Fancy Pants

  Jaycee had been dead for a year now, his life washed away by alcohol and a mean temper. Dallie hadn't found out about his father's death until a few months after it had happened when he'd run into one of Jaycee's old drinking buddies in a Nacogdoches saloon. Dallie wished he had known at the time so he could have stood next to Jaycee's coffin, looked down at his father's corpse, and spit right between the old man's closed eyes. One glob of spit for all the bruises he'd earned from Jaycee's fists, all the abuse he'd taken throughout his childhood, all the times he'd listened to Jaycee call him worthless... a pretty boy... a no-account... until he hadn't been able to stand it anymore and had run away at fifteen.

  From what he'd been able to see in a few old photos, Dallie got most of his good looks from his mother. She, too, had run off. She had fled from Jaycee not long after Dallie was born, and she hadn't bothered to leave a forwarding address. Jaycee once said he heard she'd gone to Alaska, but he had never tried to find her. “Too much trouble,” Jaycee had told Dallie. “No woman's worth that much trouble, especially when there are so many others around.”

  With his thick auburn hair and heavy-lidded eyes, Jaycée had attracted more women than he knew what to do with. Over the years at least a dozen had spent varying amounts of time living with them, a few even bringing children along. Some of the women had taken good care of Dallie, others had abused him. As he grew older, he noticed that the ones who abused him seemed to last longer than the others, probably because it took a certain amount of ill temper to survive Jaycee for more than a few months.

  “He was born mean,” one of the nicer women had told Dallie while she packed her suitcase. “Some people are just like that. You don't realize it at first about Jaycee because he's smart, and he can talk so nice that he makes you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. But there's something twisted inside him that makes him mean right through to his blood. Don't listen to all that stuff he says about you, Dallie. You're a good kid. He's just afraid you'll grow up and make something of your life, which is more than he's ever been able to do.”

  Dallie had stayed out of the way of Jaycee's fists as much as he could. The classroom became his safest haven, and unlike his friends he never cut school—unless he had a particularly bad set of bruises on his face, in which case he would hang out with the caddies who worked at the country club down the road. They taught him golf, and by the time he was twelve he had found an even safer haven than school.

  Dallie shook off his old memories and told Skeet it was time to call it a night. They went back to the motel, but even though he was tired, Dallie had been thinking about the past too much to fall asleep easily.

  With the qualifying round completed and the Pro-Am out of the way, the real tournament began the next day. Like all major professional golf tournaments, the Orange Blossom Open held its first two rounds on Thursday and Friday. The players who survived the cut after Friday went on to the final two rounds. Not only did Dallie survive Friday's cut, but he was leading the tournament by four strokes when he walked past the network television tower onto the first tee on Sunday morning for the final round.

  “Now, you just hold steady today, Dallie,” Skeet said. He tapped the heel of his hand against the top of Dallie's golf bag and looked nervously over at the leader board, which had Dallie's name prominently displayed at the top. “Remember that you're playing your own game today, not anybody else's. Put those television cameras out of your mind and concentrate on making one shot at a time.”

  Dallie didn't even nod in acknowledgment of Skeet's words. Instead, he grinned at a spectacular brunette standing near the ropes that held back the gallery of fans. She smiled back, so he wandered over to crack a few jokes with her, acting like he didn't have a care in the world, like winning this tournament wasn't the most important thing in his life, like this year there wouldn't be any Halloween at all.

  Dallie was playing in the final foursome along with Johnny Miller, the leading money winner on the tour that season. When it was Dallie's turn to tee up, Skeet handed him a three-wood and gave his final words of advice. “Remember that you're the best young golfer on the tour today, Dallie. You know it and I know it. How about we let the rest of the world figure it out?” Dallie nodded, took his stance, and hit the kind of golf shot that makes history.

