Me: I’m so freaked out and pissed at Coco Nash I could spit.
Me: Easy now.
Me: I have to confront her.
Me: Why? When?
Me: Now, goddamn it, today! What can I gain by waiting? I’ve got evidence, solid empirical evidence that she means harm to the greatest creature ever to tread ground. That’s why, for Christ’s sake. I almost caught her twice. Three times.
Me: Wait. I really think Genie should know. Let her decide what to do.
Me: What, are you crazy? She’s already said she doesn’t want to make a big thing out of this, she doesn’t want to stir up this kind of publicity, and for sure she doesn’t need the emotional turmoil that’d go with it. The fucking tournament starts tomorrow! It’s time!
Me: You’re acting rashly.
Me: Am I? Or am I simply taking appropriate measures to ensure my beloved’s welfare?
Me: Would you consider admitting that you’re doing this for purely selfish reasons? To win points with Genie? To impress her so that she’ll love you forever? To make up for the many inadequacies in your life?
Me: No, I would not.
Me: I thought not.
Me: Look, if she were in a burning building, would I stop and dither, or would I rush in?
Me: You’d rush in.
Me: I rest my case.
Me: And I rest mine.
This argument took so long I had to drive past the clubhouse and around again. Finally, I turned in.
The pro-am was wrapping up; there was to be a party and charity auction afterward. I stationed myself near the clubhouse and wondered how to get a private audience with Coco—just walk up to her and start talking? Slip her a note?
Player after player came in; Genie went by chatting with a couple of the British pros. After a while I asked a club official where Coco Nash was.
“I believe she’s inside already.”
“May I go in—just for a minute?”
“Are you a pro-am participant?”
“Yes, I am.”
“May I see your pass, then, please?”
“Oh, never mind.”
_____
So once again I found myself lurking late at night outside the house in Indian Wells, but this time I didn’t lurk long. After a brief reconnaissance, I strode up and rang the bell.
The Norwegian woman opened the door and stood there looking at me hostilely.
“Coco Nash, please.”
“Who are you?” Her face was a narrow wedge.
“Lillian Byrd.” I handed her my card. “She’s expecting me.”
“This is concerning?”
“She’s expecting me.”
She shut the door and I heard her throw the bolt. I waited.
Coco came to the door and stood with her hands braced behind her hips. She still had the bandage on her chin.
I said, “Do you recognize me?”
She looked me over, sizing me up. “It was dark,” she said. “Was it not?”
“Yes.” I sure didn’t need to size her up. She projected the same graceful athleticism Genie did, but she had an edge, an anger in her eyes that I’d seen in the eyes of kids in the projects in Detroit. Those kids’ eyes betrayed a baffled anger; Coco Nash’s anger, though, was knowing.
She said, “I want to talk to you, bitch.”
“Good, because I want to talk to you.”
I followed her through a fancy foyer to a fancy living room. We stood in deep pile carpet facing each other. The carpet was Air Force blue; I saw a grand piano in a large room beyond. No one else was there.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“My name is Lillian Byrd, and I’m a friend of Genie Maychild.”
“Why are you spying on me?”
“Why are you bothering Genie?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Somehow I knew you’d say that. You know what.”
“Suck my dick! What do you want?”
“I want you to leave her alone. You’d have to kill her to stop her, do you know that?”
“Kill her!” She lunged for me, but I sidestepped fast. I could have tripped her, but I’d made up my mind not to hurt her, no matter what. She whirled and seized me in a hug and kicked my knees out. I went down backward, my head bouncing on the carpet. She sat on my stomach and pinned my arms over my head.
She was awesome to look up at, I’ll tell you. The cords in her neck were like cathedral columns.
And she was so frenzied that spittle flew as she said, “Now what the fuck are you talking about?”
“All right. You’ve tried to frighten her with threats. You’ve prowled around at night trying to scare or hurt her.” I tried to launch some spittle back. “Obviously, you’re obsessed with her. She’s your dream and your nightmare rolled into one. Anyone can understand that. And I’ve got evidence that you’re planning to execute her. You hauled it out to the desert last night to destroy it. I’ve got it!”
“Why do you say I want to kill her?”
“That picture! With the noose around her neck! You drew a noose around her neck! You want to lynch this white girl who’s in your way, you sick self-aggrandizing bitch! I’d call you something worse, but I’m too polite!”
My adversary arched her back, lifting her face to the ceiling. I didn’t know whether she was going to slam her forehead into my face, or bite off my nose, or what. I probably would’ve bitten my nose off if I’d been her.
Her hands were like iron bands around my forearms.
To show I wasn’t scared, I said, “Make it happen, bitch, whatever you’re going to do. I’m getting bored with this.”
She let out another shriek of the kind she’d let out the night before. Suddenly, her face was an inch from mine.
“I should kill your candy ass.”
I waited.
“You’re the biggest asshole I ever met,” she said.
“Eat me.”
“You eat me.”
“I would, if it’d make you leave Genie alone.”
