Free The Blood Red Indian Summer by David Handler Page B

hurt.”
    “I’m serious, Mitch. Do you believe him?”
    “No, I don’t. I believe he’s spinning the truth about what happened so that he can live with himself. ‘This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’” On her blank stare, he explained, “That’s from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , a very good picture John Ford made toward the end of his career. Lee Marvin slays in it.”
    “Do you realize that sometimes I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
    “But sometimes you do. How cool is that?”
    “Justy and Bob Paffin persuaded me to pay a ‘courtesy’ call on our newest, blackest resident this morning.”
    “Oh, yeah? What’s Da Beast really like?”
    “There’s no short answer to that. He’s bright, self-aware and intuitive. He has a sense of humor. But he can go rage monster almost instantly—and then thirty seconds later be totally calm again.”
    “Are we talking steroids here?”
    “Real? I have no idea. I just know it’s hard to tell who Tyrone Grantham is from one minute to the next. Maybe that’s how Tyrone likes it. He dictates the flow by keeping the people around him off balance. He has an extended family staying there. Some very decent people. His younger brother, Rondell, has an MBA from Wharton. His wife, Jamella, is nobody’s fool. And her kid sister, Kinitra, has a set of pipes on her like you wouldn’t believe. The girl’s a major singing talent. But I ran a check on his cousin Clarence, who fancies himself a recording engineer, and it turns out he got kicked out of Clemson for stealing stereos from dorm rooms. Not only lost his basketball scholarship but got sentenced to a hundred hours of community service plus a year of probation. And the girls’ father, Calvin, has spent half of his adult life in lock-up down in Houston. You name it, Calvin’s done it—car theft, armed assault, pimping, dealing. It was the girls’ mother who raised them. She worked as a cashier at a Walmart. Got shot to death in the parking lot two years ago. The shooter was never apprehended. And the girls have been on their own ever since. When Jamella took up with the famous Tyrone Grantham, Calvin suddenly resurfaced. Tyrone’s letting him stay there with them, but he’s a punk, as the boys’ mother, Chantal, so eloquently put it. And she would know. Back home in South Central L.A. she was picked up a gazillion times for prostitution and drug possession.”
    The sky was turning from pink to violet. The darkness came fast this late in the year.
    “Stewart Plotka was out front trying to drum up publicity for his lawsuit,” Des went on as they started back toward Mitch’s cottage. “Just for the hell of it I phoned the Nassau County P.D. detective who investigated that Dave & Buster’s fracas. He told me they declined to pursue criminal charges against Tyrone because the waitresses and customers all backed up what Tyrone and Jamella said—which was that Plotka approached their table and started shouting and screaming at Tyrone. When Tyrone stood up, Plotka went into a tizzy and tripped over a chair. Plotka claims he broke his eyeglasses when he fell and suffered severe eye and hand injuries. But no one saw that happen. No ambulance was called to the scene. And Plotka’s ‘doctor’ lost his license to practice medicine in the state of New York five years ago. What he has is a license to practice chiropractic medicine in Nevada. Where I could get a license to practice. The Nassau P.D. detective thinks the man’s just looking for a payday. That lawyer of his, Andrea Halperin, is famous for squeezing go-away money out of celebrities.”
    “You’re saying Plotka’s a creep who has no case and yet the NFL suspended Tyrone Grantham anyway. They were just looking for an excuse, weren’t they?”
    Des nodded. “They’re tired of his act.”
    “So am I. When I was growing up in New York City in the eighties, I had three huge sports heroes—Dwight Gooden,