Life's Work (6 page)

"Why do you call him `Professor' Walt?" I asked Otto.

"He's got a Ph.D. in exercise physiology," Bluerock said. "Or so he claims. He got the nickname when he won the Nationals in power lifting a couple of years ago. The muscle mags dubbed him the 'Professor of Press."'

"He's a power lifter?" I said. "Over the phone, the son-of-a-bitch sounded like a corporate lawyer."

"Oh, Walt's a class act, all right. If you're impressed, just think how he comes across to guys like Fred -guys whose entire life's reading consists of back issues of Joe Weider magazines."

"Fred's a protege?"

"A star pupil."

"What about Parks?"

"It's different with Bill," he said, without explanation.

I started to ask him what he meant, but I knew I wouldn't get an answer. The sense of loyalty that had kept him from talking to me the night before hadn't evaporated overnight. And nagging him about Parks wasn't going to change that. Instead, I asked him how Kaplan had gotten involved in the agency business.

"How do you think?" Bluerock said. "You tell somebody how to spend his time, pretty soon you're telling him how to spend his money. And how much money he should make. It's a very sweet racket."

"Okay, Otto," I said. "Thanks for the help."

"Stoner," Bluerock said. "Give me a call after you get done with the Prof."

"All right."

"And Stoner?"

"Yes."

"Quit calling me Otto. I hate that fucking name."

"What do you want me to call you?" I said.

"Mr. Bluerock would be nice. But friends call me Blue." He laughed. "You know, I'm setting a precedent here."

"You afraid you're going to regret it?"

"I think I already do," he said, and hung up.
 

As holy shrines go, Kaplan's Health and Fitness Club was no Taj Mahal just a long, low concrete building with a plate glass door and window and a flat asphalt roof It was located right where Kaplan had said it would be, across from the Sohio station on Winton Road, in one of those little shopping plazas that used to be the rage before the big malls were built. The club was on the south side of the plaza, across from a bakery and a drugstore. I couldn't see into the gym from where I'd parked in the lot out front -the window was blinded and the plate glass door to its right had been painted over- but it looked identical to the bakery and the drugstore, except for the parade of men and boys who kept trailing in and out.

Not all of Kaplan's clients were bodybuilder types. Some of them were chunky teenagers -high school football players with bull necks, crew cuts, and peach basket rear ends. A few were middle-aged businessmen, carrying canvas bags with "Adidas" and "Pony" stitched on the sides. But a goodly number of them were musclebound jocks in tank tops and shorts, with the rapt, tanned, hyper faces of professional bodybuilders. I spent a couple of minutes watching two of them standing on the narrow concrete curb in front of the club. They were talking to each other, but I didn't see them make eye contact once. In fact, they didn't seem to be looking at anything at all. It was as if they were still standing in front of a mirror, practicing curls, as if that circuit had never been broken. They flexed their biceps, shifted their weight from foot to foot, rolled their heads on their necks, and wiggled their fingers like they were practicing the scales on a piano. But they never looked at each other and they never stopped fidgeting.

I waited until the bodybuilders had gone. Then I got out of the Pinto, walked up to the window of the club, and peered through the blinds. There was a small desk inside, manned by a burly beachboy in T-shirt and cutoffs. He had his feet on the desktop, and he was smiling at something that was going on in the gym. I couldn't see what he was laughing at because there was a drywall partition behind him, which cordoned off everything but the desk and a small waiting area to its right. I checked my watch -I was on time- and opened the door.

The place was filled with noise -the creaking of chain pulleys on the Universal machines, the thud of barbells being dropped to mats, the whizzing of flye pulls and exercise bikes, and behind it all, like the night sounds of crickets and distant traffic, the groans of the bodybuilders themselves. I stood in front of the kid at the desk, waiting for him to acknowledge my presence. But he was listening to a ball game on a transistor radio -one of those ghetto blasters that look like assorted pie plates glued to a masonry block -and couldn't be bothered. He was an ugly kid, with a nest of curly red hair and a red, lumpy face, acne-scarred along the chin and neck.

