“In some secluded rendezvous ...”

—TONY RANDALL

The Odd Couple, ABC

13

PETER NAST HAD NOT BEEN whistling Dixie.

I didn’t know whose sexual preference was what, and I didn’t care a damn. As far as softball was concerned, these were my kind of people.

A lot of people play sports to socialize and work up a sweat, and I suppose for them, it’s fine. For me, if I want to socialize, I’ll go to a party, and if I want to sweat, I’ll take up (yuck) jogging.

But to get the most out of a sport, you have to stretch yourself, to test yourself, to get the absolute best out of yourself that’s there, with no compromises—not with the rules, not with the opposition, not with the demands of the game itself.

That was the way Coif You! and Mr. Leonard of Soho played softball. I think some professional athletes could have learned from them. We slid hard to break up double plays. We went for the extra base. We knew how many outs there were, and we knew where the runners were on base. The infielders (Marcie was the shortstop—she threw like a girl, but then so did Tony Kubek. She got the ball there.) planted themselves directly in front of the grounders, and were always in position to take relays and cutoffs.

I never enjoyed a game more in my life.

We took a four-two lead into the ninth. I’d been part of two of the runs, scoring ahead of Sammi’s single in the fourth, then moving Marcie from the first to third with a sacrifice bunt-and-run, after which she scored on Hernando’s sacrifice fly.

Coif You! was the visiting team, so Leonard’s team was batting to end the game.

With two outs and a man on, Wolf came to bat. As always, the bat looked like a twig when he held it. We’d managed to walk him every previous time he’d come up before this. It was a good strategy. He was strong enough to hit the ball out of any park in the country, Central included. Hell; he could have hit one out of Yellowstone, if he got a tail wind.

Wolf was not happy. The lights gleamed on the sweat of his muscles and the gold of his earring. “Just give me one to hit, you pussies,” he said under his breath.

Fat chance, I thought, but with a count of two balls and no strikes on him, Peter made his one really bad pitch of the night, a little high, on the outside part of the plate.

Wolf crushed it.

As soon as I heard it hit, I thought, here we go, extra innings. Jono, the left fielder, was running dead away from me as though a flying saucer had landed just behind second base. The runner from first scored before he even caught up with the ball, but Wolf had just gotten to second, and I began to have some hope. I got rid of my mask and awaited developments.

Jono would have needed a howitzer to get the ball back to the infield from where he was, but he hit Hernando, the short fielder, with a perfect throw, who in turn pegged it to Marcie, who’d come out to get the relay.

Wolf, representing the tying run, was rounding third as Marcie was wheeling. I watched him from the corner of my eye, but my attention was on the ball.

“Home it!” I yelled. “Home it!”

Marcie never had any intention of doing anything else. She threw me a perfect strike that smacked into my mitt with Wolf still about fifteen feet away.

He’d seen me catch the ball. I could tell from his eyes he wasn’t going to slide, wasn’t going to try to avoid the tag. Wolf probably had never slid in his life. He was going to try to bowl me over and knock the ball loose.

For a split second, I felt a cold prickle on my scalp, probably a foreshadowing of my head being shaved.

Then I got very calm, remembered my training. Ball in fist, fist in glove, glove against chest with the fist inside.

I braced myself, but that was only temporary. If all you do is brace yourself when somebody like Wolf is bearing down on you, you’re likely to wake up in the hospital with footprints on your face.

It’s counterintuitive, but the best thing to do is jump into the runner with all your might, make sure he soaks up some of the impact, too.

I jumped, chest first.

It was like being run over by a truck.

We both went down. Wolf recovered first, scrambled off me, and crossed the plate, screaming “Yes!”

The umpire was standing over me. Groggily, I unfolded my hands and showed him the ball. “You’re out!” he hollered, pumping his hand in the air to emphasize it.

Wolf said, “What?” so hard his voice cracked, and he came over to see for himself.

