by Harlan Coben
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.”
&nbs
p; 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?”
