Life's Work Page 5

  Not all of Kaplan’s clients were bodybuilder types. Some of them were chunky teenagers—high school football players with bull necks, crew cuts, and peach basket rear ends. A few were middle-aged businessmen, carrying canvas bags with “Adidas” and “Pony” stitched on the sides. But a goodly number of them were muscle-bound jocks in tank tops and shorts, with the rapt, tanned, hyper faces of professional bodybuilders. I spent a couple of minutes watching two of them standing on the narrow concrete curb in front of the club. They were talking to each other, but I didn’t see them make eye contact once. In fact, they didn’t seem to be looking at anything at all. It was as if they were still standing in front of a mirror, practicing curls, as if that circuit had never been broken. They flexed their biceps, shifted their weight from foot to foot, rolled their heads on their necks, and wiggled their fingers like they were practicing the scales on a piano. But they never looked at each other and they never stopped fidgeting.

  I waited until the bodybuilders had gone. Then I got out of the Pinto, walked up to the window of the club, and peered through the blinds. There was a small desk inside, manned by a burly beachboy in T-shirt and cutoffs. He had his feet on the desktop, and he was smiling at something that was going on in the gym. I couldn’t see what he was laughing at because there was a drywall partition behind him, which cordoned off everything but the desk and a small waiting area to its right. I checked my watch—I was on time—and opened the door.

  The place was filled with noise—the creaking of chain pulleys on the Universal machines, the thud of barbells being dropped to mats, the whizzing of five pulls and exercise bikes, and behind it all, like the night sounds of crickets and distant traffic, the groans of the bodybuilders themselves. I stood in front of the kid at the desk, waiting for him to acknowledge my presence. But he was listening to a ball game on a transistor radio—one of those ghetto blasters that look like assorted pie plates glued to a masonry block—and couldn’t be bothered. He was an ugly kid, with a nest of curly red hair and a red, lumpy face, acne-scarred along the chin and neck.

  After a minute or two, I got tired of waiting, and started for the opening that led to the gym.

  “Hold on there, cowboy,” the kid behind the desk said.

  He looked up from the radio, glanced at my face, then studied my arms and chest, as if my muscles were the windows to my soul. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got an appointment to see Kaplan. The name is Stoner.”

  “Stoner,” the kid repeated slowly, as if he were sounding out syllables in a book. “Just a second.”

  The kid reached out and jabbed at an intercom sitting on his desk.

  A voice crackled over the intercom speaker. “Yeah?”

  “Walt, a guy named Stoner is here to see you,” the kid said.

  “Show him in,” the voice said.

  The kid swung his feet off the desk, stood up, and led me through the entry way into the gym. The place was surprisingly old-fashioned on the inside: mirrored wall to the right, with benches and Universal machines lined up in front of it; dumbbell racks, flye pulls, and more benches on the left; squat racks and curling stands at the rear; and a half dozen exercise bikes set up on gray mats by the door. Overhead, big-bladed ceiling fans stirred the boiling air.

  We picked our way among the machines and the men working out on them. Most of the bodybuilders were young—college-age jocks. But there were a few grownups in the crowd, including three guys in short-sleeve Cougar sweatshirts, working out on a squat rack at the back of the room. I recognized one of them—Fred, Kaplan’s protégé. He didn’t see me. He was too busy trying to lift four hundred pounds of weights draped across his back. Eyes squeezed shut, jaw set, lips quivering, his face beet red and pouring sweat, he trembled and groaned beneath an oversize Olympic bar so loaded down with plates that it drooped at either end. The other two Cougars stood beside him, arms outstretched, ready to lift the bar off his back if Fred failed. They shouted at him savagely, urging him on as if he were a horse caught hoof-deep in mud.

  The beachboy stopped to watch Fred for a moment, then looked at me as if to say, “That’s what it means to be a real man!” He shouted, “Work!” at Fred, then walked up to a shuttered door by the racks and knocked. Someone said, “Come in.”

  “You heard the man,” the kid said and wandered back to where Fred was squatting.