After a minute or two, I got tired of waiting, and started for the opening that led to the gym.

"Hold on there, cowboy," the kid behind the desk said.

He looked up from the radio, glanced at my face, then studied my arms and chest, as if my muscles were the windows to my soul. "What can I do for you?"

"I've got an appointment to see Kaplan. The name is Stoner."

"Stoner," the kid repeated slowly, as if he were sounding out syllables in a book. "Just a second."

The kid reached out and jabbed at an intercom sitting on his desk.

A voice crackled over the intercom speaker. "Yeah?"

"Walt, a guy named Stoner is here to see you," the kid said.

"Show him in," the voice said.

The kid swung his feet off the desk, stood up, and led me through the entryway into the gym. The place was surprisingly old-fashioned on the inside: mirrored wall to the right, with benches and Universal machines lined up in front of it; dumbbell racks, flye pulls, and more benches on the left; squat racks and curling stands at the rear; and a half dozen exercise bikes set up on gray mats by the door. Overhead, big-bladed ceiling fans stirred the boiling air.

We picked our way among the machines and the men working out on them. Most of the bodybuilders were young -college-age jocks. But there were a few grownups in the crowd, including three guys in short-sleeve Cougar sweatshirts, working out on a squat rack at the back of the room. I recognized one of them -Fred, Kaplan's protege. He didn't see me. He was too busy trying to lift four hundred pounds of weights draped across his back. Eyes squeezed shut, jaw set, lips quivering, his face beet red and pouring sweat, he trembled, and groaned beneath an oversize Olympic bar so loaded down with plates that it drooped at either end. The other two Cougars stood beside him, arms outstretched, ready to lift the bar off his back if Fred failed. They shouted at him savagely, urging him on as if he were a horse caught hoof-deep in mud.

The beachboy stopped to watch Fred for a moment, then looked at me as if to say, "That's what it means to be a real man!" He shouted, "Work!" at Fred, then walked up to a shuttered door by the racks and knocked. Someone said, "Come in."

"You heard the man," the kid said and wandered back to where Fred was squatting.

I went in. The door opened on a small white-walled office, decorated with posters of bodybuilders and with newspaper clippings. There was an air conditioner chugging in a window by a door in the far wall. The blast of cold air hit me so hard it made me shudder.

Two men were sitting inside the room. One of them a huge kid with ringlets of brown hair all over his head and a fat, dimpled, stupid face- sat on a chair next to the door. His head was tilted back so that it was resting against the wall. Eyes half shut, chin pointing upward, arms folded across his chest, he peered down his nose at me, as if he could just barely make me out. The other man was sitting behind the desk. If anything he was a little bigger than Baby Huey. He was also a good twenty years older, and on the surface, at least, a lot more intelligent-looking. He had a ruddy, pockmarked face, fringed with a bushy black beard, muttonchops, and a thick mustache. His hair had been combed forward from beneath the crown, presumably to cover a bald spot. It made a little curtain of curls across his forehead. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with "Kaplan's Health and Fitness Club" silk-screened on the front. Maybe it was the beard or maybe it was the fact that the T-shirt rode so high up his chest, but the guy didn't seem to have any neck at all. His head rested on his shoulders like a bowling ball on a shelf.

"Glad to meet you, Harry," he said, holding out an enormous hand. "I'm Walt Kaplan."

I shook with him. He didn't squeeze down, the way Otto had. But I could tell from the size of his biceps that if he'd wanted to, he could have crushed my hand like an empty beer can. His upper arms were enormous and so thick with black hair that they almost looked simian. The only part of him that appeared even remotely weak were his eyes, and that might have been an illusion caused by the black horn-rim glasses he was wearing. One of the screws had fallen out of the right hinge, and he'd stuck a paper clip through the hole in its stead. But the clip didn't hold the glasses together tightly, and they drooped across his right eye, giving him the pained, fidgety look of a man stuck behind a pillar at the ballpark.

