by Lynn Shurr
Howdy didn’t like the looks of that couch. Both ends scrolled up but the divan had no back, plenty of red cushions though, and a double-wide tufted width that reminded him of a mattress. Cassie sat down, folding her legs the way supermodels did. Rizzo’s black eyes followed her all the way. Without removing his glance from those long, tanned limbs, he repeated, “Get out, kid.”
Howdy stood his ground, the sheriff ready to draw on the villain. “Sir, we aren’t here for an audition. I have reason to believe you might be my father. My mom put your name in the family Bible.”
The black-eyed stare whipped back to Howdy’s open, pleasant face, his wide grin gone missing. “Not the first time I’ve heard that. I don’t see any resemblance. Who’s your mother?”
“Mary McCoy.”
“Means nothing to me.”
Cassie piped up from the casting couch. “How about Mariah Coy?”
The casino owner shrugged. “Now her I’ve fucked more than once, but not lately. She’s getting kind of long in the tooth. But you, you could have a career in Vegas. You sing, dance?”
“Not very well. I’m a psychologist helping Howard McCoy find his father. It’s vital to his mental health.” She rose to stand by Howdy’s side.
Rizzo barked out a laugh. “You’re off my hook. I can’t stand a woman with too many brains. They always want to talk instead of getting down to business by which I mean…”
Howdy moved close to the desk and leaned over it. “We know what you mean. Answer the question, Are you my father? and we’ll leave.”
“I doubt it, but if Mariah is your mother, maybe.” He opened a drawer and sent a business card skidding across the polished top of the desk. “My doctor. He has my DNA on file for cases like this and other possible mishaps. When you deal with gambling, you never know what might happen.” He shrugged his nicely padded shoulders. “If you are mine, I can give you a position in my establishment. Otherwise, don’t try to shake me down for nothing.”
Howdy stepped back a pace, hands on hips, ready to draw. “I have a job, a very good one. I’m a kicker for the Sinners and don’t need your money. In fact, I don’t want you to give me anything, not even a DNA test.”
He folded the card into a triangle and flicked it like a paper football back toward Rizzo. A quick hand with peach-colored nails intercepted it in flight. Cassie smoothed the card out against the desk’s slick surface. “Thank you, Mr. Rizzo. We’ll let you know the results.”
Benny Rizzo smiled, his teeth glaring white against his olive complexion. “Hey, I’d like to have a kid in pro football. What do you think the odds are of Billodeaux taking another Super Bowl?”
Howdy answered before he could stop himself. “Not this year. The team is rebuilding.”
“But sometime down the line, a missed field goal could change the outcome of the big event, right?”
“I always do my best, sir. I’d never throw a game.”
Rizzo found that statement and Howdy’s solemnity hilarious. He laughed until tears ran down a jaw already blue-black with early beard shadow and blotted his face on a pale gray pocket square. “See, I tell you, no son of mine. Get outta here. But I just gotta ask—you have panties on under that getup, honey?”
Cassie hitched her hip on the edge of the desk and swayed close to Mr. Rizzo’s prominent nose. “You’ll never know.”
“Sassy,” Rizzo said. “I do like sassy.”
“That’s what they call me. Come on, Howdy, we really are outta here.” She put an extra sway in her walk that both men could appreciate as she went to the door.
“If you can’t handle her, son, send her to papa.”
“I think I’ll manage without your help.”
Howdy rushed to block Rizzo’s view of Cassie’s backside and closed the door with a slam that startled the secretary and made her muss the red nail polish she applied. “I guess you won’t need a second appointment?”
“No, we’ll just leave a message.” Cassie summoned the elevator.
Once safely inside the metal box, Howdy slammed his hand against the wall, leaving a palm print behind on the immaculate space. “I don’t want that man to be my father. Give me the card so I can tear it up.”
“No way.” Taking a cue from Mariah Coy who vamped at them from her poster, Cassie shoved the card deep between her breasts.
“Cassie, give me the card or I’ll go in after it.”
“No, you won’t. You’re too much of a gentleman. Besides, we need to know who you are really.” She gazed at herself in the glass covering the picture of Mariah. “I may not sing or dance, but I think I could be an actress. I played the role of sultry slut fairly well.”
