Cheater's Game

by Paul Levine

  So many threads that lead . . . where?

  Why the Cayman Islands?

  And what’s with the pricey Tesla at the bottom of a canal?

  Who called 911?

  I replaced the items in the locker and walked down the corridor toward Kip’s room. I would be there when he woke up. And we would talk.

  Kip. This is your Uncle Jake. It’s time to get reacquainted. Let’s play Ten.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Doctor Is In

  Melissa Gold . . .

  Jake’s phone call rocked Dr. Melissa Gold. “Oh my God, Jake! Is he unconscious?”

  “Sedated. It’s probably just a concussion.” He paused a moment. “I guess that’s a little ironic, my saying, ‘just a concussion.’”

  Her fiancé, Jake Lassiter, had his own history of head bangers, which may have led to brain damage. Irony there, too. If not for Jake’s traumatic brain injury, they never would have met. As a neuropathologist, she treated him. As a woman, she loved him.

  “I’m with a patient,” Melissa said, “but I can be there in an hour.”

  “Maybe it’s better if I talk to him alone first. We need to reconnect.”

  “Has he strayed that far?”

  “All my fault. I’ve let him get away from me.”

  Sadness and regret were heavy in his voice. She could practically see his broad shoulders slumping. Jake had given so much of himself so unselfishly, raising Kip after his mother had abandoned him. Jake’s capacity for giving, in fact, had been one of the attractions for her.

  They met when she was director of the Center for Neuroscience at UCLA’s medical school. He had taken her deposition in a civil suit, and there was an immediate attraction. He said he liked long, leggy women who were smart and savvy. She usually didn’t like wise-guy lawyers, but there was something solid about him. A strength of character to go with that barrel chest.

  In her Left Coast days, she’d dated a number of eligible bachelors. Hollywood business managers in their Zegna suits and Italian silk ties, film agents in their Brioni suits and shiny shirts with no ties, even a couple of actors (what was I thinking?) in torn jeans and five-day beards. The men shared one personality trait: none could pass a mirror without pausing to admire himself. Los Angeles was awash with that kind of man, a Century City Narcissus worshiping his own reflection, waiting for his next project to be greenlit. Sure, a man of towering ego liked having an attractive, professional woman on his arm, but no more than that diamond-encrusted Piaget watch.

  Then she met Jake, who was effortlessly natural and without pretensions, responsive to her needs, an excellent listener, and unaware of how rare a prize he was. He was something of a throwback. At a downtown diner, he drank his coffee black with a slice of apple pie, not a cinnamon cappuccino with a passionfruit macaron. In chi-chi South Beach, he remained a brew-and-burger guy in a paté and Chardonnay world.

  “Do it, Jake. Talk to him first. You know him best.”

  “I thought I did, but what the hell happened?” He sighed into the phone. “When he went off to college, he had such promise.”

  “Has such promise. Jake, he’s twenty! Didn’t you ever get into trouble at that age?”

  “I was almost kicked out of Penn State for throwing a refrigerator off a fourth-floor balcony. It was a twenty-dollar bet, and I’d already emptied the refrigerator of beer, so I knew I could do it.”

  “Just be gentle with Kip. He’s sensitive and . . .”

  “And I’m not?”

  “No, you are, but in a different way. You grew up like Huck Finn, barefoot and rowdy. I doubt Kip ever free-dived to steal lobster pots.”

  “Only stole the lobsters. I left the pots on the ocean floor.”

  “I love you, big guy.”

  “I love you, too, Doc. Even when you stick needles in my butt.”

  She worried about both Lassiter men. Kip was a mystery. Just how did a kid who got a perfect score on the SAT, who never sweated through an academically rigorous private school, get booted out of college his second semester?

  But her fiancé’s medical condition had become her primary focus. Once Jake had been diagnosed with a precursor to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the fatal brain disease best known for afflicting former football players, he suggested—politely and sweetly—that they put off the wedding.

  “I need a definitive diagnosis,” Jake had said. “I don’t want you to be a young widow.”