She collapsed as if she’d been shot. All in an instant she released my arms and rolled off me, burying her face in her arms. I hoped maybe she was having a nervous breakdown. I sat up.
Pretty soon she sat up, too, and I saw she was laughing. “Oh,” she gasped, “Oh.” Her body shook.
No one had come in to check on us during this chaos.
“You are the stupidest bitch in the world,” said Coco Nash. “I mean to say, you are not bright.”
“That may be,” I acknowledged, not for the first time in my life. We looked at each other. “Something has changed here, hasn’t it?”
She closed her eyes, then slowly opened them. Something certainly had changed: All the hard, sly anger in them was gone. I realized she’d been afraid of me. And now she wasn’t.
Speaking for myself, I was shook up. I took a few deep breaths and rubbed my forearms, which were bruising already. A pack of cigarettes lay on a small table. They were Shermans, an expensive kind. I reached for them, found them temptingly fresh, and lit one with a butane table lighter fashioned in the shape of a penguin. Its mouth, or beak, flipped open to shoot the flame out.
“Butt me,” said the number-two lady golfer in the world.
“You smoke?”
“Kick me one, you jackass.”
“If you’re going to call me that, you’d better prove it.”
“Gladly.” Coco Nash smiled at me as if I’d dropped a bouquet of gardenias into her lap.
15
She made herself comfortable against a gold brocade couch, while I scooted to lean against a matching armchair. I practically wriggled with the pleasure of the relief I was feeling. She exhaled a stream of rich smoke and said, “Okay. Part of what you said is partly true. Obsessed with Genie Maychild? Not me. Not anymore. But I was.”
“I knew it!”
“Where is my box of gold fucking stars? Shut up. Yes. I thought she was God. She was God to me. When I was a kid, I collected a
ll that shit about her.”
“It goes up to pretty recently.”
“Shut up. I tried to be her. I memorized her every statistic, I watched every minute of her on television I could. When I met her, I was nineteen and playing in my first Open. When she shook my hand I almost fainted. I won the Amateur that year.”
“Like Tiger was with Jack.”
“H’h,” she spat, “that son of privilege. Do not compare me to him. Big daddy was there for him every step of the way—that boy had everything handed to him, even his dick when he needed to piss.”
“Except the wins.”
“H’h.”
“You came up the hard way, I know it.” To impress her I sent forth a series of small, very thick smoke rings. She watched carefully.
“Those are good,” she said, then hollered, “CARLENE!”
My ears were still ringing as the wedge-faced Norwegian came in.
Coco said, “Ashtray.”
Carlene opened a cabinet, took out a silver saucer, placed it on the coffee table between us, and left again.
“But you do not know about the way I came up,” Coco said. “My mama killed herself when I was ten. She drank Drano one day until her windpipe was gone and she could scream no more. I consider that the beginning of my blessed life. My granddaddy, he raised me up. He was a Gabriel in toe joints all around the South Coast.”
“I’m sorry about your mother. The Gulf Coast?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever pick up the horn yourself?”
“I did not. I see now that you are hep.”
“No, but I’m not so off the cob as you thought. I grew up in a gin mill in Motown.”
She laughed, a delighted squeal that was startlingly high pitched. “Off the cob! I have not heard that one in years!”
“How come you talk jazz cat from forever ago?”
Again she laughed.
I said, “How come you like to intimidate people? Part of your image?”
“Damn straight. You can believe it or not, but I grew up whacking rocks in a pasture with a stick.”
“Sure I believe it. There are plenty of things a little black girl can do.”
“I made my own way, just like Genie Maychild made her way. See? She was it. All the way up to last night, she was it for me. I dragged all that shit around to every tournament with me. I collected that shit for years.”
“Did you also collect the articles where you insulted her?”
“I insulted her?”
“Well, she says you did, in interviews all over the place. That she was old and couldn’t win anymore, and you were going to show the world who’s boss.”
“Oh.”
“Something like that.”
Coco’s mouth curved into a half smile. “She is speaking of the Sports Illustrated profile on me in which I said—and I am quoting myself verbatim—quote, Older players have experience on their side, but younger ones like myself have a passion for winning. We got the brio. That is an advantage, no matter what anybody else says. I intend to win often. I will be swinging those trophies around my head while everybody else is checking their tickets home. Unquote.”
“Oh.”
“I did not even mention Genie Maychild.”
“Oh.”
“She took it a little personal, did she not?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Look, I would not diss somebody like Genie Maychild. I would not diss anybody. People look for diss in what I say and do, and they find it. But not because it is there, dig?”
I certainly did.
“She was my ideal.”
“Her caddie’s not bad, either.”
“Yes, Peaches Oshinsky.”
“She told me she’s never lost a stroke, never taken a penalty, due to a mistake made by Peaches.”
“I’d love to take him away from her,” she said.
“All right, Coco. Why burn all that shit?”
“Because it was time, man! Because it stopped working. It started to work against me, even. Because I cannot shoot for something I have already surpassed. I have been playing on the level of the heppest bitch in the game! I had to cut her out of me. Had to cut her out of my mind. I said, ‘Cornelia Nash, you got to find a new way.’”
