Size 12 and Ready to Rock

“Black belt,” I hear him call from the basement, where I’m not surprised to learn he stores the gun safe. It explains why I never noticed it. I try never to go into the basement. Why would I? It’s where Cooper keeps all his sporting equipment, such as his golf clubs, ten-speed, basketballs, racquetballs, and also, apparently, his gun collection. Plus, it’s where all the spiders are.

When I come back downstairs, having changed into my “relaxing clothes”—oversize sweats and a large T-shirt left over from the Sugar Rush tour—I have to deal with Lucy, who seems to be able to sense how unnerved I am . . . or maybe it’s the steak I consumed at the Cartwrights’ . . . or possibly it’s the lingering scent of Tania’s dog, Baby. In any case, she’s all over me, wanting to crawl into my lap the way Baby had, but Lucy isn’t a Chihuahua, so this isn’t practical. I have to give her a rawhide bone, with which she quickly disappears through her dog door. Lucy always buries her toys . . . for what purpose I’ll have to take a course in doggie psychology to learn.

“Here,” Cooper says, placing a scotch on the rocks in front of my chair at the kitchen table. “It’s not a pink greyhound, but at least it’s not Drambuie, and it’s the best I can do on short notice. Don’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” I say, sitting down and lifting the drink. “I hate secrets. They always come out, and then they ruin everything.”

“Well,” he says, “you know mine now. Tell me yours.”

The fumes from the whiskey make me feel a little sick. I realize what I want is milk and cookies, because everything I’ve heard tonight makes me long to revert back to my childhood—the one I never actually got to have. I put down the glass.

“My secret seems stupid now,” I say, “compared to Tania’s. She’s got the secret that ended up getting Jared Greenberg killed.”

“I’m sure your secret isn’t stupid,” Cooper says, sitting down across from me. “But tell me what Tania said.”

And so, beneath the large, greenhouse-like windows facing the back of Fischer Hall, in which I can see a few lights blazing, I tell him everything Tania told me, even though she’d made me promise never to repeat a single word . . .

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past year, it’s that some promises are better off broken. The one I made to Tania is one of them.

“How could Tania Trace have married her high school choir teacher,” Cooper asks in disbelief when I’m through, “and that story isn’t plastered all over the Internet?”

“Well, maybe for one thing,” I say, dunking an Oreo into the glass of two-percent milk in front of me, “because she was paying him ten grand a month to keep his mouth shut about it.”

“Ten grand a month?” Cooper nearly spits out the sip of coffee he’s just taken. Cooper’s got his laptop in front of him. Midway through my tale, he went to his office to get it so he could double-check facts relating to the story as I related them. “Sorry,” he says, dabbing at the screen with a napkin. “Didn’t mean to be sexist. I’ve got male clients who pay four to five times that much in alimony to their ex-wives. But ten grand a month to her high school choir teacher?”

“She can afford it,” I say with a shrug. “She’s got the number-one hit single in the country . . . and unlike me when I was in her shoes, she actually wrote the song. She’ll be earning residuals on it forever. But what judge in his—or her—right mind would award alimony in any amount to a creep like Gary Hall?”

“No judge would want to,” Cooper says, “if they knew the whole story. But if Tania filed for a no-fault divorce, they’d have to. In New York State, unlike Florida and California, you still have the choice—no-fault or with cause. That’s how I make the bulk of my living—clients who choose to divorce with grounds and need evidence of their spouse’s adultery, or cruel and inhuman treatment, in order to make their case. Clearly, Tania chose not to go that route in court. It sounds like she’s still in pretty deep denial about her marriage.”

“She’s in pretty deep denial about everything,” I say bitterly. “She really thought if she paid the creep, he’d keep quiet about the whole thing. And for a long time it worked. Until he found out she was marrying Jordan and having his baby. Then—like any enterprising sleazeball—he decided to up the ante and said he wanted twenty thousand a month or he’d go to the press. And that’s when Tania finally got a spine and said no. She even started writing those kiss-off anthems—”

“Kiss-off anthems?” Cooper looks confused.

“Like ‘So Sue Me,’ ” I explain, peeling open an Oreo and scraping the filling out with my finger. “Apparently that’s exactly what she told Gary to do . . . sue her if he wanted more money. He got mad and said she owed him because he was her manager when she was first starting out and he made her what she is today, blah blah blah.”

“Jesus,” Cooper says. “I am really starting to dislike this guy.”

“Welcome to the club,” I say. “He must not think he has much of a case, though, because instead of going to court, he’s been e-mailing her—if she doesn’t pay what she owes him, she’ll get what she deserves, that kind of thing.”

“He’s good,” Cooper says with grudging admiration. “There’s no explicit threat of violence there, so nothing she can take to the police to get a cease and desist or a restraining order—and that would be if she wanted to risk letting any of this become public information, which of course she doesn’t. How old is this guy?”

“Only forty,” I say. “That’s how Tania put it. At least he was only forty when they started going out. But she says Gary—I mean, Mr. Hall—and she never ‘messed around’ until she was eighteen. That’s the age of consent in Florida, where she’s from. She says he was real careful about that.”

“Oh,” Cooper says with a snort, beginning to type on his laptop’s keyboard. “I’m sure he was. Real careful. He sounds like a pro.”

I’d been fairly certain at that point in my conversation with Tania that I was going to vomit all the steak and mashed potatoes I’d eaten. But somehow I’d managed to keep them down.