rules anymore,” she continued. “You’re decimating them. Just yesterday you told me you’d lie under oath to protect me.”

“That’s different.”

Esperanza looked straight at him. “Are you sure about that?”

“Yes. I’ll do whatever I have to to protect you.”

“Including breaking laws? That’s my point, Myron.”

He shifted in his chair.

“And one other thing,” she said. “You’re using this whole moral dilemma thing to distract yourself from two truths you don’t want to face.”

“What truths?”

“One, Brenda.”

“And two?”

Esperanza smiled. “Skipped over one pretty fast.”

“And two?” he repeated.

Her smile was gentle, understanding. “Two, it gets your mind off why you’re really here.”

“And why’s that?”

“You’re starting to do more than wonder if I killed Clu. And you’re trying to find a way to rationalize it away if I did. You killed once, ergo it may be justifiable if I killed too. You just want to hear a reason.”

“He hit you,” Myron said. “In the parking garage.”

She said nothing.

“The radio said they found pubic hairs in his apartment—”

“Don’t go there,” she said.

“I have to.”

“Just stay out.”

“I can’t.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“There’s more to it than that. I’m involved in this.”

“Only because you want to be.”

“Did Clu tell you I was in danger?”

She said nothing.

“He told my parents that. And Jessica. I thought at first it was hyperbole. But maybe it’s not. I got this weird diskette in the mail. There was an image of a young girl.”

“You’re ranting,” she said. “You think you’re ready for this, but you’re not. Learn something from your past mistakes. Keep away from this.”

“But it won’t keep away from me,” Myron said. “Why did Clu say I was in danger? Why did he hit you? What happened at the Take A Guess bar?”

She shook her head. “Guard.”

The guard opened the door. Esperanza kept her eyes down. She turned and left the room without looking back at Myron. Myron sat alone for a few seconds, gathered his thoughts. He checked his watch. Nine forty-five. Plenty of time to get to Yankee Stadium for his eleven o’clock meeting with Sophie and Jared Mayor. He had barely left the room when a man approached him.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes.”

“This is for you.”

The man handed him an envelope and disappeared. Myron opened it. A subpoena from the Bergen County district attorney’s office. Case heading: “People of Bergen County v. Esperanza Diaz.” Well, well. Esperanza and Hester had been right not to tell him anything.

He stuffed it into his pocket. At least now he wouldn’t have to lie.

CHAPTER 17

Myron did what every good boy should do when he gets into legal trouble: He called his mommy.

“Your aunt Clara will handle the subpoena,” Mom said.

Aunt Clara wasn’t really his aunt, just an old friend from the neighborhood. On the High Holy Days she still pinched Myron’s cheek and cried out, “What a punim!” Myron sort of hoped she wouldn’t do that in front of the judge: “Your Honor, I ask you to look at this face: Is that a punim or is that a punim?”

“Okay,” Myron said.

“I’ll call her, she’ll call the DA. In the meantime you say nothing, understand?”

“Yes.”

“See now, Mr. Smarty Pants? See what I was telling you now? About Hester Crimstein being right?”

“Yeah, Mom, whatever.”

“Don’t whatever me. They’ve subpoenaed you. But because Esperanza wouldn’t tell you anything, you can’t hurt her case.”

“I see that, Mom.”

“Good. Now let me go call Aunt Clara.”

She hung up. And Mr. Smarty Pants did likewise.

Bluntly put, Yankee Stadium was located in a cesspool section of the ever-eroding Bronx. It didn’t much matter. Whenever you first caught sight of the famed sports edifice, you still fell into an immediate church hush. Couldn’t help it. Memories swarmed in and burrowed down. Images flashed in and out. His youth. A small child crammed standing on the 4 train, holding Dad’s seemingly giant hand, looking up into his gentle face, the pregame anticipation tingling through every part of him. Dad had caught a fly ball when Myron was five years old. He could still see it sometimes—the arc of white rawhide, the crowd standing, his dad’s arm stretching to an impossible height, the ball landing on the palm with a happy smack, the warm beam coming off Dad’s face when he handed the prized possession to his son. Myron still had that ball, browning in the basement of his parents’ house.

Basketball was Myron’s sport of choice, and football was probably his favorite to watch on TV. Tennis was the game of princes, golf the game of kings. But baseball was magic. Early childhood memories are faint, but almost every boy can recall his first major-league baseball game. He can remember the score, who hit a home run, who pitched. But mostly he remembers his father. The smell of his after-shave is wrapped up in the smells of baseball—the freshly cut grass, the summer air, the hot dogs, the stale popcorn, the spilled beer, the overoiled glove complete with baseball breaking in the pocket. He remembers the visiting team, the way Yaz tossed grounders to warm up Petrocelli at short, the way the hecklers made gentle fun of Frank Howard’s TV commercials for Nestlé’s Quik, the way the game’s greats rounded second and slid headfirst into third. You remember your sibling keeping stats, studying the lineups the way rabbinical scholars study the Talmud, baseball cards gripped in your hand, the ease and pace of a slow summer afternoon, Mom spending more time sunning herself than watching the action. You remember Dad buying you a pennant of the visiting team and later hanging it on your wall in a ceremony equal to the Celtics raising a banner in the old Boston Garden. You remember the way the players in the bullpen looked so relaxed, big wads of chew distorting their cheeks. You remember your healthy, respectful hate for the visiting team’s superstars, the pure joy of going on Bat Day and treasuring that piece of wood as though it’d come straight from Honus Wagner’s locker.

Show me a boy who didn’t dream of being a big leaguer before age seven, before Training League or whatever slowly began to thin the herd in one of life’s earliest lessons that the world can and will disappoint you. Show me a boy who doesn’t remember wearing his Little League cap to school when the teachers would allow it, keeping it pitched high with a favorite baseball card tucked inside, wearing it to the dinner table, sleeping with it on the night table next to his bed. Show me a boy who doesn’t remember playing catch with his father on the weekends or, better, on those precious summer nights when Dad would rush home from his job, shake off his work clothes, put on a T-shirt that was always a little too small, grab a mitt, and head into the backyard before the final rays faded away. Show me a boy who didn’t stare in awe at how far his father could hit or throw a baseball—no matter how bad an athlete his father was, no matter how spastic or what have you—and for that shining moment Dad was transformed into a man of unimaginable ability and strength.

Only baseball had that magic.

The new majority owner of the New York Yankees was Sophie Mayor. She and her husband, Gary, had shocked the baseball world by buying the team from the longtime unpopular owner Vincent Riverton less than a year ago. Most fans had applauded. Vincent Riverton, a publishing mogul, had a love-hate relationship with the public (mostly hate) and the Mayors, a techno-nouveau-riche pair who had found their fortune through computer software, promised a more hands-off approach. Gary Mayor had grown up in the Bronx and promised a return to the days of the Mick and DiMaggio. The fans were thrilled.

But tragedy struck pretty fast. Two weeks before the deal to buy was finalized, Gary Mayor died of a sudden heart attack. Sophie Mayor, who had always been an equal, if not dominating, partner in the software business, insisted on going ahead with the transaction. She had public support and sympathy, but Gary and his roots had been the rope tethering her to the public. Sophie was a midwestemer, and with her love of hunting mixed with her background as a math genius, she hit the prenatally suspicious New Yorkers as being something of a kook.

Soon after taking over the helm, Sophie made her son Jared, a man with virtually no baseball experience, co-general manager. The public frowned. She made a quick trade, gutting the Yankee farm system on the chance that Clu Haid still had a good year or two left. The public cried. She had stood firm. She wanted a World Series in the Bronx immediately. Trading for Clu Haid was the way to get it. The public was skeptical.

But Clu pitched amazingly well during his first month with the team. His fastball was back over ninety, and his curves were breaking as if they were accepting signals from a remote control. He got better with each outing, and the Yankees grabbed first place. The public was appeased. For a little while anyway, Myron guessed. He had stopped paying attention, but he could imagine the backlash against the Mayor family when Clu tested positive for drugs.

Myron was led immediately into Sophie Mayor’s office. She and Jared both stood to greet him. Sophie Mayor was probably mid-fifties, what was commonly called a handsome woman, her hair gray and neat, her back straight, her handshake firm, her arms tawny, her eyes twinkling with hints of mischief and cunning. Jared was twenty-fiveish. He wore his hair parted on the right with no hint of style, wire-rimmed glasses, a blue blazer, and a polka dot bow tie. Youths for George Will.

The office was sparsely decorated, or maybe it just appeared that way because the scene was dominated by a moose head hanging on a wall. A dead moose actually. A live moose is so hard to hang. Quite the decorating touch. Myron tried not to make a face. He almost said, “You must have hated this moose,” à la Dudley Moore in Arthur but refrained. With age comes maturity.

Myron shook Jared’s hand, then turned toward Sophie Mayor.

Sophie pounced. “Where the hell have you been, Myron?”

“Excuse me?”

She pointed to a chair. “Sit.”

Like he was a dog. But he obeyed. Jared too. Sophie stayed on her feet and glowered down at him.

“In court yesterday they said something about your being in the Caribbean,” she continued.

Myron made a noncommittal “uh-huh” sound.

“Where were you?”

“I was away.”

“Away?”

“Yes.”

She looked over at her son, then back at Myron. “For how long?”

“Three weeks.”

“But Miss Diaz told me you were in town.”

Myron said nothing.

Sophie Mayor made two fists and leaned toward him. “Why would she tell me that, Myron?”

“Because she didn’t know where I was.”

“In other words, she lied to me.”

Myron did not bother replying.

“So where were you?” she pressed.

“Out of the country.”

“The Caribbean?”

“Yes.”

“And you never told anyone?”

Myron shifted in his chair, trying to find an opening or gain some sort of footing here. “I don’t mean to sound rude,” he said, “but I don’t see how my whereabouts are any of your business.”

“You don’t?” A sharp chortle passed her lips. She looked at her son as if to say, Do you believe this guy?, then redirected her laser grays back toward Myron. “I relied on you,” she said.

Myron said nothing.

“I bought this team and I decided to be hands-off. I know software. I know computers. I know business. I really don’t know much about baseball. But I made one decision. I wanted Clu Haid. I had a feeling about him. I thought he still had something left. So I traded for him. People thought I was nuts—three good prospects for one has-been. I understood that concern. So I went to you, Myron, remember?”

“Yes.”

“And you assured me he was going to stay clean.”

“Wrong,” Myron said. “I said he wanted to stay clean.”

“Wanted, was going to … What is this, a lesson in semantics?”

“He was my client,” Myron said. “It’s my job to worry about his interests.”

“And damn mine?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Damn integrity and ethics too? Is that the way you work, Myron?”

“That’s not it at all. Sure, we wanted this trade to happen—”

“You wanted it badly,” she corrected him.

“Fine, we wanted it badly. But I never promised you he’d stay clean because it’s not something I or anyone else can guarantee. I assured you we would try our hardest. I made it part of the deal. I gave you the right to randomly test him at any time.”

“You gave me the right? I demanded it! And you fought me on it every step of the way.”

“We shared the risk,” Myron said. “I made his salary contingent on his staying clean. I let you put in a strict morals clause.”

She smiled, crossed her arms. “You know who you sound like? Those hypocritical car commercials where General Motors or Ford tout all the pollution-saving devices they’ve put on their cars. As though they did it on their own. As though they woke up one day more concerned with the environment than the bottom line. They leave out the fact that the government forced them to put on those devices, that they fought the government tooth and nail the whole way.”

“He was my client,” Myron said again.

“And you think that’s an all-purpose excuse?”

“It’s my job to get him the best deal.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Myron.”

“I can’t stop a man from returning to an addiction. You knew that.”

“But you said you’d watch him. You said you’d work on keeping him straight.”

Myron swallowed and shifted in his chair again. “Yes.”

“But you didn’t watch him, Myron, did you?”

Silence.

“You took a vacation and didn’t tell anyone. You left Clu alone. You acted irresponsibly, and so I blame you in part for his falling off the wagon.”

Myron opened his mouth, closed it. She was right, of course, but he didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in that right now. Later. He’d think about his role in this later. The pain from last night’s beating was angrily stirring from its snooze. He reached into his pocket and shook out a couple of extra-strength Tylenols.

Satisfied—or maybe satiated—Sophie Mayor sat down. Seeing the pills, she asked, “Would you like some water?”

“Please.”

She nodded at Jared. Jared poured Myron a glass of water and handed it to him. Myron thanked him and swallowed the tablets. The placebo effect jumped in, and he immediately felt better.

Before Sophie Mayor could strike again, Myron tried to shift gears. “Tell me about Clu’s failed drug test,” he said.

Sophie Mayor looked puzzled. “What’s to tell?”

“Clu claimed he was clean.”

“And you believe that?”

“I want to look into it.”

“Why?”

“Because when Clu was caught in the past, he begged forgiveness and promised to get help. He never pretended a test result was wrong.”

She crossed her arms. “And that’s evidence of what exactly?”

“Nothing. I’d just like to ask a few questions.”

“Ask away then.”

“How often did you test him?”

Sophie looked over at her son. His cue. Jared spoke for the first time since greeting Myron at the door. “At least once a week,” he said.

“Urine tests?” Myron asked.

“Yes,” Jared said.

“And he passed them all? I mean, except for the last one.”

“Yes.”

Myron shook his head. “Every week? And no other positives? Just that one?”

“That’s right.”

He looked back at Sophie. “Didn’t you find that odd?”

“Why?” she countered. “He’d been trying to stay clean, and he fell off the wagon. It happens every day, doesn’t it?”

It did, Myron guessed, and still something about it didn’t sit right with him. “But Clu knew you were testing him?”

“I assume so, yes. We’d been testing him at least once a week.”

“And how were the tests conducted?”

Sophie again looked over at Jared. Jared asked, “What do you mean?”

“Step by step,” Myron said. “What did he do?”

Sophie took that one. “He peed in the cup, Myron. It’s pretty simple.”

It was never pretty simple. “Did someone watch him urinate?”

“What?”

“Did someone actually witness Clu peeing or did he step into a stall?” Myron said. “Was he naked when he did it or did he have on shorts—”

“What difference does any of that make?”

“Plenty. Clu had spent his lifetime beating these tests. If he knew they were coming, he’d be prepared.”

“Prepared how?” Sophie asked.

“Lots of ways, depending on the sophistication of the test,” Myron said. “If the testing was more primitive, you can put motor oil on your fingers and let the urine hit them while urinating. The phosphates throw the results out of whack. Some testers know this, so they check for phosphates. If the tester lets the guy urinate in a stall, he can strap clean urine onto his inner thigh and use that. Or the testee keeps the clean urine hidden in a condom or small balloon. He stores it in the lining of his boxer shorts maybe. Or between his toes. Under his armpit. In his mouth even.”

“Are you serious?”

“It gets worse. If the testee gets tipped off a strict test is coming up—one where the administrators are watching every move he makes—he’ll drain his bladder and use a catheter to pump in clean urine.”

Sophie Mayor looked horror-stricken. “He pumps someone else’s urine into his bladder?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“Jesus.” Then she pinned him down with her eyes. “You seem to know quite a bit about this, Myron.”

“So did Clu.”

“What are you saying?”

“It raises some questions, that’s all.”

“He probably got caught by surprise.”

“Maybe,” Myron said. “But if you were testing him every week, how surprised could he have been?”

“He might have just messed up,” Sophie went on. “Drug addicts have a way of doing that.”

“Could be. But I’d like to speak with the person who administered the test.”

“Dr. Stilwell,” Jared said. “He’s the team doctor. He handled it. Sawyer Wells assisted him.”

“Sawyer Wells, as in the self-help guru?”

“He’s a psychologist specializing in human behavior and an excellent motivational therapist,” Jared corrected.

Motivational therapist. Uh-huh. “Are either of them around now?”

“No, I don’t think so. But they’ll be here later. We have a home game tonight.”

“Who on the team was especially friendly with Clu? A coach, a player?”

“I really wouldn’t know,” Jared said.

“Who did he room with on the road?”

Sophie almost smiled. “You really were out of touch, weren’t you?”

“Cabral,” Jared said. “Enos Cabral. He’s a Cuban pitcher.”

Myron knew him. He nodded, glancing about, and that was when he saw it. His heart lurched, and it took all his willpower not to scream.

He had just been sweeping the room with his eyes, taking the room in but not really seeing anything, just the normal thing everyone does, when an object snagged his gaze as though on a rusted hook. Myron froze. On the credenza. On the right side of the credenza, mixed in with the other framed photos and the trophies and those latex cubes that encased civic awards and the first issue of Mayor Software stock and the like. Right there. A framed photograph.

A framed photograph of the girl on the computer diskette.

Myron tried to maintain a calm facade. Deep breath in, deep breath out. But he could feel his pulse quicken. His mind fought through the haze, searching for a temporary clearing. He scanned his internal memory banks. Okay, slow down. Breathe. Keep breathing.

No wonder the girl had looked familiar to him.

But what was her deal? More memory bank scanning. She was Sophie Mayor’s daughter, of course. Jared Mayor’s sister. What was her name again? His recollections were vague. What had happened to her? A runaway, right? Ten, fifteen years ago. There had been an estrangement or something. Foul play was not suspected. Or was it? He didn’t remember.

“Myron?”

He needed to think. Calmly. He needed space, time. He couldn’t just blurt out, “Oh, I got this weird diskette with an image of your daughter melting in blood on it.” He had to get out of here. Do some research. Think it through. He stood, clumsily looking at his watch.

“I have to go,” he said.

“What?”

“I’d like to speak with Dr. Stilwell as soon as possible,” he said.

Sophie’s eyes stayed on him. “I don’t see the relevance.”

“I just explained—”

“What difference would it make? Clu is dead now. The drug test isn’t relevant.”

“There might be a connection.”

“Between his death and a drug test?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure I agree.”

“I’d still like to check it out. I have that right.”

“What right?”

“If the drug test was inconclusive, it changes things.”

“Changes what—” Then Sophie stopped, smiled a bit, and nodded to herself. “I think I see now.”

Myron said nothing.

“You mean in terms of his contract, don’t you?”

“I have to go,” he repeated.

She leaned back and recrossed her arms. “Well, Myron, I have to hand it to you. You are definitely an agent. Trying to squeeze one more commission out of a corpse, eh?”

Myron let the insult roll off. “If Clu was clean, his contract would still be valid. You’d owe the family at least three million dollars.”

“So this is a shakedown? You’re here for money?”

He glanced at the picture of the young girl again. He remembered the diskette, the laugh, the blood. “Right now,” he said, “I’d just like to talk with the team doctor.”

Sophie Mayor looked at him like he was a turd on the carpet. “Get out of my office, Myron.”

“Will you let me speak to the doctor?”

“You don’t have any legal standing here.”

“I think I do.”

“You don’t, believe me. The blood money has run dry here. Get out, Myron. Now.”

He took one more look at the photograph. Now was not the time to argue the point. He hurried out the door.

CHAPTER 18

Myron was starting to hurt. The Tylenol alone wasn’t doing the trick. He had Tylenol with codeine in his back pocket, but he did not dare. He needed to stay sharp, and that stuff put him to sleep faster than, er, sex. He quickly cataloged the sore spots. His sliced-up shin hurt most, followed closely by his bruised ribs. The rest of the aches were an almost welcome distraction. But the pain made him conscious of every movement.

When he got back to his office, Big Cyndi handed him a huge pile of message slips.

“How many reporters have called?” he asked.

“I stopped counting, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Any messages from Bruce Taylor?”

“Yes.”

Bruce covered the Mets, not the Yankees. But every reporter wanted in on this story. Bruce was also something of a friend. He would know about Sophie Mayor’s daughter. The question was, of course, how to raise the subject without getting him overly curious.

Myron closed his office door, sat down, dialed a number. A voice answered on the first ring.

“Taylor.”

“Hey, Brucie.”

“Myron? Jesus Christ. Hey, I appreciate you calling me back.”

“Sure, Bruce. I love to cooperate with my favorite reporter.”

Pause. Then: “Uh-oh.”

“What?” Myron said.

“This is too easy.”

“Pardon.”

“Okay, Myron, let’s skip the part where you break down my defenses with your supernatural charisma. Cut to it.”

“I want to make a deal.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’m not willing to make a statement yet. But when I do, you get first crack. An exclusive.”

“An exclusive? Sheesh, Myron, you really do know your media lingo, don’t you?”

“I could have said scoop. It’s one of my favorite words.”

“Okay, Myron, great. So in return for your not telling me anything, you get what?”

“Just some information. But you don’t read into anything that I ask and you don’t report on it. You’re just my source.”

“More like your bitch,” Bruce said.

“If that’s what you’re into.”

“Not today, dear, I have a headache. So let me get this straight. You tell me nothing. I report nothing. In return I get to tell you everything. Sorry, big guy, no deal.”

“Bye-bye, Brucie.”

“Whoa, whoa, Myron, hold up. Christ, I’m not a general manager. Don’t pull that negotiating crap on me. Look, let’s stop tugging each other’s chains here. This is what we do: You give me something. A statement, anything. It can be as innocuous as you want to make it. But I want to be the first with a statement from Myron Bolitar. Then I tell you what you want, I keep quiet, you give me the exclusive scoop or whatever before everyone else. Deal?”

“Deal,” Myron said. “Here’s your statement: Esperanza Diaz did not kill Clu Haid. I stand behind her one hundred percent.”

“Was she having an affair with Clu?”

“That’s my statement, Bruce. Period.”

“Okay, fine, but what’s this about your being out of the country at the time of the murder?”

“A statement, Bruce. As in, ‘no further comment.’ As in, ‘I’ll be answering no questions today.’ ”

“Hey, it’s already public knowledge. I just want a confirmation. You were in the Caribbean, right?”

“Right.”

“Where in the Caribbean?”

“No comment.”

“Why not? Were you really in the Cayman Islands?”

“No, I was not in the Caymans.”

“Then where?”

See how reporters work? “No comment.”

“I called you immediately following Clu’s positive drug test. Esperanza said you were in town but would not comment.”

“And I still won’t,” Myron said. “Now it’s your turn, Bruce.”

“Come on, Myron, you’re giving me nothing here.”

“We had a deal.”

“Yeah, all right, sure, I want to be fair,” he said in a tone that made it clear he would start up again later. “Ask away.”

Casual, casual. He couldn’t just ask about Sophie Mayor’s daughter. Subtlety. That was the key. Myron’s office door opened, and Win swept into the room. Myron signaled with one finger. Win nodded and opened a closet door. There was a full-length mirror on the inside back. Win stared at his reflection and smiled. A nice way of passing the time.

“What were the rumors about Clu?” Myron asked.

“You mean before the positive test results?”

“Yes.”

“Time bomb,” Bruce said.

“Explain.”

“He was pitching great, no question. And he looked good. Thinned down, seemed focused. But then a week or so before the drug test, he started looking like hell. Christ, you must have seen it, right? Or were you out of the country then too?”

“Just go on, Bruce.”

“What else can I tell you? With Clu you’ve seen it a hundred times before. The guy breaks your heart. His arm was touched by God. The rest of him was, well, just touched, if you follow my meaning.”

“So there were signs before the positive test?”

“Yeah, I guess. In hindsight, sure there were lots of signs. I hear his wife threw him out. He was unshaven, red-eyed, that kind of thing.”

“It didn’t have to be drugs,” Myron said.

“True. It could have been booze.”

“Or maybe it was just the strain of marital discord.”

“Look, Myron, maybe some guys like Orel Hershiser get the benefit of the doubt. But when it comes to Clu Haid or Steve Howe or some other perennial screwup, you figure it’s substance abuse, and eleven times out of ten you’re right.”

Myron looked over at Win. Win had finished patting the blond locks and was now using the mirror to practice his different smiles. Right now he was working on roguish.

Subtle, Myron reminded himself, subtle.… “Bruce?”

“Yeah?”

“What can you tell me about Sophie Mayor?”

“What about her?”

“Nothing specific.”

“Just curious, huh?”

“Right, curious.”

“Sure you are,” Bruce said.

“How much damage did Clu’s drug test do to her?”

“Tremendous damage. But you know this. Sophie Mayor stuck her neck out, and for a while she was a genius. Then Clu fails the drug test, and presto, she’s an idiotic bimbo who should let the men run things.”

“So tell me about her background.”

“Background?”

“Yes. I want to get a feel for her.”

“Why?” Bruce asked. Then: “Ah, what the hell. She’s from Kansas, I think, or Iowa or Indiana or Montana. Someplace like that. An aged Ivory Girl type. Loves fishing, hunting, all that nature stuff. She was also something of a math prodigy. Came East to go to MIT. That’s where she met Gary Mayor. They got married and lived most of their lives as science professors. He taught at Brandeis; she taught at Tufts. They developed a software program for personal finance in the early eighties and suddenly went from middle-class professors to millionaires. They took the company public in ’94 and changed the m to a b.”

“The m to a b?”

“Millionaire to billionaire.”

“Oh.”

“So the Mayors did what lots of superwealthy people do: They bought a sports franchise. In this case, the Yankees. Gary Mayor grew up loving them. It was going to be a nice toy for him, but of course he never got to enjoy it.”

Myron cleared his throat. “And they, uh, have children?” Señor Subtle-o.

“They had two. You know Jared. He’s actually a pretty good kid, smart, went to your alma mater, Duke. But everyone hates him because he got the job through nepotism. His main responsibility is to keep an eye on Mommy’s investment. My understanding is that he’s actually pretty good at that and that he leaves the baseball to the baseball guys.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They also have a daughter. Or had a daughter.”

With great effort, Win sighed, closed the closet door. So difficult to pull himself away from a mirror. He sat across from Myron looking, as always, completely at ease. Myron cleared his throat and said into the phone, “What do you mean, had a daughter?”

“The daughter’s very estranged. Don’t you remember the story?”

“Vaguely. She ran away, right?”

“Right. Her name was Lucy. She took off with a boyfriend, some grunge musician, a few weeks before her eighteenth birthday. This was, I don’t know, ten, fifteen years ago. Before the Mayors had any money.”

“So where does she live now?”

“Well, that’s the thing. No one knows.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She ran away, that much is known for sure. She left them a note, I think. She was going to hit the road with her boyfriend and seek her fortune, the usual teenage stuff. Sophie and Gary Mayor were typical East Coast college professors who read too much Dr. Spock, so they gave their daughter ‘space,’ figuring of course that she’d come back.”

“But she didn’t.”

“Duh.”

“And they never heard from her?”

“Duh again.”

“But I remember reading about this a few years ago. Didn’t they start a search for her or something?”

“Yeah. First off, the boyfriend came back after a few months. They’d broken up and gone their separate ways. Big shock, right? Anyway, he didn’t know where she went. So the Mayors called the police, but they treated it like no big deal. Lucy was eighteen by this time, and she had clearly run away on her own. There was no evidence of foul play or anything and remember that this was before the Mayors had beaucoup bucks.”

“And after they became rich?”

“Sophie and Gary tried to find her again. They made it like a search for the missing heiress. The tabloids loved it for a while. There were some wild reports but nothing concrete. Some say Lucy moved overseas. Some say she’s living in a commune somewhere. Some say she’s dead. Whatever. They never found her, and there was still no sign of foul play, so the story eventually petered out.”

Silence. Win looked at Myron and arched an eyebrow. Myron shook his head.

“So why the interest?” Bruce asked.

“I just want to get a feel for the Mayors.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No big deal.”

“Okay, I buy that. Not.”

“It’s the truth,” Myron lied. “And how about using a more up-to-date reference? No one says not anymore.”

“They don’t?” Pause: “Guess I gotta watch more MTV. But Vanilla Ice is still hip, right?”

“Ice, ice, baby.”

“Fine, okay, we’ll play it your way for now, Myron. But I don’t know anything else about Lucy Mayor. You can try a search on Lexis. The papers might have more detail.”

“Good idea, thanks. Listen, Bruce, I got another call coming in.”

“What? You’re just going to cut me loose?”

“That was our deal.”

“So why all the questions about the Mayors?”

“Like I said, I want to get a feel for them.”

“Does the phrase what a crock mean anything to you?”

“Good-bye, Bruce.”

“Wait.” Pause. Then Bruce said, “Something serious is going down here, right?”

“Clu Haid has been murdered. Esperanza’s been arrested for the crime. I’d say that’s pretty serious.”

“There’s more to it. Tell me that much. I won’t print it, I promise.”

“Truth, Bruce? I don’t know yet.”

“And when you do?”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“You really think Esperanza’s innocent? Even with all that evidence?”

“Yes.”

“Call me, Myron. If you need anything else. I like Esperanza. I want to help if I can.”

Myron hung up. He looked over at Win. Win seemed in deep thought. He was tapping his chin with his index finger. They sat in silence for several seconds.

Win stopped tapping and asked, “Whatever happened to the King Family?”

“You mean the ones with the Christmas specials?”

Win nodded. “Every year you were supposed to watch the King Family Christmas Special. There must have been a hundred of the buggers—big Kings with beards, little Kings in knickers, Mommy Kings, Daddy Kings, Uncle and Aunt and Cousin Kings. Then one year—poof—they’re gone. All of them. What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

“And what did the King clan do the rest of the year?”

“Prepared for the next Christmas special?”

“What a life, no?” Win said. “Christmas passes, and you start thinking about next Christmas. You live in a snow globe of Christmas.”

“I guess.”

“I wonder where they are now, all those suddenly unemployed Kings. Do they sell cars? Insurance? Are they drug dealers? Do they get sad every Christmas?”

“Yeah, poignant point, Win. By the way, did you come down here for a reason?”

“Discussing the King Family isn’t reason enough? Weren’t you the one who came up to my office because you didn’t understand the meaning of a Sheena Easton song?”

“You’re comparing the King Family to Sheena Easton?”

“Yes, well, in truth, I came up here to inform you that I quashed the subpoenas against Lock-Horne.”

Myron shouldn’t have been surprised. “The power of payoffs,” he said with a shake of his head. “It never fails to amaze me.”

“Payoff is such an offensive term,” Win said. “I prefer the more politically correct assisting the contribution-challenged.” He sat back, crossed his legs in that way of his, folded his hands on his lap. He gestured at the phone and said, “Explain.”

So Myron did. He filled him in on everything, especially on the Lucy Mayor incident. When Myron was finished, Win said, “Puzzling.”

“Agreed.”

“But I am not sure I see a connection.”

“Someone mails me a diskette with Lucy Mayor’s image on it and a little while later Clu is murdered. You think that’s just a coincidence?”

Win mulled that over. “Too early to tell,” he concluded. “Let’s do a little recap, shall we?”

“Go ahead.”

“Let’s start with a straight time line: Clu gets traded to New York, he pitches well, he gets thrown out by Bonnie, he starts collapsing, he fails a drug test, he desperately searches for you, he comes to me and withdraws two hundred thousand dollars, he strikes Esperanza, he gets murdered.” Win stopped. “That sound fair?”

“Yes.”

“Now let’s explore some possible tangents from this line.”

“Let’s.”

“One, our old fraternity chum Billy Lee Palms appears to be missing. Clu purportedly contacted him shortly before the murder. Aside from that, is there any reason to tie Billy Lee into all this?”

“Not really. And according to his mother, Billy Lee isn’t the most dependable tool in the shed.”

“So maybe his disappearance has nothing to do with this.”

“Maybe.

“But that would be yet another bizarre coincidence,” Win said.

“It would at that.”

“Fine, let’s move on for the moment. Tangent two, this Take A Guess nightspot.”

“All we know is that Clu called them.”

Win shook his head. “We know a great deal more.”

“For example?”

“They overreacted to your visit. Tossing you out would have been one thing. Roughing you up a bit would have been one thing. But this sort of interrogation complete with knife slashes and electrocution—that’s overkill.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that you struck a nerve, poked the hive, stirred the nest, choose your favorite cliché.”

“So they’re connected into all this.”

“Logical,” Win said, again doing his best Spock.

“How?”

“Heavens, I haven’t a clue.”

Myron chewed it over a bit. “I had thought maybe Clu and Esperanza hooked up there.”

“And now?”

“Let’s say they did hook up there. What would be the big deal about that? Why the overkill?”

“So it’s something else.”

Myron nodded. “Any more tangents?”

“The big one,” Win said. “The disappearance of Lucy Mayor.”

“Which happened more than ten years ago.”

“And we must confess that her connection is tenuous at best.”

“So confessed,” Myron said.

Win steepled his fingers and raised the pointers. “But the diskette was addressed to you.”

“Yes.”

“Ergo we cannot be sure that Lucy Mayor is connected to Clu Haid at all—”

“Right.”

“—but we can be sure that Lucy Mayor is somehow connected to you.”

“Me?” Myron made a face. “I can’t imagine how.”

“Think hard. Perhaps you met her once.”

Myron shook his head. “Never.”

“You might not have known. The woman has been living in some sort of clandestine state for a very long time. Perhaps she was someone you met in a bar, a one-night stand.”

“I don’t one-night stand.”

“That’s right,” Win said. Then with flat eyes: “God, I wish I were you.”

Myron waved him off. “But suppose you’re right. Suppose I did meet her but didn’t know it. So what? She decides to repay me by sending me a diskette of her face melting into a puddle of blood?”

Win nodded. “Puzzling.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Puzzled.”

The speaker buzzed. Myron said, “Yes?”

Big Cyndi said, “Your father is on line one, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Thank you.” Myron picked up the receiver. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hey, Myron. How are you?”

“Good.”

“You readjusting to being home?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Happy to be back?”

Dad was stalling. “Yeah, Dad, I’m great.”

“All this stuff with Esperanza. It must be keeping you hopping, huh?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“Soooo,” Dad said, stretching out the word, “think you have time for lunch with your old man?”

There was a strain in the voice.

“Sure, Dad.”

“How about tomorrow? At the club?”

Myron bit back a groan. Not the club. “Sure. Noon, okay?”

“Good, son, that’ll be fine.”

Dad didn’t call him son very often. More like never. Myron switched hands. “Anything wrong, Dad?”

“No, no,” he said too quickly. “Everything’s fine. I just want to talk to you about something.”

“About what?”

“It’ll keep, no biggie. See you tomorrow.”

Click.

Myron looked at Win. “That was my father.”

“Yes, I picked up on that when Big Cyndi said your father was on the line. It was further reemphasized when you said ‘Dad’ four times during the conversation. I’m gifted that way.”

“He wants to have lunch tomorrow.”

Win nodded. “And I care because—?”

“Just telling you.”

“I’ll write about it in my diary tonight,” Win said. “In the meantime, I had another thought, vis-à-vis Lucy Mayor.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you recall, we were trying to figure out who was being injured in all this.”

“I recall.”

“Clu obviously. Esperanza. You. I.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we must add a new person: Sophie Mayor.”

Myron thought about it. Then he started nodding. “That could very well be the connection. If you wanted to destroy Sophie Mayor, what would you do? First, you’d do something to undermine any support she had with the Yankee fans and management.”

“Clu Haid,” Win said.

“Right. Then you might hit her in what has to be a vulnerable spot—her missing daughter. I mean, if someone sent her a similar diskette, can you imagine the horror?”

“Which raises an interesting question,” Win said.

“What?”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“About the diskette?”

“No, about recent troop movements in Bosnia. Yes, the diskette.”

Myron thought about it but not for very long. “I don’t see where I have any choice. I have to tell her.”

“Perhaps that too is part of the theoretical plan to wear her down,” Win said. “Perhaps someone sent you the diskette knowing it would get back to her.”

“Maybe. But she still has the right to know. It’s not my place to decide what Sophie Mayor is strong enough to handle.”

“Too true.” Win rose. “I have some contacts trying to locate the official reports on Clu’s murder—autopsy, crime scene, witness statements, labs, what have you. But everyone is tight-lipped.”

“I got a possible source,” Myron said.

“Oh?”

“The Bergen County medical examiner is Sally Li. I know her.”

“Through Jessica’s father?”

“Yes.”

“Go for it,” Win said.

Myron watched him head for the door. “Win?”

“Yes?”

“You have any thoughts on how I should break the news to Sophie Mayor?”

“None whatsoever.”

Win left then. Myron stared at the phone. He picked it up and dialed Sophie Mayor’s phone number. It took some time, but a secretary finally patched him through to her. Sophie sounded less than thrilled to hear his voice.

She opened sharply. “What?”

“We need to talk,” Myron said. There was distortion on the line. A cell or car phone probably.

“We already talked.”

“This is different.”

Silence. Then: “I’m in the car right now, about a mile from my house out on the Island. How important is this?”

Myron picked up a pen. “Give me your address,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”

CHAPTER 19

On the street the man was still reading a newspaper.

Myron’s elevator trip down to the lobby featured mucho stops. Not atypical. No one spoke, of course, everyone busying themselves by staring up at the descending flashing numbers as though awaiting a UFO landing. In the lobby he joined the stream of suits and flowed out onto Park Avenue, salmons fighting upstream against the tide until, well, they died. Many of the suits walked with heads high, their expressions kick-ass-runway-model; others walked with backs bent, flesh versions of the statue on Fifth Avenue of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders, but for them the world was simply too heavy.

Whoa, again with the deep.

Perfectly situated on the corner of Forty-sixth and Park, standing reading a newspaper but positioned in such way as to watch all entering or leaving the Lock-Horne building, was the same man Myron had noticed standing there when he entered.

Hmm.

Myron took out his cell phone and hit the programmed button.

“Articulate,” Win said.

“I think I got a tail.”

“Hold please.” Maybe ten seconds passed. Then: “The newspaper on the corner.”

Win keeps a variety of telescopes and binoculars in his office. Don’t ask.

“Yep.”

“Good Lord,” Win said. “Could he be any more obvious?”

“Doubt it.”

“Where’s the pride in his work? Where’s the professionalism?”

“Sad.”

“That, my friend, is the whole problem with this country.”

“Bad tails?”

“It’s an example. Look at him. Does anybody really stand on a street corner and read a newspaper like that? He might as well cut out two eyeholes.”

“Uh-huh,” Myron said. “You got some free time?”

“But of course. How would you like to play it?”

“Back me up,” Myron said.

“Give me five.”

Myron waited five minutes. He stood there and studiously avoided looking at the tail. He checked his watch and huffed a bit as though he expected someone and was getting impatient. When the five minutes passed, Myron walked straight over to the tail.

The tail spotted his approach and ducked into the newspaper.

Myron kept walking until he stood directly next to the tail. The tail kept his face in the newspaper. Myron gave him Smile 8. Big and toothy. A televangelist being handed a hefty check. Early Wink Martindale. The tail kept his eyes on the newspaper. Myron kept smiling, his eyes wide as a clown’s. The tail ignored him. Myron inched closer, leaned his über-wattage smile within inches of the tail’s face, wriggled his eyebrows.

The tail snapped closed the newspaper and sighed. “Fine, hotshot, you made me. Congratulations.”

Still with the Wink Martindale smile: “And thank you for playing our game! But don’t worry, we won’t let you go home empty-handed! You get the home version of Incompetent Tail and a year’s subscription to Modern Doofus.”

“Yeah, right, see you around.”

“Wait! Final Jeopardy! round. Answer: He or she hired you to follow me.”

“Bite me.”

“Ooo, sorry, you needed to put that in the form of a question.”

The tail started walking away. When he looked back, Myron gave him the smile and a big wave. “This has been a Mark Goodson-Bill Todman production. Good-bye, everybody!” More waving.

The tail shook his head and continued down the street, joining another stream of people. Lots of people in this stream; Win happened to be one of them. The tail would probably find a clearing and then call his boss. Win would listen in and learn all. What a plan.

Myron headed to his rented car. He circled the block once. No more tails. At least none as obvious as the last. No matter. He was driving out to the Mayor estate on Long Island. It didn’t much matter if anyone knew.

He spent his time in the car working on the cell phone. He had two arena football players—indoor football on a smaller field, for those who don’t know—both of whom were hoping to scratch a bench spot on an NFL roster before the waiver wire closed down. Myron called teams, but nobody was interested. Lots of people asked him about the murder. He brushed them off. He knew his efforts were fairly futile, but he stuck to it. Big of him. He tried concentrating on his work, tried to lose himself in the numb bliss of what he did for a living. But the world kept creeping in. He thought about Esperanza in jail. He thought about Jessica in California. He thought about Bonnie Haid and her fatherless boys at home. He thought about Clu in formaldehyde. He thought about his father’s phone call. And strangely, he kept thinking about Terese alone on that island.

He blocked out the rest.

When he reached Muttontown, a section of Long Island that had somehow escaped him in the past, he turned right onto a heavily wooded road. He drove about two miles, passing maybe three driveways. He finally reached a simple iron gate with a small sign that read THE MAYORS. There were several security cameras and an intercom. He pressed the button. A woman’s voice came on and said, “May I help you?”

“Myron Bolitar to see Sophie Mayor.”

“Please drive up. Park in front of the house.”

The gate opened. Myron drove up a rather steep hill. Tall hedges lined both sides of the driveway, giving the aura of being a rat in a maze. He spotted a few more security cameras. No sign of the house yet. When he reached the top of the hill, he hit upon a clearing. There was a slightly overgrown grass tennis court and croquet field. Very Norma Desmond. He made another turn. The house was dead straight ahead. It was a mansion, of course, though not as huge as some Myron had seen. Vines clung to pale yellow stucco. The windows looked leaded. The whole scene screamed Roaring Twenties. Myron half expected Scott and Zelda to pull up behind him in a slick roadster.

This part of the driveway was made up of small loose pebbles rather than pavement. His tires crunched them as it drew closer. There was a fountain in the middle of the circular drive, about fifteen feet in front of the door. Neptune stood naked with a triton in his hand. The fountain, Myron realized, was a smaller version of the one in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. Water spouted up but not very high or with much enthusiasm, as if someone had set the water pressure on “light urination.”

Myron parked the car. There was a perfectly square swimming pool on his right, complete with lily pads floating on the top. A poor man’s Giverny. There were statues in the gardens, again something from old Italy or Greece or the like. Venus de Milo–like except with all the limbs.

He got out of the car and stopped. He thought about what he was about to unearth, and for a brief moment he considered turning back. How, he wondered again, do I tell this woman about her missing daughter melting on a computer diskette?

No answer came to him.

The door opened. A woman in casual clothes led him through a corridor and into a large room with high tin ceilings and lots of windows and a semidisappointing view of more white statues and woods. The interior was art deco, but it didn’t try too hard. Nice. Except, of course, for the hunting trophies. Taxidermy birds of some sort sat on the shelves. The birds looked upset. Probably were. Who could blame them?

Myron turned and stared at a mounted deer. He waited for Sophie Mayor. The deer waited too. The deer seemed very patient.

“Go ahead,” a voice said.

Myron turned around. It was Sophie Mayor. She was wearing dirt-smeared jeans and a plaid shirt, the very essence of the weekend botanist.

Never short of a witty opening gambit, Myron countered, “Go ahead and what?”

“Make the snide remark about hunting.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Come, come, Myron. Don’t you think hunting is barbaric?”

Myron shrugged. “I never really thought about it.” Not true, but what the hey.

“But you don’t approve, do you?”

“Not my place to approve.”

“How tolerant.” She smiled. “But you of course would never do it, am I right?”

“Hunt? No, it’s not for me.”

“You think it’s inhumane.” She gestured with her chin to the mounted deer. “Killing Bambi’s mother and all.”

“It’s just not for me.”

“I see. Are you a vegetarian?”

“I don’t eat much red meat,” Myron said.

“I’m not talking about your health. Do you ever eat any dead animals?”

“Yes.”

“So do you think it’s more humane to kill, say, a chicken or a cow than it is to kill a deer?”

“No.”

“Do you know what kind of awful torture that cow goes through before it’s slaughtered?”

“For food,” Myron said.

“Pardon?”

“Slaughtered for food.”

“I eat what I kill, Myron. Your friend up there”—she nodded to the patient deer—“she was gutted and eaten. Feel better?”

Myron thought about that. “Uh, we’re not having lunch, are we?”

That got a small chuckle. “I won’t go into the whole food chain argument,” Sophie Mayor said. “But God created a world where the only way to survive is to kill. Period. We all kill. Even the strict vegetarians have to plow fields. You don’t think plowing kills small animals and insects?”

“I never really thought about it.”

“Hunting is just more hands-on, more honest. When you sit down and eat an animal, you have no appreciation for the process, for the sacrifice made so that you could survive. You let someone else do the killing. You’re above even thinking about it. When I eat an animal, I have a fuller understanding. I don’t do it casually. I don’t depersonalize it.”

“Okay,” Myron said, “while we’re on the subject, what about those hunters who don’t kill for food?”

“Most do eat what they kill.”

“But what about those who kill for sport? I mean, isn’t that part of it?”

“Yes.”

“So what about that? What about killing merely for sport?”

“As opposed to what, Myron? Killing for a pair of shoes? Or a nice coat? Is spending a full day outdoors, coming to understand how nature works and appreciating her bountiful glory, is that worth any less than a leather pocketbook? If it’s worth killing an animal because you prefer your belt made of animal skin instead of something man-made, is it not worth killing one because you simply enjoy the thrill of it?”

He said nothing.

“I’m sorry to ride you about this. But the hypocrisy of it all drives me somewhat batty. Everyone wants to save the whale, but what about the thousands of fish and shrimp a whale eats each day? Are their lives worthless because they aren’t as cute? Ever notice how no one ever wants to save ugly animals? And the same people who think hunting is barbaric put up special fences so the deer can’t eat their precious gardens. So the deers overpopulate and die of starvation. Is that better? And don’t even get me started on those so-called ecofeminists. Men hunt, they say, but women are too genteel. Of all the sexist nonsense. They want to be environmentalists? They want to stay as close to a state of nature as possible? Then understand the one universal truth about nature: You either kill or you die.”

They both turned and stared at the deer for a moment. Proof positive.

“You didn’t come here for a lecture,” she said.

Myron had welcomed this delay. But the time had come. “No, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” Sophie Mayor chuckled without a hint of humor. “That sounds grim, Myron.”

Myron turned and looked at her. She met his gaze and held it.

“Call me Sophie,” she said.

He nodded. “Can I ask you a very personal, maybe hurtful question, Sophie?”

“You can try.”

“Have you heard anything from your daughter since she ran away?”

“No.”

The answer came fast. Her gaze remained steady, her voice strong. But her face was losing color.

“Then you have no idea where she is?”

“No idea.”

“Or even if she’s …”

“Alive or dead,” she finished for him. “None.”

Her voice was so monotone it seemed on the verge of a scream. There was a quaking near her mouth now, a fault line starting to give way. Sophie Mayor stood and waited for his explanation, afraid perhaps to say any more.

“I got a diskette in the mail,” he began.

She frowned. “What?”

“A computer diskette. It came in the mail. I put it in my A drive, and it just started up. I didn’t have to hit any keys.”

“Self-starting program,” she said, suddenly the computer expert. “That’s not complicated technology.”

Myron cleared his throat. “A graphic came on. It started out as a photograph of your daughter.”

Sophie Mayor took a step back.

“It was the same photograph that’s in your office. On the right side of the credenza.”

“That was Lucy’s junior year of high school,” she said. “The school portrait.”

Myron nodded, though he didn’t know why. “After a few seconds her image started melting on the screen.”

“Melting?”

“Yes. It sort of dissolved into a puddle of, uh, blood. Then a sound came on. A teenage girl laughing, I think.”

Sophie Mayor’s eyes were glistening now. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“This came in the mail?”

“Yes.”

“On a floppy disk?”

“Yes,” Myron said. Then he added for no reason: “A three-and-a-half-inch floppy.”

“When?”

“It arrived in my office about two weeks ago.”

“Why did you wait so long to tell me?” She put a hand up. “Oh, wait. You were out of the country.”

“Yes.”

“So when did you first see it?”

“Yesterday.”

“But you saw me this morning. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I didn’t know who the girl was. Not at first anyway. Then when I was in your office, I saw the photograph on the credenza. I got confused. I wasn’t sure what to say.”

She nodded slowly. “So that explains your abrupt departure.”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Do you have the diskette? My people will analyze it.”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew it. “I don’t think it’ll be any help.”

“Why not?”

“I took it to a police lab. They said it automatically reformatted itself.”

“So the diskette is blank?”

“Yes.”

It was as though her muscles had suddenly decided to flee the district. Sophie Mayor’s legs gave way. She dropped to a chair. Her head lolled into her hands. Myron waited. There were no sounds. She just sat there, head in hands. When she looked up again, the gray eyes were tinged with red.

“You said something about a police lab.”

He nodded.

“You used to work in law enforcement.”

“Not really.”

“I remember Clip Arnstein saying something about it.”

Myron said nothing. Clip Arnstein was the man who had drafted Myron in the first round for the Boston Celtics. He also had a big mouth.

“You helped Clip when Greg Downing vanished,” she continued.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been hiring private investigators to search for Lucy for years. Supposedly the best in the world. Sometimes we seem to get close but …” Her voice drifted off, her eyes far away. She looked at the diskette in her hand as if it had suddenly materialized there. “Why would someone send this to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you know my daughter?”

“No.”

Sophie took a couple of careful breaths. “I want to show you something. Wait here a minute.” It took maybe half that time. Myron had just begun to stare into the eyes of some dead bird, noting with some dismay how closely they resembled the eyes of some human beings he knew, and Sophie was back. She handed him a sheet of paper.

Myron looked at it. It was an artist’s rendering of a woman nearing thirty years of age.

“It’s from MIT,” she explained. “My alma mater. A scientist there has developed a software package that helps with age progression. For missing people. So you can see what they might look like today. He made this up for me a few months ago.”

Myron looked at the image of what the teenage Lucy might look like as a woman heading toward thirty. The effect was nothing short of startling. Oh, it looked like her, he guessed, but talk about ghosts, talk about life being a series of what-ifs, talk about the years slipping away and then smacking you in the face. Myron stared at the image, at the more conservative haircut, the small frown lines. How painful must it be for Sophie Mayor to look at this?

“Does she look familiar at all?” Sophie asked.

Myron shook his head. “No, I’m sorry.”

“You’re sure?”

“As sure as you can be in these situations.”

“Will you help me find her?”

He wasn’t sure how to answer. “I can’t see how I can help.”

“Clip said you’re good at these things.”

“I’m not. But even if I were, I can’t see what I can do. You’ve hired experts already. You have the cops—”

“The police have been useless. They view Lucy as a runaway, period.”

Myron said nothing.

“Do you think it’s hopeless?” she asked.

“I don’t know enough about it.”

“She was a good girl, you know.” Sophie Mayor smiled at him, her eyes misty with time travel. “Headstrong, sure. Too adventurous for her own good. But then again I raised Lucy to be independent. The police. They think she was simply a troubled kid. She wasn’t. Just confused. Who isn’t at that age? And it wasn’t as if she ran off in the middle of the night without telling anyone.”

Against his better judgment Myron asked, “Then what happened?”

“Lucy was a teenager, Myron. She was sullen and unhappy, and she didn’t fit in. Her parents were college math professors and computer geeks. Her younger brother was considered a genius. She hated school. She wanted to see the world and live on the road. She had the whole rock ’n’ roll fantasy. One day she told us she was going off with Owen.”

“Owen was her boyfriend?”

She nodded. “An average musician who fronted a garage band, certain that his immense talent was being held back by them.” She made a lemon-sucking face. “They wanted to run off and get a record deal and become famous. So Gary and I said okay. Lucy was like a wild bird trapped in a small cage. She wouldn’t stop flapping her wings no matter what we did. Gary and I felt we had no choice in the matter. We even thought it might be good for her. Lots of her classmates were backpacking through Europe. What was the difference?”

She stopped and looked up at him. Myron waited. When she didn’t say anything, he said, “And?”

“And we never heard from her again.”

Silence.

She turned back to the mounted deer. The deer looked back at her with something akin, it seemed, to pity.

Myron said, “But Owen came back, right?”

“Yes.” She was still staring at the deer. “He’s a car salesman in New Jersey. He plays in a wedding band on weekends. Can you imagine? He dresses up in a cheap tuxedo and belts out ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and ‘Celebration’ and introduces the bridal party.” She shook her head at the irony. “When Owen came back, the police questioned him, but he didn’t know anything. Their story was so typical: They went out to Los Angeles, failed miserably, started fighting, and broke up after six months. Owen stayed out there another three months, certain this time it had been Lucy who was holding back his immense talent. When he failed again, he came back home with his tail between his legs. He said he hadn’t seen Lucy since their breakup.”

“The police checked it out?”

“So they said. But it was a dead end.”

“Do you suspect Owen?”

“No,” she said bitterly. “He’s too big a nothing.”

“Have there been any solid leads at all?”

“Solid?” She thought about it. “Not really. Several of the investigators we’ve hired think she joined a cult.”

Myron made a face. “A cult?”

“Her personality fit the profile, they said. Despite my attempts to make her independent, they claim she was just the opposite—someone needing guidance, alone, suggestible, alienated from friends and family.”

“I don’t agree,” Myron said.

She looked at him. “You said you never met Lucy.”

“The psychological profile may be right, but I doubt she’s with a cult.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Cults like money. Lucy Mayor is the daughter of an extraordinarily wealthy family. Maybe you didn’t have money when she first would have joined, but believe me, they’d know about you by now. And they would have been in touch, if for no other reason than to extort vast sums.”

She started blinking again. Her eyes closed, and she turned her back to him. Myron took a step forward and then stopped, not sure what to do. He chose discretion, kept his distance, waited.

“The not knowing,” Sophie Mayor said after some time had passed. “It gnaws at you. All day, all night, for twelve years. It never stops. It never goes away. When my husband’s heart gave out, everyone was so shocked. Such a healthy man, they said. So young. Even now I don’t know how I’ll get through the day without him. But we rarely spoke about Lucy after she disappeared. We just lay in bed at night and pretended that the other one was asleep and stared at the ceiling and imagined all the horrors only parents with missing children can conjure up.”

More silence.

Myron had no idea what to say. But the silence was growing so thick he could barely breathe. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She didn’t look up.

“I’ll go to the police,” he said. “Tell them about the diskette.”

“What good will that do?”

“They’ll investigate.”

“They already have. I told you. They think she’s a runaway.”

“But now we have this new evidence. They’ll take the case more seriously. I can even go to the media. It’ll jump-start their coverage.”

She shook her head. Myron waited. She stood and wiped her palms on the thighs of her jeans. “The diskette,” she said, “was sent to you.”

“Yes.”

“Addressed to you.”

“Yes.”

“So,” she said, “someone is reaching out to you.”

Win had said something similar. “You don’t know that,” Myron said. “I don’t want to douse your hopes, but it could be nothing more than a prank.”

“It’s not a prank.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“If it was a prank, it would have been sent to me. Or Jared. Or someone who knew her. It wasn’t. It was sent to you. Someone is reaching out to you specifically. It might even be Lucy.”

He took a deep breath. “Again I don’t want to douse your—”

“Don’t patronize me, Myron. Just say what you want to say.”

“Okay … if it were Lucy, why would she send an image of herself melting into a puddle of blood?”

Sophie Mayor did not wince, but she came close. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s not her. Maybe it’s her killer. Either way, they’re seeking you out. It’s the first solid lead in years. And if we make it loud and public, I fear that whoever sent this will go back into hiding. I can’t risk that.”

“I don’t know what I can do,” Myron said.

“I’ll pay you whatever you want. Name a price. A hundred thousand? A million?”

“It’s not the money. I just don’t see where I can help.”

“You can investigate.”

He shook his head. “My best friend and business partner is in jail for murder. My client was shot in his own home. I have other clients who rely on me for their job security.”

“I see,” she said. “So you don’t have time, is that it?”

“It’s not a question of time. I really have nothing to go on. No clue, no connection, no source. There’s nothing to start with here.”

Her eyes pinned him down. “You can start with you. You’re my clue, my connection, my source.” She reached out and took his hand. Her flesh was cold and hard. “All I’m asking is that you look closer.”

“At what?”

“Maybe,” she said, “at yourself.”

Silence. They stood there, she holding his hand.

“That sounds good, Sophie, but I’m not sure what it means.”

“You don’t have children, do you?”

“No,” Myron said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize.”

“So let me ask you, Myron: What would you do if you were me? What would you do if the first real clue in ten years just walked in your door?”

“The same thing you’re doing.”

So under the mounted deer, he told her he would keep his eyes open. He told her he would think about it. He told her he would try to figure out the connection.

CHAPTER 20

Back at the office Myron strapped on the Ultra Slim phone headset and started making phone calls. Very Jerry Maguire. Not just in appearance but in the fact that clients were abandoning him left and right. And he hadn’t even written a mission statement.

Win called. “Newspaper Tail’s name is Wayne Tunis. He lives in Staten Island and works in construction. He placed one call to a John McClain, telling him that he had been spotted. That’s it. They’re pretty careful.”

“So we don’t yet know who hired him?”

“That would be correct.”

“When in doubt,” Myron said, “we should go with the obvious choice.”

“Young FJ?”

“Who else? He’s been following me for months.”

“Course of action?”

“I’d like to get him off my back.”

“May I recommend a well-placed bullet through the back of the skull?”

“We’ve got enough problems without adding one more.”

“Fine. Course of action?”

“We confront him.”

“He usually hangs out at a Starbucks on Forty-ninth Street,” Win said.

“Starbucks?”

“The old mob espresso bars have gone the way of leisure suits and disco music.”

“Both of them are coming back.”

“No,” Win said, “bizarre mutations of them are coming back.”

“Like coffee bars in place of espresso bars?”

“Then you understand.”

“So let’s pay FJ a visit.”

“Give me twenty minutes,” Win said before hanging up.

As soon as Myron hit the disconnect, Big Cyndi buzzed his line.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes?”

“A Miss or Mr. Thrill is on the phone,” Big Cyndi said.

Myron closed his eyes. “You mean from last night?”

“Unless you know someone else named Thrill, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Take a message.”

“Both her words and tone suggest urgency, Mr. Bolitar.”

Suggest urgency? “Fine. Patch her—or him—through.”

“Yes, Mr. Bolitar.”

There was a click.

“Myron?”

“Uh, yeah, hi, Thrill.”

“That was some exit you made last night, big fella,” Thrill said. “You really know how to impress a girl.”

“Yeah, I usually don’t jump through a plate glass window until the second date.”

“So how come you haven’t called me?”

“I’ve been really busy.”

“I’m downstairs,” Thrill said. “Tell the guard to let me up.”

“It’s not a good time. Like I said before—”

“Men rarely say no to Thrill. I must be losing my touch.”

“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just that the timing is all wrong.”

“Myron, my name isn’t really Thrill.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but I kinda suspected it read something else on your birth certificate.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Look, let me up. We need to talk about last night. About something that happened after you left.”

So he shrugged and called down to the guard at the front desk and told him to let up anyone identifying themselves as Thrill. The guard was puzzled but said okay. The headset was still strapped on so Myron speed-dialed a sports apparel company. Before dashing to the Caribbean, Myron had been on the verge of landing a sneaker deal for a track and field client with said company. But now he was being put on hold. An assistant to an assistant finally came on the line. Myron asked him about the deal. It had fallen through, he was told. Why? he asked.

“Ask your client,” the assistant said. “Oh, and ask his new agent too.”

Click.

Myron closed his eyes and pulled off his headset. Damn.

There was a knock on his office door. The alien sound caused a ripple of pain. Esperanza had never knocked. Never. She prided herself on interrupting him. She would sooner give up a limb than knock.

“Come in.”

The door opened. Someone stepped inside and said, “Surprise.”

Myron tried not to stare. He took off the headset.

“You’re …?”

“Thrill, yup.”

Nothing was the same. Gone was the Cat Woman costume, the blond wig, the high heels, the, uh, prodigious bosom. Thrill was still female, thank heavens. Still quite attractive in her conservative navy suit with matching blouse, her hair done in a pixie style, her eyes less luminous behind round tortoiseshell glasses, her makeup now applied with a far lighter hand. Her figure was thinner, more toned, less, uh, shapely. Nothing to complain about, mind you. Just different.

“To answer your first question,” she said, “when I dress like Thrill, I wear the aptly named Raquel Wonder Breast Enhancements.”

Myron nodded. “That the stuff that looks like flattened Silly Putty?”

“The very. You jam them in your bra. Guess you’ve seen the infomercial on TV.”

“Seen it? I bought the video.”

Thrill laughed. Last night her laugh—not to mention her walk, her movements, her tone of voice, her choice of words—had been a double entendre. In the light of day the sound was melodic and almost childlike.

“I also strap on the aptly named Miracle Bra,” she continued. “To lift it all up high.”

“Any higher,” Myron said, “and they could have doubled as earrings.”

“Too true,” she said. “The legs and ass, however, are mine. And for the record, I do not have a penis.”

“So noted.”

“Can I sit down?”

Myron looked at his watch. “I hate to be a pest—”

“You’ll want to hear, this, believe me.” She sat in the chair in front of his desk. Myron folded his arms and leaned his butt on the desk’s lip. “My real name is Nancy Sinclair. I don’t dress like Thrill for kicks. I’m a journalist, and I’m doing a story on Take A Guess. An insider’s look at what goes on, what kind of people go there, what makes them tick. In order to get people to open up, I go undercover as Thrill.”

“So you do all this for a story?”

“I do all what?”

“Dress up and, uh …” His gestures were unintelligible.

“Not that I see where it’s even vaguely any of your concern, but the answer is no. I dress a part. I strike up conversations. I flirt. Period. I like to watch people’s reaction to me.”

“Oh.” Then Myron cleared his throat and said, “Just, uh, out of curiosity, I’m not going to be in your story, am I? I mean, I’ve really never been there before and I was—”

“Relax. I recognized you as soon as you came in the door.”

“You did?”

“I follow basketball. I got season tickets to the Dragons.”

“I see.” The Dragons were New Jersey’s pro basketball team. Myron had tried a comeback with them not long ago.

“That’s why I approached you.”

“To see if I was into, uh, gender ambiguity?”

“Everyone else there is. Why not you?”

“But I explained to you that I was there to ask about someone.”

“Clu Haid, right. Still, your reaction to me was interesting.”

“I found you to be a witty conversationalist,” Myron said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And I also have a Julie-Newmar-as-Cat-Woman fetish.”

“You’d be surprised how many people have that same fetish.”

“No, I don’t think I would be,” Myron said. “So why are you here, Nancy?”

“Pat saw us talking last night.”

“The bartender?”

“He’s also one of the owners. He has shares in a couple of places in the city.”

“And?”

“And after the smoke cleared from your exit, Pat pulled me aside.”

“Because he saw us talking?”

“Because he saw me giving you my phone number.”

“So?”

“So I’d never done that before.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be. I’m just making a point. I come on to a ton of girls and guys and whatever in there. But I never give out a phone number.”

“So why did you give it to me?”

“Because I was curious to see if you’d call. You rebuffed Thrill, so you clearly weren’t there for sex. I wondered what you were up to.”

Myron frowned. “That was the only reason?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing about my rugged good looks and brawny body?”

“Oh, yeah. I almost forgot.”

“So what did Pat want?”

“He wants me to bring you to another club tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“How did he know I’d call?” Again the smile. “Nancy Sinclair might not guarantee an immediate phone call …”

“But Thrill does?”

“Bosoms are empowerment. And if you didn’t, he told me I could look up your business number in the phone book.”

“Which is what you did.”

“Yes. He also promised me you wouldn’t be hurt.”

“How comforting. And your interest in all this?”

“Isn’t it obvious? A story. The Clu Haid murder is huge news. Now you’re tying this week’s murder-of-the-century to a kinky New York nightclub.”

“I don’t think I can help you.”

“Cow dooky.”

“Cow dooky?”

She shrugged.

“What else did Pat say to you?” Myron asked.

“Nothing much. He just said that he wanted to talk.”

“If he wanted to talk, he could have looked up my phone number too.”

“Thrill, not the brightest bulb on the tree, didn’t pick up on that.”

“But Nancy Sinclair did.”

She smiled again. It was a damn nice smile. “Pat was also huddled up with Zorra.”

“Who?”

“That’s their psycho bouncer. A cross-dresser with a blond wig.”

“Like Veronica Lake?”

She nodded. “He’s absolutely nuts. Lift up your shirt.”

“Pardon?”

“He can do anything with that razor heel. His favorite is a Z slash on the right side. You were in the back room with him.”

Made sense. Myron hadn’t made him miss. Zorra—Zorra?—just wanted to brand him. “I have one.”

“He’s seriously whacked out. Did some sort of stuff in the Persian Gulf War. Undercover. Worked for the Israelis too. There are all kinds of rumors about him, but if five percent of the stories I’ve heard are true, he’s killed dozens.”

Just what he needed—Cross-Dressing Mossad. “Did they talk about Clu at all?”

“No. But Pat said something about your trying to kill somebody.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“They think I killed Clu?”

“I don’t think so. It sounded more like they thought you were at the club to find someone and kill him.”

“Who?”

“No idea. They just said you were out to kill him.”

“They didn’t say who?”

“If they did, I didn’t hear them.” She smiled. “So do we have a date?”

“Guess so.”

“You’re not scared?”

“I’ll have backup.”

“Someone good?”

Myron nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

“Then I better go home and strap up my breasts.”

“Need any help?”

“My hero. But no, Myron, I think I can handle it myself.”

“And if you can’t?”

“I have your phone number,” she said. “See you tonight.”

CHAPTER 21

Win frowned. “Nonsurgical breast enhancements?”

“Yes. They’re an accessory of some sort.”

“An accessory? Like a matching pocketbook?”

“In a way.” Then thinking about it, Myron added, “But they’re probably more noticeable.”

Win showed him the flat eyes. Myron shrugged.

“False advertising,” Win said.

“Pardon?”

“Breast enhancements. It’s false advertising. There should be a law.”

“Right, Win. But the politicians in Washington—where are they when it comes to the real issues?”

“Then you understand.”

“I understand that you’re a snorting pig.”

“A thousand pardons, O Enlightened One.” Win put a hand to his ear and tilted his head to the side. “Tell me again, Myron: What first attracted you to this Thrill?”

“The catsuit,” Myron said.

“I see. So if, say, Big Cyndi came into the office in the catsuit—”

“Hey, c’mon, I just ate a muffin.”

“Exactly.”

“Fine, I’m a pig too. Happy?”

“Yes, ecstatic. And perhaps you misread me. Perhaps I wish to outlaw such accessories because of what they do to a woman’s self-esteem. Perhaps I tire of a society that forces unobtainable beauty on a woman—size four dresses with D cups.”

“The key word here being perhaps.”

Win smiled. “Love me for all my faults.”

“What else is there?”

Win adjusted his tie. “FJ and the two oversized hormonal glands that guard him are at Starbucks. Shall we?”

“Let’s. Then I want to head over to Yankee Stadium. I need to question a couple of folks.”

“Sounds almost like a plan,” Win said.

They strolled up Park Avenue. The light changed, and they waited at the corner. Myron stood next to a man in a business suit talking on a cell phone. Nothing unusual about that, except the man was having phone sex. He was actually rubbing his, uh, nether parts and saying into the phone, “Yeah, baby, like that,” and other stuff not worth repeating. The light changed. The man crossed, still rubbing and talking. Talk about I Love New York.

“About tonight,” Win said.

“Yes.”

“You trust this Thrill?”

“She checks out.”

“There is of course a chance that they’ll just shoot you when you show up.”

“I doubt it. This Pat is part owner. He wouldn’t want the trouble in his own place.”

“So you think they’re extending this invitation to buy you a drink?”

“Could be,” Myron said. “With my preference-crossing animal magnetism, I’m considered something of a tasty morsel to the swinger set.”

Win chose not to argue.

They headed east on Forty-ninth Street. The Starbucks was four blocks up on the right. When they arrived, Win signaled for Myron to wait. He leaned in and took a quick peek through the glass before backing away. “Young FJ is at a table with someone,” Win reported. “Hans and Franz are two tables over. Only one other table is occupied.”

Myron nodded. “Shall we?”

“You first,” Win said. “Let me trail.”

Myron had stopped questioning Win’s methods a long time ago. He immediately stepped inside and headed toward FJ’s table. Hans and Franz, the Mr. Universe Bookends, were still wearing the tank tops and the semipajama pants smeared with a pattern that resembled melted paisley. They bolted upright when Myron entered, fingers tightened into fists, necks in midcrack.

FJ was decked out in a light herringbone sports coat, collared shirt buttoned all the way to the top, cuffed pants, and Cole-Haan tasseled loafers. Too natty for words. He spotted Myron and raised his hand in the bruisers’ direction. Hans and Franz froze.

“Hi, FJ,” Myron said.

FJ was sipping something foamy; it kinda looked like shaving cream. “Ah, Myron,” he said with what he must have been sure was savoir faire. He gestured at his table companion. His companion got up without a word and scooted toward the exit like a scared gerbil. “Please, Myron, join me. This is such a strange coincidence.”

“Oh?”

“You saved me a trip. I was just going to pay you a visit.” FJ tossed Myron the snake smile. Myron let it land on the floor and watched it slither away. “I guess it’s kismet, huh, Myron? Your coming here. Pure kismet.”

FJ cracked up at that. Hans and Franz laughed too.

“Kismet,” Myron repeated. “Good one.”

FJ waved a modest hand as if to say, I got a million like that. “Please sit, Myron.”

Myron pulled out a chair.

“Care for a drink?”

“An iced latte would be fine. Grande, skim, with a dash of vanilla.”

FJ motioned to the guy working behind the coffee bar.

“He’s new,” FJ confided.

“Who?”

“The guy working the espresso machine. The last guy who worked here made a wonderful latte. But he quit for moral reasons.”

“Moral reasons?”

“They started selling Kenny G CDs,” FJ said. “Suddenly he couldn’t sleep at night. It was tearing him apart. Suppose an impressionable kid bought one? How could he live with himself? Pushing caffeine was okay. But Kenny G … the man had scruples.”

Myron said, “Commendable.”

Win chose that moment to enter. FJ spotted him and looked over at Hans and Franz. Win did not hesitate. He beelined straight toward FJ’s table. Hans and Franz went to work. They stepped in Win’s path and expanded their chests to dimensions large enough to apply for a parking permit. Win kept walking. Both men wore turtlenecks so high and loose they looked like something awaiting circumcision.

Hans managed a smirk. “You Win?”

“Yes,” Win said, “me Win.”

“You don’t look so tough.” Hans looked at Franz.

“He look tough to you, Keith?”

Keith said, “Not so tough.”

Win did not break stride. Almost casually and without the slightest warning, he struck Hans with the knife-edge of his hand behind the ear. Hans’s whole body stiffened and then collapsed as though someone had ripped the skeleton out of him. Franz gaped at the sight. But not for long. In the same motion Win pirouetted and struck Franz in the oft vulnerable throat. An awful gurgling noise shot out of Franz’s lips, as though he were choking on a slew of small bones. Win reached for the carotid artery, found it, and squeezed with his pointer and thumb. Franz’s eyes closed, and he too slid into Nighty-Night Land.

The couple at the other table exited quickly. Win smiled down at the unconscious bruisers. Then he glanced at Myron. Myron shook his head. Win shrugged and turned to the guy manning the coffee bar.

“Barista,” Win said. “One caffe mocha.”

“What size?”

“Grande, please.”

“Skim or whole milk?”

“Skim. I’m watching my figure.”

“Right away.”

Win joined Myron and FJ. He sat and crossed his legs.

“Nice sports coat, FJ.”

“Glad you like it, Win.”

“It really brings out the demonic red in your eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“So where were we?”

Myron played along. “I was just about to tell FJ that I’m getting a little tired of the tail.”

“And I was just about to tell Myron that I’m getting tired of him meddling in my affairs,” FJ said.

Myron looked at Win. “Meddling? Does anybody really use that word anymore?”

Win thought about it. “The old man at the end of every Scooby Doo.”

“Right. You meddling kids, stuff like that.”

“You will never guess who does the voice for Shaggy,” Win said.

“Who?”

“Casey Kasem.”

“Get out,” Myron said. “The top-forty radio guy?”

“The very same.”

“Live and learn.”

On the floor Hans and Franz started to stir. Win showed FJ the gun he had semihidden in his one hand. “For the safety of all concerned,” Win said, “please ask your employees to refrain from moving.”

FJ told them. He was not scared. His father was Frank Ache. That was protection enough. The muscles here were for show.

“You’ve been following me for weeks now,” Myron said. “I want it to end.”

“Then I suggest that you stop interfering with my company.”

Myron sighed. “Fine, FJ, I’ll bite. How am I interfering with your company?”

“Did you or did you not visit Sophie and Jared Mayor this morning?” FJ asked.

“You know I did.”

“For what purpose?”

“It had nothing to do with you, FJ.”

“Wrong answer.”

“Wrong answer?”

“You visited the owner of the New York Yankees even though you currently represent no one who plays for the team.”

“So?”

“So why were you there?”

Myron looked at Win. Win shrugged. “Not that I need to explain myself to you, FJ, but just to assuage your paranoid delusions, I was there about Clu Haid.”

“What about him?”

“I was asking about his drug tests.”

FJ’s eyes narrowed. “That’s interesting.”

“Glad you think so, FJ.”

“You see, I’m just a new guy trying to learn this confusing business.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m young and inexperienced.”

Win said, “Ah, how often I’ve heard that line.”

Myron just shook his head.

FJ leaned forward, his scaly features coming closer. Myron feared his tongue would dart out and sniff him. “I want to learn, Myron. So please tell me: What possible significance could Clu’s drug test results have now?”

Myron quickly debated answering and decided, What’s the harm? “If I can show the drug test was faulty, his contract would still be active.”

FJ nodded, seeing the thought trail now. “You’d be able to get his contract paid out.”

“Right.”

“Do you have reason to believe that the test was faulty?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential, FJ. Agent-client privilege or whatever you want to call it. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do,” FJ said.

“Good.”

“But you, Myron, are not his agent.”

“I am still responsible for his estate’s financial well-being. Clu’s death doesn’t alter my obligation.”

“Wrong answer.”

Myron looked at Win. “Again with the wrong answer?”

“You are not responsible.” FJ reached to the floor and pulled a briefcase into view. He snapped it open with as much flair as possible. His finger danced through a stack of papers before withdrawing the one he sought. He handed it to Myron and smiled. Myron looked into FJ’s eyes, and again he was reminded of the eyes of that mounted deer.

Myron skimmed it over. He read the first line, felt a thump, checked the signature. “What the hell is this?”

FJ’s smile was like a dripping candle now. “Exactly what it looks like. Clu Haid changed representation. He fired MB SportsReps and hired TruPro.”

He remembered what Sophie Mayor had said in her office, about his having no legal standing. “He never told us.”

“Never told us, Myron, or never told you?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You weren’t around. Perhaps he tried to tell you. Perhaps he told your associate.”

“So he just happened by you, FJ?”

“How I recruit is none of your business. If you kept your clients happy, the best recruitment efforts wouldn’t work.”

Myron checked the date. “This is quite a coincidence, FJ.”

“What’s that?”

“He dies two days after he signs with you.”

“Yes, Myron, I agree. I don’t think it was a coincidence. Fortunately for me, it means that I had no motive to kill him. Unfortunately for the sizzling Esperanza, the opposite is true.”

Myron glanced over at Win. Win was staring down at Hans and Franz. They were both awake now, face to the floor, hands behind their heads. Customers occasionally came into the coffee bar. Some saw the two men on the floor and exited right away. Others were unfazed, walking past as though Hans and Franz were just two more Manhattan panhandlers.

“Very convenient,” Myron said.

“What’s that?”

“Clu signing with you so close to his death. On the surface it eliminates you as a serious suspect.”

“On the surface?”

“It draws attention away from you, makes it look like his death hurts your interests.”

“It does hurt my interests.”

Myron shook his head. “He had failed a drug test. His contract was null and void. He’s thirty-five years old with several suspensions. As a monetary commodity Clu was fairly worthless.”

“Clu had overcome adversity before,” FJ said.

“Not like this. He was through.”

“If he stayed with MB, yes, that’s probably true. But TruPro has influence. We would have found a way to relaunch his career.”

Doubtful. But all this raised some interesting questions. The signature looked real, the contract legit. So maybe Clu had left him. Why? Well, lots of reasons. His life was being flushed down the toilet while Myron lollygagged in the sands of the Caribbean. Okay, but why TruPro? Clu knew their reputation. He knew what the Aches were all about. Why would he choose them?

Unless he had to.

Unless Clu was in debt to them. Myron remembered the missing two hundred thousand dollars. Could Clu have been in debt to FJ? Had he gotten in too deep—so deep he had to sign with TruPro? But if that was the case, why not take out more money? He still had more in the account.

No, maybe this was far simpler. Maybe Clu got himself in big trouble. He looked to Myron for help. Myron wasn’t there. Clu felt abandoned. He had no one. In desperation he turned to his old friend Billy Lee Palms. But Billy Lee was too messed up to help anyone. He looked again for Myron. But Myron was still gone, possibly avoiding him. Clu was weak and alone, and FJ was there with promises and power.

So maybe Clu didn’t have an affair with Esperanza after all. Maybe Clu told her he was leaving the agency and she got upset and then he got upset. Maybe Clu gave her a good-bye smack in that garage.

Hmm.

But there were problems with that scenario too. If there was no affair, how do you explain Esperanza’s hairs at the crime scene? How do you explain the blood in the car, the gun in the office, and Esperanza’s continued silence?

FJ was still smiling.

“Let’s cut to it,” Myron said. “How do I get you off my back?”

“Stay away from my clients.”

“The same way you stayed away from mine?”

“Tell you what, Myron.” FJ sipped more shaving cream. “If I desert my clients for six weeks, I give you carte blanche to pursue them with as much gusto as you can muster.”

Myron looked at Win. No solace. Scary as it might sound. FJ had a point.

“Esperanza has been indicted for Clu’s murder,” Myron said. “I’m involved until she’s cleared. Outside of that, I’ll stay out of your business. And you stay out of mine.”

“Suppose she’s not cleared,” FJ said.

“What?”

“Have you considered the possibility that Esperanza did indeed kill him?”

“You know something I don’t, FJ?”

FJ put his hand to his chest. “Me?” The most innocent lamb ever to lie next to a lion. “What would I know?” He finished his coffee whatever and stood. He looked down at his goons, then at Win. Win nodded. FJ told Hans and Franz to get up. They did. FJ ordered them out the door. They went out, heads high, chests out, eyes up, but still looking like a pair of whipped dogs.

“If you find anything that might help me get Clu’s contract reinstated, you’ll let me know?”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Great. Then let’s stay in touch, Myron.”

“Oh,” Myron said. “Let’s.”

CHAPTER 22

They took the subway to Yankee Stadium. The 4 train was fairly empty this time of the day. After they found seats, Myron asked, “Why did you beat up those two muscleheads?”

“You know why,” Win said.

“Because they challenged you?”

“I hardly call what they mustered a challenge.”

“So why did you beat them up?”

“Because it was simple.”

“What?”

Win hated repeating himself.

“You overreacted,” Myron said. “As usual.”

“No, Myron, I reacted perfectly.”

“Meaning?”

“I have a reputation, do I not?”

“As a violent psycho, yes.”

“Exactly—a reputation that I’ve culled and created through what you call overreacting. You trade off that reputation sometimes, do you not?”

“I guess I do.”

“It helps us?”

“I guess so.”

“Guess nothing,” Win said. “Friends and foes believe I snap too easily—overreact, as you put it. That I’m unstable, out of control. But that’s nonsense, of course. I’m never out of control. Just the opposite. Every attack has been well thought out. The pros and cons have been weighed.”

“And in this case, the pros won?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew you were going to beat up those two before we entered?”

“I considered it. Once I realized that they were unarmed and that taking them out would be easy, I made the final decision.”

“Just to enhance your reputation?”

“In a word, yes. My reputation keeps us safe. Why do you think FJ was ordered by his father not to kill you?”

“Because I’m a ray of sunshine? Because I make the world a better place for all?”

Win smiled. “Then you understand.”

“Does it bother you at all, Win?”

“Does what?”

“Attacking someone like that.”

“They’re goons, Myron, not nuns.”

“Still. You just walloped them without provocation.”

“Oh, I see. You don’t like the fact that I sucker-punched them. You would have preferred a fairer fight?”

“I guess not. But suppose you miscalculated?”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Suppose one of them was better than you thought and didn’t go down so easily. Suppose you had to maim or kill one.”

“They’re goons, Myron, not nuns.”

“So you would have done it?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“I guess I do.”

“Who would have mourned their passing?” Win asked. “Two scums in the night who freely chose a profession that bullies and maims.”

Myron did not answer. The train stopped. Passengers exited. Myron and Win stayed in their seats.

“But you enjoy it,” Myron said.

Win said nothing.

“You have other reasons, sure, but you enjoy violence.”