“Well, there are other role models for you out there. Not necessarily golfers.”
She looked at me searchingly. I could see her wondering whom I might suggest, but she wasn’t going to ask. All she said was, “Right you are. I put that shit out for trash, but I kept seeing it going to Alcatraz, or whatever dump they use, and all of it lying there in the dump getting covered deeper and deeper, and I could see it there in the dark just like it was still in my hands. So I decided to burn it, right that night and—” She broke off and glared at me. “Where did you come from, bitch? Where did you come from?”
“I’ll tell you after you tell me about the noose in the picture.”
“Lord. Lord. I was studying her swing all the way through last week. It is not a noose. I drew a cord, a wire if you will, around her neck connecting it to the tree to inform myself how steady she keeps her head through the swing, like as if it is wired in place.”
“And—”
“I put the arrows in to show myself how her swing originates there, at the knees. At the feet, really, but you can see her activate her knees before any other part of her, if you look just right.”
“Oh.”
“Do you know I wanted to fuck her? I wanted to fuck her until she cried and said Cornelia Nash, you are the greatest in the world, you are greater than I myself. I wanted that, oh, man.”
“Did you get it?”
“No. Did you?”
“Of course I got it,” I told her. “That bank opened up wide for me. D’you think I’d go to all the trouble of crossing you if I hadn’t got it?”
“What’s she like?”
“Like going over Niagara Falls in a Dixie cup.”
“She strong?”
“Very.”
“Stronger than me?”
I paused. “Yes.”
“You are lying.”
“Well, all I know is you’re a good thug, but I have no idea if you’re a good lay.”
There was a silence.
I asked, “Well, if you no longer want to go to bed with her, what were you doing sneaking around her place?”
She stared at me, her mind working. “You mean—”
I stared back.
“That was you?” she said, touching her chin. “Who chased me through the sprinklers?”
“Yes it was me! Christ almighty!”
“That was her place?”
“Yes!”
“For this week? Right there on sixteen?”
“Yes!”
“Lord.”
I waited.
In a heavy tone that said she wouldn’t blame me if I didn’t believe her, she said, “I was checking on something on the course.”
“Well, what?”
“I wanted to know where the nearest sprinkler head is to where I intend to land my drives on that hole this week.”
“How come?”
“Because the ground is always a little bit softer near a sprinkler head, here in the desert. You get a little bit different bounce.”
“Wow.”
“So.”
“Why sneak at night, though?”
“The notion had just occurred to me, and I wanted to go see right then to fix it in my mind. I have not played this course so many times.”
“Well, why did you run, then?”
What a smile she gave me. Oh, my. It was a smile of superiority mixed with thirst for my approval. Her teeth were big and beautiful. “For the hell of it. You startled the living Jesus out of me, first. Then I wanted to see if I could get away for the hell of it. And I did.”
“Not without shedding some blood.”
“You run like a jackrabbit. I almost died beating you.”
For an instant I w
ished I had a wall of fire to walk through for Coco Nash. I breathed a long, happy sigh. “Now all that’s left are the odds and ends,” I said, “which I can guess about. But tell me, if you would, why did you climb through that window in Hollywood? And what about that note on the car? And the phone calls?”
She looked at me for a minute. “Do not cast a kitten,” said Cornelia Nash, “but what window in Hollywood, what note, what phone calls?”
16
It was some time before I left the house in Indian Wells.
I slipped into bed beside Genie. She didn’t wake up. For a long while I watched her face in the dimness, her composed fourteenth-century face, there so close to mine on the pillow.
_____
The next day, Thursday, was go-time for the Dinah. The course looked as though God had pulled an all-nighter on it: spectacular—not a petal or a stalk was out of place. But beauty can be treacherous, as we know. From every player the course would demand the accuracy of William Tell, the courage of Saint Catherine, the patience of Siddhartha, and the stamina of Ma Joad.
The jets were still coming in, disgorging the last big wave of spectators; the hotels were straining their corsets, and rental cars were careening all over the place.
Genie had time to breakfast with me. She’d lined up a courtesy car for herself for the duration of the tournament, meaning that a volunteer would drive her to and from the course; she didn’t want the distraction of driving herself even the short distance around the course to the clubhouse, and she didn’t want me chauffeuring either.
“You use the Jag,” she said. We were having toast and my special veggie eggs with the secret ingredient of tiny bits of chopped pickle. She chewed and swallowed. I loved the shape of her mouth: a perfect bow with those curled corners. “These eggs are good,” she said. “It’s all business for me from here on in.”
“I know.” I watched her getting herself into a zone, her zone, a bubble of concentration she would strive to stay in for the next four days. There was a look taking hold in her eyes, a look of intensity, a look of gathering strength.
The phone rang, as I hoped it would, and I jumped for it as Genie said, “No!”
“Hello.”
A liquid-sounding male voice said, “He’d be almost fourteen now.”
The Lillian Byrd Crime Series Page 31