  I went in. The door opened on a small white-walled office, decorated with posters of bodybuilders and with newspaper clippings. There was an air conditioner chugging in a window by a door in the far wall. The blast of cold air hit me so hard it made me shudder.

  Two men were sitting inside the room. One of them—a huge kid with ringlets of brown hair all over his head and a fat, dimpled, stupid face—sat on a chair next to the door. His head was tilted back so that it was resting against the wall. Eyes half shut, chin pointing upward, arms folded across his chest, he peered down his nose at me, as if he could just barely make me out. The other man was sitting behind the desk. If anything he was a little bigger than Baby Huey. He was also a good twenty years older, and on the surface, at least, a lot more intelligent-looking. He had a ruddy, pockmarked face, fringed with a bushy black beard, muttonchops, and a thick mustache. His hair had been combed forward from beneath the crown, presumably to cover a bald spot. It made a little curtain of curls across his forehead. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with “Kaplan’s Health and Fitness Club” silk-screened on the front. Maybe it was the beard or maybe it was the fact that the T-shirt rode so high up his chest, but the guy didn’t seem to have any neck at all. His head rested on his shoulders like a bowling ball on a shelf.

  “Glad to meet you, Harry,” he said, holding out an enormous hand. “I’m Walt Kaplan.”

  I shook with him. He didn’t squeeze down, the way Otto had. But I could tell from the size of his biceps that if he’d wanted to, he could have crushed my hand like an empty beer can. His upper arms were enormous and so thick with black hair that they almost looked simian. The only part of him that appeared even remotely weak were his eyes, and that might have been an illusion caused by the black horn-rim glasses he was wearing. One of the screws had fallen out of the right hinge, and he’d stuck a paper clip through the hole in its stead. But the clip didn’t hold the glasses together tightly, and they drooped across his right eye, giving him the pained, fidgety look of a man stuck behind a pillar at the ballpark.

  “I’m glad you could make it out, Harry,” Kaplan said in his deep, friendly voice. “Please, have a seat.”

  I sat down in a desk chair across from him.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he said. “Juice? Gatorade?”

  When I said no, he turned to Baby Huey.

  “This is my friend and associate, Mickey,” he said, addressing the kid directly, as if Mickey periodically needed to be reminded of who he was. “Mickey works for me here at the club.”

  Mickey indicated by the slightest movement of his head that he recognized that I had entered the room.

  “Mickey,” Kaplan said, with that undue courtesy that bosses use with their hirelings around strangers, “would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes? Harry and I have some business to discuss.”

  Mickey grunted, got to his feet, and walked out the door to the gym.

  As soon as Mickey had left, Kaplan picked up a roll of antacid tablets lying on his desk, pried one of them off, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed on it ruminatively and smiled sadly. “I’ll tell you, my friend,” he said. “It’s no fun getting old.” He rubbed his forehead vigorously, and the loose skin bunched up in pleats beneath his fingers. “I just had a bowel movement that looked like Chicken and Stars soup. Now my head hurts. Doctor told me there’s a virus going around. You heard about that? A virus or something?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said.

  “I guess it’s a virus,” Kaplan said.

  For a guru, he certainly wore his foibles nakedly. He pried another antacid tablet off the
roll and stuck it in his mouth. “You’ve got to listen to your body, Harry,” he said. “It’ll tell you everything you need to know, if you can just interpret the messages correctly. This mind-body duality crap is the bane of our civilization. Some day people are going to wise up and realize that the two are one—the unconscious mind is the body.” He adjusted the glasses on his nose. “I guess it’s a virus.”

  “Probably.”

  Kaplan leaned forward, bending so close to me I caught a chalky whiff of Tums. “I want to talk to you, my friend,” he said with great earnestness. “I want to let you know what Bill Parks is really like.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Kaplan laughed unhappily, as if I’d made a rude noise. “Because I think you’ve been fed some misinformation. Or should I say, disinformation? It’s Mr. Petrie’s specialty.”

