11

On her way through the lobby to the press conference, Sam caught sight of Cindy Lou in a bisecting hallway. Thank God for small favors and good timing.

The former Miss Ohio was wearing a powder-blue suit, her shoulders hunched in a posture that would have never won her a rhinestone tiara. She was still hiding behind those shades.

Was that because Kurt, the mean, mysterious Kurt, had popped her one good, as the reporter from the Inquirer had surmised? Sam called after the former Miss Ohio.

Cindy Lou turned and spotted Sam. She hesitated for a count of one, then raced on, her heels clicking on the terrazzo.

But Sam didn’t walk miles every day for nothing. “Hi!” she said as she pulled even with Cindy Lou, who didn’t look the least bit pleased.

“Sam Adams. Atlanta Constitution. I’m the one who did the interview yesterday in the press—”

“I know.” Cindy Lou hadn’t slowed.

“I was on my way to ask a couple of questions of Barbara Stein, but I saw you and thought, What the heck, I bet you know more than she does. After all, you’ve been up on that big stage, haven’t you?”

Cindy Lou pointed the dark glasses straight at her. If she lifted them, her eyes would read, Cut the crap.

“I was wondering, do you and the final judges sit down and have a powwow?”

Cindy slowed a tad. “Yes, we do. We get together on Saturday morning.”

“And you tell the celebrity judges all the poop from the past week? Like who has the biggest sob story, gimp points—”

Cindy came to a full stop. A little smile played around the corners of her mouth. “You’re picking up the angles.”

“I’m a quick study. Another thing, has it made any difference with one less judge?”

Cindy stiffened. “Dividing the totals by six is no more difficult than dividing by seven. The pageant uses computers, you know. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

Sam stepped right in front of her. “Rumor has it that Kurt Roberts was kidnapped by the delegation from—” Which state would make sense? It helped to have these lies worked out in advance. Kidnapped by whom? The mob. New Jersey. It’d play. “—New Jersey because they got the drift that Kurt didn’t like their girl.”

Cindy whirled. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

Well, at least it got her attention. “And I couldn’t help but notice, I saw you and Kurt Roberts out at the pool yesterday afternoon, and it seemed as if you two—I was just wondering—do you know where he went? I was thinking of doing a sidebar on judges and the judging process.” Actually that wasn’t a bad idea. “And it’d be interesting to know what could drag a man away from—”

Cindy Lou bobbled her head above a rigid neck, her lips in a pout. When Goldie Hawn did it, the gesture was cute. “He went back to New York.”

“That’s what I heard, but it seems strange. Is that what he told you?”

“He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Really? He just up and left without saying good-bye?”

“He—I—” Suddenly Cindy Lou’s composure crumpled. Her mouth trembled. “Get away, leave me alone,” she snapped, then wheeled and bolted down the hall.

Sam could have caught her again, if she’d really wanted to. But there was the siren call of the press conference. She’d give Cindy Lou a rest.

*

Darleen Carroll stared in the mirror of the dressing table. It was almost noon, and she hadn’t put her face on yet. Here she was, barely 36, and an old hag.

At least, that’s what Darleen thought. Actually, she still looked rather like the 18-year-old only daughter of the only Jewish jeweler in Eureka—way north of San Francisco, on the cool redwood coast where the fog made for good complexions—when she left off the two inches of makeup.

If she looked hard, she could see that young girl yet, the Darleen who’d hitchhiked her way south across the border to an abortionist in Tijuana before she chickened out at his front door, where pigs were rooting in garbage she didn’t want to think about. It was in Los Angeles that she, still pregnant and hitching her way back toward Eureka, met Billy, who was pumping gas and waiting for a break into the Big Time. Billy thought he had the stuff to be another Old Blue Eyes. He’d done some little theater, and he had the eyes and the best baritone in Sioux Falls.

Those had been the sweet days. He’d said she reminded him a lot of the little sister he’d left back home in South Dakota, and he’d let her sleep on his couch. It wasn’t long before she’d moved into his bed, and then she had a miscarriage, losing the baby of that other Billy, Billy Barnes back in Eureka, who couldn’t have been much of a man, said Billy Carroll, whose real name was Billy Karczewski, to let her run off that way by herself.

