The Bookmakers (19 page)

“No thanks,” said Mack. In quick succession he vetoed a mannish woman whose gigantic breasts swung loose in a white T-shirt, a pale teenager eating an ice-cream bar and an old lady shuffling along in a walker. Then there was a break in the crowd; for almost a minute no one came along.

“Three more to go,” said McClain. “The tension mounts.” Mack was surprised to find that he actually did feel tense. He took a slug of beer and waited.

“Here’s number eight,” said McClain, nodding in the direction of a thirtyish woman in a flowered skirt. She had slumped shoulders and unkempt hair the color of mud, but she was smiling to herself and there was something pleasant about her regular features. Once more Mack was tempted but he finally shook his head. “Naw, let’s go for broke,” he said.

Number nine and number ten passed together, a stout woman in her fifties with white hair, walking arm in arm with an elderly lady who appeared to be her mother.

“There she is,” McClain crowed. “The future Mrs. Mack Green.”

Mack laughed. “Well, at least I didn’t get the one with the walker. Not a bad game, Big John. Maybe I’ll use it in the book.”

“Use it in your life, hotshot,” said McClain. He took a swig of Bud, belched for punctuation and surreptitiously peeked at his watch. “Okay, you ready to try it again?”

“Why me? It’s your turn.”

“I already said
stop
when I met Joyce. You’re the one looking for Miss Right.”

“No offense, but I don’t think I’m going to find her walking around the Four Corners mall.”

“You never know,” McClain said. He nodded toward a buxom woman in a housedress who crossed their field of vision. “There’s number one.”

“No thanks,” said Mack. “Okay, one more round.” He swiveled in his chair for a better view and quickly rejected three more shoppers. “Not much of a selection here. Maybe we should try—”

“Try what?” asked McClain.

Mack seized his arm. “John, do you see that woman over there, in front of the record store?”

“The blond with the long legs? She’s a knockout,” said McClain.

“She looks just like Linda Birney.”

“Is that right?” said McClain, but Mack didn’t hear him; he was concentrating on the woman, who was about fifty feet away, looking into the window of the record store. “Maybe it’s her.”

“Huh?”

“I said, maybe it’s her,” McClain repeated.

“Couldn’t be,” said Mack. “She’s too young.”

The woman turned from the display window and began walking slowly toward the food court. She moved like Linda, head up and cocked slightly to the side, her stride, even in high heels, unhurried and easy. As she came closer Mack fought the impulse to jump up and rush over to her. He made himself remember all the times he had felt foolish after mistaking women in the street in New York for Linda.

“She’s coming this way,” said McClain. “What number you on?”

“Number?” Mack felt his excitement grow with every step the woman took. She didn’t look quite so young now, early thirties maybe—Linda could look that young. She wore an expensive
black silk business suit that revealed the shape of her hips. Linda had been thinner, willowy, but she had been a girl then; this woman had the kind of body Linda’s body could have become. And then, when she was no more than fifteen feet away, she paused, looked over in the general direction of the food court and grinned her unmistakable, lopsided, sexy-pirate grin.

Mack grabbed McClain’s arm. “That’s her!” he whispered. “That’s Linda! What do I do now?”

“Go over and say hello,” said McClain. “Unless you want to keep waiting, see if someone better comes by.”

“What if she doesn’t remember me?”

“She’ll remember you,” McClain said, pushing him to his feet. The glee on his face told Mack that this was not a guess.

“You set this up,” he said, accusingly.

“Quit stalling,” said McClain. “Go get her.”

Mack rose, gave McClain’s arm a squeeze and walked toward Linda. McClain watched as he approached her, saw her face light up and smiled when she pulled Mack into her arms for a long embrace. The hell with Dr. Sigmund Ephron, he thought; Dr. Big John McClain had come up with the right medicine. It hadn’t been easy finding Linda Birney, but seeing them together, standing close and talking intensely, their arms still wrapped loosely around one another, McClain felt an overwhelming sense that now everything would be all right with Mack. He couldn’t wait to get home and tell Joyce all about it.

