The Star Quarterback

“My girlfriend is missing,” he said. He was less than half my age, a senior at Shenendehowa High School in the Albany suburb of Clifton Park. He was the quarterback of the high school football team, a good-looking kid with an easy smile and a build, a face, and a manor that could melt any girl’s heart.

As a junior, Gil Harmon had signed a letter of intent to play at Syracuse. When they went 1-10-1 and fired their coach, he tore up the letter and enrolled at the University of Southern California, a perennial contender. The high school All-America status USA Today had bestowed on him hadn’t hurt matters any in that regard. The local media covered him as if he were a rock star, which he might eventually be.

Now, he was sitting in my client chair, angry, but poised. And he was showing the demeanor I suspected he used when he marched his team down the field for a score.

“No offense, but girls in high school are notoriously fickle. She might have decided her true love was a member of the A-V club or the math league.”

Gil looked like an All-American. He wore perfectly tailored Levis and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A pair of sunglasses dangled from the button hole in the pocket. His sneakers probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. His hair was jet black, close cropped, and perfect. If I were twenty years younger and gay, I’d be stammering. If he made it to the NFL, he’d make more in endorsement than he would playing.

“I’m not some idiot kid who won’t acknowledge a broken heart. She’s missing.”

“Talk to the cops.”

He held my eyes in a long stare without saying anything. From his age, I’d have expected an eye roll and more overt anger and a dismissive attitude. Instead he nodded

“They won’t listen. Her mom and step-dad don’t seem to think there’s a problem.”

“Why?”

For the first time since he entered my office, Gil’s veneer of confident assurance turned transparent. He looked away from me and slid his palms up and down the thighs of his perfect jeans.

“She’s pregnant.”

Not exactly a surprise. Aside from the thrill of victory and the allure of lots of money in a professional future, young men play sports to gain the attention of young women. And when they get that attention, it’s no mystery what comes next.

“You the daddy?”

He nodded, but still didn’t meet my gaze.

“Parents pissed off about it?”

“Yeah.” His voice was small now and he snorted a humorless laugh. “Her mom’s a little absolute, religiously. Rebecca likes the oldies station and when they played Only the Good Die Young, she went on and on about how much her mom hates that song because it demeans Catholics.”

“Mom’s a Catholic.”

“Her mom’s more Catholic than the Virgin Mary.” He looked me in the eye again, but without any hint of bravado. This was important to him, and though his emotions were strong, he held them in check.

I liked him. If he didn’t listen to people tell him how God-like he was, he might do well. I glanced at the picture he gave me. Rebecca McGraw—that was her name—was a pretty girl with full lips, eyes the size of a bushel basket, a healthy smattering of freckles, and red hair that seemed radiant. I could see what he saw in her. She wasn’t especially pretty or hot, but she was attractive. Her smile and the mischief in her eyes made her that way. He told me she was seventeen.

“You understand you absolutely no legal standing here,” I said. “Even if I find her, you can’t bring her home. I can’t even guarantee that you’ll be able talk to her.”

He nodded. “My dad’s lawyer told me as much. He thinks it’s a waste of money to hire you.”

I didn’t know his dad’s attorney, but I didn’t think much of someone who would dismiss me out of hand that way, even if he was right.

“Speaking of money.”

He pulled a check from his wallet and set it on the front of my desk. His name was at the top of the check, which was number 2862. My name was already entered, as was the date and Gil’s signature. The only thing missing was the amount. Usually I bill ahead of time for five days. If I can take care of my client in less than that, I return the difference.

He didn’t blink when I told him the amount. He wrote it in the right spots, then tore the check out and slid the check across the table to me.

“No offense, but we need to be sure your father and his attorney aren’t going to stop payment on the check.”

“I drove here in a blue BMW convertible that I hold the title to. I have about three-quarters of a million dollars in the various investments that I manage. If I never pay a down of professional football, I’ll be a millionaire before I graduate college.”