“And you don’t, Myron?”

“Not like you.”

“No, not like me. But you feel the rush.”

“And I usually feel sick after it’s all over.”

“Well, Myron, that’s probably because you’re such a fine humanitarian.”

They exited the subway at 161st Street and walked in silence to Yankee Stadium. Four hours to game time, but there were already several hundred fans lining up to watch the warm-ups. A giant Louisville Slugger bat cast a long shadow. Cops aplenty stood near clusters of unfazed ticket scalpers. Classic détente. There were hot dog carts, some with—gasp!—Yoo-Hoo umbrellas. Yum. At the press entrance Myron flashed his business card, the guard made a call, they were let in.

They traveled down the stairs on the right, reached the stadium tunnel, and emerged into bright sunshine and green grass. Myron and Win had just been discussing the nature of violence, and now Myron thought again about his dad’s phone call. Myron had seen his father, the most gentle man he had ever known, grow violent only once. And it was here at Yankee Stadium.

When Myron was ten years old, his father had taken him and his younger brother, Brad, to a game. Brad was five at the time. Dad had secured four seats in the upper tier, but at the last minute a business associate had given him two more seats three rows behind the Red Sox bench. Brad was a huge fan of the Red Sox. So Dad suggested that Brad and Myron sit by the dugout for a few innings. Dad would stay in the upper tier. Myron held Brad’s hand, and they walked down to the box seats. The seats were, in a word, awesome.

Brad started cheering his five-year-old lungs out. Cheering like mad. He spotted Carl Yastrzemski in the batter’s box and started calling out, “Yaz! Yaz!” The guy sitting in front of them turned around. He was maybe twenty-five and bearded and looked a bit like a church image of Jesus. “That’s enough,” the bearded guy snapped at Brad. “Quiet down.”

Brad looked hurt.

“Don’t listen to him,” Myron said. “You’re allowed to yell.”

The bearded man’s hands moved fast. He grabbed the ten-year-old Myron by his shirt, bunching the Yankee emblem in his seemingly giant fist, and pulled Myron closer to him. There was beer on his breath. “He’s giving my girlfriend a headache. He shuts up now.”

Fear engulfed Myron. Tears filled his eyes, but he wouldn’t let them escape. He remembered being shocked, scared, and mostly, for some unknown reason, ashamed. The bearded man glared at Myron another few seconds and then pushed him back. Myron grabbed Brad’s hand and rushed back to the upper tier. He tried to pretend everything was all right, but ten-year-olds are not great actors, and Dad could read his son as if he lived inside his skull.

“What’s wrong?” Dad asked.

Myron hesitated. Dad asked again. Myron finally told him what happened. And something happened to Myron’s father, something Myron had never seen before or since. There was an explosion in his eyes. His face turned red; his eyes went black.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

Myron watched the rest through binoculars. Dad moved down to the seat behind the Red Sox dugout. His father’s face was still red. Myron saw Dad cup his hands around his mouth, lean forward, and start screaming for all he was worth. The red in his face turned to crimson. Dad kept screaming. The bearded man tried to ignore him. Dad leaned into his ear à la Mike Tyson and screamed some more. When the bearded man finally turned around, Dad did something that shocked Myron to the core. He pushed the man. He pushed the man twice and then gestured toward the exit, the international sign inviting another man to step outside. The guy with the beard refused. Dad pushed him again.

Two security guards raced down the steps and broke it up. No one was tossed. Dad came back to the upper tier. “Go back down,” Dad said. “He won’t bother you again.”

But Myron and Brad shook their heads. They liked the seats up here better.

Win said, “Time traveling again, are we?”

Myron nodded.

“You realize, of course, that you are far too young for so many reflective spells.”

“Yeah, I know.”

A group of Yankee players were sitting on the outfield grass, legs sprawled, hands back, still kids under the collars waiting for their Little League game to start. A man in a too-nicely-fitted suit was talking to them. The man gestured wildly, smiling and enthusiastic and as enraptured with life as the new born-again on the block. Myron recognized him. Sawyer Wells, the motivational speaker né con man of the moment. Two years ago Wells was an unknown charlatan, spouting the standard reworded dogma about finding yourself, unlocking your potential, doing something for yourself—as though people weren’t self-centered enough. His big break came when the Mayors hired him to do talks for their workforce. The speeches were, if not original, successful, and Sawyer Wells caught on. He got a book deal—cleverly monikered The Wells Guide to Wellness—along with an infomercial, audiotapes, video, a planner, the full self-help schematic. Fortune 500 companies started hiring him. When the Mayors took over the Yankees, they brought him on board as a consulting motivational psychologist or some such drivel.

When Sawyer Wells spotted Win, he almost started panting.

“He smells a new client,” Myron said.

“Or perhaps he’s never seen anyone quite this handsome before.”

“Oh, yeah,” Myron said. “That’s probably it.”

Wells turned back to the players, shouted out a bit more enthusiasm, spasmed with gestures, clapped once, and then bade them good-bye. He looked back over at Win. He waved. He waved hard. Then he started bounding over like a puppy chasing a new squeaky toy or a politician chasing a potential contributor.

Win frowned. “In a word, decaf.”

Myron nodded.

“You want me to befriend him?” Win asked.

“He was supposedly present for the drug tests. And he’s also the team psychologist. He probably hears a lot of rumors.”

“Fine,” Win said. “You take the roommate. I’ll take Sawyer.”

Enos Cabral was a good-looking wiry Cuban with a flame-throwing fastball and breaking pitches that still needed work. He was twenty-four, but he had the kind of looks that probably got him carded at any liquor store. He stood watching batting practice, his body slack except for his mouth. Like most relief pitchers, he chewed gum or tobacco with the ferocity of a lion gnawing on a recently downed gazelle.

Myron introduced himself.

Enos shook his hand and said, “I know who you are.”

“Oh?”

“Clu talked about you a lot. He thought I should sign with you.”

A pang. “Clu said that?”

“I wanted a change,” Enos continued. “My agent. He treats me well, no? And he made me a rich man.”

“I don’t mean to knock the importance of good representation, Enos, but you made you a rich man. An agent facilitates. He doesn’t create.”

Enos nodded. “You know my story?”

The thumbnail sketch. The boat trip had been rough. Very rough. For a week everyone had assumed they had been lost at sea. When they finally did pop up, only two of the eight Cubans were still alive. One of the dead was Enos’s brother Hector, considered the best player to come out of Cuba in the past decade. Enos, considered the lesser talent, was nearly dead of dehydration.

“Just what I’ve read in the papers,” Myron said.

“My agent. He was there when I arrived. I had family in Miami. When he heard about the Cabral brothers, he loaned them money. He paid for my hospital stay. He gave me money and jewelry and a car. He promised me more money. And I have it.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“He has no soul.”

“You want an agent with a soul?”

Enos shrugged. “I’m Catholic,” he said. “We believe in miracles.”

They both laughed.

Enos seemed to be studying Myron. “Clu was always suspicious of people. Even me. He had something of a hard shell.”

“I know,” Myron said.

“But he believed in you. He said you were a good man. He said that he had trusted you with his life and would gladly do so again.”

Another pang. “Clu was also a lousy judge of character.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Enos, I wanted to talk to you about Clu’s last few weeks.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I thought you came here to recruit me.”

“No,” Myron said. Then: “But have you heard the expression killing two birds with one stone?”

Enos laughed. “What do you want to know?”

“Were you surprised when Clu failed the drug test?”

He picked up a bat. He gripped and regripped it in his hands. Finding the right groove. Funny. He was an American League pitcher. He would probably never have the opportunity to bat. “I have trouble understanding addictions,” he said. “Where I come from, yes, a man may try to drink away his world, if he can afford it. You live in such stink, why not leave, no? But here, when you have as much as Clu had …”

He didn’t finish the thought. No point in stating the obvious.

“One time Clu tried to explain it to me,” Enos continued. “‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to escape the world; sometimes you want to escape yourself.’ ” He cocked his head. “Do you believe that?”

“Not really,” Myron said. “Like a lot of cute phrases, it sounds good. But it also sounds like a load of self-rationalization.”

Enos smiled. “You’re mad at him.”

“I guess I am.”

“Don’t be. He was a very unhappy man, Myron. A man who needs so much excess … there is something broken inside him, no?”

Myron said nothing.

“Clu tried. He fought hard, you have no idea. He wouldn’t go out at night. If our room had a minibar, he’d make them take it out. He didn’t hang out with old friends because he was afraid of what he might do. He was scared all the time. He fought long and hard.”

“And he lost,” Myron added.

“I never saw him take drugs. I never saw him drink.”

“But you noticed changes.”

Enos nodded. “His life began to fall apart. So many bad things happened.”

“What bad things?”

The organ music revved immediately into high gear, the legendary Eddie Layton opening up with his rendition of that ballpark classic “The Girl from Ipanema.” Enos lifted the bat to his shoulder, then lowered it again. “I feel uncomfortable talking about this.”

“I’m not prying for the fun of it. I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

“The papers said your secretary did it.”

“They’re wrong.”

Enos stared at the bat as though there were a message hidden beneath the word Louisville. Myron tried to prompt him.

“Clu withdrew two hundred thousand dollars not long before he died,” Myron said. “Was he having financial problems?”

“If he did, I didn’t see it.”

“Did he gamble?”

“I didn’t see him him gamble, no.”

“Do you know that he changed agents?”

Enos looked surprised. “He fired you?”

“Apparently he was going to.”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I know he was looking for you. But no, I didn’t know that.”

“So what was it then, Enos? What made him cave?”

He lifted his eyes and blinked into the sun. The perfect weather for a night game. Soon fans would arrive, and memories would be made. Happened every night in stadiums around the world. It was always some kid’s first game.

“His marriage,” Enos said. “That was the big thing, I think. You know Bonnie?”

“Yes.”

“Clu loved her very much.”

“He had an odd way of showing it.”

Enos smiled. “Sleeping with all those women. I think he did it more to hurt himself than anyone else.”

“That sounds like another one of those big, fat rationalizations, Enos. Clu may have made self-destruction an art form. But that’s not an excuse for what he put her through.”

“I think he’d agree with that. But Clu hurt himself most of all.”

“Don’t kid yourself. He hurt Bonnie too.”

“Yes, you’re right, of course. But he still loved her. When she threw him out, it hurt him so much. You have no idea.”

“What can you tell me about their breakup?”

Another hesitation. “Not much to tell. Clu felt betrayed, angry.”

“You know that Clu had fooled around before.”

“Yes.”

“So what made it different this time? Bonnie was used to his straying. What made her finally snap? Who was his girlfriend?”

Enos looked puzzled. “You think Bonnie threw him out over a girl?”

“She didn’t?”

Enos shook his head.

“You’re sure.”

“It was never about girls with Clu. They were just part of the drugs and alcohol. They were easy for him to give up.”

Myron was confused. “So he wasn’t having an affair?”

“No,” Enos said. “She was.”

That was when it clicked. Myron felt a cold wave roll through him, squeezing the pit of his stomach. He barely said good-bye before he hurried away.

CHAPTER 23

He knew Bonnie would be home.

The car had barely come to a full stop when he shot out the driver’s door. There were perhaps a dozen other vehicles parked on the street. Mourners. The front door was opened. Myron headed inside without knocking. He wanted to find Bonnie and confront her and end this. But she wasn’t in the living room. Just mourners. Some approached him, slowing him down. He offered his condolences to Clu’s mother, her face ravaged with grief. He shook other hands, trying to swim through the thick sea of grief-stricken and glad-handers and find Bonnie. He finally spotted her outside in the backyard. She sat alone on the deck, her knees tucked under her chin, watching her children play. He steeled himself and pushed open the sliding glass doors.

The porch was cedarwood and overlooked a large swing set. Clu’s boys were on it, both dressed in red ties and untucked short-sleeve shirts. They ran and laughed. Miniature versions of their dead father, their smiles so like his, their features eternal echoes of Clu’s. Bonnie watched them. Her back was to Myron, a cigarette in her hand. She did not turn around as he approached.

“Clu didn’t have the affair,” Myron said. “You did.”

Bonnie inhaled deeply and let it out. “Great timing, Myron.”

“That can’t be helped.”

“Can’t we talk about this later?”

Myron waited a beat. Then: “I know who you were sleeping with.”

She stiffened. Myron looked down at her. She finally turned and met his gaze.

“Let’s take a walk,” Bonnie said.

She reached out a hand, and Myron helped her to her feet.

They walked down the backyard to a wooded area. The din of traffic filtered through a sound barrier up the hill. The house was spanking new, large and innately nouveau-riche. Airy, lots of windows, cathedral ceilings, small living room, huge kitchen flowing into huge California room, huge master bedroom, closets large enough to double as Gap outlets. Probably went for about eight hundred thou. Beautiful and sterile and soulless. Needing to be lived in a bit. Properly aged like a fine Merlot.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

“You don’t know a lot of things about me, Myron.”

Touché. He looked at her profile, and again he saw that young coed heading into the fraternity basement. He flashed back to that very moment, to the sound of Clu’s sharp intake of air when he first laid eyes on her. Suppose she’d come down a little later, after Clu had passed out or hooked up with another woman. Suppose she had gone to another frat party that night. Dumb thoughts—life’s arbitrary forks in the road, the series of what ifs—but there you go.

“So what makes you think I was the one having an affair?” she said.

“Clu told Enos.”

“Clu lied.”

“No,” Myron said.

They kept walking. Bonnie took a last drag and tossed the cigarette on the ground. “My property,” she said. “I’m allowed.”

Myron said nothing.

“Did Clu tell Enos who he thought I was sleeping with?”

“No.”

“But you think you know who this mystery lover is.”

“Yes,” Myron said. “It’s Esperanza.”

Silence.

“Would you believe me if I insisted you were wrong?” she said.

“You’d have a lot of explaining to do.”

“How’s that?”

“Let’s start with you coming to my office after Esperanza was arrested.”

“Okay.”

“You wanted to know what they had on her—that was the real reason. I wondered why you warned me away from finding the truth. You told me to clear my friend but not dig too hard.”

She nodded. “And you think I said that because I didn’t want you to know about this affair?”

“Yes. But there’s more. Like Esperanza’s silence, for one thing. Win and I theorized that she didn’t want us to know about her affair with Clu. It would look bad on several levels to be having an affair with a client. But to be having an affair with a client’s wife? What could be dumber than that?”

“That’s hardly evidence, Myron.”

“I’m not finished. You see, all the evidence that points to an affair between Esperanza and Clu actually points to an affair between you two. The physical evidence, for example. The pubic hairs and DNA found at the Fort Lee apartment. I started thinking about that. You and Clu lived there for a short time. Then you moved into this house. But you still had the lease on the apartment. So before you threw him out, it was empty, right?”

“Right.”

“What better place to meet for a tryst? It wasn’t Clu and Esperanza meeting there. It was you two.”

Bonnie said nothing.

“The E-Z Pass records—most of the bridge crossings were on days when the Yankees were out of town. So Esperanza wasn’t coming out to see Clu. She was coming out to see you. I checked the office phone records. She never called the apartment after you threw Clu out—only this house. Why? Clu wasn’t living here. You were.”

She took out another cigarette and struck a match.

“And lastly, the fight in the garage when Clu struck Esperanza. That bothered the hell out of me. Why would he hit her? Because she broke off an affair? That didn’t make sense. Because he wanted to find me or was crazed from taking drugs? Again, no. I couldn’t figure it out. But now the answer is obvious. Esperanza was having an affair with his wife. He blamed her for breaking up the marriage. Enos said the breakup shook him to the core. What could be worse for a psyche as fragile as Clu’s than his wife having an affair with a woman?”

Her voice was sharp. “Are you blaming me for his death?”

“Depends. Did you kill him?”

“Would it help if I said no?”

“It would be a start.”

She smiled, but there was no joy in it. Like the house, it was beautiful and sterile and almost soulless. “Do you want to hear something funny?” she said. “Clu’s beating the drugs and the drinking didn’t help our marriage—it ended it. For so long Clu was … I don’t know … a work in progress. I blamed his shortcomings on the drugs and drinking and all that. But once he finally exorcised his demons, what was left was just”—she lifted her palms and shrugged—“just him. I saw Clu clearly for the first time, Myron, and you know what I realized? I didn’t love him.”

Myron said nothing.

“And don’t blame Esperanza. It wasn’t her fault. I held on purely for the sake of my kids, and when Esperanza came along—” Bonnie stopped, and this time her smile seemed more genuine. “You want to hear something else funny? I’m not a lesbian. I’m not even a bisexual. It’s just … she treated me tenderly. We had sex, sure, but it was never about sex. I know that sounds weird, but her gender was irrelevant. Esperanza is just a beautiful person, and I fell in love with that. Does that make sense?”

“You know how this looks,” Myron said.

“Of course I know how it looks. Two dykes got together and offed the husband. Why do you think we’re trying so hard to keep it secret? The weakness in their case right now is motive. But if they find out we were lovers—”

“Did you kill him?”

“What do you expect me to say to that, Myron?”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“No, we didn’t kill him. I was leaving him. Why would I throw him out and start filing papers if I planned on killing him?”

“To prevent a scandal that would surely hurt your kids.”

She made a face. “Come on, Myron.”

“So how do you explain the gun in the office and the blood in the car?”

“I can’t.”

Myron thought about it. His head hurt—from the physical altercation or this latest revelation, he couldn’t say. He tried to concentrate through the haze. “Who else knows about the affair?”

“Just Esperanza’s lawyer, Hester Crimstein.”

“No one else?”

“No one. We were very discreet.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because,” Myron said, “if I were going to murder Clu and I wanted to frame someone for it, his wife’s lover would be my first choice.”

Bonnie saw where he was heading. “So you think the killer knew about us?”

“It might explain a lot.”

“I didn’t tell anyone. And Esperanza said she didn’t either.”

Pow. Right between the eyes. “You couldn’t have been too careful,” Myron said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Clu found out, didn’t he?”

She thought about it, nodded.

“Did you tell him?” he asked.

“No.”

“What did you say when you threw him out?”

She shrugged. “That there was no one else. That was true in a sense. It wasn’t about Esperanza.”

“So how did he find out?”

“I don’t know. I assumed he became obsessed. That he followed me.”

“And he found out the truth?”

“Yes.”

“And then he went after Esperanza and attacked her?

“Yes.”

“And before he has a chance to tell anyone else about this, before it has a chance of getting out and hurting either of you, he ends up dead. And the murder weapon ends up with Esperanza. And Clu’s blood ends up in the car she’s been driving. And the E-Z Pass records show Esperanza came back to New York an hour after the murder.”

“Again, yes.”

Myron shook his head. “It doesn’t look good, Bonnie.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said. “If even you won’t believe us, how do you think a jury is going to react?”

There was no need to answer. They headed back to the house then. The two young boys were still at play, oblivious of what was going on around them. Myron watched for a moment. Fatherless, he thought, shuddering at the word. With one last look he turned and walked away.

CHAPTER 24

Thrill, not Nancy Sinclair, met him outside a bar called the Biker Wannabee. Honesty in advertising. Nice to see.

“Howdy,” Myron said. Tex Bolitar.

Her smile was full of pornographic promise. Totally into Thrill mode now. “Howdy yourself, pardner,” she cooed. With some women, every syllable is cooed. “How do I look?”

“Mighty tasty, ma’am. But I think I prefer you as Nancy.”

“Liar.”

Myron shrugged, not sure if he was telling the truth or not. This whole thing reminded him of when Barbara Eden would play her evil sister on I Dream of Jeannie. He was often torn back then too, not sure if Larry Hagman should stay with Jeannie or run off with the enticingly evil sister. But hey, talk about your great dilemmas.

“I thought you were bringing backup,” Thrill said.

“I am.”

“Where is he?”

“If things go well, you won’t see him.”

“How mysterious.”

“Isn’t it?”

They headed inside and grabbed a corner booth in the back. Yep, biker wanna-be. Lots of guys aiming for that hairy, Vietnam vet–cum–hit-the-road look. The jukebox played “God Only Knows (What I’d Be Without You)”—the Beach Boys, but unlike anything else the Beach Boys did. The song was a plaintive wail, and despite its pop misgivings, it always struck Myron to the bone, the trepidation of what the future might hold so naked in Brian’s voice, the words so hauntingly simple. Especially now.

Thrill was studying his face. “You okay?” she asked.

“Fine. So what happens next?”

“We order a drink, I guess.”

Five minutes passed. “Lonely Boy” came on the jukebox. Andrew Gold. Serious seventies AM bubble gum. Chorus: “Oh, oh, oh … oh what a lonely boy … oh what a lonely boy … oh what a lonely boy.” By the time the chorus was repeated for the eighth time, Myron had it down pat so he sang along. Megamemory. Maybe he should do an infomercial.

Men at nearby tables checked out Thrill, some surreptitiously, most not. Thrill’s smile was practically a leer now, sinking deeper into the role.

“You get into this,” Myron said.

“It’s a part, Myron. We’re all actors on a stage and all that.”

“But you enjoy the attention.”

“So?”

“So I was just saying.”

She shrugged. “I find it fascinating.”

“What’s that?”

“What a large bosom does to a man. They get so obsessed.”

“You just reached the conclusion that men are mammary-obsessed? I hate to break this to you, Nancy, but the research has been done.”

“But it’s weird when you think about it.”

“I try not to.”

“Bosoms do weird things to men, no doubt,” she said, “but I don’t like what they do to women either.”

“How’s that?”

Thrill put her palms on the table. “Okay, everyone knows that we women put too much of our self-worth into our bodies. Old news, right?”

“Right.”

“I know it, you know it, everyone knows it. And unlike my more feminist sisters, I don’t blame men for this.”

“You don’t?”

“Mademoiselle, Vogue, Bazaar, Glamour—those are run by women and have a totally female clientele. They want to change the image, start there. Why ask the men to change a perception that women themselves won’t change?”

“Refreshing viewpoint,” Myron noted.

“But bosoms do funny things to people. Men, okay, that’s obvious. They become brain-dead. It’s as if the nipples shoot out like two grapefruit spoons, dig into their frontal lobe, and scrape away all cognitive thought.”

Myron looked up, the imagery giving him pause.

“But for women, well, it starts when you’re young. A girl develops early. Adolescent boys start lusting after her. How do her girlfriends react? They take it out on her. They’re jealous of the attention or feeling inadequate or whatever. But they take it out on the young girl who can’t help what her body is going through. With me?”

“Yes.”

“Even now. Look at the glances the women in here give me. Pure hatred. You get a group of women together and a chesty counterpart walks by and they all sigh, ‘Oh, please.’ Professional women, for example, feel the urge to dress down—not just because of leering men but because of women. Because of how women treat them. A businesswoman sees a big-chested businesswoman with a better title—well, she got the job because of her tits. Plain and simple. Might be true, might not be. Is this animosity spawned again from dormant jealousy or a misplaced feeling of inadequacy or because they unfairly equate bosoms with stupidity? Any way you look at it, it’s an ugly thing.”

“I never really thought about it,” Myron said.

“And finally I don’t like what it does to me.”

“Your reaction to seeing a big chest or having one?”

“The latter.”

“Why?”

“Because the big-breasted woman gets used to it. She takes it for granted. She uses them to her advantage.”

“So?”

“What do you mean, so?”

“All attractive people do that,” Myron said. “It’s not just bosoms. If a woman is beautiful, she knows it and uses it. Nothing wrong with that. Men use it too, if they can. Sometimes—I’m ashamed to admit this—even I shake my little tush to get my way.”

“Shocking.”

“Well, not really. Because it never works.”

“I think you’re being modest. But either way, don’t you see anything wrong with that?”

“With what?”

“With using a physical attribute to get your way.”

“I didn’t say there was nothing wrong with it. I’m simply noting that what you’re talking about is not merely a mammarial phenomenon.”

She made a face. “Mammarial phenomenon?”

Myron shrugged, and mercifully the waitress came over. Myron made a point of not looking anywhere near her chest, which was tantamount to telling yourself not to scratch that irksome itch. The waitress had a pen behind her ear. Her overtreated hair aimed for on-the-farm strawberry blond but landed far closer to fell-at-the-4H-fair cotton candy.

“Get you?” she said. Skipping the preliminaries like “Hello” and “What can I …?”

“Rob Roy,” Thrill said.

The pen came out of the ear holster, jotted it down, back in the holster. Wyatt Earp. “You?” she said to Myron.

Myron doubted that they had any Yoo-Hoo. “A diet soda, please.”

She looked at him as if he’d ordered a bedpan.

“Maybe a beer,” Myron said.

She clacked her gum. “Bud, Michelob, or some pansy brew?”

“Pansy would be fine, thank you,” Myron said. “And do you have any of those little cocktail umbrellas?”

The waitress rolled her eyes and walked away.

They chatted for a while. Myron had just started relaxing and yes, even enjoying himself when Thrill said, “Behind you. By the door.”

He was not much in the mood for clandestine games. They wanted him here for a reason. No sense beating around the bush. He turned without an iota of subtlety and spotted Pat the bartender and Veronica Lake aka Zorra dressed again in a cashmere sweater—peach-toned, for those keeping score—long skirt, and a strand of pearls. Zorra, the Steroid Debutante. Myron shook his head. Bonnie Franklin and Mall Girl were nowhere to be seen.

Myron gave a big wave. “Over here, fellas!”

Pat scowled, feigning surprise. He looked toward Zorra, She-Man of the Saber Heel. Zorra showed nothing. The great ones never do. Myron always wondered if their blaséness was an act or if, in truth, nothing really surprised them. Probably a bit of both.

Pat strode toward their table, acting as though he were shocked—shocked!—that Myron was in his bar. Zorra followed, more gliding than walking, the eyes soaking in everything. Like Win, Zorra moved economically—albeit in stylish red pumps—no motion wasted. Pat was still scowling when he reached the table.

“What the hell are you doing here, Bolitar?” Pat asked.

Myron nodded. “Not bad, but it could use work. Do me a favor. Try it again. But add a little gasp first. Gasp, what the hell are you doing here, Bolitar? Like that. Better yet, why not give a wry shake of your head and say something like ‘All the gin joints in all the world, you have to walk into mine—two nights in a row.’”

Zorra was smiling now.

“You’re crazy,” Pat said.

“Pat.” It was Zorra. He looked at Pat and shook his head just once. The shake said, Stop with the games.

Pat turned to Thrill. “Do me a favor, hon.”

Thrill offered up breathless. “Sure, Pat.”

“Go powder your nose or something, okay?”

Myron made a face. “Go powder your nose?” He looked pleadingly at Zorra. Zorra’s small shrug was semiapologetic. “What next, Pat? You going to threaten to make me sleep with the fishes? Make me an offer I can’t refuse. I mean, go powder your nose?”

Pat was fuming. He looked over at Thrill. “Please, hon.”

“No problem, Pat.” She slid out of the booth. Pat and Zorra immediately took her place. Myron frowned at the change in scenery.

“We need some information,” Pat said.

“Yeah, I picked up on that last night,” Myron said.

“That got out of control. I’m sorry.”

“I bet.”

“Hey, we let you go, right?”

“As soon as I was electrocuted with a cattle prod, slashed twice with a heel blade, kicked in the ribs, and then jumped through a glass mirror. Yeah, you let me go.”

Pat smiled. “If Zorra here didn’t want you to escape, you wouldn’t have escaped. Get my meaning?”

Myron looked at Zorra. Zorra looked at Myron. Myron said, “A peach sweater with red pumps?”

Zorra smiled, shrugged.

“Zorra here could have killed you easy as pie,” Pat continued.

“Right, fine, Zorra is a tough guy, you’re supergenerous to me. Get to it.”

“Why were you asking about Clu Haid?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I was telling you the truth last night. I’m trying to find his killer.”

“So what does my club have to do with that?”

“Before I got dragged into the back room, I would have said, ‘Nothing.’ But now, well, that’s what I’d like to know.”

Pat looked at Zorra. Zorra did not move. Pat said, “We want to take you for a ride.”

“Damn.”

“What?”

“You’d gone nearly three minutes without a mob cliché. Then you come up with the take a ride bit. It’s sad really. Can I powder my nose first?”

“You want to crack wise or you want to come with us?”

“I can do both,” Myron said. “I’m rather multitalented.”

Pat shook his head. “Let’s go.” Myron started to slide out the booth.

“No,” Zorra said.

Everyone stopped. “What’s wrong?” Pat said.

Zorra looked at Myron. “We are not interested in hurting you,” Zorra said.

More reassurances.

“But we can’t let you know where you’re going, dreamboat. You’ll have to be blindfolded.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“Fine, blindfold me. Let’s go.”

“No,” Zorra said again.

“What now?”

“Your friend Win. Zorra assumes he’s close by.”

“Who?”

Zorra smiled. He-she wasn’t pretty. Lots of transvestites are. Lots of times you can’t even tell. But Zorra had a five o’clock shadow (a look Myron found to be less than alluring in a woman), big hands with hairy knuckles (ditto), a skewered wig (call him picky), a rather masculine, whispery voice (comme ci, comme ça) and despite the outer trappings, Zorra looked like, well, a guy wearing a dress. “Don’t insult Zorra’s intelligence, dreamboat.”

“You see him?”

“If Zorra could,” Zorra said, “then someone has grossly overexaggerated his reputation.”

“So what makes you so sure Win’s here?”

“You’re doing it again,” Zorra said.

“Doing what?”

“Insulting Zorra’s intelligence.”

Nothing like a psycho who refers to himself in the third person.

“Please ask him to come forward,” Zorra said. “We have no interest in hurting anyone. But Zorra knows that your colleague will follow wherever you go. Then Zorra will have to follow him. It will lead to conflict. None of us wants that.”

Win’s voice came from Myron’s cell phone. Must have taken off the mute. “What guarantee do we have that Myron will return?”

Myron lifted the cell phone into view.

“You and Zorra will sit and enjoy a drink, dreamboat,” Zorra said into the phone. “Myron will travel with Pat.”

“Travel where?” Myron asked.

“We can’t tell you.”

Myron frowned. “Is this cloak-and-dagger stuff really necessary?”

Pat leaned back now, letting Zorra handle it. “You have questions, we have questions,” Zorra said. “This meeting is the only way to satisfy both.”

“So why can’t we talk here?”

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

“You have to go with Pat.”

“Where?”

“Zorra cannot tell you.”

“Who are you taking me to see?”

“Zorra cannot tell you that either.”

Myron said, “Does the fate of the free world rest in Zorra’s maintaining silence?”

Zorra adjusted his lips, forming what he probably read someplace was known as a smile. “You mock Zorra. But Zorra has kept silent before. Zorra has seen horrors you cannot imagine. Zorra has been tortured. For weeks on end. Zorra has felt pain that makes what you felt with that cattle prod seem like a lover’s kiss.”

Myron nodded solemnly. “Wow,” he said.

Zorra spread his hands. Hairy knuckles and pink nail polish. Hold me back. “We can always choose to part ways, dreamboat.”

From the cell phone Win said, “Good idea.”

Myron lifted the receiver. “What?”

“If we agree to their terms,” Win said, “I cannot guarantee they won’t kill you.”

“Zorra guarantees it,” Zorra said. “With her life.”

Myron said, “Excuse me?”

“Zorra stays here with Win,” Zorra went on, the glint in the overmascaraed eye sparkling anew. Something was there, and it was not lucidity. “Zorra will be unarmed. If you don’t return in perfect health, Win kills Zorra.”

“Heck of a guarantee,” Myron said. “Ever thought about becoming a car mechanic?”

Win entered the bar now. He walked straight toward the table, sat down, hands under it. “If you’d be so kind,” Win said to Zorra and Pat, “please put all hands on the table.”

They did.

“And, Ms. Zorra, if you wouldn’t mind kicking off your heels?”

“Sure, dreamboat.” Win kept his eyes on Zorra. Zorra kept his on Win. There would be no blinking here. Win said, “I still cannot guarantee his safety. Yes, I have the option of killing you if he does not return. But for all I know, Pat the Bunny here doesn’t give a rodent’s buttocks about you.”

“Hey,” Pat said, “you have my word.”

Win just looked at him for a moment. Then he turned back to Zorra. “Myron goes armed. Pat drives. Myron keeps the gun on him.”

Zorra shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Then we have no deal.”

Zorra shrugged. “Then Zorra and Pat must bid you adieu.”

They rose to leave. Myron knew that Win wouldn’t call them back. He whispered to Win, “I need to know what’s going on here.”

Win shrugged. “It’s a mistake,” he said, “but it’s your call.”

Myron looked up. “We agree,” he said.

Zorra sat back down. Under the table Win kept the gun on him.

“Myron keeps his cell phone on,” Win said. “I listen to every word.”

Zorra nodded. “Fair enough.”

Pat and Myron started to leave.

“Oh, Pat?” Win said.

Pat stopped.

Win’s voice was how’s-the-weather casual. “If Myron isn’t returned, I may or may not kill Zorra. I will decide at the appropriate time. Either way, I will use all my considerable influence and money and time and effort to find you. I will offer rewards. I will search. I will not sleep. I will find you. And when I do, I won’t kill you. Do you understand?”

Pat swallowed, nodded.

“Go,” Win said.

CHAPTER 25

When they reached the car, Pat frisked him. Nothing. Then he handed Myron a black hood. “Put this on.”

Myron made a face. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“Put it on. Then lie down in the backseat. Don’t look up.”

Myron rolled his eyes, but he did as he was asked. His six-four frame wasn’t all that comfortable, but he made do. Big of him. Pat got in the front seat and started the car.

“Quick suggestion,” Myron said.

“What did you say?”

“Next time you do this, try vacuuming out the car first. It’s disgusting back here.”

Pat drove. Myron tried to concentrate, listening for sounds that would give him a clue where they were going. That always worked on TV. The guy would hear, say, a boat horn and know he’d gone to Pier 12 or something, and they’d all rush in and find him. But all Myron heard were, not surprisingly, traffic noises: the occasional horn, cars passing or being passed, loud radios, that kind of thing. He tried to keep track of turns and distances but quickly realized the futility. What did he think he was, a human compass?

The drive lasted maybe ten minutes. Not enough time to leave the city. Clue: He was still in Manhattan. Gee, that was helpful. Pat turned off the engine.

“You can sit up,” he said. “But keep the hood on.”

“You sure the hood goes with this ensemble? I want to look my best for Mr. Big.”

“Someone once tell you were funny, Bolitar?”

“You’re right. Black goes with everything.”

Pat sighed. When nervous, some people run. Some hide. Some grow silent. Some get chatty. And some make dumb jokes.

Pat helped Myron out of the car and led him by the elbow. Myron again tried to pick up sounds. The cooing of a seagull maybe. That too always seemed to happen on TV. But in New York seagulls didn’t coo as much as phlegm cough. And if you heard a seagull in New York, it was more likely you were near a trash canister than a pier. Myron tried to think of the last time he had seen a seagull in New York. There was a picture of one on a sign for his favorite bagel store. Caption: “If a bird flying over the sea is a seagull, what do you call a bird flying over the bay?” Clever when you think about it.

The two men walked—where to, Myron had no idea. He stumbled on uneven pavement, but Pat kept him upright. Another clue. Find the spot in Manhattan with uneven pavement. Christ, he practically had the guy cornered.

They walked up what felt like a stoop and entered a room with heat and humidity slightly more stifling than a Burmese forest fire. Myron was still blindfolded, but light from what might be a bare bulb filtered through the cloth. The room reeked of mildew and steam and dried sweat—like the most popular sauna at Jack La Lanne’s gone to seed. It was hard to breathe through the hood. Pat put a hand on Myron’s shoulder.

“Sit,” Pat said before pushing down slightly.

Myron sat. He heard Pat’s footsteps, then low voices. Whispers actually. Mostly from Pat. An argument of some sort. Footsteps again. Coming closer to Myron. A body suddenly cut off the bare lightbulb, bathing Myron in total darkness. One more step. Someone stopped directly over him.

“Hello, Myron,” the voice said.

There was a tremor there, an almost manic twang in the tone. But there was no doubt. Myron was not great with names and faces, but voices were imprints. Memories flooded in. After all these years his recall was instantaneous.

“Hello, Billy Lee.”

The missing Billy Lee Palms, to be exact. Former frat brother and Duke baseball star. Former best bud of Clu Haid. Son of Mrs. My-Life-Is-but-a-Wallpaper-Tapestry.

“Mind if I take the hood off now?” Myron asked.

“Not at all.”

Myron reached up and grabbed the top of the hood. He pulled it off. Billy Lee was standing over him. Or at least he assumed it was Billy Lee. It was as if the former pretty boy had been kidnapped and replaced with this fleshier counterpart. Billy Lee’s formerly prominent cheekbones looked malleable, tallow skin in mid-shed clung to sagging features, his eyes sunken deeper than any pirate treasure, his complexion the gray of a city street after a rainfall. His hair was greasy and jutting all over the place, as unwashed as any MTV video jockey’s.

Billy Lee was also holding what looked liked a sawed-off shotgun about six inches from Myron’s face.

“He’s holding what looks like a sawed-off shotgun about six inches from my face,” Myron said for the benefit of the cell phone.

Billy Lee giggled. That sound too was familiar.

“Bonnie Franklin,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Last night. You were the one who hit me with the cattle prod.”

Billy Lee spread his hands impossibly wide. “Bingo, baby!”

Myron shook his head. “You definitely look better with the makeup, Billy Lee.”

Billy Lee giggled again and retrained the shotgun on Myron. Then he held out his free hand. “Give me the phone.”

Myron hesitated but not for long. The sunken eyes, once Myron could see them, were wet and unfocused and tinged with a dull red. Billy Lee’s body was one tremor. Myron checked out the short sleeves and saw the needle tracks. Billy Lee looked like the wildest and most unpredictable of animals: a cornered junkie. Myron handed him the phone. Billy Lee put it to his ear.

“Win?”

Win’s voice was clear. “Yes, Billy Lee.”

“Go to hell.”

Billy Lee giggled again. Then he clicked off the phone, untethering them from the outside world, and Myron felt the dread rise in his chest.

Billy Lee stuck the phone in Myron’s pocket and looked over at Pat. “Tie him to the chair.”

Pat said, “What?”

“Tie him to the chair. There’s rope right behind it.”

“Tie him how? I look like a goddamn Boy Scout?”

“Just wrap it around him and tie a knot. I want to slow him down in case he gets dumb before I kill him.”

Pat moved toward Myron. Billy Lee kept an eye on Myron.

Myron said, “It’s not really a good idea to upset Win.”

“Win doesn’t scare me.”

Myron shook his head.

“What?”

“I knew you were strung out,” Myron said. “But I didn’t realize how badly.”

Pat started winding the rope around Myron’s chest. “Maybe you should call him back,” Pat said. If the San Andreas quaked like his voice, they’d be calling for an evacuation. “We don’t need him searching for us too, you know what I’m saying?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Billy Lee said.

“And Zorra’s still there—”

“Don’t worry about it!” Screaming this time. A shrill, awful scream. The shotgun bounced closer to Myron’s face. Myron tensed his body, preparing to make a move before the rope was knotted. But Billy Lee jumped back suddenly, as if realizing for the first time that Myron was in the room.

Nobody spoke. Pat tightened the rope and tied it in a knot. Not well done, but it’d serve its stated purpose—i.e., slow him down so that Billy Lee would have plenty of time to blow Myron’s head off.

“You trying to kill me, Myron?”

Strange question. “No,” Myron said.

Billy Lee’s fist slammed into the lower part of Myron’s belly. Myron doubled over, the air gone, his lungs spasming in the pure, naked need for oxygen. He felt tears push into his eyes.

“Don’t lie to me, asshole.”

Myron fought for breath.

Billy Lee sniffed, wiped his face with his sleeve. “Why are you trying to kill me?”

Myron tried to respond, but it took too long. Billy Lee hit him hard with the butt of the shotgun, exactly on the Z spot Zorra had sliced into him the night before. The stitches split apart, and blood mushroomed onto Myron’s shirt. His head began to swim. Billy Lee giggled some more. Then he raised the butt of the shotgun over his head and started it in an arc toward Myron’s head.

“Billy Lee!” Pat shouted.

Myron saw it coming, but there was no escape. He managed to tilt the chair with his toes and roll back. The blow glanced the top of his head, scraping his scalp. The chair teetered over, and Myron’s head banged against the wooden floor. His skull tingled.

Oh Christ …

He looked up. Billy Lee was raising the butt of the shotgun again. A straight blow would crush his skull. Myron tried to roll, but he was hopelessly tangled up. Billy Lee smiled down at him. He held the shotgun high above his head, letting the moment drag out, watching Myron struggle the way some people watch an injured ant before stomping it with their foot.

Billy Lee suddenly frowned. He lowered the weapon, studying it for a moment. “Hmm,” he said. “Might break my gun that way.”

Myron felt Billy Lee grab his shoulders and lift him and the chair back up. The shotgun was at eye level now.

“Fuck it,” Billy Lee said. “Might as well just shoot your sorry ass, am I right?”

Myron barely heard the giggling now. When a gun is pointed so directly in your face, it has a tendency to block out everything else. The double barrel’s opening grows, moves closer, surrounds you until everything you are and see and hear is consumed in its black mouth.

Pat tried again. “Billy Lee …”

Myron felt the sweat under his arms begin to gush. Calm. Keep the tone calm. Don’t excite him. “Tell me what’s going on, Billy Lee. I want to help.”

Billy Lee snickered, the shotgun still shaking in his hand. “You want to help me?”

“Yes.”

That made him laugh. “Bullshit, Myron. Total bullshit.”

Myron kept still.

“We were never even friends, were we, Myron? I mean, we were frat brothers, and we hung out and stuff. But we were never really friends.”

Myron tried to keep his eyes on Billy Lee’s. “This is a heck of a time to go tiptoeing through the past, Billy Lee.”

“I’m trying to make a point here, asshole. You’re peddling this crap about wanting to help me. Like we’re friends. But that’s a load of bullshit. We’re not friends. You never really liked me.”

Never really liked me. Like they were third graders during recess. “I still helped pull your ass out of a few fires, Billy Lee.”

The smile. “Not my ass, Myron. Clu’s. It was always about Clu, wasn’t it? The drunk driving thing when we were living in Massachusetts. You didn’t drive up to save my ass. You drove up because of Clu. And that brawl at that bar in the city. That was also because of Clu.”

Billy Lee suddenly tilted his head like a dog hearing a new sound. “Why weren’t we friends, Myron?”

“Because you didn’t invite me to your birthday party at the roller rink?”

“Don’t fuck with me, asshole.”

“I liked you just fine, Billy Lee. You were a fun guy.”

“But it got tired after a while, didn’t it? My whole act, I mean. While I was a college star, it was pretty cool, right? But when I failed in the pros, I wasn’t so cute and funny anymore. I was suddenly pathetic. That sound about right, Myron?”

“You say so.”

“So what about Clu?”

“What about him?”

“You were friends with him.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Clu partied the same way. Maybe even harder. He was always getting his ass in trouble. Why were you his friend?”

“This is stupid, Billy Lee.”

“Is it?”

“Put the gun down already.”

Billy Lee’s smile was wide and knowing and somewhere just south of sane. “I’ll tell you why you stayed friendly with Clu. Because he was a better baseball player than me. He was going to the bigs. And you knew that. That’s the only difference between Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms. He got drunk and took drugs and screwed tons of women, but it was all so funny because he was a pro.”

“So what are you trying to say, Billy Lee?” Myron countered. “That pro athletes are treated differently from the rest of us? Hell of a revelation.”

But the revelation sat uneasily on Myron. Probably because Billy Lee’s words, while wholly irrelevant, were at least in part true. Clu was charming and quirky simply because he was a pro athlete. But if the velocity of his fastball had dropped a few miles per hour, if the rotation of his arm had been just a little askew or if his finger position had not allowed for good ball movement on his pitches, Clu would have ended up like Billy Lee. Alternate worlds—totally different lives and fates—are right there, separated by a curtain no thicker than membrane. But with athletes, you can see your alternate life a little too clearly. You have the ability to throw the ball just a little faster than the next guy, you end up a god rather than the most pitiful of mortals. You get the girls, the fame, the big house, the money instead of the rats, the dull anonymity, the crummy apartment, the menial job. You get to go on TV and offer life insights. People want to be near you and hear you speak and touch the hem of your cloak. Just because you can hurl the rawhide with great velocity or put an orange ball in a metallic circle or swing a stick with a slightly more pure arc. You are special.

Nuts when you think about it.

“Did you kill him, Billy Lee?” Myron said.

Billy Lee looked like he’d been slapped. “What?”

“You were jealous of Clu. He had everything. He left you behind.”

“He was my best friend!”

“A long time ago, Billy Lee.”

Myron again debated making a move. He could try to slip the ropes—they were not on very tightly—but it would take time and he was still too far away. He wondered how Win was reacting to being cut off from all this and shuddered. Not worth dwelling upon.

A funny, tranquil flat line crossed Billy Lee’s face. He stopped shaking, looked straight at Myron without jerking or twitching. His voice was suddenly soft.

“Enough,” he said.

Silence.

“I have to kill you, Myron. It’s self-defense.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You killed Clu. And now you want to kill me.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Maybe you had your secretary do it. And she got caught. Or maybe Win did it. That guy’s always been your lapdog. Or maybe you did it yourself, Myron. The gun was found in your office, right? The blood in your car?”

“Why would I kill Clu?”

“You use people, Myron. You used him to start up your business. But after he failed his last drug test, Clu was finished. So you figured, why not cut your losses?”

“That makes no sense,” Myron said. “And even if it did, why would I want to kill you?”

“Because I can talk too.”

“Talk about what?”

“About how helpful you are.”

Tears started rolling down Billy Lee’s face. His voice tailed off. And Myron knew he was in huge trouble.

The moment of calm was over. The barrel of the gun was shaking. Myron tested the ropes. Nope. Despite the heat, something icy flooded his veins. He was trapped. No chance of making a move.

Billy Lee tried to giggle again, but something inside him was too weary now. “Bye.”

Panic squeezed Myron’s insides. Billy Lee was only seconds away from killing him. Period. There was no chance of talking him out of it. The combo of drugs and paranoia had scooped out all his ability to reason. Myron accessed his options and liked none of them.

“Win,” Myron said.

“I already told you. I ain’t afraid of him.”

“I’m not talking to you.” Myron glanced over at Pat. The bartender was breathing hard, and his shoulders were drooping as though someone had packed them with wet sand. “Once he pulls that trigger,” Myron said to him, “I’m better off than you are.”

Pat started toward Billy Lee. “Let’s just calm down a second, Billy Lee. Think this through, okay?”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“Billy Lee, this Win guy. I’ve heard stories—”

“You don’t understand, Pat. You just don’t get it.”

“Then tell me, man. I’m here to help.”

“After I kill him.”

Billy Lee stepped toward Myron. He put the barrel of the gun against Myron’s temple. Myron went rigid.

“Don’t!”

Pat was close enough now. Or at least that was what he thought. He made his move, diving for Billy Lee’s legs. But beneath the diminished drug addict lurked some of the athlete’s old reflexes. Enough of them anyway. Billy Lee spun and fired. The bullet hit Pat’s chest. For the briefest moment Pat looked surprised. Then he went down.

Billy Lee screamed, “Pat!” He dropped onto his knees and crawled toward the still body.

Myron’s heart was flapping like a caged condor. He did not wait. He struggled with the ropes. No go. He slid down in a frenzied slither. The rope was tighter than he thought, but he made some headway.

“Pat!” Billy Lee screamed again.

Myron’s knees were on the floor now, his body contorted, his spine bow-bending in a way it was never supposed to. Billy Lee was wailing over a too-silent Pat. The rope got caught under Myron’s chin, pushing his head back and temporarily strangling him. How long did he have? How long before Billy Lee regained his senses? Impossible to say. Myron tilted his chin even higher, and the rope began to pass over him. He was almost out.

Billy Lee startled and turned around.

Myron was still caught in the rope. The two men locked eyes. It was over. Billy Lee lifted the shotgun. Maybe eight feet separated them. Myron saw the barrel, saw Billy Lee’s eyes, saw the distance.

No chance. Too late.

The gun fired.

The first bullet hit Billy Lee’s hand. He screamed in pain and dropped the shotgun. The second bullet hit Billy Lee’s knee. Another scream. Blood spurted. The third bullet came so fast Billy Lee didn’t have time to hit the floor. His head flew back from the impact, his legs splaying in midair. Billy Lee dropped out of sight like something at a shooting gallery.

The room was still.

Myron pulled the rope the rest of the way off and rolled into a corner.

“Win?” he shouted.

No answer.

“Win?”

Nothing.

Pat and Billy Lee did not so much as twitch. Myron stood, the only sound his own breath. Blood. Everywhere blood. They had to be dead. Myron pressed back into the corner. Someone was watching him. He knew that now. He crossed the room and looked out a window. He looked left. Nothing. He looked right.

Someone stood in the shadows. A silhouette. Fear engulfed Myron. The silhouette seemed to hover and then vanished into the darkness. Myron spun around and found the doorknob. He threw the door open and began to run.

CHAPTER 26

He vomited three blocks away. He pulled up, leaned against a building, and puked his guts out. Several homeless men stopped and applauded. Myron gave a wave, acknowledging his fans. Welcome to New York.

Myron tried his cell phone, but it’d been crushed in the melee. He found a street sign and saw that he was only ten blocks south of the Biker Wannabee bar, in the meatpacking district near the West Side Highway. He jogged, holding his side, trying to stop the blood flow. He located a working pay phone, a feat that in this section of Manhattan normally involved a burning bush, and dialed Win’s cellular.

Win picked up on the first ring. “Articulate.”

“They’re dead,” Myron said. “Both of them.”

“Explain.”

Myron did.

When he finished, Win said, “I’ll be there in three minutes.”

“I have to call the cops.”

“Unwise.”

“Why?”

“They will not believe your tale of woe,” Win said, “especially the part about a mystery savior.”

“Meaning they’ll think you killed them?”

“Precisely.”

Win had a point.

“But we’d be able to clear it up,” Myron said.

“Yes perhaps, eventually. But it would take serious time.”

“Time we don’t have.”

“Then you understand.”

Myron thought about it. “But witnesses saw me leave the bar with Pat.”

“So?”

“So the police will question people. They’ll learn about that. They’ll be able to place me at the scene.”

“No more.”

“What?”

“On the phone. No more discussion. I’ll be there in three minutes.”

“What about Zorra? What did you do to him?”

But Win was already off the line. Myron hung up the phone. A new set of homeless guys eyed him like he was a dropped sandwich. Myron met their gaze and did not look away until they did. He was not in the mood to be afraid anymore tonight.

A car pulled up in the promised three minutes. A Chevy Nova. Win had a collection of them—all old, all very used, all untraceable. Disposable cars, he called them. Win liked to use them for certain night activities. Don’t ask.

The front passenger door opened. Myron glanced inside and saw Win behind the wheel. Myron slid in next to him.

“The die is cast,” Win said.

“What?”

“The police are already at the scene. It was on the scanner.”

Bad news. “I can still come forward.”

“Yes, of course. And why, Mr. Bolitar, did you not call the police? Why, in fact, did you call your friend before the proper authorities? Are you or are you not suspected of aiding Ms. Esperanza Diaz in the murder of Billy Lee Palms’s oldest friend? What exactly were you doing in that bar in the first place? Why would Mr. Palms want to kill you?”

“It can all be explained.”

Win shrugged. “Your call.”

“Just as it was my call to go alone with Pat.”

“Yes.”

“Which I called wrong.”

“Yes. You were too vulnerable going in like that. There were other ways.”

“What other ways?”

“We could have grabbed Pat at another time and made him tell us.”

“Made him?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, rough him up? Or torture him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t do that.”

“Grow up,” Win said. “It is a simple cost-benefit analysis: By causing temporary discomfort to a malfeasant, you greatly lower the risk of being killed. It’s a no-brainer.” Win glanced at him. “By the way, you look like hell.”

“You should see the other guy,” he said. Then: “Did you kill Zorra?”

Win smiled. “You know me better than that.”

“No, Win, I don’t. Did you kill him?”

Win pulled up to the Biker Wannabee bar. He put the car in park. “Take a look inside.”

“Why are we back here?”

“Two reasons. One, you never left.”

“I didn’t?”

“That’s what I’ll swear to. You were here all night. You just walked Pat out for a moment. Thrill will back me on it.” He smiled. “So will Zorra.”

“You didn’t kill him?”

“Her. Zorra prefers to be called a her.”

“Her. You didn’t kill her?”

“Of course not.”

They got out of the car.

“I’m surprised,” Myron said.

“Why?”

“Usually when you threaten—”

“I never threatened Zorra. I threatened Pat. I said I may kill Zorra. But what would have been the point? Should Zorra suffer because a drugged-out psychotic like Billy Lee Palms hangs up a phone? Methinks not.”

Myron shook his head. “You’re a constant surprise.”

Win stopped. “And lately you’re a constant screwup. You got lucky. Zorra said she’d be willing to use her life to guarantee your safety. I recognized that she couldn’t do it. It’s why I told you not to go.”

“I didn’t think I had a choice.”

“Now you know better.”

“Maybe.”

Win put a stilling hand on Myron’s arm. “You’re not over her yet. Esperanza has a point when she tells you that.”

Myron nodded. Win dropped his arm.

“Take this,” Win said, handing him a small bottle. “Please.”

Trial-size mouthwash. Count on Win. They made their way inside the Biker Wannabee. Myron stopped in the bathroom, rinsed out his mouth, splashed water on his face, checked the wound. It hurt. He looked in the mirror. His face was still tan from his three weeks with Terese, but Win was right: He looked like hell.

He met up with Win outside the bathroom door. “You said two reasons before, that there were two reasons you wanted me to come back here.”

“Reason two,” Win said. “Nancy—or Thrill, if you prefer. She was worried about you. I thought it best if you saw her.”

When they reached the corner booth, Zorra and Thrill were busy chatting like, well, two single women at a bar.

Zorra smiled at Myron. “Zorra is sorry, dreamboat.”

“Not your fault,” Myron said.

“Zorra means that they’re dead,” Zorra said. “Zorra would have liked a few hours alone with them first.”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “Pity.”

“Zorra already told Win all Zorra knows, which is very little. Zorra is just a beautiful hired gun. She likes to know as little as possible.”

“But you worked for Pat?”

He-she nodded, but the wig did not. “Zorra was a bouncer and bodyguard. Do you believe that? Zorra Avrahaim having to settle for work as a common bouncer?”

“Yeah, times are tough. So what was Pat into?”

“A little of everything. Mostly drugs.”

“And how were Billy Lee and Pat connected?”

“Billy Lee claimed to be his uncle.” Zorra shrugged. “But that could have been a lie.”

“Did you ever meet Clu Haid?”

“No.”

“Do you know why Billy Lee was hiding?”

“He was terrified. He thought someone was trying to kill him.”

“That someone being me?”

“So it seemed.”

Myron couldn’t figure that one out. He asked a few more questions, but there was nothing else to learn. Win offered his hand. Zorra took it and stepped out of the booth. She handled the high heels well. Not everyone does.

Zorra kissed Win on the cheek. “Thanks for not killing Zorra, dreamboat.”

Win bowed slightly. “A pleasure, madame.” Win the charmer. “I’ll walk you out.”

Myron slid into the booth next to Thrill. Without saying a word, she grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him hard. He kissed her back. Win and his mouthwash. What a guy.

When they came up for air, Thrill said, “You do know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Ditto.”

“You also scared the hell out of me.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

She searched his face. “Are you okay?”

“I will be.”

“Part of me wants to invite you back to my place.”

He said nothing, lowering his eyes. She kept her eyes on his face.

“This is it, isn’t it?” she said. “You won’t call, will you?”

Myron said, “You’re beautiful, intelligent, fun—”

“And about to get the big kiss-off.”

“It’s not you.”

“Oh, that’s original. Don’t tell me. It’s you, right?”

He tried a smile. “You know me so well.”

“I’d like to.”

“I’m damaged goods, Nancy.”

“Who isn’t?”

“I’m just over a long-term relationship—”

“Who said anything about a relationship? We could just go out, right?”

“No.”

“What?”

“I don’t work that way,” he said. “I can’t help it. I go out with someone, I start picturing kids and a backyard barbecue and a rusted hoop in the driveway. I try to size up all that stuff right away.”

She looked at him. “Christ, you’re strange.”

Hard to argue.

She started fiddling with a mixing straw. “And you can’t imagine me in any of those domestic settings?”

“Just the opposite,” Myron said. “That’s the problem.”

“I see. At least I think I see.” She shifted in her seat. “I better go.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“No, I’ll get a taxi.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“I think it is. Good night, Myron.”

She walked away. Myron stood. Win moved up next to him. They watched her disappear out the door.

“You’ll make sure she gets home safely?” Myron asked.

Win nodded. “I already called a car service for her.”

“Thanks.”

Silence. Then Win put his hand on Myron’s shoulder.

“May I make one observation at this juncture?” Win asked.

“Shoot.”

“You’re a total moron.”

They stopped at the doctor’s apartment on the Upper West Side. He restitched the wound, making a tsk-tsk noise as he sewed. When they reached Win’s apartment at the Dakota building, the two friends settled into the Louis the Someteenth decor with their favorite beverages. Myron chugged on a Yoo-Hoo; Win sipped an amber liquor.

Win flipped channels with a remote control. He stopped on CNN. Myron looked at the screen and thought of Terese on that island by herself. He checked the time. This was normally Terese’s anchor slot. A bad dye job filled in. Myron wondered when or if Terese would be back on the air. And he wondered why he kept thinking about her.

Win turned the TV off. “Need a refill?”

Myron shook his head. “So what did Sawyer Wells tell you?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid. Clu was a drug addict. He tried to help him. Blah, blah, blah. Sawyer is leaving the Yankees, you know.”

“I didn’t.”

“He credits them with raising him out of obscurity. But alas, now it’s time for dear Sawyer to take hold of his reins and motivate more minions. He’s going to start touring soon.”

“Like a rock star?”

Win nodded. “Complete with overpriced T-shirts.”

“Are they black?”

“I don’t know. But at the end of each performance he encores after frenzied fans flick their Bics and shout, ‘Freebird!’ ”

“That’s so 1977.”

“Isn’t it? But I did a little checking. Guess who’s sponsoring the tour.”

“Budweiser, the undisputed King of Beer?”

“Close,” Win said. “His new publisher. Riverton Press.”

“As in Vincent Riverton, former owner of the New York Yankees?”

“The very.”

Myron whistled, processed it, came up with nothing. “With all the buyouts in publishing, Riverton owns half the books in town. Probably means nothing.”

“Probably,” Win agreed. “If you have more questions, Sawyer is giving a seminar tomorrow at the Cagemore Auditorium at Reston University. He invited me to attend. I’m allowed to bring a date.”

“I don’t put out on the first date.”

“And you’re proud of that?”

Myron took a deep chug. Maybe he was getting older, but Yoo-Hoo didn’t have the same kick anymore. He craved a venti-size skim iced latte with a splash of vanilla, though he hated ordering it in front of other men. “I’m going to try to find out about Clu’s autopsy tomorrow.”

“Through this Sally Li?”

Myron nodded. “She’s been in court, but she’s supposed to be back at the morgue tomorrow morning.”

“Think she’ll tell you anything?”

“I don’t know.”

“You may have to turn on the charm again,” Win said. “Is this Sally Li of the heterosexual persuasion?”

“She is now,” Myron said. “But once I turn on the charm—”

“All bets are off, yes.”

“Charm so potent,” Myron said, “he can turn a woman against men.”

“You should print that on your business card.” Win did that snifter circle, palm up and under the glass. “Before our old chum Billy Lee perished, did he reveal anything of import?”

“Not really,” Myron said. “Just that he thought I was the one who killed Clu and now wanted to kill him.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm what?”

“Once again, your name rears its ugly head.”

“He was a strung-out addict.”

“I see,” Win said. “So he was just ranting?”

Silence.

“Somehow,” Myron said, “I keep ending up in the middle of this.”

“So it seems.”

“But I can’t imagine why.”

“Life’s little mysteries.”

“I also can’t figure out how Billy Lee fits into any of this: into Clu’s murder, into Esperanza’s affair with Bonnie, into Clu getting thrown off the team, into Clu signing with FJ, into any of it.”

Win put down his snifter and stood. “I suggest we sleep on it.”

Good advice. Myron crawled under the covers and plunged immediately into slumber land. It was several hours later—after the REM and alpha sleep cycles, when he started rising to consciousness and his brain activity started going haywire—that it came to him. He thought again about FJ and about his having tailed Myron. He thought about what FJ had said, about how he had even seen Myron at the cemetery before Myron disappeared with Terese in the Caribbean.

And a big click sounded in his head.

CHAPTER 27

He called FJ at nine in the morning. FJ’s secretary said that Mr. Ache could not be disturbed. Myron told her it was urgent. Sorry, Mr. Ache was out of the office. But, Myron reminded her, you just said he could not be disturbed. He cannot be disturbed, the secretary countered, because he is not in the office. Ah.

“Tell him I want to meet with him,” Myron said. “And it has to be today.”

“I can’t promise you—”

“Just tell him.”

He looked at his watch. He was meeting Dad at “the Club” at noon. It gave him time to try to rendezvous with Sally Li, chief medical examiner for Bergen County. He called her office and told her he wanted to talk.

“Not here,” Sally said. “You know the Fashion Center?”

“It’s one of the malls on Route Seventeen, right?”

“On the Ridgewood Avenue intersection, yeah. There’s a sub shop outside the Bed, Bath and Beyond. Meet me there in an hour.”

“Bed, Bath and Beyond is part of the Fashion Center?”

“Must have something to do with the Beyond part.”

She hung up. He got in the rental car and started out to Paramus, New Jersey. Motto: There’s No Such Thing as Too Much Commerce. The town of Paramus was like a muggy, jam-packed elevator with some jerk holding the door-open button and shouting, “Come on, we can squeeze in one more strip mall.”

Nothing about the Fashion Center was particularly fashionable; the mall was in fact so unhip that teenagers didn’t even hang out there. Sally Li sat on a bench, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips. She wore green hospital scrubs and rubber sports sandals with no socks—footwear sported by many a coroner because it made cleaning off blood and guts and other human debris easy with a simple garden hose.

Okay, a little background here: For the past decade or so, Myron had been involved in an on-again, off-again romance with Jessica Culver. More recently they’d been in love. They’d moved in together. And now it was over. Or so he thought. He was not sure what exactly had happened. Objective observers might point to Brenda. She came along and changed a lot of things. But Myron was not sure.

So what’s that have to do with Sally Li?

Jessica’s father, Adam Culver, had been the Bergen County chief medical examiner until he was murdered several years ago. Sally Li, his assistant and close friend, had taken his place. That was how Myron knew her.

He approached. “Another no-smoking mall?”

“No one uses the word no anymore,” Sally said. “They say free instead. This isn’t a no-smoking mall; it’s a smoke-free zone. Next they’ll call underwater an air-free zone. Or the Senate a brain-free zone.”

“So why did you want to meet here?”

Sally sighed, sat up. “Because you want to know about Clu Haid’s autopsy, right?”

Myron hesitated, nodded.

“Well, my superiors—and I use that term knowing I don’t even have equals—would frown upon seeing us together. In fact, they’d probably try to fire my ass.”

“So why take the risk?” he asked.

“First off, I’m going to change jobs. I’m going back West, probably UCLA. Second, I’m cute, female, and what they now call Asian-American. It makes it harder to fire me. I might make a stink and the politically ambitious hate to look like they’re beating up a minority. Third, you’re a good guy. You figured out the truth when Adam was killed. I figure I owe you.” She took the cigarette out of her mouth, put it back in the package, took out another one, put it in her mouth. “So what do you want to know?”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Myron said, “I thought I’d have to turn on my charm.”

“Only if you want to get me naked.” She waved a hand. “Ah, who am I kidding? Go ahead, Myron, fire away.”

“Injuries?” Myron asked.

“Four bullet wounds.”

“I thought there were three.”

“So did we at first. Two to the head, both at close range, either one of which would have been fatal. The cops thought there was only one. There was another in the right calf, and another in the back between the shoulder blades.”

“Longer range?”

“Yeah, I’d say at least five feet. Looked liked thirty-eights, but I don’t do ballistics.”

“You were at the scene, right?”

“Yup.”

“Could you tell if there was forced entry?”

“The cops said no.”

Myron sat back and nodded to himself. “Let me see if I got the DA’s theory right. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“I look forward to it.”

“They figure Clu knew the killer. He let him or her in voluntarily, they talked or whatever, and something went wrong. The killer draws a gun, Clu runs, the killer fires two shots. One hits his calf, the other his back. Could you tell which came first?”

“Which what?”

“The calf shot or the back shot.”

“No,” Sally said.

“Okay, so Clu goes down. He’s hurt but not dead. The killer puts the gun to Clu’s head. Bang, bang.”

Sally arched an eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”

“Thanks.”

“As far as it goes.”

“Pardon?”

She sighed and shifted on the bench. “There are problems.”

“Such as?”

“The body was moved.”

Myron felt his pulse pick up. “Clu was killed someplace else?”

“No. But his body was moved. After he was killed.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The lividity wasn’t affected, so the blood didn’t have time to settle. But he was dragged around on the floor, probably immediately after death, though it could be up to an hour later. And the room was tossed.”

“The killer was searching for something,” Myron said. “Probably the two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Don’t know about that. But there were blood smears all over the place.”

“What do you mean, smears?”

“Look, I’m an ME. I don’t interpret crime scenes. But the place was a mess. Overturned furniture and bookshelves, drawers emptied out, and blood everywhere. On the walls. And on the floor. Like he’d been dragged like a rag doll.”

“Maybe he was dragging himself around. After he was shot in the leg and back.”

“Could be, I guess. Of course it’s hard to drag yourself across walls unless you’re Spider-Man.”

Myron’s blood chilled a few degrees. He tried to sort and sift and process. How did all this fit? The killer was on a rampage to find the cash. Okay, that makes sense. But why drag around the body? Why smear the walls with blood?

“We’re not finished,” Sally said.

Myron blinked as though coming out of a trance.

“I also ran a full tox screen on the deceased. Know what I found?”

“Heroin?”

She shook her head. “El Zippo.”

“What?”

“Nada, nothing, the big zero.”

“Clu was clean?”

“Not even a Tums.”

Myron made a face. “But that could have been temporary, right? I mean, the drugs might have just been out of his system.”

“Nope.”

“What do you mean, nope?”

“Let’s keep the science simple here, shall we? If a guy abuses drugs or alcohol, it shows up somewhere. Enlarged heart, liver damage, lung modules, whatever. And it did. There was no question that Clu Haid had liked some pretty potent chemicals. Had, Myron. Had. There are other tests—hair tests, for example—that give you a more recent snapshot. And those were clean. Which means he’d been off the stuff for a while.”

“But he failed a drug test two weeks ago.”

She shrugged.

“Are you telling me that test was fixed?”

Sally held up both hands. “Not me. I’m telling you that my data disputes that data. I never said anything about a fix. It could have been an innocent error. There are such things as false positives.”

Myron’s head swam. Clu had been clean. His body had been dragged around after being shot four times. Why? None of this made any sense.

They chatted a few more minutes, mostly about the past, and headed for the exit ten minutes later. Myron started back to his car. Time to see Dad. He tried the new cellular—count on Win to have “extras” lying about his apartment—and called Win.

“Articulate,” Win answered.

“Clu was right. The drug test was fixed.”

Win said, “My, my.”

“Sawyer Wells witnessed the drug test.”

“More my, my.”

“What time is he doing the motivational talk at Reston?”

“Two o’clock,” Win said.

“In the mood to get motivated?”

“You have no idea.”

CHAPTER 28

The Club.

Brooklake Country Club, to be more exact, though there was no brook, no lake, and they were not in the country. It was, however, most definitely a club. As Myron’s car made its way up the steep drive, the clubhouse’s white Greco-Roman pillars rising through the clouds, childhood memories popped up in fluorescent flashes. It was how he always saw the place. In flashes. Not always pleasant ones.

The Club was the epitome of nouveau-riche, Myron’s wealthy brethren proving that they could be just as tacky and exclusive as their goyish counterparts. Older women with perpetual tans on large, freckled chests sat by the pool, their hair shellacked into place by fake French hairdressers to the point where the strands resembled frozen fiber optics, never allowing it, God forbid, to touch the water, sleeping, he imagined, without putting their heads down lest they shatter the dos like so much Venetian glass; there were nose jobs and liposuction and face-lifts so extreme that the ears almost touched in the back, the overall effect bizarrely sexy in the same way you might find Yvonne De Carlo on The Munsters sexy; women fighting off old age and on the surface winning, but Myron wondered if they doth protest too much, their fear just a little too bare in the scar-revealing, harsh overhead lights of the dining room.

Men and women were separated at the Club, the women animatedly playing mah-jongg, the men silently chewing on cigars over a hand of cards; women still had special tee times so as not to interfere with the breadwinners’—i.e., their husbands’—precious leisure moments; there was tennis too, but that was more for fashion than exercise, giving everyone an excuse to wear sweatsuits that rarely encountered sweat, couples sometimes sporting matching ones; a men’s grill, a women’s lounge, the oak boards memorializing golf champions in gold leaf, the same man winning seven years in a row, now dead, the large locker rooms with masseur’s tables, the bathrooms with combs sitting in blue alcohol, the pickle-and-cole-slaw bar, cleat marks on the rug, the Founders Board with his grandparents’ names still on it, immigrant dining room help, all referred to by their first names, always smiling too hard and at the ready.

What shocked Myron now was that people his age were members. The same young girls who had sneered at their mothers’ idleness now abandoned their own foundering careers to “raise” the kids—read: hire nannies—came here to lunch and bore each other silly with a continuous game of one-upmanship. The men Myron’s age had manicures and long hair and were well fed and too well dressed, kicking back with their cellular phones and casually swearing to a colleague. Their kids were there too, dark-eyed youngsters walking through the clubhouse with hand-held video games and Walkmans and too regal a bearing.

All conversations were inane and depressed the hell out of Myron. The grandpas in Myron’s day had the good sense not to talk much to one another, just discarding and picking up what was dealt, occasionally grumbling about a local sports team; the grandmothers interrogated one another, measuring their own children and grandchildren against the competition, seeking an opponent’s weakness and any conversational opening to jab forward with tales of offspring heroics, no one really listening, just preparing for the next frontal assault, familial pride getting confused with self-worth and desperation.

The main clubhouse dining room was as expected: waaaay too overstated. The green carpeting, the curtains that resembled corduroy leisure suits, the gold tablecloths on huge round mahogany, the floral centerpieces piled too high and with no sense of proportion, not unlike the plates traipsing down the buffet line. Myron remembered attending a sports-themed bar mitzvah here as a child: juke-boxes, posters, pennants, a Wiffle ball batting cage, a basket for foul shots, an artist wanna-be stuck sketching sports-related caricatures of thirteen-year-old boys—thirteen-year-old boys being God’s most obnoxious creation short of television lawyers—and a wedding band complete with an overweight lead singer who handed the kids silver dollars shrouded in leather pouches that were emblazoned with the band’s phone number.

But this view—these flashes—were too quick and thus simplistic. Myron knew that. His remembrances were all screwed up about this place—the derision blending with the nostalgia—but he also remembered coming here as a child for family dinners, his clip-on tie slightly askew, sent by Mom into the inner sanctum of the men’s card room to find his grandfather, the undisputed family patriarch, the room reeking of cigar smoke, his pop-pop greeting him with a ferocious embrace, his gruff compatriots who wore golf shirts that were too loud and too tight, barely acknowledging the interloper because their own grandkids would do the same soon, the card game trickling down, participant by participant.

These same people he so easily picked apart were the first generation fully out of Russia or Poland or Ukraine or some other shtetl-laced combat zone. They’d hit the New World running—running away from the past, the poverty, the fear—and they just ran a bit too far. But under the hair and the jewelry and the gold lamé, no mother bear would ever be so quick to kill for her cubs, the women’s hard eyes still seeking out the pogrom in the distance, suspicious, always expecting the worst, bracing themselves to take the blow for their children.

Myron’s dad sat in a yellow, pseudo-leather swivel chair in the brunch room, fitting in with this crowd about as well as a camel-riding mufti. Dad did not belong here. Never had. He didn’t play golf or tennis or cards. He didn’t swim and he didn’t brag and he didn’t brunch and he didn’t talk stock tips. He wore his work clothes of all things: charcoal gray slacks, loafers, and a white dress shirt over a sleeveless white undershirt. His eyes were dark, his skin pale olive, his nose jutting forward like a hand waiting to be shook.

Interestingly enough, Dad was not a member of Brooklake. Dad’s parents, on the other hand, had been founding members, or in the case of Pop-pop, a ninety-two-year-old quasi vegetable whose rich life had been dissolved into useless fragments by Alzheimer’s, still was. Dad hated the place, but he kept up the membership for the sake of his father. That meant showing up every once in a while. Dad looked at it as a small price to pay.

When Dad spotted Myron, he rose, more slowly than usual, and suddenly the obvious hit Myron: The cycle was beginning anew. Dad was the age Pop-pop had been back then, the age of the people they’d made fun of, his ink-black hair wispy, static gray now. The thought was far from comforting.

“Over here!” Dad called, though Myron had seen him. Myron threaded his way through the brunchers, mostly overkept women who constantly pendulumed between chewing and chatting, bits of coleslaw caught in the corners of their glossy mouths, water glasses stained with pink lipstick. They eyed Myron as he walked by for three reasons: under forty, male, no marriage band. Measuring his son-in-law potential. Always on the lookout, though not necessarily for their own daughters, the yenta from the shtetl never too far away.

Myron hugged his father and as always kissed his cheek. The cheek still felt wonderfully rough, but the skin was loosening. The scent of Old Spice wafted gently in the air, as comforting as any hot chocolate on the coldest of days. Dad hugged him back, released, then hugged him again. No one noticed the display of affection. Such acts were not uncommon here.

The two men sat. The paper place mats had an overhead diagram of the golf course’s eighteen holes and an ornate letter B in the middle. The club’s logo. Dad picked up a stubby green pencil, a golf pencil, to scribble down their order. That was how it worked. The menu had not changed in thirty years. As a kid Myron always ordered either the Monte Cristo or Reuben sandwich. Today he asked for a bagel with lox and cream cheese. Dad wrote it down.

“So,” Dad began. “Getting acclimated to being back?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Hell of a thing with Esperanza.”

“She didn’t do it.”

Dad nodded. “Your mother tells me that you’ve been subpoenaed.”

“Yep. But I don’t know anything.”

“You listen to your aunt Clara. She’s a smart lady. Always has been. Even in school, Clara was the smartest girl in the class.”

“I will.”

The waitress came by. Dad handed her the order. He turned back to Myron and shrugged. “It’s getting near the end of the month,” Dad said. “I have to use your pop-pop’s minimum before the thirtieth. I didn’t want the money to go to waste.”

“This place is fine.”

Dad made a face signaling disagreement. He grabbed some bread, buttered it, then pushed it away. He shifted in his chair. Myron watched him. Dad was working up to something.

“So you and Jessica broke up?”

In all the years Myron had been dating Jessica, Dad had never inquired about their relationship past the polite questions. It just wasn’t his way. He’d ask how Jessica was, what she was up to, when her next book was coming out. He was polite and friendly and greeted her warmly, but he’d never given a true indication of how he really felt about her. Mom had made her own feelings on the subject crystal clear: Jessica was not good enough for her son, but then again, who was? Dad was like a great newscaster, the kind of guy who asks questions without giving the viewer any hint of how he was really leaning on the issue.

“I think it’s over,” Myron said.

“Because”—Dad stopped, looked away, looked back—“of Brenda?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m not big on giving advice. You know that. Maybe I should have been. I read those life instruction books fathers write for their children. You ever see those?”

“Yes.”

“All kinds of wisdom in there. Like: Watch a sunrise once a year. Why? Suppose you want to sleep in? Another one: Overtip a breakfast waitress. But suppose she’s grumpy? Suppose she’s really bad? Maybe that’s why I never dealt with it. I always see the other side.”

Myron smiled.

“So I was never big on advice. But I have learned one thing for sure. One thing. So listen to me because this is important.”

“Okay.”

“The most important decision you’ll ever make is who you marry,” Dad said. “You can take every other decision you’ll ever make, add them together, and it still won’t be as important as that one. Suppose you choose the wrong job, for example. With the right wife, that’s not a problem. She’ll encourage you to make a change, cheer you on no matter what. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Remember that, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You have to love her more than anything in the world. But she has to love you just as much. Your priority should be her happiness, and her priority should be yours. That’s a funny thing—caring about someone more than yourself. It’s not easy. So don’t look at her as just a sexual object or as just a friend to talk to. Picture every day with the person. Picture paying bills with that person, raising children with that person, being stuck in a hot room with no air-conditioning and a screaming baby with that person. Am I making sense?”

“Yes.” Myron smiled and folded his hands on the table. “Is that how it is with you and Mom? Is she all those things to you?”

“All those things,” Dad agreed, “plus a pain in the tuchus.”

Myron laughed.

“If you promise not to tell your mother, I’ll let you in on a little secret.”

“What?”

He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially. “When your mother walks in the room—even now, even after all these years, if she were to, say, stroll by us right now—my heart still does a little two-step. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so, yeah. That used to happen with Jess.”

Dad spread his hands. “Enough then.”

“Are you saying Jessica is that person?”

“Not my place to say one way or the other.”

“Do you think I’m making a mistake?”

Dad shrugged. “You’ll figure that out, Myron. I have tremendous confidence in you. Maybe that’s why I never gave you much advice. Maybe I always thought you were smart enough without me.”

“Bull.”

“Or maybe it was easier parenting, I don’t know.”

“Or maybe you led by example,” Myron said. “Maybe you led gently. Maybe you showed rather than told.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.”

They fell into silence. The women around them chatted up their white noise.

Dad said, “I turn sixty-eight this year.”

“I know.”

“Not a young man anymore.”

Myron shook his head. “Not old either.”

“True enough.”

More silence.

“I’m selling the business,” Dad said.

Myron froze. He saw the warehouse in Newark, the place Dad had worked for as long as Myron could remember. The schmata business—in Dad’s case, undergarments. He could picture Dad with his ink-black hair in his glass-walled warehouse office, barking out orders, sleeves rolled up, Eloise, his long-time secretary, fetching him whatever he needed before he knew he needed it.

“I’m too old for it now,” Dad went on. “So I’m getting out. I spoke to Artie Bernstein. You remember Artie?”

Myron managed a nod.

“The man’s a rat bastard, but he’s been dying to buy me out for years. Right now his offer is garbage, but I still might take it.”

Myron blinked. “You’re selling?”

“Yes. And your mother is going to cut back at the law firm.”

“I don’t understand.”

Dad put a hand on Myron’s arm. “We’re tired, Myron.”

Myron felt two giant hands press down on his chest.

“We’re also buying a place in Florida.”

“Florida?”

“Yes.”

“You’re moving to Florida?” Myron’s Theory on East Coast Jewish Life: You grow up, you get married, you have kids, you go to Florida, you die.

“No, maybe part of the year, I don’t know. Your mother and I are going to start traveling a little more.” Dad paused. “So we’ll probably sell the house.”

They’d owned that house Myron’s entire life. Myron looked down at the table. He grabbed a wrapped Saltine cracker from the bread basket and tore open the cellophane.

“Are you okay?” Dad asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. But he wasn’t fine. And he couldn’t articulate why, even to himself.

The waitress served them. Dad was having a salad with cottage cheese. Dad hated cottage cheese. They ate in silence. Myron kept feeling tears sting his eyes. Silly.

“There’s one other thing,” Dad said.

Myron looked up. “What?”

“It’s not a big deal really. I didn’t even want to tell you, but your mother thought I should. And you know how it is with your mother. When she has something in her mind, God himself—”

“What is it, Dad?”

Dad fixed his eyes on Myron’s. “I want you to know this has nothing to do with you or your going to the Caribbean.”

“Dad, what?”

“While you were gone”—Dad shrugged and started blinking; he put down his fork, and there was the faintest quiver in his lower lip—“I had some chest pains.”

Myron felt his own heart sputter. He saw Dad with the ink-black hair at Yankee Stadium. He saw Dad’s face turning red when he told him about the bearded man. He saw Dad rise and storm off to avenge his sons.

When Myron spoke, his voice sounded tinny and far away. “Chest pains?”

“Don’t make a thing of it.”

“You had a heart attack?”

“Let’s not blow it out of proportion. The doctors weren’t sure what it was. It was just some chest pains, that’s all. I was out of the hospital in two days.”

