Clu was clean?
Not even a Turns.
Myron made a face. But that could have been temporary, right? I mean, the drugs might have
just been out of his system.
Nope.
What do you mean, nope?
Let's keep the science simple here, shall we? If a guy abuses drugs or alcohol, it shows up
somewhere. Enlarged heart, liver damage, lung modules, whatever. And it did. There was no question that Clu Haid had liked some pretty potent chemicals. Had, Myron. Had. There are other tests hair tests, for example that give you a more recent snapshot. And those were clean. Which means he'd been off the stuff for a while.
But he failed a drug test two weeks ago.
She shrugged.
Are you telling me that test was fixed?
Sally held up both hands. Not me. I'm telling you that my data disputes that data. I never said
anything about a fix. It could have been an innocent error. There are such things as false
positives.
Myron's head swam. Clu had been clean. His body had been dragged around after being shot
four times. Why? None of this made any sense.
They chatted a few more minutes, mostly about the past, and headed for the exit ten minutes later. Myron started back to his car. Time to see Dad. He tried the new cellular count on Win to have extras lying about his apartment and called Win.
Articulate, Win answered.
Clu was right. The drug test was fixed.
Win said, My, my.
Sawyer Wells witnessed the drug test.
More my, my.
What time is he doing the motivational talk at Res-ton?
Two o'clock, Win said.
In the mood to get motivated?
You have no idea.
Chapter 28
The Club.
Brooklake Country Club, to be more exact, though there was no brook, no lake, and they were not in the country. It was, however, most definitely a club. As Myron's car made its way up the steep drive, the clubhouse's white Greco-Roman pillars rising through the clouds, childhood memories popped up in fluorescent flashes. It was how he always saw the place. In flashes. Not always pleasant ones.
The Club was the epitome of nouveau-riche, Myron's wealthy brethren proving that they could be just as tacky and exclusive as their goyish counterparts. Older women with perpetual tans on large, freckled chests sat by the pool, their hair shellacked into place by fake French hairdressers to the point where the strands resembled frozen fiber optics, never allowing it, God forbid, to touch the water, sleeping, he imagined, without putting their heads down lest they shatter the dos like so much Venetian glass; there were nose jobs and liposuction and face- lifts so extreme that the ears almost touched in the back, the overall effect bizarrely sexy in the same way you might find Yvonne De Carlo on The Munsters sexy; women fighting off old age and on the surface winning, but Myron wondered if they doth protest too much, their fear just a little too bare in the scar-revealing, harsh overhead lights of the dining room.
Men and women were separated at the Club, the women animatedly playing mah-jongg, the men silently chewing on cigars over a hand of cards; women still had special tee times so as not to interfere with the breadwinners' i.e., their husbands' precious leisure moments; there was tennis too, but that was more for fashion than exercise, giving everyone an excuse to wear sweatsuits that rarely encountered sweat, couples sometimes sporting matching ones; a men's grill, a women's lounge, the oak boards memorializing golf champions in gold leaf, the same man winning seven years in a row, now dead, the large locker rooms with masseur's tables, the bathrooms with combs sitting in blue alcohol, the pickle-and-cole-slaw bar, cleat marks on the rug, the Founders Board with his grandparents' names still on it, immigrant dining room help, all referred to by their first names, always smiling too hard and at the ready.
What shocked Myron now was that people his age were members. The same young girls who had sneered at their mothers' idleness now abandoned their own foundering careers to raise the kids read: hire nannies came here to lunch and bore each other silly with a continuous game of one-upmanship. The men Myron's age had manicures and long hair and were well fed and too well dressed, kicking back with their cellular phones and casually swearing to a colleague. Their kids were there too, dark-eyed youngsters walking through the clubhouse with hand-held video games and Walkmans and too regal a bearing.
All conversations were inane and depressed the hell out of Myron. The grandpas in Myron's day had the good sense not to talk much to one another, just discarding and picking up what was dealt, occasionally grumbling about a local sports team; the grandmothers interrogated one another, measuring their own children and grandchildren against the competition, seeking an opponent's weakness and any conversational opening to jab forward with tales of offspring heroics, no one really listening, just preparing for the next frontal assault, familial pride getting confused with self-worth and desperation.
The main clubhouse dining room was as expected: waaaay too overstated. The green carpeting, the curtains that resembled corduroy leisure suits, the gold tablecloths on huge round mahogany, the floral centerpieces piled too high and with no sense of proportion, not unlike the plates traipsing down the buffet line. Myron remembered attending a sports-themed bar mitzvah here as a child: jukeboxes, posters, pennants, a Wiffle ball batting cage, a basket for foul shots, an artist wanna-be stuck sketching sports-related caricatures of thirteen-year-old boys thirteen-year-old boys being God's most obnoxious creation short of television lawyers and a wedding band complete with an overweight lead singer who handed the kids silver dollars shrouded in leather pouches that were emblazoned with the band's phone number.
But this view these flashes were too quick and thus simplistic. Myron knew that. His remembrances were all screwed up about this place the derision blending with the nostalgia but he also remembered coming here as a child for family dinners, his clip-on tie slightly askew, sent by Mom into the inner sanctum of the men's card room to find his grandfather, the undisputed family patriarch, the room reeking of cigar smoke, his pop-pop greeting him with a ferocious embrace, his gruff compatriots who wore golf shirts that were too loud and too tight, barely acknowledging the interloper because their own grandkids would do the same soon, the card game trickling down, participant by participant.
These same people he so easily picked apart were the first generation fully out of Russia or Poland or Ukraine or some other shtetl-laced combat zone. They'd hit the New World running running away from the past, the poverty, the fear and they just ran a bit too far. But under the hair and the jewelry and the gold lame, no mother bear would ever be so quick to kill for her cubs, the women's hard eyes still seeking out the pogrom in the distance, suspicious, always expecting the worst, bracing themselves to take the blow for their children.
Myron's dad sat in a yellow, pseudo-leather swivel chair in the brunch room, fitting in with this crowd about as well as a camel-riding mufti. Dad did not belong here. Never had. He didn't play golf or tennis or cards. He didn't swim and he didn't brag and he didn't brunch and he didn't talk stock tips. He wore his work clothes of all things: charcoal gray slacks, loafers, and a white dress shirt over a sleeveless white undershirt. His eyes were dark, his skin pale olive, his nose jutting forward like a hand waiting to be shook.
Interestingly enough, Dad was not a member of Brook-lake. Dad's parents, on the other hand, had been founding members, or in the case of Pop-pop, a ninety-two-year-old quasi vegetable whose rich life had been dissolved into useless fragments by Alzheimer's, still was. Dad hated the place, but he kept up the membership for the sake of his father. That meant showing up every once in a while. Dad looked at it as a small price to pay.
When Dad spotted Myron, he rose, more slowly than usual, and suddenly the obvious hit Myron: The cycle was beginning anew. Dad was the age Pop-pop had been back then, the age of the people they'd made fun of, his ink-black hair wispy, static gray now. The thought was far from comforting.
Over here! Dad called, though Myron had seen him. Myron threaded his way through the brunchers, mostly