“Stay a psychologist because if Benny Rizzo is my dad, I’ll need a shrink for the rest of my life.”
Since this was Vegas, the nurse who took the sample showed no surprise at their request for a DNA test. Must happen all the time. Expect the results at the end of the week, she said. Mr. Rizzo had phoned ahead and would pay the bill. By five p.m., Howdy and Cassie stood before the white medical building flanked by two palm trees and wondered what to do next.
“Since you’re all dressed up, you want to take in a show? Celine Dionne, maybe? Or Donny Osmond. My grandma liked him,” Howdy suggested.
“I’m more in the mood for cabaret. Let’s get some dinner, then go see Mariah Coy. Even if she isn’t your mother, we can go back and say we were served breakfast by a celebrity.”
“I really don’t want to do that.”
“Come on, Howdy. We’re in Vegas. Let’s gamble a little, stuff ourselves with lobster, and watch Mariah perform.”
He humored her. They went back to Nero’s Lounge, played the slots and won a paltry number of coins compared to the ones they put in the machines, but broke even at blackjack. The Golden Room had small, chilled lobsters on the buffet and shrimp almost as large. Howdy ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon at one-hundred fifty dollars a popped cork with complete panache thanks to the lessons received from Brian Lightfoot.
“Is this where you get me liquored up?” Cassie asked, smiling at him over the rim of a bubbling flute.
“Yep. We could get married between Mariah’s acts. Maybe she’d agree to be your bridesmaid.”
“Sorry, I did rash and impulsive with Bijou. Never again. Besides, my mother made it clear after that fiasco I must marry in the Church with every Thomas alive in attendance to make up for her embarrassment.”
“You think she’d accept a Baptist? I know she likes me. She saved me extra dessert on Good Friday, hid it from the ravenous hoard of your family.”
“Being used to Joe, Connor, and the Rev, she thinks you’re too thin for a football player, but yes, she does like you.”
“You couldn’t marry Joe in your church. He’d be a divorced man.”
“In my childish fantasy, I thought he’d buy an annulment.”
“And make his kids illegitimate. I don’t think so.”
“Me neither, not anymore. Nell has the life I thought I wanted, and I was willing to go after Joe to get it. I feel almost as ashamed as the day the two of them rescued me from Bijou.”
“Be glad Joe turned you down, or you might be implanted with his triplets right now and not sipping champagne with me in Vegas.” Howdy gave her one of his broad, loopy grins.
She raised her glass and clinked it against his. “To us.”
“Right, to us.”
They finished off the bottle because Dom Perignon was not a wine to be wasted and made their merry way to the lounge to get a front seat for Mariah Coy’s act. When the lights dimmed over the audience and brightened on the stage, their waitress appeared sitting atop a white piano with an accompanist wearing the de rigueur tuxedo and a drummer and bass player filling out the stage.
Creative makeup and kind lighting softened her lines and removed ten years from her face. A tight black gown so low cut it barely covered her nipples helped distract from her age by luring the eyes of male viewers elsewhere. She had her lon
g, showgirl legs crossed, a backless stiletto high heel dangling from one toe. Making love to the mic, she crooned a selection of steamy songs, then slid off the piano to do a red hair tossing Tina Turner strut around the stage on a couple of faster pieces. Clearly winded, Mariah returned to lounge against the baby grand for a smoky version of Fever to close the show. Adequate applause rewarded her performance, but she did not return for an encore song. Instead, the band slid into a blue note, the cue to bring out the aging jazz trumpeter who waited in the wings.
“Not great, but not bad,” Howdy evaluated. “Let’s go back to our room. I think I can give you a fever.” He tickled the back of her neck with a single finger.
“First, we pay our respects to the chanteuse.” Cassie headed for a hulking white-haired guard, whose once broad shoulders hunched with age as he protected the backstage and dressing rooms. She assumed Howdy would follow. He did.