  When they spoke of marriage now, it was tied to a clean bill of health. Jake was in a study she was running at the University of Miami. Would the early indications of the disease that showed up on his brain scans morph into the full-blown killer that had stricken so many of his contemporaries? Or would they discover a cure for C.T.E. itself, saving him and thousands of others? No one knew.

  Their personal relationship was much more joyful. When Chloe, her best girlfriend in Los Angeles, had asked how it was going, Melissa told her, “He gets me. Respects me. It’s so easy, and we mesh so well.”

  “And in bed?” Chloe said.

  “He takes my breath away.”

  “New lab project. Clone him!”

  All of which raised a troubling question. When could she tell Jake about the new development in her life? Certainly not today, not until Kip was safely at home. She faced an issue so common these days that it had become a cliché. How could she manage both her relationship and her career? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Would Jake uproot his life for her, as she had done for him?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Blizzard

  I’d been sitting in a straight-back chair designed for pygmies for three hours when Kip’s pale blue eyes fluttered open and focused on me. I helped him scoot into a sitting position, and he ran a hand across his face, as if checking for dents.

  “Uncle Jake?”

  “How you feeling, kiddo?”

  “I dunno.” He touched the cervical collar around his neck and wriggled his toes under the sheets.

  “Are you in pain?”

  He touched a spot above his right temple. “Head’s pounding. That’s about all.”

  I bent over, picked up a Styrofoam cooler and opened it.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Got something I didn’t want the nurses to put in a fridge with the urine samples.” I handed him a gigantic blue and red cup with a plastic spoon and fork sticking out of a cold, creamy froth.

  “You brought me a Blizzard. Jumbo size.” Kip gave me a smile that started as gratitude but turned frosty, like the drink.

  “An Oreo Blizzard from Dairy Queen,” I said. “Your favorite.”

  “Yeah. When I was nine.”

  Without taking a sip, he placed the cup on the elevated tray next to the bed.

  “I remember the first time I took you to the D.Q. on South Dixie,” I said. “You’d never had a Blizzard. You probably never had ice cream unless your mom shoplifted a Nutty Buddy from the 7-11.”

  “Cheap wine,” he corrected me. “That’s what she boosted from convenience stores.”

  “Anyway, an hour ago, I called Tony Frontero. Remember him?”

  “He owned a cab company.” Kip said. “Drove you home whenever you got wasted.”

  “I kept Tony out of jail when he was pocketing payroll taxes. Drives an Uber now and made a special delivery for you, kiddo.” I shot an admiring look at the cookie chunks floating in vanilla ice cream above the rim of the cup. “Nothing on earth like an Oreo Blizzard.”

  Kip studied me a moment as if he didn’t know quite what to say. Thanks, Uncle Jake did not seem to be on the tip of his tongue.

  “You know I’m a vegan, right?” he said.

  “Yeah, but for old times’ sake . . .”

  “I don’t eat dairy anymore. Period.”

  “Suit yourself.” I grabbed the giant cup and slurped through the straw until my throat grew icicles. I wanted to make Kip forget all about kale and tofu and avocado toast. I wanted him to rip the Blizzard out of
my hand and chug it and then demand baby-back ribs for dinner. In short, I wanted the old Kip back. The kid he used to be.

  Part of parenting, I know, is allowing your children to grow up and become their own persons. To get away from your home and your influence. This part of parental self-discipline, however, is not my forté.

  In theory, I got it. Kip was 20. He had his own apartment and did not give me a key. He owned an expensive S.U.V. that I knew nothing about and traveled out of the country without telling me.

  Deal with it. The kid is a grown-up. Or is he just playing one?

  “Mmm,” I murmured, wiping my lips. “Oreo cookies and vanilla ice cream. A heavenly treat.”

  “Might send you straight to heaven. Eleven hundred calories, forty-one grams of fat, and one hundred twenty-two grams of sugar.”