I smiled back at him and slid the check into the top drawer of my desk. “I’m still going to check.”
“I expect you to.” He got up and walked to the door, then turned back toward me. “I bank at HSBC. I’ll call the branch manager and have him call you to verify everything.”

“The bank manager’s name wouldn’t be Abe Frohman, would it?”

“Huh?”

“Old-person joke. I’ll call you later today.”

He pulled out a Blackberry and wiggled it between us. “Call on the cell, if you would.”

“Of course.”



The little bastard checked out, so the romantic four-day weekend I had planned with Lindsey was off. She hid her disappointment well.

“We just got married,” she said. “We spent a week on a cruise during which we had more sex than I had in my entire first marriage. I think I’ll get missing the weekend. Besides, I have to write thank you notes, and so do you.”

I growled a little and she laughed. Lindsey Martin Black was a five-foot-ten-inch woman with light brown hair, blue eyes, small breasts, and hips that were a bit wider than they’d been almost a decade earlier when she turned thirty—or so she said. To me, she was the sexiest, most attractive woman ever born. She was a narcotic to me, an addiction so strong I wanted to immerse myself in it every time I saw her. Even if she was wearing baggy, amorphous sweats and an oversized t-shirt.

“We could go in the other room for—you know—a mini-vacation.”

“Yeah, mini is right,” she said. She got up from the kitchen table, where she’d made a small dent in the list of people she had to thank. “But, I suppose if you have to work, I could give you something to sustain you through the difficult days ahead.”

If I’d died the second I saw her smile, I’d have lived enough, as dopey as that sounds.



When we finished, I set to work.

Any attempts to talk to Rebecca’s friends would be wasted. Gil had agreed on that. If they would talk, they’d talk to him, not to some creepy old detective guy. She went to youth group on Wednesday nights, which happened to be tonight, so I drove to her church and sat across the street with a pair of binoculars.

I put the Mets on the radio and sipped at the decaf I picked up on the way and watched the building while the teens sat inside and learned about Jesus. I wondered if it felt odd to learn about Jesus while you were a pregnant seventeen-year-old.

When youth group let out, she walked out with a group of other girls. She was nearly six feet tall. The style among the high school girls evolved to jeans and layers of muted colored shirts that hugged their upper bodies at least as tight as their boyfriends did. When I went to high school, they didn’t make girls with bodies like hers.

“Geez,” I said to myself. She had all the right curves in all the right places and in spite of myself, I pictured what she might look like without clothes on. “Perverted bastard.”

Most of the girls she came out with got into their own cars or cars with waiting parents and drove away. Rebecca didn’t. She stood apart from the other girls and waited. Eventually, she was the only one left. She toed the curb and glanced at her watch a couple times. No one else came out.

I decided to drive across the street and introduce myself. When I got out of the car, two spots away from her, she barely noticed me.

“Rebecca?”

She looked up and fear exploded in her eyes. She took two giant steps toward the church door.

“My name is Shane Black. I’m a private investigator.”

She took two more steps and reached for the handle. When she turned, I could see she was starting to show, even with the loose-fitting shirt.

“Gil hired me.”

She brought her hands to her mouth and stepped back half a step, then forward. Even in the gathering darkness, her eyes grew with curiosity and concern. “Gil?” she said. “How…how is he?”

“He hired me to find out what’s going on. He hasn’t seen you or heard from you and he’s worried.”

She dropped her hands about six inches and bit her lower lip. “What about the baby?”

“He wants the baby. He wants you to go with him to California with him.”

She stepped back and her head jerked rapidly right to left. “No, no, that’s not going to work. I can’t go with him. I just can’t. I’m…tell him I’m sorry.”

“I think he’d like to hear it from you.”

“No. I need to go. Inside. I need to go inside. Please.” She didn’t turn as she stepped backwards, but when her back hit the glass panel next to the door, she spun around and ran inside.

“So much for plan A.”