“Son of a bitch!” he cried, pulling me to my feet. “Who would have believed you could hang on to that ball?”

The news finally sank in to my pink-shirted teammates, and they rushed in from the field to congratulate me, led by Spot, who had spent the game sitting like a good boy by the bench while everybody told him how beautiful he was, and especially admired his hair.

I was mobbed. There were nine other members of the Coif You! team, five of them women, but I swear I got at least seven kisses. I didn’t care, I was on another plane, and I loved them all.

“Nobody blocks the plate on Wolf,” Peter was saying. “They just play bullfighter and try to tag him as he goes by.”

“Good way to break an arm,” I told him.

“What you did,” Marcie said, “was a good way to break your head.” Then she kissed me again, going out of her way this time to make it memorable.

Peter contented himself with shaking my hand, which made me just as glad. “Don’t forget to show up for the haircut tomorrow. I’ll handle you personally. On the house. No. You pay, like a dollar. Or even full price, it’ll be worth it—I’m the best. You’ll never go anywhere else. Then you’ll be a legit customer, and we can add you to the team for the rest of the season.”

I held up a hand.

“Whoa,” I said. “Thanks, I’m honored, but I don’t know if I could commit to the rest of the season.”

“It’s only five more weeks,” somebody said.

“Well, seven if we go all the way,” another voice added.

I was beginning to feel like some high-priced free agent.

“Maybe little sister can persuade him, eh?”

“I’ve warned you before about your filthy mouth, Hernando,” Marcie said. She sounded bored.

“Hey,” I said. “I never wanted to cause dissension around here. Tell you what—when I get my hair cut tomorrow, I’ll find out the rest of the details from Peter. If I can do it at all, I will. How’s that?”

Peter said, “Well ...”

“What do you want?” his sister demanded. “A contract signed in blood? Matt is an important man, he can’t just close up the shop when there’s a game. He said he’ll do his best. Now leave him alone.”

There were murmurs about how they hadn’t meant to get pushy, just wanted to keep me on the team, I fit in great, etc., great game, thanks, and so on. All very gratifying. Then they drifted away, and I was alone with Spot and Marcie.

She was scratching the Samoyed behind the ears. “This your dog?”

“Sort of. Why?”

“He’s too beautiful, he’s like a walking fur stole. A fashion accessory. You’re not the accessory type.”

“How do you know what type I am? You never knew I existed until this morning.”

“I knew you existed. I’ve made it my business to know about everybody important at the Network.”

“I’m not that important.”

She laughed. “You sleep with the major stockholder. That makes you important.”

“That’s frank,” I said. I was irritated.

“I’m always frank, unless I make a conscious decision not to be.”

“Good, that’ll come in handy when you answer my questions.”

“Sure,” she said. “But not here. They’ll be turning off the lights soon, and I’m holding you to that drink you blackmailed me into.”

“Mmm,” I agreed. “And after you saved my life tonight, too.”

“Peter is very protective.”

“So I noticed. Thanks.”

“I didn’t do it for you, I just didn’t want my brother to get in trouble. Or hurt. I saw your eyes. Bat or no bat, you weren’t afraid.”

“Wrong. I was afraid I was going to have to have Spot rip out his throat.”

“Would he?”

“On command. There’s more to this fluffball than good looks.”

“That’s something the three of us have in common, then.”

“Where do you want to have this drink? There’s a place on Central Park West not too far from here, we could talk and I could put you in a cab for home after.”

She put her finger on the tip of my nose. “I’ll be frank again. I like you a lot better than I did before the game started. But you got me into this, and you are not getting off cheap—or the Network isn’t. This will be on your expense account, won’t it?”

She went on without waiting for an answer.

“And, Matt dear, you are hardly presentable. There is sweat and dust on your face, your hair is mud, and while you taste delicious, you smell like dirty socks.