"I'm glad you could make it out, Harry," Kaplan said in his deep, friendly voice. "Please, have a seat."

I sat down in a desk chair across from him.

"Would you like something to drink?" he said. "Juice? Gatorade?"

When I said no, he turned to Baby Huey.

"This is my friend and associate, Mickey," he said, addressing the kid directly, as if Mickey periodically needed to be reminded of who he was. "Mickey works for me here at the club."

Mickey indicated by the slightest movement of his head that he recognized that I had entered the room.

"Mickey," Kaplan said, with that undue courtesy that bosses use with their hirelings around strangers, "would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes? Harry and I have some business to discuss."

Mickey grunted, got to his feet, and walked out the door to the gym.

As soon as Mickey had left, Kaplan picked up a roll of antacid tablets lying on his desk, pried one of them off, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed on it ruminatively and smiled sadly. "I'll tell you, my friend," he said. "It's no fun getting old." He rubbed his forehead vigorously, and the loose skin bunched up in pleats beneath his fingers. "I just had a bowel movement that looked like Chicken and Stars soup. Now my head hurts. Doctor told me there's a virus going around. You heard about that? A virus or something?"

"Hell if I know," I said.

"I guess it's a virus," Kaplan said.

For a guru, he certainly wore his foibles nakedly. He pried another antacid tablet off the roll and stuck it in his mouth. "You've got to listen to your body, Harry," he said. "It'll tell you everything you need to know, if you can just interpret the messages correctly. This mindbody duality crap is the bane of our civilization. Some day people are going to wise up and realize that the two are one -the unconscious mind is the body." He adjusted the glasses on his nose. "I guess it's a virus."

"Probably."

Kaplan leaned forward, bending so close to me I caught a chalky whiff of Turns. "I want to talk to you, my friend," he said with great earnestness. "I want to let you know what Bill Parks is really like."

"Why?" I said.

Kaplan laughed unhappily, as if I'd made a rude noise. "Because I think you've been fed some misinformation. Or should I say, disinformation? It's Mr. Petrie's specialty."

"Exactly how have I been misinformed?"

"You've been led to believe that Bill is a`missing person.' Let me assure you that he is not missing. He had good reasons for leaving training camp in the way that he did, and Mr. Petrie knows this."

"You mean the contract dispute?"

"Exactly." Kaplan popped another antacid tablet into his kisser and crushed it noisily between his teeth. "I approached Mr. Petrie on three different occasions earlier this year, in an attempt to settle our differences fairly. And on each of these occasions he made it clear that he wasn't interested in being fair. As a result, Bill felt that he had no other choice but to leave camp without further notice."

"Parks is under contract, isn't he?"

"Yes," Kaplan said. "A contract that he signed better than three years ago. Things have changed in his life since then. Dramatically. For one thing, his skills are more valuable now. And then he has new responsibilities to meet, a wife and family to support. All of this costs money."

"Parks is married?" I said.

"He plans to be," Kaplan said. "He's very much in love, I can tell you that. With a wonderful girl, who's had a terrifically positive influence on his life."

"May I ask her name?"

Kaplan didn't answer me. "Mr. Petrie knows that Dill will return to camp as soon as Petrie starts bargaining with us in good faith. Excuse me for being so blunt, but hiring someone like you is nothing less than a slap in Bill's face. Just one more instance of bad-faith bargaining, and an insidious way of pressuring my friend into making a bad -a fatally bad- decision about his future."

"All I've been hired to do is find him," I said.

"You can't be that naive," Kaplan said, leaning back in his chair. "If Bill wanted Mr. Petrie to know where he was, he would have told him."

"Do you know where he is?"

"We have been in confact, of course." Kaplan stared at me for a moment. "Bill has authorized me to ask you to leave him alone. I'm asking you, too, as Bill's friend.