“Um, Billy…” Cassie read the name embroidered in red thread on his uniform pocket. “We’d like to meet Ms. Coy and tell her how much we enjoyed her act.” Attesting to her acting ability, she inflected her words with a breathless admiration
“Been some time since Mariah had any fans ask to see her, and I’ve guarded her since she started years ago. Let me check. Be right back.”
They watched Billy lumber on stiff, arthritic legs down a dimly lit corridor where he raised his large, big-veined fist to rap on a door bearing one dingy silver star. He turned the knob, poked his head inside for a moment, then shambled back to them.
“You go right in, but you better not be making fun of her. Youngsters sometimes do. I won’t have it, you hear? Toss you out on your ears if you do.” He hardly looked like he could carry out the threat, but they reassured him.
“We won’t be doing that, sir,” Howdy said. “We only came to talk.”
As they walked along the corridor, he whispered to Cassie, “Why do I feel like I’m walking the last mile on Death Row?’
“I think it’s the lighting. Courage, Howdy. Get your John Wayne on again like you did in Rizzo’s office.”
“Enter,” the seductive voice called when they rapped on the star, flaking off even more of its silver paint. In the short interval since the show, Mariah had shed her slinky black gown and a body stocking that lay across a chair like a broken cocoon and the damp creature that had crawled out of it. Kicked into a corner, her shoes interlocked their killer spiked heels. The red hairpiece that augmented her thinner tresses perched on top of a Styrofoam head in one corner of the dressing table. A single coral-colored rose in a crystal bud vase adorned the other.
Mariah, clad in a black dressing gown made gaudy with Chinese red dragon embroidery and not covering much of her overblown chest, sucked in a lungful of smoke from her cigarette and blew it out again. “Saw you in the first row. So you came to see your waitress sing. Want an autograph?” She flicked the ash into a handy coffee cup, no better receptacle in view.
“No,” Howdy said and could not go further.
Before he got them thrown out by Billy who would probably need their help to do so, Cassie answered. “We did enjoy your act, but what we really wanted to know is if Howdy is your son, yours and Mr. Rizzo’s boy.”
“You’re a sharp young woman, cheap-looking, but sharp. I’ll give you that. So they call you Howdy now. I knew that, but to me you were always my sweet, little Howie. I named you for my father, the most decent man on earth. One day, I knew you’d come to find me. When I saw you moving along that sidewalk looking like you’d driven all night in search of me, I recognized you right away. I goosed Arnie into giving you the discount coupon and paid off Doris to take her table.”
“See, see?” Cassie said triumphantly. “I was right.”
“Could I sit? I feel a mite dizzy in here. Maybe it’s all the smoke.” Howdy sank into the chair holding the discarded gown and settled on the body stocking.
“Yeah, Benny doesn’t like anyone smoking back here so I have to keep the door closed. He thinks not providing ashtrays will keep a person from taking a drag. Ha! Splash some of that air freshener around, hon.” Mariah gestured toward a can of lilac-scented spray.
Cassie obliged, but the artificial aroma only made the air thicker and more cloying. Howdy looked ready to hurl. She eyed a nearby waste can filled with makeup-soiled wipes just in case he needed it quickly and moved closer to rub his tense shoulders.
He raised his drooping head and asked his mother, “I didn’t know you. How did you recognize me?’
Mariah opened a drawer in the dressing table and removed an album bulging with playbills and clippings. The pale pink cover glittered with tiny gold stars, something a teenage girl might purchase to hold pictures of her movie star crushes. A clear pocket displayed a current publicity still with her facial lines air-brushed away. Since Howdy made no move to take it, Cassie brought the album to him and laid it open on his knees.
Turning page after page, they watched flat-chested Mary McCoy morph into busty Mariah Coy. The first photo displayed a very young woman in a long draped gown designed to hide her lack of assets. Wide blue eyes gazed at them hopefully, wanting their approval. The small rosebud mouth smiled tentatively. Gradually, the breasts grew larger and larger, the small lips fuller, pumped up with collagen. The auburn hair burned to the brightest shade of red, and the blue eyes suddenly turned to emerald green.
“Not that stuff. Look in the back,” Mariah prompted. She ground out her expired cigarette with its filter ringed in bronze lipstick into the coffee cup and lit another.