“The hospital?” More images: Dad waking up with the pains, Mom starting to cry, calling an ambulance, rushing to the hospital, the oxygen mask on his face, Mom holding his hand, both their faces devoid of any color.…

And then something broke open. Myron couldn’t stop himself. He got up and half sprinted to the bathroom. Someone said hello to him, called out his name, but he kept moving. He pushed open the bathroom door, opened a stall, locked himself in, and nearly collapsed.

Myron started to cry.

Deep, bone-crushing cries, full-body sobs. Just when he thought he couldn’t cry anymore. Something inside him had finally given way, and now he sobbed without pause or letup.

Myron heard the bathroom door open. Someone leaned against the stall door. Dad’s voice, when he finally spoke, was barely a whisper. “I’m fine, Myron.”

But Myron again saw Dad at Yankee Stadium. The ink-black hair was gone, replaced with the gray, fly-away wisps. Myron saw Dad challenge the bearded man. He saw the bearded man rise, and then he saw Dad clutch his chest and fall to the ground.

CHAPTER 29

Myron tried to shake it off. No choice really. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And he couldn’t stop worrying. Worrying had never been his style in the past, even when a crisis loomed. All of a sudden he had the worry-queasies in his stomach. It was true what they said: The older you become, the more you are like your parents. Soon he’d be telling a kid not to stick his elbow out the car window or he’d lose it.

Win met him in front of the auditorium. He was in classic Win pose, eyes level, arms crossed, totally relaxed. He wore designer sunglasses and looked ultrasleek. GQ casual.

“Problem?” Win said.

“No.”

Win shrugged.

“I thought we were going to meet inside,” Myron said.

“That would mean I’d have to listen to more of Sawyer Wells.”

“That bad?”

“Imagine, if you will, a Mariah Carey—Michael Bolton duet,” Win said.

“Eeuw.”

Win checked his watch. “He should be finishing up now. We must be brave.”

They headed inside. The Cagemore Center was a sprawling facility that featured oodles of concert and lecture halls that could be cut to any size by sliding walls back and forth. There was a summer camp for young children in one room. Win and Myron stopped and listened to the children sing “Farmer in the Dell.” The sound made Myron smile.

“… the farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi-ho-the-dairy-o, the farmer in the dell …”

Win turned to Myron. “What’s a dell?” Win asked.

“No idea.”

Win shrugged and moved on to the main auditorium. There was a table out front selling Sawyer Wells paraphernalia. Cassettes, videos, books, magazines, posters, pennants (though what one does with a Sawyer Wells pennant went beyond Myron’s capacity to imagine) and yep, T-shirts. Groovy titles too: The Wells Guide to Wellness, The Wells Rules for Wellness, Key to Wellness: It’s All About You. Myron shook his head.

The auditorium was packed, the crowd so silent they’d put the Vatican to shame. Up on the stage, jittering to and fro like Robin Williams in his stand-up comic days, was the self-help guru himself. Sawyer Wells was resplendent in a business suit with the jacket off, shirt cuffs turned once, fancy suspenders cutting into his shoulders. A good look for a self-help guru: The expensive suit makes you reek of success while the jacket off and rolled-up sleeves give you the air of a regular guy. A perfectly balanced ensemble.

“It’s all about you,” Sawyer Wells told the enraptured audience. “If you remember nothing else today, remember that. It’s all about you. Make everything about you. Every decision is about you. Everything you see, everything you touch is a reflection of you. No … more than that—it is you. You are everything. And everything is you.”

Win leaned toward Myron. “Isn’t that a song?”

“The Stylistics, I think. Circa early seventies.”

“I want you to remember that,” Sawyer continued. “Visualize. Visualize everything as you. Your family is you. Your job is you. When you’re walking down the street, that beautiful tree is you. That blooming rose is you.”

Win said, “That dirty commode at the bus terminal.”

Myron nodded. “You.”

“You see the boss, the leader, the breadwinner, the successful, fulfilled person. That person is you. No one can lead you because the leader is you. You stand in front of your opponent, and you know you can win because you are your opponent. And you know how to beat you. Remember you are your opponent. Your opponent is you.”

Win frowned. “But don’t you know how to beat you too?”

“It’s a paradox,” Myron agreed.

“You fear the unknown,” Sawyer Wells ranted. “You fear success. You fear taking chances. But now you know that the unknown is you. Success is you. Taking chances is you. You don’t fear you, do you?”

Win frowned.

“Listen to Mozart. Take long walks. Ask yourself what you did today. Do that every night. Before you go to sleep, ask yourself if the world is better because of you. After all, it’s your world. You are the world.”

Win said, “If he breaks into a rendition of ‘We Are the World,’ I’m using my gun.”

“But you are your gun,” Myron countered.

“And he is my gun too.”

“Right.”

Win considered that. “So if he is my gun and my gun kills him, it’s a suicide.”

“Take responsibility for your actions,” Wells said. “That’s one of the Wells Rules for Wellness. Take responsibility. Cher once said, ‘Excuses won’t lift your butt, ’kay?’ Listen to that. Believe that with all your heart.”

The man was quoting Cher. The crowd was nodding. There is no God.

“Confess something about yourself to a friend—something awful, something you’d never want anyone to know. You’ll feel better. You’ll still see that you’re worthy of love. And since your friend is you, you are really just telling yourself. Have an interest in everything. Thirst for knowledge. That’s another rule. Remember that it’s all about you. When you learn about other things, you are actually learning about yourself. Get to know you better.”

Win looked at Myron, his face pained.

“Let’s wait outside,” Myron said.

But luck was with them. Two sentences later Sawyer Wells was done. The crowd went ballistic. They stood, they applauded, they hooted like an old Arsenio Hall audience.

Win shook his head. “Four hundred dollars a pop.”

“That what this thing costs?”

“He is your money.”

People approached the stage, stretching their hands toward the heavens in the vain hope that Sawyer Wells might reach out and touch them. Myron and Win watched. The table with the Wells paraphernalia was swarmed now like rotting fruit with buzzing flies.

“The citified version of a tent revival,” Win noted.

Myron nodded.

Eventually Sawyer Wells waved and ran offstage. The crowd continued to cheer and purchase. Myron half expected a voice-over to announce that Elvis had left the building. Win and Myron swam through the crowd.

“Come,” Win said. “I have backstage passes.”

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

He wasn’t. They actually said “Backstage Pass” on them. A plainclothes security guard scowled at them and scrutinized the passes as if they were the Zapruder film. Satisfied, he let them past the velvet rope. Yep, velvet rope. Sawyer Wells spotted Win and bounced toward them.

“So glad you could come, Win!” He turned to Myron and stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Sawyer Wells.”

Myron shook it. “Myron Bolitar.”

Sawyer’s smile flickered but stayed on. “Nice to meet you, Myron.”

Myron decided to try a frontal assault. “Why did you fix Clu Haid’s drug test so it would appear he was taking heroin?”

The smile was still there, but it wasn’t sitting right. “Pardon?”

“Clu Haid. The name ring a bell?”

“Of course. As I told Win yesterday, I worked very hard with him.”

“Worked how?”

“To keep him off drugs. I have an extensive background as a drug counselor. That’s how I was trained. To help addicts.”

“Not so different from what you’re doing now,” Myron said.

“Pardon?”

“People with addictive personalities need an addiction. If it’s not booze or drugs, maybe it’s religion or self-help mumbo jumbo. They’re simply swapping addictions; we hope to one less damaging.”

Sawyer Wells overnodded. “That’s a really interesting viewpoint, Myron.”

“Gee, thanks, Sawyer.”

“I learned much about human frailty, about our lack of self-esteem, from addicts like Clu Haid. As I said, I worked very hard with him. His failure hurt me greatly.”

Win said, “Because it was your failure.”

“Pardon?”

“You are everything, and everything is you,” Win said. “You are Clu Haid. He failed, ergo you failed.”

Sawyer Wells maintained the smile. But it was different when he looked at Win. His gestures were tighter too, more controlled. He was one of those guys who tried to imitate the person with whom he was conversing. Myron hated that. “I see you came in at the end of my seminar, Win.”

“Did I misunderstand your message?”

“No, it’s not that. But a man creates his own world. That’s my point. You are what you create, what you perceive. Take responsibility. That’s the most important component of the Wells Guide to Wellness. You take responsibility for your own actions. And you admit fault. You know what the two most beautiful sentences in the world are?”

Win opened his mouth, stopped, looked at Myron, shook his head. “Too easy,” he said.

“‘I am responsible,’ ” Sawyer continued. “‘It’s my fault.’ ” He turned toward Myron. “Say it, Myron.”

“What?”

“Come on. It’s exhilarating. Say, ‘I am responsible. It’s my fault.’ Stop passing the buck in your life. Say it. Come on, I’ll say it with you. Win, you too.”

Myron and Sawyer said, “I am responsible. It’s my fault.” Win remained silent.

“Feel better?” Sawyer said.

“It was almost like sex,” Myron said.

“It can be powerful, yes.”

“Yeah, uh-huh. Look, Sawyer, I’m not here to critique your seminar. I want to know about Clu’s drug test. It was fixed. We have evidence that proves that fact. You helped administer that test. I want to know why you made it look like Clu was on drugs.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The autopsy shows conclusively that Clu hadn’t taken drugs for at least two months before his death. Yet you tested him positive two weeks ago.”

“Maybe the test was faulty,” Sawyer said.

Win tsk-tsked. “Say, ‘I am responsible. It’s my fault.’ ”

“Stop passing the buck in your life,” Myron added.

“Come on, Sawyer. It’s exhilarating.”

“That’s not funny,” Sawyer said.

“Wait,” Win said. “You are everything, thus you are the drug test.”

“And you are a positive guy,” Myron added.

“Ergo the test result was positive.”

Sawyer said, “I think I’ve had just about enough.”

“You’re finished, Wells,” Myron said. “I’ll blab to the papers.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a fixed test.”

“Want to hear my theory?” Myron said.

“No.”

“You’re leaving the Yankees and going to work for Vincent Riverton, right?”

“I’m not working exclusively for anyone. His conglomerate publishes my book.”

“He’s also Sophie Mayor’s archenemy.”

“You don’t know that,” Sawyer said.

“He lived for owning the team. When she took over, he was pissed. She ends up being everything New York wants in an owner because she minds her own business. She makes only one move, acquiring Clu Haid, and it’s a beauty. Clu pitches better than anyone dared hope. The Yankees start heading for greatness. Then you step in. Clu fails a drug test. Sophie Mayor looks incompetent. The Yankees tumble.”

Sawyer seemed to recoup a bit. Something in what Myron had just said had given him a new lease. Odd. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”

“What part?”

“All of it,” Sawyer said, chest back out. “Sophie Mayor has been good to me. I was working as a drug counselor at the Sloan State and Rockwell rehab centers when she gave me my chance to move up. Why would I want to hurt her?”

“You tell me.”

“I have no idea. I firmly believed that Clu was on drugs. If he wasn’t, then the test was faulty.”

“You know the results are double-tested. There was no mistake. Someone had to fix it.”

“It wasn’t me. Maybe you should speak to Dr. Stilwell.”

“But you were there? You admit that?”

“Yes, I was there. And I will no longer dignify your questions with answers.” With that Sawyer Wells abruptly spun and stormed off.

“I don’t think he liked us,” Myron said.

“But if it’s all about you, then we are he.”

“So he doesn’t like himself?”

“Sad, isn’t it?”

“Not to mention confusing,” Myron said.

They headed for the exit.

“So where to, O Motivated One?” Win asked.

“Starbucks.”

“Latte time?”

Myron shook his head. “Confront FJ time.”

CHAPTER 30

FJ was not there. Myron called his office again. The same secretary told him that FJ was still unavailable. Myron repeated that it was imperative that he speak to Francis Ache Junior as soon as humanly possible. The secretary remained unimpressed.

Myron returned to his office.

Big Cyndi wore a bright green spandex bodysuit with a slogan across the chest—this on a woman who could barely squeeze into a caftan. The fabric screamed in pain, the letters in the slogan so elongated that Myron couldn’t read them, kinda like what happens to Silly Putty after you press it against a newspaper headline and stretch it out.

“Lots of clients have been calling, Mr. Bolitar,” Big Cyndi said. “They are not pleased by your absence.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

She gave him the messages. “Oh, and Jared Mayor called,” she said. “He seemed very anxious to talk to you.”

“Okay, thanks.”

He called Jared Mayor first. He was in his mother’s office at Yankee Stadium. Sophie switched on the speakerphone.

“You called?” Myron said.

“I was hoping you could give us an update,” Jared said.

“I think someone is setting up your mother.”

Sophie said, “Setting me up how?”

“Clu’s drug test was a fix. He was clean.”

“I know you want to believe that—”

“I have proof,” Myron said.

Silence.

“What kind of proof?” Jared asked.

“There’s no time for that now. But trust me on this. Clu was clean.”

“Who would have fixed the test?” Sophie asked.

“That’s what I want to know. The logical suspects are Dr. Stilwell and Sawyer Wells.”

“But why would they want to hurt Clu?”

“Not Clu, Sophie. You. It fits in with everything else we have. Raising the specter of your missing daughter, taking your big baseball trade and turning it against you—I think someone’s out to hurt you.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” Sophie said.

“Could be.”

“Who would want to hurt me?”

“I’m sure you’ve made your share of enemies. How about Vincent Riverton, for one?”

“Riverton? No. Our whole takeover was far more amicable than the press portrayed it.”

“Still, I wouldn’t rule him out.”

“Listen, Myron, I don’t really care about any of this. I just want you to find my daughter.”

“They’re probably connected.”

“How?”

Myron changed ears. “You want me to be blunt, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I have to remind you what the odds are that your daughter is still alive.”

“Slim,” she said.

“Very slim.”

“No, I’ll stay with slim. In fact, I think it’s better than slim.”

“Do you really believe Lucy is alive someplace?”

“Yes.”

“She’s out there somewhere, waiting to be found?”

“Yes.”

“Then the big question,” Myron said, “is why.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why isn’t she home?” he asked. “Do you think someone’s been holding her hostage all these years?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what other choices are there? If Lucy is still alive, why hasn’t she come home? Or phoned home? What is she hiding from?”

Silence.

Sophie broke it. “You think someone has resurrected my daughter’s memory as part of some vendetta against me?”

Myron was not sure how to answer. “I think it’s a possibility we have to consider.”

“I appreciate your bluntness, Myron. I want you to remain honest with me. Don’t hold back. But I’ll also keep my hope. When your child disappears into thin air, it creates a huge void. I need something to fill that void, Myron. So until I find out otherwise, I’ll fill it with hope.”

Myron said, “I understand.”

“Then you’ll keep looking.”

There was a knock on the door. Myron put his hand over the phone and said to come in. Big Cyndi opened the door. Myron gestured to a chair. She took it. In the bright green she looked a bit like a planet.

“I’m not sure what I can do, Sophie.”

“Jared will investigate Clu’s drug test,” she said. “If there was anything amiss, he’ll find out about it. You keep your eyes open for my daughter. You may be right about Lucy’s fate. Then again you may be wrong. Don’t give up.”

Before he could reply, the line was disconnected. Myron put the phone back in the cradle.

“Well?” Big Cyndi asked.

“She still has hope.”

Big Cyndi scrunched up her face. “There’s a fine line between hope and delusion, Mr. Bolitar,” she said. “I think Ms. Mayor may have crossed it.”

Myron nodded. He shifted in his chair. “Something I can do for you?” he asked.

She shook her head. Her head was a nearly perfect cube and reminded Myron of the old game of Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots. Not sure what else to do, Myron folded his hands and put them on his desk. He wondered how many times he had been alone with Big Cyndi like this. Less than a handful for sure. Wrong to say, but she made him uncomfortable.

After some time had passed, Big Cyndi said, “My mother was a big, ugly woman.”

Myron had no comeback for that one.

“And like most big, ugly women, she was a shrinking violet. That’s how it is with big, ugly women, Mr. Bolitar. They get used to standing alone in the corner. They hide. They become angry and defensive. They keep their heads down, and they let themselves be treated with disdain and disgust and—”

She stopped suddenly, waved a meaty paw. Myron sat still.

“I hated my mother,” she said. “I swore that I would never be like that.”

Myron risked a small nod.

“That’s why you have to save Esperanza.”

“I’m not sure I see the connection.”

“She’s the only one who sees past this.”

“Past what?”

She thought about that one for a moment. “What’s the first thing you think when you see me, Mr. Bolitar?”

“I don’t know.”

“People like to stare,” she said.

“Hard to blame them, don’t you think?” Myron said. “I mean, the way you dress and stuff.”

She smiled. “I’d rather see shock on their faces than pity,” she said. “And I’d rather they see brazen or outrageous than shrinking or scared or sad. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“I’m not standing alone in the corner anymore. I’ve done enough of that.”

Myron, unsure what to say, settled for a nod.

“When I was nineteen, I started wrestling professionally. And of course I was cast as a villain. I sneered. I made faces. I cheated. I hit opponents when they weren’t looking. It was all an act, of course. But that was my job.”

Myron sat back and listened.

“One night I was scheduled to fight Esperanza—Little Pocahontas, I should say. It was the first time we’d met. She was already the most beloved wrestler on the circuit. Cute and pretty and small and all the things … all the things that I’m not. Anyway, we were performing in some high school gym outside Scranton. The script was the usual. A back-and-forth match. Esperanza winning with her skill. Me cheating. Twice I was supposed to nearly have her pinned when the crowd would go wild and she’d start stamping her foot, like the cheers were giving her strength, and then everyone would start clapping in unison with her stomps. You know how it works, right?”

Myron nodded.

“She was supposed to pin me with a backflip at the fifteen-minute mark. We executed it perfectly. Then as she was raising her hands in victory, I was supposed to sneak up on her and whack her in the back with a metal chair. Again it went perfectly. She collapsed to the canvas. The crowd gasped. I, the Human Volcano—that’s what I was called then—raised my hands in victory. They started booing and throwing things. I sneered. The announcers acted all concerned for poor Little Pocahontas. They brought out the stretcher. Again you’ve seen the same act a million times on cable.”

He nodded again.

“So there was another match or two, and then the crowd was ushered out. I decided not to change until I got back to the motel. I left for the bus a few minutes before the other girls. It was dark, of course. Nearly midnight. But some of the spectators were still out there. They confronted me. There must have been twenty of them. They started shouting at me. I decided to play back. I did my ring sneer and flexed”—her voice caught—“and that was when a rock hit me square in the mouth.”

Myron kept perfectly still.

“I started bleeding. Then another rock hit me in the shoulder. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I tried to head back inside, but they circled around me. I didn’t know what to do. They started moving in closer. I ducked down. Someone hit me over the head with a beer bottle. My knees hit the pavement. Then someone kicked me in the stomach and someone else pulled my hair.”

She stopped. Her eyes blinked a few times and she looked up and away. Myron thought about reaching out to her, but he didn’t. Later he’d wonder why.

“And that’s when Esperanza stepped in,” Big Cyndi said after a few moments had passed. “She jumped over someone in the crowd and landed right on me. The morons thought she was there to help beat me up. But she just wanted to put herself between me and the blows. She told them to stop. But they wouldn’t listen. One of them pulled her away so they could keep beating me. I felt another kick. Someone yanked my hair so hard my neck snapped back. I really thought they were going to kill me.”

Big Cyndi stopped again and took a deep breath. Myron stayed where he was and waited.

“You know what Esperanza did then?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“She announced that we were going to be tag team partners. Just like that. She shouted that after she’d been taken off on the stretcher, I’d visited her and we realized that we were actually long-lost sisters. The Human Volcano was now going to be called Big Chief Mama and we were going to be partners and friends. Some of the spectators backed off then. Others looked wary. ‘It’s a trap!’ they warned her. ‘The Human Volcano is setting you up!’ But Esperanza insisted. She helped me to my feet and by then the police showed up and the moment was over. The crowd dispersed pretty easily.”

Big Cyndi threw up her thick arms and smiled. “The end.”

Myron smiled back. “So that’s how you two became tag team partners?”

“That’s how. When the president of FLOW heard about the incident, he decided to capitalize on it. The rest, as they say, is history.”

They both sat back in silence, still smiling. After some time had passed, Myron said, “I had my heart broken six years ago.”

Big Cyndi nodded. “By Jessica, right?”

“Right. I walked in on her with another man. A guy named Doug.” He paused. He could not believe he was telling her this. And it still hurt. After all this time it still hurt. “Jessica left me then. Isn’t that weird? I didn’t throw her out. She just left. We didn’t speak for four years—until she came back and we started up again. But you know about that.”

Big Cyndi made a face. “Esperanza hates Jessica.”

“Yeah, I know. She doesn’t exactly go to pains to hide that fact.”

“She calls her Queen Bitch.”

“When she’s in a good mood,” Myron said. “But that’s why. Up until we broke up that first time, she was more or less indifferent. But after that—”

“Esperanza doesn’t forgive easily,” Big Cyndi said. “Not when it comes to her friends.”

“Right. Anyway, I was devastated. Win was no help. When it comes to matters of the heart, well, it’s like explaining Mozart to a deaf man. So about a week after Jess left me, I moped into the office. Esperanza had two airplane tickets in her hand. ‘We’re going away,’ she said. ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘I already called your folks. I told them we’d be gone for a week.’ ” Myron smiled. “My parents love Esperanza.”

“That should tell you something,” Big Cyndi said.

“I told her I didn’t have any clothes. She pointed to two suitcases on the floor. ‘I bought you all you’ll need.’ I protested, but I didn’t have much left, and you know Esperanza.”

“Stubborn,” Big Cyndi said.

“To put it mildly. You know where she took me?”

Big Cyndi smiled. “On a cruise. Esperanza told me about it.”

“Right. One of those big new ships with four hundred meals a day. And she made me go to every dumb activity. I even made a wallet. We drank. We danced. We played friggin’ bingo. We slept in the same bed and she held me and we never so much as kissed.”

They sat for another long moment, both smiling again.

“We never asked her for help,” Big Cyndi said. “Esperanza just knows and does the right thing.”

“And now it’s our turn,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“She’s still hiding something from me.”

Big Cyndi nodded. “I know.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No,” she said.

Myron leaned back. “We’ll save her anyway,” he said.

At eight o’clock Win called down to Myron’s office.

“Meet me at the apartment in an hour. I have a surprise for you.”

“I’m not much in the mood for surprises, Win.”

Click.

Great. He tried FJ’s office again. No answer. He didn’t much like waiting. FJ was a key in all this, he was sure of it now. But what choice did he have? It was getting late anyway. Better to go home and be surprised by whatever Win had in store and then get some rest.

The subway was still crowded at eight-thirty; the so-called Manhattan rush hour had grown to more like five or six. People worked too hard, Myron decided. He got off and walked to the Dakota. The same doorman was there. He had been given instructions to let Myron in at any time, that indeed Myron was now officially a resident of the Dakota, but the doorman still made a face like there was a bad odor whenever he passed.

Myron took the elevator up, fumbled for his key, and opened the door.

“Win?”

“He’s not here.”

Myron turned. Terese Collins gave him a small smile.

“Surprise,” she said.

He gaped. “You left the island?”

Terese glanced in a nearby mirror, then back at him. “Apparently.”

“But—”

“Not now.”

She stepped toward him and they embraced. He kissed her. They fumbled with buttons and zippers and snaps. Neither one spoke. They made it into the bedroom, and then they made love.

When it was over, they clung to each other, the sheets tangled and binding them close together. Myron rested his cheek against her soft breast, hearing her heartbeat. Her chest was hitching a bit, and he knew that she was quietly crying.

“Tell me,” he said.

“No.” Terese’s hand stroked his hair. “Why did you leave?”

“A friend is in trouble.”

“That sounds so noble.”

Again with that word. “I thought we agreed we wouldn’t do this,” he said.

“You complaining?”

“Hardly,” he said. “Just curious why you changed your mind.”

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t think so.”

She stroked his hair some more. He closed his eyes, not moving, wanting only to enjoy the wonderful suppleness of her skin against his cheek and ride the rise and fall of her chest.

“Your friend in trouble,” she said. “It’s Esperanza Diaz.”

“Win told you?”

“I read it in the papers.”

He kept his eyes closed.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“We were never great at talking on the island.”

“Yeah, but that was then, this is now.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you look a little worse for wear,” she said. “I think you’ll need the recovery time.”

Myron smiled. “Oysters. The island had oysters.”

“So tell me.”

So he did. Everything. She stroked his hair. She interrupted a lot with follow-up questions, relaxing in the more familiar role of interviewer. It took him almost an hour.

“Some story,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Does it hurt? I mean, where you got beaten up?”

“Yes. But I’m a tough guy.”

She kissed the top of his head. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

They sat in comfortable silence.

“I remember the Lucy Mayor disappearance,” Terese said. “At least the second round.”

“The second round?”

“When the Mayors had the money to run the big campaign to find her. Before that there really wasn’t much of a story. An eighteen-year-old runaway. No big deal.”

“You remember anything that might help me?”

“No. I hate covering stories like that. And not just for the obvious reason that lives are being shattered.”

“Then what?”

“There’s just too much denial,” she said.

“Denial?”

“Yes.”

“You mean with the family?”

“No, with the public. People block when it comes to their children. They deny because it’s too painful to accept. They tell themselves it can’t happen to them. God is not that fickle. There has to be a reason. Do you remember the Louise Woodward case a couple of years ago?”

“The nanny who killed the baby in Massachusetts?”

“Reduced to manslaughter by the judge, but yes. The public kept denying, even those who thought she was guilty. The mother shouldn’t have been working, they said. Never mind the fact that the mother worked only part-time and came home at lunch every day to breast-feed the baby. It was her fault. And the father. He should have checked out the nanny’s background better. The parents should have been more careful.”

“I remember,” Myron said.

“In the Mayors’ case it was the same kind of thing. If Lucy Mayor had been raised right, she would have never run away in the first place. That’s what I mean by denial. It’s too painful to think about, so you block and convince yourself it can’t happen to you.”

“Do you think there’s any merit to that argument in this case?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were Lucy Mayor’s parents part of the problem?”

Terese’s voice was soft. “It’s not important.”

“What makes you say that?”

She was silent, her breathing a little more hitched again.

“Terese?”

“Sometimes,” she said, “a parent is to blame. But that doesn’t change anything. Because either way—your fault or not—your child is gone and that’s all that matters.”

More silence.

Myron broke it. “You okay?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Sophie Mayor told me that the worst part was the not knowing.”

“She’s wrong,” Terese said.

Myron wanted to ask her more, but she got out of bed then. When she came back, they made love again—languid and bittersweet, as the song says—both feeling loss, both searching for something in the moment or at least settling for the numb.

They were still snarled in the sheets when the phone woke Myron early in the morning. He reached over her head and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“What’s so important?”

It was FJ. Myron quickly sat up.

“We need to chat,” Myron said.

“Again?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“Starbucks,” FJ said. “And Myron?”

“What?”

“Tell Win to stay outside.”

CHAPTER 31

FJ sat alone at the same table. He had his legs crossed at the knee and sipped as if maybe there were something in the bottom of the cup he wanted no part of. A bit of foam clung to his upper lip. His face was clean and wax-treatment smooth. Myron checked for Hans and Franz or some new goons, but nobody was there. FJ smiled and as always, something cold scrambled down Myron’s back.

“Where’s Win?” FJ asked.

“Outside,” Myron said.

“Good. Have a seat.”

“I know why Clu signed with you, FJ.”

“Care for an iced latte? You take it skim, correct?”

“It was bugging the hell out of me,” Myron said. “Why would Clu sign with you? Don’t get me wrong. He had every reason to leave MB. But he knew about TruPro’s reputation. Why would he go there?”

“Because we offer a valuable service.”

“At first I figured it was a gambling or drug debt. It’s how your dad always worked. He gets his hooks into someone, and then he gnaws on the carcass. But Clu was clean. And he had plenty of cash. So that wasn’t it.”

FJ put his elbow on the table and leaned his chin against his palm. “This is so fascinating, Myron.”

“It gets better. When I ran off to the Caribbean, you were keeping tabs on me. Because of the whole Brenda Slaughter situation. You even admitted it when I first got back, remember? You knew I’d been visiting the cemetery.”

“A very poignant moment for us all,” FJ agreed.

“When I vanished, you still wanted to keep tabs on me. If anything, my disappearance probably piqued your curiosity. You also saw an opening for TruPro, but that’s not here or there. You wanted to know where I was. But I wasn’t around. So you did the next best thing: You followed Esperanza, my partner and closest friend.”

FJ made a clucking noise. “And here I thought Win was your closest friend.”

“They both are. But that’s not the point. Following Win would be too difficult. He’d spot the tail before you even had him in place. So you followed Esperanza instead.”

“I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Clu’s decision to improve his representation.”

“I was missing. You knew that. You took advantage. You called my clients, telling them that I’d abandoned them.”

“Was I wrong?”

“I don’t care about that now. You saw a weakness and you exploited it. You couldn’t help yourself. It’s how you were raised.”

“Ouch.”

“But the important thing here is that you were following Esperanza, hoping she’d lead you to me or at least give you a clue to how long I’d be gone. You followed her out to New Jersey. And you stumbled upon something you were never supposed to learn.”

His smile was positively wet. “And what would that be?”

“Wipe that smile off your face, FJ. You’re no better than a peeping Tom. Even your father wouldn’t stoop that low.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised how low my father would stoop.”

“You’re a pervert, and worse, you used what you learned as leverage against a client. Clu went nuts when Bonnie threw him out. He had no idea why. But now you knew. So you made a deal with him. He signs with TruPro, he learns the truth about his wife.”

FJ leaned back, recrossed the legs, folded his hands, and placed them on his lap. “Quite a spin, Myron.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

FJ tilted his head in a maybe-yes, maybe-no fashion. “Let me tell you how I see it,” he began. “Clu Haid’s old agency, MB SportsReps, was clearly screwing him. In every way. His agent—that would be you, Myron—abandoned him when he needed him most. Your partner—that would be the lovely and rather lithe Esperanza—was engaging in a lick fest with his wife. True?”

Myron said nothing.

FJ unfolded the hands, took a sip of foam, refolded the hands. “What I did,” he continued, “was take Clu Haid out of this awful situation. I brought him to an agency that would not abuse his trust. An agency that would look out for his interests. One of the ways we do that is through information. Valuable information. So the client understands what is happening to him. That’s part of an agent’s job, Myron. One of our agencies engaged in questionable ethics here. And it wasn’t TruPro.”

It was a reverse spin, but it was also true. One day, when Myron had the time to dwell upon them, the words would undoubtedly wound. But not now.

“So you admit it?”

FJ shrugged.

“But if you were following Esperanza, you know she didn’t do it.”

Again the head tilt. “Do I?”

“Stop playing games with me, FJ.”

“Please hold a moment.” FJ took out his cell phone and dialed a number. He stood, walked toward the corner, chatted. He put the phone between his shoulder and ear, took out a pen and paper, jotted something down. He hung up and returned to the table.

“You were saying?”

“Did Esperanza do it?”

He smiled. “You want the truth?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Honest. Yes, I followed her. But as I am sure you know, even lesbian scenes get repetitive. So after a while we’d stop watching her once she crossed the Washington Bridge. There was no point.”

“So you really don’t know who killed Clu?”

“Afraid not.”

“Are you still following me, FJ?”

“No.”

“Last night. You didn’t have a man on me?”

“No. And truth be told, I didn’t have a man on you when you came in here yesterday.”

“The guy I spotted outside my office wasn’t yours?”

“Sorry, no.”

Myron was missing something here.

FJ leaned forward again. His smile was so creepy that his teeth seemed to wiggle. “How far are you willing to go to save Esperanza?” he whispered.

“You know how far.”

“The ends of the earth?”

“What are you getting at, FJ?”

“You’re right, of course. I did learn about Esperanza and Bonnie. And I saw an opening. So I called Clu at the apartment in Fort Lee. But he wasn’t there. I left a rather intriguing message on his machine. Something to the effect of ‘I know who your wife is sleeping with.’ He called me back on my private line within the hour.”

“When was this?”

“What … three days before his death?”

“What did he say?”

“His reaction was the obvious. But the what is not nearly as important as the where.”

“The where?”

“I have caller ID on my private line.” FJ sat back. “Clu was out of town when he returned my call.”

“Where?”

FJ took his time. He picked up the coffee, took a long sip, made an aaah noise as if he were filming a 7-Up commercial, put the cup back down. He looked at Myron. Then he shook his head. “Not so fast.”

Myron waited.

“My specialty, as you’ve now seen, is gathering information. Information is power. It’s currency. It’s cash. I just don’t give away cash.”

“How much, FJ?”

“Not money, Myron. I don’t want your money. I could buy you ten times over; we both know that.”

“So what do you want?”

He took another long sip. Myron wanted so very much to reach across the table and throttle him. “Sure you don’t want anything to drink?”

“Cut the crap, FJ.”

“Temper, temper.”

Myron made two fists and hid them under the table. He willed himself to stay calm. “What do you want, FJ?”

“You are familiar, are you not, with Dean Pashaian and Larry Vitale.”

“They’re two of my clients.”

“Correction. They are seriously considering leaving MB SportsReps and joining TruPro. They are on the fence as we speak. So here is my deal. You stop pursuing them. You don’t call them and hand them crap about TruPro being run by gangsters. You promise to do that”—he showed Myron the piece of paper he’d been writing on in the corner—“I give you the number Clu called from.”

“Your agency will destroy their careers. It always does.”

FJ smiled again. “I can guarantee you, Myron, that no one on my staff will have a lesbian affair with their wives.”

“No deal.”

“Good-bye then.” FJ stood.

“Wait.”

“Your promise or I walk.”

“Let’s talk about this,” Myron said. “We can come up with something.”

“Good-bye.”

FJ started for the door.

“Okay,” Myron said.

FJ put a hand to his ear. “I missed that.”

Selling out two clients. What would he stoop to next, running political campaigns? “You have a deal. I won’t talk to them.”

FJ spread his hands. “You really are a master negotiator, Myron. I’m in awe of your skills.”

“Where did he call from, FJ?”

“Here’s the phone number.” He handed Myron the piece of paper. Myron read it and sprinted back to the car.

CHAPTER 32

Myron was on the cell phone before he reached Win. He pressed in the number and heard three rings.

“Hamlet Motel,” a man said.

“Where are you located?”

“In Wilston. On Route Nine off Ninety-one.”

Myron thanked the man and hung up. Win looked at him. Myron dialed Bonnie’s number. Bonnie’s mother answered. Myron identified himself and asked to speak with Bonnie.

“She was very upset after you left yesterday,” Bonnie’s mother said.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Why do you want to talk to her?”

“Please. It’s very important.”

“She’s in mourning. You realize that. Their marriage may have been in trouble—”

“I understand that, Mrs. Cohen. Please let me speak to her.”

A deep sigh, but two minutes later Bonnie came on. “What is it, Myron?”

“What does the Hamlet Motel in Wilston, Massachusetts, mean to you?”

Myron thought he heard a short intake of air. “Nothing.”

“You and Clu lived there, didn’t you?”

“Not at the motel.”

“I mean, in Wilston. When Clu was playing for the Bisons in the minor leagues.”

“You know we did.”

“And Billy Lee Palms. He lived there too. At the same time.”

“Not Wilston. I think he was in Deerfield. It’s the neighboring town.”

“So what was Clu doing staying at the Hamlet Motel three days before he died?”

Silence.

“Bonnie?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

“Think. Why would Clu need to go up there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was visiting an old friend.”

“What old friend?”

“Myron, you’re not listening. I don’t know. I haven’t been up there in almost ten years. But we lived there for eight months. Maybe he made a friend. Maybe he went up there to fish or take a vacation or get away from it all. I don’t know.”

Myron gripped the phone. “You’re lying to me, Bonnie.”

Silence.

“Please,” he said. “I’m just trying to help Esperanza.”

“Let me ask you something, Myron.”

“What?”

“You keep digging and digging, right? I asked you not to. Esperanza asked you not to. Hester Crimstein asked you not to. But you keep digging.”

“Is there a question in there?”

“It’s coming now: Has all your digging helped? Has all your digging made Esperanza look more guilty or less?”

Myron hesitated. But it didn’t matter. Bonnie hung up before he had the chance to answer. Myron put the phone back in his lap. He looked at Win.

“I’ll take Awful Songs for two hundred, Alex,” Win said.

“What?”

“Answer: Barry Manilow and Eastern Standard.”

Myron almost smiled. “What is ‘Time in New England,’ Alex?”

“Correct answer.” Win shook his head. “Sometimes when our minds are that in tune—”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “It’s scary.”

“Shall we?”

Myron thought about it. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

“Call Terese first.”

Myron nodded, started dialing. “You know how to get there?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll probably take three hours.”

Win hit the accelerator. No easy trick in midtown Manhattan. “Try two.”

CHAPTER 33

Wilston is in western Massachusetts, about an hour shy of the New Hampshire and Vermont borders. You could still see remnants of the old days, the oft artistically rendered New England town with V-shaped brick walks, colonial clapboard homes, the historical society bronze signs welded onto the front of every other building, the white-steepled chapel in the center of the town—the whole scene screaming for the lush leaves of autumn or a major snowstorm. But like everywhere else in the US of A, the superstore boom was playing havoc with the historical. The roads between these postcard villages had widened over the years, as though guilty of gluttony, feeding off the warehouse-size stores that now lined them. The stores sucked out the character and the quaintness and left in their wake a universal blandness that plagued the byroads and highways of America. Maine to Minnesota, North Carolina to Nevada—there was little texture and individuality left. It was about Home Depot and Office Max and the price clubs.

On the other hand, whining about the changes progress imposes upon us and longing for the good ol’ days make for easy pickings. Harder to answer the question of why, if these changes are so bad, do every place and everybody so quickly and warmly welcome them.

Wilston had the classic New England Christmas card—conservative facade, but it was a college town, the college in question being Wilston College, and was thus liberal—liberal in the way only a college town can be, liberal in the way only the young can be, liberal in the way only the isolated and protected and rose-tinted can be. But that was okay. In fact, that was how it should be.

But even Wilston was changing. Yes, the old signs of liberalism were there: the tofu sweet shop, the migrant-friendly coffeehouse, the lesbian bookstore, the shop with the black lightbulbs and the pot paraphernalia, the clothing store that sold only ponchos. But the franchises were sneaking in quietly, slowly eating away at the gray stone corners: Dunkin’ Donuts, Angelo’s Sub Shop, Baskin-Robbins, Seattle Coffee.

Myron started softly singing “Time in New England.”

Win looked at him. “You realize, of course, that I’m well armed.”

“Hey, you’re the one who got the song stuck in my head.”

They sped through town—with Win driving, you only sped—and arrived at the Hamlet Motel, a quasi-dump on Route 9 hovering on the town’s edge. A sign advertised FREE HBO! and the ice machine was so large you could see it from your average space station. Myron checked his watch. Less than two hours to get here. Win parked the Jag.

“I don’t get it,” Myron said. “Why would Clu stay here?”

“Free HBO?”

“More likely because he could pay in cash. That’s why we didn’t see anything about this on his credit cards. But why wouldn’t he want anyone to know he was here?”

“Such good questions,” Win said. “Perhaps you should go inside and see if you can find some of the answers.”

They both stepped out of the car. Win noticed a restaurant next door. “I’ll try there,” he said. “You take the desk clerk.”

Myron nodded. The desk clerk, definitely a college kid on break, sat behind the counter and stared straight ahead at nothing. He could have looked more bored, but only if a qualified physician induced a coma. Myron took a glance around and spotted the computer terminal. This was a good thing.

“Hello?”

The kid’s eyes slid toward Myron. “Yeah?”

“This computer. It keeps track of outgoing calls, right? Even local ones.”

The kid’s eyes narrowed. “Who wants to know?”

“I need to see records for all outgoing guest calls from the tenth and eleventh of this month.”

That got the kid to his feet. “You a cop? Let me see your badge.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Then—”

“I’ll pay you five hundred dollars for the information.” No sense in playing around here, Myron thought. “No one will ever know.”

The kid hesitated but not for long. “Hell, even if I get canned, that’s more money than I clear in a month. What dates did you need?”

Myron told him. The kid punched a few buttons. The printer started cranking. It all fitted on one sheet. Myron handed the kid the money. The kid handed him the sheet. Myron quickly scanned the list.

Instant bingo.

He spotted the long-distance call to FJ’s office. It had come from room 117. Myron looked for other calls made from the same room. Clu had called his answering machine at home twice. Okay, good, fine. Now how about something more local? No reason to come up here just to make long-distance calls.

Bingo again.

Room 117. The first call on the list. A local number. Myron’s heart started pumping, his breath growing shallow. He was close now. So close. He walked outside. The driveway was gravel. He kicked it around a bit. He took out his phone and was about to dial the number. No. That might be a mistake. He should learn all he could first. If he called, he might tip someone off. Of course, he didn’t know whom he’d tip off or how they’d be tipped off or what they’d be tipped off about. But he didn’t want to screw up now. He had the phone number. Big Cyndi at the office would have a reverse directory. These were easy to come by now. Any software store sold CD-ROMs that had the entire country’s phone books on them or you could visit www.infospace.com on the Web. You plug in a number, it tells you who the number belongs to and where they live. More progress.

He called Big Cyndi.

“I was just about to call you, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Oh?”

“I have Hester Crimstein on the line. She says that she urgently needs to talk to you.”

“Okay, put her through in a sec. Big Cyndi?”

“Yes.”

“About what you said yesterday. About people staring. I’m sorry if—”

“No pity, Mr. Bolitar. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“Please don’t change a thing, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“Put Hester Crimstein through,” he said. “And while I’m on the line, do you know where Esperanza keeps the reverse phone directory CDs?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to look up a number for me.” He read it off to her. She repeated it. Then she put Hester Crimstein through.

“Where are you?” the attorney barked at him.

“Why do you care?”

Hester was not pleased. “God damn it, Myron, stop acting like a child. Where are you?”

“None of your business.”

“You’re not helping.”

“What do you want, Hester?”

“You’re on a cell phone, right?”

“Right.”

“Then we don’t know if the line is safe,” she said. “We have to meet right away. I’ll be in my office.”

“No can do.”

“Look, do you want to help Esperanza or not?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Then get your ass in here, pronto,” Hester said. “We got a problem, and I think you can help.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Not on the phone. I’ll be waiting for you.”

“It’ll take me some time,” Myron said.

Silence.

“Why will it take some time, Myron?”

“It just will.”

“It’s almost noon,” she said. “When can I expect you?”

“Not until at least six.”

“That’s too late.”

“Sorry.”

She sighed. “Myron, get here now. Esperanza wants to see you.”

Myron’s heart did a little flip. “I thought she was in jail.”

“I just got her released. It’s hush-hush. Get your ass over here, Myron. Get over here now.”

Myron and Win stood in the Hamlet Motel parking lot.

“What do you make of it?” Win asked.

“I don’t like it,” Myron said.

“How so?”

“Why is Hester Crimstein so desperate to see me all of a sudden? She’s been trying to get rid of me from the moment I returned. Now I’m the answer to a problem?”

“It is bizarre,” Win agreed.

“And not only that, I don’t like this whole hush-hush release for Esperanza.”

“It happens.”

“Sure, it happens. But if it did, why hasn’t Esperanza called me? Why is Hester making the call for her?”

“Why indeed?”

Myron thought about it. “Do you think she’s involved in all this?”

“I cannot imagine how,” Win said. Then: “Except that she may have spoken to Bonnie Haid.”

“So?”

“So then she may have deduced that we are in Wilston.”

“And now she urgently wants us to return,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“So she’s trying to get us out of Wilston.”

“It is a possibility,” Win said.

“So what is she afraid we’ll find?”

Win shrugged. “She’s Esperanza’s advocate.”

“So something detrimental to Esperanza.”

“Logical,” Win said.

A couple in their eighties stumbled out of one of the motel rooms. The old man had his arm around the woman’s shoulder. They both looked postsex. At noon. Nice to see. Myron and Win watched them in silence.

“I pushed too hard last time,” Myron said.

Win did not reply.

“You warned me. You told me I didn’t keep my eye on the prize. But I didn’t listen.”

Win still said nothing.

“Am I doing the same now?”

“You are not good at letting things go,” Win said.

“That’s not an answer.”

Win frowned. “I’m not some holy wise man on the mount,” he said. “I don’t have all the answers.”

“I want to know what you think.”

Win squinted, though the sun was pretty much gone by now. “Last time, you lost sight of your goal,” he said. “Do you know what your goal is this time?”

Myron thought about it. “Freeing Esperanza,” he said. “And finding the truth.”

Win smiled. “And if those two are mutually contradictory?”

“Then I bury the truth.”

Win nodded. “You seem to have a good handle on the goal.”

“Should I let it go anyway?” Myron asked.

Win looked at him. “There’s one other complication.”

“What’s that?”

“Lucy Mayor.”

“I’m not actively looking for her. I’d love to find her, but I don’t expect to.”

“Still,” Win said, “she is your personal connection into all this.”

Myron shook his head.

“The diskette came to you, Myron. You can’t run away from that. You’re not built that way. Somehow you and this missing girl are linked.”

Silence.

Myron checked the address and name Big Cyndi had given him. The phone was listed to a Barbara Cromwell at 12 Claremont Road. The name meant nothing to him. “There’s a rental car place down the street,” Myron said. “You go back. Talk to Hester Crimstein. See what you can learn.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to check out Barbara Cromwell of Twelve Claremont Road.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Win said.

“A good one?”

“I didn’t say that.”

CHAPTER 34

Massachusetts, like Myron’s home state of New Jersey, can quickly turn from big city to full-fledged town to hicksville. That was the case here. Twelve Claremont Road—why the numbers reached twelve when the whole road had only three buildings on it Myron could not say—was an old farmhouse. At least it looked old. The color, probably once a deep red, had faded to a barely visible, watery pastel. The top of the structure curled forward as though suffering from osteoporosis. The front roof overhang had split down the middle, the right lip dipping forward like the mouth of a stroke victim. There were loose boards and major cracks and the grass was tall enough to go on the adult rides at a Six Flags.

He stopped in front of Barbara Cromwell’s house and debated his approach. He hit the redial button and Big Cyndi answered.

“Got anything yet?”

“Not very much, Mr. Bolitar. Barbara Cromwell is thirty-one years old. She was divorced four years ago from a Lawrence Cromwell.”

“Children?”

“That’s all I have right now, Mr. Bolitar. I’m terribly sorry.”

He thanked her and said to keep trying. He looked back at the house. There was a dull, steady thudding in his chest. Thirty-one years old. He reached into his pocket and took out the computer rendering of the aged Lucy Mayor. He stared at it. How old would Lucy be if she were still alive? Twenty-nine, maybe thirty. Close in age, but who cares? He shook the thought away, but it didn’t go easy.

Now what?

He turned off the engine. A curtain jumped in an upstairs window. Spotted. No choice now. He opened the door and walked up the drive. It had been paved at one time, but the grass now laid claim to all but a few patches of tar. The side yard had one of those plastic Fisher-Price tree houses with a slide and rope ladder; the loud yellow, blue, and red of the play set shone through the brown grass like gems against black velvet. He reached the door. No bell, so he knocked and waited.

He could hear house sounds, someone running, someone whispering. A child called out, “Mom!” Someone hushed him.

Myron heard footsteps, and then a woman said, “Yes?”

“Ms. Cromwell?”

“What do you want?”

“Ms. Cromwell, my name is Myron Bolitar. I’d like to talk to you a moment.”

“I don’t want to buy anything.”

“No, ma’am, I’m not selling—”

“And I don’t accept door-to-door solicitations. You want a donation, you ask by mail.”

“I’m not here for any of that.”

Brief silence.

“Then what do you want?” she said.

“Ms. Cromwell”—he’d clipped on his most reassuring voice now—“would you mind opening your door?”

“I’m calling the police.”

“No, no, please, just wait a second.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to ask you about Clu Haid.”

There was a long pause. The little boy started talking again. The woman hushed him. “I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“Please open the door, Ms. Cromwell. We need to talk.”

“Look, mister, I’m friendly with all the cops around here. I say the word, they’ll lock you up for trespassing.”

“I understand your concerns,” Myron said. “How about if we talk by phone?”

“Just go away.”

The little boy started crying.

“Go away,” she repeated. “Or I’ll call the police.”

More crying.

“Okay,” Myron said. “I’m leaving.” Then, figuring what the hey, he shouted, “Does the name Lucy Mayor mean anything to you?”

The child’s crying was the only reply.

Myron let loose a sigh and started back to the car. Now what? He hadn’t even been able to see her. Maybe he could poke around the house, try to peek in a window. Oh, that was a great idea. Get arrested for peeping. Or worse, scare a little kid. And she’d call the cops for sure—

Hold the phone.

Barbara Cromwell said that she was friendly with the police in town. But so was Myron. In a way. Wilston was the town where Clu had been nabbed on that first drunk driving charge when he was in the minors. Myron had gotten him off with the help of two cops. He scanned the memory banks for names. It didn’t take him long. The arresting officer was named Kobler. Myron didn’t remember his first name. The sheriff was a guy named Ron Lemmon. Lemmon was in his fifties then. He might have retired. But odds were pretty good one of them would still be on the force. They might know something about the mysterious Barbara Cromwell.

Worth a shot anyway.

CHAPTER 35

One might expect the Wilston police station to be in a dinky little building. Not so. It was in the basement of a tall, fortresslike structure of dark, old brick. The steps down had one of those old bomb shelter signs, the black and yellow triangles still bright in the ominous circle. The image brought back memories of Burnet Hill Elementary School and the old bombing drills, a somewhat intense activity in which children were taught that crouching in a corridor was a suitable defense against a Soviet nuclear blitzkrieg.

Myron had never been to the station house before. After Clu’s accident he’d met with the two cops in the back booth of a diner on Route 9. The whole episode took less than ten minutes. No one wanted to hurt the up-and-coming superstar. No one wanted to ruin Clu’s promising young career. Dollars changed hands—some for the arresting officer, some for the sheriff in charge. Donations, they’d called it with a chuckle. Everyone smiled.

The desk sergeant looked up at Myron when he came in. He was around thirty and, like so many cops nowadays, built as if he spent more time in the weight room than the doughnut shop. His nametag read “Hobert.” “May I help you?”

“Does Sheriff Lemmon still work here?”

“No, sorry to say. Ron died, oh, gotta be a year now. Retired about two years before that.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, cancer. Ate through him like a hungry rat.” Hobert shrugged as if to say, What can you do?

“How about a guy named Kobler? I think he was a deputy about ten years ago.”

Hobert’s voice was suddenly tight. “Eddie’s not on the force anymore.”

“Does he still live in the area?”

“No. I think he lives in Wyoming. May I ask your name, sir?”

“Myron Bolitar.”

“Your name sounds familiar.”

“I used to play basketball.”

“Nah, that’s not it. I hate basketball.” He thought a moment, then shook his head. “So why are you asking about two former cops?”

“They’re sort of old friends.”

Hobert looked doubtful.

“I wanted to ask them about someone a client of mine has become involved with.”

“A client?”

Myron put on his helpless-puppy-dog smile. He usually used it on old ladies, but hey, waste not, want not. “I’m a sports agent. My job is to look after athletes and, well, make sure they’re not being taken advantage of. So this client of mine has an interest in a lady who lives in town. I just wanted to make sure she’s not a gold digger or anything.”

Two words: truly lame.

Hobert said, “What’s her name?”

“Barbara Cromwell.”

The officer blinked. “This a joke?”

“No.”

“One of your athletes is interested in dating Barbara Cromwell?”

Myron tried a little backpedal. “I might have gotten the name wrong,” he said.

“I think maybe you have.”

“Why’s that?”

“You mentioned Ron Lemmon before. The old sheriff.”

“Right.”

“Barbara Cromwell is his daughter.”

For a moment Myron just stood there. A fan whirred. A phone rang. Hobert said, “Excuse me a second,” and picked it up. Myron heard none of it. Someone had frozen the moment. Someone had suspended him above a dark hole, giving Myron plenty of time to stare down at the nothingness, until suddenly the same someone let go. Myron plunged down into the black, his hands wheeling, his body turning, waiting, almost hoping, to smash against the bottom.

CHAPTER 36

Myron stumbled back outside. He walked the town square. He grabbed something to eat at a Mexican place, wolfing it down without even tasting the food. Win called.

“We were correct,” Win said. “Hester Crimstein was trying to divert our attention.”

“She admitted it?”

“No. She offers no explanation. She claims that she will speak with you and only you and only in person. She then pushed me for details on your whereabouts.”

No surprise.

“Would you like me to”—Win paused—“interrogate her?”

“Please no,” Myron said. “Ethics aside, I don’t think there’s much need anymore.”

“Oh?”

“Sawyer Wells said he was a drug counselor at Rockwell.”

“I remember.”

“Billy Lee Palms was treated at Rockwell. His mother mentioned it when I visited her house.

“Hmm,” Win said. “Wonderful coincidence.”

“Not a coincidence,” Myron said. “It explains everything.”

When he finished talking to Win, he strolled the main street of Wilston seven or eight times over. The shopkeepers, light on business, smiled at him. He smiled back. He nodded hello to the large assortment of people passing by. The town was so stuck in the sixties, the kind of place where people still wore unkempt beards and black caps and looked like Seals and Crofts at an outdoor concert. He liked it here. He liked it a lot.

He thought about his mother and his father. He thought about them getting old and wondered why he could not accept it. He thought about how his father’s “chest pains” were partially his fault, how the strain of his running away had at least tangentially contributed to what happened. He thought about what it would have been like for his parents if they had suffered the same fate as Sophie and Gary Mayor, if he had disappeared at seventeen without a trace and were never found. He thought about Jessica and how she claimed she would fight for him. He thought about Brenda and what he had done. He thought about Terese and last night and what, if anything, it meant. He thought about Win and Esperanza and the sacrifices that friends make.

For a long time he did not think about Clu’s murder or Billy Lee’s death. He did not think about Lucy Mayor and her disappearance and his connection to it. But that lasted only so long. Eventually he made a few phone calls, did some digging, confirmed what he already suspected.

The answers never come with cries of “Eureka!” You stumble toward them, often in total darkness. You stagger through an unlit room at night, tripping over the unseen, lumbering forward, bruising your shins, toppling over and righting yourself, feeling your way across the walls and hoping your hand happens upon the light switch. And then—to keep within this piss-poor but sadly accurate analogy—when you find the switch, when you flick it on and bathe the room in light, sometimes the room is just as you pictured it. And then sometimes, like now, you wonder if you’d have been better off staying forever stumbling in the dark.

Win of course would say that Myron was limiting the analogy. He would point out that there were other options. You could simply leave the room. You could let your eyes get accustomed to the dark, and while you would never see everything clearly, that was okay. You could even flick the switch back off once you turned it on. In the case of Horace and Brenda Slaughter, Win would be right. In the case of Clu Haid, Myron was not so sure.

He had found the light switch. He had flicked it on. But the analogy did not hold—and not just because it was a dumb one from the start. Everything in the room was still murky, as though he were looking through a shower curtain. He could see lights and shadows. He could make out shapes. But to know exactly what had happened, he would have to push aside the curtain.

He could still back off, let the curtain rest or even flick the light back off. But that was the problem with darkness and Win’s options. In the dark you cannot see the rot fester. The rot is free to continue to eat away, undisturbed, until it consumes everything, even the man huddled in the corner, trying like hell to stay away from that damned light switch.

So Myron got in his car. He drove back out to the farmhouse on Claremont Road. He knocked on the door, and again Barbara Cromwell told him to go away. “I know why Clu Haid came here,” he told her. He kept talking. And eventually she let him in.

When he left, Myron called Win again. They talked a long time. First about Clu Haid’s murder. Then about Myron’s dad. It helped. But not a lot. He called Terese and told her what he knew. She said that she’d tried to check some of the facts with her sources.

“So Win was right,” Terese said. “You are personally connected.”

“Yes.”

“I blame myself every day,” Terese said. “You get used to it.”

Again he wanted to ask more. Again he knew that it wasn’t time.

Myron made two more calls on the cell phone. The first was to the law office of Hester Crimstein.

“Where are you?” Hester snapped.

“I assume you’re in contact with Bonnie Haid,” he said.

Pause. Then: “Oh Christ, Myron, what did you do?”

“They aren’t telling you everything, Hester. In fact, I bet Esperanza barely told you anything.”

“Where are you, dammit?”

“I’ll be in your office in three hours. Have Bonnie there.”

His final call was to Sophie Mayor. When she answered, he said three words: “I found Lucy.”

CHAPTER 37

Myron tried to drive like Win, but that was beyond his capabilities. He sped, but he still hit construction on Route 95. You always hit construction on Route 95. It was a Connecticut state law. He listened to the radio. He made phone calls. He felt frightened.

Hester Crimstein was a senior partner in a high-rise, higher-bill, mega New York law firm. The attractive receptionist had clearly been expecting him. She led him down a hallway lined with what looked like mahogany wallpaper and into a conference room. There was a rectangular table big enough to seat twenty, pens and legal pads in front of each chair, billable no doubt to some unsuspecting client at wildly inflated prices. Hester Crimstein sat next to Bonnie Haid, their backs to the window. They started to rise when he entered.

“Don’t bother,” he said.

Both women stopped.

“What’s this all about?” Hester asked.

Myron ignored her and looked at Bonnie. “You almost told me, didn’t you, Bonnie? When I first came back. You said you wondered if we did Clu a disservice by helping him. You wondered if our sheltering him and protecting him had eventually led to his death. I said you were wrong. The only person to blame is the person who shot him. But I didn’t know everything, did I?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Hester said.

“I want to tell you a story,” he said.

“What?”

“Just listen, Hester. You might find out what you’ve gotten yourself involved in.”

Hester closed her mouth. Bonnie kept silent.

“Twelve years ago,” Myron said, “Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms were minor-league players for a team called the New England Bisons. They were both young and reckless in the way athletes tend to be. The world was their oyster, they thought they were the cat’s pajamas, you know the fairy tale. I won’t insult you by going into details.”

Both women slid back into their seats. Myron sat across from them and continued.

“One day Clu Haid drove drunk—well, he probably drove drunk more than once, but on this occasion he wrapped his car around a tree. Bonnie”—he gestured to her with his chin—“was injured in the accident. She suffered a bad concussion and spent several days in the hospital. Clu was unhurt. Billy Lee broke a finger. When it happened, Clu panicked. A drunk driving charge could ruin a young athlete, even as little as twelve years ago. I had just signed him to several profitable endorsement deals. He was going to move up to the majors in a matter of months. So he did what a lot of athletes did. He found someone who’d get him out of trouble. His agent. Me. I drove up to the scene like a madman. I met with the arresting officer, a guy named Eddie Kobler, and the town sheriff, Ron Lemmon.”

Hester Crimstein said, “I don’t understand any of this.”

“Give me time, you will,” Myron said. “The officers and I came to an understanding. It happens all the time with big-time athletes. Matters like this are swept under the rug. Clu was a good kid, we all agreed. No reason to destroy his life over this little incident. It was a somewhat victimless crime—the only person hurt was Clu’s own wife. So money changed hands, and an agreement was reached. Clu wasn’t drunk. He swerved to avoid another car. That’s what caused the accident. Billy Lee Palms and Bonnie would swear to it. Incident over and forgotten.”

Hester wore her annoyed-but-curious scowl. Bonnie’s face was losing color fast.

“It’s twelve years later now,” Myron said. “And the incident is almost like one of those mummy curses. The drunk driver, Clu, is murdered. His best friend and passenger, Billy Lee Palms, is shot to death—I won’t call that murder because the shooter saved my life. The sheriff I bought off—he died of prostate cancer. Nothing too strange about that or perhaps God got to him before the mummy. And as for Eddie Kobler, the other officer, he was caught last year taking bribes in a big drug string. He was arrested and plea-bargained down. His wife left him. His kids won’t talk to him. He lives alone in a bottle in Wyoming.”

“How do you know about this Kobler guy?” Hester Crimstein asked.

“A local cop named Hobert told me what happened. A reporter friend confirmed it.”

“I still don’t see the relevance,” Hester said.

“That’s because Esperanza kept you in the dark,” Myron said. “I was wondering how much she told you. Apparently not much. Probably just insisted that I be kept totally out of this, right?”

Hester gave him the courtroom eyes. “Are you saying Esperanza has something to do with all this?”

“No.”

“You’re the one who committed a crime here, Myron. You bribed two police officers.”

“And there’s the rub,” Myron said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Even that night something struck me as odd about the whole incident. The three of them in the car together. Why? Bonnie didn’t much care for Billy Lee Palms. Sure, she’d go out with Clu and Clu would go out with Billy Lee and maybe they’d even double-date or something. But why were the three of them in that car so late at night?”

Hester Crimstein stayed the lawyer. “Are you saying one of them wasn’t in the car?”

“No. I’m saying that there were four people in the car, not three.”

“What?”

They both looked at Bonnie. Bonnie lowered her head.

“Who were the four?” Hester asked.

“Bonnie and Clu were one couple.” Myron tried to meet Bonnie’s eyes, but she wouldn’t look up. “Billy Lee Palms and Lucy Mayor were the other.”

Hester Crimstein looked as if she’d been hit with a two-by-four. “Lucy Mayor?” she repeated. “As in the missing Mayor girl?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Myron kept his eyes on Bonnie. Eventually she raised her head. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

Hester Crimstein said, “She’s not talking.”

“Yes,” Bonnie said. “It’s true.”

“But you never knew what happened to her, did you?”

Bonnie hesitated. “Not then, no.”

“What did Clu tell you?”

“That you bought her off too,” Bonnie said. “Like with the police. He said you paid her to keep silent.”

Myron nodded. It made sense. “There’s one thing I don’t get. There was a ton of publicity about Lucy Mayor a few years back. You must have seen her picture in the paper.”

“I did.”

“Didn’t it ring a bell?”

“No. You have to remember. I only saw her that one time. You know Billy Lee. A different girl every night. And Clu and I sat in the front. Her hair was a different color too. She was a blonde then. So I didn’t know.”

“And neither did Clu.”

“That’s right.”

“But eventually you learned the truth.”

“Eventually,” she said.

“Whoa,” Hester Crimstein said. “I’m not following any of this. What does an old traffic accident have to do with Clu’s murder?”

“Everything,” Myron said.

“You better explain, Myron. And while you’re at it, why did Esperanza get framed for it?”

“That was a mistake.”

“What?”

“Esperanza wasn’t the one they intended to frame,” Myron said. “I was.”

CHAPTER 38

Yankee Stadium hunched over in the night, crouching shoulders low as though trying to escape the glow from its own lights. Myron parked in Lot 14, where the executives and players parked. There were only three other cars there. The night guard at the press entrance said he was expected, that the Mayors would meet him on the field. Myron moved down the lower tier and hopped the wall near the batter’s box. The stadium lights were on, but nobody was there. He stood alone on the field and took a deep breath. Even in the Bronx nothing smelled like a baseball diamond. He turned toward the visitor’s dugout, scanning the lower boxes and finding the exact seats he and his brother had sat in all those years ago. Funny what you remember. He walked toward the pitcher’s mound, the grass making a gentle whooshing sound, and sat down on the rubber and waited. Clu’s home. The one place he’d always felt at peace.

Should have buried him here, Myron thought. Under a pitcher’s mound.

He stared up into the thousands of seats, empty like the shattered eyes of the dead, the vacant stadium merely a body now without a soul. The whites of the foul lines were muddied, nearly dirt-toned now. They’d be put down anew tomorrow before game time.

People say that baseball is a metaphor for life. Myron did not know about that, but staring down the foul line, he wondered. The line between good and evil is not so different from the foul line on a baseball field. It’s often made of stuff as flimsy as lime. It tends to fade over time. It needs to be constantly redrawn. And if enough players trample on it, the line becomes smeared and blurred to the point where fair is foul and foul is fair, where good and evil become indistinguishable from each other.

Jared Mayor’s voice broke the stillness. “You said you found my sister.”

Myron squinted toward the dugout. “I lied,” he said.

Jared stepped up the cement stairs. Sophie followed. Myron rose to his feet. Jared started to say something more, but his mother put her hand on his arm. They kept walking as though they were coaches coming out to talk to the relief pitcher.

“Your sister is dead,” Myron said. “But you both know that.”

They kept walking.

“She was killed in a drunk driving accident,” he went on. “She died on impact.”

“Maybe,” Sophie said.

Myron looked confused. “Maybe?”

“Maybe she died on impact, maybe she didn’t,” Sophie continued. “Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms weren’t doctors. They were dumb, drunk jocks. Lucy might have just been injured. She may have been alive. A doctor might have been able to save her.”

Myron nodded. “I guess that’s possible.”

“Go on,” Sophie said. “I want to hear what you have to say.”

“Whatever your daughter’s condition actually was, Clu and Billy Lee believed that she was dead. Clu was terrified. Drunk driving charges would be serious enough, but this was vehicular homicide. You don’t walk away from that, no matter how far your curveball breaks. He and Billy Lee panicked. I don’t know the details here. Sawyer Wells can tell us. My guess is that they hid the body. It was a quiet road, but there still wouldn’t be enough time to bury Lucy before the police and ambulance arrived. So they probably stashed her in the brush. And when it all calmed down, they came back and buried her. Like I said, I don’t know the details. I don’t think they’re particularly relevant. What is relevant is that Clu and Billy Lee got rid of the body.”

Jared stepped into Myron’s face. “You can’t prove any of this.”

Myron ignored him, keeping his eyes on Jared’s mother. “The years pass. Lucy is gone. But not in the minds of Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms. Maybe I’m overanalyzing. Maybe I’m being too easy on them. But I think what they did that night defined the rest of their lives. Their self-destructive tendencies. The drugs—”

“You’re being too easy,” Sophie said.

Myron waited.

“Don’t give them credit for having consciences,” she continued. “They were worthless scum.”

“Maybe you’re right. I shouldn’t analyze. And I guess it doesn’t matter. Clu and Billy Lee may have created their own hell, but it wasn’t close to the agony your family experienced. You told me about the awful torment of not knowing the truth, how it lives with you every day. With Lucy dead and buried like that, the torment just went on.”

Sophie’s head was still high. There was no flinch in her. “Do you know how we finally learned our daughter’s fate?”

“From Sawyer Wells,” Myron said. “The Wells Rules of Wellness, Rule Eight: ‘Confess something about yourself to a friend—something awful, something you’d never want anyone to know. You’ll feel better. You’ll still see that you’re worthy of love.’ Sawyer was a drug counselor at Rockwell. Billy Lee was a patient there. My guess is that he caught him during a withdrawal episode. When he was delirious probably. He did what his therapist asked. Rule eight. He confessed the worst thing he could imagine, the one moment in his life that shaped all others. Sawyer suddenly saw his ticket out of Rockwell and into the spotlight. Through the wealthy Mayor family, owners of Mayor Software. So he went to you and your husband. And he told you what he’d heard.”

Again Jared said, “You have no proof of any of this!”

And again Sophie silenced him with her hand. “Go on, Myron,” she said. “What happened then?”

“With this new information, you found your daughter’s body. I don’t know if your private investigators did it or if you just used your money and influence to keep the authorities quiet. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone in your position.”

“I see,” Sophie said. “But if all that’s true, why would I want to keep it quiet? Why not prosecute Clu and Billy Lee—and even you?”

“Because you couldn’t,” Myron said.

“Why not?”

“The corpse had been buried for twelve years. There was no evidence there. The car was long gone—no evidence there either. The police report listed a Breathalyzer test that showed Clu was not drunk. So what did you have: the ranting of a drug addict going through withdrawal? Billy Lee’s confession to Sawyer Wells would probably be suppressed, and even if it wasn’t, so what? His testimony about the police payoffs was complete hearsay since he wasn’t even there when it happened. You realized all that, didn’t you?”

She said nothing.

“And that meant justice was up to you, Sophie. You and Gary would have to avenge your daughter.” He stopped, looked at Jared, then back at Sophie. “You told me about a void. You said that you preferred to fill that void with hope.”

Sophie nodded. “I did.”

“And when the hope was gone—when the discovery of your daughter’s body sucked it all away—you and your husband still needed to fill that void.”

“Yes.”

“So you filled it with revenge.”

She fixed her gaze on his. “Do you blame us, Myron?”

He said nothing.

“The crooked sheriff was dying of cancer,” Sophie said. “There was nothing to be done about him. The other officer, well, as your friend Win could tell you, money is influence. The Federal Bureau of Investigation set him up at our behest. He took the bait. And yes, I shattered his life. Gladly.”

“But Clu was the one you wanted to hurt most,” Myron said.

“Hurt nothing. I wanted to crush him.”

“But he too was fairly broken down,” Myron said. “In order to really crush him, you had to give him hope. Just like you and Gary had all these years. Give him hope, then snatch it away. Hope hurts like nothing else. You knew that. So you and your husband bought the Yankees. You overpaid, but so what? You had the money. You didn’t care. Gary died soon after the transaction.”

“From heartache,” Sophie interrupted. She raised her head, and for the first time he saw a tear. “From years of heartache.”

“But you carried on without him.”

“Yes.”

“You concentrated on one thing and one thing only: getting Clu in your grasp. It was a silly trade—everyone thought so—and it was strange coming from an owner who kept out of every other baseball decision. But it was all about getting Clu on the team. That’s the only reason you bought the Yankees. To give Clu a last chance. And even better, Clu cooperated. He started straightening out his life. He was clean and sober. He was pitching well. He was as happy as Clu Haid was ever going to get. You had him in the palm of your hand.

“And then you closed your fist.”

Jared put his arm around her shoulders and pressed her close.

“I don’t know the order,” Myron went on. “You sent Clu a computer diskette like you sent me. Bonnie told me that. She also told me that you blackmailed him. Anonymously. That explains the missing two hundred thousand dollars. You made him live in terror. And Bonnie even inadvertently helped you by filing for divorce. Now Clu was in the perfect position for your coup de grace: the drug test. You fixed it so he would fail. Sawyer helped. Who better, since he already knew what was going on? It worked beautifully. Not only did it destroy Clu, but it also diverted any attention from you. Who would ever suspect you, especially since the test seemingly hurt you too? But you didn’t care about any of that. The Yankees meant nothing to you except as a vehicle to destroy Clu Haid.”

“So true,” Sophie said.

“Don’t,” Jared said.

She shook her head and patted her son’s arm. “It’s okay.”

“Clu had no idea the girl he buried in the woods was your daughter. But after you bombarded him with the calls and the diskette and especially after he failed the drug test, he put it together. But what could he do about it? He certainly couldn’t say the drug test was fixed because he’d killed Lucy Mayor. He was trapped. He tried to figure out how you’d learned the truth. He thought maybe it was Barbara Cromwell.”

“Who?”

“Barbara Cromwell. She’s Sheriff Lemmon’s daughter.”

“How did she know?”

“Because as quiet as you tried to keep the investigation, Wilston is a small town. The sheriff was tipped off about the discovery. He was dying. He had no money. His family was poor. So he told his daughter about what had really happened that night. She could never get in trouble for it—it was his crime, not hers. And they could use the information to blackmail Clu Haid. Which they did. On several occasions. Clu figured Barbara had been the one who opened her mouth. When he called her to find out if she’d told anyone, Barbara played coy. She demanded more money. So Clu drove up to Wilston a few days later. He refused to pay her. He said it was over.”

Sophie nodded. “So that’s how you put it together.”

“It was the final piece, yes,” Myron said. “When I realized that Clu had visited Lemmon’s daughter, it all fell into place. But I’m still surprised, Sophie.”

“Surprised about what?”

“That you killed him. That you let Clu out of his misery.”

Jared’s arm dropped off his mother. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“Let him speak,” Sophie said. “Go on, Myron.”

“What more is there?”

“For starters,” she said, “how about your part in all this?”

A lead block formed in his chest. He said nothing.

“You’re not going to claim that you were blameless in all this, are you, Myron?”

His voice was soft. “No.”

In the distance, out beyond center field, a janitor started cleaning off the memorials to the Yankees’ greats. He sprayed and wiped, working, Myron knew from past stadium visits, on Lou Gehrig’s stone. The Iron Horse. Such bravery in the face of so awful a death.

“You’ve done this too, haven’t you?” Sophie said.

Myron kept his eyes on the janitor. “Done what?” But he knew.

“I’ve looked into your past,” she said. “You and your business associate often take the law into your own hands, am I right? You play judge and jury.”

Myron said nothing.

“That’s all I did. For the sake of my daughter’s memory.”

The blurry line between fair and foul again. “So you decided to frame me for Clu’s murder.”

“Yes.”

“The perfect way to wreak vengeance on me for bribing the officers.”

“I thought so at the time.”

“But you messed up, Sophie. You ended up framing the wrong person.”

“That was an accident.”

Myron shook his head. “I should have seen it,” he said. “Even Billy Lee Palms said it, but I didn’t pay attention. And Hester Crimstein said it to me the first time I met her.”

“Said what?”

“They both pointed out that the blood was found in my car, the gun in my office. Maybe I killed Clu, they said. A logical deduction except for one thing. I was out of the country. You didn’t know that, Sophie. You didn’t know that Esperanza and Big Cyndi were playing a shell game with everybody, pretending I was still around. That’s why you were so upset with me when you found out I’d been away. I messed up your plan. You also didn’t know that Clu had an altercation with Esperanza. So all the evidence that was supposed to point to me—”

“Pointed instead to your associate, Miss Diaz,” Sophie said.

“Exactly,” Myron said. “But there’s one other thing I want to clear up.”

“More than one thing,” Sophie corrected.

“What?”

“There’s more than one thing you’ll want to clear up,” Sophie said. “But please go ahead. What would you like to know?”

“You were the one who had me followed,” he said. “The guy I spotted outside the Lock-Horne building. He was yours.”

“Yes. I knew Clu had tried to hook up with you. I hoped the same might happen with Billy Lee Palms.”

“Which it did. Billy Lee thought that maybe I killed Clu to keep my part in the crime buried. He thought I wanted to kill him too.”

“It makes sense,” she agreed. “You had a lot to lose.”

“So you were following me then? At the bar?”

“Yes.”

“Personally?”

She smiled. “I grew up a hunter and a tracker, Myron. The city or the woods, it makes little difference.”

“You saved my life,” he said.

She did not reply.

“Why?”

“You know why. I didn’t come there to kill Billy Lee Palms. But there are degrees of guilt. Simply put, he was more guilty than you. When it came down to a question of you or him, I chose to kill him. You deserve to be punished, Myron. But you didn’t deserve to be killed by scum like Billy Lee Palms.”

“Judge and jury again?”

“Luckily for you, Myron, yes.”

He sat down hard on the pitcher’s mound, his whole body suddenly drained. “I can’t just let you get away with this,” he said. “I may sympathize. But you killed Clu Haid in cold blood.”

“No.”

“What?”

“I didn’t kill Clu Haid.”

“I don’t expect you to confess.”

“Expect or don’t expect. I didn’t kill him.”

Myron frowned. “You had to. It all adds up.”

Her eyes remained placid pools. Myron’s head started spinning. He turned and looked up at Jared.

“He didn’t kill him either,” Sophie said.

“One of you did,” Myron said.

“No.”

Myron looked at Jared. Jared said nothing. Myron opened his mouth, closed it, tried to come up with something.

“Think, Myron.” Sophie crossed her arms and smiled at him. “I told you my philosophy when you were last here. I’m a hunter. I don’t hate what I kill. Just the opposite. I respect what I kill. I honor my kill. I consider the animal brave and noble. Killing, in fact, can be merciful. That’s why I kill with one shot. Not Billy Lee Palms, of course. I wanted him to have at least a few moments of agony and fear. And of course, I would never show Clu Haid mercy.”

Myron tried to sort through it. “But—”

And then he heard yet another click. His conversation with Sally Li started uncoiling in his head.

The crime scene …

Christ, the crime scene. It was in such a state of disarray. Blood on the walls. Blood on the floor. Because blood splatters would show the truth. So splatter some more. Destroy the evidence. Fire more shots into the corpse. To the calf, to the back, even to the head. Take the gun with you. Mess things up. Cover up what really happened.

“Oh God …”

Sophie nodded at him.

Myron’s mouth felt dry as a sandstorm. “Clu committed suicide?”

Sophie tried a smile, but she just couldn’t quite make it.

Myron started to stand, his bad knee audibly creaking as he rose. “The end of his marriage, the failed drug test, but mostly the past coming back at him—it was all too much. He shot himself in the head. The other shots were just to throw the police off. The crime scene was messed up so no one would be able to analyze the blood splatters and see it was a suicide. It was all a diversion.”

“A coward to the end,” Sophie said.

“But how did you know he killed himself? Did you have his place bugged or under surveillance?”

“Nothing so technical, Myron. He wanted us to find him—me specifically.”

Myron just stared at her.

“We were supposed to have our big confrontation that night. Yes, Clu had hit rock bottom, Myron. But I was not through with him. Not by a long shot. An animal deserved a quick kill. Not Clu Haid. But when Jared and I arrived, he’d already taken the gutless way out.”

“And the money?”

“It was there. As you noted, the anonymous stranger who sent him the diskette and made all those phone calls was blackmailing him. But he knew it was us. I took the money that night and donated it to the Child Welfare Institute.”

“You caused him to kill himself.”

She shook her head, her posture still ramrod. “Nobody causes someone to kill himself. Clu Haid chose his fate. It was not what I intended but—”

“Intended? He’s dead, Sophie.”

“Yes, but it was not what I intended. Just as you, Myron, did not intend to cover up my daughter’s murder.”

Silence.

“You took advantage of his death,” Myron said. “You planted the blood and gun in my car and office. Or you hired someone to do it.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “The truth has to come out,” he said.

“No.”

“I’m not letting Esperanza rot in jail—”

“It’s done,” Sophie Mayor said.

“What?”

“My attorney is meeting with the DA as we speak. Anonymously, of course. They won’t know whom he represents.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I kept evidence that night,” she said. “I took pictures of the body. They’ll test Clu’s hand for powder residue. I even have a suicide note, if need be. The charges against Esperanza will be dropped. She’ll be released in the morning. It’s over.”

“The DA isn’t going to settle for that. He’s going to want to know the whole story.”

“Life is full of wants, Myron. But the DA won’t get it in this case. He’ll just have to live with that reality. And in the end it’s just a suicide anyway. High profile or not, it won’t be a priority.” She reached into her pocket and took out a piece of paper. “Here,” she said. “It’s Clu’s suicide note.”

Myron hesitated. He took the note, immediately recognizing Clu’s handwriting. He started reading:

Dear Mrs. Mayor,

The torment has gone on long enough. I know you won’t accept my apology and I can’t say that I blame you. But I also don’t have the strength to face you. I’ve been running away from that night all my life. I hurt my family and my friends, but I hurt nobody so much as I hurt you. I hope my death gives you some measure of comfort.

I am the one to blame for what happened. Billy Lee Palms just did what I told him to. The same goes for Myron Bolitar. I paid off the police. Myron just delivered the money. He never knew the truth. My wife was knocked out in the accident. She also never knew the truth and she still doesn’t.

The money is all here. Do with it what you will. Tell Bonnie that I’m sorry and that I understand everything. And let my children know that their father always loved them. They were the only thing pure and good in my life. You, of all people, should understand that.

Clu Haid

Myron read the note again. He pictured Clu writing it, then putting it aside, then picking up the gun and pressing it against his head. Did he close his eyes then? Did he think of his children, the two boys with his smile, before he pulled the trigger? Did he hesitate at all?

His eyes stayed on the note. “You didn’t believe him,” he said.

“About the culpability of the others? No. I knew he was lying. You, for example. You were more than a delivery boy. You bribed those officers.”

“Clu lied to protect us,” Myron said. “In the end he sacrificed himself for those he loved.”

Sophie frowned. “Don’t make him out to be a martyr.”

“I’m not. But you just can’t walk away from what you did.”

“I did nothing.”

“You made a man—the father of two boys—kill himself.”

“He made a choice, that’s all.”

“He didn’t deserve that.”

“And my daughter didn’t deserve to be murdered and buried in an anonymous pit,” she said.

Myron looked up into the stadium lights, letting them blind him a bit.

“Clu was off drugs,” he said. “You’ll pay the rest of his salary.”

“No.”

“You’ll also let the world know—and his children—that in the end Clu wasn’t on drugs.”

“No,” Sophie said again. “The world won’t know that. And they also won’t know Clu was a murderer. I’d say that’s a pretty good bargain, wouldn’t you?”

He read the note again, tears stinging his eyes.

“One heroic moment in the end doesn’t redeem him,” Sophie said.

“But it says something.”

