Troublemaker Read Online Free PDF Page B

the couch and sat there again. "Your sweetheart once," he said. "I saw the inscription on an old photo of you in his desk."
    "Ancient history." Kegan bit into a shiny green apple and talked while he chewed. "Yeah, I was crazy about him. Crazy as I can be, for as long as I can be. I'm a Libra with the moon in the seventh house." He looked wanly toward the sunlit beach. "I can't be what they used to call 'faithful.' I hated hurting him, and believe me, nobody could look hurt the way Rick could. I just couldn't do anything about it. Wrong. I did what I could. I financed The Square Circle. I was a good lightweight." Remembering, he instinctively lightened his stomach muscles. "Well, maybe not so good, but good-looking, you know what I mean. They paid to watch me. And Rick didn't have a dime. So I set up the bar and let him run it for me. I made good bread in the fifties. They televised fights a lot —remember? Bitched it was ruining the fight game. Hell, it didn't hurt me." He left-jabbed an imaginary opponent, and went into the kitchen to get rid of the apple core. "No, if there was anybody to throw out, I'd be the one to do that. He hated confrontations."
    "He was right," Dave said. "The last one was bad for him." He drank again, lit a cigarette. "The fifteen hundred dollars —if he didn't pay off the furniture trucker, then it was in the envelope, right? Who else could have known about it?"
    "I told you." Kegan came, wiping apple juice off his fingers onto his Levi's, to stand facing Dave. "I didn't know about it myself."
    "That's what you told me. And you also didn't know Wendell had jumped the rails over a new boy. You didn't even suspect it?"
    "Second-guessing it, I should have." Kegan lifted a foot and pushed with a brown toe at the crooked stacks of magazines and records. "Soon as I opened at noon, a phone call came, asking for him. Young sounding. Wouldn't leave a name. But shit —that's not too unusual. Kids get it in their mind we're their buddies, you know? It's part of the business—everybody who buys a forty-cent beer is your friend. They choose one or the other of us. Usually Rick—he was so open about himself, easy talker."
    He sighed and put a foot on the floor. "So —they get into scrapes or get depressed, they get on the phone. But when Rick came in at three-thirty, he said, yeah, he'd gotten the call at home. Then he phoned home and, the way it sounded, took up an argument he'd been having with Heather about her not getting out enough. He kept asking her to promise him she'd take in a flick that night, The Sundown Studs. She'd like the horses."
    "She didn't like what they did to them," Dave said.
    "But she went," Kegan said. "He really gave her a hard sell, argued with her for a half hour, telling her what a great movie it was. And I happened to know he'd never seen it. It only opened Friday. He hadn't got a night off to see it. Or an afternoon either. Not on a weekend." He frowned to himself, nodded. "Yeah, I should have figured out what he was up to." He gave Dave a bleak smile. "But frankly, Bobby was on my mind. That damn contest. On looks, he can win it going away. But a couple of dudes in that line-up have got a little intelligence, a lot of charm."
    "When Wendell left early that night," Dave said, "that didn't add it all up for you —that there might be another Monkey in the picture?"
    "No," Kegan said, "and I'll tell you why. It was Monday. Business was slow. We were just standing around. He said he might as well see the flick with her. It was natural."
    Feet thudded on the deck outside. Bobby stood in the door opening. His long, blond muscles were slick with sweat. "Salad?" he panted. "Steak? I don't smell any charcoal."
    Kegan looked at his watch. "It's not half an hour," he said. "Okay, okay. Go shower. It'll be ready when you get out." He watched the boy disappear down a dim white hallway, hopping, shedding the little shorts. Between the sun brown of his torso and legs, his butt gleamed