“You must not have told her right,” Gil said.

We met at Friendly’s ice cream. He ate a Jim Dandy sundae. I had a cup of coffee. I remembered Jim Dandy sundaes well from when I was his age. They’re fishbowls full of ice cream with a banana added for nutritional purposes. I salivated the entire time and had to restrain myself from asking him what it tasted like.

“I told her everything you said. I’ve been doing this for a while.”

He took a bite and stared of into the infinite space just beyond my left shoulder. Behind the counter was a waitress who filled out her Friendly’s outfit very nicely. I noticed it when I came in, part of my efforts to be ever vigilant. He didn’t glance at her once.

“Did she tell you why she was saying no?”

I shrugged. “That’s just it. She didn’t actually say no. She said she had to go in. She seemed very fearful.”

He shook his head and squinted slightly, as if he were working on a difficult trig problem that just wouldn’t come. “I don’t get it.”

I held back my urge to tell him to get used to it. Living beyond childhood means you don’t get a lot of things. The world is too big and complex to get it all.

“I hate to ask you this, but what if she doesn’t love you?”

“I thought of that. If that’s the case, that’s how it is. I can’t make her love me. But before I give up on it, I want her to tell me, or at least tell you that she doesn’t love me.”

I nodded and drained my coffee. “That seems reasonable.”



Lindsey wanted me to pick up some ground turkey, which she’d taken to using for hamburgers, wheat rolls, and some fresh asparagus from Price Chopper on the way home. When I called her I moaned about having to drink coffee while Gil attacked a giant bowl of ice cream, only to have to go home to eat stuff that’s good for me.

“Was it decaf?”

“Yes, dear,” I said.

“You yes dear me again, and there’ll be no dessert.”

Dessert, in Lindsey-speak, could be anything from a big Boston Cream pie, to a trip back to Friendly’s, to some quality together time, depending on her mood.

“Yes, dear.” Being a smart ass is greater than any of those things, and I might get dessert anyway.

I got everything she wanted at the store, plus a six-pack of Cherry Coke Zero, and found a surprise waiting for me when I got back to my car.

Three guys stood there, looking like linebackers—linebackers who’d been away from the game for a couple decades.

“Hi guys.”

“What you’re working on, stop,” the lead guy said. He was maybe forty and probably twenty-five pounds north of scary looking. He was probably a construction worker or something, someone used to seeming tough. And with two of his tough buddies with him, he should have no problems. Or so he figured.

“I’m working on bringing home groceries for dinner right now. I’d stop, but my wife hinted I might have sex if I brought them straightaway. You know how that is,” I said. “Or, looking at you, maybe you don’t.”

He bared his teeth and his friends stepped forward but stood behind him. Normally, I don’t like to draw my weapon in the parking lot of a Price Chopper, but as out of shape as these guys were, there were three of them and they could get lucky.

I opened my jacket and let them see my gun. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re talking about. If you try to screw with me, I will shoot your kneecaps off.”

The two guys behind the leader stepped back, but he didn’t budge. Then they turned and started to walk away. “Dwight, are you coming?”

Dwight shook his head. But now he was alone. And people were starting to notice the two of us standing in the parking lot staring at each other like a couple idiots.

“What is it I’m working on that you want me to stay away from?” It was an honest question. The only thing I was working on was Gil’s thing and I didn’t figure to get mini-thugs warning me about it.

“Stay away from Rebecca. You’ve been warned.”

“Okay.”

He stood still for a few seconds, then turned and left. I watched him walk directly to his car, a white Ford F150 with a vanity plate, and drive off.

“Frigging amateur.”



While Lindsey made dinner, I found out that Dwight’s last name was McGraw and he owned a general contracting firm. The last name seemed like a clue, so I dug some more. His brother’s name was Andy McGraw. I called Gil.

“What’s Rebecca’s dad’s name?”

“Geez, I don’t know,” he said.

“You love her and want her to follow you to California, but you don’t know her dad’s name?”