“So here is what we’ll do,” she said primly. “You will indeed walk me to Central Park West and put me in a cab. Then you’ll take a cab home yourself, make yourself presentable, and meet me in an hour and a half in the Churchill Bar.”

The idea held a certain appeal. The sooner I got my Wolf-battered body into a hot shower, the better I’d like it. We could also linger longer over fewer drinks at a place like the Churchill. Hell, with what they charged for a drink you should get a month’s rent with it.

“It would not,” I told her, “amuse me to be stood up.”

“I’ll be there,” she promised.

Clean, nicely dressed, and Spot-free, I sat in the cab on the way across the Park wondering if she was going to be there. I also realized I personally couldn’t do much about it if she weren’t, since if I tried to make her life difficult at the Network, she had a prima facie sexual harassment case on me a two-year-old could argue successfully. It would be a lie, but most sexual harassment complaints are definitely not, and that little statistic would tell against me, too.

Damned clever, our little Marcie.

Still, I had things to fall back on. If she didn’t want to talk to me, she could talk to the cops. Formidable as she was, tough as she seemed, the lieutenant had a detective on his staff named Denise Berkowitz who could take Marcie apart like a peeled tangerine.

But it was academic. Marcie was there, in this case, Marcie, Mark III.

Gone was the frump of the morning; gone was the pocket Amazon of the softball diamond. In their place was the young career woman off for a carefree night on the town.

She was standing just inside the door, waiting for me, in a flower print summerweight dress that managed to show plenty of leg and back, along with a provocative shadow of cleavage, without ever losing its air of innocence. The glasses were back, but instead of making her look owlish, they made her look perky and alert.

I put myself on alert. A woman who could convincingly present three very different personae in fourteen hours was potentially dangerous. Not that most people don’t put on different faces for different occasions—they do, constantly. Most of them, though, have a base personality that comes out when we let our guard down, a default mode, as computer mavens call it. It’s the thing that automatically gets done when there are no orders to do anything special.

Each of the personae I saw her in seemed to be her default mode, but I don’t think any of them was. They were not only different, they were alien to each other. Either she was acting all the time, or she had no real self to fall back on, just another role to step into.

She saw me and said, “Well there you are,” like a popular high school girl encouraging a shy date. “I was afraid you were going to stand me up.”

“Liar,” I said. “No man has ever stood you up in your life.”

She looked at me for a second. “You’re right,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”

We found a quiet booth in the corner. A waitress came by and we ordered, a Gibson for her, Wild Turkey 101 with water back for me. One thing about the Churchill—when the last glass of 101 is served, it will be the Churchill that serves it. They’ve probably been stocking up for years.

Marcie looked at me. I could see her eyes glittering behind her glasses. “I like you better all the time. You have no more tolerance for bullshit than I have.”

“If you can’t tolerate bullshit,” I told her, “you’re in the wrong business.”

She showed me a rounded throat as she threw back her head to laugh.

“Oh no,” she said. “I am most emphatically in the right business. I am bursting with ideas, I’m smart, tough, and ruthless. I’ll wind up running this Network.”

I sipped bourbon.

“That’s an interesting thought,” I said. “Is there a timetable on this project?”

“Not a strict one. It’ll happen while I’m still young enough to enjoy it.” She rubbed a fingertip around the rim of her glass. “You’ll be there, working for me.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Yes, you’re right, maybe. If I decide to let you stay.” She laughed deep in her throat.

“There’s something I want to ask you,” I said.

“Ah, yes, the famous questions.”

“No, those come later. I’m still trying to figure you out.”

“I’m easy to figure out,” she said. With a dainty finger and thumb, she picked the onion out of her glass and crushed it between her teeth.

“You are a remarkable young woman,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“Watching you in action tonight, on the diamond and off, I would say you are perfectly capable of taking care of yourself.”

“Perfectly capable,” she echoed.

“Why does your brother come on like a hillbilly with a shotgun to protect you, then? He seemed perfectly sane the rest of the time.”