Cassie flipped over a substantial section and stopped at a baby picture of a toothless infant with a wide smile and a shock of auburn hair. A succession of school pictures followed, then news clippings of Howdy’s rise as a kicker, his receipt of the Lou Groza Award for top college placekicker, his signing with the Sinners.
“Dad sent me stuff behind my mother’s back. The deal when I left you in Oklahoma was I’d stay away, keep quiet, and my folks would raise you, Ruth’s idea of course. They did a better job with you than me. My mother bound me so tight I just had to bust loose. Maybe with your being a boy, Dad had more influence.” The more she talked, the more she became the Oklahoma girl again rather than the sultry songstress.
Howdy, his innocent blue eyes bloodshot and blinking, managed to choke out, “So Benny Rizzo is my daddy.”
Mariah shrugged. “Ruth pressed me and pressed me for a name to put in the Bible. I wanted you to have a rich, powerful father who might help you out in the future. But, I don’t know. It could have been Benny. He was my first lover, then on and off again for years. Not much finesse there. I hope you do better by women, Howie.”
“Oh, he does!” Cassie blurted.
Howdy sank his face into his hands and mumbled through the spaces between his fingers. “Who else could it be?”
“Might be Lionel Lowe, my agent. He bought me my first breast implants—to enhance my career, he said. I always hoped you belonged to Chet Lovell, a big real estate man in Vegas. He was my sugar daddy for a while. I thought I’d be his fourth wife, told him the baby must be his. Bless his high blood pressure he pre-paid the obstetrician and the hospital for my care before stroking out on the ninth hole while playing golf. Said we’d be married as soon as I got my figure back. Chet financed my second set of boobs, huge ones, the way he liked them, before I wound up pregnant.”
“Anyone else?” Howdy asked without raising his head.
“Maybe I should include old Billy. I stayed pretty active around that time flushing out all the Baptist in me, and Bill adored me.”
Howdy moaned. “Old Billy, too. Didn’t you ever hear of birth control?”
“Look, twenty-four years ago, Billy acted as my bodyguard because I needed one back then. You talk about a hunky older man, but after sixty men slide some. He still looks out for me. As for that birth control crack, the pills made me nauseated and bloated. I used a diaphragm, but must not have got in sucked in just right. I did lots of drinking back then
and maybe forgot a time or two. And I won’t sugar coat it for you either. If I hadn’t been five months along and wearing Chet’s engagement ring when he died, I would have gone for an abortion. My career peaked right around the time I got knocked up. After I had you, it all went downhill.”
“Yeah, blame the baby. It’s a wonder I wasn’t born with fetal alcohol syndrome,” Howdy retorted, coming out of the shell of his hands like a snapping turtle. He unfolded from the chair and scraped the clinging body stocking from his butt as if he’d sat in shit. “Come on Cassie. I can’t take anymore.”
“Well, you asked. I want you to know I stayed off the sauce and the ciggies for the duration. I didn’t want a cretin for a child either.” Mariah blew smoke in his direction. “If you really want an answer, I know Billy would be willing to take a test. Chet is long gone, but he has a son about twenty years older than you. He runs Lovell Real Estate now. I always liked him, and he was very taken with me. I think he wouldn’t mind.”
Howdy froze the doorway. “Could he be my father, too?”
“No. I wouldn’t have done that to Chet. I have my standards. Too bad he didn’t provide for me in his will. His three ex-wives bought me off and for a while, Lionel and I lived the high life. The money ran out, and I had to let the Mexican nanny go and get back on the stage. Li and I dropped you off in Oklahoma. He recreated me as a green-eyed goddess. Damn, back then, I only needed the contacts to tint my eyes. Now I need them to see fine print. Billy, you out there?’
The door burst open with surprising force missing Howdy’s freckled nose by an inch as the kicker jumped back. “You need me, Mariah? These kids giving you trouble?”
“No. This is my son, Howie, and his girlfriend, I guess. You might be his daddy. You willing to take a paternity test?”
“Sure. If he’s mine, will you marry me?”
“Now you know that won’t ever happen, darling. Could be Lionel, too, and I never would marry him either.”