He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s…complicated. She’s not connected with her father. She lives with her mom and her new husband.”

“Come on, Gil, dig deep here. I need the help.”

“I dunno. Andy, I think.”

I smiled broadly, then as the implications of the connection sunk in, my smile faded. “Her father’s brother threatened me, told me to stay away from her. What aren’t you telling me, Gil?”

He said nothing.

“Come on, dude. Whatever it is, it’s going to come out anyway.”

“The baby’s not mine,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s not mine. The timing is wrong.”

I rubbed my forehead. People are messy, and that’s good, or I wouldn’t have a means to make money. On the other hand, people are messy, and it can drive you nuts to try to keep up. Either he was lying to me, in which case, he wasn’t what he seemed. Or he was telling the truth, in which case, he wanted a woman who’d cheated on him to move to California with him.

“You understand this makes no sense.”

“Yeah. What can I say? I love her.”

“She cheated on you. She diddled some guy and got pregnant.”

“No,” he said, almost before I finished my sentence. His voice had force and carried the conviction you hear when someone’s trying to convince themselves of something. “It’s not that way. She told me she didn’t cheat.”

“If she didn’t cheat and it’s not yours…is the Holy Spirit the father?”

“I don’t know. She won’t talk to me about it.”

“Dude, she cheated on you. I know that’s hard, but it happens.”

He waited a couple seconds before answering. “No. She didn’t cheat. She’s not screwing some other guy.”

“Why won’t she see you, then?”

“I don’t know.”



Andy McGraw was an accountant who works out of a converted house on route 9 about three miles north of the intersection with route 146. The next morning, I sat in the Hess Mart across the street, enjoying caffeinated coffee and a whole-wheat bagel, while he got out of his Hummer H2 and entered the building. Another car, a late-model Accord with rust around the back wheel well, was already there when he pulled up at twenty after nine. Probably his secretary. Definitely not hired security. I slid on my jacket over my shoulder rig and pulled across the road to park next to the Accord.

I walked in and past the fifty-something woman behind the desk in what used to be a living room. She yelled something about my not being able to do that as I walked past her into the former bedroom that looked like the largest office, the one that had a laptop on the desk, and pushed the door shut. Andy entered from what used to be the master bathroom. He was a small man, maybe five-six and about as imposing as a bundle of pipe-cleaners.

“Can I help you?” His voice contained an edge that could be either anger or fear.

I flopped down in one of the client chairs in front of his large mahogany desk—a far cry from the Sam’s Club particle-board special in the reception area. My jacket fell open and the butt of my gun came into view. I hate when that happens.

“Tell your brother Dwight that if he ever tries to scare me again, I’ll give him a nine-millimeter castration.” I’ve always wanted to say something like that and make it sound arrogant and scary. My presentation rather pleased me and I let it show.

Andy walked past me and closed the door.

“Is anything wrong, Mr. McGraw?” the woman asked through the door.

“No, Helen, it’s fine.”

When Andy McGraw sat down behind his desk, he looked pale. He stared at me without saying anything, then bolted from his chair. I thought he might be fleeing, but he ducked into the master bathroom and vomited. I glanced in to make sure there wasn’t another exit to the room. There wasn’t. This was the master’s bathroom, dammit, and no one else should use it.
When he returned, flushed and gasping, I held out a tin of Altoids. He shook his head.

“Thanks anyway,” he said.

He fell into his chair behind the desk and we stared at each other. I had time to wait for him to say or do something. Several possibilities swirled in my head, but I wanted him to take the first step.

“What do you want?”

“I want to know why your daughter can’t be with the man she loves.”

“Maybe she doesn’t love him,” he said.

I shook my head. “I talked to her last night. I saw it in her eyes when she asked how he was.”

Andy said nothing.

“Gil says he doesn’t think she cheated on him,” I said. “She’s pregnant and he says it’s not his. What do you think?”