At a nearby table, a middle-aged man in a gray cardigan watched the scene, too. He didn’t know why McClain was blowing his nose, didn’t know who the woman was or why Mack Green was kissing her in the middle of the mall. He didn’t particularly care, either, although he’d find out if he was asked to. For that matter, he didn’t know why he had been asked to keep an eye on Green. It was just a job, and if the boss didn’t want him involved in the big picture, that didn’t bother him. Arlen Nashua had long since come to terms with the undeniable fact that he was not a big-picture kind of guy.

“What if I had just bumped into you on the street?” Mack asked Linda. “Would you have recognized me?” They were together at the Markham Inn, having dinner in a quiet corner of the room. In high school, the Markham had been considered an elegant place, Oriole’s answer to the Four Seasons, with a real continental chef from Quebec and candles on the tables. Linda had smiled when he suggested it tonight and now he knew why—it seemed like a pavilion in Disneyland: The Midwest Fake French Food and Corny Atmosphere pavilion. Mack didn’t care, though; he was barely aware of his surroundings.

“You were my first love,” said Linda, in a tone somewhere between sincerity and self-mockery. “Girls don’t forget their first love.”

“Yeah, right,” muttered Mack, afraid to take her seriously.

“Tell me about you, Mackinac. About your glamorous life.”

“Glamorous? I guess if you look at it from the outside, my life does seem glamorous, doesn’t it?”

“You’ve developed a little New York accent, you know? Maybe not an accent exactly, but a way of talking. I used to hear it a lot in LA. It’s not how I remember you sounding.”

“You remember me that well? The way I talked?”

“I should. You talked enough,” she said, giving him her crooked smile.

“You should have married me,” Mack blurted. The thought had been running through his mind all evening.

“Maybe,” she replied. “I’ve wondered about it over the years.”

“You have?” She nodded and looked at him evenly; he noticed the flecks of gray in her dark-green eyes. “Then why didn’t you? We were perfect for each other.”

“Nobody’s perfect for anybody, especially at that age,” she said. “Besides, I thought I could do better.” She saw the hurt expression on his face and put her hand on his. “I was eighteen years old, Mack. And I didn’t trust you.”

“Why not? I never lied to you. It’s a unique distinction, by the way.”

“That’s why, that kind of comment. You were always saying things like that, making yourself sound so distant and cynical. I suppose it was your way of trying to act grown-up—Jesus, do you realize we were just about my son Teddy’s age?—but I didn’t know how to handle it. And you didn’t believe in love.”

“I was in love with you.”

“You said love was just a literary device.”

“And you believed me? Shit, I didn’t mean 90 percent of what I used to say back then.” He paused and grinned. “These days it’s around 65.”

Linda laughed. “You want to scare me all over again?”

“You don’t look like you scare so easily.”

“Maybe a little easier than you think. But yeah, not so much. Not anymore.”

“What happened, Linnie. After that day on the phone?”

“The story of my life?”

“The highlights. What about Flanders?”

“Gregg and I got divorced twelve, no thirteen years ago. He busted up his knees, the Rams cut him and he cut me. It was a bad season, you could say.”

“Were you in love with him?”

“Not at the end, no. But I liked him all right. He was good about my going to law school while Teddy was small—”

“How old is he now? Teddy?”

“Nineteen. He’s a sophomore at Columbia.”

“Not a football player?”

“No, not a football player,” said Linda.

“Okay, so you and Flanders split up. Then what?”

“I stayed in LA. By that time I was with a firm that did entertainment law and I was making very big money, three hundred dollars an hour—”

“You must be a good lawyer,” said Mack.

“Damn good,” Linda said. “And I enjoyed it, the entertainment scene. It was fun. That’s how I met my second husband. Roger Chadwick?”

“Should I know the name?”

“I guess not, although if you lived out there you probably would. He’s a producer, not one of the biggest, but fairly well known.”