Darleen had straightened up Billy’s little apartment, made some curtains out of flowered sheets she found on sale—she’d liked to make things pretty since she was a tiny thing—and before you knew it, they had a sweet little home, and Billy did get a break. They honeymooned on the proceeds from his deodorant commercial, and then there was a walk-on on a soap. Next came a small speaking part in a James Garner film, and they thought the sky was the limit.

But before too long, it became apparent that Billy would have to aim a little lower.

“Too short, next!” casting directors would say, right to Billy’s face. Hey! What about Dustin, he’d scream as he threw things through the windows of the little house they’d taken in Santa Monica. A few inches didn’t stop him.

Darleen never said, Yeah, but maybe he was more talented, though she was beginning to think that. But it was too late to make noises like that because Rachel Rose was on the way, and she definitely wanted this baby to have a daddy.

So she kept telling Billy he was the greatest and went right on with the decorating classes she’d started taking at night. It wasn’t long before Darleen could render you a perspective of what your house was going to look like, color swatches attached, and she found it real easy to get along with the Haute Queen antiques dealers at the Design Center who gave her special deals and turned her on to super-rich clients in return for a little kickback.

Darleen had done very well, and Billy’s career had eventually picked up. He’d found his way into the emcee market—and occasionally got to sing a song or two. Then “The Big One” had come along, and it was the Big Time—for Billy. It paid bushels of cash, and the set was always plump with cute little dollies.

Darleen stared hard at her face in the mirror and wondered, What would happen if I had a chin implant? Would that pull out those little grooves that are starting from my nose down to my mouth? Or are we talking full-scale lift here?

She’d have to ask her friend Maureen, who had had the whole thing done when she was 40. Maureen said there was no such thing as too early, and besides, you could always have it done again.

But what Maureen couldn’t tell her, and what she wanted to know right now, was whether or not Billy was sleeping with Miss New Jersey.

He played Atlantic City once a year, just to keep his hand in, he said. His hand in what? Last night Darleen had passed on watching Billy’s act. After all, she’d seen it a million times before, both onstage and in their living room, and besides—it wasn’t in the main room. He was just another singer playing to a bunch of drunks and losers, and the combo couldn’t ever seem to get the intro to his theme song, “Send in the Clowns,” to go just right.

Frankly, the show embarrassed her.

Actually, Billy was beginning to embarrass her.

Darleen, she said to herself in the mirror, admit it. Billy has embarrassed you for years, and humiliated you with other women, and what you’re trying to do now is get up the nerve to leave him.

That’s right, she whispered back. But it’s hard to do, after all this time, and you’re afraid of spending the rest of your life like all those divorcées you know back home in Newport Beach, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, doing your house and your face over and over until your face looks Chinese and your house looks like Versailles. So what you’re looking for is some Grand Finale, some Huge Scene, some in flagrante delicto so flagrante that it will force you into declaring it the coup d’état—Darleen having learned more than a soupçon of French from the Haute Queens.

For a long time she’d hung in because of Rachel Rose. But she couldn’t use her as an excuse any longer. Rachel Rose was just about grown, and she was wise to her dad, though she still loved him. As did Darleen—a little. After all, he had taken her in when she was young and desperate. They knew each other’s warts. On the other hand, there was her pride.

The song was right. Breaking up was hard to do.

Just then, Billy stumbled into the bathroom.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “My head.”

Darleen gave him a look of cool appraisal. After all, she wasn’t a jeweler’s daughter for nothing. “Four A.M., I’d say. And at least half a bottle of Cutty Sark.”

He held his head. “Ooooooh. Don’t remind me.”

“I waited for you after the show, Billy. Right where we agreed, in Uncle Pennybags.”

Billy lifted his face from the sink, which he’d filled with ice from the wet bar. His theory was that a faceful of ice cured any multitude of sins and hid them from the camera. Darleen didn’t know why he persisted in this belief, since he looked easily five years older than she, and they were born two weeks apart.

But then, she didn’t drink.

And she didn’t screw around.

