“What?”
“Just called you out of the blue for a night out? Please.”
“Look, Myron, why are you asking me these questions? Why don’t you ask your brother where she is?”
Silence.
“Ah,” Lex said, “I see. So you’re doing this for your bro?”
“No.”
“You know I love to wax philosophical, right?”
“I do.”
“Here is a simple one: Relationships are complicated. Especially matters of the heart. You have to let people work their own stuff out.”
“Where is she, Lex?”
“I told you. I don’t know.”
“Did you ask her about Brad?”
“Her husband?” Lex frowned. “Now it’s my turn to say, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ”
Myron handed him a copy of the still frame he’d gotten off the security camera of the ponytailed guy. “Kitty was with this guy at the club. Do you know him?”
Lex took a look at it and shook his head. “Nope.”
“He was part of your entourage.”
“No,” Lex said, “he wasn’t.” He sighed, picked up a cocktail napkin, started tearing it into strips.
“Tell me what happened, Lex.”
“Nothing happened. I mean, not really.” Lex looked toward the bar. A pudgy man in a fitted golf shirt was chatting up one of the au pairs. Tears for Fears’s “Shout” was on and literally everyone else in the bar yelled “Shout” at the appropriate time. The guys who’d been snapping on the dance floor still snapped.
Myron waited, gave Lex space.
“Look, Kitty called me,” Lex said. “She said she needed to talk. She sounded pretty desperate. You know we go way back. You remember those days, right?”
There had been a time when the rock gods partied with the tennis starlets. Myron had been there for part of it, fresh out of law school and seeking clients for his start-up agency. So had his younger brother, Brad, enjoying the summer before his freshman year of college by “interning” for his big bro. That summer had started off with such promise. It ended with the love of his life breaking his heart—and Brad gone from his life for good.
“I remember,” Myron said.
“So anyway I figured that Kitty just wanted to say hi. For old times’ sake. I always felt bad for her, you know, the whole career gone up in flames like that. I guess I was curious too. It’s been, what, fifteen years since she quit.”
“Something like that.”
“So Kitty meets up with us at the nightclub, and right away I know something isn’t right.”
“In what way?”
“She has a bad case of the shakes. Her eyes are glazed, and man, I know strung out when I see it. I stopped using a long time ago. Suzze and me, we went through that war already. Kitty, no offense, but she was still using. She hadn’t come to me to say hello. She came to me to score. When I told her I wasn’t into that scene, she asked for money. I told her no on that too. So she moved on.”
“Moved on?”
“Yep.”
“What do you mean, moved on?”
“What part is hard to understand, man? It’s a simple equation. Kitty is a junkie—and we wouldn’t give her a fix. Ergo, she hooked up with someone who could, uh, help her out.”
Myron held up the photo of Ponytail. “This guy?”
“I guess.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing.”
“You said Kitty was an old friend.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you didn’t think to try to help her?”
“Help her how?” Lex said, turning his palms to the sky. “Like, organize an intervention right there in the nightclub? Like, drag her by force to rehab?”
Myron said nothing.
“You don’t know junkies.”
“I remember when you were one,” Myron said. “I remember when you and Gabriel were throwing all your cash at blow and blackjack.”
“Blow and blackjack. I like that.” Lex smiled. “So how come you never helped us out?”
“Maybe I should have.”
“Nah, you couldn’t have helped. A man has to find his own way.”
Myron wondered about that. He wondered about Alista Snow, whether earlier intervention with Gabriel Wire could have helped her out. He almost said that, but what would be the point?
“You keep wanting to fix things,” Lex said, “but the world has a certain ebb and flow. You screw with it, you just make it worse. It isn’t always your fight, Myron. Do you mind if I give you a quick example from, well, from your past?”
“I guess not,” Myron said, regretting the words the moment they passed his lips.
“When I first met you all those years ago, you had a serious girlfriend, right? Jessica something. The writer.”
The regret started taking shape and expanding.
“And something bad happened between you. I don’t know what. Here you were, what, twenty-four, twenty-five years old?”
“What’s your point, Lex?”
“I was a huge basketball fan, so I knew your whole story. First-round draft pick of the Boston Celtics. Supposed to be the next big superstar, all the planets aligned, and then, bam, you wreck your knee in a preseason game. Career over, just like that.”
Myron made a face. “Uh, your point?”
“Just listen a second, okay? So you go to Harvard Law and then you come down to Nick’s tennis camp to recruit these tennis players. You had no chance against the big guys like IMG and TruPro. I mean, who are you? You’re barely out of school. But you land Kitty, the top prospect, and then when she quits the game, you get Suzze. You know how you did that?”
“I really don’t see the relevance.”
“Just stay with me a moment. Do you know how?”
“I made a good pitch, I guess.”
“No. You landed them the same way you landed me when I heard you were branching out of sports. There’s a decency to you, Myron. A person senses it right away. Yeah, you give good meeting and let’s face it, having Win as your financial guy gives you a big head start. But what separates you is that we know you care. We know you’d rescue us if we were in trouble. We know you’d rather lose a limb than steal a nickel from us.”
“With all due respect,” Myron said, “I still don’t see your point.”
“So when Suzze calls you because we’ve had a tiff, you come running. That’s your job. You’re hired to do that. But unless a person is hired, well, I have a different philosophy: Things ripple.”