He’d been staring at his desk while I spoke, and now he looked up and I saw hope in his eyes. “I think he’s a liar.”

“’Course a paternity test can confirm that. Or we could ask your daughter who the daddy is.”

He nodded and the hope drained from his face. “I have an appointment,” he said. “It’s at ten and I need to get ready for it.”

I smiled at him. “Then you need to come to terms with this first, because I’m not leaving. And I expect the State Accounting Board, or whatever you call it, would be interested in accountants who hire muscle to threaten people.”

He nodded. “You aren’t going to give me a way out of this, are you?”

“Without knowing what this is, I don’t see how I can.”

For a string-bean of an accountant, he was quick. Before I could react, he had the drawer open. At the flash of steel, I reached under my armpit, knowing I was too late. I didn’t expect him to reach into his desk for a gun, and now I’d pay for it. Everything slowed down and the world diminished to him and me and this room. For some reason, I noticed a rusty swingset in the backyard, framed perfectly by the window behind him.

I was doing okay reaching for and grabbing my gun, but the change of direction to pull it out seemed to take years. It was halfway out, pointed at the side wall a little more than halfway between us when I realized I needn’t worry. He put the gun to his temple.

“No!”

I was still screaming when the side of his head exploded, spraying what used to be his brain on the wall. He slumped over the side of his chair and the gun made a dull thud as it fell to the ground.

When Helen entered, she had a gun drawn on me. “Don’t move,” she said. Expertly, she disarmed me—not that I was going to put up a fight—and checked my gun to see if it had been fired.

“Son of a bitch,” she said and she kicked the desk.

“He killed himself.”

“I know,” she said. She didn’t seem happy about it.



Andy McGraw didn’t impregnate Rebecca. What he did was worse. He took her to Lake Placid, where three men from New York City had sex with her. Andy didn’t get any money out of it. He didn’t even get the payment he was promised.

Andy trafficked in pornography for adults who preferred Hillary Duff to Angelina Jolie. Apparently, he was prolific, but not very careful. Helen turned out to be a state investigator, a woman who knew Lindsey from work. She was working undercover as his secretary.
Andy was getting ready for a meeting with the guy who’d blackmailed him into providing his daughter for the meeting. Only it turned out, she wasn’t really his daughter. She was born to a man his then-wife—the really Catholic one—had an affair with.

I was figuring out whether I really wanted to cash Gil’s check when he walked into my office. He didn’t knock, but then he hadn’t the first time. Even in jeans and a Yankees t-shirt, he strode across the office floor with the self-assurance of a quarterback assessing the opposing defense. It wasn’t confidence born of bravado. He’d done it hundreds of time before and would do it hundreds of times again. He glanced around my office, then sat in one of the client chairs.

“How’s Rebecca?”

He shrugged. “Not pregnant any more. Not speaking to her mom any more.”

“Her Catholic mom?”

He shrugged again. “It’s hard.”

I figured he was talking about the mom, or maybe about everything.

“Rebecca’s different, you know. It’s like she needs to learn to trust me all over again.”

“She was raped and the man she thought was her father set it up. Then she got pregnant.”

He nodded. “He’d done it before, you know…rented her out. When she was smaller and she’d go over for the weekend. Her mom never knew. She told me last week. Her mother was kind of promiscuous as a kid and when she found Jesus…she overcorrected.”

We fell into silence.

“Gonna be hard to rebuild her trust from California,” I said.

“Yeah, well…” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I’ll wind up going to SC. They’re going to red shirt me this year, and we’ll see how it goes. If she’s still having problems—if she wants me around, I’ll transfer to Syracuse. If I time it right, I won’t have to sit out a year.”

“SC is a rocket-sled to the pros. Syracuse isn’t.”

“Did you see the car I drive?” he said.

I’d seen it. It cost more than my last four cars put together, most likely. But when he spoke of it, his words didn’t carry an aftertaste of arrogance or privilege.

