Bino's Blues Read online

“Glad to know who my friends are,” Chris said brightly. “And, man. Am I glad to be out.”

  “Yeah,” Bino said. “They turned you loose in a hurry.”

  Carla hugged Chris around the waist. “I told Mr. Goldman like you said, that I wasn’t appearing before any old grand jury until I had my husband beside me. Worked like a charm.”

  Bino was puzzled. “Like I … ?”

  “Like you said,” Carla said firmly. She grabbed Chris’s hand and tugged him away down the hallway. “Showtime in five minutes,” she said, “or whatever they call this testimony stuff. See you, hoss. Be sure and catch the act sometime.”

  Bino watched them go, Carla’s fanny bouncing from side to side, the couple’s arms about each other. He wondered if Carla had been telling him the truth, that he was the only one. He supposed he’d never know.

  “Catch the act? Count on it,” Bino said to himself.

  He took the afternoon off, tooling the Linc out the tollway to Vapors North, sitting with his feet propped up on the kitchen table and watching Cecil drift aimlessly for a while, finally dropping a minnow in the Oscar’s tank and looking on as Cecil ran the darting little bugger down. He then retreated to his bedroom, put on a sunflowered boxer-style bathing suit, snatched up a plastic bottle of Bullfrog sunblock and this month’s Golf Digest, then sat down on the edge of the bed to call his office. He got the answering machine, supposed that Dodie had run over to the courthouse on some errand or other, and left her a message.

  Fifteen minutes later, his chest, stomach, and legs coated with Bullfrog, Bino hopped up and down in the shallow end of the pool and then launched himself headlong onto an inflated raft. Then he turned over and backstroked his way to the edge, grabbed up his magazine and a pair of Cool-Ray sunglasses, and floated aimlessly to the center of the pool. He scanned an article, wondering if the hand action which Paul Azinger described would help him fade the ball. In a few minutes his fingers relaxed, the Golf Digest fluttered down open across his chest, and Bino emitted a series of snores.

  There he stood in the eighteenth fairway at Augusta National, tossing up some blades of grass to test the wind, the hushed mob jamming both sides of the fairway and encircling the green one-eighty in front of him. The leader board showed a tie for the lead: Phillips -12, Zoeller -12. Ten yards behind him stood Fuzzy Zoeller himself, grinning a challenge, hands on hips. Bino glanced at the green to see Zoeller’s white ball perched ten feet above the hole. He gritted his teeth and asked his caddy for his five-iron. Club in hand, Bino assumed his stance and made a perfect swing. The ball flew straight at the pin, drifting, spinning, and …

  A sheet of water cascaded over him. He opened one eye as a well-formed leg kicked another spray in his direction. He sat up.

  Dodie sat on the edge wearing short white shorts and a Harvard University T-shirt. Beside her was a covered pot. She picked it up. “It’s a ham,” she said. “Where’s your apartment key?”

  He looked up, the sun still high in the sky and beating down on him. Sweat ran down his neck. “Who’s minding the office, Dode?”

  “It can mind itself, for all I care. I haven’t taken off in—”

  His magazine slid into the water. “Hold on, I know you’ve been working hard. I just wondered—”

  “—three months. I’ll need some rolls, something for a salad. After we eat we can take in a movie or something.” She held out her hand. “The key.”

  He pointed to his towel, rolled up on a wooden chaise longue. “In there,” he said.

  She stood holding the pot, water beading on her calf. She was barefoot, feet spread. “It’ll be ready in an hour, in case you want to shower first.” She walked toward the chaise longue, bent at the waist, and held the pot on her hip while she rummaged for his apartment key.

  He rolled off the raft and stood in waist-deep, rippling blue water. “Did you say a movie?”

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “That’s what I said. The Fugitive, if you haven’t seen it.” She had the key now and stepped toward his apartment.

  “Tonight?” he yelled.

  “Yep.” She kept walking.

  He jumped up and down and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Wait a minute. What about this Robert guy?”

  She stopped, stuck out one hip, and grinned at him. “Who the hell is Robert?” Dodie said.