“No, darling, I didn’t get your message.” She shifted into her cheerful voice, which Billy detested in the morning, if you could call noon the morning. “Did you leave it with one of the sweet Guatemalan waiters who couldn’t deliver it because he doesn’t speak English so well, bless his heart?”

“No, I left it with the hotel answering service.”

“Oh, damn that hotel answering service.”

Billy lowered the ice from his face. “Sarcasm is not becoming, Darleen.”

“Oh, double damn,” she said. “And to think no one has told me that before now.”

*

Billy was worried about Darleen. She didn’t seem like herself lately. A little more snippy. A lot more outspoken. He wondered if she was going through the change of life early. His Aunt Thelma back in Pierre had done that. At least that’s what they said when she went out into the barn early one morning and castrated all the bulls.

The thought made Billy shiver. He reached for the bottle of Maalox.

“Bad stomach?” Darleen cooed.

Yeah, maybe it was the change. Maybe he ought to talk to her about going to see that gynecologist of hers. Of course, Billy was convinced that the gynecologist was a dyke. How else did you explain a woman wanting to stick her hand up other women all day? And he didn’t want any dyke putting any more ideas in Darleen’s head. She came up with enough of them by herself—and talking to her crazy friend Maureen.

He didn’t know what had gotten into women these days. Nothing ever seemed to make them happy. That’s why he preferred ’em young.

Of course, preferring and having were two different things. If you’d been around the block more than once, you really had to show the girls something.

Something like a Mercedes 560 SL, for starters. Access to swanky clubs, hideaways down in Florida, a lot of disposable green to throw around.

At that thought, Billy shivered again.

It was trying to make that disposable green to impress the dollies that had gotten him into the fix he was in.

Oh, Jesus.

He didn’t know why he’d let himself get snookered into that poker game in the first place. Poker wasn’t his thing. He favored the ponies.

He stared into his sunny-side-up eyes above the sink and thought, Who’re you fooling, Billy? Everything’s your thing. Everything you can lose money at. Football. Cards. The track. Basketball. Baseball. Hockey. Tennis. Hell, once he’d even bet on Ping-Pong when the Olympics were on TV in a bar.

The girl who was with him at the time, a silly little redhead not much older than Rachel Rose, which shamed him if he thought about it—he tried not to think about it—said: Billy’ll bet on anything that has balls.

There was some truth in that. The whole truth was, Billy would bet on anything, period. He was the kind of guy, the fellas in Vegas liked to say, his mother was dying, Billy’d bet which way she’d fall.

Yeah, Billy was a Vegas kind of guy.

The kind they loved to see coming.

And coming and coming and coming.

Yeah, Billy was a real spurter all right. And a bleeder and a sweater and a crybaby, and right now he felt like he didn’t have a single drop of liquid left in his body.

He’d pissed it all away on the cards last night.

And why had he gone into that back room at Tommy’s for that very private little game with the high rollers? The big boys?

Because they asked him, that’s why.

It made him feel like one of the gang. It made him feel like a big man, Billy Carroll of “The Big One.” Little Billy Karczewski was left behind in Sioux Falls, never to be thought of again.

It made him feel like the kind of guy who would always be lucky, and who would get lucky every night, with a different beautiful babe on his arm—many of them tall.

But then, when it was all over, and he’d lost, lost Big Time, he’d turned to old Angelo Carlo, called Angelo Pizza because he ran a chain of pizza parlors for Ma Amato. Angelo was very big in Ma’s various businesses, not the least of which was loan-sharking. “Angelo,” he said, “I’m gonna have to ask you for a favor.”

“Don’t do it,” Angelo had said, shifting his weight to his good leg. “It won’t be no favor.”

“I need ten large.”

“I can see that. But I can also see that the last time you had trouble paying the vig, and it got nasty before it got nice, and I don’t like having to do that. It puts me in an awkward position, Billy. And I’m in a bad mood already, got a guy who skipped, just like you, always behind.”

“Please. You know I never skipped on anything in my life. What’s skip? As if you couldn’t find me in a second. Please, Ange.” Billy hated hearing himself beg like that. But he didn’t have much choice. He had to give the players the money, or he wasn’t getting out of the room alive. Better to be alive now and worry about being dead tomorrow was one of Billy’s philosophies.