She took a pull at her drink. “What you want to know is what makes Peter tick.

“Well, that’s easy, too. Peter was eighteen, you see, just legally an adult, and I was twelve, when our mother died. Our father’d deserted us years ago, he’s probably dead and I hope he is.

“Anyway, Peter kept us together. It would be hard enough for any eighteen-year-old to bring up his twelve-year-old sister—imagine the pressure on a gay eighteen-year-old.”

“Peter is gay, then?”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Just being a hairdresser doesn’t make him gay.”

“What is this, Matt? Did you think about the game and get queasy over the idea that you may have just gone through a major bonding experience with a bunch of faggots?”

“Wild pitch, Marcie. Not even close. That couldn’t work unless I had some doubts about myself. I just don’t like jumping to conclusions.”

“And you don’t have any doubts about yourself?”

“Nothing to get me queasy,” I said.

“There’s something else we have in common,” she said. “I don’t have any doubts, either.”

She took another sip and went on. “This is good. Helps me relax after a game. And of course I don’t have to go to work tomorrow. We spent all day putting together a “best of” tape, and tonight, News is taking the time slot for a special on the murder. Anyway to answer your question—frankly as always—I don’t know if Peter is gay. Most of his friends and employees are, but I don’t know if he is. I don’t know if he’s ever had a partnered orgasm in his life, and we don’t discuss his fantasy life.

“You see, I’m Peter’s project. He gives things up for me. He was supposed to go to college, but of course when mother died, that was out. Instead he apprenticed to a hairdresser, and turned out to be brilliant at it. Took over the place eventually. Does quite, quite well.

“The other thing he gave up for me was a sex life, normal or ab, I couldn’t say. The way Peter sees New York, it’s a jungle, only the predators are social workers, ready to snatch me off to a foster home at the slightest excuse. So he never gave them one.”

“He must love you very much.”

“Oh, he does.”

“And you must be very grateful to him.”

“Yes, I must, mustn’t I? The closest I ever come to feeling guilty is when I realize I’m not. I just think Peter is a shmuck to do what he’s done. I certainly wouldn’t do it for anybody.”

I said, “That was certainly frank.”

“Told you. Next question?”

“Okay. Being as capable as you are, why do you need to pull all that Suzie-Creamcheese victimized woman crap at work on Vivian Pike?”

“Oh. Well, that’s over now. It was all part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

“Matt, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention. The plan to take over the Network. I always get what I want, Matt, and I always take the shortest safe route to getting it. The fact that everyone does it any other way has always been totally mystifying to me.

“And to get what I want, I’ll use everything I can—lawsuits and court decisions, people’s illusions and misconceptions, my own brains and talent, anything.

“Surely you can see that Vivian Pike was an obstacle to me? I don’t want other women with power around the Network. It will detract from my own uniqueness. Women subordinates I can handle; they’ll be a power base. Women equals or superiors?”

She shook her head. “They’ve got to go. Do you think I could have another Gibson?”

I flagged the waitress and took care of it. I was glad of the chance to take a breath. The woman was a psychopath. I felt like the stenographer for Mein Kampf. Except of course that the stenographer for Mein Kampf was Joseph Goebbels, and he was just as crazy as Hitler was.

The drink came. She took another ladylike sip and approved of it.

“Everything you can,” I said. “Does that include screwing Bentyne in his dressing room every afternoon?”

“Naturally.”

So much for my big gun.

“It was even enjoyable, a little. He was so eager to please. Richard may have been a terrific entertainer, but he was dreadfully insecure.”

“And this was part of the plan.”

“Matt, you don’t have to be deliberately obtuse.” She was getting genuinely irritated.

“Humor me,” I said. “The Network’s paying.”

“That’s true. All right, I’ll spell it out, but honestly! By fucking Richard, I simultaneously bound him to me, and drove a wedge between him and Vivian. Her entire power base was her relationship with Richard—not that he’d touched her in almost a year, anyway—anxiety about the Network deal.”