  A young nurse nametagged "Magda" walked in and checked various panels and electronic displays, a couple of which beeped and whistled as she pushed buttons. She told us the doctor would be coming around soon, and they’d be keeping Kip overnight for observation.

  When she was gone I said, “How do you know all that nutritional info?”

  “Three or four years ago, I looked it up.”

  “Amazing.”

  He shrugged. “I just remember stuff. It’s no big deal.”

  “Hah! You’re a genius.”

  “Let’s not go there, Jake.”

  His voice was taking on an edge. Now it was Jake. Not Uncle Jake.

  “Where are we not going, Kip? What subjects are off limits?”

  I need a road map to avoid the path where my nephew’s disapproval lurks like a pool of quicksand.

  “College,” he said. “In a second you’ll want to dredge up what happened at Penn and where I go from here.”

  “I swear I wasn’t thinking of that.”

  Okay, a white lie. Sure, I was thinking of Kip’s spectacular flame-out at the Ivy League school most of my pals confuse with Penn State.

  “You have tremendous potential,” I said. “Untapped potential. That’s all I’ve ever said.”

  He dismissed that notion with a wave of his hand, the hospital ID band sliding around his small wrist. "I don't want to talk about it."

  I sighed and let us sit in silence a moment. Then I said, “Okay, you win. Tell me about the accident.”

  “I drove off the road.”

  “Did you have a blowout?”

  “No.”

  “Fall asleep at the wheel?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Collision with another car?”

  “What other car?”

  I noticed he hadn’t answered the question. “I don’t know, Kip. How did your car end up in the drink?”

  “Jeez, Uncle Jake. Do you think I was playing Road Fury in real life?”

  The question struck me as odd. Kip’s obsession with eGames was a painful reminder of his adolescence. Medal of Honor, League of Legends, Road Fury. A child psychiatrist told me that the games had warped Kip’s perception of reality so that he couldn’t tell where fantasy ended and real life began. It took two years of therapy to kick the eGames habit. As far as I knew, Kip had hung up his saddle and stopped killing horse rustlers in Red Dead Redemption.

  “No, I think you’re over that eGame nonsense,” I said.

  “You’re right. What happened isn’t complicated. I just drove into a canal.”

  “In a new Tesla S.U.V., model X. What is that, about eighty thousand bucks?”

  He snorted a laugh. “You are so yasterday,” which meant “yesterday” in hipster-speak, but if I knew that, it probably didn’t mean it anymore.

  “With the high-performance package and the autopilot,” Kip said, “you’re talking north of a hundred grand. But what you really want to know is how I could afford it.”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “If I tell you everything, will you back off, let me breathe?”

  “I didn’t know I was suffocating you.”

  “You didn’t used to. But when you got sick . . .”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Fine. When your C.T.E. symptoms cropped up, you decided to become Parent of the Year. Like maybe you’d better do that before you croaked.” He paused a moment, seeming to consider whether to fire another harpoon into the whale. “Tell you the truth, Jake, I liked you better when you were more wrapped up in yourself.”

  “And I liked you better, kiddo, when you were a carnivore.”

  “Yasss!” He laughed, a high-pitched jangle of coins. “Nice clap-back!”

  Great, he enjoyed sparring with me. That was better than sullen and silent. Then I spoke the words nearly every parent has said to a child once, or maybe a million times. “C’mon Kip. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

  He gave me a half-smile. “Okay, here’s the deal. Ask me anything. I won’t deflect or evade. Then when we’re done, you’ll get out of my grill.”

  “Deal.” I tried hard not to wince at the coldness in his voice, the distance in his manner.

  I began asking questions, and true to his word, Kip did not deflect or evade. He just lied.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Launching the Child Like a Sailboat

  “Good morning,” he lied.

  That’s what popped into my head midway into our colloquy. I have cross-examined professional perjurers for twenty-five years. Kip reminded me of a witness I once questioned, a guy who fabricated every answer, even to the polite request, “Please state your name for the record.”

  It started well enough. Kip grinned and said, “Fire away.”

  “What were you doing in the Glades?”