  “Exactly how have I been misinformed?”

  “You’ve been led to believe that Bill is a ‘missing person.’ Let me assure you that he is not missing. He had good reasons for leaving training camp in the way that he did, and Mr. Petrie knows this.”

  “You mean the contract dispute?”

  “Exactly.” Kaplan popped another antacid tablet into his kisser and crushed it noisily between his teeth. “I approached Mr. Petrie on three different occasions earlier this year, in an attempt to settle our differences fairly. And on each of these occasions he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in being fair. As a result, Bill felt that he had no other choice but to leave camp without further notice.”

  “Parks is under contract, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Kaplan said. “A contract that he signed better than three years ago. Things have changed in his life since then. Dramatically. For one thing, his skills are more valuable now. And then he has new responsibilities to meet, a wife and family to support. All of this costs money.”

  “Parks is married?” I said.

  “He plans to be,” Kaplan said. “He’s very much in love, I can tell you that. With a wonderful girl, who’s had a terrifically positive influence on his life.”

  “May I ask her name?”

  Kaplan didn’t answer me. “Mr. Petrie knows that Bill will return to camp as soon as Petrie starts bargaining with us in good faith. Excuse me for being so blunt, but hiring someone like you is nothing less than a slap in Bill’s face. Just one more instance of bad-faith bargaining, and an insidious way of pressuring my friend into making a bad—a fatally bad—decision about his future.”

  “All I’ve been hired to do is find him,” I said.

  “You can’t be that naive,” Kaplan said, leaning back in his chair. “If Bill wanted Mr. Petrie to know where he was, he would have told him.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “We have been in contact, of course.” Kaplan stared at me for a moment. “Bill has authorized me to ask you to leave him alone. I’m asking you, too, as Bill’s friend. Continuing this...inquisition will only cause him trouble, and will ultimately undermine any chance we may have of securing a fair settlement of the issue.”

  “And how will it do that?”

  Kaplan shook his head and sighed. “I thought you were an adult, Harry,” he said long-sufferingly. “I thought we didn’t have to play this kind of game. But since you insist, let me put it to you bluntly. How would you like to have your life picked over by a stranger? A stranger who is working for a man who does not have your best interests at heart? We all have things in our pasts that we’re not particularly proud of, and I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that Bill Parks is any different. He’s a troubled man who’s had many problems, some of which he’s just now beginning to resolve. But those problems are nobody’s business but his own. He has a right to privacy, even if it’s merely the privacy to contemplate his own follies. Whether you realize it or not, you are violating that right. And I am asking you again, on Bill’s behalf, to let us settle this dispute in our own way.”

  “Mr. Kaplan,” I said, getting to my feet, “you can make my job much easier by simply telling Parks to get in touch with the Cougars. As far as I’m concerned, that will close the case. Until then, I’m obligated to keep looking for him.”

  “Obligated?” Kaplan said with outrage. “What about your obligation to your fellow man? Your obligation to be fair? Does that go by the way simply because you took money to do someone else’s dirty work?”

  “I agreed to do a job,” I said. “I intend to do it.”

  I turned to go. Kaplan came out from behind the desk. He was a hair over six feet tall, but all those muscles made him look enormous.

  “I’ve asked you politely,” he said in a very tough voice. “Stay out of Bill’s life.” The glasses had slipped down his nose, and he pinned them to his forehead with a forefinger. “Bill works for the Cougars. They don’t own him.”

  “And you don’t own me,” I said.

  He took a deep breath, and his stomach rumbled. “You’re upsetting my stomach,” he said. “You’re making me angry. Don’t make me angry, Mr. Stoner. Believe me, you won’t like it.”

  “I’ll have to take that chance,” I said, and walked out the door.