She looked puzzled. “That’s another thing I’ll never understand—why do people get anxiety when they should be feeling triumph?”

“Crossed wires in the psyche,” I offered.

“You could be right. It’s the best explanation I’ve ever heard for it.”

She waved it away. “So there was that, and there was the fact that she was doing a good job as a producer. Her weakness there was that she felt pressure too much. So I did everything I could to put more pressure on her.”

She smiled at me. “Did you really need me to explain all that?”

“I guess not,” I said. “What are you going to do now? No more show, no more job.”

“I’ll get reassigned somewhere. If the Network doesn’t place me quickly enough, or tries to fob me off with some Sunday afternoon public affairs show nobody watches, I’ll go back to court. I’m not worried.”

She tilted her head. “I’m more worried about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Like, should I seduce you, or not. You’d undoubtedly be better in bed than Richard was, you might even make me come.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. Besides, I don’t have access to rhino horn,”

Marcie laughed, loud. “Wasn’t that pathetic? How did you know? Did you find his stash?”

“A cop did,” I said.

She sighed as the laugh subsided. “Poor Richard. But you know, it did help him. Strictly psychological, I’m sure. Like Dumbo’s magic feather.”

“He just kept remembering that rhinos stay coupled for forty-five minutes at a time.” That was a piece of knowledge I’d picked up earlier that evening from Bill Bevacqua’s tapes.

“But not with their horns,” she said.

“Good point,” I said.

“And as for flattering myself, I never do. I could have you in bed tonight, if I wanted to. You’d love it. But the question is, what would be the point of making an enemy of Roxanne Schick? She’s not a threat to me at present, and since it would be a lot of work to neutralize her, I think I won’t go out of my way to antagonize her.”

“I don’t make love unless I’m in love,” I told her.

“How corny.”

“I don’t picture myself in love with you.”

She shrugged. “Maybe not. I think it bothers you to meet a woman as smart as you are, but tougher and more honest with herself. See, my theory is nobody really cares about anybody else. They just bog themselves down in pretending to.”

“I see. Everybody does what you do; you just do it better because you do it consciously.”

“Exactly!” she said, as if to a bright pupil. “I knew you were smart. It’s very liberating. I’m complimenting you when I say I think you could get there if you worked at it a little.” She laughed again, so loud that other people turned to look at us. “Together, we could rule the world!”

“You realize this kind of talk does not serve to remove you from suspicion for Bentyne’s murder.”

“Don’t be absurd. What possible motive could I have?”

“He might have kissed you off.”

“And gotten himself a big stink of publicity after I talked to my lawyer and the press. Not that there was any danger of it happening, Matt. He was deliriously happy with me.

“Besides, murder is stupid. It’s so ... irrevocable. There are so many other, better ways to deal with difficult people. The odds against murder are too high; and the other ways don’t have long prison sentences attached to them if you make a mistake. I wouldn’t kill anybody, Matt. I’m too smart to. I’m too smart to need to.”

I believed her. I also believed this decision had been thought over long and hard before the murder option had been rejected as a matter of policy. I told her as much.

“I think long and hard about everything,” she said primly.

“Okay,” I said. “Drink up. It’s late, and I, at least, still have to go to work tomorrow.”

She did. “I hope I’ve been helpful,” she said. “You worked so hard to earn it, after all.”

“Come on,” I said, “I’ll put you in a cab. We wouldn’t want that remarkable brain of yours spilled all over the sidewalk by a mugger, would we?”

“You don’t sound as if you’ve made up your mind on the question yet,” she said.

“No? I have, though.”

I flagged a taxi, told him the address, and handed him ten dollars of the Network’s money.

I opened the back door for Marcie. Before she got in, she grabbed me by the ears, pulled my face down to hers, and planted another enthusiastic kiss on me.

When she took her mouth away, she said, “Any time I wanted you,” then closed the door and disappeared into the night.