  “Collecting money Jimmy Tiger owed me for tutoring his dumb ass. He was staying at his family’s fishing cabin.”

  “Who’s Jimmy Tiger?”

  Kip pushed a button on a remote, and the hospital bed groaned and propped him upright. “Jimmy was a year behind me at Tuttle.”

  Meaning Biscayne-Tuttle. Kip’s fancy-pants private high school that sits regally on the shoreline of Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove. Mediocre football program, but the sailing and chess teams, top-notch.

  Kip continued, “Jimmy used to come over to the house. Don’t you remember?”

  I shook my head. The name neither rang a bell nor set off alarms. “How much did he owe you?”

  Silence. I could have run the 40-yard dash while he decided what to say, and I was never fast. Surely he knew the amount, so why the delay?

  “Eight hundred bucks,” he said, finally.

  “I guess that explains the $987 in your wallet.”

  Another pause. “I guess.”

  Kip might be able to get a perfect score on the SAT, but he was a real dunce at prevarication.

  “Why didn’t Jimmy send you a check?” I asked. “Or . . . what’s that system you use?”

  “PayPal.” He shrugged. “Jimmy likes cash.”

  “So do a lot of my clients. I send them birthday cards every year. Raiford, Avon Park, Dade Correctional.”

  “Chill, Jake. This isn’t illegal.”

  I chilled by finishing the icy Blizzard shake. The nurse returned and left a menu for Kip. He was hungry, and I wasn’t, probably because I had just inhaled a zillion calories.

  When she was gone, I shifted gears. “What’s with your trips to Grand Cayman?”

  Instead of answering, Kip took the oxygen clips out of his nose. “I gotta pee.”

  Maybe he did or maybe he just wanted to concoct an answer. He swung his feet out from under the sheets, and I grabbed his skinny left arm.

  “I don’t need help, Jake. Just push the cart for me, will you?”

  I didn’t protest that he was wobbly. If he stumbled, I could catch him with one paw. I pushed the cart that held his IV bag and opened the door to the restroom.

  “I go to Cayman for business,” Kip said, once inside.

  I heard a tinkling. At least he wasn’t lying about that.

  “Dr. Ringle has a vacation hou
se on the beach,” Kip continued. “It’s where we have our marketing meetings.”

  “Hold on. Who’s Dr. Ringle?”

  “Max Ringle. He’s got a Ph.D. You remember Shari Ringle, right?”

  “Another student at Tuttle?” I ventured.

  “Boarding school at Saint Andrew’s in Boca Raton.” Kip walked unsteadily back into the room, and we retraced our steps. After he slid under the sheets, he continued, “The Ringles live in California, but they have houses in Palm Beach and Grand Cayman. I tutored Shari for the SAT, and now she’s at U.S.C.”

  “Go Trojans. Is she your girlfriend?”

  “I wish. Anyhow, that’s how I met her dad, who’s really brilliant. He runs Quest Educational Development. You know the Latin abbreviation, right? Q.E.D.”

  “No, but I’m sure you do.”

  “Quod erat demonstrandum. ‘Thus, it has been demonstrated.’ Mathematicians use it to signify the accuracy of their proofs.”

  “So it’s a math tutoring company?”

  Kip gave me a pitying look that teachers reserve for their dimmest students. “You’re being too literal. Philosophers use Q.E.D. with their propositions. You could even end a closing argument with it.”

  “Speak Latin? My jurors have trouble with bus schedules.”

  “Q.E.D. helps wealthy families get their kids into elite universities,” Kip went on. “Résumé enhancement, SAT and ACT prep, even psychologists to help with test anxiety.”

  “'Résumé enhancement’ leaves an unsavory taste. Sounds like hired hands putting a spit shine on the shoddy work of rich dullards.”

  “Max says we’re just showing students in their best possible light.”

  “When you cut through the marketing bullshit, aren’t rich parents just paving the road for their kids to get into fancy colleges? Meanwhile, poor parents scrape by, hoping for loans and scholarships.”