  8

  I WASN’T in a particularly good mood as I drove back to town. I didn’t like being threatened by a dyspeptic bully, and more than that, I didn’t like what the bully had said. Kaplan was the second person in two days who had told me that I was being used by the Cougars as a weapon against Parks. Of course, Otto had been drunk and angry when he made his accusation. And Walt wasn’t exactly a disinterested party. He stood to benefit directly from the renegotiation of Parks’s contract. But the two stories were enough alike to make me feel vaguely uneasy about Petrie’s motives—and about my own. I’d taken the case because I hadn’t liked what Parks had done to those four girls. I still didn’t like that. But they weren’t the reason I’d been hired. I’d been hired, I reminded myself, to find the son-of-a-bitch. And if Petrie saw it differently, we’d have to have a little renegotiation of our own.

  And yet even as I was telling myself that Parks’s past sins were his own business, I couldn’t help wondering which one of them had Kaplan so worked up. The three assault arrests and the Candy Kane trial weren’t secrets to Cougar management. Kaplan had to know that, seeing that he seemed to know everything else about the Cougars. Which meant that something else was bothering him—something he was afraid I’d uncover in the course of the investigation. Since drug scandals were rife that summer, I wondered if Bill had run afoul of the same DEA sting that had netted Monroe, Calhoun, and Greene. If he had, the Feds hadn’t gone public with it yet. But that would be a career-buster, all right—something that could really throw a wrench into contract negotiations.

  As soon as I got back to the apartment, I called Hugh Petrie at his office in the Stadium. The girl from his answering service said that he was gone for the day, but that she would relay my message. About ten minutes later, Petrie himself called back.

  “What’s the problem, Harry?” he said. “I need to meet with you about Parks.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Come in on Monday morning.”

  “It can’t wait until Monday morning,” I said.

  Petrie sighed. “Okay. If it’s that urgent, you better come out here. I can spare a half hour this evening. No more.” He gave me an address in Indian Hill and rang off.

  ******

  It took me about twenty minutes to drive out to Indian Hill and another fifteen minutes to find Petrie’s home, which was hidden away in a maple grove at the end of a winding, tree-shaded lane. I’d half figured Petrie for one of the flashy white Colonials along the Camargo drag—the kind with the two-mower lawn and the flagpole set in concrete and the carriage house as big as a four-family apartment in Reading. But the bungalow at the end of the shady lane was a carriage house, and a relatively small one, at that. It had been spruced up with white trim, red siding, and Pennsylvania Dutch shutters on the upper-story windows, but it was still recognizably a ba
rn—loaf-shaped, mansard-roofed. In fact, between the siding and the shutters, it looked like a child’s painted lunch box. There was a car parked in a gravel lot to the left of the house—a puke green Toyota Tercel with muddy tires. Without advancing any genetic theorems of my own, I’d expected something more patrician from a man like Petrie. But he’d fooled me again—first with the office and now with the house and the car.

  I parked my heap behind the Toyota, got out into the afternoon sun, and followed a gravel path around a late-blooming magnolia to the front door. The magnolia had perfumed the whole yard, as if someone had spilled cologne in the grass. I waded through the stink, stepped onto a slate stoop, and knocked at a Dutch door. After a time, the top half swung open and Petrie appeared, clad in a sweat-soaked T-shirt and khaki shorts. His bald head was gleaming with perspiration, and he was breathing hard through his mouth.

  “I’ve been working out,” he said. “C’mon in.”

  He opened the bottom half of the door and waved me through it into a small tiled kitchen as neat and modest as the outside of the house. A cellar door was stopped open on the left-hand wall. Petrie started for it.

  “We might as well go downstairs,” he said. “I can finish my workout and you can give me the scoop.”

  I followed him down a wooden staircase into the cellar. The basement had been converted into a full-scale gym. There was springy green Astroturf on the floor, a wet bar on the short wall, and on each of the long walls rows of Nautilus machines—spare black skeletal structures of heavy steel and chain, like oddly twisted jungle gyms or the cabs of heavy lifters.

  Petrie watched me as I took it all in, with a look that mingled pride and embarrassment, as if I’d caught him in an excess that he couldn’t quite justify but wasn’t prepared to give up. I had the feeling that I’d gotten a peek at his diary. And apparently, so did he.