“Go home, Myron. And be glad it’s over. If the truth were ever to come out, there is only one guilty party left to take the fall.”

Myron nodded. “Me.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other.

“I didn’t know about your daughter,” he said.

“I know that now.”

“You thought I helped Clu cover it up.”

“No, I know you helped Clu cover it up. What I wasn’t sure about is if you knew what you were doing. It was why I asked you to look for Lucy—so I could see how deep your involvement was.”

“The void,” Myron said.

“What about it?”

“Did this help fill it?”

Sophie thought about it. “Strangely enough, the answer is yes, I think. It doesn’t bring Lucy back. But I feel as though she’s been properly buried now. I think we can begin to heal.”

“So we all just go on?”

Sophie smiled. “What else can we do?”

She nodded to Jared. Jared took his mother’s hand, and they started back for the dugout.

“I am very sorry,” Myron said.

Sophie stopped. She dropped her son’s hand and studied Myron for a moment, her eyes moving over his face. “You committed a felony by bribing those police officers. You put my family and me through years of agony. You probably contributed to my husband’s premature death. You had a hand in the deaths of Clu Haid and Billy Lee Palms. And in the end you made me commit horrible acts I always thought I was incapable of committing.” She stepped back toward her son, her gaze more tired now than accusatory. “I won’t hurt you any further. But if you don’t mind, I’ll let you keep your apology.”

She gave Myron a moment for rebuttal. He didn’t use it. They strode down the steps and disappeared, leaving Myron alone with the grass and the dirt and the bright stadium lights.

CHAPTER 39

In the lot Win frowned and holstered his .44. “No one even pulled a gun.”

Myron said nothing. He got into his car. Win got into his. Myron’s cellular phone rang before he had driven five minutes. It was Hester Crimstein.

“They’re dropping the charges,” she said to him. “Esperanza will be out tomorrow morning. They’re offering up a full exoneration and apology if we promise not to sue.”

“Will you accept that?”

“It’s up to Esperanza. But I think she’ll agree.”

Myron drove to Bonnie’s house. Her mother opened the door and looked angry. Myron pushed past her and found Bonnie alone. He showed her the note. She cried. He held her. He looked in on the two sleeping boys and stayed in the doorway until Bonnie’s mother tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to leave. He did.

He headed back to Win’s apartment. When he opened the door, Terese’s suitcase was by the entrance. She stepped into the foyer.

“You’re packed,” Myron said.

She smiled. “I love a man who misses nothing.”

He waited.

“I’m leaving in an hour for Atlanta,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I spoke to my boss at CNN. Ratings have been down. He wants me back on the air tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Myron said again.

Terese pulled at a ring on her finger. “You ever try a long-distance relationship?” she asked.

“No.”

“Might be worth a try.”

“Might be,” he said.

“I hear the sex is great.”

“That’s never been our trouble, Terese.”

“No,” she said. “It hasn’t.”

He checked his watch. “Only an hour, you said?”

She smiled. “Actually, an hour and ten minutes.”

“Whew,” he said, moving closer.

At midnight Myron and Win were in the living room watching television.

“You’ll miss her,” Win said.

“I’m flying down to Atlanta this weekend.”

Win nodded. “Best-case scenario.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you are the pitiful, needy type who feels incomplete without a steady girlfriend. Who better than a career woman who lives a thousand miles away?”

More silence. They watched a repeat of Frasier on Channel 11. The show was starting to grow on them both.

“An agent represents his clients,” Win said during a commercial. “You’re his advocate. You can’t worry about the repercussions.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure, why not?”

Myron shrugged. “Yeah, why not?” He watched another commercial. “Esperanza said I’m starting to get too comfortable with breaking the rules.”

Win said nothing.

“Truth is,” Myron said, “I’ve been doing it for a while. I paid off police officers to cover up a crime.”

“You didn’t know the severity.”

“Does that matter?”

“Of course it does.”

Myron shook his head. “We trample on that damned foul line until we can’t see it anymore,” he said softly.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about us. Sophie Mayor said that you and I do the same thing she did. We take the law into our own hands. We break the rules.”

“So?”

“So it’s not right.”

Win frowned. “Oh, please.”

“The innocent get hurt.”

“The police hurt the innocent too.”

“Not like this. Esperanza suffered when she had nothing to do with any of this. Clu deserved to be punished, but what happened to Lucy Mayor was still an accident.”

Win drummed his chin with two fingers. “If we put aside an argument on the relative severity of drunk driving,” he said, “in the end it was not merely an accident. Clu chose to bury the body. The fact that he couldn’t live with it doesn’t excuse it.”

“We can’t keep doing this, Win.”

“Keep doing what?”

“Breaking the rules.”

“Let me pose a question to you, Myron.” Win continued his chin drumming. “Suppose you were Sophie Mayor and Lucy Mayor were your daughter. What would you have done?”

“Maybe the same thing,” Myron said. “Does that make it right?”

“Depends,” Win said.

“On?”

“On the Clu Haid factor: Can you live with yourself?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Can you live with yourself? I know that I could.”

“And you’re comfortable with that?”

“With what?”

“With a world where people take the law into their own hands,” Myron said.

“Good lord, no. I’m not prescribing this remedy for others.”

“Just you.”

Win shrugged. “I trust my judgment. I’d trust yours too. But now you want to go back in time and take an alternate route. Life is not like that. You made a decision. It was a good one based on what you knew. A tough call, but aren’t they all? It could have worked out the other way. Clu might have smartened up from the experience, become a better person. My point is, you can’t concern yourself with distant, impossible-to-see consequences.”

“Just worry about the here and now.”

“Precisely.”

“And what you can live with.”

“Yes.

“So maybe next time,” Myron said, “I should opt for doing the right thing.”

Win shook his head. “You’re confusing the right thing with the legal or seemingly moral thing. But that’s not the real world. Sometimes the good guys break the rules because they know better.”

Myron smiled. “They cross the foul line. Just for a second. Just to do good. Then they scramble back into fair territory. But when you do that too often, you start smearing the line.”

“Perhaps the line is supposed to be smeared,” Win said.

“Perhaps.”

“On balance, you and I do good.”

“That balance might be better if we didn’t stray across the line so much—even if that meant letting a few more injustices remain injustices.”

Win shrugged. “Your call.”

Myron sat back. “You know what’s bothering me the most about this conversation?”

“What’s that?”

“That I don’t think it’ll change anything. That I think you’re probably right.”

“But you’re not sure,” Win said.

“No, I’m not sure.”

“And you still don’t like it.”

“I definitely don’t like it,” Myron said.

Win nodded. “That’s all I wanted to hear.”

CHAPTER 40

Big Cyndi was totally in orange. An orange sweatshirt. Orange parachute pants like something stolen from MC Hammer’s 1989 closet. Dyed orange hair. Orange fingernail polish. Orange—don’t ask how—skin. She looked like a mutant teenage carrot.

“Orange is Esperanza’s favorite color,” she told Myron.

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s not?”

Myron shook his head. “Blue is.” For a moment, he pictured a giant Smurf.

Big Cyndi mulled that one over. “Orange is her second favorite color?”

“Sure, I guess.”

Satisfied, Big Cyndi smiled and strung up a sign across the reception area that read WELCOME BACK, ESPERANZA!

Myron moved into his inner office. He made some calls, managed to do a little work, kept listening for the elevator.

Finally, the elevator dinged at 10:00 A.M. The doors slid open. Myron stayed put. He heard Big Cyndi’s squeal of delight; the floors below them almost evacuated at the sound. He felt the vibrations of Big Cyndi leaping to her feet. Myron stood now and still waited. He heard cries and sighs and reassurances.

Two minutes later Esperanza entered Myron’s office. She didn’t knock. As always.

Their hug was a little awkward. Myron backed off, shoved his hands in his pockets. “Welcome back.”

Esperanza tried a smile. “Thanks.”

Silence.

“You knew about my personal involvement the whole time, didn’t you?”

Esperanza said nothing.

“That’s the part I could never resolve,” Myron said.

“Myron, don’t—”

“You’re my best friend,” he continued. “You know I’d do anything for you. So I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why you wouldn’t talk to me. It made no sense. At first I thought you were angry at me for disappearing. But that isn’t like you. Then I thought you had an affair with Clu and you didn’t want me to know. But that was wrong. Then I thought it was because you had an affair with Bonnie—”

“Showing very poor judgment,” Esperanza added.

“Yes. But I’m hardly in a position to lecture you. And you wouldn’t be afraid to tell me about it. Especially with the stakes so high. So I kept wondering, What could be so bad that you wouldn’t talk to me? Win thought that the only explanation was that you did indeed kill Clu.”

“That Win,” Esperanza said. “Always the sunny side.”

“But even that wouldn’t do it. I’d still stick by you. You knew that. There is only one reason you wouldn’t tell me the truth—”

Esperanza sighed. “I need a shower.”

“You were protecting me.”

She looked at him. “Don’t get all mushy on me, okay? I hate when you do that.”

“Bonnie told you about the car accident. About my bribing the cops.”

“Pillow talk,” Esperanza said with a shrug.

“And once you were arrested, you made her swear to keep her mouth shut. Not for your sake or hers. But for mine. You knew that if the bribes ever became public, I’d be ruined. I’d committed a serious felony. I’d be disbarred or worse. And you knew that if I ever found out, you wouldn’t be able to stop me from telling the DA because it would’ve been enough to get you off.”

Esperanza put her hands on her hips. “Is there a point to this, Myron?”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Nothing to thank me for. You were too weak coming off Brenda. I was afraid you’d do something stupid. You have that habit.”

He hugged her again. She hugged him back. Nothing felt awkward this time. When they broke the embrace, he stepped back. “Thank you.”

“Stop saying that.”

“You are my best friend.”

“And I did it for my sake too, Myron. For the business. My business.”

“I know.”

“So do we still have any clients left?” she asked.

“A few.”

“Maybe we better get on the horn then.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I love you, Esperanza.”

“Shut up before I puke my guts out.”

“And you love me.”

“If you start singing ‘Barney,’ I’ll kill you. I’ve already done prison time. I’m not afraid to do more.”

Big Cyndi stuck her head in. She was smiling. With the orange skin, she looked like the most frightening jack-o’-lantern imaginable. “Marty Towey on line two.”

“I’ll take it,” Esperanza said.

“And I have Enos Cabral on line three.”

“Mine,” said Myron.

At the end of a wonderfully long workday Win came into the office. “I spoke to Esperanza,” he said. “We’re all doing pizza and old CBS Sunday at my place.”

“I can’t.”

Win arched an eyebrow. “All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett?”

“Sorry.”

“The Sammy Davis episode of All in the Family?”

“Not tonight, Win.”

Win looked concerned. “I know you want to punish yourself,” he said, “but this is taking self-flagellation too far.”

Myron smiled. “It’s not that.”

“Don’t tell me you want to be alone. You never want to be alone.”

“Sorry, I got other plans,” Myron said.

Win arched the eyebrow, turned, left without another word.

Myron picked up the phone. He dialed the familiar number. “I’m on my way,” he said.

“Good,” Mom said. “I already called Fong’s. I got two orders of shrimp with lobster sauce.”

“Mom?”

“What?”

“I really don’t like their shrimp in lobster sauce anymore.”

“What? You’ve always loved it. It’s your favorite.”

“Not since I was fourteen.”

“So how come you never told me?”

“I have. Several times.”

“And what, you expect me to remember every little thing? So what are you trying to tell me, Myron, your taste buds are too mature for Fong’s shrimp with lobster sauce now? Who do you think you are, the Galloping Gourmet or something?”

Myron heard his father yell in the background. “Stop bothering the boy.”

“Who’s bothering him? Myron, am I bothering you?”

“And tell him to hurry,” Dad shouted. “The game’s almost on.”

“Big deal, Al. He doesn’t care.”

Myron said, “Tell Dad I’m on my way.”

“Drive slowly, Myron. There’s no rush. The game will wait.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Wear a seat belt.”

“Sure thing.”

“And your father has a surprise for you.”

“Ellen!” It was Dad again.

“What’s the big deal, Al?”

“I wanted to tell him—”

“Oh stop being silly, Al. Myron?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Your father bought tickets to a Mets game. For Sunday. Just the two of you.”

Myron swallowed, said nothing.

“They’re playing the Tunas,” Mom said.

“The Marlins!” Dad shouted.

“Tunas, marlins—what’s the difference? You going to be a marine biologist now, Al? Is that what you’re going to do with your leisure time, study fish?”

Myron smiled.

“Myron, you there?”

“I’m on my way, Mom.”

He hung up. He slapped his thighs and stood. He said good night to Esperanza and Big Cyndi. He stepped into the elevator and managed a smile. Friends and lovers were great, he thought, but sometimes a boy just wanted his mom and dad.

For Aunt Evelyn in Revere,
with lots and lots of love

And in memory of Larry Gerson
1962–1998
Close your eyes and you can still see the smile

Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2000 by Harlan Coben

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, N.Y.

Dell® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99–89788
eISBN: 978-0-307-48358-4
v3.0_r1

OPM

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Darkest Fear

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Other Books by This Author

About the Author

“What is your darkest fear?” the voice whispers. Close your eyes now and picture it. Can you see it? Do you have it yet? The very worst agony you can imagine?”

After a long pause, I say, “Yes.”

“Good. Now imagine something worse, something far, far worse …”

—“The Mind of Terror” by Stan Gibbs,
column in the New York Herald,

January 16

1

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like a urinal cake.

“Well?” Mom prompted.

Myron battled his throat, won a costly victory, swallowed. “Not bad.”

Mom shook her head, disappointed.

“What?”

“I’m a lawyer,” Mom said. “You’d think I’d have raised a better liar.”

“You did the best you could,” Myron said.

She shrugged and waved a hand at the, uh, pastry. “It’s my first time baking, bubbe. It’s okay to tell me the truth.”

“It’s like biting into a urinal cake,” Myron said.

“A what?”

“In men’s public bathrooms. In the urinals. They put them there for the smell or something.”

“And you eat them?”

“No—”

“Is that why your father takes so long in there? He’s having a little Tastykake? And here I thought his prostate was acting up.”

“I’m joking, Mom.”

She smiled through blue eyes tinged with a red that Visine could never hope to get out, the red you can only get through slow, steady tears. Normally Mom was heavily into histrionics. Slow, steady tears were not her style. “So am I, Mr. Smarty Pants. You think you’re the only one in this family with a sense of humor?”

Myron said nothing. He looked down at the, uh, pastry, fearing or perhaps hoping it might crawl away. In the thirty-plus years his mother had lived in this house, she had never baked—not from a recipe, not from scratch, not even from one of those Pillsbury morning croissant thingies that came in small mailing tubes. She could barely boil water without strict instructions and pretty much never cooked, though she could whip up a mean Celeste frozen pizza in the microwave, her agile fingers dancing across the numerical keypad in the vein of Nureyev at Lincoln Center. No, in the Bolitar household, the kitchen was more a gathering place—a Family Room Lite, if you will—than anything related to even the basest of the culinary arts. The round table held magazines and catalogs and congealing white boxes of Chinese takeout. The stovetop saw less action than a Merchant-Ivory production. The oven was a prop, strictly for show, like a politician’s Bible.

Something was definitely amiss.

They were sitting in the living room with the dated pseudo-leather white modular couch and aqua-tinged rug whose shagginess reminded Myron of a toilet-seat cover. Grown-up Greg Brady. Myron kept stealing glances out the picture window at the For Sale sign in the front yard as though it were a spaceship that had just landed and something sinister was about to step out.

“Where’s Dad?”

Mom gave a weary wave toward the door. “He’s in the basement.”

“In my room?”

“Your old room, yes. You moved out, remember?”

He did—at the tender age of thirty-four no less. Childcare experts would salivate and tsk-tsk over that one—the prodigal son choosing to remain in his split-level cocoon long after the deemed appropriate deadline for the butterfly to break free. But Myron might argue the opposite. He might bring up the fact that for generations and in most cultures, offspring lived in the familial home until a ripe old age, that adopting such a philosophy could indeed be a societal boom, helping people stay rooted to something tangible in this era of the disintegrating nuclear family. Or, if that rationale didn’t float your boat, Myron could try another. He had a million.

But the truth of the matter was far simpler: He liked hanging out in the burbs with Mom and Dad—even if confessing such a sentiment was about as hip as an Air Supply eight track.

“So what’s going on?” he asked.

“Your father doesn’t know you’re here yet,” she said. “He thinks you’re not coming for another hour.”

Myron nodded, puzzled. “What’s he doing in the basement?”

“He bought a computer. Your father plays with it down there.”

“Dad?”

“My point exactly. The man can’t change a lightbulb without a manual—all of a sudden he’s Bill Gates. Always on the nest.”

“The Net,” Myron corrected.

“The what?”

“It’s called the Net, Mom.”

“I thought it was nest. The bird’s nest or something.”

“No, it’s Net.”

“Are you sure? I know there’s a bird in there somewhere.”

“The Web maybe,” Myron tried. “Like with a spider.”

She snapped her fingers. “That’s it. Anyway your father is on there all the time, weaving the Web or whatever. He chats with people, Myron. That’s what he tells me. He chats with complete strangers. Like he used to do with the CB radio, remember?”

Myron remembered. Circa 1976. Jewish Dads in the suburbs checking for “smokeys” on the way to the delicatessen. Mighty convoy of Cadillac Sevilles. Ten-four, good buddy.

“And that’s not all,” she went on. “He’s typing his memoirs. A man who can’t scribble down a grocery list without consulting Strunk and White suddenly thinks he’s an ex-president.”

They were selling the house. Myron still could not believe it. His eyes wandered about the overly familiar surroundings, his gaze getting snagged on the photographs running up the stairwell. He saw his family mature via fashion—the skirts and sideburns lengthening and shortening, the quasi-hippie fringes and suede and tie-dyes, the leisure suits and bell-bottoms, the frilly tuxedos that would be too tacky for a Vegas casino—the years flying by frame by frame like one of those depressing life insurance commercials. He spotted the poses from his basketball days—a sixth-grade suburban-league foul shot, an eighth-grade drive to the hoop, a high school slam dunk—the row ending with Sports Illustrated cover shots, two from his days at Duke and one with his leg in a cast and a large-fonted IS HE FINISHED? emblazoned across his knee-cast image (the answer in the mind’s eye being an equally large-fonted YES!).

“So what’s wrong?” he asked.

“I didn’t say anything was wrong.”

Myron shook his head, disappointed. “And you a lawyer.”

“Setting a bad example?”

“It’s no wonder I never ran for higher office.”

She folded her hands on her lap. “We need to chat.”

Myron didn’t like the tone.

“But not here,” she added. “Let’s take a walk around the block.”

Myron nodded and they rose. Before they reached the door, his cell phone rang. Myron snatched it up with a speed that would have made Wyatt Earp step back. He put the phone to his ear and cleared his throat.

“MB SportsReps,” he said, silky-smooth, professional-like. “This is Myron Bolitar speaking.”

“Nice phone voice,” Esperanza said. “You sound like Billy Dee ordering two Colt 45s.”

Esperanza Diaz was his longtime assistant and now sports-agent partner at MB SportsReps (M for Myron, the B for Bolitar—for those keeping score).

“I was hoping you were Lamar,” he said.

“He hasn’t called yet?”

“Nope.”

He could almost see Esperanza frown. “We’re in deep doo-doo here,” she said.

“We’re not in deep doo-doo. We’re just sucking a little wind, that’s all.”

“Sucking a little wind,” Esperanza repeated. “Like Pavarotti running the Boston Marathon.”

“Good one,” Myron said.

“Thanks.”

Lamar Richardson was a power-hitting Golden Glove shortstop who’d just become a free agent—“free agent” being a phrase agents whisper in the same way a mufti might whisper “Praise Allah.” Lamar was shopping for new representation and had whittled his final list down to three agencies: two supersized conglomerates with enough office space to house a Price Club and the aforementioned pimple-on-the-buttocks but oh-so-personal MB SportsReps. Go, pimple-butt!

Myron watched his mother standing by the door. He switched ears and said, “Anything else?”

“You’ll never guess who called,” Esperanza said.

“Elle and Claudia demanding another ménage à trois?”

“Oooo, close.”

She would never just tell him. With his friends, everything was a TV game show. “How about a hint?” he said.

“One of your ex-lovers.”

He felt a jolt. “Jessica.”

Esperanza made a buzzing noise. “Sorry, wrong bitch.”

Myron was puzzled. He’d only had two long-term relationships in his life: Jessica on and off for the past thirteen years (now very off). And before that, well, you’d have to go back to …

“Emily Downing?”

Esperanza made a ding-ding noise.

A sudden image pierced his heart like a straight-blade. He saw Emily sitting on that threadbare couch in the frat basement, smiling that smile at him, her legs bent and tucked under her, wearing his high school varsity jacket that was several sizes too big, her gesturing hands slipping down and disappearing into the sleeves.

His mouth went dry. “What did she want?”

“Don’t know. But she said that she simply had to talk to you. She’s very breathy, you know. Like everything she says is a double entendre.”

With Emily, everything was.

“She good in the sack?” Esperanza asked.

Being an overly attractive bisexual, Esperanza viewed everyone as a potential sex partner. Myron wondered what that must be like, to have and thus weigh so many options, and then he decided to leave that road untraveled. Wise man.

“What did Emily say exactly?” Myron said.

“Nothing specific. She just spewed out a colorful assortment of breathy teasers: urgent, life-and-death, grave matters, etceteras, etceteras.”

“I don’t want to talk to her.”

“I didn’t think so. If she calls back, you want me to give her the runaround?”

“Please.”

“Más tarde then.”

He hung up as a second image whacked him like a surprise wave at the beach. Senior year at Duke. Emily so composed as she dumped the varsity jacket onto his bed and walked out. Not long after that, she married the man who’d ruin Myron’s life.

Deep breaths, he told himself. In and out. That’s it.

“Everything okay?” Mom asked.

“Fine.”

Mom shook her head again, disappointed.

“I’m not lying,” he said.

“Fine, right, sure, you always breathe like an obscene phone call. Listen, if you don’t want to tell your mother—”

“I don’t want to tell my mother.”

“Who raised you and …”

Myron tuned her out, as was his custom. She was digressing again, taking on a past life or something. It was something she did a lot. One minute she was thoroughly modern, an early feminist who marched alongside Gloria Steinem and became proof that—to quote her old T-shirt—A Woman’s Place Is in the House … and Senate. But at the sight of her son, her progressive attire slid to the floor and revealed the babushka-clad yenta beneath the burned bra. It made for an interesting childhood.

They headed out the front door. Myron kept his eyes on the For Sale sign as though it might suddenly brandish a gun. His mind flashed onto something he had never actually seen—the sunny day when Mom and Dad had arrived here for the first time, hand in hand, Mom’s belly swelling with child, both of them scared and exhilarated realizing that this cookie-cut three-bedroom split-level would be their life vessel, their SS American Dream. Now, like it or not, that journey was coming to an end. Forget that “close one door, open another” crap. That For Sale sign marked the end—the end of youth, of middle age, of a family, the universe of two people who’d started here and fought here and raised kids here and worked and carpooled and lived their lives here.

They walked up the street. Leaves were piled along the curb, the surest sign of suburban autumn, while leaf blowers shattered the still air like helicopters over Saigon. Myron took the inside track so his path would skim the piles’ edges. The dead leaves crackled under his sneakers and he liked that. He wasn’t sure why.

“Your father spoke to you,” Mom said, half-question. “About what happened to him.”

Myron felt his stomach tense up. He veered deeper into the leaves, lifting his legs high and crunching louder. “Yes.”

“What did he say exactly?” Mom asked.

“That he’d had chest pains while I was in the Caribbean.”

The Kaufman house had always been yellow, but the new family had painted it white. It looked wrong with the new color, out of place. Some homes had gone the aluminum-siding route, while others had built on additions, bumping out the kitchens and master bedrooms. The young family who’d moved into the Miller home had gotten rid of the Millers’ trademark overflowing flower boxes. The new owners of the Davis place had ripped out those wonderful shrubs Bob Davis had worked on every weekend. It all reminded Myron of an invading army ripping down the flags of the conquered.

“He didn’t want to tell you,” Mom said. “You know your father. He still feels he has to protect you.”

Myron nodded, stayed in the leaves.

Then she said, “It was more than chest pains.”

Myron stopped.

“It was a full-blown coronary,” she went on, not meeting his eyes. “He was in intensive care for three days.” She started blinking. “The artery was almost entirely blocked.”

Myron felt his throat close.

“It’s changed him. I know how much you love him, but you have to accept that.”

“Accept what?”

Her voice was gentle and firm. “That your father is getting older. That I’m getting older.”

He thought about it. “I’m trying,” he said.

“But?”

“But I see that For Sale sign—”

“Wood and bricks and nails, Myron.”

“What?”

She waded through the leaves and took hold of his elbow. “Listen to me. You mope around here like we’re sitting shiva, but that house is not your childhood. It isn’t a part of your family. It doesn’t breathe or think or care. It’s just wood and bricks and nails.”

“You’ve lived there for almost thirty-five years.”

“So?”

He turned away, kept walking.

“Your father wants to be honest with you,” she said, “but you’re not making it any easier.”

“Why? What did I do?”

She shook her head, looked up into the sky as though willing divine inspiration, continued walking. Myron stayed by her side. She snaked her arm under his elbow and leaned against him.

“You were always a terrific athlete,” she said. “Not like your father. Truth be told, your father was a spaz.”

“I know this,” Myron said.

“Right. You know this because your father never pretended to be something he wasn’t. He let you see him as human—vulnerable even. And it had a strange effect on you. You worshipped him all the more. You turned him into something almost mythical.”

Myron thought about it, didn’t argue. He shrugged and said, “I love him.”

“I know, sweetheart. But he’s just a man. A good man. But now he’s getting old and he’s scared. Your father always wanted you to see him as human. But he doesn’t want you to see him scared.”

Myron kept his head down. There are certain things you cannot picture your parents doing—having sex being the classic example. Most people cannot—probably should not even try to—picture their parents in flagrante delicto. But right now Myron was trying to conjure up another taboo image, one of his father sitting alone in the dark, hand on his chest, scared, and the sight, while achievable, was aching, unbearable. When he spoke again, his voice was thick. “So what should I do?”

“Accept the changes. Your father is retiring. He’s worked his whole life and like most moronically macho men of his era, his self-worth is wrapped up in his job. So he’s having a tough time. He’s not the same. You’re not the same. Your relationship is shifting and neither one of you likes change.”

Myron stayed silent, waiting for more.

“Reach out to him a little,” Mom said. “He’s carried you your whole life. He won’t ask, but now it’s his turn.”

When they turned the final corner, Myron saw the Mercedes parked in front of the For Sale sign. He wondered for a moment if it was a realtor showing the house. His father stood in the front yard chatting with a woman. Dad was gesturing wildly and smiling. Looking at his father’s face—the rough skin that always seemed in need of a shave, the prominent nose Dad used to “nose punch” him during their giggling fun-fights, the heavy-lidded eyes à la Victor Mature and Dean Martin, the wispy hairs of gray that held on stubbornly after the thick black had fled—Myron felt a hand reach in and tweak his heart.

Dad caught his eye and waved. “Look who stopped by!” he shouted.

Emily Downing turned around and gave him a tight smile. Myron looked back at her and said nothing. Fifty minutes had passed. Ten more until the heel crushed the tomato.

2

Too much history. His parents made themselves scarce. For all their almost legendary butting in, they both had the uncanny ability to trample full tilt through the Isle of Nosiness without tripping any gone-too-far mines. They quietly disappeared into the house.

Emily tried a smile, but it just wasn’t happening. “Well, well, well,” she said when they were alone. “If it isn’t the good one I let get away.”

“You used that line last time I saw you.”

“Did I?”

They had met in the library freshman year at Duke. Emily had been bigger then, a bit fleshier, though not in a bad way, and the years had definitely slimmed her down and toned her up, though again not in a bad way. But the visual whammy was still there. Emily wasn’t so much pretty as, to quote SuperFly, foxy. Hot. Sizzlingly so. As a young coed, she’d had long, kinky hair that always had that just-did-the-nasty muss to it, a crooked smile that could knock a movie up a rating, and a subconsciously undulating body that continuously flickered out the word sex like an old movie projector. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t beautiful; beauty had little to do with it, in fact. This was an innate thing; Emily couldn’t turn it off if she donned a muumuu and put roadkill on her head.

The weird thing was, they were both virgins when they met, somehow missing the perhaps overblown sexual revolution of the seventies and early eighties. Myron always believed that the revolution was mostly hype or, at the very least, that it didn’t seep past the brick façades of suburban high schools. But then again, he was pretty good at self-rationalization. More likely, it was his fault—if you could consider not being promiscuous a fault. He’d always been attracted to the “nice” girls, even in high school. Casual affairs never interested him. Every girl he met was gauged as a potential life partner, a soul mate, an undying love, as though every relationship should be a Carpenters song.

But with Emily it had been complete sexual exploration and discovery. They learned from each other in stuttering, though achingly blissful, steps. Even now, as much as he detested her very being, he could still feel the tightening, could still recall the way his nerve endings would sing and surge when they were in bed. Or the back of a car. Or a movie theater or a library or once even during a poly sci lecture on Hobbes’s Leviathan. While he may have yearned to be a Carpenters man, his first long-term relationship had ended up more like something off Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album—hot, heavy, sweaty, fast, the whole “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

Still, there had to have been more to it. He and Emily had lasted three years. He had loved her, and she’d been the first to break his heart.

“There a coffee bar near here?” she asked.

“A Starbucks,” Myron said.

“I’ll drive.”

“I don’t want to go with you, Emily.”

She gave him the smile. “Lost my charms, have I?”

“They lost their effect on me a long time ago.” Half lie.

She shifted her hips. Myron watched, thinking about what Esperanza had said. It wasn’t just her voice or her words—even her movements ended up a double entendre. “It’s important, Myron.”

“Not to me.”

“You don’t even know—”

“It doesn’t matter, Emily. You’re the past. So is your husband—”

“My ex-husband. I divorced him, remember? And I never knew what he did to you.”

“Right,” Myron said. “You were just the cause.”

She looked at him. “It’s not that simple. You know that.”

He nodded. She was right, of course. “I always knew why I did it,” Myron said. “I was being a competitive dumbass who wanted to get one up on Greg. But why you?”

Emily shook her head. The old hair would have flown side to side, ending up half covering her face. Her new coif was shorter and more stylized, but his mind’s eye still saw the kinky flow. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” she said.

“Guess not,” he said, “but I’ve always been curious.”

“We both had too much to drink.”

“Simple as that?”

“Yes.”

Myron made a face. “Lame,” he said.

“Maybe it was just about sex,” she said.

“A purely physical act?”

“Maybe.”

“The night before you married someone else?”

She looked at him. “It was dumb, okay?”

“You say so.”

“And maybe I was scared,” she said.

“Of getting married?”

“Of marrying the wrong man.”

Myron shook his head. “Jesus, you’re shameless.”

Emily was about to say more, but she stopped as though her last reserves had suddenly been zapped away. He wanted her gone, but with ex-loves there is also a pulling sadness. There before you stands the true road untraveled, the lifetime what-if, the embodiment of a totally alternate life if things had gone a little different. He had absolutely no interest in her anymore, yet her words still drew out his old self, wounds and all.

“It was fourteen years ago,” she said softly. “Don’t you think it’s time we moved on?”

He thought about what that “purely physical” night had cost him. Everything, maybe. His lifelong dream, for sure. “You’re right,” he said, turning away. “Please leave.”

“I need your help.”

He shook his head. “As you said, time to move on.”

“Just have coffee with me. With an old friend.”

He wanted to say no, but the past had too strong a pull. He nodded, afraid to speak. They drove in silence to Starbucks and ordered their complicated coffees from an artist-wannabe barista with more attitude than the guy who works at the local record store. They added whatever condiments at the little stand, playing a game of Twister by reaching across one another for the nonfat milk or Equal. They sat down in metal chairs with too-low backs. The sound system was playing reggae music, a CD entitled Jamaican Me Crazy.

Emily crossed her legs and took a sip. “Have you ever heard of Fanconi anemia?”

Interesting opening gambit. “No.”

“It’s an inherited anemia that leads to bone marrow failure. It weakens your chromosomes.”

Myron waited.

“Are you familiar with bone marrow transplants?”

Strange line of questioning, but he decided to play it straight. “A little. A friend of mine had leukemia and needed a transplant. They had a marrow drive at the temple. We all went down and got tested.”

“When you say ‘we all’—”

“Mom, Dad, my whole family. I think Win went too.”

She tilted her head. “How is Win?”

“The same.”

“Sorry to hear that,” she said. “When we were at Duke, he used to listen to us making love, didn’t he?”

“Only when we pulled down the shade so he couldn’t watch.”

She laughed. “He never liked me.”

“You were his favorite.”

“Really?”

“That’s not saying much,” Myron said.

“He hates women, doesn’t he?”

Myron thought about it. “As sex objects, they’re fine. But in terms of relationships …”

“An odd duck.”

She should only know.

Emily took a sip. “I’m stalling,” she said.

“I sorta figured that.”

“What happened to your friend with leukemia?”

“He died.”

Her face went white. “I’m sorry. How old was he?”

“Thirty-four.”

Emily took another sip, cradling the mug with both hands. “So you’re listed with the bone marrow national registry?”

“I guess. I gave blood and they gave me a donor card.”

She closed her eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“Fanconi anemia is fatal. You can treat it for a while with blood transfusions and hormones, but the only cure is a bone marrow transplant.”

“I don’t understand, Emily. Do you have this disease?”

“It doesn’t hit adults.” She put down her coffee and looked up. He was not big on reading eyes, but the pain was neon-obvious. “It hits children.”

As though on cue, the Starbucks soundtrack changed to something instrumental and somber. Myron waited. It didn’t take her long.

“My son has it,” she said.

Myron remembered visiting the house in Franklin Lakes when Greg disappeared, the boy playing in the backyard with his sister. Must have been, what, two, three years ago. The boy was about ten, his sister maybe eight. Greg and Emily were in the midst of a bloody take-no-prisoners custody battle, the two children pinned down in the crossfire, the kind no one walks away from without a serious hit.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“We need to find a bone marrow match.”

“I thought siblings were an almost automatic match.”

Her eyes flicked around the room. “One-in-four chance,” she said, stopping abruptly.

“Oh.”

“The national registry found only three potential donors. By potential I mean that the initial HLA tests showed them as possibilities. The A and B match, but then they have to do a full blood and tissue workup to see—” She stopped again. “I’m getting technical. I don’t mean to. But when your kid is sick like this, it’s like you live in a snow globe of medical jargon.”

“I understand.”

“Anyway, getting past the initial screening is like winning a second-tier lottery ticket. The chance of a match is still slim. The blood center calls in the potential donors and runs a battery of tests, but the odds they’ll be a close enough match to go through with the transplant are pretty low, especially with only three potential donors.”

Myron nodded, still having no idea why she was telling him any of this.

“We got lucky,” she said. “One of the three was a match with Jeremy.”

“Great.”

“There’s a problem,” she said. Again the crooked smile. “The donor is missing.”

“What do you mean, missing?”

“I don’t have the details. The registry is confidential. No one will tell me what’s going on. We seemed to be on the right track, and then all of a sudden, the donor just pulled out. My doctor can’t say anything—like I said, it’s protected.”

“Maybe the donor just changed his mind.”

“Then we better change it back,” she said, “or Jeremy dies.”

The statement was plain enough.

“So what do you think happened?” Myron asked. “You think he’s missing or something?”

“He or she,” Emily said. “Yes.”

“He or she?”

“I don’t know anything about the donor—age, sex, where they live, nothing. But Jeremy isn’t getting any better and the odds of finding another donor in time are, well, almost nonexistent.” She kept the face tight, but Myron could see the foundation starting to crack a bit. “We have to find this donor.”

“And that’s why you’ve come to me? To find him?”

“You and Win found Greg when no one else could. When he disappeared, Clip went to you first. Why?”

“That’s a long story.”

“Not so long, Myron. You and Win are trained in this sort of thing. You’re good at it.”

“Not in a case like this,” Myron said. “Greg is a high-profile athlete. He can take to the airwaves, offer rewards. He can buy private detectives.”

“We’re already doing that. Greg has a press conference set up for tomorrow.”

“So?”

“So it won’t work. I told Jeremy’s doctor we would pay anything to the donor, even though it’s illegal. But something else is wrong here. I’m afraid all the publicity might even backfire—that it may send the donor deeper into hiding or something, I don’t know.”

“What does Greg say to that?”

“We don’t talk much, Myron. And when we do, it’s usually not very pretty.”

“Does Greg know you’re talking to me now?”

She looked at him. “He hates you as much as you hate him. Maybe more so.”

Myron decided to take that as a no. Emily kept her eyes on him, searching his face as though there were an answer there.

“I can’t help you, Emily.”

She looked like she’d just been slapped.

“I sympathize,” he went on, “but I’m just getting over some major problems of my own.”

“Are you saying you don’t have time?”

“It’s not that. A private detective would have a better chance—”

“Greg’s hired four already. They can’t even find out the donor’s name.”

“I doubt I can do any better.”

“This is my son’s life, Myron.”

“I understand, Emily.”

“Can’t you put aside your animosity for me and Greg?”

He wasn’t sure that he could. “That’s not the issue. I’m a sports agent, not a detective.”

“That didn’t stop you before.”

“And look how things ended up. Every time I meddle, it leads to disaster.”

“My son is thirteen years old, Myron.”

“I’m sorry—”

“I don’t want your sympathy, dammit.” Her eyes were smaller now, black. She leaned toward him until her face was scant inches from his. “I want you to do the math.”

He looked puzzled. “What?”

“You’re an agent. You know all about numbers, right? So do the math.”

Myron tilted back, giving himself a little distance. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Jeremy’s birthday is July eighteenth,” she said. “Do the math.”

“What math?”

“One more time: He’s thirteen years old. He was born July the eighteenth. I was married October tenth.”

Nothing. For several seconds, he heard the mothers chatting over one another, one baby cry, one barista call out an order to another, and then it happened. A cold gust blew across Myron’s heart. Steel bands wrapped around his chest, making it almost impossible to breathe. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. It was like someone had whacked his solar plexus with a baseball bat. Emily watched him and nodded.

“That’s right,” she said. “He’s your son.”

3

“You can’t know that for sure,” Myron said.

Emily’s whole persona screamed exhaustion. “I do.”

“You were sleeping with Greg too, right?”

“Yes.”

“And we only had that one night during that time. You probably had a whole bunch with Greg.”

“True.”

“So how can you possibly know—?”

“Denial,” she interjected with a sigh. “The first step.”

He pointed a finger at her. “Don’t hand me that psychology-major crap, Emily.”

“Moving quickly to anger,” she continued.

“You can’t know—”

“I’ve always known,” she interrupted.

Myron sat back. He stayed composed but underneath he could almost feel the fissure widening, his foundation starting to shift.

“When I first got pregnant, I figured like you: I’d slept with Greg more, so it was probably his baby. At least, that’s what I told myself.” She closed her eyes. Myron stayed very still, the knot in his stomach tightening. “And when Jeremy was born, he favored me, so who was to say? But—and this is going to sound so goddamn stupid—a mother knows. I can’t tell you how. But I knew. I tried to deny it too. I told myself I was just feeling guilty over what we’d done, and that this was God’s way of punishing me.”

“How Old Testament of you,” Myron said.

“Sarcasm,” she said with almost a smile. “Your favorite defense.”

“Your maternal intuition hardly counts as evidence, Emily.”

“You asked before about Sara.”

“Sara?”

“Jeremy’s sister. You wondered about her matching as a donor. She didn’t.”

“Right, but you said there was only a one-in-four chance with siblings.”

“For full siblings, yes. But the match wasn’t even close. Because she’s only Jeremy’s half sister.”

“The doctor told you this?”

“Yes.”

Myron felt the stone footing beneath his feet give way. “So … Greg knows?”

Emily shook her head. “The doctor pulled me aside. Because of the divorce, I’m Jeremy’s primary custodian. Greg has custody too, but the children live with me. I’m in charge of the medical decisions.”

“So Greg still believes …?”

“That Jeremy is his, yes.”

Myron was floundering in deep water with no land in sight. “But you said you’ve always known.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you kidding? I was married to Greg. I loved him. We were starting our life together.”

“You still should have told me.”

“When, Myron? When should I have told you?”

“As soon as the baby was born.”

“Aren’t you listening? I just told you I wasn’t sure.”

“A mother knows, you said.”

“Come on, Myron. I was in love with Greg, not you. You with your corny sense of morality—you would have insisted I divorce Greg and marry you and live some suburban fairy tale.”

“So instead you chose to live a lie?”

“It was the right decision based on what I knew then. With hindsight”—she stopped, took a deep sip—“I probably would have done a lot of things differently.”

He tried to let some of it sink in, but it was a no-go. Another group of stroller-laced soccer moms entered the coffee shop. They took a corner table and started jabbering about little Brittany and Kyle and Morgan.

“How long have you and Greg been separated?” Myron’s voice sounded sharper than he intended. Or maybe not.

“Four years now.”

“And you were no longer in love with him, right? Four years ago?”

“Right.”

“Earlier even,” he went on. “I mean, you probably fell out of love with him a long time ago, right?”

She looked confused. “Right.”

“So you could have told me then. At least four years ago. Why didn’t you?”

“Stop cross-examining me.”

“You’re the one who dropped this bombshell,” he said. “How do you expect me to react?”

“Like a man.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I need your help. Jeremy needs your help. That’s what we should be concentrating on.”

“I want some answers first. I’m entitled to that much.”

She hesitated, looked like she might argue, then nodded wearily. “If it’ll help you get past this—”

“Get past this? Like it’s a kidney stone or something?”

“I’m too tired to fight with you,” she said. “Just go on. Ask your questions.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before now.”

Her eyes drifted over his shoulder. “I almost did,” she said. “Once.”

“When?”

“Do you remember when you came to the house? When Greg first vanished?”

He nodded. He had just been thinking about that day.

“You were looking out the window at him. He was in the yard with his sister.”

“I remember,” Myron said.

“Greg and I were going through that nasty custody battle.”

“You accused him of abusing the children.”

“It wasn’t true. You realized that right away. It was just a legal ploy.”

“Some ploy,” Myron said. “Next time accuse him of war atrocities.”

“Who are you to judge me?”

“Actually,” Myron said, “I think I’m just the person.”

Emily pinned him with her eyes. “Custody battles are war without the Geneva Accords,” she said. “Greg got nasty. I got nasty back. You do whatever you have to in order to win.”

“And that includes revealing that Greg wasn’t Jeremy’s father?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I won custody anyway.”

“That’s not an answer. You hated Greg.”

“Yes.”

“Still do?” he asked.

“Yes.” No hesitation.

“So why didn’t you tell him?”

“Because as much as I loathe Greg,” she said, “I love Jeremy more. I could hurt Greg. I’d probably enjoy it. But I couldn’t do that to my son—take away his father like that.”

“I thought you’d do anything to win.”

“I’d do anything to Greg,” she said, “not Jeremy.”

It made sense, he guessed, but he suspected she was holding something back. “So you kept this secret for thirteen years.”

“Yes.”

“Do your parents know?”

“No.”

“You never told anyone?”

“Never.”

“So why are you telling me now?”

Emily shook her head. “Are you being purposely dense, Myron?”

He put his hands on the table. They weren’t shaking. Somehow he understood that these questions came from more than mere curiosity; they were part of the defense mechanism, the internal barbed wire and moat he’d lavishly built to keep Emily’s revelation from reaching him. He knew that what she was telling him was life altering in a way nothing he’d ever heard before was. The words my son kept floating through his subconscious. But they were just words right now. They’d get through eventually, he guessed, but for now the barbed wire and moat were holding.

“You think I wanted to tell you? I practically begged you to help, but you wouldn’t listen. I’m desperate here.”

“Desperate enough to lie?”

“Yes,” she said, again with no hesitation. “But I’m not, Myron. You have to believe that.”

He shrugged. “Maybe someone else is Jeremy’s father.”

“Excuse me?”

“A third party,” he said. “You slept with me the night before your wedding. I doubt I was the only one. Could be one of a dozen guys.”

She looked at him. “You want your pound of flesh, Myron? Go ahead, I can take it. But this isn’t like you.”

“You know me that well, huh?”

“Even when you got angry—even when you had every right to hate me—you’ve never been cruel. It’s not your way.”

“We’re in uncharted waters here, Emily.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said.

He felt something well up, making it hard to breathe. He grabbed his mug, looked into it as though it might have an answer on the bottom, put it back down. He couldn’t look at her. “How could you do this to me?”

Emily reached across the table and put her hand on his forearm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He pulled away.

“I don’t know what else to say. You asked before why I never told you. My main concern was always Jeremy’s welfare, but you were a consideration too.”

“Bull.”

“I know how you are, Myron. I know you can’t just shrug this off. But for now you have to. You have to find the donor and save Jeremy’s life. We can worry about the rest after that.”

“How long has”—he almost said my son—“Jeremy been ill?”

“We learned about it six months ago. When he was playing basketball. He started getting bruised too easily. Then he was short of breath for no reason. He started falling down …” Her voice tailed off.

“Is he in the hospital?”

“No. He lives at home and goes to school and he looks fine, just a little pale. But he can’t play competitive sports or anything like that. He seems to be doing well, but … it’s just a matter of time. He’s so anemic and his marrow cells are so weak that something will get him. Either he’ll contract a life-threatening infection or if he manages to get past that, malignancies will eventually develop. We treat him with hormones. That helps, but it’s a temporary treatment, not a cure.”

“And a bone marrow transplant would be a cure?”

“Yes.” Her face brightened with an almost religious fervor. “If the transplant takes, he can be completely cured. I’ve seen it happen with other kids.”

Myron nodded, sat back, crossed his legs, uncrossed them. “Can I meet him?”

She looked down. The sound of the blender, probably making a frappuccino, exploded while the espresso maker shrieked its familiar mating call to the various lattes. Emily waited for the noise to die down. “I can’t stop you. But I’m hoping you’ll do the right thing here.”

“That being?”

“It’s hard enough being thirteen years old and almost terminally ill. Do you really want to take away his father too?”

Myron said nothing.

“I know you’re in shock right now. And I know you have a million more questions. But you have to forget that for now. You have to work through your confusion, your anger, everything. The life of a thirteen-year-old boy—our son—is at stake. Concentrate on that, Myron. Find the donor, okay?”

He looked back toward the soccer moms, still cooing about their children. Listening to them, he felt an overwhelming pang.

“Where can I find Jeremy’s doctor?” he asked.

4

When the elevator doors opened into the reception area of MB SportsReps, Big Cyndi reached out to Myron with two arms the approximate circumference of the marble columns at the Acropolis. Myron almost leaped out of the way—involuntary survival reflex and all—but he stayed still and closed his eyes. Big Cyndi embraced him, which was like being wrapped in wet attic insulation, and lifted him into the air. “Oh, Mr. Bolitar!” she cried.

He grimaced and rode it out. Eventually she put him back down as though he were a porcelain doll she was returning to a shelf. Big Cyndi is six-six and on the planetoid side of three hundred pounds, the former intercontinental tag-team wrestling champion with Esperanza, aka Big Chief Mama to Esperanza’s Little Pocahontas. Her head was cube shaped and topped with hair spiked to look like the Statue of Liberty on a bad acid trip. She wore more makeup than the cast of Cats, her clothing form-fitted like sausage casing, her scowl the stuff of sumos.

“Uh, everything okay?” Myron ventured.

“Oh, Mr. Bolitar!”

Big Cyndi looked like she was about to hug him again, but something stopped her, perhaps the stark terror in Myron’s eyes. She picked up luggage that in her manhole-paw resembled a Close’N Play phonograph from the early seventies. She was that kind of big, the kind of big where the world around her always looked like a bad B-monster movie set and she was walking through a miniature Tokyo, knocking over power lines and swatting at buzzing fighter planes.

Esperanza appeared in her office doorway. She folded her arms and rested against the frame. Even after her recent ordeal, Esperanza still looked immensely beautiful, the shiny black ringlets still falling over her forehead just so, the dark olive skin still radiant—the whole image a sort of gypsy, peasant-blouse fantasy. But he could see some new lines around the eyes and a slight slouch in the perfect posture. He’d wanted her to take time off after her release, but he knew she wouldn’t. Esperanza loved MB SportsReps. She wanted to save it.

“What’s going on?” Myron asked.

“It’s all in the letter, Mr. Bolitar,” Big Cyndi said.

“What letter?”

“Oh, Mr. Bolitar!” she cried again.

“What?”

But she didn’t respond, hiding her face in her hands and ducking into the elevator as though entering a tepee. The elevator doors slid closed, and she was gone.

Myron waited a beat and then turned to Esperanza. “Explanation?”

“She’s taking a leave of absence,” Esperanza said.

“Why?”

“Big Cyndi isn’t stupid, Myron.”

“I didn’t say she was.”

“She sees what’s going on here.”

“It’s only temporary,” Myron said. “We’ll snap back.”

“And when we do, Big Cyndi will come back. In the meantime she got a good job offer.”

“With Leather-N-Lust?” Big Cyndi worked nights as a bouncer at an S&M bar called Leather-N-Lust. Motto: Hurt the ones you love. Sometimes—or so he had heard—Big Cyndi was part of the stage show. What part she played Myron had no idea nor had he worked up the courage to ask—another taboo abyss his mind did its best to circumvent.

“No,” Esperanza said. “She’s returning to FLOW.”

For the wrestling uninitiated, FLOW is the acronym for the Fabulous Ladies of Wrestling.

“Big Cyndi is going to wrestle again?”

Esperanza nodded. “On the senior circuit.”

“Excuse me?”

“FLOW wanted to expand its product. They did some research, saw how well the PGA is doing with the senior golf tour and …” She shrugged.

“A senior ladies’ wrestling tour?”

“More like retired,” Esperanza said. “I mean, Big Cyndi is only thirty-eight. They’re bringing back a lot of the old favorites: Queen Qaddafi, Cold War Connie, Brezhnev Babe, Cellblock Celia, Black Widow—”

“I don’t remember the Black Widow.”

“Before our time. Hell, before our parents’ time. She must be in her seventies.”

Myron tried not to make a face. “And people are going to pay money to see a seventy-year-old woman wrestle?”

“You shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of age.”

“Right, sorry.” Myron rubbed his eyes.

“And professional women’s wrestling is struggling right now, what with the competition from Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake. They need to do something.”

“And grappling old ladies is the answer?”

“I think they’re aiming more for nostalgia.”

“A chance to cheer on the wrestler of your youth?”

“Didn’t you go see Steely Dan in concert a couple of years ago?”

“That’s different, don’t you think?”

She shrugged. “Both past their prime. Both mining more on what you remember than what you see or hear.”

It made sense. Scary sense maybe. But sense. “How about you?” Myron asked.

“What about me?”

“Didn’t they want Little Pocahontas to return?”

“Yep.”

“Were you tempted?”

“To what? Return to the ring?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, sure,” Esperanza said. “I busted my shapely ass working full-time while getting my law degree, so I could once again don a suede bikini and grope aging nymphs in front of drooling trailer trash.” She paused. “Still, it is a step above being a sports agent.”

“Ha-ha.” Myron walked over to Big Cyndi’s desk. There was an envelope with his name scrawled across the top in glow-in-the-dark orange.

“She wrote it in crayon?” Myron said.

“Eye shadow.”

“I see.”

“So are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Myron said.

“Bullshit,” she said. “You look like you just heard Wham split up.”

“Don’t bring that up,” Myron said. “Sometimes, late at night, I still suffer flashbacks.”

Esperanza studied his face a few more seconds. “This have something to do with your college sweetheart?”

“Sort of.”

“Oh Christ.”

“What?”

“How do I say this nicely, Myron? You are beyond moronic in the ways of women. Exhibits A and B are Jessica and Emily.”

“You don’t even know Emily.”

“I know enough,” she said. “I thought you didn’t want to talk to her.”

“I didn’t. She found me at my parents’ place.”

“She just showed up there?”

“Yep.”

“What did she want?”

He shook his head. He still wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. “Any messages?”

“Not as many as we’d like.”

“Win upstairs?”

“I think he went home already.” She picked up her coat. “I think I’ll do likewise.”

“Good night.”

“If you hear anything from Lamar—”

“I’ll call you.”

Esperanza put on her coat, flipping the glistening black flow out of the collar. Myron headed into his office and made a few phone calls, mostly of a recruiting nature. It was not going well.

Several months ago, a friend’s death had sent Myron into a tail-spin, causing him to—and we’re using complex psychiatric jargon here—wig out. Nothing overly drastic, no nervous breakdown or institutional commitment. He had instead fled to a deserted Caribbean island with Terese Collins, a beautiful TV anchorwoman he didn’t know. He had told no one—not Win, not Esperanza, not even Mom and Dad—where he was going or when he’d be back.

As Win put it, when he wigged out, he wigged out in style.

By the time Myron was forced to return, their clients were scattering into the night like kitchen help during an immigration bust. Now Myron and Esperanza were back, attempting to revive the comatose and perhaps dying MB SportsReps. This was no easy task. The competition in this business was a dozen starving lions, and Myron was one heavily limping Christian.

The MB SportsReps office was nicely situated on Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street in the Lock-Horne Building, owned by the family of Myron’s college-and-current roommate, Win. The building was in a primo midtown location and offered up some semi-dazzling views of the Manhattan skyline. Myron soaked it in for a moment and then looked down at the suits speeding below. The sight of the working ants always depressed him, a chorus of “Is That All There Is?” playing in his head.

He turned now toward his Client Wall, the one with action shots of all the athletes represented by MB SportsReps, which now looked as spotty and sparse as a bad hair transplant. He wanted to care, but unfair as it was to Esperanza, his heart wasn’t really in it. He wanted to go back, to love MB and have that old hunger, but no matter how much he tried to stoke the old fire, it wouldn’t flame up.

Emily called about an hour later.

“Dr. Singh doesn’t have office hours tomorrow,” Emily said. “But you can hook up during rounds tomorrow morning.”

“Where?”

“Babies and Children’s Hospital. It’s part of Columbia Presbyterian on 167th Street. Tenth floor, south.”

“What time?”

“Rounds start at eight,” Emily said.

“Okay.”

Brief silence.

“You okay, Myron?”

“I want to see him.”

It took her a few seconds. “Like I said before, I can’t stop you. But sleep on it, okay?”

“I just want to see him,” Myron said. “I won’t say anything. Not yet, at least.”

“Can we talk about this tomorrow?” Emily asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

She hesitated again. “Do you have Web access, Myron?”

“Yes.”

“We have a private URL.”

“What?”

“A private Web address. I take photos with the digital camera and post them there. For my parents. They moved to Miami last year. They check it out every week. Get to see new pictures of the grandkids. So if you want to see what Jeremy looks like …”

“What’s the address?”

She gave it to him and Myron typed it in. He hung up before hitting the return button. The images came up slowly. He drummed his fingers on the desk. On top of the screen was a banner saying HI, NANA AND POP-POP. Myron thought about his parents and shook it off.

There were four photographs of Jeremy and Sara. Myron swallowed. He placed the arrow on Jeremy’s image and clicked the mouse, zooming in closer, enlarging the boy’s face. He tried to keep his breathing steady. He stared at the boy’s face for a long time without really registering anything. Eventually his vision blurred, his own face reflecting on the monitor over the boy’s, blending the images together, creating a visual echo of he knew not what.

5

Myron heard the cries of ecstasy through the door.

Win—real name: Windsor Horne Lockwood III—was letting Myron temporarily crash at his apartment in the Dakota on Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. The Dakota was an old New York landmark whose rich and lush history had been totally eclipsed by the murder of John Lennon twenty-some-odd years ago. Entering meant crossing over the spot where Lennon had bled to death, the feeling not unlike trampling over a grave. Myron was finally getting used to it.

From the outside, the Dakota was beautiful and dark and resembled a haunted house on steroids. Most apartments, including Win’s, had more square footage than a European principality. Last year, after a lifetime of living in Mom and Dad’s suburban sprawl, Myron had finally moved out of the basement and into a SoHo loft with his ladylove, Jessica. It was a huge step, the first sign that after more than a decade, Jessica was ready to—gasp!—commit. So the two lovers clasped hands and took the live-together plunge. And like so many plunges in life, it ended in an ugly splat.

More cries of ecstasy.

Myron pressed his ear against the door. Cries, yes, and a soundtrack. Not live action, he decided. He used his key and pushed open the door. The cries were coming from the TV room. Win never used that room for, uh, filming. Myron sighed and stepped through the portal.

Win wore his casual WASP uniform: khakis, shirt with a color so loud you couldn’t look at it straight on except through a pinhole, loafers, no socks. His blond locks had been parted with the precision of old ladies dividing up a lunch check; his skin was the color of white china with dabs of golf-ruddy red on both cheeks. He sat yoga-lotus-style, his legs pretzeled to a point man was never supposed to achieve. His index fingers and thumbs formed two circles, the hands resting against the knees. Yuppie Zen. Old World European clashing heads with Ancient Oriental. The sweet smell of Main Line mixed with the heavy Asian incense.

Win breathed in for a twenty count, held it, breathed out for a twenty count. He was meditating, of course, but with a Win-like twist. He did not, for example, listen to soothing nature sounds or chimes; no, he preferred meditating to the sound tracks of, uh, skin flicks from the seventies, which basically sounded like a bad Jimi Hendrix impersonator making wah-wah-wah noises on an electric kazoo. Just listening to it was enough to make you rush out for a shot of antibiotics.

Win did not close his eyes either. He did not visualize a deer sipping water by a lapping stream or a gentle waterfall against green foliage or any of that. His gaze remained fixed on the television screen; more specifically, on homemade videotapes of himself and a potpourri of females in the throes of passion.

Myron stepped fully into the room. Win turned one of his finger-Os into a flat-palm stop sign, then lifted the index finger up to indicate he wanted another moment. Myron risked a glance at the screen, saw the writhing flesh, turned away.

A few seconds later, Win said, “Hello.”

“I’d like my disgust noted for the record,” Myron said.

“So noted.”

Win moved fluidly from the lotus position to a full stand. He popped out the tape and put it in a box. The box was labeled Anon 11. Anon, Myron knew, stood for Anonymous. It meant Win had either forgotten her name or never learned it.

“I can’t believe you still do this,” Myron said.

“Are we moralizing again?” Win asked with a smile. “How nice for us.”

“Let me ask you something.”

“Oh, please do.”

“Something I always wanted to know.”

“My ears are all atwitter.”

“Putting aside my repugnancy for a moment—”

“Not on my account,” Win said. “I so enjoy when you’re superior.”

“You claim this”—Myron motioned vaguely at the videotape and then the TV screen—“relaxes you.”

“Yes.”

“But doesn’t it also … I mean, sick as it is … doesn’t it also arouse you?”

“Not at all,” Win replied.

“That’s the part I don’t understand.”

“Viewing the act does not arouse me,” Win explained. “Thinking about the act does not arouse me. Videos, dirty magazines, Penthouse Forum, cyber-porn—none of them arouse me. For me, there is no substitute for the real thing. A partner must be present. The rest has the same effect as tickling myself. It’s why I never masturbate.”

Myron said nothing.

“Problem?” Win asked.

“I’m just wondering what possessed me to ask,” Myron said.

Win opened a Ming dynasty cabinet that had been converted into a small fridge and tossed Myron a Yoo-Hoo. He poured himself a snifter of cognac. The room was lush antiques and rich tapestries and Oriental carpets and busts of men with long, curly hair. If not for the state-of-the-art home entertainment system, the room could have been something you’d stumble across on a tour of a Medici palace.

They grabbed their usual seats.

Win said, “You look troubled.”

“I have a case for us.”

“Ah.”

“I know I said we weren’t going to do this anymore. But this is sort of a special circumstance.”

“I see,” Win said.

“Do you remember Emily?”

Win did that swirl thing with his snifter. “College girlfriend. Used to make monkey noises during sex. Dumped you in the beginning of our senior year. Married your archenemy Greg Downing. Dumped him too. Probably still makes monkey noises.”

“She has a son,” Myron said. “He’s sick.” He quickly explained the situation, leaving out the part about possibly being the kid’s father. If he couldn’t talk about it with Esperanza, there was no way he could raise the subject with Win.

When he finished, Win said, “It shouldn’t be too difficult. You’re going to talk to the doctor tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Find out what you can about who handles the records.”

Win picked up the remote and flicked on the television. He flipped the channels because there were a lot of commercials on and because he was male. He stopped at CNN. Terese Collins was anchoring the news.

“Is the lovely Ms. Collins visiting us tomorrow?” Win asked.

Myron nodded. “Her flight comes in at ten.”

“She’s been visiting quite a bit.”

“Yep.”

“Are you two”—Win crinkled his face as if someone had just flashed him a particularly nasty case of jock rot—“getting serious?”

Myron looked at Terese on the screen. “Still too new,” he said.

There was an All in the Family marathon on cable, so Win flipped to it. They ordered in some Chinese food and watched two episodes. Myron tried to get lost in the bliss of Archie and Edith, but it wasn’t happening. His thoughts naturally kept returning to Jeremy. He managed to deflect the paternity issue, concentrating, as Emily had asked, on the disease and task at hand. Fanconi anemia. That was what she said the boy had. Myron wondered if they had anything about it on the Web.

“I’ll be back in a little while,” Myron said.

Win looked at him. “The Stretch Cunningham funeral episode is up next.”

“I want to check something on the Web.”

“The episode where Archie gives the eulogy.”

“I know.”

“Where he comments that he never thought Stretch Cunningham was Jewish because of the ‘ham’ in his last name.”

“I know the episode, Win.”

“And you’re willing to miss it for the sake of the Web?”

“You have it on tape.”

“That’s not the point.”

The two men looked at each other, comfortable in the silence. After some time passed, Win said, “Tell me.”

He barely hesitated. “Emily said I’m the boy’s father.”

Win nodded and said, “Ah.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

Win used the chopsticks to grab another shrimp. “You believe her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, it’s a hell of a thing to lie about it.”

“But Emily is good at lying, Myron. She’s always lied to you. She lied to you in college. She lied to you when Greg disappeared. She lied in court about Greg’s behavior with the children. She betrayed Greg the night before their wedding by sleeping with you. And, if you will, if she is telling the truth now, she lied to you for the better part of thirteen years.”

Myron thought about it. “I think she’s telling the truth about this.”

“You think, Myron.”

“I’m going to take a blood test.”

Win shrugged. “If you must.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll let the statement speak for itself.”

Myron made a face. “Didn’t you just say I should find out for sure?”

“Not at all,” Win said. “I was merely pointing out the obvious. I didn’t say it made a difference.”

Myron thought about it. “You’re confusing me.”

“Simply put,” Win said, “so what if you are the boy’s biological father? What difference does it make?”

“Come on, Win. Not even you can be that cold.”

“Quite the opposite. As strange as this might sound, I am using my heart on this one.”

“How do you figure?”

Win swirled the liquid again, studied the amber, took a sip. It colored his cheeks a bit. “Again I’ll put it simply: No matter what a blood test might indicate, you are not Jeremy Downing’s father. Greg is. You may be a sperm donor. You may be an accident of lust and biology. You may have provided a simple microscopic cell structure that combined with one slightly more complex. But you are not this boy’s father.”

“It’s not that simple, Win.”

“It is that simple, my friend. The fact that you insipidly choose to confuse the issue does not change the fact. I’ll demonstrate, if you’d like.”

“I’m listening.”

“You love your father, correct?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“I do,” Win said. “But what makes him your father? The fact that he once grunted on top of Mommy after a few drinks—or the way he has cared for you and loved you for the past thirty-five years?”

Myron looked down at the can of Yoo-Hoo.

“You owe this boy nothing,” Win continued, “and equally important, he owes you nothing. We will try to save his life, if that is what you wish, but that should be where it ends.”

Myron thought about it. The only thing scarier than Win irrational was when Win made sense. “Maybe you’re right.”

“But you still don’t think it’s that simple.”

“I don’t know.”

On the television, Archie approached the pulpit, a yarmulke on his head. “It’s a start,” Win said.

6

Myron mixed childlike Froot Loops and very adult All-Bran into a bowl and poured on skim milk. For those not reading the Cliffs Notes, this act denotes that there is still a great deal of boy in the man. Heavy symbolism. How poignant.

The Number 1 train took Myron to a platform on 168th Street so far below ground that commuters had to take a urine-encapsulated elevator to reach the surface. The elevator was big and dark and shaky and brought on images of a PBS documentary on coal mining.

Located in Washington Heights, a quick stone’s toss from Harlem and directly across Broadway from the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was gunned down, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center’s famed pediatric building was called Babies and Children’s Hospital. It used to be called just Babies Hospital, but a committee of learned medical experts was formed and after hours of intense study, they decided to change the name from Babies Hospital to Babies and Children’s Hospital. Moral of the story: Committees are really, really important.

But the name, while not exactly Madison Avenue, does adequately reflect the reality of the situation—the hospital is strictly pediatric and deliveries, a well-worn twelve-floor edifice with eleven of them devoted to sick children. There was something very wrong with that, but probably nothing beyond the theologically obvious.

Myron stopped before the entranceway and looked up at the pollution-brown brick. Lots of misery in the city and much of it ended up here. He ducked inside and checked in at the security desk. He gave his name to a guard. The guard tossed him a pass, almost glancing up from his TV Guide in the process. Myron waited a long time for the elevator, reading the Patient’s Bill of Rights, which was printed in both English and Spanish. There was a sign for the Sol Goldman Heart Center right next to a sign for the hospital’s Burger King. Mixed messages or assuring future business—Myron wasn’t sure which.

The elevator opened on the tenth floor. Directly in front of him, there was a rainbow-hued “Save the Rain Forest” mural, painted, according to the sign, by the “pediatric patients” of the hospital. Save the Rain Forest. Oh, like these kids didn’t have enough on their plate, right?

Myron asked a nurse where he might find Dr. Singh. The nurse pointed to a woman leading a dozen interns through the corridor. Myron was a little surprised to see that Dr. Singh was of the female persuasion, mostly because he had somehow imagined her being a man. Terribly sexist, but there you go.

Dr. Singh was, as her name strongly implied, Indian, from-India Indian as opposed to Native American Indian. Mid-thirties, he figured, her hair a lighter brown than what he was used to seeing on India Indians. She wore a white doctor coat, of course. So did all the interns, most of them appearing to be about fourteen years of age, their white coats more like smocks, like they were about to finger-paint or maybe dissect a frog in a junior high biology class. Some wore grave expressions that were almost laughable on their cherubic faces, but most emanated that medical-intern exhaustion from too many nights on call.

Only two of the interns were men—boys really—both sporting blue jeans, colorful ties, and white sneakers like waiters at Bennigan’s. The women—to call them girls would use up Myron’s anti-PC quota for the week—favored hospital scrubs. So young. Babies taking care of babies.

Myron followed the group at a semi-discreet distance. Every once in a while he glanced in a room and immediately regretted it. The corridor walls were festive and brightly painted, jammed with Disney/Nick Junior/PBS kiddie images and collages and mobiles, but Myron only saw black. A floor filled with dying children. Bald little boys and girls in pain, their veins blackened by toxins and poisons. Most of the children looked so calm and unafraid and unnaturally brave. If you wanted to see the stark terror, you had to look in the eyes of the parents, as though Mom and Dad were sucking the horror toward them, taking it on so that their child wouldn’t have to.

“Mr. Bolitar?”

Dr. Singh met his eye and held out her hand. “I’m Karen Singh.”

Myron almost asked her how she did this, how she stayed on this floor day in and day out, watching children die. But he didn’t. They exchanged the usual pleasantries. Myron had expected an Indian accent, but the only thing he picked up was a little Bronx.

“We can talk in here,” she said.

She pushed open one of the superheavy, superwide doors endemic to hospitals and nursing homes, and they stepped into an empty room with stripped beds. The barrenness ignited Myron’s imagination. He could almost see a loved one rushing into the hospital, repeatedly pushing the elevator call button, diving inside, pushing more buttons, sprinting down the corridor into this silent room, the bed being stripped by a nurse, then the sudden cry of anguish.…

Myron shook his head. He watched too much TV.

Karen Singh sat on the corner of the mattress, and Myron studied her face for a moment. She had long sharp features. Everything pointed down—her nose, her chin, her eyebrows. Sort of harsh.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I don’t mean to.”

She pointed to her forehead. “You were maybe expecting a dot?”

“Er, no.”

“Very good, then let’s get to it, shall we?”

“Okay.”

“Mrs. Downing wants me to tell you whatever you want to know.”

“I appreciate your taking the time.”

“Are you a private investigator?” she asked.

“More like a family friend.”

“Did you play basketball with Greg Downing?”

Myron was always surprised by the memory of the public. After all these years, people could still recall his big games, his big shots, sometimes with more clarity than Myron could. “You’re a fan?”

“Nope,” she said. “Can’t stand sports actually.”

“So how did you—”

“Just a deduction. You’re tall and about the right age and you said you were a family friend. So …” She shrugged.

“Nice deduction.”

“It’s what we do here when you think about it. Deduce. Some diagnoses are easy. Others must be deduced from the evidence. You ever read Sherlock Holmes?”

“Sure.”

“Sherlock said that you should never theorize before you have facts—because then you twist facts to suit theories rather than twisting theories to suit facts. If you see a misdiagnosis, nine times out of ten they ignored Sherlock’s axiom.”

“Did that happen with Jeremy Downing?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it did.”

Somewhere down the hall, a machine started beeping. The sound hit the nerves like a police taser.

“So his first doctor screwed up?”

“I won’t get into that. But Fanconi anemia isn’t common. And because it looks like other things, it’s often misdiagnosed.”

“So tell me about Jeremy.”

“What’s to tell? He has it. Fanconi anemia, that is. In simple terms, his bone marrow is corrupted.”

“Corrupted?”

“In layman’s term, it’s shit. It makes him susceptible to a host of infections and even cancers. It commonly turns into AML.” She saw the puzzled look on his face and added, “That’s acute myelogenous leukemia.”

“But you can cure him?”

“ ‘Cure’ is an optimistic word,” she said. “But with a bone marrow transplant and treatments with a new flu-darabine compound, yes, I believe his prognosis is excellent.”

“Fluda-what?”

“Not important. We need a bone marrow donor that matches Jeremy. That’s what counts here.”

“And you don’t have one.”

Dr. Singh shifted on the mattress. “That’s correct.”

Myron felt the resistance. He decided to back off, test another flank. “Could you take me through the transplant process?”

“Step by step?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

She shrugged. “First step: find a donor.”

“How do you go about that?”

“You try family members, of course. Siblings have the best chance of matching. Then parents. Then people of similar background.”

“When you say people of similar background—”

“Blacks with blacks, Jews with Jews, Latino descent with Latino descent. You’ll see that quite often in marrow drives. If the patient is, for example, a Hasidic Jew, the donation drives will take place within their shuls. Mixed blood is usually the hardest to match.”

“And Jeremy’s blood or whatever you need to match—it’s fairly rare?”

“Yes.”

Emily and Greg were both of Irish descent. Myron’s family came from the usual potpourri of old Russia and Poland and even a little Palestine thrown in. Mixed blood. He thought about the paternity implications.

“So after you exhausted the family, how do you search for the match?”

“You go to the national registry.”

“Where are they located?”

“In Washington. You listed?”

Myron nodded.

“They keep computer records there. We search for a preliminary match in their banks.”

“Okay, now assuming you find a match in the computer—”

“A preliminary match,” she corrected. “The local center calls the potential donor and asks them to come in. They run a battery of tests. But the odds of matching are still fairly slim.”

Myron could see that Karen Singh was relaxing, comfortable with the familiar subject matter, which was exactly what he wanted. Interrogations are a funny thing. Sometimes you go for the full frontal attack, and sometimes you sidle up, friendly-like, and sneak in the back. Win put it simpler: Sometimes you get more ants with honey, but you should always pack a can of Raid.

“Let’s suppose you find a full-fledged donor,” Myron said. “What then?”

“The center acquires the donor’s permission.”

“When you say ‘center,’ do you mean the national registry in Washington?”

“No, I mean the local center. Do you have your donor card in your wallet?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see it.”

Myron took out his wallet, flipped through about a dozen supermarket discount cards, three video club memberships, a couple of those buy-a-hundred-coffees-get-ten-cents-off-the-hundredth coupon, that sort of thing. He found the donor card and handed it to her.

“See here,” she said, pointing to the back. “Your local center is in East Orange, New Jersey.”

“So if I was a preliminary match, the East Orange center would call me?”

“Yes.”

“And if I ended up being a full match?”

“You’d sign some papers and donate marrow.”

“Is that like donating blood?”

Karen Singh handed the card back to him and shifted again. “Harvesting bone marrow is a more invasive procedure.”

Invasive. Every profession has its own buzzwords. “How so?”

“For one thing, you have to be put under.”

“Anesthesia?”

“Yes.”

“And then what do they do?”

“A doctor sticks a needle through the bone and sucks the marrow out with a syringe.”

Myron said, “Eeuw.”

“As I just explained, you’re not awake during the procedure.”

“Still,” Myron said, “it sounds much more complicated than giving blood.”

“It is,” she said. “But the procedure is safe and relatively painless.”

“But people must balk. I mean, most probably signed up the same way I did: They had a friend who was sick and ran a drive. For someone you know and care about, sure, you’re willing to make a sacrifice. But for a stranger?”

Karen Singh’s eyes found his and settled in hard. “You are saving a life, Mr. Bolitar. Think about that. How many opportunities do you get to save a fellow human being’s life?”

He had hit a nerve. Good. “Are you saying people don’t balk?”

“I’m not saying it never happens,” she said, “but most people do the right thing.”

“Does the donor get to meet the person he or she is saving?”

“No. It’s totally anonymous. Confidentiality is very important here. Everything is held in the utmost secrecy.”

They were getting to it now, and Myron could sense that her defenses were starting to slide back up like a car window. He decided to pull back again, let her resettle on comfy ground. “What’s the patient going through during all this?” he asked.

“At what point?”

“While the marrow is being harvested. How do you prep the patient?” Prep. Myron had said “prep.” Like a real doctor. Who said watching St. Elsewhere was a waste of time?

“It depends on what you’re treating,” Dr. Singh said. “But for most diseases, the recipient goes through about a week’s worth of chemotherapy.”

Chemotherapy. One of those words that hush a room like a nun’s scowl. “They get chemo before the transplant?”

“Yes.”

“I would think that would weaken them,” Myron said.

“To some degree, yes.”

“Why would you do it, then?”

“You have to. You’re giving the recipient new bone marrow. Before you do that, you have to kill the old marrow. With leukemia, for example, the amount of chemo is high because you have to kill off all the living marrow. In the case of Fanconi anemia, you can be less aggressive because the marrow is already very weak.”

“So you kill off all the bone marrow?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Dr. Singh gave him the steady eyes again. “This is a dangerous procedure, Mr. Bolitar. You are in effect replacing a person’s bone marrow.”

“And then?”

“And then the patient is infused with new marrow through an IV. He or she is kept isolated in a sterile environment for the first two weeks.”

“Quarantined?”

“In effect. Do you remember the old TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble?”

“Who doesn’t?”

Dr. Singh smiled.

“Is that what the patient lives in?” Myron asked.

“A bubble chamber of sorts, yes.”

“I had no idea,” Myron said. “And this works?”

“Rejection is always a possibility, of course. But our success rate is quite high. In the case of Jeremy Downing, he can live a normal, active life with the transplant.”

“And without it?”

“We can keep treating him with male hormones and growth factors, but his premature death is inevitable.”

Silence. Except for that steady mechanical beep coming from down the hall.

Myron cleared his throat. “When you said that everything involving the donor is confidential—”

“I meant totally.”

Enough wading. “How does that sit with you, Dr. Singh?”

“What do you mean?”

“The national registry located a donor who matched Jeremy, didn’t they?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“So what happened?”

She tapped her chin with her index finger. “May I speak candidly?”

“Please.”

“I believe in the need for secrecy and confidentiality. Most people don’t understand how easy, painless, and important it is to put their name in the registry. All they have to do is give a little blood. Just a little tube of the stuff, less than you would for any blood donation. Do that simple act—and you can save a life. Do you understand the significance of that?”

“I think so.”

“We in the medical community must do all we can to encourage people to join the bone marrow registry. Education, of course, is important. So, too, is confidentiality. It has to be honored. The donors have to trust us.”

She stopped, crossed her legs, leaned back on her hands. “But in this case, something of a quandary has developed. The importance of confidentiality is bumping up against the welfare of my patient. For me, the quandary is easy to resolve. The Hippocratic oath trumps all. I’m not a lawyer or a priest. My priority must be to save the life, not protect confidences. My guess is that I’m not the only doctor that feels that way.

Perhaps that’s why we have no contact with the donors. The blood center—in your case, the one in East Orange—does everything. They harvest the marrow and ship it to us.”

“Are you saying that you don’t know who the donor is?”

“That’s right.”

“Or if it’s a he or she or where they live or anything?”

Karen Singh nodded. “I can only tell you that the national registry found a match. They called and told me so. I later received a call telling me that the donor was no longer available.”

“What does that mean?”

“My question exactly.”

“Did they give you an answer?”

“No,” she said. “And while I see things on the micro level, the national registry has to remain macro. I respect that.”

“You just gave up?”

She stiffened at his words. Her eyes went small and black. “No, Mr. Bolitar, I did not give up. I raged against the machine. But the people at the national registry are not ogres. They understand that this is a life-or-death situation. If a donor backs out, they try their best to bring them back into the fold. They do everything I would do to convince the donor to go through with it.”

“But nothing worked here?”

“That seems to be the case.”

“The donor would be told that he’s sentencing a thirteen-year-old boy to death?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

Myron threw up his hands. “So what do we conclude here, Doctor? That the donor is a selfish monster?”

Karen Singh chewed on that one for a moment. “Perhaps,” she said. “Or perhaps the answer is simpler.”

“For example?”

“For example,” she said, “maybe the center can’t find the donor.”

Hello. Myron sat up a bit. “What do you mean, ‘can’t find’?”

“I don’t know what happened here. The center won’t tell me, and that’s probably how it should be. I’m the patient’s advocate. It’s their job to deal with the donors. But I believe they were”—she stopped, searching for the right word—“perplexed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Nothing concrete. Just a feeling that this might be more than a donor with cold feet.”

“How do we find out?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do we find the donor’s name?”

“We can’t.”

“There has to be a way,” Myron said. “Play pretend with me. How could I do it?”

She shrugged. “Break into the computer system. That’s the only way I know.”

“The computer in Washington?”

“They network with the local centers. But you’d have to know codes and passwords. Maybe a good hacker could get through, I don’t know.”

Hackers, Myron knew, worked better in the movies than in real life. A few years ago, maybe—but most computer systems nowadays were secure against such invasions.

“How long do we have here, Doctor?”

“There’s no way of telling. Jeremy is reacting well to the hormones and growth factors. But it’s only a question of time.”

“So we have to find a donor.”

“Yes.” Karen Singh stopped, looked at Myron, looked away.

“Is there something else?” Myron asked.

She did not face him. “There is one other remote possibility,” she said.

“What?” Myron asked.

“Keep in mind what I said before. I’m the patient’s advocate. It’s my job to explore every possible avenue to save him.”

Her voice was funny now.

“I’m listening,” Myron said.

Karen Singh rubbed her palms on her pant legs. “If Jeremy’s biological parents were to conceive again, there is a twenty-five percent chance that the offspring would be a match.”

She looked at Myron.

“I don’t think that’s a possibility,” he said.

“Even if it’s the only way to save Jeremy’s life?”

Myron had no reply. An orderly walked by, looked in the room, mumbled an apology, left. Myron stood and thanked her.

“I’ll show you to the elevator,” Dr. Singh said.

“Thank you.”

“There’s a lab on the first floor in the Harkness Pavilion.” She handed him a slip of paper. Myron looked at it. It was an order form. “I understand you might want to take a certain confidential blood test.”

Neither of them said anything else as they walked toward the elevators. There were several children being wheeled through the corridor. Dr. Singh smiled at them, the pointed features softening into something almost celestial. Again the children looked unafraid. Myron wondered if the calmness spawned from ignorance or acceptance. He wondered if the children did not understand the gravity of what was happening to them or if they possessed a quiet clarity their parents would never know. Such philosophical queries, Myron knew, were best left to those more learned. But maybe the answer was simpler than he imagined: The children’s suffering would be relatively short; their parents’ would be eternal.

When they reached the elevator, Myron said, “How do you do it?”