  At the end of fourteen holes, Dallie was still in the lead at sixteen under par. With only four holes to go, Johnny Miller was coming up fast, but he was still four strokes behind. Dallie put Miller out of his mind and concentrated on his own game. As he sank a five-foot putt, he told himself that he was born to play golf. Some champions are made, but others are created at the moment of conception. He was finally going to live up to the reputation the magazines had created for him. With his name sitting at the top of the leader board of the Orange Blossom Open, Dallie felt as if he'd come out of the womb with a brand-new Titleist ball clenched in his hand.

  His strides grew longer as he walked down the fifteenth fairway. The network cameras followed his every move, and confidence surged through him. Those final-round defeats of the past two years were all behind him now. They were flukes, nothing but flukes. This Texas boy was about to set the golf world on fire.

  The sun hit his blond hair and warmed his shirt. In the gallery, a shapely female fan blew him a kiss. He laughed and made a play out of catching the kiss in midair and slipping it into his pocket.

  Skeet held out an eight-iron for an easy approach shot to the fifteenth green. Dallie gripped the club, assessed the lie, and took his stance. He felt strong and in control. His lead was solid, his game was on, nothing could snatch away this victory.

  Nothing except the Bear.

  You don't really think you can win this thing, do you, Beaudine?

  The Bear's voice popped into Dallie's head sounding just as clear as if Jack Nicklaus were standing beside him.

  Champions like me win golf tournaments, not failures like you.

  Go away, Dallie's brain screamed. Don't show up now! Sweat began to break out on his forehead. He adjusted his grip, tried to loosen himself up again, tried not to listen to that voice.

  What have you got to show for yourself? What have you done with your life except screw things up?

  Leave me alone! Dallie stepped away from the ball, rechecked the line, and settled in again. He drew back the club and hit. The crowd let out a collective groan as the ball drifted to the left and landed in high rough. In Dallie's mind, the Bear shook his big blond head.

  That's exactly what I'm talking about, Beaudine. You just don't have the stuff it takes to make a champion.

  Skeet, his expression clearly worried, came up next to Dallie. “Where in hell did that shot come from? Now you're going to have to scramble to make par.”

  “I just lost my balance,” Dallie snapped, stalking off toward the green.

  You just lost your guts, the Bear whispered back.

  The Bear had begun to appear in Dallie's head not long after Dallie had started playing on the pro tour. Before that, it had only been Jaycee's voice he had heard in his head. Logically, Dallie understood that he'd created the Bear himself, and he knew there was a big difference between the soft-spoken, well-mannered Jack Nicklaus of real life and this creature from hell who spoke like Nicklaus, and looked like Nicklaus, and knew all Dallie's deepest secrets.

  But logic didn't have much to do with private devils, and it wasn't accidental that Dallie's private devil had taken the form of Jack Nicklaus, a man he admired just about more than anyone else—a man with a beautiful family, the respect of his peers, and the greatest game of golf the world had ever seen. A man who wouldn't know how to fail if he tried.

  You're a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, the Bear whispered as Dallie lined up a short putt on the sixteenth green. It lipped the edge of the cup and scooted off to the side.

  Johnny Miller gave Dallie a sympathetic look, then sank his own putt for a par. Two holes later when Dallie hit his drive on eighteen, his four-shot lead had be
en reduced to a tie with Miller.

  Your old man told you you'd never amount to much, the Bear said as Dallie's drive sliced viciously to the right. Why didn't you listen?

  The worse Dallie played, the more he joked with the crowd. “Now, where did that miserable golf shot come from?” he called over to them, scratching his head in mock bewilderment. And then he pointed to a plump, matronly woman standing near the ropes. “Ma'am, maybe you'd better put down your purse and come on over here so you can hit the next one for me.”

  He bogeyed the final hole and Johnny Miller birdied it. After the players had signed their scorecards, the tournament chairman presented Miller with the first-place trophy and a check for thirty thousand dollars. Dallie shook his hand, gave Miller a few congratulatory pats on the shoulder, and then went over to joke with the crowd some more.