Eventually, Angelo made him the loan.

But now Billy looked at his eyes in the mirror, and they made him want to puke because they were so scared. The vig, the vigorish, the interest on the 10, was 300 a week. That was just to stay even, paying nothing back on the principal, 156% interest a year, or $15,600. Plus the original 10 large.

“And,” Angelo had said, “I’m giving you a break on the vig ’cause I know you. And I like your singing. Anybody ever tell you you sound a little bit like the Crooner?”

Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. Billy knew all that. He also knew that Angelo could charge up to five, six percent on a short-term and nobody would really holler. Nobody desperate, that is. And who but somebody desperate would borrow money from Angelo Pizza in the first place?

Just then, Darleen came up and put her face right beside his. She’d slapped on her full war paint. She began running her fingers through his hair, or trying to.

“Billy, did you ever think you might bring your do into the twentieth century?”

Billy stiffened. He hated talking about his hair. He hated talking about almost anything personal, but especially his hair. This was his lucky hair. He’d been wearing this hairdo when he got his shot at the Big Time on “The Big One,” and he saw no reason to mess with success.

“Get out of here, Darleen,” he said.

She pinched him on the behind through his pink boxer shorts. He stared at her, big-eyed in the mirror. She used to do that when she was in the mood.

“Do you have something in mind here, Darleen?”

She did. She didn’t know why, but every time she got right to the edge of leaving Billy, she wanted him like crazy. Maybe it was realizing that once he was out of the picture, loving might be scarce for a while. Maybe it was old times. In any case, she leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck. “Why don’t you slip into the shower, and I’ll sit outside here and tell you all about what I’ve got in mind.”

He couldn’t believe it. That’s what they used to do, back in the old days, before they lost it. He’d shower, and Darleen would talk dirty to him Sometimes she couldn’t wait, would jump inside ,and they’d make love standing up with the suds and hot water running all over them.

“Darleen—” he started, and then changed his mind. Better not to talk. He ripped his shorts off, adjusted the water, and stepped inside.

“Do you remember,” she purred, “that weekend we spent in Acapulco?”

How could he ever forget it? Darleen hadn’t worn any panties the whole time, and he’d felt like the biggest stud south of the border.

“Do you remember that afternoon when we sat by the pool and sucked down about forty-two margaritas and then in the elevator on the way to the room—”

Oh, yeah. This was more like it. Like old times, when they still liked each other, before he… The phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Billy cried. It was probably somebody he owed money, and whoever it was, he wasn’t in the mood. What he was in the mood for now… “Please don’t answer it, Darleen.”

But she did. After all, Barbara Bush may have decided she needed a redo on the house in Kennebunkport. Get rid of all that frumpy old chintz and think about—

But it wasn’t Barbara Bush. Or Nancy. Or Rosalynn. Or any of the other First Ladies Darleen had fantasies about.

Though it was a Barbara. Barbara Stein. Who seemed desperate to speak with Billy.

Darleen handed the receiver into the shower.

Billy listened for a moment, then turned down the water. “You said he did what? He can’t? You what? Me? You’re sure? Well, of course. I’d be delighted. It’s wonderful. I mean, it’s too bad for Gary, and nobody can really replace him. Yes, I know, Phyllis will be a big help. She’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful. And, yes, I agree, NBC’s wonderful for thinking of me. I know, the most convenient thing in the world, that I’m right here! Yes indeedy, the show must go on.”

After it was over, Billy leaned against the back wall of the shower, ignoring Darleen outside yelling What? What? What? and turned the water back up, letting it pour over him like a baptism.

For he was saved. Yes, he was.

Gary Collins was sick as a dog, puking his guts out, and they wanted him. They were going to pay him $100K for the three nights, tonight, tomorrow, and the Saturday night live on TV, more than enough to pay off Angelo Pizza and any vig he might dream up.

Miss America had saved Billy Carroll’s sweet patootie.

Way to go, Miss A! Billy screamed, standing ankle-deep in hot water.