She knew what he meant. “I could say something fancy about finding solace in helping, but the truth is, I block and I compartmentalize. It’s the only way.”

The elevator door opened, but before Myron could move he heard a familiar voice say, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Greg Downing stepped toward him.

7

Too much history. Again. The last time the two men had been in the same room, Myron was straddled over Greg’s chest, trying to kill him, punching him repeatedly in the face until Win—Win of all people—pulled him off. Three years ago. Myron hadn’t seen him since, except on highlight films during the evening news.

Greg Downing glared at Myron, then at Karen Singh, then back at Myron as though he expected him to have evaporated by then.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked again.

Greg was clad in a flannel shirt over some waffle knit you’d buy at Baby Gap, faded jeans, and preternaturally scuffed work boots. The Suburban Lumberjack.

Something sparked hot in Myron’s chest, ignited, took flight.

From the day they first battled for a rebound in the sixth grade, Greg and Myron were the pure definition of cross-town rivals. In high school, where their competitive cup truly runneth over, Greg and Myron met up eight times, splitting the games evenly. Rumor had it that there was bad blood between the budding superstars, but that was just standard sports hyperbole. The truth was, Myron barely knew Greg off the court. They were killer competitors, sure, willing to do just about anything to win, but once the final buzzer sounded, the two boys shook hands and the rivalry hibernated until the next opening tap.

Or so Myron had always thought.

When he accepted a scholarship at Duke and Greg chose the University of North Carolina, basketball fans rejoiced. Their seemingly innocent rivalry was ready for ACC prime time. Myron and Greg did not disappoint. The Duke-UNC matchups drew fantastic television ratings, no game decided by more than three points. Both had spectacular college careers. Both were named first-team All-Americans. Both were on covers of Sports Illustrated, once even sharing it. But the rivalry stayed on the court. They would do battle until bloody, but the competition never overlapped into their personal arenas.

Until Emily.

Before the start of senior year, Myron broached the subject of marriage with Emily. The next day she came to him, held his hands, looked into his eyes, and said, “I’m not sure I love you.” Bam, like that. He still wondered what happened. Too much too soon, he guessed. A need to spread the proverbial wings a bit, play the proverbial field, what have you. Time passed. Three months, by Myron’s count. Then Emily took up with Greg. Myron publicly shrugged it off—even when Greg and Emily got engaged just before graduation. The NBA draft took place right about then too. Both went in the first round, though Greg was surprisingly picked before Myron.

That was when it all unraveled.

The end result?

Almost a decade and a half later, Greg Downing was winding down an All-Star pro basketball career. People cheered him. He made millions and was famous. He played the game he loved. For Myron, his lifelong dream had ended before it had begun. During his first preseason game with the Celtics, Big Burt Wesson had slammed into him, sandwiching Myron’s knee between himself and another player. There was a snap, crackle, pop—and then a hot, ripping pain, as though metal talons were shredding his kneecap into thin strips.

His knee never recovered.

A freak accident. Or so everyone thought. Including Myron. For more than ten years, he’d believed that the injury was merely a fluke, the fickle work of the Fates. But now he knew better. Now he knew the man who stood in front of him had been the cause. Now he knew that their seemingly innocent childhood rivalry had grown monstrous, had feasted upon his dream, had slaughtered Greg and Emily’s marriage, and had in all probability led to the birth of Jeremy Downing.

He felt his hands tighten into fists. “I was just leaving.”

Greg put a hand on Myron’s chest. “I asked you a question.”

Myron stared at the hand. “One good thing,” he said.

“What?”

“No transportation time,” Myron said. “We’re already at the hospital.”

Greg sneered. “You sucker-punched me last time.”

“You want to go again?”

“Pardon me,” Karen Singh said. “But are you guys for real?”

Greg kept glaring at Myron.

“Stop it,” Myron said, “or I’ll wet myself.”

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

“And you’re not on my Christmas card list either, Greggy-poo.” Greggy-poo. Very mature.

Greg leaned closer. “You know what I’d like to do to you, Bolitar?”

“Kiss me on the lips? Buy me flowers?”

“Flowers for your grave maybe.”

Myron nodded. “Good one, Greg. I mean, ouch, I’m wounded.”

Karen Singh said, “Just because this is a children’s floor doesn’t mean you two have to act like ones.”

Greg took a step back, his eyes never leaving Myron. “Emily,” he spat suddenly. “She called you, right?”

“I have nothing to say to you, Greg.”

“She asked you to find the donor. Like you found me.”

“You always were a bright boy.”

“I’m calling a press conference today. I’m going to make a direct appeal to the donor. Offer a reward.”

“Good.”

“So we don’t need you, Bolitar.”

Myron looked at Greg, and for a moment they were back on the court, faces drenched with sweat, the crowd cheering, the clock ticking down, the ball bouncing. Nirvana. Gone forever. Snatched away by Greg. And by Emily. And maybe most of all, when he looked at it honestly, by Myron’s own stupidity.

“I’ve got to go,” Myron said.

Greg took a step back. Myron moved past him and pressed the elevator button.

“Hey, Bolitar.”

He faced Greg.

“I came here to talk to the doc about my son,” Greg said, “not rehash our past.”

Myron said nothing. He turned back to the elevator.

“You think you can help save my boy?” Greg asked.

Myron’s mouth went dry. “I don’t know.”

The elevator dinged and opened. There were no good-byes, no nods, no further communication of any sort. Myron stepped inside and let the doors close. When he reached the first level, he went to the lab. He rolled up his sleeve. A woman drew his blood, untied the tourniquet, and said, “Your doctor will be in touch with you about the results.”

8

Win was bored, so he drove Myron to the airport to pick up Terese. His foot pushed down on the gas pedal as though it had offended him. The Jag flew. As was his custom when driving with Win, Myron kept his eyes averted.

“It would appear,” Win began, “that our best option would be to locate a satellite marrow clinic in a somewhat remote area. Upstate maybe or in western Jersey. We would then break in at night with a computer expert.”

“Won’t work,” Myron said.

“Por qua?”

“The Washington center shuts down the computer network at six o’clock. Even if we were to break in, we couldn’t bring up the mainframe.”

Win said, “Hmm.”

“Don’t fret,” Myron said. “I have a plan.”

“When you talk like that,” Win said, “my nipples harden.”

“I thought only the real thing aroused you.”

“This isn’t the real thing?”

They parked in JFK Airport’s short-term parking and reached the Continental Airlines gate ten minutes before the flight touched down. When the passengers began to appear, Win said, “I’ll stand over in the corner.”

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t want to cast a shadow on your greeting,” he said. “And standing over there affords me a better view of Ms. Collins’s derriere.”

Ah, Win.

Two minutes later, Terese Collins—to use a purely transportational term—disembarked. She was casually decked out in a white blouse and green slacks. Her brown hair was up in a ponytail. People lightly elbowed one another, whispering and subtly gesturing, giving her that surreptitious glance, the one that says “I recognize you but don’t want to appear fawning.”

Terese approached Myron and offered up her breaking-to-commercial smile. It was small and tight, trying to be friendly but reminding viewers that she was telling them about war and pestilence and tragedy and that maybe a big happy smile would be somewhat obscene. They hugged a little too tightly, and Myron felt the familiar sadness overwhelm him. It happened to him every time they hugged—a sense that something inside of him was crumbling anew. He sensed that the same thing happened to her.

Win came over.

“Hello, Win,” she said.

“Hello, Terese.”

“Checking out my ass again?”

“I prefer the term ‘derriere.’ And yes.”

“Still choice?”

“Grade A.”

“Ahem,” Myron said. “Please wait for the meat inspector.”

Win and Terese looked at each other and rolled their eyes.

Myron had been wrong before. Emily was not Win’s favorite. Terese was—though it was strictly because she lived far away. “You are the pitiful, needy type who feels incomplete without a steady girlfriend,” Win had told him. “Who better than a career woman who lives a thousand miles away?”

Win headed for his Jag while they waited for her luggage. Terese watched Win walk away.

Myron said, “Is his ass better than mine?”

“No ass is better than yours,” she said.

“I know that. I was just testing you.”

Terese kept looking. “Win is an interesting fellow,” she said.

“Oh yeah,” Myron agreed.

“On the outside, he’s all cold and detached,” she said. “But underneath that—way down deep inside—he’s all cold and detached.”

“You read people well, Terese.”

Win dropped them off at the Dakota and returned to the office. When Myron and Terese got inside the apartment, she kissed him hard. Always an urgency with Terese. A desperation in their love-making. Pleasant, sure. Awesome even. But there was still the aura of sadness. The sadness didn’t go away when they made love, but for a little while it lifted like cloud cover, hovering above instead of weighing them down.

They had hooked up at a charity function a few months back, both dragged there by well-meaning friends. It was their mutual misery that drew them, as though it were one of those psychic crowns only they could spot on each other. They met and ran away that very night to the Caribbean on a let’s-just-flee dare. For the usually predictable Myron, the spontaneous act felt surprisingly right. They spent a numbingly blissful three weeks alone on a private island, trying to stave off the flow of pain. When Myron was finally forced to return home, they’d both assumed it was over. They’d assumed wrong. At least, it appeared that way.

Myron recognized that his own healing was finally under way. He wasn’t back to full strength or normal or any of that. He doubted he ever would be. Or even wanted to be. Giant hands had twisted him and then let go, and while his world was slowly untwisting, he knew that it would never fully return to its original position.

Again with the poignant.

But whatever had happened to Terese—whatever had brought on the sadness and twisted her world, if you will—still held firm, refusing to let go.

Terese’s head lay on his chest, her arms wrapped around him. He could not see her face. She never showed him her face when they finished.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

She still hadn’t told him, and Myron rarely asked. Doing so, he knew, was breaking an unspoken though cardinal rule.

“No.”

“I’m not pushing,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that if you’re ever ready, I’m here.”

“I know,” she said.

He wanted to say something more, but she was still at a place where words were either superfluous or they stung. He stayed quiet and stroked her hair.

“This relationship,” Terese said. “It’s bizarre.”

“I guess.”

“Someone told me you’re dating Jessica Culver, the writer.”

“We broke up,” he said.

“Oh.” She did not move, still holding him a little too tightly. “Can I ask when?”

“A month before we met.”

“And how long were you two together?”

“Thirteen years, on and off.”

“I see,” she said. “Am I the recovery?”

“Am I yours?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Same answer.”

She thought about that a little. “But Jessica Culver is not the reason you ran away with me.”

He remembered the cemetery overlooking the school yard. “No,” he said, “she’s not the reason.”

Terese finally turned to him. “We have no chance. You know that, right?”

Myron said nothing.

“That’s not unusual,” she went on. “Plenty of relationships have no chance. But people stay in them because it’s fun. This isn’t fun either.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Myron. You’re a hell of a lay.”

“Could you put that in a sworn affidavit?”

She smiled but there was still no joy. “So what do we have here?”

“Truth?”

“Preferably.”

“I always overanalyze,” Myron said. “It’s my nature. I meet a woman, and I immediately picture the house in the burbs and the white picket fence and the two-point-five kids. But for once I’m not doing that. I’m just letting it happen. So, to answer your question, I don’t know. And I’m not sure I care.”

She lowered her head. “You realize that I’m pretty damaged.”

“I guess.”

“I have more baggage than most.”

“We all have baggage,” Myron said. “The question is, does your baggage go with mine?”

“Who said that?”

“I’m paraphrasing from a Broadway musical.”

“Which one?”

“Rent.”

She frowned. “I don’t like musicals.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Myron said.

“You do?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You’re in your mid-thirties, single, sensitive, and you like show tunes,” she said. “If you were a better dresser, I’d say you were gay.”

She pressed a hard, quick kiss to his lips, and then they held each other a little more. Once again he wanted to ask her what had happened to her, but he wouldn’t. She would tell him one day. Or she wouldn’t. He decided to change subjects.

“I need your help with something,” Myron said.

She looked at him.

“I need to break into a bone marrow center’s computer system,” he said. “And I think you can help.”

“Me?”

“Yup.”

“You got the wrong technophobe,” she said.

“I don’t need a technophobe. I need a famous anchorwoman.”

“I see. And you’re asking for this favor postcoital?”

“Part of my plan,” Myron said. “I’ve weakened your will. You cannot refuse me.”

“Diabolical.”

“Indeed.”

“And if I refuse?”

Myron wiggled his eyebrows. “I’ll once again use my brawny body and patented lovemaking technique to make you succumb.”

“ ‘Succumb,’ ” she repeated, pulling him closer. “Is that one word or two?”

9

It took a shockingly short time to set up. Myron told Terese his plan. She listened without interruption. When he finished, she started placing calls. She never asked why he was looking for the donor or how he and the donor were connected. The unspoken rule again, he guessed.

Within the hour a news van complete with a handheld television camera was delivered to the Dakota. The director of the Bergen County Blood Center—a nearby New Jersey bone marrow center—had agreed to drop everything for an immediate interview with Terese Collins, anchorwoman extraordinaire. The power of the idiot box.

They took the Harlem River Drive up to the George Washington Bridge, crossing the Hudson and exiting onto Jones Road in Englewood, New Jersey. After they parked, Myron hoisted up the camera. Heavier than he thought. Terese showed him how to hold it, how to lean it against his shoulder and aim. There was something bazooka-like about the whole thing.

“Do you think I should wear a disguise?” Myron asked.

“Why?”

“People still recognize me from my playing days.”

She made a face.

“I’m rather famous in certain circles.”

“Get real, Myron. You’re an ex-jock. If someone by some miracle recognizes you, they’ll think you got lucky and didn’t end up in a gutter like most ex-jocks.”

He thought about it. “Fair enough.”

“One other thing,” she said. “And this will be nearly impossible for you.”

“What?”

“You have to keep your big mouth shut,” Terese said.

“Egads.”

“You’re just the cameraman here.”

“We prefer to be called ‘photographic artists.’ ”

“Just play your part. Trust me to handle him.”

“Can I at least use a pseudonym?” He put the camera to his eye. “You can call me Lens. Or Scoop.”

“How about Bozo? No, wait, that would be a synonym.”

Everyone’s a wise guy.

When they entered the clinic’s lobby, people turned toward Terese and did that surreptitious stare again. Myron realized that today was the first time he had been with her in public. He had never quite thought about how famous she was.

“You get these stares wherever you go?” he whispered.

“Pretty much.”

“Does it bother you?”

She shook her head. “That’s horseshit.”

“What is?”

“Celebrities who complain about people staring at them. Want to really piss off a celebrity? Let him go someplace and not be recognized.”

Myron smiled. “You’re so self-realized.”

“That a new way of saying cynical?”

The receptionist said, “Mr. Englehardt will see you now.”

She led them down a corridor with thin plaster walls and a bad paint job. Englehardt sat behind a plastic-wood desk. He was probably late twenties with a slight build and a chin weaker than machine-dispensed coffee.

Myron quickly noted the computer setup. Two of them. One on his desk. One on the credenza. Hmm.

Englehardt jumped up as though he’d just been passed a note that his chair had cooties. His eyes were wide and fixed on Terese. Myron was ignored and felt like, well, the cameraman. Terese smiled brightly at Englehardt, and he was lost.

“I’m Terese Collins,” she said, extending her hand. Englehardt did everything but take a knee and kiss it. “This is my cameraman, Malachy Throne.”

Myron sort of smiled. After the Broadway-musical debacle, he had worried. But Malachy Throne? Genius. Pure genius.

They all exchanged quick pleasantries. Englehardt kept touching his hair, trying very hard to look subtle about it and not like he was prepping for the camera. Not happening, bub. Finally Terese signaled that they were ready to begin.

“Where would you like me to sit?” Englehardt asked.

“Behind the desk would be nice,” she said. “Don’t you agree, Malachy?”

“Behind the desk,” Myron said. “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”

The interview began. Terese kept her gaze on her subject; Englehardt, trapped in the beam, could look nowhere else. Myron put his eye to the camera. The consummate professional. Very Richard Avedon.

Terese asked Englehardt how he’d gotten started in this business, his background, general crap, relaxing him, putting him on that comfy ground, not all that different from the technique Myron had used with Dr. Singh. She was in on-air mode now. Her voice was different, her eyes steadier.

“So the national registry in Washington keeps track of all donors?” Terese asked.

“That’s correct.”

“But you can access the records?”

Englehardt tapped the computer on his desk. The screen faced him, the back of the monitor toward them. Okay, Myron thought, so it was the one on his desk. That would make it more difficult, but not impossible.

Terese looked at Myron. “Why don’t you get a back shot, Malachy?” Then turning to Englehardt, “If that’s okay with you.”

“No problem at all,” Englehardt said.

Myron started moving into position. The monitor was off. No surprise.

Terese continued to hold Englehardt’s gaze. “Does everyone in the office have access to the national registry’s computer?”

Englehardt shook his head firmly. “I’m the only one.”

“Why’s that?”

“The information is confidential. We don’t breach the secrecy under any circumstance.”

“I see,” she said. Myron was in place now. “But what’s to stop someone from coming in here when you’re not around?”

“I always lock my office door,” Englehardt said, up on his haunches and eager to please. “And you can only access the network with a password.”

“You’re the only one who knows the password?”

Englehardt tried not to preen, but he didn’t try too hard. “That’s correct.”

Ever see those hidden-camera stories on Dateline or 20/20? They always shoot from some strange angle and in black-and-white. Truth is, it’s easy for any layperson to buy one and it’s even easy to get one that films in color. There are stores that sell them right in Manhattan, or you can go online and search under “spy stores.” You’ll see hidden cameras in clocks, pens, briefcases and, most common of all, smoke detectors—available to anyone with the proper buckage. Myron had one that looked like a film case. He dropped it now on the window ledge with the lens pointing toward the computer monitor.

When it was in place, Myron tapped his nose with his finger, à la Redford in The Sting. Their signal. Bolitar. Myron Bolitar. A Yoo-Hoo. Shaken not stirred. Terese picked up her cue. The smile dropped off her face like an anvil.

Englehardt looked startled. “Ms. Collins? Are you okay?”

For a moment she could not bear to face him. Then: “Mr. Englehardt,” Terese said, her voice Gulf War-grave, “I must confess something.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I am here under somewhat false pretenses.”

Englehardt looked confused. Terese was so good, Myron almost looked confused.

“I sincerely believe you are doing important work here,” she continued. “But others are not so sure.”

Englehardt’s eyes were widening. “I don’t understand.”

“I need your help, Mr. Englehardt.”

“Billy,” he corrected.

Myron made a face. Billy?

Terese didn’t miss a beat. “Someone is trying to disrupt your work, Billy.”

“My work?”

“The national registry’s work.”

“I’m still not sure what you—”

“Are you familiar with the case of Jeremy Downing?”

Englehardt shook his head. “I never know the names of patients.”

“He’s the son of Greg Downing, the basketball star.”

“Oh, wait, yes, I heard about this. His son has Fanconi anemia.”

Terese nodded. “That’s correct.”

“Isn’t Mr. Downing supposed to hold a press conference today? To track down a donor?”

“Exactly, Billy. And that’s the problem.”

“What is?”

“Mr. Downing has found the donor.”

Still confused. “That’s a problem?”

“No, of course not. If the person is the donor. And if the person is telling the truth.”

Englehardt looked at Myron. Myron shrugged and moved back to the front of the desk. He left the film case on the windowsill.

“I’m not following you, Ms. Collins.”

“Terese,” she said. “A man has come forward. He claims that he is the matching donor.”

“And you think he’s lying?”

“Let me finish. He not only claims he’s the donor, but he says that the reason he refused to donate his marrow was because of the terrible treatment he received from this center.”

Englehardt nearly tipped back. “What?”

“He claims he was treated shabbily, that your staff was rude, and that he’s even debating leveling a lawsuit.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Probably.”

“He’s lying.”

“Probably,” she said again.

“And he’ll be found out,” Englehardt continued. “They’ll test his blood and see he’s a phony.”

“But when, Billy?”

“What?”

“When will they do that? A day from now? A week from now? A month? But by then the damage is done. He’s going to appear at the press conference today with Greg Downing. The media will be there in force. Even if it ends up being false, no one remembers the retraction. They just remember the allegation.”

Englehardt sat back. “Jesus.”

“Let me be frank, Billy. A number of my colleagues believe him. I don’t. I smell a publicity hound. I’m having some of my best investigators dig into this man’s past. So far they’ve come up with nothing, and time is running short.”

“So what can I do?”

“I need to know it’s not true. I can’t stop it merely because I believe it’s not true. I have to know for certain.”

“How?”

Terese chewed on her lower lip. Deep thought. “Your computer network.”

Englehardt shook his head. “The information in here is confidential. I explained that before. I can’t tell you—”

“I don’t need to know the name of the donor.” She leaned forward. Myron moved as far away from the action as possible, trying to be no threat whatsoever. “I need to know what’s not the name.”

Englehardt looked hesistant.

“I’m sitting over here,” she said. “I can’t see the monitor. Malachy is by the door.” She turned to Myron. “Your camera is off, Malachy?”

“Yes, Terese,” Myron said. He put it down for emphasis.

“So here is what I suggest,” Terese said. “You look up Jeremy Downing in your computer. It will list a donor. I give you a name. You tell me if the name matches. Simple?”

Englehardt still looked hesitant.

“You wouldn’t be violating anyone’s confidentiality,” she said. “We can’t see your screen. We can even leave the room while you look it up, if you’d like.”

Englehardt said nothing. Terese said nothing either.

Waiting him out. The perfect interviewer. She finally turned to Myron. “Grab your stuff,” she said to him.

“Wait.” Englehardt’s eyes slid left, then right, up then down. “Jeremy Downing, you say?”

“Yes.”

He did another quick series of eye-slides. When he saw that the coast was clear, he hunched over the keyboard and typed quickly. A few seconds later, he asked, “What’s the name of this supposed donor?”

“Victor Johnson.”

Englehardt looked at the monitor and smiled. “That’s not him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Terese matched the smile. “That’s all we needed to know.”

“You’ll stop him?”

“He won’t even get to the press conference.”

Myron grabbed the film case and camera, and they hurried down the corridor. Once outside he turned to her and said, “Malachy Throne?”

“You know who he is?”

“He played False Face on Batman.”

Terese smiled and nodded. “Very good.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“What?”

“It turns me on when you talk Batman,” he said.

“And even when I don’t.”

“Are you trying to make a point?”

Five minutes later they were watching the tape in the van.

10

Mr. Davis Taylor

221 North End Ave

Waterbury, Connecticut

The social security and phone numbers were there too. Myron took out his cell phone and dialed. After two rings, a machine picked up and a robotic voice, the default greeting, asked him to leave a message at the tone. He left his name and mobile number and asked Mr. Taylor to return his call.

“So what are you going to do?” Terese asked.

“I guess I’ll drive up and try to talk to Mr. Davis Taylor.”

“Hasn’t the clinic already tried that?”

“Probably.”

“But you’re more persuasive?”

“Questionable.”

“I have to cover the Waldorf tonight,” she said.

“I know. I’ll go alone. Or maybe I’ll bring Win.”

She still would not face him. “This boy who needs the transplant,” she said. “He’s not a stranger, is he?”

Myron was not sure how to answer that. “I guess not.”

Terese nodded in a way that told him not to say any more. He didn’t. He picked up the phone and called Emily. She answered halfway through the first ring.

“Hello?”

“When is Greg doing the news conference?” he asked.

“In two hours,” Emily said.

“I need to reach him.”

He heard a hopeful gasp. “Did you find the donor for Jeremy?”

“Not yet.”

“But you have something.”

“We’ll see.”

“Don’t patronize me, Myron.”

“I’m not patronizing you.”

“This is my son’s life we’re talking about here.”

And mine? “I have a lead, Emily. That’s all.”

She gave him the number. “Myron, please call me if—”

“The moment I know something.”

He hung up and called Greg.

“I need you to put off the press conference,” Myron said.

“Why?” Greg asked.

“Just give me till tomorrow.”

“You have something?”

“Maybe,” Myron said.

“Maybe nothing,” Greg said. “Do you have something or not?”

“I have a name and address. It might be our man. I want to check it out before you make a public plea.”

“Where does he live?” Greg asked.

“Connecticut.”

“You driving up?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“Pretty much.”

“I want to go with you,” Greg said.

“That’s not a good idea.”

“He’s my kid, dammit.”

Myron closed his eyes. “I understand that.”

“So then you’ll understand this: I’m not asking your permission. I’m going. So stop dicking around and tell me where you want me to pick you up.”

Greg drove. He had one of those fancy SUV four-by-fours that are all the rage with New Jersey suburbanites whose idea of “off-road” is a speed bump at the mall. Très truck chic. For a long while neither man spoke. The tension in the air was more than the cut-with-a-knife variety; it pressed against the car windows, weighed Myron down, made him tired and gloomy.

“How did you get this name?” Greg asked.

“It’s not important.”

Greg left it alone. They drove some more. On the radio, Jewel earnestly insisted that her hands were small, she knew, but they were hers and not someone else’s. Myron frowned. Not exactly “Blowing in the Wind,” was it?

“You broke my nose, you know,” Greg said.

Myron kept quiet.

“And my vision hasn’t been the same. I’m having trouble focusing on the basket.”

Myron could not believe what he was hearing. “You blaming me for your crappy season, Greg?”

“I’m just saying—”

“You’re getting old, Greg. You’ve played fourteen seasons, and sitting out the strike didn’t help you.”

Greg waved a hand. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“You’re right.” Myron’s knob turned from Simmer to Boil. “I never got to play pro ball.”

“Right, and I never fucked my friend’s wife.”

“She wasn’t your wife,” Myron said. “And we weren’t friends.”

They both stopped then. Greg kept his eyes on the road. Myron turned away and stared out the passenger window.

Waterbury is one of those cities you bypass to reach another city. Myron had probably taken this stretch of 84 a hundred times, always remarking that at a distance Waterbury was a butt-ugly city. But now that he had the opportunity to see the city up close, he realized that he had underestimated the city’s offensiveness to the eyes, that indeed the city had a butt-ugly quality to it that you just couldn’t appreciate from afar. He shook his head. And people make fun of New Jersey?

Myron had gotten directions from the MapQuest Web site. He read them off to Greg in a voice he barely recognized as his own. Greg followed them in silence. Five minutes later, they pulled up to a dilapidated clapboard house in the middle of a street of dilapidated clapboards. The houses were uneven and crammed so close together, they looked like a set of teeth needing extensive orthodontic work.

They got out of the car. Myron wanted to tell Greg to stay back, but that would be pointless. He knocked on the door and almost immediately a gruff voice said, “Daniel? That you, Daniel?”

Myron said, “I’m looking for Davis Taylor.”

“Daniel?”

“No,” Myron said, yelling through the door. “Davis Taylor. But maybe he calls himself Daniel.”

“What are you talking about?” An old man opened the door, already in full-suspicious squint. He wore glasses too small for his face, so that the metal earpieces were embedded into the folds of skin beneath both temples, and a bad yellow wig, like something Carol Channing wore once too often, adorned his crown. He had on one slipper and one shoe, and his bathrobe looked as if it’d been trampled over during the Boer War.

“I thought you was Daniel,” the old man said. He tried to readjust the glasses, but they wouldn’t move. He squinted again. “You look like Daniel.”

“Must be the clouds in your eyes,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Are you Davis Taylor?”

“What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Davis Taylor.”

“Don’t know no Davis Taylor.”

“This is 221 North End Drive?”

“That’s right.”

“And there’s no Davis Taylor living here?”

“Just me and my boy Daniel. But he’s been away. Overseas.”

“Spain?” Myron asked. He pronounced it Spahhheeeeen. Elton would have been proud.

“What?”

“Never mind.” The old man turned to Greg, tried again to readjust the glasses, gave another squint. “I know you. You play basketball, right?”

Greg gave the old man a gentle if not superior smile—Moses gazing down at a skeptic after the Red Sea parted. “That’s right.”

“You’re Dolph Schayes.”

“No.”

“You look like Dolph. Helluva shooter. Saw him play in St. Louis last year. What a touch.”

Myron and Greg exchanged a glance. Dolph Schayes had retired in 1964.

“I’m sorry,” Myron said. “We didn’t catch your name.”

“You’re not wearing uniforms,” the old man said.

“No, sir, he only wears it on the court.”

“Not that kind of uniform.”

“Oh,” Myron said, though he had no idea why.

“So you can’t be here about Daniel. That’s what I mean. I was afraid you were with the army and …” His voice drifted off then.

Myron saw where this was going. “Your son is stationed overseas?”

The old man nodded. “Nam.”

Myron nodded, feeling bad now about the Elton John teasing. “We still didn’t catch your name.”

“Nathan. Nathan Mostoni.”

“Mr. Mostoni, we’re looking for someone named Davis Taylor. It’s very important we find him.”

“Don’t know no Davis Taylor. He a friend of Daniel’s?”

“Might be.”

The old man thought about it. “Nope, don’t know him.”

“Who else lives here?”

“Just me and my boy.”

“And it’s just the two of you?”

“Yep. But my boy is overseas.”

“So right now you live here alone?”

“How many different ways you gonna ask that question, boy?”

“It’s just that it’s a pretty big house,” Myron said.

“So?”

“Ever take in any boarders?”

“Sure. Had a college girl just moved out of here.”

“What was her name?”

“Stacy something. I don’t remember.”

“How long did she live here?”

“About six months.”

“And before that?”

That one took some thought. Nathan Mostoni scratched his face like a dog going after his own belly. “A guy named Ken.”

“Did you ever have a tenant named Davis Taylor?” Myron asked. “Or something like that?”

“Nope. Never.”

“Did this Stacy have a boyfriend?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you know her last name?”

“My memory ain’t so good. But she’s at the college.”

“Which college?”

“Waterbury State.”

Myron turned to Greg and another thought hit him. “Mr. Mostoni, have you heard the name Davis Taylor before today?”

Another squint. “What do you mean?”

“Has anybody else visited you or called you and asked about Davis Taylor?”

“No, sir. Never heard the name before.”

Myron looked at Greg again, then turned back to the old man. “So no one from the bone marrow center has been in touch with you?”

The old man cocked his head and put a hand to his ear. “The bone what?”

Myron asked a few more questions, but Nathan Mostoni started time-traveling again. There was nothing more to get here. Myron and Greg thanked him and headed back down the cracked pathway.

When they were back in the car, Greg asked, “Why didn’t the bone marrow center contact this guy?”

“Maybe they did,” Myron said. “Maybe he just forgot.”

Greg didn’t like it. Neither did Myron. “So what’s next?” Greg asked.

“We run a background check on Davis Taylor. Find out everything we can about him.”

“How?

“It’s easy nowadays. Just a few keystrokes and my partner will know it all.”

“Your partner? You mean that violent wacko you used to room with in college?”

“A, it is unhealthy to refer to Win as a violent wacko, even when he appears not to be in the vicinity. B, no, I mean my partner at MB SportsReps, Esperanza Diaz.”

Greg looked back at the house. “What do I do?”

“Go home,” Myron said.

“And?”

“And be with your son.”

Greg shook his head. “I don’t get to see him until the weekend.”

“I’m sure Emily wouldn’t mind.”

“Yeah, right.” Greg smirked, shook his head. “You don’t know her too well anymore, do you, Myron?”

“I guess not, no.”

“If she had her way, I’d never get to see Jeremy again.”

“That’s a bit harsh, Greg.”

“No, Myron. If anything, it’s being generous.”

“Emily told me that you’re a good father.”

“Did she also tell you what she charged in our custody battle?”

Myron nodded. “That you abused the kids.”

“Not just abused them, Myron. Sexually abused them.”

“She wanted to win.”

“And that’s an excuse?”

“No,” Myron said. “It’s deplorable.”

“More than that,” Greg said. “It’s sick. You have no idea what Emily’s capable of doing to get her way.”

“For example?”

But Greg just shook his head and started up the car. “I’ll ask you again: What can I do to help?”

“Nothing, Greg.”

“No good. I’m not sitting around while my kid is dying, you understand?”

“I do.”

“You have anything besides this name and address?”

“Nope.”

“Fine,” Greg said. “I’ll drop you off at the train station. I’m staying up here and watching the house.”

“You think the old man is lying?”

Greg shrugged. “Maybe he’s just confused and forgot. Or maybe I’m wasting my time. But I got to do something.”

Myron said nothing. Greg continued to drive.

“You’ll call me if you hear something?” Greg asked.

“Sure.”

During the train ride back to Manhattan, Myron thought about what Greg had said. About Emily. And about what she’d done—and what she’d do—to save her son.

11

Myron and Terese started out the next morning showering together. Myron controlled the temperature and kept the water hot. Prevents, er, shrinkage.

When they stepped out of the steamy stall, he helped Terese towel off.

“Thorough,” she said.

“We’re a full-service operation, ma’am.” He toweled her off some more.

“One thing I notice when I shower with a man,” Terese said.

“What’s that?”

“My breasts always end up squeaky clean.”

Win had left several hours ago. Lately he liked to get to the office by six. Overseas markets or something. Terese toasted a bagel while Myron fixed himself a bowl of cereal. Quisp cereal. They didn’t have it in New York anymore, but Win had it shipped in from a place called Woodsman’s in Wisconsin. Myron downed an industrial-size spoonful; the sugar rush came at him so fast he nearly ducked.

Terese said, “I have to go back tomorrow morning.”

“I know.”

He took another spoonful, feeling her eyes on him.

“Run away with me again,” Terese said.

He glanced up at her. She looked smaller, farther away.

“I can get us the same house on the island. We can just hop on a plane and—”

“I can’t,” he interrupted.

“Oh,” she said. Then: “You need to find this Davis Taylor?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And after that …?”

Myron shook his head. They ate some more in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Myron said.

She nodded.

“Running away isn’t always the answer, Terese.”

“Myron?”

“What?”

“Do I look in the mood for platitudes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“Sometimes you can’t help,” she said. “Sometimes all that’s left is running away.”

“Not for me,” he said.

“No,” she agreed. “Not for you.”

She wasn’t angry or upset, just flat and resigned, and that scared him all the more.

An hour later Esperanza came into Myron’s office without knocking.

“Okay,” she began, grabbing a seat, “here’s what we’ve got on Davis Taylor.”

Myron leaned back and put his hands behind his head.

“One, he’s never filed a tax return with the IRS.”

“Never?”

“Glad you’re paying attention,” Esperanza said.

“Are you saying he’s never shown any income?”

“Will you let me finish?”

“Sorry.”

“Two, he has virtually no paperwork. No driver’s license. One credit card, a Visa recently issued by his bank. It has very little activity. Only one bank account, with a current balance of under two hundred dollars.”

“Suspicious,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“When did he open the account?”

“Three months ago.”

“And before that?”

“Nada. At least nada that I’ve been able to come up with so far.”

Myron stroked his chin. “No one flies that far below the radar screen,” he said. “It has to be an alias.”

“I thought the same thing,” Esperanza said.

“And?”

“The answer is yes and no.” Myron waited for the explanation. Esperanza tucked some loose tresses behind both ears. “It appears to be a name change.”

Myron frowned. “But we got his social security number, right?”

“Right.”

“And most records are kept by social security number, not name, right?”

“Another right.”

“So I don’t get it,” Myron said. “You can’t change your social security number. A name change might make you harder to find, but it wouldn’t wipe out your past. You’d still have tax returns and stuff like that.”

Esperanza turned both palms upward. “That’s what I mean by yes and no.”

“There’s no paperwork under the social security number either?”

“That’s correct,” Esperanza said.

Myron tried to digest this. “So what’s Davis Taylor’s real name?”

“I don’t have it yet.”

“I would have thought it’d be easy to locate.”

“It would,” she said, “if he had any records at all. But he doesn’t. The social security number has no hits. It’s as though this person hasn’t done a thing in his whole life.”

Myron thought about it. “Only one explanation,” he said.

“That being?”

“A fake ID.”

Esperanza shook her head. “The social security number exists.”

“I don’t doubt that. But I think someone pulled the classic tombstone-fake-ID trick.”

“That being?”

“You go to a graveyard and find the tombstone of a dead child,” Myron said. “Someone who would be about your age if he’d lived. Then you write and request his birth certificate and paperwork and voilà, you’ve set up the perfect fake ID. Oldest trick in the book.”

Esperanza gave him the look she saved for his most idiotic moments. “No,” she said.

“No?”

“You think the police don’t watch TV, Myron? That doesn’t work anymore. Hasn’t worked in years, except maybe on cop shows. But just to make sure, I double-checked.”

“How?”

“Death records,” she said. “There’s a Web site that has the social security numbers of all the deceased.”

“And the number isn’t there.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” Esperanza said.

Myron leaned forward. “This makes absolutely no sense,” he said. “Our phony Davis Taylor has gone to a great deal of trouble to create this phony ID—or at least to fly below the radar, right?”

“Right.”

“He wants no records, no paperwork, nothing.”

“Right again.”

“Even changes his name.”

“You go, boy.”

Myron put his arms out. “Then why would he sign up to be a bone marrow donor?”

“Myron?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Esperanza said.

True enough. He’d called last night and asked her to check out Davis Taylor. He had not yet told her why.

“I guess I owe you an explanation,” he said.

She shrugged.

“I sort of promised you I wouldn’t be doing this anymore,” he said.

“Investigating,” she said.

“Right. And I meant it. I wanted this to be a straight agency from now on.”

She didn’t respond. Myron glanced at the wall behind her. The sparse Client Wall again reminded him of a hair transplant that hadn’t taken. Maybe he should paint on a couple of coats of Rogaine.

“You remember Emily’s call?” he said.

“It was yesterday, Myron. My memory can sometimes go back a whole week.”

He explained it all. Some men—men Myron grudgingly admired—keep it all inside, bury their secrets, hide the pain, the whole cliché. Myron rarely did. He was not one to walk down the mean streets alone—he liked Win to be his backup. He didn’t grab a bottle of whiskey and drown his sorrows—he discussed them with Esperanza. Not very macho, but there you have it.

Esperanza stayed silent as he spoke. When he got to the part about being Jeremy’s father, she let out a small groan and closed her eyes and kept them shut for a very long time. When she finally opened them, she asked, “So what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find the donor.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He knew that. “I don’t know,” he said.

She thought about it, shook her head in disbelief. “You have a son.”

“Seems so.”

“And you don’t know what you’re going to do about it?”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re leaning,” she said.

“Win made a pretty good case for not saying anything.”

She made a sound. “Win would.”

“Actually he claims to be using his heart.”

“If only he had one.”

“You don’t agree?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t agree.”

“You think I should tell Jeremy?”

“I think first and foremost you should put aside your Batman complex,” she said.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you always try a little too hard to be heroic.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Sometimes it clouds your thinking,” she said. “The heroic thing is not always the right thing.”

“Jeremy already has a family. He has a mother and a father—”

“He has,” Esperanza interrupted, “a lie.”

They sat there and stared at each other. The phone, usually so active, was silent, as it had been for too long now. Myron wondered how he could explain it so that she would understand. She stayed still, waiting.

“We were both lucky when it came to parents,” Myron said.

“Mine are dead, Myron.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. He took a deep breath. “How many days pass that you don’t still miss them?”

“None,” she said without hesitation.

He nodded. “We were both loved unconditionally and we both loved our parents the same way.”

Esperanza’s eyes started misting. “So?”

“So—and this was what Win said—isn’t that what makes a mother or father? Isn’t it about who raised us and loved us and not simply an accident of biology?”

Esperanza leaned back. “Win said that?”

Myron smiled. “He has his moments.”

“That he does,” she said.

“And think about your father—the one who raised and loved you. What happens to him?”

Her eyes were still misty. “My love for him is strong enough to survive the truth. Isn’t yours?”

He tilted back as though the words were jabs at his chin. “Sure,” he said. “But it would still hurt him.”

“Your father would be hurt?”

“Of course.”

“I see,” Esperanza said. “So now you’re worried about poor Greg Downing?”

“Hardly. You want to hear something awful?”

“Love to.”

“When Greg constantly refers to Jeremy as ‘my son,’ I want to yell out the truth. Right in his smug face. Just to see his reaction. Just to watch his world crumble.”

“So much for your Batman complex,” Esperanza said.

Myron held out his hands. “I have my moments too,” he said.

Esperanza stood and headed for the door.

“Where you going?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said.

He sat back.

“You’re blocking,” she said. “You know that?”

He nodded slowly.

“When you move past it—and you will—we’ll talk about it again. Otherwise, we’re wasting our time here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Just don’t be stupid.”

“ ‘Don’t be stupid,’ ” he repeated. “Check.”

Her departing smile was brief.

12

Myron spent the rest of the day working the phones. He strapped on his Ultra Slim headset and paced the office. He talked up college coaches, mining for potential free agents. He touched base with his clients and listened to their problems, both real and imagined, therapist-style, which was a large part of his job. He sifted through his Rolodex of companies, trying to conjure up a few endorsement deals.

One serious lead came a-knocking on its own: “Mr. Bolitar? I’m Ronny Angle from Rack Enterprises. Are you familiar with us?”

“You run a bunch of topless bars, right?”

“We prefer they be called upscale exotic nightclubs.”

“And I prefer to be called a well-endowed stallion,” Myron said. “What can I do for you, Mr. Angle?”

“Ronny please. Can I call you Myron?”

“Myron please.”

“Great, Myron. Rack Enterprises is entering a new venture.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’ve probably read about it. A chain of coffeehouses called La, La, Latte.”

“For real?”

“Pardon?”

“Well, I think I did see something about this, but I figured it was a joke.”

“It’s no joke, Mr. Bolitar.”

“So you guys are really going to open up topless coffee bars?”

“We prefer they be called upscale erotic coffee experiences.”

“I see. But your, uh, baristas will be topless, correct?”

“Correct.”

Myron thought about it. “Makes asking for milk something of a double entendre, don’t you think?”

“That’s very funny, Myron.”

“Thanks, Ronny.”

“We’re going to open with a big splash.”

“That another milk joke, Ronny?”

“No, Myron, but you’re a pretty funny guy.”

“Thanks, Ronny.”

“Let me cut right to it, okay? We like Suzze T.” Suzze T was Suzze Tamirino, a journeyman (or is it journey-woman?) on the pro tennis circuit. “We saw her picture in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and, well, we were very impressed. We’d like her to do a cameo for our grand opening.”

Myron rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “When you say cameo—”

“A brief performance.”

“How brief?”

“No more than five minutes.”

“I don’t mean brief in terms of time. I mean in terms of clothing.”

“We’d require full frontal nudity.”

“Well, thanks for thinking of us, Ronny, but I don’t think Suzze will be interested.”

“We’re offering two hundred thousand dollars.”

Myron sat up. Easy to hang up, but with this kind of dough, he had a responsibility to follow up. “How about if she wears a small top?”

“No.”

“A bikini?”

“No.”

“An itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny bikini?”

“Like in the song?”

“Exactly,” Myron said. “Like in the song.”

“I’m going to state this as plainly as I can,” Ronny said. “There must be nipple visibility.”

“Nipple visibility?”

“This point is nonnegotiable.”

“So to speak.”

Myron promised to call him back later in the week. The two men hung up. Negotiating nipple visibility. What a business.

Esperanza came in without knocking. Her eyes were wide and bright.

“Lamar Richardson is on line one,” she said.

“Lamar himself?”

She nodded.

“No relative or personal manager or favorite astrologer?”

“Lamar himself,” Esperanza repeated.

They both nodded. This was a good thing.

Myron picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“Let’s meet,” Lamar said.

“Sure,” Myron said.

“When?”

“You name it.”

“When are you free?”

“You name it,” Myron said.

“I’m in Detroit right now.”

“I’ll catch the next plane out.”

“Just like that?” Lamar said.

“Yup.”

“Shouldn’t you pretend you’re really busy?”

“We going to date, Lamar?”

Lamar chuckled. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then I’ll skip the playing-hard-to-get stage. Esperanza and I want you to sign up with MB Sports-Reps. We’ll do a good job. We’ll make you a priority. And we won’t play mind games with you.”

Myron smiled at Esperanza. Was he good or what?

Lamar said he was going to be in Manhattan later in the week and would like to meet then. They set up a time. Myron hung up. He and Esperanza sat there and smiled at each other.

“We have a chance,” she said.

“Yep.”

“So what’s our strategy?”

“I thought I’d impress him with my nimble mind,” he said.

“Hmm,” Esperanza said. “Maybe I should wear something low cut.”

“I was kinda counting on that.”

“Hit him with brains and beauty.”

“Yes,” Myron said. “But which one of us is which?”

When Myron got back to the Dakota, Win was heading out with his leather gym bag and Terese was gone.

“She left a note,” Win said, handing it to Myron.

Had to go back early. I’ll call.
Terese

Myron read the note again. It didn’t change. He folded it up and put it away.

“You going to Master Kwon’s?” Myron asked. Master Kwon was their martial arts instructor.

Win nodded. “He’s been asking for you.”

“What did you tell him?” Myron asked.

“That you wigged out.”

“Thanks.”

Win gave a slight bow and lifted his gym bag. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Shoot.”

“You haven’t been to the dojang in a long while.”

“I know.”

“You have a great deal of stress in your life,” Win said. “You need an outlet. You need some focus. Some balance. Some structure.”

“You’re not going to make me snatch a pebble from your hand, are you?”

“Not today, no. But come with me.”

Myron shrugged. “I’ll grab my stuff.”

They were halfway out the door when Esperanza called. He told her they were just on their way out.

“Where?” she asked.

“Master Kwon’s.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Why? What’s up?”

“I got some information on Davis Taylor.”

“And?”

“And it’s more than a little strange. Is Win going with you?”

“Yes.”

“Ask him if he knows anything about Raymond Lex’s family.”

Silence. “Raymond Lex is dead, Esperanza.”

“Duh, Myron. I said family.”

“This has something to do with Davis Taylor?”

“It’ll be easier to explain in person. I’ll see you down there in an hour.”

She hung up.

One of the doormen had already fetched Win’s Jag. It sat waiting for them on Central Park West. The rich. Myron settled into the lush leather. Win hit the accelerator pad. He was big with the accelerator pad; he had a bit more trouble when it came to the brake.

“Do you know Raymond Lex’s family?”

“They used to be clients,” Win said.

“You’re kidding?”

“Oh yes, I’m a regular Red Buttons.”

“Were you directly involved in this inheritance squabble?”

“Calling this a squabble would be similar to calling nuclear Armageddon a campfire.”

“Hard to divide up billions, huh?”

“Indeed. So why are we discussing the Lex clan?”

“Esperanza is going to meet us down at the dojang. She has some information on Davis Taylor. Somehow the Lex family is connected.”

Win arched his eyebrow. “The plot doth thicken.”

“So tell me a little about them.”

“Most of it was in the media. Raymond Lex writes a controversial bestseller called Midnight Confessions. Said bestseller becomes an Oscar-winning blockbuster. Suddenly he goes from obscure junior-college instructor to millionaire. Unlike most of his artistic brethren, he understands business. He invests and amasses private holdings with a substantial yet confidential net worth.”

“The papers place it in the billions.”

“I won’t argue.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“The way you word things,” Win said. “It’s like Proust.”

“He never wrote another book?”

“No.”

“Odd.”

“Not really,” Win said. “Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell never wrote another book. And at least Lex kept busy. It’s hard to build one of the largest privately held corporations and do book signings.”

“So now that he’s dead, his family is—how to say it?—nuclear Armageddoning?”

“Close enough.”

Master Kwon had moved his headquarters and main dojang into the second floor of a building on Twenty-third Street near Broadway. Five rooms—studios really—with hardwood floors, mirrored walls, high-tech sound system, sleek and shiny Nautilus equipment—oh, and some of those rice-paper Oriental scroll-posters. Gave the place a real Old World Asia feel.

Myron and Win slipped into their dobok, a white uniform, and tied their black belts. Myron had been studying tae kwon do and hapkido since Win had first introduced him to them in college, but he hadn’t been to a dojang more than five times in the past three years. Win, on the other hand, remained devoutly lethal. Don’t tug on Superman’s cape, don’t spit in the wind, don’t pull the mask off the ol’ Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Win. Bah, bah, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.

Master Kwon was in his mid-seventies but could easily pass for two decades younger. Win had met him during his Asian travels when he was fifteen. As near as Myron could tell, Master Kwon had been a high priest or some such thing at a small Buddhist monastery straight out of a Hong Kong revenge flick. When Master Kwon emigrated to the United States, he spoke very little English. Now, some twenty years later, he spoke almost none. As soon as the wise master hit our shores, he opened up a chain of state-of-the-art tae kwon do schools—with Win’s financial backing, of course. Once he saw the Karate Kid movies, Master Kwon started playing the old wise man to the hilt. His English disappeared. He started dressing like the Dalai Lama and began every sentence with the words “Confucius say,” ignoring the small fact that he was Korean and Confucius was Chinese.

Win and Myron headed to Master Kwon’s office. At the entrance, both men bowed deeply.

“Please in,” Master Kwon said.

The desk was fine oak, the chair rich leather and orthopedic looking. Master Kwon was standing near a corner. He held a putter in his hands and wore a splendidly tailored suit. His face brightened when he saw Myron, and the two men embraced.

When they broke apart, Master Kwon said, “You better?”

“Better,” Myron agreed.

The old man smiled and grabbed his own lapel. “Armani,” he said.

“I thought so,” Myron said.

“You like?”

“Very nice.”

Satisfied, Master Kwon said, “Go.”

Win and Myron bowed deeply. Once in the dojang, they fell into their customary roles: Win led and Myron followed. They started with meditation. Win loved meditating, as we already graphically witnessed. He sat in the lotus position, palms tilted up, hands resting on knees, back straight, tongue folded against the upper teeth. He breathed in through his nose, forcing the air down, letting his abdomen do all the work. Myron tried to duplicate—had been trying for years—but he had never quite gotten the hang of it. His mind, even during less chaotic times, wandered. His bad knee tightened. He got fidgety.

They cut down the stretching to only ten minutes. Again Win was effortless, executing splits and toe touches and deep bends with ease, his bones and joints as flexible as a politician’s voting record. Myron had never been a naturally limber guy. When he was training seriously, he could touch his toes and complete a hurdle stretch with little problem. But just then, that felt like a long time ago.

“I’m already sore,” Myron said through a grunt.

Win tilted his head. “Odd.”

“What?”

“That’s precisely what my date said last night.”

“You weren’t kidding before,” Myron said. “You really are another Red Buttons.”

They did a little sparring, and Myron immediately realized how out of shape he was. Sparring is the most tiring activity in the world. Don’t believe it? Find a punching bag and pretend-box with it for one three-minute round. Just a bag that can’t fight back. Try it, just one round. You’ll see.

When Esperanza came in, the sparring mercifully ceased and Myron grabbed his knees, sucking wind. He bowed to Win, threw a towel over his shoulder, grabbed some Evian. Esperanza folded her arms and waited. A group of students walked past the door, saw Esperanza, did a double take.

Esperanza handed Myron a sheet of paper. “The birth certificate of Davis Taylor né Dennis Lex.”

“Lex,” Myron repeated. “As in …?”

“Yep.”

Myron scanned the photocopy. According to the document, Dennis Lex would be thirty-seven years old. His father was listed as one Raymond Lex, his mother as Maureen Lehman Lex. Born in East Hampton, New York.

Myron handed it to Win.

“They had another child?”

“Apparently so,” Esperanza said.

Myron looked at Win. Win shrugged.

“He must have died young,” Win said.

“If he did,” Esperanza said, “I can’t find it anywhere. There’s no death certificate.”

“No one in the family ever mentioned another child?” Myron asked Win.

“No one,” Win said.

He turned back to Esperanza. “What else you got?”

“Not much. Dennis Lex changed his name to Davis Taylor eight months ago. I also found this.” She handed him a photocopy of a news clipping. A small birth announcement from the Hampton Gazette dated thirty-seven years ago:

Raymond and Maureen Lex of Wister Drive in East Hampton are delighted to announce the birth of their son, Dennis, six pounds eight ounces on June 18th. Dennis joins his sister Susan and his brother Bronwyn.

Myron shook his head. “How could no one know about this?”

“It’s not all that surprising,” Win said.

“How do you figure?”

“None of the Lex family holdings are public. They are fiercely protective of their privacy. Security around them is around-the-clock and the best money can buy. Everyone who works with them must sign confidentiality agreements.”

“Even you?”

“I don’t do confidentiality agreements,” Win said. “No matter how much money is involved.”

“So they never asked you to sign one?”

“They asked. I refused. We parted ways.”

“You gave them up as clients?”

“Yes.”

“Why? I mean, what would have been the big deal? You keep everything confidential anyway.”

“Exactly. Clients hire me not only because of my brilliance in the ways of finance but because I am the very model of discretion.”

“Don’t overlook your startling modesty,” Myron added.

“I don’t need to sign a contract saying I won’t reveal anything. It should be a given. It’s the equivalent of signing a document saying that I won’t burn down their house.”

Myron nodded. “Nice analogy,” he said.

“Yes, thank you, but I’m trying to illustrate how far this family will go to maintain their privacy. Until this inheritance feud erupted, the media had no idea how extensive Raymond Lex’s holdings were.”

“But come on, Win. This is Raymond Lex’s son. You’d know about a son.”

Win pointed to the top of the clipping. “Notice when the child was born—before Raymond Lex’s book came out, when Lex was just a typical small-town professor. It wouldn’t make news.”

“You really buy that?”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

“So where is the kid now? How can the son of one of America’s wealthiest families have no paperwork? No credit cards, no driver’s license, no IRS filings, no trail at all? Why did he change his name?”

“The last one is easy,” Win said.

“Oh?”

“He’s hiding.”

“From?”

“His siblings perhaps,” Win said. “As I said before, this inheritance battle is rather nasty.”

“That might make sense—and I stress the word ‘might’—if he’d been around before. But how can there be no paperwork on him? What is he hiding from? And why on earth would he put his name in the bone marrow registry?”

“Good questions,” Win said.

“Very good,” Esperanza added.

Myron reread the article and looked at his two friends. “Nice to have a consensus,” he said.

13

The mobile phone blew him out of his sleep like a shotgun blast. Myron’s hand reached up blindly, his fingers bouncing along the night table until they located the phone.

“Hello?” he croaked.

“Is this Myron Bolitar?”

The voice was a whisper.

“Who is this?” Myron asked.

“You called me.”

Still whispering, the sound like leaves skittering across pavement.

Myron sat upright, his heartbeat picking up a little steam. “Davis Taylor?”

“Sow the seeds. Keep sowing. And open the shades. Let the truth come in. Let the secrets finally wither in the daylight.”

Ooookay. “I need your help, Mr. Taylor.”

“Sow the seeds.”

“Yes, of course, we’ll sow away.” Myron flicked on the light. 2:17 A.M. He checked the LCD display on the phone. The Caller ID was blocked. Damn. “But we have to meet.”

“Sow the seeds. It’s the only way.”

“I understand, Mr. Taylor. Can we meet?”

“Someone must sow the seeds. And someone must unlock the chains.”

“I’ll bring a key. Just tell me where you are.”

“Why do you wish to see me?”

What to say? “It’s a matter of life and death.”

“Whenever you sow the seeds, it’s a matter of life and death.”

“You donated blood for a bone marrow drive. You’re a match. A young boy will die if you don’t help.”

Silence.

“Mr. Taylor?”

“Technology cannot help him. I thought you were one of us.” Still whispering but sad now.

“I am. Or at least I want to be—”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“No, wait—”

“Good-bye.”

“Dennis Lex,” Myron said.

Silence, except for the sound of breathing. Myron wasn’t sure if the sound was coming from him or the caller.

“Please,” Myron said. “I’ll do whatever you ask. But we have to meet.”

“Will you remember to sow the seeds?”

Small chunks of ice dropped down his back.

“Yes,” Myron said, “I’ll remember.”

“Good. Then you know what you must do.”

Myron gripped the receiver. “No,” he said. “What must I do?”

“The boy,” the voice whispered. “Say one last good-bye to the boy.”

14

“Sow the seeds?” Esperanza said. They were in Myron’s office. The morning sun striped the floor with Venetian slits, two cutting across Esperanza’s face. She didn’t seem to mind.

“Right,” Myron said. “And something about that phrase keeps gnawing at me.”

“It was a Tears for Fears song,” Esperanza said.

“ ‘Sowing the Seeds of Love.’ I remember.”

“Wasn’t that the name of the tour too? We saw them at the Meadowlands in, what, 1988?”

“Eighty-nine.”

“What happened to those guys?”

“They broke up,” Myron said.

“Why do they all do that?”

“Got me.”

“Supertramp, Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers—”

“Not to mention Wham.”

“They break up and then they never make anything decent on their own. They flounder around and end up a segment of VH-1’s Where Are They Now?”

“We’re getting off the subject.”

Esperanza handed him a slip of paper. “Here’s the office number for Susan Lex, Dennis’s older sister.”

Myron read the number like it was in code and might mean something. “I had another thought.”

“What’s that?”

“If Dennis Lex exists, then he had to have gone to school, right?”

“Maybe.”

“So let’s see if we can find out where the Children Lex schooled—public, private, whatever.”

Esperanza frowned. “You mean like college?”

“Start there, yes. Not that siblings go to the same school, but maybe they did. Or maybe they all went to Ivy League schools. Something like that. You might want to start with high school. It’s more likely that they all went to the same one.”

“And if I don’t find any record of him in high school?”

“Go back even further.”

She crossed her legs, folded her arms. “How far?”

“As far as you can.”

“And what good will this exercise in futility do us?”

“I want to know when Dennis Lex fell off the radar screen. Did people know him in high school? In college? In grad school?”

She did not look impressed. “And assuming I somehow manage to find, say, his elementary school, what exactly is that going to do for us?”

“Damn if I know. I’m grasping at straws here.”

“No, you’re asking me to grasp at straws.”

“Then don’t do it, Esperanza, okay? It was just a thought.”

“Nah,” she said with a wave of her hand. “You may be right.”

Myron put his palms on his desk, arched his back, looked left, looked right, looked up, looked down.

“What?” she said.

“You said I may be right. I’m waiting for the world as we know it to end.”

“Good one,” Esperanza said, standing. “I’ll see what I can dig up.”

She left the room. Myron picked up the telephone and dialed Susan Lex’s number. The receptionist transferred the call, and a woman identifying herself as Ms. Lex’s secretary picked it up. She had a voice like a steel-wool tire over gravel.

“Ms. Lex does not see people she doesn’t know.”

“It’s a matter of grave importance,” Myron said.

“Perhaps you did not hear me the first time.” Classic Battle-ax. “Ms. Lex does not see people she doesn’t know.”

“Tell her it’s about Dennis.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just tell her that.”

Battle-ax put Myron on hold without another word. Myron listened to a Muzak version of Al Stewart’s “Time Passages.” Myron had thought the original was Muzak-y enough, thank you very much.

The battle-ax came back with a snap. “Ms. Lex does not see people she doesn’t know.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, but it doesn’t really make sense.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, at some time she must see people she doesn’t know—otherwise she’d never meet anybody new. And if we follow my logic, how did you ever get to see her for the first time? She was willing to see you before she knew you, right?”

“I’m hanging up now, Mr. Bolitar.”

“Tell her I know about Dennis.”

“I just—”

“Tell her if she doesn’t agree to see me, I’ll go to the press.”

Silence. “Hold.” A click and then the Muzak came back on. Time passed. So, mercifully, did “Time Passages,” replaced by the Alan Parsons Project’s “Time.” Myron nearly slipped into a coma.

Battle-ax returned. “Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes?”

“Ms. Lex will give you five minutes of her time. I have an opening on the fifteenth of next month.”

“No good,” Myron said. “It has to be today.”

“Ms. Lex is a very busy woman.”

“Today,” Myron said.

“That simply will not be possible.”

“At eleven. If I’m not let in, I go immediately to the press.”

“You’re being terribly rude, Mr. Bolitar.”

“To the press,” Myron repeated. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Will you be there?”

“What possible difference could that make?”

“All this sexual tension is driving me batty. Maybe afterward we could get together for a nice cool latte.”

He heard the phone go click and smiled. The charm, he thought. It’s baaaaack.

Esperanza buzzed in. “Topless tennis, anyone?”

“What?”

“I got Suzze T on line one.”

He hit a button. “Hey, Suzze.”

“Hey, Myron, what’s shaking?”

“I got an offer for you to refuse.”

“You mean you’re going to hit on me?”

The charm suffers a setback. “Where are you going to be this afternoon?”

“Same place as now,” she said. “The Morning Mosh. You know it?”

“No.”

She gave him the address, and Myron agreed to meet her there in a few hours. He hung up the phone and leaned back.

“ ‘Sow the seeds,’ ” he said out loud.

He stared at the wall. An hour to kill before he headed over to the Lex Building on Fifth Avenue. He could sit here and think about life and maybe contemplate his navel. No, too much of that already. He swiveled his seat to the computer, double-clicked the proper icon, connected to the Net. He tried Yahoo first and typed sow the seeds into the search field. Only one hit: a Web site for the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners. They went by the acronym SLUG. Tough guys probably. A gang. Probably wore green bandannas and engaged in drive-by waterings.

He tried Alta Vista’s search engine next, but they listed 2,501 Web pages. It was kinda like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Yahoo’s search was toooo small. Alta Vista’s was toooo big. They didn’t have LEXIS-NEXIS at the office, but Myron tried a less powerful media engine. He typed in the same three words and pressed the return key, and bammo.

http://vwvw.nyherald.com/archives/9800322

Myron hit the link and the article came up:

New York Herald

THE MIND OF TERROR—YOUR DARKEST FEAR
by Stan Gibbs

Whoa, hold the phone. Myron knew the name. Stan Gibbs had been a big-time newspaper columnist, the kind of guy who regularly pontificated (read: pimped) on the cable news talk shows, though he’d been less annoying than most, which is like saying syphilis is less annoying than gonorrhea. But that had all been before the scandal gutted him like Ted Nugent over a fallen moose. Myron read:

The phone call comes out of the blue.

“What is your darkest fear?” the voice whispers. “Close your eyes now and picture it. Can you see it? Do you have it yet? The very worst agony you can imagine?”

After a long pause, I say, “Yes.”

“Good. Now imagine something worse, something far, far worse …”

Myron took a deep breath. He remembered the series of articles. Stan Gibbs had broken a story about a bizarre kidnapper. He’d told the heart-wrenching tale of three abductions that the police had supposedly wanted to keep quiet, out of, Stan Gibbs claimed, embarrassment. No names were mentioned. He had spoken with the families under the condition of anonymity. And, the coup de grâce, the kidnapper had granted Gibbs access:

I ask the kidnapper why he does it. Is it for the ransom?

“I never pick up the ransom money,” he says. “I usually leave explosives at the spot and burn it. But sometimes money helps me sow the seeds. That is what I’m trying to do. Sow the seeds.”

Myron felt his blood stop.

“You all think you’re safe,” he continues, “in your technological cocoon. But you’re not. Technology has made us expect easy answers and happy endings. But with me, there is no answer and there is no end.”

He has kidnapped at least four people: the father of two young children, age 41; a female college student, age 20; and a young couple, newlyweds ages 28 and 27. All were abducted while in the New York City area.

“The idea,” he says, “is to keep the terror going. Let it grow, not with gore or obvious bloodletting, but with your own imagination. Technology is trying to destroy our ability to imagine. But when someone you love is taken away, your mind can conjure up horrors darker than any machine—than anything even I can do. Some minds won’t go that far. Some minds stop and put up a barrier. My job is to push them through that barrier.”

I ask him how he does that.

“Sow the seeds,” he repeats. “You sow the seeds over time.”

He explains that sowing the seeds means giving hope and taking it away over a sustained period of time. His first call to the victim’s family is naturally devastating, but merely the beginning of a long and torturous ordeal.

He begins the call, he claims, with a normal hello and asks the family member to please hold. After a pause, the family member hears their loved one give a blood-curdling shriek. “Just one,” he says, “and it’s very short. I cut them off in mid-scream.

“This is the last they’ll ever hear from their loved one,” he continues. “Imagine how that scream echoes.”

But for the victim’s family, it does not end there. He demands a ransom that he has no intention of claiming. He calls after midnight and asks the family to imagine their darkest fear. He convinces them that this time, he will really let their loved one go, but he is only extending hope to those who no longer have it, rekindling their agony.

“Time and hope,” he says, “sow the seeds of despair.”

The father of two has been missing for three years. The young premed college student has been missing for twenty-seven months. The newlyweds were married almost two years ago this weekend. To date, not a trace of any of them has been found. Rarely does a week pass when the families don’t get a call from their tormentor.

When I ask him if his victims are alive or dead, he is coy. “Death is closure,” he explains, “and closure stops the sowing.”

He wants to talk about society, how computers and technology are doing our thinking for us, how what he does lets us see the power of the human brain.

“That is where God exists,” he says. “That is where all things valuable exist. True bliss can only be found inside of you. The meaning of life is not in your new home entertainment system or sports car. People must see their limitless potential. How do you make them see? Right now imagine what these families are going through.”

His voice soft, he invites me to try.

“Technology could never conjure up the horrors you are now imagining. Sow the seeds. Sowing the seeds shows us the potential.”

Myron’s heart pounded in big thuds. He sat back, shook his head, started reading again. The crazed kidnapper ranted on, his theories feverishly demented, sort of Symbionese Liberation Army by way of Ted Kaczynski. Stan Gibbs’s column continued into the next day’s paper. Myron hit the link and read on. During the second day, Gibbs opened with some heartbreaking quotes from the family of the victims. Then he questioned the kidnapper some more:

I ask him how he has managed to keep these kidnappings out of the media.

“By sowing the seeds,” he repeats yet again.

I ask for an example.

“I tell his wife to go to the garage and open the red Stanley toolbox on the third shelf. I tell her to pick out the black pliers with the bubble grip. Then I send her to the basement. I tell her to stand in front of the Mission chair they bought the previous summer at that tag sale on the Cape. Imagine, I say, your husband tied naked to that chair. Imagine those pliers in my hand. And finally, imagine what I’ll do if I see anything about him in the newspaper.”

But he does not stop there.

“I ask her about the children. I mention their names. I mention their schools and their teachers and their favorite breakfast cereal.”

I ask him how he knows these things.

His answer is simple. “Daddy tells me.”

Myron fell back. “Jesus,” he uttered.

Deep breaths, he told himself again. In and out. That’s it. Think it through. Slowly now. Carefully. Okay, first off: Horrible as this is, what does it have to do with Davis Taylor né Dennis Lex? Probably nothing. The worst sort of long shot. And again, horrible as this is, Myron knew that there was more to the story. More—and in a sense, less.

The Gibbs columns drew weeks’ worth of nationwide attention and criticism—until, Myron remembered, it all blew up in the most public way possible. What had happened exactly? Myron hit some keys and clicked the mouse. He started a search of articles where Stan Gibbs was the subject. They came up in date order:

FEDS DEMAND GIBBS’S SOURCE

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in recent weeks has been denying the allegations listed in Stan Gibbs’s columns, took a new tack today. They demanded his notes and information.

Dan Conway, a spokesman for the FBI, began by saying, “We know nothing about these crimes,” then added, “But if Mr. Gibbs is being truthful, he has important information on a possible serial kidnapper and killer, perhaps even harboring or aiding him. We have a right to that information.”

Stan Gibbs, a popular columnist and television journalist, has refused to reveal his sources. “I’m not protecting a killer here,” Mr. Gibbs said. “The families of the victims as well as the perpetrator of the crimes spoke to me under the strict condition of confidentiality. It’s a cry as old as our country: I will not reveal my sources.”

The New York Herald and American Civil Liberties Union have already denounced the FBI and plan on backing Mr. Gibbs. The judge has ordered the case sealed from the public.

Myron read on. The arguments on both sides were pretty standard. Gibbs’s attorneys naturally wrapped themselves in the First Amendment, while the feds equally naturally countered that the First Amendment was not an absolute, that you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and that freedom of expression does not include protecting possible criminals. The country also argued the issue. It played well on CNBC and MSNBC and CNN and a bunch of other cable letters, lighting up the phone lines like a radio giveaway. The judge was about to render a verdict when the whole story exploded in a way no one expected.

Myron hit the link:

GIBBS FIBS?

Reporter accused of plagiarism

Myron read the endgame shocker: Someone had found a mystery novel published by a tiny press with a minuscule print run in 1978. The novel, Whisper to a Scream, by F. K. Armstrong, closely mirrored Gibbs’s story. Too closely. Certain snippets of dialogue were pretty much copied verbatim. The crimes in the novel—kidnappings with no resolution—were too similar to what Gibbs had written to be dismissed as coincidence.

The plagiaristic spectres of Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith and the like rose from the grave and would not disperse. Heads rolled. There were resignations and hand-wringing. For his part, Stan Gibbs refused to comment, which didn’t look good. Gibbs ended up “taking a leave of absence,” a modern-day euphemism for getting fired. The ACLU issued an ambiguous statement and retreated. The New York Herald quietly retracted the story, saying that the matter “was under internal review.”

After some time passed, Myron reached for the phone and dialed.

“News desk. Bruce Taylor speaking.”

“How about meeting me for a drink?”

“I know this is out nowadays, Myron, but I’m strictly hetero.”

“I have the ability to change you.”

“I don’t think so, pal.”

“Several women I’ve dated started out hetero,” Myron said. “But one date with me and whammo, they switched teams.”

“I love it when you’re self-deprecating, Myron. It’s just so real.”

“So what do you say?”

“I’m on deadline.”

“You’re always on deadline.”

“You buying?”

“To quote my brethren during Passover seders, why should this night be different from any other night?”

“I buy sometimes.”

“Do you even own a wallet?”

“Hey, I’m not the one asking for favors,” Bruce said. “Four o’clock. The Rusty Umbrella.”

15

The Lex Building’s wrought-iron gates lined a Fifth Avenue façade with vegetation so dense you wouldn’t see light through it if a supernova burst on the other side. The famed edifice was a converted Manhattan mansion with a European courtyard and a regal art deco exterior and enough security to handle a Tyson boxing match. The building had wonderful old lines and detailed Venetian touches, except that for the sake of privacy, the windows had been converted into the smoky-limo variety. It made for a distracting and unnatural mix.

Four blue-blazered, gray-slacked guards stood at the entrance—real guards, Myron noted, with cop eyes and KGB facial tics, not the rent-a-uniforms you saw at department stores or airports. The four of them stood silently, eyeing Myron like he was wearing a tube top in the Vatican.

One of the guards stepped forward. “May I see some ID please?”

Myron took out his wallet and showed him a credit card and driver’s license.

“There’s no photo on the driver’s license,” the guard said.

“New Jersey doesn’t require them.”

“I need a photo ID.”

“I have my picture on my health club membership card.”

Cop-patient sigh. “That won’t do, sir. Do you have a passport?”

“In midtown Manhattan?”

“Yes, sir. For the purposes of ID.”

“No,” Myron said. “Besides, it’s a terrible picture. Doesn’t fully capture the radiant blue in my eyes.” Myron batted them for emphasis.

“Wait here, sir.”

He waited. The other three guards frowned, crossed their arms, studied him as though he might start drinking from a toilet. Myron heard a whirring noise and looked up. A security camera was on him now, focusing in. Myron waved, smiled into the lens, performed a few flexes he had picked up from watching he-man events on ESPN 2. He ended with a pretty dramatic back lat spread and waved to the appreciative crowd. The blue-blazers looked unimpressed.

“All natural,” Myron said. “I’ve never taken steroids.”

No replies.

The first guard came back. “Follow me, please.”

Stepping into the courtyard was like stepping into C. S. Lewis’s wardrobe, another world, the other side of the shrubbery, so to speak. Here in the middle of Manhattan, the street noises were suddenly very far away, muted. The garden was lush, the tile walkways forming a pattern not unlike an Oriental carpet. There was a sprouting fountain in the middle with a statue of a horse rearing back its head.

A new set of blue-blazers greeted him by the ornate front door. This place, Myron thought, must rack up a hell of a dry-cleaning bill. They made him empty his pockets, confiscated his cell phone, frisked him by hand, ran a metal wand over his person so thoroughly he almost asked for a condom, walked him through a metal detector twice, again frisked him with a little too much gusto.

“If you touch my wee-wee one more time,” Myron said, “I’m telling my mommy.”

More no replies. Maybe the Lexes demanded not only confidentiality but a discriminating sense of humor.

“Follow me, sir,” the talking blue-blazer said.

The stillness of the place—a building in the middle of Manhattan, for chrissake—was unnerving, the only sound now the steady echo of their footsteps against the cool marble. It was like walking through an old museum at night, the whole experience like something out of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The guards formed a poor man’s presidential motorcade—the talking blue-blazer and a buddy three paces in front of him, two other blue-blazers three paces back. Just for fun, Myron would slow down or speed up and watch the guards do likewise. Like a really bad line dance, which was something of a redundancy. At one point he almost did a moonwalk, à la Michael Jackson, but these guys were already viewing him as a potential pedophile.

The mahogany staircase was wide and smelled a bit like lemon Pledge. There were enormous tapestries on the wall, the kind with swords and horses and hedonistic feasts of suckling pig. There were two more blue-blazers on the second floor. Now it was their turn to inspect Myron as though they’d never seen a man before. Myron twirled for their benefit. They too seemed unimpressed.

“You should have seen me flex before,” Myron said.

The double doors opened and Myron entered a room slightly larger than a sports arena. Two guards followed him and took up positions in the back corners. There was a big man sitting to the right in a wing chair. At least he looked big in the chair. Or maybe the chair was tiny. The man was probably in his mid-forties. His head and neck formed a near-perfect trapezoid, the top buzzed into a military crew cut. He had a flat nose and ham-hock hands and knockwurst fingers. Ex-boxer or ex-marine or probably both. A man of ninety-degree angles and granite blocks.

Granite Man gave Myron more hard eyes, though his were more relaxed, as though Myron amused him in the way a little kitty nipping at his pant leg might. He didn’t stand, choosing instead to stare at Myron and crack his knuckles one at a time.

Myron looked at Granite Man. Granite Man cracked another knuckle.

“Shiver,” Myron said.

No one asked him to take a seat. Hell, no one spoke. Myron stood there and waited with the three sets of eyes weighing on him.

“Okay,” Myron said. “I’m intimidated. Can we get past this, please?”

Granite Man nodded at the two blazers. They both left. Almost simultaneously, a door on the other side of the room opened and two women appeared. They were pretty far away, but Myron guessed that the first one was Susan Lex. Her hair was done up in an impossibly neat, semi-shellacked bun, and her lips were pursed as if she’d just swallowed a live beetle. The other woman—she looked no more than eighteen or nineteen—had to be her daughter, a carbon copy with the same pursed lips and twenty-five years less wear and tear, not to mention better hair.

Myron started to cross the room with his hand extended, but Susan Lex held up her palm in a stop gesture. Granite Man sat forward, nearly leaning into Myron’s path. He gave Myron a small shake of the head, which was no easy task when you have no neck. Myron stayed where he was.

“I don’t like being threatened,” Susan Lex called from across the room.

“I apologize for that. But I had to see you.”

“And that makes it right to threaten and blackmail me?”

Myron had no quick answer to that. “I need to talk to you about your brother Dennis.”

“So you said on the phone.”

“Where is he?”

Susan Lex looked at Granite Man. Granite Man frowned and cracked his knuckles again. “Just like that, Mr. Bolitar?” Susan Lex said. “You call my office. You threaten me. You insist I alter my schedule to accommodate you. And then you come in here and make demands?”

“I don’t mean to be abrupt,” Myron said. “But this is a matter of life and death.”

Whenever he said “a matter of life and death,” he expected to hear that melodramatic dum-dum-duuuummm music.

“That’s hardly an explanation,” Susan Lex said.

“Your brother registered with the national bone marrow center,” Myron said. “His marrow matched a sick child’s.” After the creepy say-good-bye-to-the-boy conversation last night, Myron had decided to stop being gender specific. “Without that transplant, the child will die.”

Susan Lex arched an eyebrow. The rich are really good at that, at arching eyebrows without altering anything else on their face. Myron wondered if they learned it at rich-people summer camp. Susan Lex looked at Granite Man again. Granite Man was trying to smile now. “You’re mistaken, Mr. Bolitar,” she said.

Myron waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he said, “Mistaken how?”

“If you’re telling the truth, you’ve made a mistake. I will say no more.”

“With all due deference,” Myron said, “that’s not good enough.”

“It will have to be.”

“Where is your brother, Ms. Lex?”

“Please leave, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I can still go to the press.”

Granite Man crossed his legs and started cracking his knuckles again.

Myron turned to him. “Yes, but can you do this?” Myron patted his head with one hand and rubbed his belly with the other.

Granite Man didn’t like that one.

“Look,” Myron said, “I don’t want to cause any trouble here. You’re private people. I understand that. But I need to find this donor.”

“It’s not my brother,” Susan Lex said.

“Then where is he?”

“He’s not your donor. More than that is none of your concern.”

“Does the name Davis Taylor mean anything to you?”

Susan Lex repursed the lips as though a fresh beetle had sneaked through. She turned and walked out. Her daughter did likewise. Again on cue, the door behind Myron opened and the two blue-blazers filled it. More glares. They stepped fully into the room. Granite Man finally stood, which took some time. He was indeed big. Very big.

The men approached Myron.

“Let’s go to the judges,” Myron said. “Charles Nelson Reilly, your score?”

Granite Man stepped in front of him, shoulders square, eyes calm.

“The not introducing yourself,” Myron said, doing his best Charles Nelson Reilly lisp, which was not very good. “I thought that was really very macho. And that whole silent persona combined with the amused glare. Very nicely done, really. Professional. But—and here’s where you kinda lost me—the knuckle cracking, well, Gene, that was overkill, don’t you think? Overall score: an 8. Comment: stick with the subtle.”

Granite Man said, “You finished?”

“Yes.”

“Myron Bolitar. Born in Livingston, New Jersey. Mother Ellen, father Al—”

“They like to be called El-Al,” Myron interjected. “Like the Israeli airline.”

“Basketball All-American at Duke University. Picked eighth in the NBA draft by the Boston Celtics. Blew out your knee in your first preseason game, ending your career. Currently owns MB SportsReps, a sports representation firm. Dated the novelist Jessica Culver since you graduated college, but you two recently parted ways. Should I go on?”

“You left off the part about my being a snazzy dancer. I can demonstrate if you like.”

Granite Man smirked. “You want my score on you now?”

“Suit yourself.”

“You wisecrack too much,” Granite Man said. “I know you do it to look confident, but you’re trying too hard. And since you raised the issue of subtlety, your story about a dying kid needing a bone marrow transplant was touching. The only thing missing was the string quartet.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, I don’t believe you.”

“So why am I here, then?”

Granite Man spread his satellite-dishes excuse for hands. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

The three men formed a triangle, Granite in front, the two blue-blazers in back. Granite made a small nod. One of the blazers produced a gun and aimed at Myron’s head.

This was not good.

There are ways of disarming a man with a gun, but there’s an inherent problem: It might not work. If you miscalculate or if your opponent is better than you think—something not unlikely in an opponent who knows how to handle a gun—you could get shot. That’s a serious drawback. And in this particular situation there were two other opponents, both of whom looked good and were probably armed. There is a word expert fighters use for a sudden move at this juncture: suicide.

“Whoever did your research on me left something out,” Myron said.

“What might that be?”

“My relationship with Win.”

Granite Man didn’t flinch. “You mean Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third? Family owns Lock-Horne Security and Investments on Park Avenue. Your college roommate from Duke. Since moving out of the Spring Street loft you shared with Jessica Culver, you’ve been living at his apartment in the Dakota. You have close business and personal ties, might even be called best friends. That relationship?”

“That would be the one,” Myron said.

“I am aware of it. I am also aware of Mr. Lockwood’s”—he paused, searching for the word—“talents.”

“Then you know that if that bozo gets itchy”—Myron head-gestured toward the blazer with the gun—“you die.”

Granite Man wrestled with his facial muscles and this time he achieved a smile, though not without effort. Heart’s song “Barracuda” played in Myron’s head. “I am not without my own, uh, talents, Mr. Bolitar.”

“If you really believe that,” Myron said, “then you don’t know enough about Win’s, uh, talents.”

“I won’t debate the point. But I will point out that he doesn’t have an army like this at his disposal. Now, are you going to tell me why you’re asking about Dennis Lex?”

“I told you,” Myron said.

“You’re really going to stick with the dying-child story?”

“It’s the truth.”

“And how did you get Dennis Lex’s name?”

“From the bone marrow center.”

“They just gave it to you?”

Myron’s turn. “I too am not without my own, uh, talents.” It somehow didn’t sound right when he said it about himself.

“So you’re saying that the bone marrow center told you that Dennis Lex was a donor—that about right?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Myron said. “Look, this is a two-way street here. I want some information.”