  “This is what I get for letting Skeet hold my jaws open last night and pour all that beer down my throat. My old grandmother could have played better out there today with a garden rake and roller skates.”

  Dallie Beaudine had spent a childhood dodging his father's fists, and he knew better than to let anybody see when he was hurting.

  Chapter

  4

  Francesca stood in the center of a pool of discarded evening gowns and studied her reflection in the wall of mirrors built into one end of her bedroom, now decorated with pastel-striped silk walls, matching Louis XV chairs, and an early Matisse. Like an architect engrossed in a blueprint, she searched her twenty-year-old face for gremlin-induced imperfections that might have mischievously appeared since she last looked in the mirror. Her small straight nose was dusted with a translucent powder priced at twelve pounds a box, her eyelids frosted with smoky shadow, and her lashes, individually separated with a tiny tortoiseshell comb, had been coated with exactly four applications of imported German mascara. She lowered her critical gaze down over her tiny frame to the graceful curve of her breasts, then inspected the neat indentation of her waist before moving on to her legs, beautifully clad in a pair of lacquer green suede slacks complemented perfectly by an ivory silk blouse from Piero De Monzi. She had just been named one of the ten most beautiful women in Great Britain for 1975. Although she would never have been so crass as to say it aloud, she secretly wondered why the magazine had bothered with nine others.

  Francesca's delicate features were more classically beautiful than either her mother's or grandmother's, and much more changeable. Her slanted green eyes could grow as chill and distant as a cat's when she was displeased, or as saucy as a Soho barmaid's if her mood shifted. When she realized how much attention it brought her, she began to emphasize her resemblance to Vivien Leigh and let her chestnut hair grow into a curly, shoulder-length cloud, occasionally even pulling it back from her small face with hair slides to make the likeness more pronounced.

  As she contemplated her reflection, it didn't occur to her that she was shallow and vain, that many of the people she considered her friends could barely tolerate her. Men loved her, and that was all that mattered. She was so outrageously beautiful, so utterly charming when she put her energy to it, that only the most self-protective of males could resist her. Men found being with Francesca rather like taking an addictive drug, and even after the relationship had ended, many discovered themselves coming back for a damaging second hit.

  Like her mother, she spoke in hyperbole and put her words into invisible italics, making even the most mundane occurrence sound like a grand adventure. She was rumored to be a sorceress in bed, although the specifics of who had actually penetrated the lovely Francesca's enchanting vagina had grown a bit muddy over time. She kissed wonderfully, that was for certain, leaning into a man's chest, curling up in his arms like a sensuous kitten, sometimes licking at his mouth with the very tip of her small pink tongue.

  Francesca never stopped to consider that men adored her because she was generally at her best with them. They didn't have to suffer her attacks of thoughtlessness, her perpetual tardiness, or her piques when she didn't get her way. Men made her bloom. At least for a while... until she grew bored. Then she became impossible.

  As she applied a slick of coral gloss to her lips, she couldn't help but smile at the memory of her most spectacular conquest, although she was, absolutely distraught that he hadn't taken their parting better. Still, what could she have done? Several months of playing second fiddle to all his official responsibilities had brought the chill light of reality to those deliriously warm visions of royal immortality she'd been entertaining—glass-enclosed carriages, cathedral doors flinging open, trumpets playing—visions not entirely unthinkable for a girl who'd been raised in the bedroom of a princess.

  When she'd finally come to her senses about their relationship and realized she didn't want to live her life at the beck and call of the British Empire, she'd tried to make her break with him as clean as possible. But he'd still taken it rather badly. She could see him now as he'd looked that night—immaculately tailored, exquisitely barbered, expensively shod. How on earth could she have known that a man who bore no wrinkles on the outside might bear a few insecurities on the inside? She remembered the evening two months earlier when she had ended her relationship with the most eligible bachelor in Great Britain.