“I’d love to play pro football. I think it would be fun. But it’s not like getting to the pros is assured, and it’s not like I need to make the pros to get out of a bad situation. I’d rather have her.”

I nodded. “You think she can handle your giving up pro football for her?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. She’s got a lot of work to do. Her father…he didn’t even stick around for her to get angry at him for what he did.”

The room fell silent. Periodically, we looked up at each other.

“I blew it, you know,” I said. “He was the key to a lot of very bad people. That cop working as his secretary was taking down names. When he shot himself, that turned everything off.”

For the first time, I saw him lose him composure. He bolted from his seat, his fists balled. The façade of control melted. This wasn’t a defense he had to drive against with two minutes and no time outs. It wasn’t a calculus problem to solve or a scout to impress. He couldn’t fix this. He had to let it be fixed, or not. And it was driving him to places I suspected he hadn’t been.

“He treated my…Rebecca like a whore. She’s everything. She’s all I want. And he might have wrecked her.”

He paced around the office for a couple minutes. I watched him and didn’t say anything.

Eventually, he capped his anger and sat down again in the chair.

I nodded. “Why’d you come see me?”

“To give you this,” he said. He dropped a bullet on the desk in front of me. It was shiny and unused, a golden .22 round. “She gave it to me last night. Before we…before we were intimate for the first time since…you know.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the bullet she was going to kill herself with. She’d been carrying it around with her. Her father—if that’s what you want to call him—told her I wouldn’t want anything to do with her once I found out. Her mom—her mom’s a mess and she just didn’t know what to do with this.”

I picked it up and cradled it in my hand.

“She was going to kill herself. She was going to leave school and drive up to Lake George. There’s a place we used to go and it looks out over the lake. She was going to get drunk and shoot herself in the head. And then she found out what you did and she changed her mind.”

I looked up from the bullet to the man sitting in my client chair, the one I’d thought was an over-privileged boy.

“We’re engaged. There’s no date. She has to deal with this first, but I’ll be there for her and we’ll get married.”

I thought about my forty years, and the time I’d wasted trying to deal with death and disappointment. And here stood a seventeen-year-old who seemed to have it all together. No doubt he’d screw some important things up; we all do. But I’d seen seventy-year-olds who didn’t understand what he did.

He chuckled. “Pete Carroll was pissed. Just pissed. Told me I was throwing away the most important opportunity in my life.”

“What did you say?”

He smiled broadly and looked down at the bullet on my desk. “I showed him that bullet and told him he was wrong.”

And then he left.

If Gil Harmon ever played professional football, even if it was with the hated Miami Dolphins, his team would be my team. I looked at the bullet some more, then opened my drawer and put it in. I’d save it there for a time when I couldn’t remember why I bothered to do this job.

Then I locked the office and called Lindsey and asked to meet her after work for a picnic.

Life is good when you’ve done something right.

Another Thanksgiving without Lindsey

Lindsey and I had only two Thanksgivings together. The last one was in 2004. She didn't have to work that day, so we got a bottle of wine and rented some sappy chick flick she wanted to see. I built a fire and we settled in to watch the movie. My goal was to have her undressed on the blanket in front of the fireplace before the movie was over. Instead, I fell asleep.

When the movie ended, she woke me up and we did what I had wanted to do anyway.

The next morning, we went to her mother's house. When Lindsey died, her mother Ev wrote me off. At the time, I thought she was family. We ate until we were gorged and then I napped on the recliner while Lindsey and her mom did the dishes.

To pay her back, I had to give her a full-body massage with lilac-scented lotion and watch another chick flick with her. In the end, it was worth the effort, because she was there.

She was shot twice in the chest in the parking lot of a Price Chopper on October 4, 2005. I still miss her.

Today, I'm sitting at a bar within walking distance of my apartment on the Dunedin causeway. My goal was to get loaded and stagger home. But I can't quite bring myself to get drunk. I wish I could.

Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. I hope yours is as good as mine used to be.