“Wrong,” Granite Man said. “It’s a one-way street. I’m a Mack truck. You’re like an egg in the road.”

Myron nodded. “Cutting,” he said. “But if you’re not going to give me anything, I’m not giving you anything.”

The guy with the gun stepped closer.

Myron felt a quiver in his legs, but he didn’t blink. Maybe he did overplay the wisecracks, but you don’t show fear. Ever. “And let’s not pretend you’re going to shoot me over this. We both know you won’t. You’re not that stupid.”

Granite Man smiled. “I might beat on you a bit.”

“You don’t want trouble, I don’t want trouble. I don’t care about this family or its fortune or any of that. I’m just trying to save a kid’s life.”

Granite Man played air violin for a moment. Then he said, “Dennis Lex is not your salvation.”

“And I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“He’s not your donor. That much I personally guarantee.”

“Is he dead?”

Granite Man folded his arms across his paddleball-court chest. “If you’re telling the truth, the bone marrow people either lied to you or made a mistake.”

“Or you’re lying to me,” Myron said. Then added, “Or you’re making a mistake.”

“The guards will show you out.”

“I can still go to the press.”

Granite Man walked away then. “We both know you won’t,” he said. “You’re not that stupid either.”

16

Bruce Taylor was in print-journalist garb—like he’d gone to his laundry hamper and dug out whatever was on the bottom. He sat at the bar, scooped up the free pretzels, and pushed them into his mouth as though he were trying to swallow his palm.

“Hate these things,” he said to Myron.

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“I’m at a bar, for crying out loud. I gotta eat something. But nobody serves peanuts anymore. Too fattening or some such crap. Pretzels instead. And not real pretzels. Little tiny buggers.” He held one up for Myron to see. “I mean, what’s up with that?”

“And the politicians,” Myron said. “They spend all that time on gun control.”

“So what do you want to drink? And don’t ask for that Yoo-Hoo crap here. It’s embarrassing.”

“What are you having?”

“The same thing I always have when you pay. Twelve-year-old Scotch.”

“I’ll just have a club soda with lime.”

“Wuss.” He ordered it. “What do you want?”

“You know Stan Gibbs?”

Bruce said, “Whoa.”

“What whoa?”

“I mean, whoa, you get involved in some hairy-ass shit, Myron. But Stan Gibbs? What the hell could you possibly have to do with him?”

“Probably nothing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just tell me about him, okay?”

Bruce shrugged, took a sip of Scotch. “Ambitious s.o.b. who went too far. What else do you need to know?”

“The whole story.”

“Starting with?”

“What exactly did he do?”

“He plagiarized a story, the dumbass. That’s not unusual. But to be so stupid about it.”

“Too stupid?” Myron asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we both agree that stealing from a published novel is not only unethical but idiotic.”

“So?”

“So I’m asking if it’s too idiotic.”

“You think he’s innocent, Myron?”

“Do you?”

He chucked down a few more pretzels. “Hell no. Stan Gibbs is guilty as sin. And as stupid as he was, I know plenty stupider. How about Mike Barnicle? The guy steals jokes from a George Carlin book. George Carlin, for chrissake.”

“Does seem pretty stupid,” Myron agreed.

“And he’s not the only one. Look, Myron, every profession’s got their dirty laundry, right? The stuff they want swept under the rug. Cops got their blue line when one of them pounds a suspect into the earth. Doctors cover each other’s asses when they take out the wrong gallbladder or whatever. Lawyers … well, don’t even get me started on their dirty little secrets.”

“And plagiarism is yours?”

“Not just plagiarism,” Bruce said. “Wholesale fabrication. I know reporters who make up sources. I know guys who make up dialogue. I know guys who make up whole conversations. They run stories about crack mothers and inner-city gang leaders who never existed. Ever read those columns? Ever wonder why so many drug addicts, say, sound so friggin’ poignant when they can’t even watch Teletubbies without a tutor?”

“And you’re saying this happens a lot?”

“Truth?”

“Preferably.”

“It’s epidemic,” Bruce said. “Some guys are lazy. Some are too ambitious. Some are just pathological liars. You know the type. They’ll lie to you about what they had for breakfast just because it comes so naturally.”

The drinks came. Bruce pointed at the empty pretzel bowl. The bartender replaced it.

“So if it’s so epidemic,” Myron said, “how come so few get caught?”

“First off, it’s hard to catch. People hide behind anonymous sources and claim people moved, stuff like that. Second, it’s like I said before. It’s our dirty little secret. We keep it buried.”

“I’d think you’d want to clean house.”

“Oh, right. Like cops want to. Like doctors want to.”

“You’re not the same thing, Bruce.”

“Let me give you a scenario, Myron, okay?” Bruce finished up his drink, and now he pointed to his glass for a refill. “You’re an editor with, say, The New York Times. A story is written for you. You print it. Now it’s brought to your attention that the story was fabricated or plagiarized or maybe just totally inaccurate, whatever. What do you do?”

“Retract it,” Myron said.

“But you’re the editor. You’re the dumbass responsible for its publication. You’re probably the dumbass who hired the writer in the first place. Who do you think the higher-ups are going to blame? And do you think the higher-ups are going to be happy to hear that their paper printed something false? You think the Times wants to lose business to the Herald or the Post or whatever? And hell, the other papers don’t even want to hear about it. The public already doesn’t trust us as an institution, right? If the truth gets out, who gets hurt? Answer: everyone.”

“So you quietly fire the guy,” Myron said.

“Maybe. But, again, you’re this editor for The New York Times. You fire, say, a columnist. Don’t you think a higher-up is going to want to know why?”

“So you just let it go?”

“We’re like the church used to be with pedophiles. We try to control the problem without hurting ourselves. We transfer the guy to another department. We pass the problem to someone else. Maybe we team him up with another writer. Harder to make shit up with someone looking over your shoulder.”

Myron took a sip of his club soda. Flat. “Okay, let me ask the obvious question then. How did Stan Gibbs get caught?”

“He was dumb, dumber, and dumbest. It was too high profile a piece to plagiarize like that. Not only that, but Stan rubbed the feds’ face in a public crapper and flushed. You don’t do that if you don’t have the facts, especially to the feds. My guess is he thought he was safe because the novel had a negligible print run from some shitass vanity press in Oregon. I don’t think they published more than five hundred copies of the thing, and that was more than twenty years ago. And the author was long dead.”

“But someone dug it up.”

“Yup.”

Myron thought about it. “Strange, don’t you think?”

“Most of the time I’d say yes, but not when it’s this high-profile. And once the truth was uncovered, boom, Stan was done. Every media outlet got an anonymous press release about it. The feds held a press conference. I mean, there was almost a campaign against him. Someone—probably the feds—were out for their pound of flesh. And they got it.”

“So maybe the feds were so pissed they set him up.”

“How do you figure?” Bruce countered. “The novel exists. The passages Stan copied exist. There is no way around that.”

Myron mulled that one over, looking for a way around it. Nothing came to him. “Did Stan Gibbs ever defend himself?”

“He never commented.”

“Why not?”

“The guy’s a reporter. He knew better. Look, stories like these become the worst kind of brushfire. Only way to get the fire out is to stop feeding the flame. No matter how bad, if there’s nothing new to report—nothing new to feed the flame—it dies out. People always make the mistake of thinking they can douse the flame with their words, that they’re so smart, their explanations will work like water or something. It’s always a mistake to talk to the press. Everything—even wonderfully worded denials—feed the flames and keep it stoked.”

“But doesn’t silence make you look guilty?”

“He is guilty, Myron. Stan could only get himself in more trouble by talking. And if he hung around and tried to defend himself, someone would dig into his past too. Mainly his old columns. All of them. Every fact, every quote, everything. And if you’ve plagiarized one story, you’ve plagiarized others. You don’t do it for the first time when you’re Stan’s age.”

“So you think he was trying to minimize the damage?”

Bruce smiled, took a sip. “That Duke education,” he said. “It wasn’t wasted on you.” He grabbed more pretzels. “Mind if I order a sandwich?”

“Suit yourself.”

“It’ll be worth it,” Bruce said with a suddenly big smile. “Because I haven’t yet mentioned the last little tidbit that convinced him to keep quiet.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s big, Myron.” The smile slid off his face. “Very big.”

“Fine, order fries too.”

“I don’t want this to become public knowledge, you understand?”

“Come on, Bruce. What?”

Bruce turned back to the bar. He picked up a cocktail napkin and tore it in half. “You know the feds took Stan to court to find his sources.”

“Yes.”

“The court documents were kept sealed, but there was a bit of nastiness. See, they wanted Stan to provide some sort of corroboration. Something to show he didn’t totally make the story up. He wouldn’t offer any. For a while he claimed that only the families could back him and he wouldn’t give them up. But the judge pressed. He finally admitted that there was one other person who could back his story.”

“Back up his made-up story?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“His mistress,” Bruce said.

“Stan was married?”

“Guess the word ‘mistress’ gave it away,” Bruce said. “Anyway, he was. Still is, technically, but now they’re separated. Naturally Stan was hesitant about naming her—he loved his wife, had two kids, the backyard, whatever—but in the end he gave the judge her name under the condition that it stay sealed.”

“Did the mistress back him?”

“Yes. This mistress—one Melina Garston—claimed to have been with him when he met the Sow the Seeds psycho.”

Myron’s brow creased. “Why does that name ring a bell?”

“Because Melina Garston is dead now. Tied and tortured and you don’t want to know what.”

“When?”

“Three months ago. Right after the shit hit Stan’s fan. Worse, the police think Stan did it.”

“To keep her from telling the truth?”

“Again that Duke education.”

“But that makes no sense. She was killed after the plagiarism was discovered, right?”

“Right after, yeah.”

“So it was too late by then. Everyone thinks he’s guilty already. He’s lost his job. He’s disgraced. If his mistress now comes out and says ‘Yeah, I lied,’ it wouldn’t really change a thing. What would Stan have gained by killing her?”

Bruce shrugged. “Maybe her retraction would have removed any doubt.”

“But there’s not much doubt there anyway.”

The bartender came over. Bruce ordered a sandwich. Myron shook him off. “Can you find out where Stan Gibbs is hiding?”

Bruce waved down the bartender again. “I already know.”

“How?”

“He was my friend.”

“Was or is?”

“Is, I guess.”

“You like him?”

“Yeah,” Bruce said. “I like him.”

“Yet, you still think he did it.”

“Murder, probably not. Plagiarize …” He shrugged. “I’m a cynical guy. And just because a guy is a friend of mine doesn’t mean he can’t do dumb things.”

“Will you give me his address?”

“Will you tell me why?”

Myron sipped his flat club soda. “Okay, this is the part where you say you want to know what I have. Then I say I have nothing and when I do, you’ll be the first to know. Then you get kinda huffy and say I owe you and that’s not good enough, but in the end you take the deal. So why don’t we skip all that and just give me the address?”

“Will I still get my sandwich?”

“Sure.”

“Fine, then,” Bruce said. “Doesn’t matter. Stan hasn’t talked to anyone since he resigned—not even his close friends. What makes you think he’ll talk to you?”

“Because I’m a witty dinner companion and natty dresser?”

“Yeah, that.” He turned to Myron and looked at him heavily. “Now, this is the part where I tell you that if you find anything, anything, that suggests that Stan Gibbs is being set up, you tell me because I’m his friend and I’m a reporter hungry for a big story.”

“Not to mention a sandwich.”

No smile. “You got me?”

“Got you.”

“Anything you want to tell me now?”

“Bruce, I got less than nothing. It’s just a thread I need to snip away.”

“You know Cross River in Englewood?”

“A mid-eighties condo development that looks like something out of Poltergeist.”

“Twenty-four Acre Drive. Stan just came back to the area. He’s renting there.”

17

The Morning Mosh was not really the establishment’s name. Located in a converted warehouse downtown on the West Side, the Mosh had a neon sign that changed as the day went on. The word Mosh stayed lit all the time, but in the morning it blinked Morning Mosh, then Mid-Day Mosh (as it now read) and later on, Midnight Mosh. And that’s Mosh, not Nosh. Myron had expected a bagel store. But the letter was M, not N, and this place was Mosh. As in Mosh Pit. As in some retro heavy-metal band minus the talent blaring sounds that could strip paint while kids danced—and we’re using that term in its loosest form here—in a pit, careening off one another like a thousand pinballs released into the machine at the same time.

A sign by the front door read FOUR BODY PIERCE MINIMUM TO ENTER (EARS DON’T COUNT).

Myron stayed on the sidewalk and used his cell phone. He called the Mosh’s number. A voice answered, “Go for it, dude.”

“Suzze T please.”

“Dig.”

Dig?

Suzze came on two minutes later. “Hello?”

“It’s Myron. I’m out on the curb.”

“Come in. No one bites. Well, except for that guy who bit the legs off a live frog last night. Man, that was so cool.”

“Suzze, please meet me out here, okay?”

“What-ev-er.”

Myron hung up, feeling old. Suzze came out less than a minute later. She wore bell-bottom jeans with a gravity-defying waist that stayed up south of her hips. Her top was pink and much too small, revealing not only a flat stomach but a bottom-side hint of what interested the fine folks at Rack Enterprises. Suzze sported only one tattoo (a tennis racket with a snake’s head grip) and no piercings, not even her ears.

Myron pointed to the sign. “You don’t meet the minimum piercing requirement.”

“Yeah, Myron, I do.”

Silence. Then Myron said, “Oh.”

They started walking down the street. Another strange Manhattan neighborhood. Kids and the homeless hung out together. There were bars and nightclubs alongside daycare centers. The modern city. Myron passed a storefront with a sign: TATTOOS WHILE U WAIT. He reread the sign and frowned. Like how else would you do it?

“We got a weird endorsement offer,” Myron said. “You know the Rack Bars?”

Suzze said, “Like, upscale topless, right?”

“Well, topless anyway.”

“What about them?”

“They’re opening up a chain of topless coffee bars.”

Suzze nodded. “Cool,” she said. “I mean, taking the popularity of Starbucks and mixing it with Scores and Goldfingers, well, it’s totally wise.”

“Uh, right. Anyway, they’re having this big grand opening and they’re trying to generate excitement and media attention and all that. So they want you to make a, uh, guest appearance.”

“Topless?”

“Like I said on the phone, I had an offer I wanted you to refuse.”

“Totally topless?”

Myron nodded. “They insist on nipple visibility.”

“How much they willing to pay?”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

She stopped. “Are you shitting me?”

“I shit you not.”

She whistled. “Lots of cha-ching.”

“Yes, but I still think—”

“This was, like, their first offer?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you could get them up?”

“No, that would be your job.”

She stopped and looked at him. Myron shrugged his apology.

“Tell them yes,” she said.

“Suzze …”

“Two hundred grand for flashing a bit of booby? Christ, last night I think I did it in there for free.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“Did you see what I wore in Sports Illustrated? I might as well have been naked.”

“That isn’t the same thing either.”

“This is Rack, Myron, not some sleazoid place like Buddy’s. It’s upscale topless.”

“Saying ‘upscale topless’ is like saying ‘good toupee,’ ” Myron said.

“Huh?”

“It might be good,” he said, “but it’s still a toupee.”

She cocked her head. “Myron, I’m twenty-four years old.”

“I know that.”

“That’s like 107 in women-tennis years. I’m ranked thirty-one in the world right now. I haven’t made two hundred grand over the past two years on tour. This is a big score, Myron. And man, will it change my image.”

“Exactly my point.”

“No, listen up, tennis is looking for draws. I’ll be controversial. I’ll get tons of attention. I’ll suddenly be a big name. Admit it, my appearance fees will quadruple.”

Appearance fees are the money paid to the big names just to show up, win or lose. Most name players make far more in appearance fees than prize money. It’s where the potential major dinero is, especially for a player ranked thirty-first.

“Probably,” Myron said.

She stopped and grabbed his arm. “I love playing tennis.”

“I know that,” he said softly.

“Doing this will extend my career. That means a lot to me, okay?”

Christ, she looked so young.

“All of what you’re saying may be true,” Myron said. “But at the end of the day, you’re still appearing at a topless bar. And once it’s done, it’s done. You will always be remembered as the tennis player who appeared topless.”

“There are worse things.”

“Yes. But I didn’t become an agent to get in the stripping business. I’ll do what you want. You’re my client. I want what’s best for you.”

“But you don’t think this is best for me?”

“I have trouble advising a young woman to appear topless.”

“Even if it makes sense?”

“Even if it makes sense.”

She smiled at him. “You know something, Myron? You’re cute when you’re being a prude.”

“Yeah, adorable.”

“Tell them yes.”

“Think about it for a few days, okay?”

“It’s a no-brainer, Myron. Just do what you do best.”

“What’s that?”

“Get the number up. And tell them yes.”

18

Cross River Condos was one of those complexes that looked like a movie façade, like whole buildings might topple over if you pushed against any one wall. The development was sprawlingly cramped, with every building looking exactly the same. Walking through it was like something out of Alice in Wonderland, all avenues mirroring the others, until you got dizzy. Have too much drink and you’re bound to stick your key in the wrong lock.

Myron parked near the complex pool. The place was nice but too close to Route 80, the major artery that ran from, well, here in New Jersey to California. The traffic sounds sloshed over the fence. Myron located the door to 24 Acre Drive and then tried to figure out which windows belonged to it. If he had it right, the lights were on. So was the television. He knocked on the door. Myron saw a face peer through the window next to the door. The face did not speak.

“Mr. Gibbs?”

Through the glass, the face said, “Who are you?”

“My name is Myron Bolitar.”

A brief pause. “The basketball player?”

“At one time, yes.”

The face looked through the window for a few more seconds before opening the door. The odor of too many cigarettes wafted through the opening and happily nested inside Myron’s nostrils. Not surprisingly, Stan Gibbs had a cigarette in his mouth. He had a gray stubble-to-beard going, too far gone for retro Miami Vice. He wore a yellow Bart Simpson sweatshirt, dark green sweatpants, socks, sneakers, and a Colorado Rockies baseball cap—the standard fashion fare shared with equal fervor by joggers and couch potatoes. Myron suspected the latter here.

“How did you find me?” Stan Gibbs asked.

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Myron shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stan said. “I have no comment.”

“I’m not a reporter.”

“So what are you?”

“A sports agent.”

Stan took a puff of the cigarette, didn’t remove it from his mouth. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven’t played competitive football since high school.”

“May I come in?”

“No, I don’t think so. What do you want?”

“I need to find the kidnapper you wrote about in your article,” Myron said.

Stan smiled with very white teeth, especially when you considered the smoking. His skin was sort of clumpy and winter-colorless, his hair thin and tired, but he had those bright eyes, superbright eyes, the kind that look like supernatural beacons are shining out from within. “Don’t you read the papers?” he asked. “I made the whole thing up.”

“Made it up or copied it from a book?”

“I stand corrected.”

“Or maybe you were telling the truth. In fact, maybe the subject of your articles called me on the phone last night.”

Stan shook his head, the growing ash on the cigarette holding on like a kid on an amusement park ride. “This is not something I want to revisit.”

“Did you plagiarize the story?”

“I already said I wouldn’t comment—”

“This isn’t for public consumption. If you did—if the story was a fake—just tell me now and I’ll go away. I don’t have time to waste on false leads.”

“Nothing personal,” Stan said, “but you’re not making a whole lot of sense here.”

“Does the name Davis Taylor mean anything to you?”

“No comment.”

“How about Dennis Lex?”

That threw him. The dangling cigarette started to slip from Stan’s lips, but he caught it with his right hand. He dropped it on the walkway and watched it sizzle for a moment.

“Maybe you better come in.”

The condo was a duplex centered with that staple of new American contruction, the cathedral ceiling. Plenty of light came in from the big windows, splashing down on a decor straight out of a Sunday circular. A blond-wood entertainment center took up one wall, a matching coffee table not far from it. There was also a white-and-blue-striped couch—Myron would bet his lunch money it was a Serta Sleeper—and matching love seat. The carpeting was the same neutral as the exterior, a sort of inoffensive tan, and the place was clean yet disorderly in a divorcé way, newspapers and magazines and books piled here and there, nothing really put in a specific place.

He had Myron sit on the couch. “Want something to drink?”

“Sure, whatever,” Myron said. The coffee table had one photograph on it. A man had his arms around two boys. All three were smiling too hard, like they’d just come in second place and didn’t want to appear disappointed. They were standing in a garden of some sort. Behind them loomed a marble statue of a woman with a bow and arrow over her shoulder. Myron picked up the frame and studied it. “This you?”

Gibbs lifted his head while scooping a handful of ice into a glass. “I’m on the right,” he said. “With my brother and my father.”

“Who’s that a statue of?”

“Diana the Huntress. You familiar with her?”

“Didn’t she turn into Wonder Woman?”

Stan chuckled. “Sprite okay?”

Myron put the photograph down. “Sure.”

Stan Gibbs poured the drink, brought it out to Myron, handed it to him. “What do you know about Dennis Lex?”

“Just that he exists,” Myron said.

“So why mention his name to me?”

Myron shrugged. “Why did you react so strongly to hearing it?”

Gibbs took out another cigarette, lit it. “You’re the one who came to me.”

“True.”

“Why?”

No secret. “I’m looking for a man named Davis Taylor. He’s a bone marrow donor who matched a kid and then vanished. I traced him to an address in Connecticut, but he’s not there. So I dug a little more and found out that Davis Taylor is a name change. His real name is Dennis Lex.”

“I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”

“This might sound a little nutty,” Myron said. “But I left a voice mail message for Davis Taylor né Dennis Lex. When he called back, he made little sense. But he kept telling me to ‘sow the seeds.’ ”

A small quake ran through Stan Gibbs. It passed quickly. “What else did he say?”

“That was pretty much it. I should sow the seeds. I should say good-bye to the child. Stuff like that.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Gibbs said. “He probably just read my article and decided to have a little fun at your expense.”

“Probably,” Myron said. “Except that wouldn’t really explain your reaction to Dennis Lex’s name.”

Stan shrugged, but there wasn’t much behind it. “The family is famous.”

“If I said Ivana Trump, would you have reacted the same?”

Gibbs stood. “I need some time to think about this.”

“Think out loud,” Myron said.

Stan just shook his head.

“Did you make up the story, Stan?”

“Another time.”

“Not good enough,” Myron said. “You owe me something here. Did you plagiarize the story?”

“How do you expect me to answer that?”

“Stan?”

“What?”

“I don’t care about your situation. I’m not here to judge you or tell on you. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you made up the story or not. All I care about is finding the bone marrow donor. Period. End of story. El Fin.”

Stan’s eyes started to well up. He took another puff of the cigarette. “No,” he said. “I never plagiarized. I never saw that book in my life.”

It was like the room had been holding its breath and finally let go.

“How do you explain the similarities between your article and that novel?”

He opened his mouth, stopped, shook his head.

“Your silence makes you look guilty.”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

“Yeah, you do. I’m trying to save a kid’s life here. You’re not that wrapped up in your problems, are you, Stan?”

Stan moved back into the kitchen. Myron stood and followed him. “Talk to me,” Myron said. “Maybe I can help.”

“No,” he said. “You can’t.”

“How do you explain the similarities, Stan? Just tell me that, okay? You must have thought about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it.”

“Meaning?”

He opened the refrigerator and grabbed another can of Sprite. “Do you think all psychotics are original?”

“I’m not following you.”

“You received a call from a guy who told you about sowing the seeds.”

“Right.”

“There are two possibilities that explain why he did that,” Stan said. “One, he is the same killer I wrote about. Or two?” Stan looked at Myron.

“He just repeated what he’d read in the article,” Myron said.

Stan snapped and pointed at Myron.

“So you’re saying that the kidnapper you interviewed read this novel and it, what, influenced him somehow? That he copied it?”

Stan took a swig from the can. “That’s a theory,” he said.

And a damn good one, Myron thought. “So why didn’t you say that to the press? Why didn’t you defend yourself?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

“Some people say it’s because you were afraid they’d look closer at your work. That they’d find other fabrications.”

“And some people are morons,” he finished.

“So why didn’t you fight?”

“I spent my whole life being a journalist,” Stan said. “Do you know what it means for a journalist to be called a plagiarist? It’s like a daycare worker being called a child molester. I’m done. No words can change that. I’ve lost everything to this scandal. My wife, my kids, my job, my reputation—”

“Your mistress?”

He shut his eyes suddenly, tightly, like a child trying to make the bogeyman go away.

“The police think you killed Melina,” Myron said.

“I’m well aware of that.”

“Tell me what’s going on here, Stan.”

He opened his eyes and shook his head. “I have to make some calls, check out some leads.”

“You can’t just cut me loose.”

“I have to,” he said.

“Let me help.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“But I need yours.”

“Not right now,” Stan said. “You’ll have to trust me on this.”

“I’m not big on trust,” Myron said.

Stan smiled. “Neither am I,” he said. “Neither am I.”

19

Myron pulled out. So, too, he noticed, did two men in a black Oldsmobile Ciera. Hmm.

The cell phone rang.

“Have you learned anything?” It was Emily.

“Not really,” Myron said.

“Where are you?”

“Englewood.”

“Do you have any plans for dinner?” Emily asked.

Myron hesitated. “No.”

“I’m a good cook, you know. We dated in college, so I didn’t have much chance to demonstrate my culinary skills.”

“I remember you cooking for me once,” Myron said.

“I did?”

“In my wok.”

Emily chuckled. “That’s right, you had an electric wok in your dorm, right?”

“Yep.”

“I almost forgot about that,” Emily said. “Why did you have one, anyway?”

“To impress chicks.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I thought I’d invite a girl up to my room, slice up some vegetables, add a little soy sauce—”

“To the vegetables?” she asked.

“For starters.”

“So how come you never pulled that one on me?”

“Didn’t have to.”

“You calling me easy, Myron?”

“How exactly does one answer that,” Myron asked, “and maintain possession of both testicles?”

“Come on over,” Emily said. “I’ll make us some dinner. No soy sauce.”

Another hesitation.

“Please don’t make me ask again,” Emily said.

He wanted very much to say no. “Okay.”

“Just take Route 4—”

“I know the way, Emily.”

He hung up then and checked the rearview mirror. The black Oldsmobile Ciera was still following. Better safe than sorry. Myron hit the preprogrammed number on his cell phone. After one ring, Win answered.

“Articulate,” Win said.

“Got a tail, methinks.”

“License plate?”

Myron read it off to him.

“Where should we coordinate?”

“Garden State Plaza mall,” Myron said.

“On my way, fair maiden.”

Myron stayed on Route 4 until he saw a sign for the Garden State Plaza. He took a rather complicated cloverleaf overpass and veered into the mall’s lot. The black Olds followed, dropping back a bit. Stall time. Myron circled a few times before finding a parking space. The Olds kept its distance. He turned off the car and headed for the “Northeast Entrance.”

The Garden State Plaza had all the artificial elements endemic in malls—the mall ear-pop when you enter, the stale mall air, the mall hollow acoustics, as though all sound were traveling through a high-volume distorter—the audial equivalent of a shower door, voices somehow rendered both loud and incomprehensible. Too much with the high ceilings and faux marble, nothing soft to cushion the sound.

He strolled through the nouveau riche section of the Garden State Plaza, past several barren shoe stores, the kind that display maybe three pairs of shoes on the ends of what look like deer antlers. He reached a store called Aveda, which sold wildly overpriced cosmetics and lotions. The Aveda saleswoman, a starving young thang in tourniquet-tight black, informed Myron that they were having a sale on face moisturizers. Myron refrained from crying out “Yippee!” and went on his way. Victoria’s Secret was next, and Myron did that male surreptitious glance at the lingerie window displays. Most of your more sophisticated heterosexual males are well versed in this art, awarding the racily clad supermodels the most casual of once-overs, feigning a lack of interest in the blown-up, blown-clear images of Stephanie and Frederique in Miracle Bras. Myron, of course, did the same thing—and then he thought, why pretend? He stopped short, squared his shoulders, ogled in earnest. Honesty. Shouldn’t a woman respect that in a man too?

He checked his watch. Not yet. More stall. The plan, as it were, was fairly simple. Win drives to the Garden State Plaza. When he arrives, he calls Myron on the cell phone. Myron then goes back to his car. Win looks for the black Olds and follows the followee. Super clever, no?

Myron hit Sharper Image, one of the few places in the world where people use the words shiatsu and ionic and nobody laughs. He tried out a massage chair (setting: Knead) and debated purchasing a $5,500 life-size statue of a Star Wars star-trooper that had been reduced to a mere $3,499. Talk about redefining nouveau riche. Here’s a little tip for you: If you’ve purchased a Sharper Image life-size Star Wars star-trooper, take out your platinum-est charge card, hand it to the nearest cashier, and buy a life.

The cell phone rang. Myron picked it up.

“They’re feds,” Win said.

“Yikes.”

“Yes.”

“No reason to follow them, then.”

“No.”

Myron spotted two men in suits and sunglasses behind him. They were studying the fruit-flavored shampoos in the Garden Botanica store window a little too closely. Two men in suits and sunglasses. Oh, like that happens. “I think they’re following me in here too.”

“If they arrest you with lingerie,” Win said, “tell them it’s for your wife.”

“That what you do?”

“Keep the phone on,” Win said.

Myron did as he asked. An old trick of theirs. Myron kept his cell phone on, thereby freeing Win to listen in. Okay, fine, now what? He kept strolling. Two more men in business suits were window-shopping up ahead. They turned as Myron approached, both staring him down. Some tail. Myron glanced behind him. The first two feds were right there.

The two feds in front of him stepped directly into his path. The other two came up behind him, boxing him in.

Myron stopped, looked at all four feds. “Did you guys check out the facial moisturizer sale at Aveda?”

“Mr. Bolitar?”

“Yes.”

One of them, a short guy with a severe haircut, flashed a badge. “I’m Special Agent Fleischer with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like a word with you, sir.”

“What about?”

“Would you mind coming with us?”

They had the standard-issue stone expressions; Myron would get nothing out of them. Probably didn’t even know anything themselves. Probably just delivery boys. Myron shrugged and followed them out. Two got into a white Olds Ciera. The other two stayed with Myron. One opened the back door of the black Ciera and head-gestured for Myron to get in. He did so. The interior was very clean. Nice, smooth seats. Myron ran his hand over it.

“Corinthian leather?” he asked.

Special Agent Fleischer turned around. “No, sir, that would be the Ford Granada.”

Touché.

No one spoke. No radio played. Myron settled back. He debated calling Emily and postponing their soy-sauce-less encounter, but he didn’t want the feds to hear him. He sat tight and kept his mouth shut. He didn’t do that often. It felt odd and somehow right.

Thirty minutes later, he was in the basement of a modest high-rise in Newark. He sat at a table with his hands on a semi-sticky table. The room had one barred window and cement walls the color and texture of dried oatmeal. The feds excused themselves and left Myron alone. Myron sighed and sat back. He’d figured that this was the old soften-him-up-by-making-him-wait bit, when the door flew open.

The woman was first. She wore a pumpkin-orange blazer, blue jeans, sneakers, and ball-and-chain earrings. The word that came to mind was husky. Not big really. Husky. Everything was husky—even her hair, a sort of canned-corn yellow. The guy riding in on her fumes was geeky thin with a pointy head and a small, greased shock of black hair. He looked like an upside-down pencil. He spoke first.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Bolitar,” Pencil said.

“Good afternoon.”

“I’m Special Agent Rick Peck,” he said. “This is Special Agent Kimberly Green.”

The orange-blazered Green did a caged-lion pace. Myron nodded at her. She nodded back but grudgingly, like her teacher had just told her to apologize for something she didn’t do.

Pencil Peck continued. “Mr. Bolitar, we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What about?”

Peck kept his eyes on his notes and spoke like he was reading. “Today you visited one Stan Gibbs at 24 Acre Drive. Is that correct?”

“How do you know I didn’t visit two Stan Gibbs?”

Peck and Green exchanged a glance. Then Peck said, “Please, Mr. Bolitar, we’d appreciate your cooperation. Did you visit Mr. Gibbs?”

“You know I did,” Myron said.

“Fine, thank you.” Peck wrote something down slowly. Then he looked up. “We’d very much like to know the nature of your visit.”

“Why?”

“You are the first visitor Mr. Gibbs has had since moving to his current residence.”

“No, I mean, why do you want to know?”

Green crossed her arms. She and Peck looked at each other again. Peck said, “Mr. Gibbs is part of an ongoing investigation.”

Myron waited. No one said anything. “Well, that pretty much clears it up.”

“That’s all I can say for the moment.”

“Same here.”

“Pardon?”

“If you can’t say any more, I can’t say any more.”

Kimberly Green put her hands on the table, gave a toothy grimace—husky teeth?—and leaned down like she might take a bite out of him. The canned-corn hair smelled like Pert Plus. She eyeballed him—must have read a memo on intimidating glares—and then spoke for the first time. “Here’s how we’re going to play it, asshole. We’re going to ask you questions. You’re going to listen to them and then you’re going to answer them. You got it?”

Myron nodded. “I want to make sure I got this straight,” he said to her. “You’re playing bad cop, right?”

Peck picked up the ball. “Mr. Bolitar, no one is interested in making trouble here. But we’d very much like your cooperation in this matter.”

“Am I under arrest?” Myron asked.

“No.”

“Bye then.”

He started to stand. Kimberly Green gave him a shove mid-rise and he fell back into the chair. “Sit down, asshole.” She looked over at Peck. “Maybe he’s part of it.”

“You think so?”

“Why else would he be so reluctant to answer questions?”

Peck nodded. “Makes sense. An accomplice.”

“We can probably arrest him now,” Green said. “Lock him up for the night, maybe leak it to the press.”

Myron looked up at her. “Gasp,” he said. “Now. I. Am. Really. Scared. Second gasp.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What did you say?”

“Don’t tell me,” Myron said. “Maybe I’m guilty of aiding and abetting. That’s my personal favorite. Does anyone actually get prosecuted for that?”

“You think we’re playing games here?”

“I do. And by the way, how come you’re all called ‘special’ agent? Doesn’t that sound like something someone made up one day? Like a kid’s game to raise self-esteem. ‘We’re promoting you from agent to special agent, Barney,’ and then what, super-special agent?”

Green grabbed his lapels and leaned his chair back. “You’re not funny.”

Myron looked at her hands gripping him. “Are you for real?”

“You want to try me?” she said.

Peck said, “Kim.”

She ignored him and kept her glare on Myron. “This is serious,” she said.

Her tone aimed for angry but came out more like a frightened plea. Two more agents entered. With the four delivery boys, that made eight. This was something big. What, Myron had no idea. The murder of Melina Garston maybe. But that was doubtful. The locals usually handled murders. You don’t call in the feds.

The new guys came at Myron in different ways, but there were only so many routes to travel and Myron knew them all. Threatening, friendly, flattering, insulting, building up, belittling, hard, soft, every sell. They denied him the bathroom, they made excuses to keep him longer, all the while they’re working him and he’s working them and neither one is giving. Sweat started flowing, mostly from them, the stains and stench filling the air, metastasizing into something Myron could swear was genuine fear.

Kimberly Green came in and out and she kept shaking her head at him. Myron wanted to cooperate, but here’s the pertinent cliché: Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t put it back in. He didn’t know what they were investigating. He didn’t know if it would benefit Jeremy to talk or hurt him. But once he spoke, once his words were in the public domain, he couldn’t take them back. Any leverage he might later be able to apply would be gone. So, for now, even if he might want to help, he wouldn’t. Not until he learned more. He had the contacts. He could find out quickly enough, make an informed decision.

Sometimes, negotiating meant shutting up.

When things wound down, Myron got up to leave. Kimberly Green blocked his path. “I’m going to make your life hell,” she said.

“That your way of asking me out?”

She leaned back as if he’d slapped her. When she recovered, she shook her head slowly. “You have no idea, do you?”

Shutting up, he reminded himself. Myron pushed past her and headed outside.

20

He called Emily from the car. “I thought I was being stood up,” she said.

Myron checked out the rearview mirror and spotted what might be another fed tail. No matter. “Sorry,” he said. “Something came up.”

“Involving the donor?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You still in Jersey?” Emily asked.

“Yes.”

“Come on over. I’ll reheat dinner.”

He wanted to say no. “Okay.”

Franklin Lakes was about sprawling. Everything sprawled. The houses were mostly new construction, big brick mansions on eternal cul-de-sacs, little gates at the front of the driveways that opened with push-button or intercom, like that would really protect the owners from what lay outside the lush lawns and pedicure-clipped hedges. The interiors were sprawling too, dining rooms big enough to house helicopters, remote-controlled blinds, Sub-Zero/Viking Stove kitchens with marble islands that overlooked family rooms the size of movie theaters, always with complicated state-of-the-art entertainment centers.

Myron rang the bell and the door opened and for the first time in his life, Myron was face-to-face with his son.

Jeremy smiled at him. “Hi.”

Strong, totally alien surges ricocheted haphazardly through Myron, his nervous system melting down and in overdrive all at once. His diaphragm contracted and his lungs stopped. So, he was sure, did his heart. His mouth weakly opened and closed like a dying fish on a boat deck. Tears headed up and pushed toward the eyes.

“You’re Myron Bolitar, right?” Jeremy said.

An ocean-shell rushing filled Myron’s ears. He managed a nod.

“You played ball against my dad,” Jeremy said, still with the smile that ripped at the corners of Myron’s heart. “In college, right?”

Myron found his voice. “Yes.”

The kid nodded back. “Cool.”

“Yeah.”

A horn honked. Jeremy leaned to the right and looked behind Myron. “That’s my ride. Later.”

Jeremy leaped past Myron. Myron numbly turned and watched the boy jog down the driveway. Imagination maybe, but that gait was oh-so-familiar. From Myron’s old game films. More surges. Oh Christ …

Myron felt a hand on his shoulder, but he ignored it and watched the boy. The car door opened and swallowed Jeremy into the darkness. The driver’s window slid down and a pretty woman called out, “Sorry I’m late, Em.”

From behind him, Emily said, “No problem.”

“I’ll take them to school in the morning.”

“Great.”

A wave and the pretty woman’s window slid back into place. The car started on its way. Myron watched it disappear down the road. He felt Emily’s eyes on him. He slowly turned to her.

“Why did you do that?”

“I thought he’d be gone by now,” Emily said.

“Do I really look that stupid?”

She stepped back into the house. “I want to show you something.”

Trying to get his legs back, his head wobbly, and his internal referee still giving him the eight count, Myron followed her silently up the stairway. She led him down a darkened corridor lined with modern lithographs. She stopped, opened a door, and flipped on the lights. The room was teenage-cluttered, as if someone had put all the belongings in the center of the room and dropped a hand grenade on them. The posters on the walls—Michael Jordan, Keith Van Horn, Greg Downing, Austin Powers, the words YEAH, BABY! across his middle in pink tie-dye lettering—had been hung askew, all tattered corners and missing pushpins. There was a Nerf basketball hoop on the closet door. There was a computer on the desk and a baseball cap dangling from a desk lamp. The corkboard had a mix of family snapshots and construction-paper crayons signed by Jeremy’s sister, all held up by oversized pushpins. There were footballs and autographed baseballs and cheap trophies and a couple of blue ribbons and three basketballs, one with no air in it. There were stacks of computer-game CD-ROMs and a Game Boy on the unmade bed and a surprising amount of books, several opened and facedown. Clothes littered the floor like war wounded; the drawers were half open, shirts and underwear hanging out like they’d been shot mid-escape. The room had the slight, oddly comforting smell of kids’ socks.

“He’s a slob,” she said. Leaving off the obvious “like you.”

Myron stayed still.

“He keeps Oxy 10 in his desk drawer,” Emily said. “He thinks I don’t know. He’s at that age where crushes keep him up all night, but he’s never even kissed a girl.” She walked over to the corkboard and snatched up a photograph of Jeremy. “He’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

“This isn’t helping, Emily.”

“I want you to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“He’s never been kissed. He is going to die and he’s never even kissed a girl.”

Myron held up his hands. “I don’t know what you want me to say here.”

“Try to understand, okay?”

“I don’t need melodrama. I understand.”

“No, Myron, you don’t. You look back at the night and see it as some sort of Gothic blunder. We did something sinful and for that we all paid a heavy price. If we could just go back and erase that tragic mistake, well, it’s all so Hamlet and Macbeth, isn’t it? Your ruined basketball career, Greg’s future, our marriage—all laid to waste in that one moment of lust.”

“It wasn’t lust.”

“Let’s not go through that argument again. I don’t care what it was. Lust, stupidity, fear, fate. Call it whatever the hell you want to—but I would never want to go back. That ‘mistake’ was the best thing that ever happened to me. Jeremy, our son, came out of that mess. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’d destroy a million careers and marriages for him.”

She looked at him, challenging. He said nothing.

“I’m not religious and I don’t believe in fate or destiny or any of that,” she went on. “But maybe, just maybe, there had to be a balance. Maybe the only way to produce something so wonderful was to surround the event with so much destruction.”

Myron started backing out of the room. “This isn’t helping,” he said again.

“Yes,” she said, “it is.”

“You want me to find the donor. I’m trying to do that. But this kind of distraction doesn’t help. I need to stay detached.”

“No, Myron, you need attachment. You need to get emotional. You have to understand the stakes—your son, that beautiful boy who opened the door—is going to die before he’s even kissed a girl.” She moved closer to him and looked into his eyes and Myron thought that her eyes had never looked so clear before.

“I watched you play every game at Duke,” she said. “I fell in love with you on that court—not because you were the team star or because you were graceful or athletic. You were so open out there, so raw and emotional. And the more emotional you got, the more pressure there was, the better you played. If the game was a blowout, you lost interest. You needed it to matter. You needed to be double-teamed with only a few seconds on the clock. You needed to lose control a little.”

“This isn’t a game, Emily.”

“Right,” she said. “The stakes are higher. The emotion should be higher. I want you desperate, Myron. That’s when you’re at your best.”

He looked at the photograph of Jeremy, and he knew that he was feeling something that he had never felt before. He blinked, caught the expression on his face in the closet-door mirror, and for a moment he saw his own father staring back.

Emily hugged him then. She buried her face in his shoulder and started to cry. Myron held on tight. They stood that way for several minutes before making their way downstairs. Over dinner, Emily told him about Jeremy, and he soaked in every story. They moved to the couch and broke out the photo albums. Emily tucked her legs under her, her elbow on the top of the couch, her head leaning on the heel of her hand, and told him more. It was nearly two in the morning when she walked him to the door. They were holding hands.

“I know you spoke to Dr. Singh,” she said in the open door.

“Yes.”

She let loose a deep breath. “I’m just going to say this, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ve been keeping track. I bought one of those home tests. The, uh, optimum conception day will be Thursday.”

He opened his mouth but she stopped him with her hand.

“I know all the arguments against this, but it might be Jeremy’s only chance. Don’t say anything. Just think about it.”

She closed the door. Myron stared at it for a few moments. He tried to conjure up the moment Jeremy had opened it, the crooked smile on the boy’s face, but already the image was hazy and fading fast.

21

First thing in the morning, Myron called Terese. Still no answer. He frowned at the phone. “Am I getting the big kiss-off?” he asked Win.

“Doubtful,” Win said. He was reading the newspaper and wearing silk pajamas with a matching bathrobe and slippers. Give him a pipe and he could have been something Noël Coward created on an off day.

“What makes you say that?”

“Our Ms. Collins appears to be rather direct,” Win said. “If you were being tossed into the dung heap, you’d know the smell.”

“And then there’s the part about my being irresistible to women,” Myron said.

Win turned the page.

“So what’s she up to?”

Win tapped his chin with his index finger. “What’s the term you relationship people use? Oh, yes. Space. Perhaps she needs some space.”

“ ‘Needing space’ is usually a code phrase for the big kiss-off.”

“Yes, well, whatever.” Win crossed his legs. “You want me to look into it?”

“Into what?”

“What Ms. Collins might be up to.”

“No.”

“Fine,” Win said. “Let’s move on, shall we? Tell me about your encounter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Myron recapped the interrogation.

“So we don’t know what they wanted,” Win said.

“Correct.”

“Not a clue?”

“Nothing. Except that they were scared.”

“Curious.”

Myron nodded.

Win took a sip of tea, pinky up. Oh, the horrors that pinky had witnessed, partaken in, even. They sat in Win’s formal dining room and used a silver tea set. Victorian mahogany table with lion-paw feet, silver tea set, silver milk pitcher, boxes of Cap’n Crunch and some new cereal called Oreo, which is exactly what you would imagine. “Theorizing at this juncture is a waste of time. I’ll make some calls, see what I can find out.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m still not sure I see a connection between Stan Gibbs and our blood donor.”

“It’s a long shot,” Myron agreed.

“More than that. A newspaper columnist makes up a story about a serial kidnapper and now—what?—we think the fictional character is the donor?”

“Stan Gibbs claims the story is real.”

“Does he now?”

“Yes.”

Win rubbed his chin. “Pray tell, why does he not defend himself?”

“No clue.”

“Presumably because he is guilty,” Win said. “Man is, above all, selfish. He’s into self-preservation. It’s instinctive. He does not martyr himself. He cares about one thing above all else: saving his hide.”

“Assuming I agree with your sunny view of human nature, wouldn’t you agree that man would lie to save himself?”

“Of course,” Win said.

“So armed with this pretty decent defense—the idea that the serial kidnapper copycatted the novel—why wouldn’t Stan use it to defend himself, even if he was guilty of plagiarism?”

Win nodded. “I like the way you’re thinking.”

“Cynically, yes.”

The intercom buzzed. Win pressed the button, and the doorman announced Esperanza. A minute later, she swept into the room, grabbed a chair, and poured herself a bowl of Oreo cereal.

“Why do they always say it’s ‘part of this complete breakfast’?” Esperanza asked. “Every single time, every single cereal. What’s all that about?”

Nobody replied.

Esperanza took a spoonful, looked at Win, head-gestured toward Myron. “I hate it when he’s right,” she said to Win.

“A bad omen,” Win agreed.

Myron said, “I was right?”

She turned her gaze to Myron. “I did that school check on Dennis Lex. I tracked down any and all educational institutions any of his siblings or parents had gone to. Nothing. College, high school, middle school—even grammar school. No trace of Dennis Lex.”

“But?” Myron said.

“Preschool.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“You found his preschool?”

“I’m more than just a great piece of ass,” Esperanza said.

Win said, “Not to me, my dear.”

“You’re sweet, Win.”

Win bowed his head slightly.

“Miss Peggy Joyce,” Esperanza said. “She still teaches and runs the Shady Wells Montessori School for Children in East Hampton.”

“And she remembers Dennis Lex?” Myron said. “From thirty years ago?”

“Apparently.” Esperanza shoved in another spoonful and tossed Myron a sheet of paper. “This is her address. She’s expecting you this morning. Drive safely now, ya hear?”

22

The car phone rang. “The old man is a lying sack of shit.” It was Greg Downing.

“What?”

“The geezer is lying.”

“You mean Nathan Mostoni?”

“Jesus Christ, what other old man have I been watching?”

Myron switched ears. “What makes you think he’s lying, Greg?”

“Lots of things.”

“Like?”

“Like starting with Mostoni never hearing from the bone marrow center. Does that sound logical to you?”

He thought of Karen Singh and her dedication and the stakes. “No,” Myron said, “but it’s like we said before—he might be confused.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Nathan Mostoni goes out plenty on his own, for one thing. Sometimes he acts loony, but other times, he seems just fine. He shops himself. He talks to people. He dresses like a normal person.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Myron said.

“No? An hour ago he went out, right? So I got close to the house, right up against the back window, and I dialed that number, the one you got for the donor.”

“And?”

“And I hear a phone inside the house ringing.”

That made Myron pause.

“So what do you think we should do?” Greg asked.

“I’m not sure. Have you seen anybody else at the house?”

“Nobody. Mostoni goes out but nobody’s been here. And I tell you something else. He looks younger now. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s weird. You making any headway on your end?”

“I’m not sure.”

“That’s some answer, Myron.”

“The only one I got.”

“So what do you think we should do about Mostoni?”

“I’ll have Esperanza do a background check. In the meantime, stay on him.”

“Time’s a-ticking away here, Myron.”

“I know that. I’ll be in touch.”

He disconnected the call and flipped on the radio. Chaka Khan was singing “Ain’t Nobody Love You Better.” If you can listen to that one without moving your feet, you got some serious rhythm issues. He took the Long Island Expressway east, which was shockingly clear today. Usually the road was more or less a parking lot that swayed forward every couple of minutes.

People always tell you that the Hamptons, the swanky Long Island summer spot where Manhattanites get away from it all by being with other Manhattanites, is best in the off season. You always hear that about vacation spots. People, mostly vacationers themselves, whine through the high-season months, waiting to reach this apex of a theoretically swarmless nirvana. But—and this was the part Myron never understood—no one is ever in the Hamptons in the off months. No one. Downtown is dead to the point of craving tumbleweeds. Shop owners sigh and discount nothing. The restaurants are less crowded, sure, but they’re also closed. And hey, let’s be honest here, the weather and beaches and even the people-watching are big draws here. Who goes to a Long Island beach in the winter?

The school was in a residential neighborhood with older, more modest homes—a place where the true Long Island regulars, none of whom hang out with Alec and Kim at Nick and Toni’s, resided. Myron parked in a church lot and followed the signs down the steps into the rectory’s basement. A young woman, a hall monitor of sorts, greeted Myron at the landing. He gave her his name and said he was here to see Ms. Joyce. The young woman nodded and told him to follow her.

The corridor was silent. Strange when one considered that this was a preschool. Preschool. Another new term. In Myron’s day, they had called them nursery schools. Myron wondered when the name had changed and what group had considered the term nursery school somehow discriminatory. Professional RNs? Breastfeeding mothers? Bottle-fed infants maybe?

Still silent. Perhaps it was vacation or naptime. Myron was about to ask the young hall monitor when she opened a door. He looked in. Wrong-a-mundo. The room was chock full of small children, probably twenty give or take, and they were all working independently and in total silence. The older teacher smiled at Myron. She whispered to the little boy she was working with—he was doing something with blocks and letters—and stood.

“Hello,” she said to Myron, speaking softly.

“Hi,” Myron whispered back.

She leaned toward the young monitor. “Miss Simmons, will you help Mrs. McLaughlin?”

“Of course.”

Peggy Joyce wore an open yellow sweater over a buttoned-at-the-neck blouse. The collar was frilly. She had half-moon glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. “We can chat in my office.”

“Okay.” He followed her. The place was silent as, well, a place without children. Myron asked, “Do you give those kids Valium?”

She smiled. “Just a little Montessori.”

“A little what?”

“You don’t have children, do you?”

The question caused a pang, but he answered in the negative.

“It’s a teaching philosophy created by Dr. Maria Montessori, Italy’s first female physician.”

“It seems to work.”

“I suppose.”

“Do the children act like this at home?”

“Good Lord, no. Truth be told, it doesn’t translate into the real world. But few things do.”

They moved into the office, which consisted of a wooden desk, three chairs, one file cabinet.

“How long have you taught here?” Myron asked.

“I’m in my forty-third year.”

“Wow.”

“Yes.”

“I guess you’ve seen lots of changes?”

“In kids? Almost none. Children don’t change, Mr. Bolitar. A five-year-old is still a five-year-old.”

“Still innocent.”

She cocked her head. “ ‘Innocent’ isn’t the word I would use. Children are total id. They are perhaps the most naturally vicious creatures on God’s green earth.”

“Strange outlook for a preschool teacher.”

“Just an honest one.”

“So what word would you use?”

She thought about it. “If pressed, I’d say ‘unformed.’ Or maybe ‘undeveloped.’ Like a picture you’ve already taken but haven’t processed yet.”

Myron nodded, though he had no idea what she meant. There was something about Peggy Joyce that was a little, well, scary.

“Do you remember that book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“It’s true, but not in the way you think. School removes children from their warm parental cocoon. School teaches them to bully or be bullied. School teaches them how to be cruel to one another. School teaches them that Mommy and Daddy lied to them when they told them that they were special and unique.”

Myron said nothing.

“You don’t agree?”

“I don’t teach preschool.”

“That’s sidestepping, Mr. Bolitar.”

Myron shrugged. “They learn socialization. That’s a hard lesson. And like every hard lesson, you have to get it wrong before you can get it right.”

“They learn boundaries, in other words?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. And perhaps true. But you remember when I was giving the film-processing example earlier?”

“Yes.”

“School only processes the picture. It doesn’t snap it.”

“Okay,” Myron said, not wanting to follow her train of thought.

“What I mean is, everything is pretty much decided by the time these children leave here and enter kindergarten. I can tell who will be successful and who will fail, who will end up happy and who will end up in prison, and ninety percent of the time I’m right. Maybe Hollywood and video games have an influence, I don’t know. But I can usually tell which kid will be watching too many violent movies or playing too many violent games.”

“You can tell all this by the time they’re five years old?”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“And you feel that’s it? That they don’t have the ability to change?”

“The ability? Oh, probably. But they’re already on a path, and while they may still be able to change it, the majority do not. Staying on the path is easier.”

“So let me ask you the eternal question: Is it nature or nurture?”

She smiled. “I get asked that all the time.”

“And?”

“I answer nurture. Know why?”

Myron shook his head.

“Believing in nurture is like believing in God. You might be wrong, but you might as well cover your bases.” She folded her hands and leaned forward. “Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Bolitar?”

“Do you remember a student named Dennis Lex?”

“I remember all my students. Does that surprise you?”

Myron didn’t want her going off on another tangent. “Did you teach the other Lex children?”

“I taught them all. Their father made a lot of changes after his book became a bestseller. But he kept them here.”

“So what can you tell me about Dennis Lex?”

She sat back and regarded him as though seeing him for the first time. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’m wondering when you’re going to tell me what this is all about. I’m talking to you, Mr. Bolitar—and breaching confidences, I suspect—because I think you’re here for a very specific reason.”

“What reason is that, Ms. Joyce?”

Her eyes had a steely glint. “Don’t play games with me, Mr. Bolitar.”

She was right. “I’m trying to find Dennis Lex.”

Peggy Joyce kept still.

“I know this sounds weird,” he went on. “But as far as I can tell, he fell off the earth after preschool.”

She stared straight ahead, though Myron had no idea at what. There were no photographs on the walls, no diplomas, no drawings by little hands. Just cold wall. “Not after,” she said finally. “During.”

There was a knock on the door. Peggy Joyce said, “Come in.” The young hall monitor, Miss Simmons, entered with a little boy. His head was down and he’d been crying. “James needs a little time,” Miss Simmons said.

Peggy Joyce nodded. “Let him lie on the mat.”

James eyed Myron and left with Miss Simmons.

Myron turned to Peggy Joyce. “What happened to Dennis Lex?”

“It’s a question I’ve been waiting for someone to ask for more than thirty years,” she said.

“What’s the answer?”

“First, tell me why you’re looking for him.”

“I’m trying to find a bone marrow donor. I think it might be Dennis Lex.” He gave her as few details as he could. When he finished, she put a bony hand to her face.

“I don’t think I can help you,” she said. “It was so long ago.”

“Please, Ms. Joyce. A child will die if I don’t find him. You’re my only lead.”

“You spoke to his family?”

“Only his sister Susan.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“I’m not sure what I can add.”

“You could start by telling me what Dennis was like.”

She sighed and neatly arranged her hands on her thighs. “He was like the other Lex children—very bright, thoughtful, contemplative, perhaps a bit too much so for so young a child. With most students, I try to get them to grow up a bit. With the Lex children, that was never an issue.”

Myron nodded, trying to encourage.

“Dennis was the youngest. You probably know that. He was here the same time as his brother Bronwyn. Susan was older.” She stopped, looked lost.

“What happened to him?”

“One day he and Bronwyn didn’t come to school. I got a call from their father saying that he was taking them on an unplanned vacation.”

“Where?”

“He didn’t say. He wasn’t being very specific.”

“Okay, go on.”

“That’s pretty much it, Mr. Bolitar. Two weeks later, Bronwyn came back to school. I never saw Dennis again.”

“You called his father?”

“Of course.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me that Dennis wouldn’t be coming back.”

“Did you ask him why?”

“Of course. But … did you ever meet Raymond Lex?”

“No.”

“You didn’t question a man like that. He mentioned something about home schooling. When I pressed, he made it clear it was none of my concern. Over the years, I’ve tried to keep track of the family, even when they moved out of the area. But like you, I never heard anything about Dennis.”

“What did you think happened?”

She looked at him. “I assumed he was dead.”

Her words, though not all that surprising, worked like a vacuum, sucking the room dry, forcing out the air.

“Why?” Myron asked.

“I figured that he was ill, and that was why he was pulled out of school.”

“Why would Mr. Lex try to hide something like that?”

“I don’t know. After his novel became a bestseller, he became private to the point of paranoia. Are you sure this donor you’re looking for is Dennis Lex?”

“Not sure, no.”

Peggy Joyce snapped her fingers. “Oh, wait, I have something you may find interesting.” She stood and opened a file drawer. She sifted through it, pulled something out, studied it for a moment. Her elbow smacked the drawer closed. “This was taken two months before Dennis left us.”

She handed him an old class photograph, the color not so much fading as greening from age. Fifteen kids flanked by two teachers, one a far younger Peggy Joyce. The years had not been unkind to her, but they’d passed anyway. A small black sign with the white lettering read SHADY WELLS MONTESSORI SCHOOL and the year.

“Which one is Dennis?”

She pointed to a boy sitting in the front row. He had a Prince Valiant cut and a face-splitting smile that never quite hit his eyes. “Can I have this?”

“If you think it will help.”

“It might.”

She nodded. “I better get back to my students.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you remember your preschool, Mr. Bolitar?”

Myron nodded. “Parkview Nursery School in Livingston, New Jersey.”

“How about your teachers? Do you remember them at all?”

Myron thought about it. “No.”

She nodded as though he’d answered correctly. “Good luck,” she said.

23

AgeComp. Or age-progression software, if you prefer.

Myron had learned a bit about it when searching for a missing woman named Lucy Mayor. The key was in the digital imaging. All Myron had to do—or in the case of their office, all Esperanza had to do—was take the class photograph and scan it into the computer. Then, using common software programs like Photoshop or Picture Publisher, you blow up the face of young Dennis Lex. AgeComp, a software program constantly being retooled and perfected by missing-children organizations, does the rest. Using advanced mathematical algorithms, AgeComp stretches, merges, and blends digital photographs of missing children and produces a color image of what they might look like today.

Naturally, a lot is left to chance. Scarring, facial fractures, facial hair, cosmetic surgery, hairstyle or, in the case of some of the older ones, male pattern baldness. Still, the class photo could be a serious lead.

When he was back in Manhattan, the cell phone rang.

“I spoke to the feds,” Win said.

“And?”

“Your impression is correct.”

“What impression?”

“They are indeed frightened.”

“Did you speak to PT?”

“I did. He put me onto the right person. They requested a face-to-face.”

“When?”

“Pretty pronto. We are, in fact, waiting in your office.”

“The feds are in my office right now?”

“Affirmative.”

“Be there in five.”

More like ten. When the elevator opened, Esperanza was sitting at Big Cyndi’s desk.

“How many?” he asked.

“Three,” Esperanza said. “One blond woman, one extra-strength dork, one nice suit.”

“Win’s with them?”

“Yep.”

He handed her the photograph and pointed to Dennis Lex’s face. “How long before we could get an age progression on this?”

“Jesus, when was this taken?”

“Thirty years ago.”

Esperanza frowned. “You know anything about age progression?”

“Some.”

“It’s mostly used to find missing kids,” she said. “And it’s usually used to age them five, maybe ten years.”

“But we can get something, right?”

“Something very rough, yeah maybe.” She flicked on the scanner and placed the photo facedown. “If they’re in the lab, we’ll probably have it by the end of the day. I’ll crop it and e-mail it over.”

“Do it later,” he said, gesturing toward the door. “Mustn’t keep the feds waiting. Our tax dollars and all that.”

“You want me in there?”

“You’re a part of everything that goes on here, Esperanza. Of course I want you in there.”

“I see,” she said. Then: “Is this the part where I blink back tears because you’re making me feel oh-so-special?”

Wiseass.

Myron opened his office door. Esperanza followed. Win sat behind Myron’s desk, probably so that none of the feds would. Win could be territorial—just one of the ways he was like a Doberman. Kimberly Green and Rick Peck rose with lack-of-sleep-luggage eyes and squared-off smiles. The third fed stayed in his seat, not moving, not even turning to see who’d entered. Myron saw his face and felt a jolt.

Whoa.

Win watched Myron, an amused smile curling the ends of his mouth. Eric Ford, deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was the man in the suit. His presence meant one thing: This was serious big-time.

Kimberly Green pointed at Esperanza. “What’s she doing in here?”

“She’s my partner,” Myron said. “And it’s not polite to point.”

“Your partner? You think this is a business transaction?”

“She stays,” Myron said.

“No,” Kimberly Green said. She was still wearing the ball-and-chain earrings, still the jeans and black turtleneck, but the jacket now was spearmint green. “We’re not exactly thrilled about talking to you and Cheekbones boy over there”—she gestured toward Win—“but at least you have some clearance. We don’t know her. She goes.”

Win’s smile spread and his eyebrows did a quick up-and-down. Cheekbones. He liked that.

“She goes,” Green said again.

Esperanza shrugged. “No biggie,” she said.

Myron was about to say something, but Win shook his head. He was right. Save it for the important battles.

Esperanza left. Win got up and gave Myron the chair. He stood on Myron’s right, arms crossed, totally at ease. Green and Peck fidgeted. Myron turned to Eric Ford. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“But you know who I am,” Ford said. He had one of those smooth soft-rock-DJ voices.

“Yes.”

“And I know who you are,” he said. “So what would be the point?”

Oookay. Myron glanced back at Win. Win shrugged.

Ford nodded at Kimberly Green. She cleared her throat. “For the record,” she said, “we don’t think we should have to go through this.”

“Through what?”

“Telling you about our investigation. Debriefing you. As a good citizen, you should be willing to cooperate with our investigation because it’s the right thing to do.”

Myron looked at Win and said, “Oh boy.”

“Some aspects of an investigation need to be contained,” she continued. “You and Mr. Lockwood should understand that better than most. You should be anxious to cooperate with any federal investigation. You should respect what we’re trying to do here.”

“Right, okay, we respect. Can we skip ahead, please? You looked us up. You know we’ll keep our mouths shut. Otherwise none of us would be here.”

She folded her hands and put them in her lap. Peck kept his head down and scribbled notes, Lord knew on what. Myron’s decor maybe. “What we say here cannot leave this room. It is classified to the highest—”

“Skipping,” Myron said with an impatient hand roll. “Skipping.”

Green slid her eyes toward Ford. He nodded again. She took a deep breath and said, “We have Stan Gibbs under surveillance.”

She stopped, settled back. Myron waited a few seconds and then said, “Label me surprised.”

“That information is classified,” she said.

“Then I’ll leave it out of my diary.”

“He isn’t supposed to know.”

“Well, that’s usually implied with words like ‘classified’ and ‘surveillance.’ ”

“But Gibbs does know. He loses us whenever he really wants. Because when he’s out in public, we can’t get too close.”

“Why can’t you get too close?”

“He’ll see us.”

“But he already knows you’re there?”

“Yes.”

Myron looked up at Win. “Wasn’t there an Abbott and Costello skit that went like this?”

“Marx Brothers,” Win said.

“If we were out in the open about tailing him,” Green said, “the fact that he’s a target could become public knowledge.”

“And you’re trying to contain that?”

“Yes.”

“How long has he been under surveillance?”

“Well, it’s not that simple. He’s been out of range a lot—”

“How long?”

Again Green looked at Ford. Again Ford nodded. She balled her hands into fists. “Since the first article on the kidnappings appeared.”

Myron sat back, feeling something akin to a head rush. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but damned if he wasn’t. The article came flooding back to him—the sudden disappearances, the awful phone calls, the constant, eternal anguish, the picket-fenced lives suddenly bulldozed over by inexplicable evil.

“My God,” Myron said. “Stan Gibbs was telling the truth.”

“We never said that,” Kimberly Green said.

“I see. So you’ve been tailing him because you don’t like his syntax?”

Silence.

“The articles were true,” Myron said. “And you’ve known it all along.”

“What we did or did not know is not your concern.”

Myron shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said. “So let me see if I got this straight. You have a serial psycho out there who snatches people out of the blue and torments their families. You want to keep a lid on it because if word got out to the public, you’d have a panic situation. Then the psycho goes directly to Stan Gibbs and suddenly the story is in the public domain …” Myron’s voice died off, seeing that his logic trail had hit a major pothole. He frowned and forged ahead. “I don’t know how that old novel or the plagiarism charges tie in. But either way, you decided to ride it. You let Gibbs get fired and disgraced, probably in part because you were pissed off that he upset your investigation. But mostly”—he spotted what he thought was a clearing—“but mostly you did it so you could watch him. If the psycho contacted him once, you figured, he’d probably do it again—especially if the articles had been discredited.”

Kimberly Green said, “Wrong.”

“But close.”

“No.”

“The kidnappings Gibbs wrote about took place, right?”

She hesitated, gave Ford an eye check. “We can’t verify all of his facts.”

“Jesus, I’m not taking a deposition here,” Myron said. “Was his column true, yes or no?”

“We’ve told you enough,” she said. “It’s your turn.”

“You haven’t told me squat.”

“And you’ve told us less.”

Negotiating. Life is being a sports agent—constant negotiating. He had learned the importance of leverage, of doling out, of being fair. People forget that last one, and it always costs you in the end. The best negotiator isn’t the one who gets the whole pie while leaving scant crumbs behind. The best negotiator is the one who gets what he wants while keeping the other side happy. So normally, Myron would dole out a little something here. Classic give-and-take. But not this time. He knew better. Once he told them the reason for his visit to Stan Gibbs, his leverage would be zippo.

The best negotiator, like the best species, also knows how to adapt.

“First answer my question,” Myron said. “Yes or no, was the story Stan Gibbs wrote true?”

“There is no yes-or-no answer to that,” she said. “Parts were true. Parts were not true.”

“For example?”

“The young couple was from Iowa, not Minnesota. The missing father had three children, not two.” She stopped, folded her hands.

“But there have been kidnappings?”

“We knew about those two,” she said. “We had no information about the missing college student.”

“Probably because the psycho got to her parents. They probably never reported it.”

“That’s our theory,” Kimberly Green said. “But we don’t know for sure. Still, there are major discrepancies. The families swear they never spoke to him, for example. Many of the phone calls and events don’t match what we know to be true.”

Myron saw more clearing. “So you asked Gibbs about it? About his sources?”

“Yes.”

“And he refused to tell you anything.”

“That’s right.”

“So you destroyed him.”

“No.”

“The one part I don’t get is the plagiarism,” Myron said. “I mean, did you guys somehow set that up? I can’t see how. Unless you made up a book and … no, that’s too far-fetched. So what’s the deal with that?”

Kimberly Green leaned forward. “Tell us why you went to his apartment.”

“Not until—”

“For several months we couldn’t find Stan Gibbs,” she interrupted. “We think maybe he left the country. But since he’s moved into that condo, he’s always alone. As I said before, he loses us sometimes. But he never accepts visitors. Several people have tracked him down. Old friends even. They come to his door or they call on the phone. And you know what always happens, Myron?”

Myron didn’t like her tone of voice.

“He sends them away. Every single time. Stan Gibbs sees no one. Except you.”

Myron looked up at Win. Win nodded very slowly. Myron took a look at Eric Ford before going back to Kimberly Green. “You think I’m the kidnapper?”

She leaned back with a partial shrug, looking satiated. Turning the tables and all that. “You tell us,” she said.

Win started for the door. Myron rose and followed.

“Where the hell are you two going?” Green asked.

Win grabbed the knob. Myron headed around the desk and said, “I’m a suspect. I’m not talking until I have an attorney present. If you’ll excuse me.”

“Hey, we’re just talking here,” Kimberly Green said. “I never said I thought you were the kidnapper.”

“Sounded that way to me,” Myron said. “Win?”

“He snatches hearts,” Win told her, “not people.”

“You got something to hide?” Green said.

“Just his fondness for cyber pornography,” Win said. Then: “Oops.”

Kimberly Green stood and blocked Myron’s path. “We think we know about the missing college student,” she said, her eyes locked hard on his. “Do you want to know how we found out about it?”

Myron kept still.

“Through her father. He got a call from the kidnapper. I don’t know what was said. He hasn’t said a word since. He’s catatonic. Whatever that psycho said to that girl’s father put him in a padded room.”

Myron felt the room shrink, the walls closing in.

“We haven’t found any bodies yet, but we’re pretty sure he kills them,” she went on. “He kidnaps them, does Lord knows what, and makes the families suffer interminably. And you know he won’t stop.”

Myron kept his eyes steady. “What’s your point?”

“This isn’t funny.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not. So stop playing stupid games.”

She said nothing.

“I want to hear it from your mouth,” Myron said. “Do you think I’m involved in this, yes or no?”

Eric Ford took this one. “No.”

Kimberly Green slid back into her chair, her eyes never leaving Myron’s. Eric Ford made a big hand gesture. “Please sit down.”

Myron and Win moved back to their original positions.

Eric Ford said, “The novel exists. So do the passages Stan Gibbs plagiarized. The book was sent to our office anonymously—more specifically, to Special Agent Green here. We admit that we found that issue confusing at first. On the one hand, Gibbs knows about the kidnappings. On the other hand, he doesn’t know everything and he clearly copied excerpts from an old, out-of-print mystery novel.”

“There’s an explanation,” Myron said. “The kidnapper might have read the book. He might have identified with the character, become a copycat of sorts.”

“We considered that possibility,” Eric Ford said, “but we don’t believe that’s the case here.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Does it involve trigonometry?”

“You still think this is a joking manner?”

“You still think it’s smart to play games?”

Ford closed his eyes. Green looked on edge. Peck continued scribbling notes. When Ford opened his eyes, he said, “We don’t believe Stan Gibbs made up the crimes,” he said. “We believe he perpetrated them.”

Myron felt a pow. He looked up at Win. Nothing.

“You have some background in the criminal mind, do you not?” Ford asked.

Myron might have nodded.

“Well, here we have an old pattern with a new twist. Arsonists love to watch firemen put out the blaze. Oft-times they’re even the ones who report the fire. They play the good Samaritan. Murderers love to attend the funerals of their victims. We videotape funerals. I’m sure you know this.”

Myron nodded again.

“Sometimes killers make themselves part of the story.” Eric Ford was gesturing a lot now, his knotted hands rising and falling as though this were a press conference in too big a room. “They claim to be witnesses. They become the innocent bystanders who happened to find the body in the brush. You’re familiar with this moth-near-the-flame phenomenon, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“So what could be more enticing than being the only columnist to report the story? Can you imagine the high? How mind-bogglingly close to the investigation you’d be. The brilliance of your deception—for a psychotic, it’s almost too delicious. And if you are perpetrating these crimes to get attention, then here you get a double dose. Attention as the serial kidnapper, one. Attention as the brilliant reporter with the scoop and possible Pulitzer, two. You even get the bonus attention of a man bravely defending the First Amendment.”

Myron was holding his breath. “That’s a hell of a theory,” he said.

“You want more?”

“Yes.”

“Why won’t he answer any of our questions?”

“You said it yourself. First Amendment.”

“He’s not a lawyer or psychiatrist.”

“But he is a reporter,” Myron said.

“What kind of monster would continue to protect his source in this situation?”

“I know plenty.”

“We spoke to the victims’ families. They swore they never spoke to him.”

“They could be lying. Maybe the kidnapper told them to say that.”

“Okay, then why hasn’t Gibbs done more to defend himself against the charges of plagiarism? He could have fought them. He could have even provided some detail that would have proved he was telling the truth. But no, instead he goes silent. Why?”

“You think it’s because he’s the kidnapper? The moth flew too close to the flame and is licking his wounds in darkness?”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

Myron said nothing.

“Lastly, there’s the murder of his mistress, Melina Garston.”

“What about it?”

“Think it through, Myron. We put the screws to him. Maybe he expected that, maybe he didn’t. Either way, the courts don’t see everything his way. You don’t know about the court findings, do you?”

“Not really, no.”

“That’s because they were sealed. In part, the judge demanded that Gibbs show some proof he had been in contact with the killer. He finally said that Melina Garston would back him.”

“And she did, right?”

“Yes. She claimed to have met the subject of his story.”

“I still don’t understand. If she backed him up, why would he kill her?”

“The day before Melina Garston died, she called her father. She told him that she lied.”

Myron sat back, tried to take it all in.

Eric Ford said, “He’s back now, Myron. Stan Gibbs has finally surfaced. While he was gone, the Sow the Seeds kidnapper was gone too. But this brand of psycho never stops on his own. He’s going to strike again and soon. So before that happens, you better talk to us. Why were you at his condominium?”

Myron thought about it but not for long. “I was looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“A missing bone marrow donor. He could save a child’s life.”

Ford looked at him steadily. “I assume that Jeremy Downing is the child in question.”

So much for being vague, but Myron was not surprised. Phone records probably. Or maybe there had indeed been a tail when he visited Emily’s. “Yes. And before I go on, I want your word that you will keep me in the loop.”

Kimberly Green said, “You’re not a part of this investigation.”

“I’m not interested in your kidnapper. I’m interested in my donor. You help me find him, I’ll tell you what I know.”

“We agree,” Ford said, waving Kimberly Green silent. “So how does Stan Gibbs fit in with your donor?”

Myron reviewed it for them. He started with Davis Taylor and then moved on to Dennis Lex and then the cryptic phone call. They kept their faces steady, Green and Peck scratching on their pads, but there was a definite jolt when he mentioned the Lex family.

They asked a few follow-up questions, like why he got involved in the first place. He said that Emily was an old friend. He wasn’t about to go into the patrimony issue. Myron could see Green getting antsy. He had served his purpose. She was anxious to get out and start tracking things down.

A few minutes later, the feds snapped their pads closed and rose. “We’re on it,” Ford said. He looked straight at Myron. “And we’ll find your donor. You stay out.”

Myron nodded and wondered if he could. After they left, Win took a seat in front of Myron’s desk.

“Why do I feel like I was picked up at a bar and now it’s the next morning and the guy just handed me the ‘I’ll call you’ line?” Myron asked.

“Because that’s precisely what you are,” Win said. “Slut.”

“Think they’re holding something back?”

“Without question.”

“Something big?”

“Gargantuan,” Win said.

“Not much we can do about it now.”

“Nope,” Win said. “Nothing at all.”

24

Myron’s mom met him at the front door.

“I’m picking up the takeout,” Mom said.

“You?”

She put her hands on her hips and shot him her best wither. “There a problem with that?”

“No, it’s just …” He decided to drop it. “Nothing.”

Mom kissed his cheek and fished through her purse for the car keys. “I’ll be back in a half hour. Your father is in the back.” She gave him the imploring eyes. “Alone.”

“Okay,” he said.

“No one else is here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you catch my drift.”

“It’s caught.”

“You’ll be alone.”

“Caught, Mom. Caught.”

“It’ll be an opportunity—”

“Mom.”

She put her hands up. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

He walked around the side of the house, past the garbage cans and recycling bins, and found Dad on the deck. The deck was sanded redwood with built-in benches and resin furniture and a Weber 500 barbecue, all brought to being during the famed Kitchen Expansion of 1994. Dad was bent over a railing with a screwdriver in his hand. For a moment, Myron fell back to those “weekend projects” with Dad, some of which lasted almost an entire hour. They would go out with toolbox in tow, Dad bent over like he was now, muttering obscenities under his breath. Myron’s sole task consisted of handing Dad tools like a scrub nurse in the operating room, the whole exercise boring as hell, shuffling his feet in the sun, sighing heavily, finding new angles from which to stand.

“Hey,” Myron said.

Dad looked up, smiled, put down the tool. “Screw loose,” he said. “But let’s not talk about your mother.”

Myron laughed. They found molded-resin chairs around a table impaled by a blue umbrella. In front of them lay Bolitar Stadium, a small patch of green-to-brown grass that had hosted countless, oft-solo football games, baseball games, soccer games, Wiffle ball games (probably the most popular sport at Bolitar Stadium), rugby scrums, badminton, kickball, and that favorite pastime for the future sadist, bombardment. Myron spotted Mom’s former vegetable garden—the word vegetable here being used to describe three annual soggy tomatoes and two flaccid zucchinis; it was now slightly more overgrown than a Cambodian rice paddy. To their right were the rusted remnants of their old tetherball pole. Tetherball. Now, there was a really dumb game.

Myron cleared his throat and put his hands on the table. “How you feeling?”

Dad gave a big nod. “Good. You?”

“Good.”

The silence floated down, puffy and relaxed. Silence with a father can be like that. You drift back and you’re young and you’re safe, safe in that all-encompassing way only a child can be with his father. You still see him hovering in your darkened doorway, the silent sentinel to your adolescence, and you sleep the sleep of the naive, the innocent, the unformed. When you get older, you realize that this safety was just an illusion, another child’s perception, like the size of your backyard.

Or maybe, if you’re lucky, you don’t.

Dad looked older today, the flesh on his face more sagged, the once-knotted biceps spongy under the T-shirt, starting to waste. Myron wondered how to start. Dad closed his eyes for a three count, opened them, and said, “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Your mother is about as subtle as a White House press release,” Dad said. “I mean, when was the last time she picked up the takeout instead of me?”

“Has she ever?”

“Once,” Dad said. “When I had a fever of a hundred and four. And even then she whined about it.”

“Where’s she going?”

“She has me on a special diet now, you know. Because of the chest pains.” Chest pains. Euphemism for heart attack.

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“She’s even tried cooking a little. She told you?”

Myron nodded. “She baked something for me yesterday.”

Dad’s body went stiff. “By God,” he said. “Her own son?”

“It was pretty scary.”

“The woman has many, many talents, but they could airdrop that stuff into starving African nations and no one would eat it.”

“So where’s she going?”

“Your mother is high on some crazy Middle Eastern health food place. Just opened in West Orange. Get this, it’s called Ayatollah Granola.”

Myron gave him flat eyes.

“Hand to God, that’s the name. Food is almost as dry as that Thanksgiving turkey your mother made when you were eight. You remember that?”

“At night,” Myron said. “It still haunts my sleep.”

Dad looked off again. “She left us alone so we could talk, right?”

“Right.”

He made a face. “I hate when she does stuff like that. She means well, your mother. We both know that. But let’s not do it, okay?”

Myron shrugged. “You say so.”

“She thinks I don’t like growing old. News flash: No one does. My friend Herschel Diamond—you remember Heshy?”

“Sure.”

“Big guy, right? Played semipro football when we were young. So Heshy, he calls me and he says now that I’m retired, I can do tai chi with him. I mean, tai chi? What the hell is that anyway? If I want to move slowly, I have to drive down to the Y to do it with a bunch of old yentas? I mean, what’s that about? I tell him no. So then Heshy, this great athlete, Myron, he could hit a softball a country mile, this marvelous big ox, he tells me we can walk together. Walk. At the mall. Speed-walk, he calls it. At the mall, for chrissake. Heshy always hated the place—now he wants us to trot around like a bunch of jackasses in matching sweatsuits and expensive walking shoes. Pump our arms with these little faigelah barbells. Walking shoes, he calls them. What the hell is that anyway? I never had a pair of shoes I couldn’t walk in, am I right?”

He waited for an answer. Myron said, “As rain.”

Dad stood up. He grabbed a screwdriver and feigned working. “So now, because I don’t want to move like an old Chinaman or walk around a godforsaken mall in overpriced sneakers, your mother thinks I’m not adjusting. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

Dad stayed bent, fiddling a little more with the railing. In the distance, Myron heard children playing. A bike bell rang. Someone laughed. A lawn mower purred. Dad’s voice, when he finally spoke again, was surprisingly soft. “You know what your mother really wants us to do?” he said.

“What?”

“She wants you and I to reverse roles.” Dad finally looked up through his heavy-lidded eyes. “I don’t want to reverse roles, Myron. I’m the father. I like being the father. Let me stay that, okay?”

Myron found it hard to speak. “Sure, Dad.”

His father put his head back down, the gray wisps upright in the humidity, his breathing tool-work heavy, and Myron again felt something open up his chest and grab hold of his heart. He looked at this man he’d loved for so long, who’d gone without complaint to that damn muggy warehouse in Newark for more than thirty years, and Myron realized that he didn’t know him. He didn’t know what his father dreamed about, what he wanted to be when he was a kid, what he thought about his own life.

Dad kept working on the screw. Myron watched him.

Promise me you won’t die, okay? Just promise me that.