  They had just finished dinner in the privacy of his apartments, and his face had seemed young and curiously vulnerable as the candlelight softened its aristocratic planes. She gazed at him across the damask tablecloth set with sterling two hundred years old and china rimmed in twenty-four-karat gold, trying to let him understand by the earnestness of her expression that this was all much more difficult for her than it could possibly be for him.

  “I see,” he said, after she'd given her reasons, as kindly as possible; for not continuing their friendship. And then, once more, “I see.”

  “You do understand?” She tilted her head to one side so that her hair fell away from her face, letting the light catch the twin rhinestone slivers that dangled from her earlobes, flickering like a chain of stars against a chestnut sky.

  His blunt response shocked her. “Actually, no.” Pushing himself back from the table, he stood abruptly. “I don't understand at all.” He looked down at the floor and then up again at her. “I must confess I've rather fallen for you, Francesca, and you gave me every reason to believe that you cared for me.”

  “I do, “ she replied earnestly. “Of course I do.”

  “But not enough to put up with all that goes along with me.”

  The combination of stubborn pride and hurt she heard in his voice made her feel horribly guilty. Weren't the royals supposed to hide their emotions, no matter how trying the circumstances? “It is rather a lot,” she reminded him.

  “Yes, it is, isn't it?” There was a trace of bitterness in his laugh. “Foolish of me to have believed you cared enough to put up with it.”

  Now, in the privacy of her bedroom, Francesca frowned briefly at her reflection in the mirror. Since her own heart had never been affected by anyone, it always came as something of a surprise to her when one of the men with whom she was involved reacted so strongly when they parted.

  Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. She recapped her pot of lip gloss and tried to restore her spirits by humming a British dance hall tune from the 1930s about a man who danced with a girl who had danced with the Prince of Wales.

  “I'm leaving now, darling,” Chloe said, appearing in the doorway as she adjusted the brim of a cream felt bowler over her dark hair, cut short and curly. “If Helmut calls, tell him I'll be back by one.”

  “If Helmut calls, I'll tell him you bloody well died.” Francesca splayed her hand on her hip, her cinnamon brown fingernails looking like small sculptured almonds as she tapped them impatiently against her green suede slacks.

  Chloe fastened the neck clasp of her mink. “Now, darling...”

  Francesca felt a pang of remorse as she noticed how tired her mother looked, but she repressed it, reminding herself that Chloe's self-destru
ctiveness with men had grown worse in recent months and it was her duty as a daughter to point it out. “He's a gigolo, Mummy. Everyone knows it. A phony German prince who's making an absolute fool of you.” She reached past the scènted Porthault hangers in her closet to the rack holding the gold fish-scale belt she'd bought at David Webb the last time she was in New York. After securing the clasp at her waist, she returned her attention to Chloe. “I'm worried about you, Mummy. There are circles under your eyes, and you look tired all the time. You've also been impossible to live with. Only yesterday you brought home the beige Givenchy kimono for me instead of the silver one I asked you to get.”

  Chloe sighed. “I'm sorry, darling. I—I've had things on my mind, and I haven't been sleeping well. I'll pick up the silver kimono for you when I'm out today.”

  Francesca's pleasure in hearing that she would get the proper kimono didn't quite overshadow her concern for Chloe. As gently as possible, she tried to make Chloe understand how serious all this was. “You're forty, Mummy. You need to start taking better care of yourself. Gracious, you haven't had a facial in weeks.”

  To her dismay, she saw that she'd hurt Chloe's feelings. Rushing over, she gave her mother a quick conciliatory hug, careful not to smear the delicate taupe shading beneath her cheekbones. “Never mind,” she said. “I adore you. And you're still the most beautiful mother in London.”

  “Which reminds me—one mother in this house is enough. You are taking your birth control pills, aren't you, darling?”

  Francesca groaned. “Not this again...”

  Chloe withdrew a pair of gloves from an ostrich-skin Chanel handbag and began tugging them on. “I can't bear the thought of your becoming pregnant when you're still so young. Pregnancy is so dangerous.”