Back Spin (Myron Bolitar 4)

“Like what?”

“Frankly I have no idea. E-mails. Correspondence. Bulletin boards he participates in. Anything that might give us a clue. It’s not a very scientific process. You check out enough stuff and maybe something will click.”

Linda thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” she said.

“How about you, Mrs. Coldren? Do you have any enemies?”

She sort of smiled. “I’m the number one–rated woman golfer in the world,” she said. “That gives me a lot of enemies.”

“Anyone you can imagine doing this?”

“No,” she said. “No one.”

“How about your husband? Anybody who hates your husband enough?”

“Jack?” She forced out a chuckle. “Everyone loves Jack.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She just shook her head and waved him off.

Myron asked a few more questions, but there was little left for him to excavate. He asked if he could go up to Chad’s room and she led him up the stairs.

The first thing Myron saw when he opened Chad’s door were the trophies. Lots of them. All golf trophies. The bronze figure on the top was always a man coiled in postswing position, the golf club over his shoulder, his head held high. Sometimes the little man wore a golf cap. Other times he had short, wavy hair like Paul Hornung in old football reels. There were two leather golf bags in the right corner, both jammed past capacity with clubs. Photographs of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Tom Watson blanketed the walls. Issues of Golf Digest littered the floor.

“Does Chad play golf?” Myron asked.

Linda Coldren just looked at him. Myron met her gaze and nodded sagely.

“My powers of deduction,” he said. “They intimidate some people.”

She almost smiled. Myron the Alleviator, Master Tension-Easer. “I’ll try to still treat you the same,” she said.

Myron stepped toward the trophies. “Is he any good?”

“Very good.” She turned away suddenly and stood with her back to the room. “Do you need anything else?”

“Not right now.”

“I’ll be downstairs.”

She didn’t wait for his blessing.

Myron walked in. He checked the answering machine on Chad’s phone. Three messages. Two from a girl named Becky. From the sound of it, she was a pretty good friend. Just calling to say, like, hi, see if he wanted to, like, do anything this weekend, you know? She and Millie and Suze were going to, like, hang out at the Heritage, okay, and if he wanted to come, well, you know, whatever. Myron smiled. Times they might be a-changin’, but her words could have come from a girl Myron had gone to high school with or his father or his father’s father. Generations cycle in. The music, the movies, the language, the fashion—they change. But that’s just outside stimuli. Beneath the baggy pants or the message-cropped hair, the same adolescent fears and needs and feelings of inadequacy remained frighteningly constant.

The last call was from a guy named Glen. He wanted to know if Chad wanted to play golf at “the Pine” this weekend, being that Merion was off-limits because of the Open. “Daddy,” Glen’s preppy taped voice assured Chad, “can get us a tee time, no prob.”

No messages from Chad’s close buddy Matthew Squires.

He snapped on the computer. Windows 95. Cool. Myron used it too. Chad Coldren, Myron immediately saw, used America Online to get his E-mail. Perfect. Myron hit FLASHSESSION. The modem hooked on and screeched for a few seconds. A voice said, “Welcome. You have mail.” Dozens of messages were automatically downloaded. The same voice said, “Good-bye.” Myron checked Chad’s E-mail address book and found Matthew Squires’s E-mail address. He skimmed the downloaded messages. None were from Matthew.

Interesting.

It was, of course, entirely possible that Matthew and Chad were not as close as Linda Coldren thought. It was also entirely possible that even if they were, Matthew had not contacted his friend since Wednesday—even though his friend had supposedly vanished without warning. It happens.

Still, it was interesting.

Myron picked up Chad’s phone and hit the redial button. Four rings later a taped voice came on. “You’ve reached Matthew. Leave a message or don’t. Up to you.”

Myron hung up without leaving a message (it was, after all, “up to him”). Hmm. Chad’s last call was to Matthew. That could be significant. Or it could have nothing to do with anything. Either way, Myron was quickly getting nowhere.

He picked up Chad’s phone and dialed his office. Esperanza answered on the second ring.

“MB SportsReps.”

“It’s me.” He filled her in. She listened without interrupting.

Esperanza Diaz had worked for MB SportReps since its inception. Ten years ago, when Esperanza was only eighteen years old, she was the Queen of Sunday Morning Cable TV. No, she wasn’t on any infomercial, though her show ran opposite plenty of them, especially that one with the abdominal exerciser that bore a striking resemblance to a medieval instrument of torture; rather, Esperanza had been a professional wrestler named Little Pocahontas, the Sensual Indian Princess. With her petite, lithe figure bedecked in only a suede bikini, Esperanza had been voted FLOW’s (Fabulous Ladies Of Wrestling) most popular wrestler three years running—or, as the award was officially known, the Babe You’d Most Like to Get in a Full Nelson. Despite this, Esperanza remained humble.

When he finished telling her about the kidnapping, Esperanza’s first words were an incredulous, “Win has a mother?”

“Yep.”

Pause. “There goes my spawned-from-a-satanic-egg theory.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Or my hatched-in-an-experiment-gone-very-wrong theory.”

“You’re not helping.”

“What’s to help?” Esperanza replied. “I like Win, you know that. But the boy is—what’s the official psychiatric term again?—cuckoo.”

“That cuckoo saved your life once,” Myron said.

“Yeah, but you remember how,” she countered.

Myron did. A dark alley. Win’s doctored bullets. Brain matter tossed about like parade confetti. Classic Win. Effective but excessive. Like squashing a bug with a wrecking ball.

Esperanza broke the long silence. “Like I said before,” she began softly, “cuckoo.”

Myron wanted to change the subject. “Any messages?”