He almost said it out loud.

Dad straightened himself out and studied his handiwork. Satisfied, he sat back down. They started talking about the Knicks and the recent Kevin Costner movie and the new Nelson DeMille book. They put away the toolbox. They had some iced tea. They lounged side by side in matching molded-resin chaises. An hour passed. They fell into a comfortable silence. Myron fingered the condensation on his glass. He could hear his father’s breathing, moderately wheezy. Dusk had settled in, bruising the sky purple, the trees going a burnt orange.

Myron closed his eyes and said, “I got a hypothetical for you.”

“Oh?”

“What would you do if you found out you weren’t my real father?”

Dad’s eyebrows went skyward. “You trying to tell me something?”

“Just a hypothetical. Suppose you found out right now that I wasn’t your biological son. How would you react?”

“Depends,” Dad said.

“On?”

“How you reacted.”

“It wouldn’t make a difference to me,” Myron said.

Dad smiled.

“What?” Myron said.

“Easy for both of us to say it wouldn’t matter. But news like that is a bombshell. You can’t predict what someone will do when a bomb lands. When I was in Korea—” Dad stopped, Myron sat up. “Well, you never knew how someone would react …” His voice tailed off. He coughed into his fist and then started up again. “Guys you were sure would be heroes completely lost it—and vice versa. That’s why you can’t ask stuff like this as a hypothetical.”

Myron looked at his father. His father kept his eyes on the grass, taking another deep sip. “You never talk about Korea,” Myron said.

“I do,” Dad said.

“Not with me.”

“No, not with you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s what I fought for. So we wouldn’t have to talk about it.”

It didn’t make sense and Myron understood.

“There a reason you raised this particular hypothetical?” Dad asked.

“No.”

Dad nodded. He knew it was a lie, but he wouldn’t push it. They settled back and watched the familiar surroundings.

“Tai chi isn’t so bad,” Myron said. “It’s a martial art. Like tae kwon do. I’ve been thinking of taking it up myself.”

Dad took another sip. Myron sneaked a glance. Something on his father’s face began to quiver. Was Dad indeed getting smaller, more fragile—or was it like the backyard and safety, again the shifting perception of a child turned adult?

“Dad …?”

“Let’s go inside,” his father said, standing. “We stay out much longer, one of us is going to get misty and say, ‘Wanna play catch?’ ”

Myron bit off a laugh and followed him inside. Mom came home not long after that, lugging two bags of food as though they were stone tablets. “Everybody hungry?” she called out.

“Starving,” Dad said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a vegetarian.”

“Very funny, Al.”

“Or even your cooking …”

“Ha-ha,” Mom said.

“… though I’d prefer the vegetarian.”

“Stop it, Al, I’m going to phlegm up, you keep making me laugh like this.” Mom dropped the bags onto the kitchen counter. “See, Myron? It’s a good thing your mother is shallow.”

“Shallow?” Myron asked.

“If I judged a man on brains or sense of humor,” Mom continued, “you’d have never been born.”

“Right-o,” Dad said with a hearty smile. “But one look at your old man in a bathing suit and whammo—all mine.”

“Oh please,” Mom said.

“Yes,” Myron said. “Please.”

They both looked at him. Mom cleared her throat. “So did you two, uh, have a nice talk?”

“We talked,” Dad said. “It was very life-affirming. I see the errors of my ways.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I. I see everything differently now.”

She put her arms around his waist and nuzzled him. “So you’ll call Heshy?”

“I’ll call Heshy,” he said.

“Promise.”

“Yes, Ellen, I promise.”

“You’ll go to the Y and do jai alai with him?”

“Tai chi,” Dad corrected.

“What?”

“It’s called tai chi, not jai alai.”

“I thought it was jai alai.”

“Tai chi. Jai alai is the game with the curved rackets down in Florida.”

“That’s shuffleboard, Al.”

“Not shuffleboard. The other thing with the sticks. And the gambling.”

“Tai chi?” Mom said, testing it for sound. “Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“But you’re not positive?”

“No, I’m not positive,” Dad said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is called jai alai.”

The name debate continued for a while. Myron didn’t bother correcting them. Never cut in on that strange dance known as marital discourse. They ate the health food. It was indeed nasty. They laughed a lot. His parents must have said “You don’t know what you’re talking about” to each other fifty times; maybe it was a euphemism for “I love you.”

Eventually Myron said good night. Mom kissed his cheek and made herself scarce. Dad walked him to the car. The night was silent save a lone dribbling basketball somewhere on Darby Road or maybe Coddington Terrace. A nice sound. When he hugged his father good-bye, Myron again noticed that his father felt smaller, less substantial. Myron held on a little longer than usual. For the first time he felt like the bigger man, the stronger man, and he suddenly remembered what Dad had said about reversing roles. So he held on in the dark. Time passed. Dad patted his back. Myron kept his eyes closed and held on tighter. Dad stroked his hair and shushed him. Just for a little while. Just until the roles reversed themselves again, returning both of them to where they belonged.

25

Granite Man was waiting outside the Dakota. Myron spotted him from his car. He picked up the cell phone and called Win. “I have company.”

“A rather large gentleman, yes,” Win said. “Two cohorts are parked across the street in a corporate vehicle owned by the Lex family.”

“I’ll leave the cell phone on.”

“They confiscated it last time,” Win said.

“Yes.”

“Likely they’ll do the same.”

“We’ll improvise.”

“Your funeral,” Win said, and hung up.

Myron parked in the lot and approached Granite Man.

“Mrs. Lex would like to see you,” Granite Man said.

“Do you know what she wants?” Myron asked.

Granite Man ignored the question.

“Maybe she saw me flexing on the security tape,” Myron said. “Wanted to get to know me better.”

Granite Man did not laugh. “You ever think about doing this comedy thing professionally?”

“There have been offers.”

“I bet. Get in the car.”

“Okay, but I have a curfew, you know. And I never French-kiss on the first date. Just so we understand each other.”

Granite Man shook his head. “Man, I’d like to waste you.”

They got in the car. Two blue-blazers sat in front. The car ride was silent except for Granite Man and His Magic Cracking Knuckles. The Lex building emerged grudgingly through the dark. Myron traveled through the security travail again. As Win predicted, they confiscated his phone. Granite Man and the two blazers turned left this time instead of right. They escorted him into an elevator. It opened into what appeared to be living quarters.

Susan Lex’s office had been done sort of Renaissance palatial, but the apartment up here—it looked like an apartment anyway—did a one-eighty. Modern and minimalism were the major themes. The walls were painted stark white and had nothing on them. The floors were a pigeon-gray wood. There were black and white bookshelves made of fiberglass, most empty, some with indistinct figurines. The couch was red and shaped like two lips. There was a well-stocked see-through bar constructed out of Lucite. Two metallic swivel stools were painted red on the base, looking about as inviting as rectal thermometers. A fire danced lazily in the fireplace, fake logs casting an unnatural glow over the black mantel. The whole place had a feel and aura about as warm as a cold sore.

Myron strolled, feigning interest. He stopped at a crystal statue with a marble base. Something modern or cubist or what-have-you. Symmetrical Bowel Movement maybe. Myron put his hand on it. Substantial. He looked out the one-way glass. Too low for much of a view beyond the hedges lining the front gate. Hmm.

The two blue-blazers did the Buckingham Palace Guard thing on either side of the door. Granite Man followed Myron, his hands clasped behind his lower back. A door on the other side of the room opened. Myron was not surprised to see Susan Lex enter, again keeping her distance. There was a man with her this time. Myron did not bother approaching.

“And you are?” he called out.

Susan Lex answered this one. “This is my brother Bronwyn.”

“Not the brother I’m interested in,” Myron said.

“Yes, I know. Please sit down.”

Granite Man gestured toward the lips-couch. Myron sat on the lower lip, waiting to be swallowed. Granite Man sat right next to him. Cozy.

“Bronwyn and I would like you to answer some questions, Mr. Bolitar,” Susan Lex said.

“Could you move a little closer?”

She smiled. “I think not.”

“I showered.”

She ignored the remark. “I understand that you occasionally do some investigative work,” Susan Lex said.

Myron did not reply.

“Is that correct?”

“Depends on what you mean by investigative work.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Susan Lex said.

Myron gave her a suit-yourself shrug.

“Is that why you’re searching for our brother?” she asked.

“I already told you why I was searching for him.”

“That bit about him being a bone marrow donor?”

“It’s not a bit.”

“Please, Mr. Bolitar,” Susan Lex said with that rich-people air. “We both know that’s a lie.”

Myron started to rise. Granite Man put a hand on Myron’s knee. It felt like a cinder block. Granite Man shook his head. Myron stayed where he was. “It’s not a lie,” he said.

“We’re wasting time,” Susan Lex said. She flicked her eyes at Granite Man. “Show him the pictures, Grover.”

Myron turned to him. “Grover is the name of my very favorite Sesame Street character. I want you to know that.”

“We’ve been following you, Myron.” Granite Man handed him a pile of photographs. Myron looked at them. They were eight-by-tens of him at the condo with Stan Gibbs. The first one showed him knocking on the door. The second one showed Stan sticking his head out. The third one showed them both heading inside the condo.

“Well?”

Myron frowned. “I have no knack for accessorizing.”

“We know that you’re working for Stan Gibbs,” Susan Lex said.

“Doing what exactly?” Myron asked.

“Investigating. As I stated earlier. So now that we understand your true motive, tell me how much it will cost for you to go away.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Simply put, how much will it cost to have you cease and desist?” Susan Lex asked. “Or are you going to force us to destroy you too?”

Too?

Brain click.

Myron turned his attention to the silent brother. “Let me ask you something, Bronwyn,” he said. “You and Dennis were both going to nursery school. You both disappeared. Two weeks later, only you came back. How come? What happened to your brother?”

Bronwyn’s mouth opened and closed, marionette style. He looked to his sister for help.

“It’s like he disappeared off the face of the earth after that,” Myron went on. “For thirty years, he’s totally off the radar. But now, well, it’s like he’s come back for some reason. He changed his name, opened a small checking account, donated blood to a bone marrow center. So what gives, Bron? You got a clue?”

Bronwyn said, “That simply cannot be!”

His sister silenced him with a look. But Myron felt something in the air. He mulled the feeling over and another thought hit him: Maybe the Lex siblings didn’t know the answer themselves. Maybe they were looking for Dennis too.

It was while he was lost in that thought that Granite Man punched him deep in the stomach. The fist followed through to the point where it seemed the knuckles must have reached the fabric of the couch. Myron snapped closed at the waist. He dropped to the floor, struggled to regain a breath, suffocating from within. He lowered his head to his knees, consumed with one thought: air. He needed air.

Susan Lex’s voice boomed in his ears. “Stan Gibbs knows the truth. His father is a disgusting liar. His accusations are totally without merit. But I’ll defend my family, Mr. Bolitar. You tell Mr. Gibbs he has not yet begun to suffer. What has happened to him so far is nothing compared to what I will do to him—and you—if he doesn’t stop. Do you understand?”

Air. Gulps of air. Myron managed not to throw up. He took his time, looked up, met her eye. “Not even a little,” he said.

Susan Lex looked at Grover. “Then make him.”

With that, she left the room. Her brother took one last look and followed.

Myron gathered his breath a hitch at a time. “Nice sucker punch, Grover,” he said.

Grover shrugged. “I went easy on you.”

“Next time, go easy when I’m looking, tough guy.”

“Won’t change the outcome.”

“We’ll see.” Myron sat up. “So what the hell is she talking about?”

“I thought Ms. Lex made herself very clear,” he said. “But because you appear to be a little vacant between the ears, I’ll restate her position. She doesn’t like people interfering with her affairs. Stan Gibbs, for example, interfered. You can see what happened to him. You interfered. You’re about to see what’s going to happen to you.”

Myron struggled to his feet. The blue-blazers stayed by the door. Granite Man started cracking his knuckles again. “Listen closely, please,” he said. “I’m going to break your leg. Then you’re going to limp your sorry ass out of here and tell Gibbs that if he sniffs around again, I will exterminate you both. Any questions?”

“Just one,” Myron said. “Don’t you think leg breaking is a tad cliché?”

Grover smiled. “Not the way I do it.”

Myron looked around the room.

“Nowhere to run, my friend.”

“Who wants to run?” Myron countered.

Without warning, he grabbed the heavy bowel-movement statue. The blue-blazers drew their guns. Granite Man ducked. But Myron wasn’t going for them. He heaved the statue, straightened his arms, spun around like a discus thrower, and hurled it marble-base-forward at the plate-glass window. The window exploded.

And that was when the gunfire began.

“Hit the deck!” Myron shouted.

The blue-blazers obeyed. Myron dove. The bullets continued. Sniper fire. One took out the overhead light. One hit the lamp.

Gotta love that Win.

“You want to live,” Myron shouted, “stay down.”

The bullets stopped. One of the blue-blazers started rising. A bullet sang out, nearly parting the man’s hair.

The blazer dropped back down, flattening himself into a bearskin rug.

“I’m getting up now,” Myron said. “And I’m leaving. I’d advise you guys to stay down. And, Grover?”

“What?”

“Radio downstairs. Tell them not to stop me. I can’t be certain but I’m pretty sure my friend will lob in grenades if I’m unduly delayed.”

Granite Man made the call. No one moved. Myron stood up. He almost whistled as he walked out.

26

It was midnight when Myron knocked on the door of Stan Gibbs’s condo. “Let’s take a walk,” Myron said to him.

Stan threw down his cigarette, smothered it with his toe. “A drive might be better,” he countered. “The feds use long-range amplifiers.”

They got into Myron’s Ford Taurus, aka the Chick Trawler. Stan Gibbs flicked on the radio and started playing with the stations. Commercial for Heineken. Does anyone really care that it’s imported by Van Munchin and Company?

“Are you wearing a wire, Myron?”

“No.”

“But the FBI spoke to you,” Stan said. “After you left.”

“How did you know?”

“They’re watching me,” he said with a shrug. “It would only be logical to assume they questioned you.”

“Tell me about your connection with Dennis Lex,” Myron said.

“I already told you. I don’t have one.”

“A big guy named Grover picked me up tonight. He and Susan Lex gave me a very stern warning not to play with you anymore. Bronwyn was there too.”

Stan Gibbs closed his eyes and rubbed them. “They knew about your visit here.”

“Had eight-by-ten glossies.”

“And they concluded that you’re working for me.”

“Bingo.”

Stan shook his head. “Get out of this, Myron. You don’t want to mess with these people.”

“Is that advice you wished someone had given you earlier?”

His smile had nothing behind it. Exhaustion came off him like heat squiggles on a hot sidewalk. “You have no idea,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“No.”

“I can help,” Myron said.

“Against the Lexes? They’re too powerful.”

“And being powerful, you wanted to do a story on them, right?”

He said nothing.

“And they didn’t like that. In fact, they took exception.”

More nothing.

“You started digging where they didn’t want you to. You learned that there was another brother named Dennis.”

“Yes.”

“And that really pissed them off.”

Stan started biting a hangnail.

“Come on, Stan. Don’t make me drag this out of you.”

“You’ve pretty much got it.”

“Then tell me.”

“I wanted to do a story on them. An exposé, really. I even had a publisher all lined up for a book deal. But then the Lexes got wind of it. They warned me to stay away. A big man came to my apartment. I didn’t catch his name. Looked like Sergeant Rock.”

“That would be Grover.”

“He told me that I could stop or I could be destroyed.”

“And that only made you more curious.”

“I guess.”

“So you found out about Dennis Lex.”

“Just that he existed. And that he vanished into thin air when he was a young child.” Stan turned to him. Myron slowed the car and felt something creep along the top of his scalp.

“Like the Sow the Seeds victims,” Myron finished.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s different.”

“How?” Myron asked.

“This is going to sound silly,” Stan said, “but the family doesn’t have that same sense of terror that the other families have.”

“The rich are good with façades.”

“It’s more than that,” Stan said. “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. But I’m sure Susan and Bronwyn Lex know what happened to their brother.”

“But they want to keep it a secret.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a guess why?”

“No,” Stan said.

Myron glanced back. The feds were following at a discreet enough distance.

“Do you think Susan Lex is responsible for that novel surfacing?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“But you never looked into it?”

“I started to. After the scandal hit. But I got a call from the big guy. He told me that it was just the beginning. That he was just flicking his finger and next time he would crush me between both palms.”

“He can be a poetic fellow,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

“But I still don’t get something.”

“What?”

“You don’t scare easily. When they warned you away the first time, you ignored it. After what they did to you, I’d have thought you’d fight back even harder.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Stan said.

“What?”

“Melina Garston.”

Silence.

“Think about it,” Stan said. “My mistress, the only person who can back up my meeting with the Sow the Seeds kidnapper, ends up dead.”

“Her father claims she retracted that.”

“Oh, right. In some bizarre before-death confession.”

“You think the Lexes arranged that too?”

“Why not? Look at what happened here. Who’s the lead suspect in Melina’s murder? I am, right? That’s what the feds told you. They think I killed her. We know that the Lexes have enough juice to dig up this novel I supposedly plagiarized. Who knows what else they can do?”

“You think they could frame you for the murder?”

“At the very least.”

“Are you saying they killed Melina Garston?”

“Maybe. Or it could have been the Sow the Seeds kidnapper. I don’t know.”

“But you think Melina was a warning.”

“She was definitely a warning,” Stan Gibbs said. “I just don’t know who sent it.”

On the radio, Stevie sang out about a landslide coming down. Oh yeah.

“You’re leaving something out, Stan.”

Stan kept his eyes forward. “What’s that?”

“There’s a personal connection here,” Myron said.

“What do you mean?”

“Susan Lex mentioned your father. She said he was a liar.”

Stan shrugged. “She might be right.”

“What does he have to do with this?”

“Take me back.”

“Don’t hold back on me now.”

“What do you really want here, Myron?”

“Excuse me?”

“What’s your interest here?”

“I told you.”

“That boy who needs a bone marrow transplant?”

“He’s thirteen years old, Stan. He’ll die without it.”

“And what if I don’t believe you? I did a little research of my own. You used to do government work.”

“A long time ago.”

“And maybe now you’re helping the FBI. Or even the Lex family.”

“No.”

“I can’t take that chance.”

“Why not? You’re telling me the truth, right? The truth can’t hurt you.”

He snorted. “You really believe that?”

“Why did Susan Lex mention your father?”

Nothing.

“Where is your father?” Myron said.

“That’s just it.”

“What?”

Stan looked at him. “He vanished. Eight years ago.”

Vanished. That word again.

“I know what you’re thinking and you’re wrong. My father wasn’t a well man. He had been in and out of institutions all his life. We’ve always assumed he ran off.”

“But you never heard from him.”

“That’s right.”

“Dennis Lex vanishes. Your father vanishes—”

“More than twenty years apart,” Stan interjected. “It’s not connected.”

“So I still don’t get it,” Myron said. “What does your father or his disappearance have to do with the Lexes?”

“They think he’s the reason I wanted to do the story. But they’re wrong.”

“Why would they think that?”

“My father was a student of Raymond Lex’s. Before Midnight Confessions came out.”

“So?”

“So my father claimed the novel was his. He said that Raymond Lex stole it from him.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“No one believed him,” Stan added quickly. “Like I said, he wasn’t right in the head.”

“Yet you suddenly decided to investigate the family?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re telling me that’s just a coincidence? That your own investigation had nothing to do with your father’s accusations?”

Stan leaned his head against the car window like a little kid longing for home. “No one believed my father. That includes me. He was a sick man. Delusional even.”

“So?”

“So at the end of the day, he was still my father,” Stan said. “Maybe I owed it to him to at least give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Do you think Raymond Lex plagiarized your father?”

“No.”

“Do you think your father is still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“There has to be a connection here,” Myron said. “Your story, the Lex family, your father’s accusations—”

Stan closed his eyes. “No more.”

Myron switched tracks. “How did the Sow the Seeds kidnapper get in touch with you?”

“I never reveal sources.”

“Come on, Stan.”

“No,” he said firmly. “I may have lost a lot. But not that part of me. You know I can’t say anything about my sources.”

“You know who it is, don’t you?”

“Take me home, Myron.”

“Is it Dennis Lex—or did the same kidnapper take Dennis Lex?”

Stan crossed his arms. “Home,” he said.

His face closed down. Myron saw it. There would be no more give tonight. He took a right and started heading back. Neither man spoke again until Myron stopped the car in the front of the condominium.

“Are you telling the truth, Myron? About the bone marrow donor?”

“Yes.”

“This boy is someone close to you?”

Myron kept both hands on the wheel. “Yes.”

“So there’s no way you’ll walk away from this?”

“None.”

Stan nodded, mostly to himself. “I’ll do what I can. But you have to trust me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Give me a few days.”

“To do what?”

“You won’t hear from me for a little while. Don’t let that shake your faith.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You do what you have to,” he said. “I’ll do the same.”

Stan Gibbs stepped out of the car and disappeared into the night.

27

Greg Downing woke Myron early the next morning with a phone call. “Nathan Mostoni left town,” he said. “So I came back to New York. I get to pick up my son this afternoon.”

Goody-goody for you, Myron thought. But he kept his tongue still.

“I’m going to the Ninety-second Street Y to shoot around,” Greg said. “You want to come?”

“No,” Myron said.

“Come anyway. Ten o’clock.”

“I’ll be late.” Myron hung up and rolled out of bed. He checked his e-mail and found a JPEG image from Esperanza’s contact at AgeComp. He clicked the file and an image slowly appeared on the screen. The possible face of Dennis Lex as a man in his mid to late thirties. Weird. Myron looked at the picture. Not familiar. Not familiar at all. Remarkable work, these age-enhanced images. So lifelike. Except in the eyes. The eyes always looked like the eyes of the dead.

He clicked on the print icon and heard his Hewlett-Packard go to work. Myron checked the clock on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Still early in the morning, but he didn’t want to wait. He called Melina Garston’s father.

George Garston agreed to meet Myron at his penthouse at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, overlooking Central Park. A dark-haired woman answered the door. She introduced herself as Sandra and led him silently down the corridor. Myron looked out a window. He could see the Gothic outline of the Dakota all the way across the park. He remembered reading somewhere how Woody and Mia would wave towels from their respective apartments on either side of Central Park. Happier days, no doubt.

“I don’t understand what you have to do with my daughter,” George Garston said to him. Garston wore a collared blue shirt nicely offset by a shock of white neck-to-chest hairs sprouting out like a troll doll’s. His bald head was an almost perfect sphere jammed between two boulder-excuses for shoulders. He had the proud, burly build of a successful immigrant, but you could see that he’d taken a hit. There was a slump there now, the stoop of the eternally grieving. Myron had seen it before. Grief like his breaks your back. You go on, but you always stoop. You smile, but it never really reaches the eyes.

“Probably nothing,” Myron said. “I’m trying to find someone. He may be connected to your daughter’s murder. I don’t know.”

The study was too-dark cherry-wood with drawn curtains and one lamp giving off a faint yellow glow. George Garston turned to the side, staring at the rich paisley wallpaper, showing Myron his profile. “We’ve worked together once,” he said. “Not us personally. Our companies. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

George Garston had made his fortune with a chain of Greek quasi-restaurants, the kind that work best as mall stands in crowded food courts. The chain was called Achilles Meals. For real. Myron had a Greek hockey player who endorsed the chain regionally, in the upper Midwest.

“So a sports agent is interested in my daughter’s murder,” Garston said.

“It’s a long story.”

“The police aren’t talking. But they think it’s her boyfriend. This reporter. Do you agree?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

He made a scoffing noise. Myron could barely see his face anymore. “What do I think?” he said. “You sound like one of those grief counselors.”

“Didn’t mean to.”

“Spewing all that sensitivity garbage. They’re just trying to distract you from reality. They say they want you to face it. But really, it’s the opposite. They want you to dig so far into yourself you won’t be able to see how terrible your life is now.” He grunted and shifted in his chair. “I don’t have an opinion on Stan Gibbs. I never met him.”

“Did you know he and your daughter were dating?”

In the dark, Myron saw the big head silently go back and forth. “She told me she had a boyfriend,” he said. “She didn’t tell me his name. Or that he was married.”

“You wouldn’t have approved?”

“Of course I wouldn’t have approved,” he said, trying to sound snappish, but he was beyond petty indignation. “Would you approve if it was your daughter?”

“I guess not. So you knew nothing about her relationship with Stan Gibbs?”

“Nothing.”

“I understand that you spoke to her not long before she died.”

“Four days before.”

“Can you tell me about the conversation?”

“Melina had been drinking,” he said in that pure monotone you get when the words have been ricocheting around your brain too long. “A lot. She drank too much, my daughter. Got that from her papa—who got it from his papa. The Garston family legacy.” He made a chuckling sound that sounded far closer to a sob than anything in the neighborhood of a laugh.

“Melina talked to you about her testimony?”

“Yes.”

“Could you tell me what she said exactly?”

“ ‘I made a mistake, Papa.’ That’s what she said. She said that she lied.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t even know what she was talking about. It’s as I told you before—I didn’t know about this boyfriend.”

“Did you ask her to explain?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And she didn’t. She said to forget about it. She said she’d take care of it. Then she told me she loved me and hung up.”

Silence.

“I had two children, Mr. Bolitar. Did you know that?”

Myron shook his head.

“A plane crash killed my Michael three years ago. Now an animal has tortured and killed my girl. My wife, her name was Melina too, passed away fifteen years ago. There is no one. Forty-eight years ago, I thought I came to this country with nothing. I made a lot of money. And now I truly have nothing. You understand?”

“Yes,” Myron said.

“Is that all, then?”

“Your daughter had an apartment on Broadway.”

“Yes.”

“Are her personal belongings still there?”

“Sandra—that’s my daughter-in-law—she’s been packing her things. But it’s all still there. Why?”

“I’d like to go through them, if it’s okay with you.”

“The police already did that.”

“I know.”

“You think you might find something they didn’t?”

“I’m almost positive I won’t.”

“But?”

“But I’m attacking this thing from a different perspective. It gives me a fresh set of eyes.”

George Garston flicked on his desk lamp. The yellow from the bulb painted his face a dark jaundice. Myron could see that his eyes were too dry, brittle like fallen acorns in the sun. “If you find whoever killed my Melina, you will tell me first.”

“No,” Myron said.

“Do you know what he did to her?”

“Yes. And I know what you want to do. But it won’t make you feel any better.”

“You say this like you know it for a fact.”

Myron kept silent.

George Garston flicked off the light and turned away. “Sandra will take you over now.”

“He sits in that study all day,” Sandra Garston told him, pressing the elevator button. “He won’t go out anymore.”

“It’s still new,” Myron said.

She shook her head. Her blue-black hair fell in big, loose curls, like thermal fax paper fresh out of the machine. But despite the hair color, her overall effect was almost Icelandic, the face and build of a world-class speed skater. Her features were sharp and ended rather abruptly. Her skin had the red of raw cold.

“He thinks he has no one,” she said.

“He has you.”

“I’m a daughter-in-law. He sees me and it’s like a tether to Michael. I don’t have the heart to tell him I finally started dating.”

When they reached the street, Myron asked, “Were you and Melina close?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Did you know about her relationship with Stan Gibbs?”

“Yes.”

“But she never told her father.”

“Oh, she would never. Papa didn’t approve of most men. A married one would have sent him off the ledge.”

They crossed the street and into the mid-city wonder known as Central Park. The park was packed on this rather spectacular day. Asian sketch artists hustled business. Men jogged by in those shorts that look suspiciously like diapers. Sunbathers lazed around on the grass, crowded together yet totally alone. New York City is like that. E. B. White once said that New York bestows the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. Damn straight. It was like everyone was plugged into their own internal Walkman, each playing a different tune, bopping obliviously to his or her own beat.

A yah-dude with a bandanna around his head tossed a Frisbee and yelled “Fetch,” but he had no dog. Hard-bodied women skated by in black jogging bras. Lots of men with various builds had their shirts off. Examples: A guy thick with flab that looked like wet Play-Doh jiggled past him. Behind him, a well-built guy skidded to a stop and arrogantly flexed a bicep. Actually flexed. In public. Myron frowned. He didn’t know which was worse: guys who shouldn’t take their shirts off and do, or guys who should take their shirts off and do.

When they reached Central Park West, Myron asked, “Did you have a problem with her dating a married man?”

Sandra shrugged. “I worried, of course. But he told Melina he would leave his wife.”

“Don’t they all?”

“Melina believed it. She seemed happy.”

“Did you ever meet Stan Gibbs?”

“No. Their relationship was supposed to be a secret.”

“Did she ever tell you about lying in court?”

“No,” she said. “Never.”

Sandra used her key and swung the door open. Myron stepped inside. Colors. Lots of them. Happy colors. The apartment looked like the Magical Mystery Tour meets the Teletubbies, all bright hues, especially greens, with hazy psychedelic splashes. The walls were covered with vivid watercolors of distant lands and ocean voyages. Some surreal stuff too. The effect was like an Enya video.

“I started throwing her stuff in boxes,” Sandra said. “But it’s hard to pack up a life.”

Myron nodded. He started walking around the small apartment, hoping for a psychic revelation or something. None came. He ran his eyes over the artwork.

“She was supposed to have her first show in the Village next month,” Sandra said.

Myron studied a painting with white domes and crystal blue water. He recognized the spot in Mykonos. It was wonderfully done. Myron could almost smell the salt of the Mediterranean, taste the grilled fish along the beach, feel the night sand clinging to a lover’s skin. No clue here, but he stared another minute or two before turning away.

He started going through the boxes. He found a high school yearbook, class of 1986, and flipped through it until he found Melina’s picture. She’d like to paint, it said. He glanced again at the walls. So bright and optimistic, her work. Death, Myron knew, was always ironic. Young death most ironic of all.

He turned his attention back to her photograph. Melina was looking off to the side with the hesitant, unsure smile of high school. Myron knew it well. Don’t we all. He closed the book and headed to her closets. Her clothes were neatly arranged, lots of sweaters folded on the top shelf, shoes lined up like tiny soldiers. He moved back to the boxes and found her photographs in a shoebox. A shoebox of all things. Myron shook his head and started going through them. Sandra sat on the floor next to him. “That’s her mother,” she said.

Myron looked at the photograph of two women, clearly mother and daughter, embracing. There was no sign of the unsure smile this time. This smile—the smile in her mother’s arms—soared like an angel’s song. Myron stared at the angel-song smile and imagined that celestial mouth crying out in hopeless agony. He thought about George Garston alone in that jaundice-lit study. And he understood.

Myron checked his watch. Time to pick up the pace. He thumbed through pictures of her father, her brother, Sandra, family outings, the norm. No pictures of Stan Gibbs. Nothing helpful.

He found makeup and perfume in another box. In another, he stumbled across a diary, but Melina hadn’t written anything in it for two years. He paged through it, but it felt like too much of an unnecessary violation. He found a love letter from an old boyfriend. He found some receipts.

He found copies of Stan’s columns.

Hmm.

In her address book. All the columns. There were no markings on them. Just the clippings themselves, held together by a paper clip. So what did that mean? He checked them again. Just clippings. He put them aside and did some more flipping. Something fell out near the back. Myron picked up a piece of cream-colored or aged-white paper torn along the left edge, more a card really, folded in half. The outside was totally blank. He opened it. On the upper half, the words With Love, Dad had been written in script. Myron thought again about George Garston sitting alone in that room and felt a deep burn flush his skin.

He sat on the couch now and tried again to conjure up something. That might sound weird—sitting in this too empty room, the sweet smell of a dead woman still hovering, feeling not unlike that tiny old lady in the Poltergeist movies—but you never knew. The victims didn’t speak to him or anything like that. But sometimes he could imagine what they’d been thinking and feeling and some spark would hit the edges and start to flame. So he tried it again.

Nothing.

He let his eyes wander across the canvases and the burn under his skin started up again. He scanned the bright colors, let them assault him. The brightness should have protected her. Nonsense, but there you have it. She’d had a life. Melina worked and she painted and she loved bright colors and had too many sweaters and stored her precious memories in a shoebox and someone had snuffed that life away because none of that meant anything to him. None of that was important. It made Myron mad.

He closed his eyes and tried to turn the anger down a notch. Anger wasn’t good. It clouded reason. He’d let that side of him out before—his Batman complex, as Esperanza had called it—but being a hero seeking justice or vengeance (if they weren’t the same thing) was unwise, unhealthy. Eventually you saw things you didn’t want to. You learned truths you never should have. It stings and then it deadens. Better to stay away.

But the heat in his blood would not leave him. So he stopped fighting it, let the heat soothe him, relax his muscles, settle gently over him. Maybe the heat wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe the horrors he’d seen and the truths he’d learned hadn’t changed him, hadn’t deadened him, after all.

Myron closed the boxes, took one last, lingering look at the sunkissed isle of Mykonos, and made a silent vow.

28

Greg and Myron met up on the court. Myron strapped on his knee brace. Greg averted his eyes. The two men shot for half an hour, barely speaking, lost in the pure strokes. People ducked in and pointed at Greg. Several kids came up to him and asked him for autographs. Greg acquiesced, glancing at Myron as he took pen in hand, clearly uncomfortable getting all this attention in front of the man whose career he had ended.

Myron stared back at him, offering no solace.

After some time, Myron said, “There a reason you wanted me here, Greg?”

Greg kept shooting.

“Because I have to get back to the office,” Myron said.

Greg grabbed the ball, dribbled twice, took a turnaround jumper. “I saw you and Emily that night. You know that?”

“I know that,” Myron said.

Greg grabbed the rebound, took a lazy hook, let the ball hit the floor, and slowly bounce toward Myron. “We were getting married the next day. You know that?”

“Know that too.”

“And there you were,” Greg said, “her old boyfriend, screwing her brains out.”

Myron picked up the ball.

“I’m trying to explain here,” Greg said.

“I slept with Emily,” Myron said. “You saw us. You wanted revenge. You told Big Burt Wesson to hurt me during a preseason game. He did. End of story.”

“I wanted him to hurt you, yes. I didn’t mean for him to end your career.”

“You say tomato, I say tomahto.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Myron said in a voice that sounded awfully calm in his own ears, “but I don’t give two shits about your intentions. You fired a weapon at me. You might have aimed for a flesh wound, but that didn’t happen. You think that makes you blameless?”

“You fucked my fiancée.”

“And she fucked me. I didn’t owe you anything. She did.”

“Are you telling me you don’t understand?”

“I understand. It just doesn’t absolve you.”

“I’m not looking for absolution.”

“Then what do you want, Greg? You want us to clasp hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’? Do you know what you did to me? Do you know what the one moment cost me?”

“I think maybe I do,” Greg said. He swallowed, put out a pleading hand as though he wanted to explain more, and then he let the hand drop to the side. “I’m so sorry.”

Myron started shooting but he felt his throat swell.

“You don’t know how sorry I am.”

Myron said nothing. Greg tried to wait him out. It didn’t work.

“What else do you want me to say here, Myron?”

Myron kept shooting.

“How do I tell you I’m sorry?”

“You’ve already done it,” Myron said.

“But you won’t accept it.”

“No, Greg. I won’t. I live without playing pro ball. You live without my accepting your apology. Pretty good deal for you, you ask me.”

Myron’s cell phone rang. He ran over, picked it up, said hello.

A whisper asked, “Did you do as I instructed?”

His bones turned to solid ice. He swallowed away something thick and said, “As you instructed?”

“The boy,” the voice whispered.

The stale air pressed against him, weighed down his lungs. “What about him?”

“Did you say one last good-bye?”

Something inside of Myron withered up and blew away. His knees buckled as the realization seeped into his chest. And the voice came on again:

“Did you say one last good-bye to the boy?”

29

Myron snapped his head toward Greg. “Where’s Jeremy?”

“What?”

“Where is he?”

Greg saw whatever it was on Myron’s face and dropped the basketball. “He’s with Emily, I guess. I don’t get him until noon.”

“Got a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Call her.”

Greg was already heading toward his gym bag, the athlete with the wonderful reflexes. “What’s going on?”

“Probably nothing.”

Myron explained about the call. Greg did not slow down to listen. He dialed. Myron started running toward his car. Greg followed, the phone pressed against his ear.

“No answer,” Greg said. He left a message on the machine.

“Does she have a cell phone?”

“If she does, I don’t have the number.”

Myron hit a stored number as they walked. Esperanza picked up.

“I need Emily’s cell phone number.”

“Give me five,” Esperanza said.

Myron hit another stored number. Win answered and said, “Articulate.”

“Possible trouble.”

“I’m here.”

They reached the car. Greg was calm. That surprised Myron. On the court, when the pressure mounted, Greg’s modus operandi was to get freaky, start screaming, psych himself into a frenzy. But of course, this was not a game. As his father had recently told him, when real bombs drop, you never know how someone will react.

Myron’s phone rang. Esperanza gave him Emily’s cell phone number. Myron dialed it. After six rings, Emily’s voice mail picked up. Damn. Myron left a message. He turned to Greg.

“Any clue where Jeremy might be?” Myron asked.

“No,” Greg said.

“How about a neighbor we can call? Or a friend?”

“When Emily and I were married, we lived in Ridgewood. I don’t know the neighbors in Franklin Lakes.”

Myron gripped the steering wheel. He hit the accelerator. “Jeremy’s probably safe,” Myron said, trying to believe it. “I don’t even know how this guy would know his name. It’s probably a bluff.”

Greg started shaking.

“He’ll be all right.”

“Jesus, Myron, I read those articles. If that guy has my kid …”

“We should call the FBI,” Myron said. “Just in case.”

“You think that’s the way to go?” Greg asked.

Myron looked at him. “Why? You don’t?”

“I just want to pay the ransom and get my boy back. I don’t want anybody screwing it up.”

“I think we should call,” Myron said. “But it’s your decision.”

“There’s something else we have to consider,” Greg said.

“What?”

“There’s a good chance this wacko is our donor, right?”

“Yes.”

“If the FBI kills him, it’s over for Jeremy.”

“First things first,” Myron said. “We have to find Jeremy. And we have to find this kidnapper.”

Greg kept shaking.

“What do you want to do, Greg?”

“You think we should call?”

“Yes.”

Greg nodded slowly. “Call,” he said.

Myron dialed Kimberly Green’s number. He felt waves pounding in his head, the blood flowing to his ears. He tried not to think about Jeremy’s face, what his smile had looked like when he opened that door.

Did you say one last good-bye to the boy?

A voice said, “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Myron Bolitar calling Kimberly Green.”

“Special Agent Green is unavailable.”

“The Sow the Seeds kidnapper may have taken somebody else. Put her on.”

The hold was longer than Myron expected.

Kimberly Green started with a bark. “What the hell are you ranting about?”

“He just called me.” Myron filled her in.

“We’re on our way,” she said.

They hit a patch of traffic where Route 4 met Route 17, but Myron went up on the grass and knocked over several orange construction buckets. He broke off at Route 208 and exited near the synagogue. Two miles later, they made the final turn onto Emily’s street. Myron could see two FBI cars making the turn at the same time.

Greg, who had gone into something of a trance, woke up and pointed. “There she is.”

Emily was putting her key in the front door. Myron started honking madly. She looked back confused. He turned the car and skidded. The FBI car followed. Myron and Greg were both out the door almost before the car had stopped.

“Where’s Jeremy?” they both said in unison.

Emily had her head tilted to the side. “What?” she called back. “What’s going on here?”

Greg took it. “Where is he, Emily?”

“He’s with a friend—”

From inside the house, the phone started ringing. Everyone froze. Emily snapped out of it first. She ran inside and picked up the phone. She put the phone to her ear, cleared her throat, and said, “Hello.”

Through the receiver, they could all hear Jeremy’s scream.

30

There were six federal agents in all. Kimberly Green was the task force leader. They set up with quiet efficiency. Myron sat on one couch, Greg the other. Emily paced between them. There was probably something symbolic in that, but Myron was not sure what. He tried to push himself past the numb so he could get to a place where he could do some good.

The phone call had been brief. After the scream, the whispery voice had said, “We’ll call back.” That was it. No warnings not to contact the authorities. No telling them to prepare funds. No setting up another time to call. Nothing.

They all sat there, the boy’s scream still echoing, mauling, shredding, conjuring up images of what could have made a thirteen-year-old boy scream like that. Myron shut his eyes and pushed hard. That was what the bastard wanted. Unwise to play into that.

Greg had contacted his bank. He was not a risky investor, and so most of his assets were liquid. If ransom money was needed, he’d be ready. The various feds, all male except for Kimberly Green, put traces on all the possible phones, including Myron’s. She and her men were doing a lot of sotto voce. Myron hadn’t pressed them yet. But that wasn’t going to last.

Kimberly caught his eyes and waved him over. He stood and excused himself. Greg and Emily paid no attention, still lost in the vortex of that scream.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Okay,” Myron said. “Start by telling me what happened when you checked out Dennis Lex.”

“You’re not family,” she said. “I could throw you out.”

“This isn’t your house,” he said. “What happened with Dennis Lex?”

She put her hands on her hips. “It’s a dead end.”

“How so?”

“We traced it down. He’s not involved in any of this.”

“How do you know that?”

“Myron, come on. We’re not stupid.”

“So where is Dennis Lex?”

“It’s not relevant,” she said.

“The hell it’s not. Even if he’s not the kidnapper, we still have him as the bone marrow donor.”

“No,” she said. “Your donor is Davis Taylor.”

“Who changed his name from Dennis Lex.”

“We don’t know that.”

Myron made a face. “What are you talking about?”

“Davis Taylor was an employee in the Lex conglomerate.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“So why did he donate blood for a bone marrow drive?”

“It was a work thing,” she said. “The plant boss had a sick nephew. Everyone at the plant gave.”

Myron nodded. Something finally made sense. “So if he didn’t give a blood sample,” he said, “it would have been conspicuous.”

“Right.”

“You got a description on him?”

“He worked on his own, kept to himself. All anyone remembers is a man with a full beard, glasses, and long blond hair.”

“A disguise,” Myron said. “And we know Davis Taylor’s original name was Dennis Lex. What else?”

Kimberly Green raised her hand. “Enough.” She sort of hitched herself up, trying to alter momentum. “Stan Gibbs is still our top suspect here. What did you talk about last night?”

“Dennis Lex,” Myron said. “Don’t you get it?”

“Get what?”

“Dennis Lex is connected into all this. He’s either the kidnapper, or maybe he was the first victim.”

“Neither,” she said.

“Then where is he?”

She shook it off. “What else did you two talk about?”

“Stan’s father.”

“Edwin Gibbs?” That got her attention. “What about him?”

“That he vanished eight years ago. But you already know about that, don’t you?”

She nodded a little too firmly. “We do,” she said.

“So what do you think happened to him?” Myron asked.

She hesitated. “You believe that Dennis Lex may be Sow the Seeds’ first victim, correct?”

“I think it’s something to look into, yes.”

“Our theory,” she went on, “is that the first victim may have been Edwin Gibbs.”

Myron made a face. “You think Stan kidnapped his own father?”

“Killed him. And the others. We don’t believe any of them are still alive.”

Myron tried not to let that sink in. “You have any evidence or motive?”

“Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Oh, that’ll go over big with a jury. Ladies and gentlemen, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And you should never put the cart before the horse. Plus every dog has his day.” He shook his head. “Are you listening to yourself?”

“On its own, I admit it doesn’t make sense. But put it all together. Eight years ago, Stan was starting out on his own. He was twenty-four, his father forty-six. By all accounts, the two men did not get along. Suddenly Edwin Gibbs vanishes. Stan never reports it.”

“This is silly.”

“Maybe. But then add back everything else we already know. The only columnist to get this scoop. The plagiarism. Melina Garston. Everything that Eric Ford discussed with you yesterday.”

“It still doesn’t add up.”

“Then tell me where Stan Gibbs is.”

Myron looked at her. “Isn’t he at the condo?”

“Last night, after you two talked, Stan Gibbs slipped surveillance. He’s done that before. We usually pick him up a few hours later. But that hasn’t happened this time. He’s suddenly out of sight—and by coincidence, Jeremy Downing has been snatched by the Sow the Seeds kidnapper. You want to explain that one to me?”

Myron’s mouth felt dry. “You’re searching for him?”

“We got an APB. But we know he’s good at hiding. You got any clue where he went?”

“None.”

“He said nothing to you about it?”

“He mentioned that he might go away for a few days. But that I should trust him.”

“Bad advice,” she said. “Anything else?”

Myron shook his head. “Where is Dennis Lex?” he tried again. “Did you see him?”

“I didn’t have to,” she said. But her voice had a funny monotone to it. “He’s not involved in this.”

“You keep saying that,” Myron said. “But how do you know?”

She slowed down. “The family.”

“You mean Susan and Bronwyn Lex?”

“Yes.”

“What about them?”

“They gave us reassurances.”

Myron almost stepped back. “You just took their word for it?”

“I didn’t say that.” She glanced around, let loose a sigh. “And it’s not my call.”

“What?”

She looked straight through him. “Eric Ford handled it personally.”

Myron could not believe what he was hearing.

“He told me to stay away,” she said, “that he had it covered.”

“Or covered up,” Myron said.

“Nothing I can do about it.” She looked at him. She had stressed the word I. Then she walked away without another word. Myron dialed his cell phone.

“Articulate,” Win said.

“We’re going to need help,” Myron said. “Is Zorra still working freelance?”

“I’ll call her.”

“Maybe Big Cyndi too.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“No time for a plan,” Myron said.

“Ooo,” Win said. “Then we’re going to get nasty.”

“Yes.”

“And here I thought you weren’t going to break the rules anymore.”

“Just this once,” Myron said.

“Ah,” Win countered. “That’s what they all say.”

31

Win, Esperanza, Big Cyndi, and Zorra were all in his office.

Zorra wore a yellow monogrammed sweater (the monogram being one letter: Z), large white pearls à la Wilma Flintstone, a plaid skirt, and white bobby socks. Her—or if you want to be anatomically correct, his—wig looked like early Bette Midler or maybe Little Orphan Annie on methadone. Shiny red high-heel shoes like something stolen from a trampy Dorothy in Oz adorned the men’s-size-twelve feet.

Zorra smiled at Myron. “Zorra is happy to see you.”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “And Myron is happy to see you too.”

“This time, we’re on the same side, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Zorra pleased.”

Zorra’s real name was Shlomo Avrahaim, and she was a former Israeli Mossad agent. The two had had a nasty run-in not long ago. Myron still carried the wound near his rib cage—a scar-shaped Z made by a blade Zorra hid in her heel.

Win said, “The Lex Building is too well guarded.”

“So we go with Plan B,” Myron said.

“Already in motion,” Win said.

Myron looked at Zorra. “You armed?”

Zorra pulled a weapon out from under her skirt. “The Uzi,” Zorra said. “Zorra likes the Uzi.”

Myron nodded. “Patriotic.”

“Question,” Esperanza said.

“What?”

Esperanza settled her eyes on his. “What if this guy doesn’t cooperate?”

“We don’t have time to worry about it,” Myron said.

“Meaning?”

“This psycho has Jeremy,” Myron said. “You understand that? Jeremy has to be the priority here.”

Esperanza shook her head.

“Then stay behind,” he said.

“You need me,” she said.

“Right. And Jeremy needs me.” He stood. “Okay, let’s go.”

Esperanza shook her head again, but she went along. The group—a sort of cut-rate Dirty (One-Third of a) Dozen—broke off when they reached the street. Esperanza and Zorra would walk. Win, Myron, and Big Cyndi headed into a garage three blocks away. Win had a car there. Chevy Nova. Totally untraceable. Win had a bunch of them. He referred to them as disposable vehicles. Like paper cups or something. The rich. You don’t want to know what he does with them.

Win drove, Myron took the front passenger seat, and Big Cyndi squeezed into the back, which was a little like watching a film of childbirth on rewind. Then they were off.

The Stokes, Layton and Grace law firm was one of the most prestigious in New York. Big Cyndi stayed in reception. The receptionist, a skinny skirt-suit of gray, tried not to stare. So Big Cyndi stared at her, daring her not to look. Sometimes Big Cyndi would growl. Like a lion. No reason. She just liked to do it.

Myron and Win were ushered into a conference room that looked like a million other big Manhattan law firm conference rooms. Myron doodled on a yellow legal pad that looked like a million other big Manhattan law firm legal pads, watched through the window the smug, pink, fresh-scrubbed Harvard grads stroll by, again all looking exactly the same as the ones at a million other big Manhattan law firms. Reverse discrimination maybe, but all young white male lawyers looked the same to him.

Then again, Myron was a white Harvard law school graduate. Hmm.

Chase Layton trollied in with his rolly build and well-fed face and chubby hands and gray comb-over, looking like, well, a name partner at a big Manhattan law firm. He wore a gold wedding band on one hand and a Harvard ring on the other. He greeted Win warmly—most wealthy people do—and then gave a firm, I’m-your-guy handshake to Myron.

“We’re in a rush,” Win said.

Chase Layton shoved the big smile out of the room and strapped on his best battle-ready face. Everyone sat. Chase Layton folded his hands in front of him. He leaned forward, putting a bit of a belly push on the vest buttons. “What can I do for you, Windsor?”

Rich people always called him Windsor.

“You’ve been after my business for a long time,” Win said.

“Well, I wouldn’t say—”

“I’m here to give it to you. In exchange for a favor.”

Chase Layton was too smart to snap-bite at that. He looked at Myron. An underling. Maybe there’d be a clue how to play on this plebeian’s face. Myron kept up the neutral. He was getting better at it. Must be from hanging around Win so much.

“We need to see Susan Lex,” Win said. “You are her attorney. We’d like you to get her to come here immediately.”

“Here?”

“Yes,” Win said. “At your office. Immediately.”

Chase opened his mouth, closed it, checked on the underling again. Still no clue. “Are you serious, Windsor?”

“You do that, you get the Lock-Horne business. You know how much income that would generate?”

“A great deal,” Chase Layton said. “And yet not even a third of what we receive from the Lex family.”

Win smiled. “Talk about having your cake and eating it too.”

“I don’t understand this,” Chase said.

“It’s pretty straightfoward, Chase.”

“Why do you want to see Ms. Lex?”

“We can’t divulge that.”

“I see.” Chase Layton scratched a ham-red cheek with a manicured finger. “Ms. Lex is a very private person.”

“Yes, we know.”

“She and I are friends.”

“I’m sure,” Win said.

“Perhaps I can set up an introduction.”

“No good. It has to be now.”

“Well, she and I usually conduct business at her office—”

“Again no good. It has to be here.”

Chase rolled his neck a bit, stalling for time, trying to sort through this, find an angle to play. “She’s a very busy woman. I wouldn’t even know what to say to get her here.”

“You’re a good attorney, Chase,” Win said, steepling his fingers. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

Chase nodded, looked down, studied his manicure.

“No,” he said. He looked back up slowly. “I don’t sell out clients, Windsor.”

“Even if it meant landing a client as big as Lock-Horne?”

“Even then.”

“And you’re not doing this just to impress me with your discretion?”

Chase smiled, relieved, as though he finally got the joke. “No,” he said. “But wouldn’t that be having my cake and eating it too?” He tried to laugh it off. Win didn’t join him.

“This isn’t a test, Chase. I need you to get her here. I guarantee that she won’t find out you helped me.”

“Do you think that’s all that concerns me here—how it would look?”

Win said nothing.

“If that’s the case, you’ve misread me. The answer is still no, I’m afraid.”

“Thank about it,” Win said.

“Nothing to think about,” Chase said. He leaned back, crossing one leg over the other, making sure the crease sat right. “You didn’t really think I’d go along with this, did you, Windsor?”

“I hoped.”

Chase again looked at Myron, then back at Win. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, gentlemen.”

“Oh, you’ll help us,” Win said.

“Pardon me?”

“It’s just a matter of what we need to do to get your cooperation.”

Chase frowned. “Are you trying to bribe me?”

“No,” Win said. “I already did that. By offering you our business.”

“Then I don’t understand—”

Myron spoke for the first time. “I’m going to make you,” he said.

Chase Layton looked at Myron and smiled. Again he said, “Pardon me?”

Myron rose. He kept his expression flat, remembering what he’d learned from Win about intimidation. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Myron said. “But you will call Susan Lex and get her to come here. And you’ll do it now.”

Chase folded his arms and sat them atop his belly. “If you wish to discuss this further—”

“I don’t,” Myron said.

Myron walked around the table. Chase did not back away. “I will not call her,” he said firmly. “Windsor, would you tell your friend to sit down?”

Win feigned a helpless shrug.

Myron stood directly over Chase. He looked back at Win. Win said, “Let me handle it.”

Myron shook his head. He loomed over Chase and let his gaze fall. “One last chance.”

Chase Layton’s face was calm, almost amused. He probably saw this as a bizarre put-on—or perhaps he was just certain that Myron would back down. That was how it was with men like Chase Layton. Physical violence was not a part of the Layton equation. Oh, sure, those uneducated animals on the street might engage in it. They might knock him on the head for his wallet. Other people—lesser people, really—yes, they solved problems with physical violence. But that was another planet—one filled with a more primitive species. In Chase Layton’s world, a world of status and position and lofty manners, you were untouchable. Men threatened. Men sued. Men cursed. Men schemed behind one another’s backs. Men never engaged in face-to-face violence.

That was why Myron knew that no bluff would work here. Men like Chase Layton believed that anything remotely physical was a bluff. Myron could probably point a gun at him, and he wouldn’t budge. And in that scenario, Chase Layton would be right.

But not this one.

Myron boxed Chase Layton’s ears hard with his palms.

Chase’s eyes widened in a way they probably never had before. Myron put his hand over the lawyer’s mouth, muffling the scream. He cupped the back of the man’s skull and pulled him back, knocking him off his chair and onto the floor.

Chase lay on his back. Myron looked him straight in the eye and saw a tear roll down the man’s cheek. Myron felt ill. He thought about Jeremy and that helped keep his face neutral. Myron said, “Call her.”

He slowly released his hand.

Chase’s breathing was labored. Myron glanced at Win. Win shook his head.

“You,” Chase said, spitting out the word, “are going to jail.”

Myron closed his eyes, made a fist, and punched the lawyer up and under the ribs, toward the liver. The lawyer’s face fell into itself. Myron held the man’s mouth again, but this time there was no scream to smother.

Win eased back in his chair. “For the record, I am the sole witness to this event. I’ll swear under oath that it was self-defense.”

Chase looked lost.

“Call her,” Myron said. He tried to keep the pleading out of his voice. He looked down at Chase Layton. Chase’s shirttail was out of his pants, his tie askew, his comb-over unraveling, and Myron realized that nothing would ever be the same for this man. Chase Layton had been physically assaulted. He would always walk a little more warily now. He would sleep a little less deeply. He would always be a little different inside.

Maybe so too would Myron.

Myron punched him again. Chase made an oof noise. Win stood by the door. Keep your face even, Myron told himself. A man at work. A man who won’t stop no matter what. Myron cocked his fist again.

Five minutes later, Chase Layton called Susan Lex.

32

“Would have been better,” Win said, “if you let me hurt him.”

Myron kept walking. “It would have been the same,” he said.

Win shrugged. They had an hour to set up. Big Cyndi was now in the conference room with Chase Layton, supposedly going over her new professional-wrestling contract. When she entered the room, all six-six, three hundred pounds of her wearing her Big Chief Mama costume, Chase Layton barely looked up. The pain from the punches, Myron was sure, was ebbing. He had not struck the man in any place that would do lasting damage, except maybe to the obvious.

Esperanza was set up in the lobby. Myron and Win met Zorra two levels down, on the seventh floor. Zorra had staked out the lower floors and decided that this would be the quietest and easiest to contain. The office suites on the northern side were empty, Zorra noted. Anyone entering or leaving had to do so from the west. Zorra was stationed there with one cell phone.

Esperanza had the other one downstairs. Win held the third. They were on a three-way line with one another. Myron and Win were in position. In the last twenty minutes, the elevator had stopped at their floor only twice. Good. Both times the door opened, Myron and Win feigned conversation, just two guys waiting for an elevator heading in the opposite direction. Real undercover commandos.

Myron hoped like hell no one happened upon the scene when it all went down. Zorra would warn them, of course, but once the operation was under way, it couldn’t be stopped. They’d have to come up with some excuse, say it was a drill maybe, but Myron was not sure he could stomach hurting any more innocents today. He closed his eyes. Can’t back down now. Too far gone.

Win smiled at him. “Wondering yet again if the ends justify the means?”

“Not wondering,” Myron said.

“Oh?”

“I know they don’t.”

“And yet?”

“I’m not in the mood for introspection right now.”

“But you’re so good at it,” Win said.

“Thanks.”

“And knowing you as well as I do, you’ll save it for later—for when you have more time. You’ll gnash your teeth over what you just did. You’ll feel ashamed, remorseful, guilty—though you’ll also be oddly proud that you didn’t have moi do your dirty work. You’ll end up making a clear declaration that it will never happen again. And perhaps it won’t—not, at least, until the stakes are this high.”

“So I’m a hypocrite,” Myron said. “Happy?”

“But that is my point,” Win said.

“What?”

“You’re not a hypocrite. You aim toward lofty heights. The fact that your arrow cannot always reach them does not make you a hypocrite.”

“So in conclusion,” Myron said, “the ends do not justify the means. Except sometimes.”

Win spread his hands. “See? I just saved you hours of soul-searching. Perhaps I should consider penning one of those how-to-manage-your-time manuals.”

Esperanza broke in through the phone. “They’re here,” she said.

Win put the phone to his ear. “How many?”

“Three coming in. Susan Lex. That granite guy Myron keeps talking about. Another bodyguard. Two more staying parked outside.”

“Zorra,” Win said into the phone. “Please keep an eye on the two gentlemen outside.”

Zorra said, “And if they move?”

“Detain them.”

“With pleasure.” Zorra giggled. Win smiled. Welcome to the Psycho Hotline. Only $3.99 per minute. First call is free.

Myron and Win waited now. Two minutes past. Esperanza said, “Middle elevator. All three are inside.”

“Anyone else with them?”

“No … wait. Damn, two businessmen are going in.”

Myron closed his eyes and cursed.

Win looked at him. “Your call.”

Panic squeezed Myron’s chest. Innocent people in the elevator. There was sure to be violence. Witnesses now.

“Well?”

“Hold the phone.” It was Esperanza. “The granite guy blocked their path. Looks like he told them to wait for another elevator.”

“Top-notch security,” Win said. “Good to see we’re not dealing with amateurs.”

“Okay,” Esperanza said. “Just the three of them are inside now.”

The relief in Myron’s face was palpable.

Esperanza said, “Elevator closing … now.”

Myron pressed the Up button. Win took out his forty-four. Myron pulled out a Glock. They waited. Myron kept the gun by his thigh. It felt heavy in a terrible, comforting way. Myron kept glancing down the corridor. No one. He hoped their luck would hold. He felt his pulse start to race. His mouth was dry. The room suddenly felt warmer.

A minute later, the light above the middle elevator dinged.

Win’s face was in the zone, semi-euphoric. He wriggled his eyebrows and said, “Showtime.”

Myron tensed his muscles, leaned in a bit. The elevator’s whirring noise stopped. There was a delay and then the doors started sliding open. Win didn’t wait. He was inside before the opening had reached a foot. He found Grover and stuck the gun in the big man’s ear. Myron did the same with the other guard.

“Waxy ear buildup a problem, Grover?” Win said in his best voice-over. “Smith and Wesson has the solution!”

Susan Lex started to open her mouth. Win cut her off with a finger against her lip and a gentle “Shh.”

Win frisked and disarmed Grover. Myron followed his lead with the second guard. Grover glared daggers at Win. Win took them on and said, “Please—no, pretty please—make a sudden move.”

Grover didn’t budge.

Win stepped back. The elevator door started closing. Myron stopped it with his foot. He pointed the weapon at Susan Lex. “You’re coming with me,” Myron said.

“Don’t you want revenge first?” Grover said.

Myron looked at him.

“Go ahead.” Grover spread his hands. “Hit me in the gut. Go ahead, give it your best shot.”

“Pardon moi,” Win said. “But does that offer apply to me too?”

Grover looked at the smaller man like a tasty leftover. “I heard you’re not bad,” he said.

Win looked back at Myron. “ ‘Not bad,’ ” he repeated. “Monsieur Grover heard I was ‘not bad.’ ”

“Win,” Myron said.

Win snapped his knee deep into Grover’s groin. He followed through, driving the man’s testicles all the way into his stomach. Grover did not make a sound. He simply folded like a bad hand of poker.

“Oh, wait, you said ‘gut,’ didn’t you?” Win looked down at him, frowned. “Must work on my aim. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I am merely ‘not bad.’ ”

Grover was on his knees, his hands between his legs. Win kicked him in the head with his instep. Grover toppled over like a bowling pin. Win looked over at the other guard, who was putting his hands up and backing quickly into a corner.

“Will you tell your friends I was ‘not bad?’ ” Win asked him.

The guard shook his head.

“Enough,” Myron said.

Win picked up the cell phone. “Zorra, report.”

“They are not moving, handsome.”

“Come back up then. You can help me clean up.”

“Clean up? Ooo, Zorra will hurry.”

Win laughed.

“No more,” Myron said. Win did not reply, but Myron hadn’t really expected him to. Myron grabbed Susan Lex’s arm. “Let’s go.”

He pulled her into the stairwell. Zorra bounded into view—on high heels no less. Leaving two unarmed men alone with Win and Zorra. Talk about scary. But he had no choice here. Myron turned to Susan Lex, keeping tight hold of her elbow.

“I need your help,” he said to her.

Susan Lex looked at him, head high, not backing off.

“I promise not to say anything,” he went on. “I have no interest in hurting you or your family. But you’re going to take me to see Dennis.”

“And if I say no?”

Myron just looked at her.

“You’d hurt me?” she said.

“I just beat up an innocent man,” Myron said.

“And you’d do the same to a woman?”

“I wouldn’t want to be accused of sexism.”

Her expression remained defiant, but unlike Chase Layton, she seemed to understand how the real world worked. “You know what sort of power I have.”

“I do.”

“Then you know what I’ll do to you when this is all over?”

“I don’t much care. A thirteen-year-old boy has been kidnapped.”

She almost smiled. “I thought you said he needed a bone marrow transplant.”

“I don’t have time to explain.”

“My brother isn’t involved in this.”

“I keep hearing that.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Then prove it to me.”

Something in her face shifted then, changing her features, relaxing them into something strangely approaching tranquility. “Come,” she said. “Let’s go.”

33

Susan Lex directed him north on the FDR to the Harlem River Drive and then north again to 684. Once they were in Connecticut, the roads grew quieter. Woods thickened. Buildings grew scarce. Traffic was pretty much nonexistent.

“We’re almost there,” Susan Lex said. “I’d like the truth now.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“Fine,” she said. Then: “How do you plan on getting away with this?”

“With what?”

“Are you going to kill me when this is all over?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll come back after you. I’ll press charges, if nothing else.”

“I told you before. I don’t much care. But I’ve thought of something.”

“Oh?”

“Dennis will save me.”

“How?”

“If he is the Sow the Seeds kidnapper—”

“He’s not.”

“—or somehow involved with him, then what I’m doing here will be small potatoes by comparison.”

“And if he’s not?”

Myron shrugged. “Either way, I’m going to learn whatever it is you want to hide. We make a deal. I never tell what I saw. In exchange, you leave me alone.”

“Or I can simply kill you.”

“I don’t believe you’d do that.”

“No?”

“You’re not a killer. And even if you were, it would be too complicated. I’d leave evidence behind. I have Win covering my back. It would be too messy.”

“We’ll see,” she said, but there was no starch there. She pointed up ahead. “Turn off up here.”

She pointed to a dirt road that seemed to materialize from nowhere. There was a guardhouse fifty yards down and to the left. Myron pulled up. Susan Lex leaned over and smiled. The guard waved her through. There were no signs, no identification marks, nothing. The whole setup looked like some sort of militia compound.

After the gatehouse, the dirt road stopped and a paved one began. New pavement from the looks of it colored the dark black-gray of heavy rain. Trees crowded the sides like parade watchers. Up ahead, the road narrowed. The trees closed in too. Myron veered the car to the left and passed through wrought-iron gates guarded by two stone falcons.

“What is this?” Myron asked.

Susan Lex did not reply.

A mansion seemed to push out of the green, elbowing its way forward. The exterior was classic off-white Georgian but on an oversized scale. Palladian windows, pilasters, fancy pediments, curved balconies, brick cornering, and what looked like real stone masonry were all garnished with hints of green ivy. A set of oversized double doors were dead center, the entire edifice perfectly symmetrical.

“Park in the lot over there,” Susan Lex said.

Myron followed her finger. There was indeed a paved lot. Myron figured it contained close to twenty cars. Various makes. A BMW, a couple of Honda Accords, three Mercedes of different lineage, Fords, SUVs, one station wagon. Your basic American melting pot. Myron glanced back at the oversized manor. He noticed ramps now. Lots of them. He checked the cars. Several had MD license plates.

“A hospital,” he said.

Susan Lex smiled. “Come along.”

They headed up the brick path. Gloved gardeners were on their knees, working on the flower beds. A woman walked by in the opposite direction. She smiled politely but said nothing. They passed through an arched entranceway and into a two-story foyer. A woman seated behind the desk stood, slightly startled.

“We weren’t expecting you, ma’am,” she said.

“That’s fine.”

“I don’t have security set up.”

“That’s fine too.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Susan Lex barely broke stride. She took the sweeping staircase on her left, staying in the middle, not touching a handrail. Myron followed.

“What did she mean about security?” Myron asked.

“When I visit, they make sure the hallways are kept clear and that no one else is present.”

“To keep your secret?”

“Yes,” she said. She did not stop moving. “Perhaps you noticed that she called me ‘ma’am.’ That’s part of the discretion here. They never use names.”

When they reached the top level, Susan turned to the left. The corridor had raised wallpaper in a classic floral design and nothing else. No small tables, no chairs, no pictures in frames, no Oriental runners. They passed by maybe a dozen rooms, only two with doors open. Myron noticed that the doors were extra wide and he remembered his visit to Babies and Children’s Hospital. Extra wide doors there too. For wheelchairs and stretchers and the like.

When they reached the end of the corridor, Susan stopped, took a deep breath, looked back at Myron. “Are you ready?”

He nodded.

She opened the door and stepped inside. Myron followed. A four-poster antique bed, like something you’d see on a tour of Jefferson’s Monticello, overwhelmed the room. The walls were warm green with woodwork trim. There was a small crystal chandelier, a burgundy Victorian couch, a Persian rug with deep scarlets. A Mozart violin concerto was playing a bit too loudly on the stereo. A woman sat in the corner reading a book. She too started upright when she saw who it was.

“It’s okay,” Susan Lex said. “Would you mind leaving us for a few moments?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the woman said. “If you need anything—”

“I’ll ring, thank you.”

The woman did a semi-curtsy/semi-bow and hurried out. Myron looked at the man in the bed. The resemblance to the computer rendering was uncanny, almost perfect. Even, strangely enough, the dead eyes. Myron moved closer. Dennis Lex followed him with the dead eyes, unfocused, empty, like windows over a vacant lot.

“Mr. Lex?”

Dennis Lex just stared at him.

“He can’t talk,” she said.

Myron turned to her. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“You were right before. It’s a hospital. Of sorts. In another era, I suppose one would have called it a private sanitarium.”

“How long has your brother been here?”

“Thirty years,” she said. She moved toward the bed, and for the first time, she looked down at her brother. “You see, Mr. Bolitar, this is where the wealthy store unpleasantness.” She reached down and stroked her brother’s cheek. Dennis Lex did not respond. “We’re too cultured not to give our loved ones the best. All very humane and practical, don’t you know.”

Myron waited for her to say more. She kept stroking her brother’s cheek. He tried to see her face, but she kept it lowered and away from him.

“Why is he here?” Myron asked.

“I shot him,” she said.

Myron opened his mouth, closed it, did the math. “But you were only a child when he disappeared.”

“Fourteen years old,” she said. “Bronwyn was six.” She stopped stroking the cheek. “It’s an old story, Mr. Bolitar. You’ve probably heard it a thousand times. We were playing with a loaded gun. Bronwyn wanted to hold it, I said no, he reached for it, it went off.” She said it all in one breath, staring down at her brother, still stroking the cheek. “This is the end result.”

Myron looked at the still eyes in the bed. “He’s been here since?”

She nodded. “For a while I kept waiting for him to die. So I could officially be a murderer.”

“You were a child,” Myron said. “It was an accident.”

She looked at him and smiled. “My, that means so much coming from you, thank you.”

Myron said nothing.

“No matter,” she said. “Daddy took care of it. He arranged for my brother to have the best care. He was a very private person, my father. It was his gun. He’d left it where his children could play with it. His business and reputation were both growing. He had political aspirations at the time. He just wanted it all to go away.”

“And it did.”

She tilted her head back and forth. “Yes.”

“What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“What did she say?”

“My mother hated unpleasantness, Mr. Bolitar. After the incident, she never saw her son again.”

Dennis Lex made a sound, a guttural scrape, nothing remotely human. Susan gently shushed him.

“Did you and Bronwyn ever get help?” Myron asked.

She cocked an eyebrow. “Help?”

“Counseling. To help you through it.”

She made a face. “Oh please,” she said.

Myron stood there, his mind circling nowhere over nothing.

“So now you know the truth, Mr. Bolitar.”

“I guess,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“I wonder why you told me all this. You could have just shown Dennis to me.”

“Because you won’t talk.”

“How can you be so sure?”

She smiled. “After you shoot your own brother, shooting strangers becomes so easy.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No, I suppose not.” Susan Lex turned and faced him. “The fact is, you really don’t have much to tell. As you said earlier, we both have reasons to keep our mouths shut. You’ll be arrested for kidnapping and Lord knows what. The evidence of my crime—if indeed it was a crime—is nonexistent. You’d be worse off than I.”

Myron nodded, but his mind still whirred. Her story might be true or just something she told him to gain sympathy, to contain the damage. Still, there was the ring of truth in her words. Maybe her reason for talking was simpler. Maybe, after all this time, she just needed someone who’d listen to her confession. Didn’t matter. None of it mattered. There was nothing here. Dennis Lex was truly a dead end.

Myron looked out the window. The sun was starting to dip away. He checked his watch. Jeremy had been missing five hours now—five hours alone with a madman—and Myron’s best lead, his only lead, was lying brain-damaged in a hospital room.

The sun was still strong, bathing the expansive garden in white. Myron saw what looked like a maze made of shrubbery. He spotted several patients in wheelchairs, legs covered with blankets, sitting by a fountain. Serene. The rays reflected off a pool of water and a statue in the middle of—

He stopped. The statue.

Myron felt the blood in his veins turn to crystal. He shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted again.

“Oh Christ,” he said.

Then he sprinted toward the stairs.

34

Susan Lex’s helicopter was starting to descend toward the sanitarium’s landing pad when Kimberly Green called him on the cell phone.

“We’ve caught Stan Gibbs,” she said. “But the boy wasn’t with him.”

“That’s because he isn’t the kidnapper.”

“You know something I don’t?”

Myron ignored the question. “Has Stan told you anything?”

“Nope. He lawyered up already. Says he won’t talk to anyone but you. You, Myron. Why don’t I find that particularly surprising?”

Had Myron responded, the helicopter’s propeller would have drowned it out. He backed off a few steps. The copter touched down. The pilot stuck his head out and waved to him.

“I’m on my way,” Myron shouted into the phone. He switched it off and turned to Susan Lex. “Thank you.”

She nodded.

He ducked and ran toward the helicopter. As they rose, Myron looked back down. Susan Lex’s chin was tilted up, her eyes still on him. He waved. And she waved back.

Stan was not in a holding cell because they had nothing to hold him on. He sat in a waiting room with his eyes on the table and let his attorney, Clara Steinberg, do the talking. Myron had known Clara—he called her Aunt Clara though there was no familial relationship—since he was too young to remember. Aunt Clara and Uncle Sidney were Mom and Dad’s closest friends. Dad had gone to elementary school with Clara. Mom had roomed with her in law school. Aunt Clara, in fact, had set up Mom and Dad on their first date. She liked to remind Myron with a wink that “you wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for your aunt Clara.” Then she’d wink again. Subtle, that Clara. During the holidays, she always pinched Myron’s cheeks in admiration of his punim.

“Let me set up the ground rules, bubbe,” she said to him. Clara had gray hair and a pair of oversized glasses that magnified her eyes to Ant-Man size. She looked up at him and the giant eyes seemed to reel in everything all at once. She wore a white blouse with a gray vest, matching skirt, a kerchief around her neck, and teardrop pearl earrings. Think Shtetl Barbara Bush.

“One,” she said, “I am Mr. Gibbs’s attorney of record. I have requested that this conversation not be overheard. I have changed rooms four times to make sure the authorities don’t listen in. But I don’t trust them. They think your aunt Clara is an old dodo bird. They think we’re going to chat right here.”

“We’re not?” Myron said.

“We’re not,” she repeated. There was little hint of the cheek pincher here; if she were an athlete, you’d say that she’d strapped on her game face. “What we’re going to do first is stand up. Got me?”

“Stand up,” Myron repeated.

“Right. Then I’m going to lead you and Stan outside, across the street. I’m going to remain on the other side of the street with all those friendly agents. We do this right now, quickly, so they won’t have a chance to set up surveillance. Understood?”

Myron nodded. Stan kept his eyes on the Formica.

“Good, just so we’re all on the same page here.” She knocked on the door. Kimberly Green opened it. Clara walked past her without speaking. Myron and Stan followed. Kimberly rushed up behind them.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Change of plans, doll.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Sure I can. I’m a sweet little old lady.”

“I don’t care if you’re the Queen Mother,” Kimberly said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“You married, hon?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Clara said. “Try this on for size. See how it fits. My client demands privacy.”

“We already promised—”

“Shh, you’re talking when you should be listening. My client demands privacy. So he and Mr. Bolitar are going to take a little walk somewhere. You and I will watch from a distance. We will not listen in.”

“I already told you—”

“Shh, you’re giving me a headache.” Aunt Clara rolled her eyes and kept walking. Myron and Stan followed. They reached the doorway. Clara pointed to a bus depot across the street. “Sit over there,” she said to them. “On the bench.”

Myron said okay. Clara put a hand on his elbow.

“Cross at the corner,” she said. “And wait for the light.”

The two men walked to the corner and waited for the light before crossing the street. Kimberly Green and her fellow agents fumed. Clara took them by the hand and led them back toward the building’s entrance. Stan and Myron sat on the bench. Stan watched a New Jersey Transit bus go by like it carried the secret to life.

“We don’t have time to enjoy the scenery, Stan.”

Stan leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “This is difficult for me.”

“If it makes it any easier,” Myron said, “I know that the Sow the Seeds kidnapper is your father.”

Stan’s head fell into his hands.

“Stan?”

“How did you find out?”

“Through Dennis Lex. I found him in a private sanitarium in Connecticut. He’s been there for thirty years. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Gibbs said nothing.

“At the sanitarium, there’s a big garden in the back. With this statue of Diana the Huntress. There’s a picture in your condo of you and your father standing in front of that same statue. He was a patient there. You don’t have to confirm or deny it. I was just there. Susan Lex has pull. An administrator told us Edwin Gibbs had been in and out of there for fifteen years. The rest is fairly obvious. Your father was there a long time. It’d be easy to learn who else was there, no matter how strict the so-called security. So he knew about Dennis Lex. And he stole his identity. It’s a hell of a twist, I’ll give him that. Fake IDs used to be somewhat pretty easy to come by. You’d visit a graveyard, find a child who died, request his social security card, bingo. But that doesn’t work anymore. Computers closed down that loophole. Nowadays when you die, your social security number dies with you. So your father took the identity of someone still alive, someone who has no use for it, someone committed permanently. In other words, he used the ID of a living person who has no life. And to go deeper undercover, he changed the person’s name. Dennis Lex became Davis Taylor. Untraceable.”

“Except you traced it.”

“I got lucky.”

“Go on,” Stan said. “Tell me what else you know.”

“We don’t have time for this, Stan.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“What?”

“If you’re the one who says it—if you figure it out on your own—it’s not as much a betrayal. You see?”

No time to argue. And maybe Myron did see. “Let’s start with the question every reporter wanted to know: why you? Why did the Sow the Seeds kidnapper choose you? The answer: because the kidnapper was your father. He knew you wouldn’t turn him in. Maybe part of you hoped someone would figure it out. I don’t know. I also don’t know if you found him or he found you.”

“He found me,” Stan said. “He came to me as a reporter. Not as a son. He made that clear.”

“Sure,” Myron said, “double protection. He gets you with the fact that you’d be turning in your own father—plus he gives you an ethical foundation for remaining silent. The beloved First Amendment. You couldn’t name a source. It gave you a very neat out—you could be both moralistic and the good son.”

Stan looked up. “So you see that I had no choice.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so easy on myself,” Myron said. “You weren’t being totally altruistic. Everyone says you were ambitious. That played a part here. You got fame out of this. You were handed a monster story—the kind that propels careers into the stratosphere. You were on TV and got your own cable show. You got a big raise and invited to fancy parties. You want to tell me that wasn’t a part of it?”

“It was a by-product,” Stan said. “It wasn’t a factor.”

“You say so.”

“It’s like you said—I couldn’t turn him in, even if I wanted to. There was a constitutional principle here. Even if he wasn’t my father, I had an obligation—”

“Save it for your minister,” Myron said. “Where is he?”

Stan did not reply. Myron looked across the street.

Lots of traffic. The cars started blurring and through them, standing on the other side of the street with Kimberly Green, he saw Greg Downing.

“That man over there,” Myron said, pointing with his chin. “That’s the boy’s father.”

Stan looked, but his face didn’t change.

“There’s a kid in danger,” Myron said. “That trumps your constitutional cover.”

“He’s still my father.”

“And he’s kidnapped a thirteen-year-old boy,” Myron said.

Stan looked up. “What would you do?”

“What?”

“Would you give up your father? Just like that?”

“If he was kidnapping children? Yeah, I would.”

“Do you really think it’s that easy?”

“Who said anything about easy?” Myron said.

Stan put his head back in his hands. “He’s sick and he needs help.”

“And there’s also an innocent boy out there.”

“So?”

Myron looked at him.

“I don’t mean to sound callous, but I don’t know this boy. He has no connection to me. My father does. That’s what matters here. You hear about a plane crash, right? You hear about how two hundred people die and you sigh and you go on with your life and you thank God it wasn’t your loved one in the plane. Don’t you do that?”

“What’s your point?”

“You do that because the people on the plane are strangers. Like this boy. We don’t care about strangers. They don’t count.”

“Speak for yourself,” Myron said.

“Are you close to your father, Myron?”

“Yes.”

“And in your heart of hearts, in your deepest, most honest moments, if you could sacrifice his life to save those two hundred people on the airplane, would you do it? Think about it. If God came down to you and said, ‘Okay, that plane never crashed. Those people all arrive safely. In exchange, your father will die.’ Would you make that trade?”

“I’m not into playing God.”

“But you’re asking me to,” Stan said. “I turn my father in, they’ll kill him. He’ll get the lethal injection. If that’s not playing God, I don’t know what is. So I’m asking you. Would you trade those two hundred lives for your father’s?”

“We don’t have time—”

“Would you?”

“Okay, if it was my father shooting down the plane,” Myron said, “yes, Stan, I would make that trade.”

“And suppose your father wasn’t culpable? If he was sick or deranged?”

“Stan, we don’t have time for this.”

Something in Stan’s face dropped. He closed his eyes.

“There’s a boy out there,” Myron said. “We can’t let him die.”

“And if he’s already dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ll want my father dead.”

“Not by my hand,” Myron said.

Stan took a deep breath and looked over at Greg Downing. Greg stared back, stared right through him. “Okay,” he said at last. “But we go alone.”

“Alone?”

“Just you and me.”

Kimberly Green had a major conniption. “Are you insane?”

They were back inside, sitting around the Formica table. Kimberly Green, Rick Peck, and two other faceless feds were hunched together as one. Clara Steinberg sat with her client. Greg sat next to Myron. Jeremy’s kidnapping had siphoned all the blood from Greg’s face. His hands looked sucked dry, his skin almost crisp, his eyes too solid and unblinking. Myron put a hand on his shoulder. Greg didn’t seem to notice.

“You want my client to cooperate or not?” Clara asked.

“I’m supposed to let my number one suspect go?”

“I’m not running away,” Stan said.

“How am I supposed to know that?” Kimberly countered.

“It’s the only way,” Stan said, his voice a plea. “You’ll go in with guns blazing. Someone is going to get hurt.”

“We’re professionals,” Green countered. “We don’t go in with guns blazing.”