“How long did that last?”

“A couple years. More than a couple, really. Four, I guess. And then we broke up and I came back here.”

“Why?”

“The short answer is that my father died and left me a lot of money. When I came home to work out the details of the estate, one of the lawyers told me about Liberty Records, which was for sale. It seemed like a good opportunity, so I decided to stay.”

“And what’s the long answer?”

Linda extracted a Kent from her purse, lit it with a gold Ronson, took a long drag and exhaled with her eyes closed. “The long answer is I didn’t like the way I was living out there. Roger was into drugs in a big way, and I got into it, too. Coke mostly, but we did everything. And when he got high, he liked to play games.”

“What kind of games?”

“Sex games, mostly, California style. He used to invite a dozen or so of his closest friends, get naked in the Jacuzzi and then see who did what to whom.”

“If you hated it, why did you go along?” asked Mack. He was trying to sound sympathetic, but he had an erection.

“I didn’t hate it, I loved it,” Linda said in a flat voice. “It got to be the only thing I did love, really; getting wrecked and going crazy and then coming down so I could get wrecked and crazy again. The funny part is, it seemed natural. I mean, that’s the way we were raised, isn’t it? You and I were smoking dope and dropping acid and screwing when I was a junior in high school.

“Then one day I came home from shopping and I found Roger in bed with Teddy and a woman. Know who she was?”

Mack swallowed hard and shook his head. “Who?”

“Teddy’s guidance counselor,” she said. “Honest to God. The three of them were stoned, and she was tied to the bedposts, sort of wriggling around. I just stood there staring, and Roger—I can’t believe I’m telling you this—Roger smiled this dopey smile and said, ‘Hop in, honey.’ ”

“How old was Teddy?”

“Fifteen. He had this dreamy, stoned look on his face and he said, ‘Come on, Linda, it’s cool.’ ”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” she said, taking another long drag on the Kent. “You want to hear the rest? The worst part?”

Mack nodded.

“I was tempted. Just for a second, you know? It was like, okay, this is where things have been heading, let’s get it on. All those years I’d been living like there was no such thing as right and
wrong. We got high in front of Teddy, we never made any effort to hide what we were doing. It was just another lifestyle, like belonging to a country club or a church. For just that split second I thought, ‘All right, this is where you step over the line, go all the way.’ ”

“And then?”

“And then I vomited. All over the guidance teacher, who didn’t seem to mind at all. I slapped Teddy so hard he noticed, dragged him, buck naked, out of bed and pushed him out of the room. I don’t really remember what happened after that, just a lot of screaming and breaking things and Roger lying there saying, ‘Chill, baby, it’s no big thing.’ If I had had a gun I would have shot him, and myself, too.”

“Jesus, Linnie,” said Mack.

“Yeah, Jesus. Anyway, I took Teddy and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel. For the next few weeks I just sort of lay around trying to figure out how the hell my life had turned out this way. ‘You’re Linda Birney,’ I kept saying to myself, as if that meant something. I guess I was detoxing, too, although I didn’t admit it at the time. God only knows what Teddy thought.”

“You never discussed it with him?”

“I was too ashamed. I wanted to believe that he was too young to understand what a whore his mother was.”

“And then what?”

“And then, luckily, my father died. I guess I shouldn’t put it that way, but it’s true. I mean, we weren’t especially close, and he’d been sick—he died of cancer. Anyway, I saw a chance to get out of LA, move to someplace normal, get myself back.”

“You should have called me—”

“And said what? ‘Hi, Mack, this is the girl who dumped you in college, how about fixing everything for me, just for old times’ sake?’ I told you I’ve thought about you a lot, especially since coming back here, but I never considered getting in touch with you. That was over.”

Green noted the past tense. The story shocked him, but it excited
him, too; he had to admit that he wondered what it would be like to be with Linda in a room full of naked strangers. He lit a Winston and looked around the darkened restaurant, trying to figure out a way to ask what he wanted to know.