“My father is unstable. If he sees a lot of cops, I can guarantee there will be bloodshed.”

“Doesn’t have to be that way,” she said. “It’s up to him.”

“Exactly,” Stan said. “I’m not taking that chance with my father’s life. You let us go. You don’t follow us. I’ll have him surrender to you. Myron will be with me the whole time. He’s armed and he has a cell phone.”

“Come on,” Myron said. “We’re wasting time here.”

Kimberly Green chewed on her lower lip. “I don’t have the authorization—”

“Forget it,” Clara Steinberg said.

“Excuse me?”

Clara pointed a meaty finger at Kimberly Green. “Listen up, missy, you haven’t arrested Mr. Gibbs, correct?”

Green hesitated. “That’s correct.”

Clara turned to Stan and Myron and waved the backs of both hands at them. “So shoo, go, good-bye. We’re talking nonsense here. Hurry along. Shoo.”

Stan and Myron slowly rose.

“Shoo.”

Stan looked down at Kimberly. “If I spot a tail, I’m calling this off. You got me?”

She stewed in silence.

“You’ve been trailing me for three weeks now. I know what one of your tails looks like.”

“She won’t tail you.”

It was Greg Downing. He and Stan locked eyes again. Greg stood. “I want to go with you too,” Greg said. “And I probably have the strongest interest in keeping your father alive.”

“How do you figure?”

“Your father’s bone marrow can save my son’s life. If he dies, so does my son. And if Jeremy has been hurt … well, I’d like to be there for him.”

Stan didn’t waste a lot of time thinking about it. “Let’s hurry.”

35

Stan drove. Greg sat in the front passenger seat, Myron in the back. “Where are we going?” Myron asked.

“Bernardsville,” Stan said. “It’s in Morris County.”

Myron knew the town.

“My grandmother died three years ago,” Stan said. “We haven’t sold the house yet. My father sometimes stays there.”

“Where else does he stay?”

“Waterbury, Connecticut.”

Greg looked back at Myron. The old man, the blond wig. It clicked for both of them at the same time.

“He’s Nathan Mostoni?”

Stan nodded. “That’s his main alias. The real Nathan Mostoni is another patient at Pine Hills—that’s what we call that fancy loony bin, Pine Hills. Mostoni was the one who came up with the idea of using the identification of the committed, mostly for scams. He and my father became close friends. When Nathan slipped into total delirium, my father took his identity.”

Greg shook his head, made two fists. “You should have turned the crazy bastard in.”

“You love your son, don’t you, Mr. Downing?”

Greg gave Stan a look that could have bored holes through titanium. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“Would you want your son to turn you in one day?”

“Don’t hand me that. If I’m a raving psychopathic maniac, yeah, my son can turn me in. Or better, he can put a bullet in my head. You knew your old man was sick, right? The least you could have done was get him help.”

“We tried,” Stan said. “He was in institutions most of his adult life. It didn’t do any good. Then he ran off. When he finally called me, I hadn’t seen him in eight years. Imagine that. Eight years. He calls me and tells me he needs to talk to me as a reporter. He made that clear. As a reporter. No matter what he told me, I couldn’t reveal the source. He made me promise. I was confused as all hell. But I agreed. And then he told me his story. What he’d been doing. I could barely breathe. I wanted to die. I wanted to just dry up and die.”

Greg put his fingers to his mouth. Stan concentrated on the road. Myron stared out the window. He thought about the father of three young children, age forty-one; the female college student, age twenty; and the young newlyweds, ages twenty-eight and twenty-seven. He thought about Jeremy’s scream over the phone. He thought about Emily waiting at the house, her mind sowing the seeds, sick and blackening.

They got off Route 78 and took 287 north. They exited onto winding streets with no straightaways. Bernardsville was about old money and rustic wealth, a town of converted mills and stone houses and waterwheels. There were fields of long brown grass swaying in death, everything a little too old and too neatly overgrown.

“It’s on this road,” Stan said.

Myron looked out. His mouth was dry. He felt a tingle deep in his belly. The car traveled down another corkscrew of a street, the loose gravel crunching under the tires. There were deeply wooded lots commingling with your standard suburban front lawns. Plenty of center-hall colonials and those mid-seventies ranches that aged like milk left out on the counter. A yellow sign warned about children at play, but Myron saw none.

They pulled into a cake-dried driveway with weeds poking up through the cracks. Myron lowered his window. There was plenty of burnt-out grass, but the sweet summer smell of lillies still loomed and even cloyed. Crickets droned. Wildflowers blossomed. Not a hint of menace.

Up ahead Myron spotted what looked like a farmhouse. Black shutters stood out against the white clapboards. There were lights coming from inside, giving the house a glow that was big and soft and oddly welcoming. The front porch was the type that craved a swinging settee and a pitcher of lemonade.

When the car reached the front of the house, Stan shifted into park and turned off the ignition. The crickets eased up. Myron almost waited for someone to note that it was “Quiet” and for someone else to add, “Yeah, too quiet.”

Stan turned to them. “I think I should go in first,” he said.

Neither man argued. Greg stared out the window at the house, probably conjuring up unspeakable horrors. Myron’s left leg started jackhammering. It often did when he was tense. Stan reached for the door handle.

That was when the first bullet smashed through the front passenger-side window.

The glass exploded, and Myron saw Greg’s head fly back at a rate it was never supposed to achieve. A thick gob of crimson smacked Myron in the cheek.

“Greg!”

No time. Instincts took over. Myron grabbed Greg, pushed him down, trying to keep his own head down too. Blood. Lots of it. From Greg. He was bleeding, bleeding heavily, but Myron couldn’t tell from where. Another bullet rang out. Another window shattered, raining shards of glass down on Myron’s head. He kept his hand on top of Greg, tried to cover him, protect him. Greg’s own hand fumbled absently on his chest and face, calmly searching for the bullet hole. Blood kept flowing. From the neck. Greg’s neck. Or collarbone. Whatever. He couldn’t see through the blood. Myron tried to stop the flow with his bare hand, pushing the sticky liquid away, finding the wound with his finger, applying pressure with his palm. But the blood slipped through the cracks between his fingers. Greg looked up at him with big eyes.

Stan Gibbs put his hands over his head and ducked into a quasi-emergency-landing position. “Stop!” he yelled, almost childlike. “Dad!”

Another bullet. More glass shards. Myron reached into his pocket and pulled out his gun. Greg grabbed his hand and pulled it down. Myron looked at him.

“Can’t kill him,” Greg said to Myron. There was blood in his mouth now. “If he dies … Jeremy’s only hope.”

Myron nodded, but he didn’t put the gun away. He looked over at Stan. In the distance, they heard a helicopter. Then sirens. The feds were on their way. No surprise. There was no way they weren’t going to follow. By air, at the very least.

Greg’s breathing was short spurts. His eyes were going hazy-gray.

“We got to do something here, Stan,” Myron said.

“Just stay down,” Stan said. Then he opened the car door and shouted, “Dad!”

No reply.

Stan got out of the car. He raised his hands and stood. “Please,” he shouted. “They’ll be here soon. They’ll kill you.”

Nothing. The air was so motionless that Myron thought he could still hear the echoes from the gun blasts.

“Dad?”

Myron lifted his head a little and risked a glance. A man stepped out from behind the side of the house. Edwin Gibbs wore full army fatigues with combat boots. He had an ammunition belt hanging off his shoulder. His rifle was pointed toward the ground. Myron could see it was Nathan Mostoni, though he looked twenty years younger. His head was high, chin up. His back was straight.

Greg made a gurgling sound. Myron ripped off his shirt and pushed it against the wound. But Greg’s eyes were closing. “Stay with me,” Myron urged. “Come on, Greg. Stay here.”

Greg did not reply. His eyes fluttered and closed. Myron felt his heart slam into his throat. “Greg?”

He felt for a pulse. It was there. Myron was no doctor, but it didn’t feel strong. Oh damn. Oh come on.

Outside the car, Stan moved closer to his father. “Please,” Stan said. “Put down the rifle, Dad.”

The fed cars poured into the driveway. Brakes squealed. Feds jumped out of their vehicles, took position using the open doors as shields, aimed their weapons. Edwin Gibbs looked confused, panicked, Frankenstein’s monster suddenly surrounded by angry villagers. Stan hurried toward him.

The air seemed to thicken, molasses-like. It was hard to move, hard to breathe. Myron could almost feel the officers tense up, fingers itchy, tips touching the cold metal of the trigger. He let go of Greg for a moment and shouted, “You can’t shoot him!”

A fed had a megaphone. “Put down the rifle! Now!”

“Don’t shoot!” Myron shouted.

For a moment nothing happened. Time did that in-and-out motion where everything rushes and freezes all at one time. Another fed car skidded up the driveway. A news van followed, screeching when it hit the brakes. Stan kept walking toward his father.

“You are surrounded,” the megaphone said. “Drop the rifle and put your hands behind your head. Drop to your knees.”

Edwin Gibbs looked left, looked right. Then he smiled. Myron felt the dread rise up in his chest. Gibbs lifted his rifle.

Myron rolled out of the car. “No!”

Stan Gibbs broke into a sprint. His father spotted him, his face calm. He aimed the rifle at his approaching son. Stan kept running. Time did stop this time, waiting for the blast of gunfire. But it didn’t come. Stan had gained on him too fast. Edwin Gibbs closed his eyes and let his son tackle him. The two men fell to the ground. Stan stayed on top of his father, blanketing him, leaving no space open.

“Don’t shoot him,” Stan yelled. His voice sounded hurt, again so childlike. “Please don’t shoot him.”

Edwin Gibbs lay on his back. He let go of the rifle. It dropped into the grass. Stan pushed it away, still on top of his father, still shielding him from harm. They stayed there until the officers took over. They gently removed Stan and then rolled Edwin Gibbs onto his stomach, cuffing his hands behind his back. The news camera caught it all.

Myron turned back to the car. Greg’s eyes were still closed. He wasn’t moving. Two of the officers ran toward the car, calling into their radios for an ambulance. Nothing Myron could do for Greg now. He looked back at the farmhouse, his heart still lodged in his throat. He ran toward the house and grabbed the knob. The door was locked. He used his shoulder. The door came down. Myron stepped into the foyer.

“Jeremy?” he called out.

But there was no reply.

36

They didn’t find Jeremy Downing. Myron checked every room, every closet, the basement, the garage. Nothing. The feds streamed in with him. They started knocking down walls. They used a heat sensor to check for underground caves or hidden places. Nothing. In the garage, they found a white van. In the back of it, they found one of Jeremy’s red sneakers.

But that was it.

News vans, lots of them, gathered at the end of the driveway. What with the kidnapped boy, his famous father shot and in critical condition, a potential serial killer in custody, the connection to Stan Gibbs and the famed plagiarism charges—the story was getting the full, round-the-clock, give-it-a-banner-and-theme-music, death-of-Diana coverage. Stiffly coiffed correspondents flashed their best grim-news teeth and led with phrases like “the vigil continues” or “the search is reaching its xth hour” or “behind me lurks the lair” or “we’ll be here until.”

A recent photograph of Jeremy, the one Emily had on the Web, ran continuously on all the stations. Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather interrupted their programming. Viewers called in tips, but so far none amounted to anything.

And the hours passed.

Emily drove to the scene. It played on all the usual outlets, her head lowered, hurrying toward a waiting car like an arrested felon, the flashbulbs creating a grotesque strobe effect. Cameramen elbowed each other out of the way to capture a glimpse of the stricken mother collapsing in the back of the car. They even got a shot of her through the passenger seat crying. Great TV.

Nightfall brought out searchlights. Volunteers and law officials scoured the nearby grounds for signs of recent graves or digging. Nothing. They brought in dogs. Nothing. They spoke to neighbors, some of whom “never trusted that family” but most gave the standard “seemed like nice folk, real quiet neighbors” spiel.

Edwin Gibbs had been taken into custody. They tried to question him at the Bernardsville Police Station, but he wasn’t talking. Clara Steinberg became his attorney. She stayed with him. So did Stan. They pleaded with Edwin, Myron guessed, but so far, he hadn’t talked.

Back at the farmhouse, the wind picked up. Myron’s bad knee ached, each step giving him a fresh jolt of pain. The pain was unpredictable, arriving whenever it damn well pleased, staying on like the most unwelcome houseguest. There was no side benefit to the knee pain, no weather forecasting or anything like that. Some days it just ached. Nothing he could do about it. He approached Emily and put his arm around her.

“He’s still out there,” Emily said to the dark.

Myron said nothing.

“He’s all alone. And it’s night. And he’s probably scared.”

“We’ll find him, Em.”

“Myron?”

“Hmm.”

“Is this more payback for that night?”

Another search party returned, their shoulders slumped in resignation, if not defeat. Odd thing, these search parties. You wanted to find something, yet you didn’t want to find something.

“No,” Myron said. “I think you were right. I think our mistake was the best thing that could have happened. And maybe there’s a price to pay to have something so good.”

She closed her eyes, but she did not cry. Myron stayed next to her. The wind howled, scattering the surrounding voices like dead leaves, whipping branches, and whispering in your ear like the most frightening lover.

37

Myron and Win looked through the one-way glass at Clara Steinberg’s back and the faces of Stan and Edwin Gibbs. Kimberly Green stood with them. So did Eric Ford. Emily had gone to the hospital to sit vigil while Greg was in surgery. No one seemed to know if he’d make it.

“Why aren’t you listening in?” Myron asked.

“Can’t,” Ford replied. “Attorney-client.”

“How long they been at it?”

“On and off since we took him into custody.”

Myron checked the clock behind his head. Nearly three in the morning. Evidence collection teams had leveled the house, but still no clue where Jeremy was. Fatigue lined everyone’s face, except maybe Win’s. Fatigue never registered on his face. Win must internalize it. Or maybe it had something to do with having little to no conscience.

“We don’t have time for this,” Myron said.

“I know,” Eric Ford said. “It’s been a long night for all of us.”

“Do something.”

“Like what?” Ford snapped. “What exactly would you like me to do?”

Win picked up that one. “Perhaps you could speak to Ms. Steinberg in private.”

That hooked Ford’s attention. “What?”

“Take her into another room,” Win said, “and leave me alone with your suspect.”

Eric Ford looked at him. “You shouldn’t even be here. He”—a gesture toward Myron—“represents the Downing family, as much as I don’t like it. But you got no reason to be here.”

“Make a reason,” Win said.

Eric Ford waved his hand as if this wasn’t worth his time.

Win kept the voice at a low, soothing level. “You don’t have to be a part of it,” he said. “Simply talk to his attorney. Leave Gibbs alone in the room. That’s all. Nothing unethical about that.”

Ford shook his head. “You’re crazy.”

“We need answers,” Win said.

“And you want to beat them out of him.”

“Beating leaves marks,” Win said. “I never leave marks.”

“That’s not how it works, pal. Ever heard of the U.S. Constitution?”

“It’s a document,” Win said, “not a trump card. You have a choice. The obscure rights of that subhuman”—Win gestured through the glass—“or a young boy’s right to live.”

Ford leaned his forehead against the glass.

“If the boy dies while we’re standing here,” Win said, “how will you feel then?”

Ford shut his eyes. In the holding room, Clara Steinberg rose from her chair. She turned, and for the first time, Myron saw her face. He knew that she had represented bad people before—very, very bad people—but whatever horrors she was now hearing had washed away her skin tone and etched in something that would probably never leave. She approached the one-way mirror and knocked. Ford hit the sound switch.

“We need to talk,” she said. “Let me out.”

Eric Ford met Clara and Stan by the door. “Let’s head down this way,” he said.

“No,” Clara said.

“Pardon me?”

“We’ll talk in here,” she said, “where I can watch my client. Wouldn’t want an accident, now, would we?”

There were no chairs so they all stood by the one-way window—Kimberly Green, Eric Ford, Clara Steinberg, Stan Gibbs, Myron, and Win. Stan kept his head down and plucked at his lower lip with his fingers. Myron tried to meet his eyes. Stan never gave him the chance.

“Okay,” Clara said. “First off, we need a D.A.”

“What for?” Eric Ford asked.

“Because we want a deal.”

Ford tried to snicker. “Are you out of your mind?”

“No. My client is the only one who can tell you where Jeremy Downing is. He’ll only do so under specific conditions.”

“What conditions?”

“That’s why we need a D.A.”

“A D.A. will back whatever I agree to,” Eric Ford said.

“I’ll still want it in writing.”

“And I want to hear what you’re looking for here.”

“Okay,” Clara said, “here’s the deal. We help you find Jeremy Downing. In exchange, you guarantee not to seek the death penalty for Edwin Gibbs. You also agree to psychiatric tests. You then recommend he be placed in a proper mental health facility, not a prison.”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“There’s more,” Clara said.

“More?”

“Mr. Edwin Gibbs will also agree to donate bone marrow to Jeremy Downing if the need arises. I understand that Mr. Bolitar is representing the family here. For the record, we should note that he is present as a witness to this agreement.”

No one said anything.

“So we clear?” Clara said.

“No,” Ford said, “we’re not.”

Clara adjusted her eyeglasses. “This deal is nonnego-tiable.” She turned to leave, her gaze snagging on Myron’s. Myron just shook his head.

“I’m his attorney,” she said to him.

“And you’ll let a boy die for him?” Myron said.

“Don’t start,” Clara said, but her voice was soft.

Myron studied her face again, saw no give. He turned to Ford. “Agree,” he said.

“Are you nuts?”

“The family cares about retribution. But they care more about finding their son. Agree to her terms.”

“You think I’m taking orders from you?”

Myron’s voice was soft. “Come on, Eric.”

Ford frowned. He rubbed his face with his hands and then dropped them back to his side. “This agreement assumes, of course, that the boy is still alive.”

“No,” Clara Steinberg said.

“What?”

“Alive or dead does not change the state of Edwin Gibbs’s mental health.”

“So you don’t know if he’s alive or—”

“If we did, it would be an attorney-client communication and thus confidential.”

Myron looked at her in stark horror. She met his eyes and would not blink. Myron tried Stan, but his head was still lowered. Even Win’s face, usually the model of neutrality, was on edge. Win wanted to hurt somebody. He wanted to hurt somebody badly.

“We can’t agree to that,” Ford said.

“Then there’s no deal,” Clara said.

“You have to be reasonable—”

“Do we have a deal or not?”

Eric Ford shook his head. “No.”

“See you in court, then.”

Myron moved into her path.

“Step aside, Myron,” Clara said.

He just looked down at her. She raised her eyes.

“You think your mother wouldn’t be doing the same thing?” Clara said.

“Leave my mother out of this.”

“Step aside,” she said again. Aunt Clara was sixty-six. For the first time since he’d known her, she looked older than her age.

Myron turned back to Eric Ford. “Agree,” he said.

He shook his head. “The boy is probably dead.”

“Probably,” Myron repeated. “Not definitely.”

Win spoke up this time. “Agree,” he said.

Ford looked at him.

“He won’t get off easily,” Win said.

Stan’s head finally rose at that one. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Win gave him flat eyes. “Absolutely nothing.”

“I want this man kept away from my father.”

Win smiled at him.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Stan said. “None of you get it. My father is sick. He’s not responsible. We’re not making this up. Any competent psychiatrist in the world will agree. He needs help.”

“He should die,” Win said.

“He’s a sick man.”

“Sick men die all the time,” Win said.

“That’s not what I mean. He’s like someone who has a heart condition. Or cancer. He needs help.”

“He kidnaps and probably kills people,” Win said.

“And it doesn’t matter why he does it?”

“Of course it doesn’t matter,” Win said. “He does it. That’s enough. He should not be put in a comfortable mental hospital. He should not be allowed to enjoy a wonderful film or read a great book or laugh again. He should not be able to see a beautiful woman or listen to Beethoven or know kindness or love—because his victims never will. What part of that don’t you understand, Mr. Gibbs?”

Stan was shaking. “You agree,” he said to Ford. “Or we don’t help.”

“If the boy dies because of this negotiation,” Win said to Stan, “you will die.”

Clara stepped into Win’s face. “You threatening my client?” she shouted.

Win smiled at her. “I never threaten.”

“There are witnesses.”

“Worried about collecting your fee, Counselor?” Win asked.

“That’s enough.” It was Eric Ford. He looked at Myron. Myron nodded. “Okay,” Ford said slowly. “We agree. Now, where is he?”

“I’ll have to take you,” Stan said.

“Again?”

“I wouldn’t be able to give you directions. I’m not even sure I can find it after all these years.”

“But we come along,” Kimberly Green said.

“Yes.”

There was an empty space, a sudden stillness that Myron didn’t like.

“Is Jeremy alive or dead?” Myron asked.

“Truth?” Stan said. “I don’t know.”

38

Eric Ford drove with Kimberly Green riding shotgun and Myron and Stan in the backseat. Several cars’ worth of agents followed them. So too did the press. Nothing they could do about that.

“My mother died in 1977,” Stan said. “Cancer. My father was already unwell. The one thing in his life that mattered to him—the one good thing—was my mother. He loved her very much.”

The time on the car clock read nearly 4:03 A.M. Stan told them where to turn off Route 15. A sign read DINGSMAN BRIDGE. They were heading into Pennsylvania.

“Whatever sanity was still there, my mother’s death stripped away. He watched her suffer. Doctors tried everything—used all their technological advances—but it only made her suffer more. That’s when my father started with the strength of the mind. If only my mother hadn’t relied on technology, he thought. If only she used her mind instead. If only she’d seen its limitless potential. Technology killed her, he said. It gave her false hope. It stopped her from using the one thing that could save her—the limitless human brain.”

No one had a comment.

“We had a summerhouse out here. It was beautiful. Fifteen acres of land, walking distance to a lake. My father used to take me hunting and fishing. But I haven’t been out here in years. Haven’t even thought about the place. He took my mother out here to die. Then he buried her in the woods. See, it’s where her suffering finally ended.”

The obvious question hung in the air, unasked: And who else’s?

Myron would later remember nothing about the drive. No buildings, no landmarks, no trees. Outside his window was total night, the black folding over black, eyes squeezed shut in the darkest of rooms. He sat back and waited.

Stan told them to stop at the foot of a wooded area. More crickets sounded. The other cars pulled up alongside them. Feds got out and started combing the area. Beams from powerful flashlights revealed uneven earth. Myron ignored them. He swallowed and ran. Stan ran with him.

Before morning broke, the federal officers would find graves. They’d find the father of three children, the female college student, and the young newlyweds.

But for now, Myron and Stan kept running. Branches whipped Myron’s face. He tripped over a root, curled into a roll, stood back up, kept running. They spotted the small house, barely visible in the faint moonlight. There were no lights on inside, no hint of life. Myron did not bother trying the knob this time. He took it full on, crashing the door down. More darkness. He heard a cry, turned, fumbled for the light switch, flipped it up.

Jeremy was there.

He was chained to a wall—dirty and terrified and still very much alive.

Myron felt his knees buckle, but he fought them and stayed upright. He ran to the boy. The boy stretched out his arms. Myron embraced him and felt his heart fall and shatter. Jeremy was crying. Myron lifted his hand and stroked the boy’s hair and shushed him. Like his father. Like his father had done to him countless times. A sudden, beautiful warmth streamed through his veins, tingling his fingers and toes, and for a moment, Myron thought that maybe he understood what his father felt. Myron had always cherished being on the son side of the hug, but now, for just the most fleeting of moments, he experienced something so much stronger—the intensity and overwhelming depth of being on the other side—that it shook every part of him.

“You’re okay,” Myron said to him, cupping the boy’s head. “It’s over now.”

But it wasn’t.

An ambulance came. Jeremy was put inside. Myron called Dr. Karen Singh. She didn’t mind being woken at five in the morning. He told her everything.

“Wow,” Karen Singh said when he finished.

“Yes.”

“We’ll get someone to harvest the marrow right away. I’ll start prepping Jeremy in the afternoon.”

“You mean with chemo.”

“Yes,” she said. “You done good, Myron. Either way, you should be proud.”

“Either way?”

“Come by my office tomorrow afternoon.”

Myron felt a thumping in his chest. “What’s up?”

“The paternity test,” she said. “The results should be in by then.”

Jeremy was on his way to the hospital. Myron wandered back outside. The feds were digging. The news vans were there. Stan Gibbs watched the mounds of earth grow, his face now beyond emotion. No sound, not even the crickets now, except for shovel hitting dirt. Myron’s knee was acting up. He felt bone-weary. He wanted to find Emily. He wanted to go to the hospital. He wanted to know the results of that test and then he wanted to know what he was going to do with them.

He climbed back up the hill toward the car. More media. Someone called out to him. He ignored them. There were more federal officers working in silence. Myron walked past them. He didn’t have the heart to hear what they’d found. Not just yet.

When he reached the top of the landing—when he saw Kimberly Green and the lifeless expression on her face—his heart took one more plummet.

He took another step. “Greg?” he said.

She shook her head, her eyes hazy and unfocused. “They shouldn’t have left him alone,” she said. “They should have watched him. Even after a careful search. You can never search too carefully.”

“Search who?”

“Edwin Gibbs.”

Myron was sure he’d heard wrong. “What about him?”

“They just found him,” she said, having trouble with the words. “He committed suicide in his cell.”

39

Karen Singh summed it up for them: You can’t get bone marrow from a dead man. Emily did not collapse when she heard the news. She took the blow without blinking and immediately segued to the next step. She was on a calmer plane now, somewhere just outside panic.

“We have incredible access to the media right now,” Emily said. They were sitting in Karen Singh’s hospital office. “We’ll make pleas. We’ll set up bone marrow drives. The NBA will help. We’ll get players to make appearances.”

Myron nodded, but the enthusiasm wasn’t there. Dr. Singh mimicked his motion.

“When will you have the paternity results?” Emily asked.

“I was just about to call for them,” Dr. Singh said.

“I’ll leave you two alone, then,” Emily said. “I have a press conference downstairs.”

Myron looked at her. “You don’t want to wait for the results?”

“I already know the results.”

Emily left without a backward glance. Karen Singh looked at Myron. Myron folded his hands and put them in his lap.

“You ready?” she asked.

He nodded.

Karen Singh picked up the phone and dialed. Someone on the other end answered. Karen read off a reference number. She waited, tapping a pencil on the desk. Someone on the other end said something. Karen said, “Thank you,” hung up, focused her eyes on Myron.

“You’re the father.”

Myron found Emily in the hospital lobby, giving the press conference. The hospital had set up a podium with their logo perfectly positioned behind it, sure to be picked up by any and all television cameras. Hospital logo. Like they were McDonald’s or Toyota, trying to sleaze some free advertising. Emily’s statement was direct and heartfelt. Her son was dying. He needed new bone marrow. Everyone who wanted to help should give blood and get registered. She plucked the strings of societal grieving, making sure it rang personal in the same way that Princess Diana’s and John Kennedy Jr.’s deaths rang personal, wanting the public to mourn as if they actually knew him. The power of celebrity.

When she finished her statement, Emily hurried off without answering questions. Myron caught up to her in the closed-off area near the elevators. She glanced at him. He nodded, and she smiled.

“So now what are you going to do?” she asked him.

“We have to save him,” Myron said.

“Yes.”

Behind them the press were still yelling out questions. The sound trickled and then faded into the background. Someone ran by with an empty gurney.

“You said Thursday was the optimum day,” Myron said.

Hope lit her eyes. “Yes.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “We try it on Thursday.”

The bullet that had struck Greg had entered in the lower part of his neck and traversed toward his chest. It had stopped short of the heart. But it had done plenty of damage anyway. He survived surgery but remained unconscious in “critical” and “guarded” condition. Myron looked in on him. Greg had tubes in his nose and a frightening assortment of machinery Myron hoped never to understand. He looked like a corpse, waxen and gray-white and sucked dry. Myron sat with him for a few minutes. But not very long.

He returned to the offices of MB SportsReps the next day.

“Lamar Richardson is coming in this afternoon,” Esperanza said.

“I know.”

“You okay?”

“Dandy.”

“Life goes on, huh?”

“Guess so.”

Special Agent Kimberly Green came semi-bouncing by a few minutes later. “It’s all wrapping up,” she told him, and for the first time he saw her smile.

Myron sat back. “I’m listening.”

“Edwin Gibbs, under his Dennis Lex/Davis Taylor identity, still had a locker at work. We found the wallets of two of his victims, Robert and Patricia Wilson, in there.”

“They were the honeymoon couple?”

“Yes.”

They both took a moment, out of respect for the dead, Myron guessed. He pictured a healthy young couple beginning their life, coming to the Big Apple to see some shows and do a little shopping, walking the bustling streets hand in hand, a little scared about the future but ready to give it a go. El fin.

Kimberly cleared her throat. “Gibbs also rented a white Ford Windstar using the Davis Taylor credit card. It was one of those automatic reservations. You just make a call, walk straight to the rental, and drive off. No one sees you.”

“Where did he pick up the van?”

“Newark Airport.”

“I assume that’s the van we found in Bernardsville,” Myron said.

“The very.”

“Tidy,” he said, using a Win word. “What else?”

“Preliminary autopsies reveal that all the victims were killed with a thirty-eight. Two shots to the head. No other signs of trauma. We don’t think he tortured them or any of that. His modus operandus seemed to involve the early scream and then he just killed them.”

“He ends the seed sowing for them,” Myron said, “but not the families.”

“Right.”

“Because for his victims, the terror would be real. He wanted it all in the mind.” Myron shook his head. “What did Jeremy tell you about his ordeal?”

“You didn’t talk to him about it?”

Myron shifted in his chair. “No.”

“Edwin Gibbs wore the same disguise he used at work—the blond wig and beard and glasses. He blindfolded Jeremy as soon as he had him in the van and drove straight to that cabin. Edwin told him to scream into the phone—even made him practice first to make sure he had it right. After the call, Edwin chained him up and left him alone. You know the rest.”

Myron nodded. He did.

“What about the plagiarism charge and the novel?”

She shrugged. “It was like you and Stan said. Edwin read it, probably right after his wife was dying of cancer. It influenced him.”

Myron stared at her for a moment.

“What?” she said.

“You guys figured that part out when you first got the novel,” Myron said. “That Stan hadn’t plagiarized. That the book influenced the killer.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Come on. You knew that the kidnappings had taken place. You just wanted to put pressure on Stan so he’d talk. And maybe you wanted to embarrass him a little.”

“That’s not true,” Kimberly Green said. “I’m not saying some of our agents didn’t take it personally, but we believed that he was the Sow the Seeds kidnapper. I already told you some of the reasons why. Now we know that a lot of the same evidence pointed to his father.”

“What same evidence?”

She shook her head. “It’s not important anymore. We knew Stan was more here than just a reporter. And we were right. We even thought he was getting stuff wrong on purpose—that he was using the book rather than what he’d really done just to throw us off.”

Her words didn’t resonate the way the truth does, but Myron didn’t argue the point. He scanned his Client Wall and tried to bring his focus around to Lamar Richardson’s visit. “So the case is closed.”

She smiled. “Like legs in a nunnery.”

“You make that one up?”

“Yup.”

“Good thing you carry a gun,” Myron said. “So are you going to get a big promotion?”

She rose. “I think I get to be a super-secret-special agent now.”

Myron smiled. They shook hands. Kimberly left then. Myron sat alone for a while. He rubbed his eyes and thought about what she’d said and what she hadn’t said and realized that something was still very wrong.

Lamar Richardson, shortstop extraordinaire, showed up on time and by himself. Positively shocking. The meeting went well. Myron gave his standard spiel, but the standard spiel was pretty good. Damn good, actually. All businesspeople need a spiel. Spiel is good. Esperanza spoke up too. She had started developing her own spiel. Well honed. The perfect complement to Myron’s. Quite the partnership, this was becoming.

Win stopped by briefly as planned. If recruitment was a baseball game, Win was the big closer. People knew his name. They checked out his reputation—er, his business reputation, that is. When prospective clients learned that Windsor Horne Lockwood III himself would handle their finances, that Win and Myron further insisted that clients meet with Win at least five times a year, they started smiling. Score one for the small agency.

Lamar Richardson played it close to the vest. He nodded a lot. He asked questions but not too many. Two hours after arriving, he shook their hands and said he’d be in touch. Myron and Esperanza walked him to the elevator and bade him good-bye.

Esperanza turned to Myron. “Well?”

“Got him.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m all-seeing,” Myron said. “All-knowing.”

They moved back into Myron’s office and sat down. “If Lamar chooses us over IMG and TruPro”—she stopped, smiled—“we’re baaaaack.”

“Pretty much.”

“And that means Big Cyndi will come back.”

“That’s supposed to be a good thing, right?”

“You’re starting to love her, you know.”

“Yeah, don’t rub it in.”

Esperanza studied his face. She did that a lot. Myron didn’t much believe in reading faces. Esperanza did. Especially his. “What happened in that law office?” she asked. “With Chase Layton?”

“I boxed his ears once and punched him seven times.”

Her eyes stayed on his face.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘But you saved Jeremy’s life,’ ” Myron added.

“No, that’s Win’s line.” She adjusted herself and faced him full. She wore an aquamarine business suit, cut low with no blouse, and it was a wonder Lamar had been able to concentrate on anything. Myron was used to her, but the effect was still there, still dazzling. He just saw the dazzle from a different angle.

“Speaking of Jeremy,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You still blocking?”

Myron thought about it, remembered the embrace in that cabin, stopped. “More than ever,” he said.

“So what now?”

“The blood test came back. I’m the father.”

Something popped onto her face—regret maybe—but it didn’t stay long. “You should tell him the truth.”

“Right now I just want to save his life.”

She kept studying the face. “Maybe soon,” she said.

“Maybe soon what?”

“You’ll stop blocking,” Esperanza said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“We’ll chat then. In the meantime …”

“Don’t be stupid,” he finished for her.

The health club was located in a chi-chi hotel in mid-town. The walls were fully mirrored. The ceiling and the trim and the front desk were whole-milk white. Same with the clothes worn by the personal trainers. The weights and exercise machines were sleek and chrome and so beautiful you didn’t want to touch them. Everything about the place gleamed; you were almost tempted to work out in sunglasses.

Myron found him on a bench press, struggling without a spotter. Myron waited, watching him wage war on gravity and the barbell. Chase Layton’s face was pure red, his teeth gritted, veins in his forehead doing their pop-up video. It took some time, but the attorney achieved victory. He dropped the weight onto the stand. His arms fell to his sides like he’d missed a brain synapse.

“You shouldn’t hold your breath,” Myron said.

Chase looked over at him. He didn’t seem surprised or upset. He sat up, breathing heavily. He wiped his face with a towel.

“I won’t take up much of your time,” Myron said.

Chase put the towel down and looked at him.

“I just wanted to say that if you want to press charges, Win and I won’t get in your way.”

Chase did not reply.

“And I’m very sorry for what I did,” Myron said.

“I watched the news,” Chase said. “You did it to save that boy’s life.”

“Doesn’t excuse it.”

“Maybe not.” He stood and added a plate to both sides of the bar. “Frankly, Mr. Bolitar, I’m not sure what to think.”

“If you want to press charges—”

“I don’t.”

Myron was not sure what to say, so he settled for “Thank you.”

Chase Layton nodded and sat back on the bench. Then he looked at Myron. “Do you want to know what the worst part of it is?”

No, Myron thought. “If you want to tell me.”

“The shame,” Chase said.

Myron started to open his mouth, but Chase waved him quiet.

“It’s not the beating or the pain. It’s the feeling of total helplessness. We were primitive. We were man to man. And there was nothing I could do but take it. You made me feel like”—he looked up, found the words, looked straight at Myron—“like I wasn’t a real man.”

The words made Myron cringe.

“I went to these great schools and joined all the right clubs and made a fortune in my chosen profession. I fathered three kids and raised them and loved them the best I could. Then one day you punch me—and I realize that I’m not a real man.”

“You’re wrong,” Myron said.

“You’re going to say that violence is no measure of a man. On some level you’re right. But on some level, the base level that makes us men, we both know you’re wrong. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. It’d just be a further insult.”

Myron swallowed down the clichés. Chase took deep breaths and reached for the bar.

“Need a spotter?” Myron said.

Chase Layton gripped it and jerked it off the stand. “I don’t need anybody,” he said.

Thursday came. Karen Singh introduced him to a fertility expert named Dr. Barbara Dittrick. Dr. Dittrick handed Myron a small cup and told him to masturbate into it. There were more surreal and embarrassing experiences in life, Myron guessed, but being led to a small room to masturbate into a cup while everyone waited for you in the next room had to be right up there with the best of them.

“Step in here, please,” Dr. Dittrick said.

Myron frowned at the cup. “I usually insist on flowers and a movie.”

“Well, at least you got the movie,” she said, pointing at the television. “The TV has X-rated videos.” She left the room and closed the door behind her.

Myron checked the titles. On Golden Blonde. Father Knows Breast (starring Robert Hung). Field of Wet Dreams (“If you watch it, they will come”). He frowned and passed. So to speak. He stared at the swivel leather chair, one of those lean-back kind, where probably hundreds of other men had sat and … He covered it with paper towels and did his bit, though it took some time. His imagination was spinning in the wrong direction, generating an aura about as erotic as mole hair on an old man’s buttock. When he was, uh, finished, he opened the door and handed the cup to Dr. Dittrick and tried to smile. He felt like the world’s biggest doofus. She wore rubber gloves, even though the, uh, specimen was in a cup. Like it might scald her. She brought it to a lab where they “washed” (their expression, not his) the semen. The semen was declared “serviceable but slow.” Like it was falling behind in algebra.

“Funny,” Emily said. “I usually found Myron to be serviceable but quick.”

“Ha-ha,” Myron said.

A few hours later Emily was in a hospital bed. Barbara Dittrick smiled while inserting what looked suspiciously like a turkey baster into her and pressed the plunger. Myron took her hand. Emily smiled.

“Romantic,” she said.

Myron made a face.

“What?”

“Serviceable?” he said.

She laughed. “But quick.”

Dr. Dittrick finished her part. Emily stayed prone for another hour. Myron sat with her. They were doing this to save Jeremy’s life. That was all. He didn’t let the future enter the equation. He didn’t consider the long-term effects or what this might one day mean. Irresponsible, sure. But first things first.

They had to save Jeremy. The hell with the rest.

Terese Collins called him from Atlanta that afternoon. “Can I come up and visit?” she asked.

“The station will give you more time off?”

“Actually, my producer encouraged me.”

“Oh?”

“You, my studly friend, are part of a huge story,” Terese said.

“You used the words ‘studly’ and ‘huge’ in the same sentence.”

“That turn you on?”

“Well, it might a lesser man.”

“And you are that lesser man.”

“I thank you,” he said.

“You’re also the only one in this story who won’t talk to the press.”

“So you just want me for my mind,” Myron said. “I feel so used.”

“Dream on, hot buns. I want your bod. It’s my producer who wants your brain.”

“Your producer cute?”

“No.”

“Terese?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to talk about what happened.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t want to hear it.”

There was a brief silence.

“Yeah,” Myron said. “I’d like it very much if you came up.”

Ten days later, Karen Singh called him at home. “The pregnancy didn’t take.”

Myron closed his eyes.

“We can try again next month,” she said.

“Thanks for calling, Karen.”

“Sure.”

There was empty space. “Anything else?” Myron asked.

“There’s been a lot of marrow drives,” she said.

“I know.”

“One donor looks like a match for an AML patient in Maryland. A young mother. She would have probably died if it weren’t for these drives.”

“Good news,” Myron said.

“But no matches for Jeremy.”

“Yeah.”

“Myron?”

“What?”

“I don’t think we have much time here.”

Terese returned to Atlanta later that day. Win invited Esperanza to his place for a night of mindless television. The three of them sat in their customary spots. Fritos and Indian takeout were on the night’s menu. Myron had the remote. He paused when he saw a familiar image on CNN. A basketball superstar simply known as “TC,” one of the NBA’s most controversial players and a teammate of Greg’s, was on Larry King Live. His hair was razor-carved to spell out Jeremy, and both gold earrings had Jeremy’s name on them. He wore a ripped T-shirt that simply read HELP OR JEREMY DIES. Myron smiled. TC was something else, but he’d get the people out in droves.

More flipping. Stan Gibbs was on some talking-head show on MSNBC. Nothing new. The only thing the press loves as much as tearing somebody down is a story of redemption. Bruce Taylor had gotten the exclusive, as promised, and he’d set the tone. The public was mixed on what Stan had done, but for the most part, they sympathized with him. In the end, Stan had risked his own life to catch a killer, saved Jeremy Downing from certain death, and been wrongly accused by a too-eager-to-convict media. The fact that Stan had been confused about turning in his own father played for him, especially since the media was anxious to wipe away the awful mar of plagiarism they’d so quickly tattooed on him. Stan got his column back. Rumor had it his show was coming back too but in a better time slot. Myron wasn’t sure what to think. Stan was no hero to him. But so few people were.

Stan, too, was pounding the bone-marrow-drive drum. “This boy needs our help,” he said directly into the camera. “Please come down. We’ll be here all night.”

A blond talking head asked Stan about his own part in this drama, about tackling his father, about racing to the cabin. Stan played the modesty card. Wise. The man knew the media.

“Boring,” Esperanza said.

“Agreed,” Win said.

“Isn’t there a Partridge Family marathon on TV Land?”

Myron suddenly stopped.

“Myron?” Win said.

He did not reply.

“Hello, world.” Esperanza snapped her fingers in Myron’s face. “There’s a song that we’re singing. Come on, get happy.”

Myron switched off the television. He looked at Win, then at Esperanza. “Say one last good-bye to the boy.”

Esperanza and Win exchanged a glance.

“You were right, Win.”

“About what?”

“Human nature,” Myron said.

40

Myron called Kimberly Green at her office. She answered the line and said, “Green.”

“I need a favor,” Myron said.

“Shit, I thought you were out of my life.”

“But never your fantasies. You want to help me or not?”

“Not.”

“I need two things.”

“Not. I said ‘not.’ ”

“Eric Ford said that the supposedly plagiarized novel was sent directly to you.”

“So?”

“Who sent it?”

“You heard him, Myron. It was sent anonymously.”

“You have no idea.”

“None.”

“Where is it now?”

“The book?”

“Yes.”

“In an evidence locker.”

“Ever do anything with it?”

“Like what?”

Myron waited.

“Myron?”

“I knew you guys were holding something back,” he said.

“Listen to me a second—”

“The author of that novel. It was Edwin Gibbs. He wrote it under a pseudonym after his wife died. It makes perfect sense now. You were searching for him right from the get-go. You knew, dammit. You knew the whole time.”

“We suspected,” she said. “We didn’t know.”

“All that crap about thinking he was Stan’s first victim—”

“It wasn’t total crap. We knew it was one of them. We just didn’t know which one. We couldn’t find Edwin Gibbs until you told us about the Waterbury address. By the time we got there, he was already on his way to kidnap Jeremy Downing. Maybe if you had been more forthcoming—”

“You guys lied to me.”

“We didn’t lie. We just didn’t tell you everything.”

“Jesus, you ever listen to yourself?”

“We owed you nothing here, Myron. You weren’t a federal agent on this. You were just a pain in the ass.”

“A pain in the ass who helped you solve the case.”

“And for that I thank you.”

Myron’s thoughts entered the maze, turned left, turned right, circled back.

“Why doesn’t the press know about Gibbs being the author?” Myron asked.

“They will. Ford wants all his ducks in a row first. Then he’ll hold yet another big press conference and present it as something new.”

“He could do that today,” Myron said.

“He could.”

“But then the story dies down. Right now the rumors keep it going. Ford gets more time in the limelight.”

“He’s a politician at heart,” she said. “So what?”

Myron took another few turns, hit a few more walls, kept feeling for the way out. “Forget it,” he said.

“Good. Can I go now?”

“First I need you to call the national bone marrow registry.”

“Why?”

“I need to find out about a donor.”

“This case is closed, Myron.”

“I know,” he said. “But I think a new one might be opening.”

Stan Gibbs was at the anchor chair when Myron and Win arrived. His new cable show, Glib with Gibbs, was filming in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and the studio, like every television studio Myron had ever seen, looked like a room with the roof ripped off. Wires and lights hung in no discernible pattern. Studios, especially newsrooms, were always much smaller in person than on television. The desks, the chairs, the world map in the background. All smaller. The power of television. A room on a nineteen-inch screen somehow looks smaller in real life.

Stan wore a blue blazer, white shirt, red tie, jeans, and sneakers. The jeans would stay under the desk and never get camera time. Classic anchorman-wear. Stan waved to them when they entered. Myron waved back. Win did not.

“We need to talk,” Myron said to him.

Stan nodded. He sent away the producers and motioned Myron and Win to the guest chairs. “Sit.”

Stan stayed in the anchor chair. Win and Myron sat in guest chairs, which felt pretty strange, as though a home audience were watching. Win checked his reflection in a camera glass and smiled. He liked what he saw.

“Any word on a donor?” Stan asked.

“None.”

“Something will come through.”

“Yeah,” Myron said. “Look, Stan, I need your help.”

Stan intertwined his fingers and rested both hands on the anchor desk. “Whatever you need.”

“There’s a lot of things that don’t add up with Jeremy’s kidnapping.”

“For example?”

“Why do you think your father took a child this time? He never did that before, right? Always adults. Why this time a child?”

Stan mulled it over, chose his words one at a time. “I don’t know. I’m not sure taking adults was a pattern or anything. His victims seemed pretty random.”

“But this wasn’t random,” Myron said. “His choosing Jeremy Downing couldn’t have been just a coincidence.”

Stan thought about that one too. “I agree with you there.”

“So he picked him because he was somehow connected with my investigation.”

“Seems logical.”

“But how would your father have known about Jeremy?”

“I don’t know,” Stan said. “He might have followed you.”

“I don’t think so. You see, Greg Downing stayed up in Waterbury after our visit. He kept his eye on Nathan Mostoni. We know he didn’t travel out of town until the day before the kidnapping.”

Win looked into the camera again. He smiled and waved. Just in case it was on.

“It’s strange,” Stan said.

“And there’s more,” Myron said. “Like the call where Jeremy screamed. With the others, your father told the family not to contact the cops. But he didn’t this time. Why? And are you aware that he wore a disguise when he kidnapped Jeremy?”

“I heard that, yes.”

“Why? If he planned on killing him, why go to the trouble of donning a disguise?”

“He kidnapped Jeremy off the streets,” Stan said. “Someone might have been able to identify him.”

“Yeah, okay, that makes sense. But then why blindfold Jeremy once he was in the van? He killed all the others. He would have killed Jeremy. So why worry about him seeing his face?”

“I’m not sure,” Stan said. “He might have always done it that way, for all we know.”

“I guess,” Myron said. “But something about it all just rings wrong, don’t you think?”

Stan thought about it. “It rings funny,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure it rings wrong.”

“That’s why I came to you. All these questions have been swirling in my head. And then I remembered Win’s credo.”

Stan Gibbs looked over at Win. Win blinked his eyes and lowered them modestly. “What credo is that?”

“Man is into self-preservation,” Myron said. “He is, above all, selfish.” He paused a moment. “You agree with that, Stan?”

“To some degree, of course. We’re all selfish.”

Myron nodded. “You even.”

“Yes, of course. And you too, I’m sure.”

“The media is making you out to be this noble guy,” Myron said. “Torn between family and duty and ultimately doing the right thing. But maybe you’re not.”

“Not what?”

“Noble.”

“I’m not,” Stan said. “I did wrong. I never claimed to be a saint.”

Myron looked at Win. “He’s good.”

“Damn good,” Win agreed.

Stan Gibbs frowned. “What are you talking about, Myron?”

“Follow me here, Stan. And remember Win’s credo. Let’s start at the beginning. When your father first contacted you. You talked to him and you decided to write the Sow the Seeds story. What was your motive at first? Were you trying to find an outlet for your fear and guilt? Was it simply to be a good reporter? Or—and here’s where we’re using the Win credo—did you write it because you knew it would make you a big star?”

Myron looked at him and waited.

“Am I supposed to answer that?”

“Please.”

Stan looked in the air and rubbed his fingertips with his thumb. “All of the above, I guess. Yes, I was excited by the story. I thought it could very well be a big deal. If that’s selfishness, okay, I’m guilty.”

Myron glanced at Win again. “Good.”

“Damn good.”

“Let’s keep following this track, Stan, okay? The story did indeed become a big deal. So did you. You became a celebrity—”

“We covered this already, Myron.”

“Right. You’re absolutely right. Let’s skip to the part where the feds sued you. They demanded to know your source. You refused. Now again there might be several reasons for this. The First Amendment, of course. That could be it. Protecting your father would be another. The combination of the two. But—and again Win’s credo—what would be the selfish choice?”

“What do you mean?”

“Think selfishly and you really have only one option.”

“That being?”

“If you caved in to the feds—if you said, Okay, now that I’m in legal trouble, my source is my father—well, how would that have looked?”

“Bad,” Win said.

“Damn bad. I doubt you’d have been much of a hero if you sold out your father—not to mention the First Amendment—just to save your hide from vague legal threats.” Myron smiled. “See what I mean about Win’s credo?”

“So you think I acted selfishly by not telling the feds,” Stan said.

“It’s possible.”

“It’s also possible that the selfish thing was also the right thing.”

“Possible too,” Myron agreed.

“I never claimed to be a hero in all this.”

“Never denied it either.”

Stan smiled this time. “Maybe I didn’t deny it because I’m using Win’s credo.”

“How’s that?”

“Denying it would harm me,” Stan said. “As would boasting about it.”

Myron didn’t have a chance to look before he heard Win say, “Damn good.”

“I still don’t see the relevance of any of this,” Stan said.

“Stick with me, I think you will.”

Stan shrugged.

“Where were we?” Myron asked.

“The feds take him to court,” Win said.

“Right, thanks, the feds take you to court. You battle back. Then something happens you totally didn’t foresee. The plagiarism charges. For the sake of discussion, we’ll assume the Lex family sent the book to the feds. They wanted to get you off their back—what better way to do that than to ruin your reputation? So what did you do? How did you react to the charges of plagiarism?”

Stan kept quiet. Win said, “He disappeared.”

“Correct answer,” Myron said.

Win smiled and nodded a thank-you into the camera.

“You took off,” Myron said to Stan. “Now the question again is why. Several things come to mind. It could have been because you were trying to protect your father. Or it might have been that you were afraid of the Lex family.”

“Which would certainly fit Win’s credo,” Stan said. “Self-preservation.”

“Right. You were afraid they’d harm you.”

“Yes.”

Myron treaded gently. “But don’t you see, Stan? We have to think selfishly too. You’re presented with this serious plagiarism charge. What choices did you have? Two really. You could either run off—or you could tell the truth.”

Stan said, “I still don’t see your point.”

“Stay with me. If you told the truth, you would again look like a louse. Here you’ve been defending the First Amendment and your father and whoops, you get in trouble and you sell them out. No good. You’d still be ruined.”

“Damned if you do,” Win said. “Damned if you don’t.”

“Right,” Myron said. “So the wise move—the selfish move—was to vanish for a while.”

“But I lost everything by vanishing.”

“No, Stan, you didn’t.”

“How can you say that?”

Myron lifted his palms to the skies and grinned. “Look around you.”

For the first time, something dark flicked across Stan’s face. Myron saw it. So did Win.

“Let’s continue, shall we?”

Stan said nothing.

“You go into hiding and start counting your problems. One, your father is a murderer. You’re selfish, Stan, but you’re not inhumane. You want him off the streets, yet you can’t tell on him. Maybe because you love him. Or maybe there’s Win’s credo.”

“Not this time,” Stan said.

“Pardon?”

“Win’s credo doesn’t apply. I kept quiet because I loved my father and because I believe in protecting sources. And I can offer proof.”

“I’m listening,” Myron said.

“If I wanted to turn my father in—if that would have been in my best interest—I could have done it anonymously.” Stan leaned back and folded his arms.

“That’s your proof?”

“Sure. I didn’t do the selfish thing.”

Myron shook his head. “You got to go deeper.”

“Deeper how?”

“Turning your father in anonymously wouldn’t help you, Stan. Not really. Yes, you needed to put your father behind bars. But more than that, you needed to be redeemed.”

Silence.

“So what would answer both those needs? What would put your father away and put you back on top—maybe even more on top than before? First, you had to be patient. That meant staying hidden. Second, you couldn’t be the one who turned him in. You had to set him up.”

“Set up my father?”

“Yes. You had to leave a trail for the feds to follow. Something subtle, something that would lead to your father, and something you could manipulate at any time. So you took a fake ID, Stan—the same way your father had. You even took a job where people would spot the disguise your father used and hey, maybe you could also tie in your dad’s old nemesis the Lex family in the process.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know what bugged me? Your father had been so careful in the past. Now all of a sudden he’s leaving incriminating evidence in a locker. He rents the kidnap van on a credit card and leaves a red sneaker in it. It didn’t make any sense. Unless someone was setting him up.”

Stan’s look of disbelief was almost genuine. “You think I killed these people?”

“No,” Myron said. “Your father did.”

“Then what—?”

“You’re the one who used the Dennis Lex identity,” Myron said, “not your father.”

Stan tried to look stunned, but it wasn’t happening.

“You kidnapped Jeremy Downing. And you called me and pretended to be the Sow the Seeds killer.”

“And why did I do that?”

“To have this heroic ending. To have your father arrested. To have yourself redeemed.”

“How the hell does calling you—”

“To get me interested. You probably learned about my background. You knew I’d investigate. You needed a dupe and a witness. Someone outside the police. I was that dupe.”

“The dupe du jour,” Win added.

Myron shot him a look. Win shrugged.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, Stan, it adds up. It answers all my earlier questions. How did the kidnapper happen to choose Jeremy? Because you followed me after I left your condo. You saw the feds pick me up. That’s how you knew I’d spoken to them. You followed me to Emily’s house. From there, any old newsman worth a damn could have figured out her son was the sick kid I told you about. His illness wasn’t a secret. So Jeremy’s being taken is no longer a coincidence, see?”

Stan folded his arms across his chest. “I see nothing.”

“Other questions get answered too now. Like why did the kidnapper wear a disguise and make Jeremy wear a blindfold? Because you couldn’t let Jeremy identify you. Why didn’t the kidnapper kill Jeremy right away, like he had the others? Same reason you wore the disguise. You had no intention of killing him. Jeremy had to survive the ordeal unharmed. Otherwise you’re no hero. Why didn’t the kidnapper make his usual demand not to contact the authorities? Because you wanted the feds in. You needed them to witness your heroics. It wouldn’t work without their involvement. I wondered how the media was always in the right spot—in Bernardsville, at the cabin. But you set that part up too. Anonymous leaks probably. So the cameras could witness and replay your heroics—your tackling your father, the dramatic rescue of Jeremy Downing. Good television. You knew the power of capturing those moments for all the world to see.”

Stan waited. “You finished?”

“Not yet. You see, I think you went too far in spots. Leaving that sneaker in the van, for example. That was overkill. Too obvious. It made me wonder how neatly it all came together in the end. And then I started realizing that I was your main sucker, Stan. You played me like a Stradivarius. But even if I hadn’t shown up, you just would have kidnapped someone else. Your main dupes were the feds. For crying out loud, that photograph of your father by the statue was the only picture in the whole condo. It even faced the window. You knew the feds were spying on you. You threw the truth about Dennis Lex right in their faces. Surely they’d go to the sanitarium and put it together. And if not, you could somehow get it out in the end, when they had you in custody. You were all set to cave in and tell on your father when I came through in the clutch. Me, the dupe du jour, saw the truth up at the sanitarium. You must have been so pleased.”

“This is crazy.”

“It answers all the questions.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s the truth.”

“The Davis Taylor address you used at work. It was the same address as your father’s in Waterbury. So we would trace it back to him, to Nathan Mostoni. Who else would have done that?”

“My father!”

“Why? Why would your father change identities at all? And if your father needed a new identity, wouldn’t he shed the old one? Or hell, at least change addresses? Only you could have pulled it off, Stan. You could have hooked up the extra phone line with no problem. Your father was pretty far gone. He was demented, at the very least. You kidnapped Jeremy. Then you probably told your father to meet you at the house in Bernardsville. He did what you said—for love or because of dementia, I don’t know which. Did you know he’d arm himself like that? I doubt it. If Greg had died, you’d probably look worse. But I don’t know for sure. Maybe the fact that he fired shots just made you look more heroic in the end. Think selfishly, Stan. That’s the key.”

Stan shook his head.

“ ‘Say one last good-bye to the boy,’ ” Myron said.

“What?”

“That’s what the Sow the Seeds killer said to me on the phone. The boy. I made a mistake when he called me. I told him a boy needed help. After that, I only used the word ‘child.’ When I spoke to Susan Lex. When I spoke to you. I said a thirteen-year-old child needs a transplant.”

“So?”

“So when we talked in the car that night, you asked what I was really after, what my real interest in all this was. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“And I said I already told you.”

“Right.”

“And you said, ‘That boy who needs a bone marrow transplant?” You said, ‘That boy.’ How did you know he was a boy, Stan?”

Win turned toward Stan. Stan looked at Win’s face.

“Is that your proof?” Stan countered. “I mean, is this supposed to be a Perry Mason moment or something? Maybe you slipped up, Myron. Or maybe I just assumed it was a boy. Or I heard wrong. That’s not evidence.”

“You’re right. It’s not. It just got me thinking, that’s all.”

“Thoughts aren’t proof.”

“Wow,” Win said. “Thoughts aren’t proof. I’ll have to remember that one.”

“But there is proof,” Myron said. “Definitive proof.”

“Impossible,” Stan said, but his voice warbled now. “What?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment. First let me back off on my indignation a little.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At the end of the day, what you did was scummy, no question about it. But in its own way, it was almost ethical. Win and I often discuss the ends justifying the means. You could claim that’s what happened here. You tried to turn your father in before he struck again. You did all you could to make sure nobody else was harmed. Jeremy was never in any real danger. You couldn’t know that Greg would be shot. So in the end, you scared a boy, but so what? Next to the murder and destruction your father would have continued to wreak, it was nothing. So you did some good. The ends perhaps justified the means. Except for one thing.”

Stan didn’t bite.

“Jeremy’s bone marrow transplant. He needs that to live, Stan. You know that. You also know that you’re the match, not your father. That was why you slipped him that cyanide pill. Because once we dragged your father to the hospital and realized that he wasn’t a match, well, we would have investigated. We would have realized that Edwin Gibbs was not Davis Taylor né Dennis Lex. So you had to have him kill himself and then you pushed for a quick cremation. I don’t mean to make it sound as harsh or cold as all that. You didn’t murder your father. He took the pill all on his own. He was a sick man. He wanted to die. It’s yet another case of the ends justifying the means.”

Myron took a moment and just looked into Stan’s eyes. Stan did not look away. In a sense, this was more agenting work. Myron was negotiating here—the most important negotiation of his life. He had put his opponent in a corner. Now he needed to reach out. Not help him yet. He had to keep him in the corner. But he had to start reaching out. Just a little.

“You’re not a monster,” Myron said. “You just didn’t count on the complication of being a bone marrow match. You want to do right by Jeremy. It’s why you’ve gone so nuts trying to help the bone marrow drive. If they find another donor, it takes you off the hook. Because you’re in this lie too deep now. You couldn’t admit the truth—that you are the match. It would ruin you. I understand that.”

Stan’s eyes were wide and wet, but he was listening.

“Before I told you that I had proof,” Myron said. “We checked the bone marrow registry. Know what we found, Stan?”

Stan didn’t reply.

“You’re not registered,” Myron said. “Here you are telling everybody to sign up and you yourself aren’t in their computer. The three of us know why. It’s because you’d be a match. And if you matched, there would be those questions again.”

Stan gave defiance one last shot. “That’s not proof.”

“Then how will you explain not registering?”

“I don’t have to explain anything.”

“A blood test will prove it conclusively. The registry still has the blood that Davis Taylor gave during the marrow drive. We can do a DNA test with yours, see if it matches up.”

“And if I don’t agree to a test?”

Win took that one. “Oh, you’ll give blood,” he said with just the slightest smile. “One way or another.”

Something on Stan’s face broke then. He lowered his head. The defiance was over. He was trapped in the corner now. No way to escape. He’d start looking for an ally. It always happened in negotiations. When you’re lost, you look for an out. Myron had reached out before. It was time to do it again.

“You don’t understand,” Stan said.

“Strangely enough, I do.” Myron moved a little closer to Stan. He made his voice soft yet unyielding. Total command mode. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Stan. You and I are going to make a deal.”

Stan looked up, confused but also hopeful. “What?”

“You are going to agree to donate bone marrow to save Jeremy’s life. You’ll do it anonymously. Win and I can set that up. No one will ever know who the donor was. You do that, you save Jeremy, I forget the rest.”

“How can I believe you?”

“Two reasons,” Myron said. “One, I’m interested in saving Jeremy’s life, not ruining yours. Two”—he tilted both palms toward the ceiling—“I’m no better. I bent rules here too. I let the ends justify the means. I assaulted a man. I kidnapped a woman.”

Win shook his head. “There’s a difference. His reasons were selfish. You, on the other hand, were trying to save a boy’s life.”

Myron turned to his friend. “Weren’t you the one who said that motives are irrelevant? That the act is the act?”

“Sure,” Win said. “But I meant that to apply to him, not you.”

Myron smiled and faced Stan again. “I’m not your moral superior. We both did wrong. Maybe we can both live with what we’ve done. But if you let a boy die, Stan, you cross the line. You can’t go home again.”

Stan closed his eyes. “I would have found a way,” he said. “I would have gotten another fake ID, given blood under a pseudonym. I was just hoping—”

“I know,” Myron said. “I know all about it.”

Myron called Dr. Karen Singh. “I found a matching donor.”

“What?”

“I can’t explain. But he has to stay anonymous.”

“I explained to you that all the bone marrow donors remain anonymous.”

“No. The bone marrow registry can’t know about this either. We have to find a place that can harvest the marrow without knowing the patient’s identity.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Yeah, it can.”

“No doctor will agree—”

“We can’t play these games, Karen. I have a donor. No one can know who he is. Make it work.”

He could hear her breathing.

“He’ll have to be retested,” she said.

“No problem.”

“And pass a physical.”

“Done.”

“Then okay. Let’s get this started.”

When Emily heard about the donor, she gave Myron a curious look and waited. He didn’t explain. She never asked.

Myron visited the hospital the day before the marrow transplant was to begin. He peeked his head around the doorjamb and saw the boy sleeping. Jeremy was bald from the chemo. His skin had a ghostly glow, like something withering from a lack of sunshine. Myron watched his son sleeping. Then he turned and went home. He didn’t come back.

He returned to work at MB SportsReps and lived his life. He visited his father and mother. He hung out with Win and Esperanza. He landed a few new clients and started rebuilding his business. Big Cyndi handed in her wrestling resignation and took over the front desk. His world was wobbly but back on the axis.

Eighty-four days later—Myron kept count—he got a call from Karen Singh. She asked him to visit her office. When he arrived, she wasted no time.

“It worked,” she said. “Jeremy went home today.”

Myron started to cry. Karen Singh moved around her desk. She sat on the arm of his chair and rubbed his back.

Myron knocked on the half-open door.

“Enter,” Greg said.

Myron did so. Greg Downing was sitting up in a chair. He’d grown a beard during his long hospital stretch.

He smiled at Myron. “Nice to see you.”

“Same here. I like the beard.”

“Gives me that Paul Bunyan touch, don’t you think?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of Sebastian Cabot as Mr. French,” Myron said.

Greg laughed. “Going home on Friday.”

“Great.”

Silence.

“You haven’t visited much,” Greg said.

“Wanted to give you time to heal. And grow that beard in fully.”

Greg tried another laugh, but he sort of choked on it. “My basketball career is over, you know.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“That easy?”

Myron smiled. “Who said anything about easy?”

“Yeah.”

“But there are more important things in life than basketball,” Myron said. “Though sometimes I forget that.”

Greg nodded again. Then he looked down and said, “I heard about you finding the donor. I don’t know how you did it—”

“It’s not important.”

He looked up. “Thank you.”

Myron was not sure what to say to that. So he kept quiet. And that was when Greg shocked him.

“You know, don’t you?”

Myron’s heart stopped.

“That was why you helped,” Greg said. His voice was pure flat-line. “Emily told you the truth.”

The muscles around Myron’s throat tightened. There was a whooshing sound in his head.

“Did you take a blood test?” Greg asked.

Myron managed a nod this time. Greg closed his eyes. Myron swallowed and said, “How long …?”

“I’m not sure anymore,” Greg said. “I guess right away.”

He knows. The words fell on Myron, smacking down like raindrops, beading and rolling off, impenetrable. He’s always known.…

“For a while I fooled myself into believing it wasn’t so,” Greg said. “It’s amazing what the mind can do sometimes. But when Jeremy was six, he had his appendix out. I saw his blood type on a chart. It pretty much confirmed what I’d known all along.”

Myron didn’t know what to say. The realization pushed down on him, swept away the months of blocking like so many children’s toys. The mind can indeed do amazing things. He looked at Greg and it was like seeing something in the proper light for the first time and it changed everything. He thought about fathers again. He thought about real sacrifice. He thought about heroes.

“Jeremy’s a good boy,” Greg said.

“I know,” Myron said.

“You remember my father? Screaming on the sidelines like a lunatic?”

“Yes.”

“I ended up looking just like him. Spitting image of my old man. He was my blood. And he was the cruelest son of a bitch I ever knew,” Greg said. Then he added, “Blood never meant much to me.”

A strange echo filled the room. The background noises faded away and there was just the two of them, staring at one another from across the most bizarre chasm.

Greg moved back to the bed. “I’m tired, Myron.”

“Don’t you think we should talk about this?”

“Yeah,” Greg said. He laid back and shut his eyes a little too tightly. “Maybe later. But right now I’m really tired.”

At the end of the day, Esperanza stepped into Myron’s office, sat down, and said, “I don’t know much about family values or what makes a happy family. I don’t know the best way to raise a kid or what you have to do to make him happy and well adjusted, whatever the hell ‘well adjusted’ means. I don’t know if it’s best to be an only child or have lots of siblings or be raised by two parents or a single parent or a gay couple or a lesbian couple or an overweight albino. But I know one thing.”

Myron looked up at her and waited.

“No child could ever be harmed by having you in his life.”

Esperanza stood and went home.

Stan Gibbs was playing in the yard with his boys when Myron and Win pulled into the driveway. His wife—at least, Myron guessed it was his wife—sat in a lawn chair and watched. A little boy rode Stan like a horsey. They other boy lay on the ground giggling.

Win frowned. “How very Norman Rockwell.”

Myron and Win stepped out of the car. Stan the horsey looked up. The smile stayed on when he saw them, but you could see it starting to lose its grip at the edges. Stan hoisted his son off his back and said something to him Myron couldn’t hear. The boy gave an “Aaaw, Dad.” Stan jumped to his feet and ruffled the boy’s hair. Win frowned again. As Stan jogged toward them, his smile faded away like the end of a song.

“What are you doing here?”

Win said, “Back together with the wife, are we?”

“We’re giving it a go.”

“Touching,” Win said.

Stan turned toward Myron. “What’s going on here?”

“Tell the kids to go inside, Stan.”

“What?”

Another car pulled in the driveway. Rick Peck was driving. Kimberly Green was in the passenger seat. Stan’s face lost color. He snapped a look at Myron.

“We had a deal,” he said.

“Remember how I told you that you had two choices when the novel was discovered?”

“I’m not in the mood—”

“I said you could run or you could tell the truth. Remember?”

Stan’s façade tottered, and for the first time, Myron saw the rage.

“I left out a third choice. A choice you yourself pointed out to me the first time we met. You could have said that the Sow the Seeds kidnapper was a copycat. That he had read the book. It might have helped you out. Taken some of the heat off.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Because it would have led to your father?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t know your father had written the book. Isn’t that right, Stan? You said you never knew about the book. I remember that from the first time we talked. I’ve been watching you say the same thing on TV. You claim you didn’t even know your father wrote it.”

“All true,” Stan said, and the façade slipped back into place. “But—I don’t know—maybe subconsciously I suspected something somehow. I can’t explain it.”

“Good,” Myron said.

“Damn good,” Win added.

“The problem was,” Myron said, “you had to say you hadn’t read it. Because if you had, well, Stan, you’d be a plagiarizer. All this work, all your big plans to regain your reputation—it would be for nothing. You’d be ruined.”

“We discussed this already.”

“No, Stan, we didn’t. At least not this part of it.” Myron held up the evidence bag with the sheet of paper inside.

Stan set his jaw.

“Know what this is, Stan?”

He said nothing.

“I found it in Melina Garston’s apartment. It says ‘With love, Dad.’ ”

Stan swallowed. “So?”

“Something about it bothered me from the beginning. First off, the word ‘Dad.’ ”

“I don’t understand—”

“Sure you do, Stan. Melina’s sister-in-law called George Garston ‘Papa.’ When I spoke to him, he referred to himself as ‘Papa.’ So why would he sign a note like this ‘Dad’?”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe, maybe not. The second thing that bothered me: Who writes a note like this—on the top inside of a folded card? People use the bottom half, right? But see, Stan, this wasn’t a card. It was a sheet of a paper folded in half. That’s the key. Then there are those tears along the left edge. See them, Stan? Like someone had ripped it out of something.”

Win handed Myron the novel that had been sent to Kimberly Green. Myron opened it and laid the piece of paper inside it.

“Something like a book.”

It was a perfect match.

“Your father wrote this inscription,” Myron said. “To you. Years ago. You’d known about the book all along.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“Come on, Stan. A handwriting analyst will have no trouble with this. The Lexes weren’t the ones who found the book. Melina Garston did. You asked her to lie for you in court. She did. But then she started growing suspicious. So she dug around your house and found this book. She’s the one who mailed it to Kimberly Green.”

“You have no proof—”

“She sent it in anonymously because she still cared about you. She even tore out the inscription so no one, most especially you, would ever know where the book had come from. You had plenty of enemies. Like Susan Lex. And the feds. She probably hoped you’d think they did it. At least for a little while. But you knew right away it was Melina. She didn’t count on that. Or your reaction.”

Stan’s hands tightened into fists. They started shaking.

“The victims’ families wouldn’t speak to you, Stan. And you needed that for your article. You ended up following the book more than reality. The feds thought it was to fool them. But that wasn’t it. Maybe your father told you he was the killer, but nothing else. Maybe the real story wasn’t as interesting, so you needed to embellish. Maybe you weren’t that good of a writer and you really felt you needed those family quotes. I don’t know. But you plagiarized. And the only one who could tie you to that book was Melina Garston. So you killed her.”

“You’ll never prove it,” Stan said.

“The feds will dig hard now. The Lexes will help. Win and I will help. We’ll find enough. If nothing else, the jury—and the world—will hear all you did in this. They’ll hate you enough to convict.”

“You son of a bitch.” Stan cocked his fist and aimed it at Myron. With an almost casual movement, Win swept his leg. Stan fell down in a heap. Win pointed and laughed. Stan’s sons watched it all.

Kimberly Green and Rick Peck got out of the car. Myron signaled them to wait, but Kimberly Green shook her head. They cuffed Stan hard and dragged him away. His sons still watched. Myron thought about Melina Garston and his silent vow. Then he and Win headed back to the car.

“You always intended to turn him in,” Win said.

“Yes. But first I had to make sure he went along with donating the bone marrow.”

“And once you knew Jeremy was okay—”

“Then I told Green, yes.”

Win started the car. “The evidence is still marginal. A good attorney will be able to poke holes.”

“Not my problem,” Myron said.

“You’d be willing to let him walk?”

“Yes,” Myron said. “But Melina’s father has juice. And he won’t.”

“I thought you advised him against taking the law into his own hands.”

Myron shrugged. “No one ever listens to me.”

“That’s true,” Win said.

Win drove.

“I just wonder,” Myron said.

“What?”

“Who was the serial killer here? Did his father really do it? Or was it all Stan?”

“Doubt we’ll ever know,” Win said.

“Probably not.”

“It shan’t matter,” Win said. “They’ll get him for Melina Garston.”

“I guess,” Myron said. Then he frowned and repeated, “ ‘Shan’t’?”

Win shrugged. “So is it finally over, my friend?”

Myron’s leg did that nervous jig again. He stopped it and said, “Jeremy.”

“Ah,” Win said. “Are you going to tell him?”

Myron looked out the window and saw nothing. “Win’s credo about selfishness would say yes.”

“And Myron’s credo?”

“I don’t know that it’s much different,” Myron said.

Jeremy was playing basketball at the Y. Myron stepped into the bleachers, the rickety kind that shake with each step, and sat. Jeremy was still pale. He was thinner than the last time Myron had seen him, but there’d been a growth spurt over the last few months. Myron realized how fast changes take place for the young and felt a deep, hard thud in his chest.

For a while, he just watched the flow of the scrimmage and tried to judge his son’s play objectively. Jeremy had the tools, Myron could see that right away, but there was plenty of rust on them. That wouldn’t be a problem though. Again with the young. Rust doesn’t stay long on the young.

As Myron watched the practice, his eyes widened. He felt his insides shrivel. He thought again about what he was about to do, and a swelling tide rose inside of him, overwhelming him, pulling him under.

Jeremy smiled when he spotted Myron. The smile cleaved Myron’s heart in two even pieces. He felt lost, adrift. He thought about what Win had said, about what a real father was, and he thought about what Esperanza had said. He thought about Greg and Emily. He wondered if he should have spoken to his own father about this, if he should have told him that this wasn’t a hypothetical, that the bomb had indeed landed, that he needed his help.

Jeremy continued to play, but Myron could see that the boy was distracted by his presence. Jeremy kept sneaking quick glances toward the stands. He played a little harder, picked up the pace a bit. Myron had been there, done that. The desire to impress. It had driven Myron, maybe as much as wanting to win. Shallow, but there you have it.

The coach had his players run a few more drills and then he lined them up on the baseline. They finished up with the aptly named “suicides,” which was basically a series of gut-heaving sprints broken up by bending and touching different lines on the floor. Myron might be nostalgic for many things connected to basketball. Suicides were not one of them.

Ten minutes later, with most of the kids still trying to catch their breath, the coach gathered his troops, gave out schedules for the rest of the week, and dispersed the boys with a big handclap. Most of them headed toward the exit, slinging backpacks over their shoulders. Some went into the locker room. Jeremy walked over to Myron slowly.

“Hi,” Jeremy said.

“Hi.”

Sweat dripped off Jeremy’s hair, his face coated and flushed from exertion. “I’m going to shower,” he said. “You want to wait?”

“Sure,” Myron said.

“Cool, I’ll be right back.”

The gymnasium emptied out. Myron stood and picked up an errant basketball. His fingers found the grooves right away. He took a few shots, watching the bottom of the net dance as the ball swished through. He smiled and sat back down, still holding the ball. A janitor came in and swept the floor Zamboni-style. His keys jangled. Someone flipped off the overhead lights. Jeremy came back not long after that. His hair was still wet. He, too, had a backpack over his shoulder.

As Win would say, “Showtime.”

Myron gripped the ball a little tighter. “Sit down, Jeremy. We need to talk.”

The boy’s face was serene and almost too beautiful. He slid the backpack off his shoulder and sat down. Myron had rehearsed this part. He had looked at it from all sides, all the pluses and minuses. He had made up his mind and changed it and made it up again. He had, as Win put it, properly tortured himself.

But in the end, he knew there was one universal truth: Lies fester. You try to put them away. You jam them in a box and bury them in the ground. But eventually they eat their way out of coffins. They dig their way out of graves. They may sleep for years. But they always wake up. When they do, they’re rested, stronger, more insidious.

Lies kill.

“This is going to be hard to understand—” He stopped. Suddenly his rehearsed speech sounded so damn canned, filled with “It’s nobody’s fault” and “Adults make mistakes too” and “It doesn’t mean your parents love you any less.” It was patronizing and stupid and—

“Mr. Bolitar?”

Myron looked up at the boy.

“My mom and dad told me,” Jeremy said. “Two days ago.”

His chest shuddered. “What?”

“I know you’re my biological father.”

Myron was surprised and yet he wasn’t. Some might say that Emily and Greg had made a preemptive strike, almost like a lawyer who reveals something bad about his own client because he knows the opposition will do it. Lessen the blow. But maybe Emily and Greg had learned the same lesson he had about lies and how they fester. And maybe, once again, they were trying to do what was best for their boy.

“How do you feel about it?” Myron asked.

“Weird, I guess,” Jeremy said. “I mean, Mom and Dad keep expecting me to fall apart or something. But I don’t see why it has to be such a big deal.”

“You don’t?”

“Sure, okay, I see it, but”—he stopped, shrugged—“it’s not like the whole world’s turned inside out or anything. You know what I mean?”

Myron nodded. “Maybe it’s because you’ve already had your world turned inside out.”

“You mean being sick and all?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, thinking about it. “Must be weird for you too.”

“Yeah,” Myron said.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Jeremy said. “You want to hear what I’ve come up with?”

Myron swallowed. He looked into the boy’s eyes—serenity, yes, but not through innocence. “Very much,” he said.

“You’re not my dad,” he said simply. “I mean, you might be my father. But you’re not my dad. You know what I mean?”

Myron managed a nod “But”—Jeremy stopped, looked up, shrugged the shrug of a thirteen-year-old—“but maybe you can still be around.”

“Around?” Myron repeated.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. He smiled again and pow, Myron’s chest took another blow. “Around. You know.”

“Yeah,” Myron said, “I know.”

“I think I’d like that.”

“Me too,” Myron said.

Jeremy nodded. “Cool.”

“Yeah.”

The gym clock grunted and pushed forward. Jeremy looked at it. “Mom’s probably outside waiting for me. We usually stop at the supermarket on the way home. Want to come?”

Myron shook his head. “Not today, thanks.”

“Cool.” Jeremy stood, watching Myron’s face. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Jeremy smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s going to work out.”

Myron tried to smile back. “How did you get to be so smart?”

“Good parenting,” he said. “Combined with good genes.”

Myron laughed. “You might want to consider a future in politics.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “Take it easy, Myron.”

“You too, Jeremy.”

He watched the boy walk out the door, again with the familiar gait. Jeremy didn’t look back. There was the sound of the door closing, the echoes, and then Myron was alone. He turned toward the basket and stared at the hoop until it blurred. He saw the boy’s first step, heard his first word, smelled the sweet clean of a young child’s pajamas. He felt the smack of a ball against a glove, bent over to help with his homework, stayed up all night when he had a virus, all of it, like his own father had, a whirl of taunting, aching images, as irretrievable as the past. He saw himself hovering in the boy’s darkened doorway, the silent sentinel to his adolescence, and he felt what remained of his heart burst into flames.

The images scattered when he blinked. His heart started beating again. He stared again at the basket and waited. This time nothing blurred. Nothing happened.

When a father gives to his son, they both laugh.

When a son gives to his father, they both cry.

—Yiddish proverb

This one is for your father. And mine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank Sujit Sheth, M.D., Department of Pediatrics, Babies and Children’s Hospital in New York, Anne Armstrong-Coben, M.D., Department of Pediatrics, Babies and Children’s Hospital (and my love monkey), and Joachim Schulz, Executive Director, Fanconi Anemia Research Fund, all of whom offered up wonderful medical insights and then watched me take liberties with them; two fellow scribes, friends, and experts in their fields, Linda Fairstein and Laura Lippman; Larry Gerson, the inspiration; Nils Lofgren, for rocking me over the last hurdle; early reader and long-time bud Maggie Griffin; Lisa Erbach Vance and Aaron Priest for another job well done; Jeffrey Bedford, FBI Special Agent (and not a bad freshman dorm counselor); as always, Dave Bolt; and mostly, Jacob Hoye, my editor for all the Myron Bolitar books—and now a father. That dedication is for you, too, Jake. Thanks, dude.

For those interested in becoming a bone marrow donor and perhaps saving a life, I urge you to contact the National Marrow Donor Program at www.marrow.org or 1-800-MARROW2. For more information on Fanconi anemia, check out www.fanconi.org.

This book is a work of fiction. That means I make stuff up.

Books by Harlan Coben

DEAL BREAKER

DROP SHOT

FADE AWAY

BACK SPIN

ONE FALSE MOVE

THE FINAL DETAIL

DARKEST FEAR

TELL NO ONE

GONE FOR GOOD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Harlan Coben is the author of six previous Myron Bolitar novels: The Final Detail, One False Move, Back Spin, the Edgar Award– and Shamus Award–winning Fade Away, Drop Shot, and Deal Breaker, which won an Anthony Award and received an Edgar Award nomination. He is also the author of Tell No One and Gone for Good. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children. Visit his website at www.harlancoben.com.