The Franchise Babe: A Novel

  “What about number two?”

  “That would be the elegant Renata.”

  “Renata?” she said. “You married a Renata?”

  Like I must have been asking for trouble, right?

  I said, “Renata Schielder. The name alone strikes fear in the hearts of man. She was a real estate agent. She talked me into renting a two-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue I couldn’t afford…and moved in with me and we got married. She was stylish, very pretty, sophisticated. But the sense of humor martinis made me think she had never surfaced. I think she saw us as a New York City ‘power couple’—I had a byline in a magazine and knew restaurant owners. She fancied herself as the real estate agent to the stars. But one day it dawned on her that I wasn’t ever going to be rich, and worse than that, I didn’t care. I liked my job too much to worry about it.”

  “That did it, huh?”

  “No, the thing that did it was the gel-hair Wall Street lawyer she met while she was trying to find him an apartment. You may be entertained by the way she left me. In the last year of our marriage—while she was secretly getting it on with Gel-Hair—I inherited some money when my Aunt Alma died. Aunt Alma left me twenty-five thousand dollars. I stuck it in the bank and didn’t think anything else about it. But Renata did. She told me the reason our marriage was in trouble, a little rocky, was because I’d never given her a proper wedding ring. I had ‘diminished’ her. I said okay, let’s go pick one out for you. So we did. We went to Tiffany’s and she spent twenty thousand of what my aunt left me on a ten-carat diamond ring. Then she left me. A week later.”

  “That’s a horrible story. What a cunt!”

  “I love that word, don’t you? Actually, baseball players love it more than we do. They like to yell, ‘Hit him in the cunt!’”

  Thurlene said she would be smoking a cigarette if it weren’t a felony to smoke indoors in California. She wondered if I could pay the check so we could continue this outside…take a stroll or something?

  I made a gesture at Dorian to bring the check. He came over and said the evening was compliments of Allison in PR. All I had to do was sign.

  “I can’t let Allison do that,” I said. “My company won’t allow it. I’ll have to insist on paying myself.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Dorian said, and handed me the check.

  It was for $737.50. I stared at it.

  Dorian said, “It was a very nice Montrachet.”

  “I wish I’d tasted it,” I said. “Tell you what, Dorian. Maybe I’ll make an exception in this case and let Allison handle it.” I signed and we left.

  Thurlene laughed her way through the lobby. We were barely out the front door of the hotel when she lit up a Capri.

  Out of casual curiosity I asked what her maiden name was.

  She said, “If you had gone to Woodrow Wilson High when I did you would have known me as Thurlene Kay Robertson. I grew up in old east Dallas…Lakewood. It was an upper-crust neighborhood at one time. My folks say it was Highland Park before there was Highland Park. You’re not with a Highland Park chick tonight.”

  “Another bad break…but I knew that.”

  “How did you know that? I’m not wearing enough jewelry?”

  “You’re thirty-eight and you haven’t had any work done yet.”

  She smiled. “That’s funny because it’s so true. Thanks for the compliment, but I’m forty. Want to take it back?”

  We were still strolling.

  She went on. “I was always athletic. Fairly good at tennis, but better at golf. I went to SMU on a golf scholarship. Thank God I got one. I guess my parents would have scraped up the tuition somehow. I was the number two player. But I worked too. I always had jobs. I was a part-time waitress in college. I worked in a jewelry store. When I graduated I took a job at a bank in Arlington. I stayed in banking. I became a loan officer at Sunset Bank in North Cliff. It was a good job. I liked it. But…when Ginger made the choice to go pro instead of college, I felt I should resign and so I could travel with her, for a year or two anyhow.”

  I said, “I understand you have a place in Palm Beach.”

  “A little south of Palm Beach proper. About eight minutes from Worth Avenue. Fifteen minutes from the airport in West Palm. Very convenient. On the ocean…it’s lovely. I wish it were paid for.”

  “Tell me more about the kid.”

  “It starts for these girls when they’re eleven and twelve. I’ll bet you don’t know that when eleven-and twelve-year-olds play in tournaments the parents can’t gallery. Unless they volunteer to work on the tournament, they have to watch through fences. That’s good, I think.”

  “I agree,” I said. “No sideline coaching from Mom and Dad.”

  “Generally it’s the father who drives the kid too hard. Working a kid too hard can result in burnout by the time a kid is sixteen. But when Ginger was sixteen, she was already dedicated. She’d go out and hit practice balls in bad weather, while most of the other girls were at the mall, buying things they didn’t need, and eating junk that wasn’t good for them.”

  “And flirting with boys.”

  “Of course.”

  “Doesn’t make them bad people,” I said. “Is all this leading up to Debbie Wendell, by chance?”

  “It is,” she said.

  We sat on a bench in a hotel garden. Tall cacti surrounded us. I was tempted to try one of her Capris, but being a person of great inner strength, I let the idea pass.

  She asked if I’d heard of something called dushuqiang. That’s how it was spelled. She pronounced it “doo-shoo-chang.”

  “Doo-shoo-chang,” I said. “Goes good with egg roll?”

  “Not particularly,” she said. “It’s a Chinese rat poison.”

  10

  Thurlene said I’d probably never heard of a young golfer on the LPGA tour named Tang Chen. I said she was right. I’d never heard of a golfer on the LPGA tour named Chen…Deng…thing.

  “Tang Chen is from Beijing,” she said.

  “I would hope so.”

  “She and Debbie Wendell became friends on the tour last year.”

  “The Chinese girl speaks English?”

  “Good enough.”

  “Why did they become friends? Debbie Wendell is a self-appointed goodwill ambassador?”

  “I’ll get to that.”

  “Is Tang Chen in the tournament? She could be in the field and I wouldn’t know it—unless you told me to look in the scores between Mao Tse-tung and wonton soup.”

  Thurlene looked at me the way a person would look if the person was saying, “Do you want to hear this or not?”

  Then she said, “Tang Chen is not in the field this week. She relies on sponsor invitations and hasn’t come over yet. She will be watched closely when she does come—you can count on it.”

  I said, “Hard-hitting reporter that I am, I’m sniffing a scandal here. Debbie Wendell is envious of Ginger Clayton. Debbie Wendell is friends with Tang Chen. Tang Chen is Chinese. There’s a rat poison that comes from China called doo-shoo-chang.”

  “You may be sniffing, but you can’t write it.”

  “I decide what I can write and what I can’t.”

  “You can’t write this. Not yet. It hasn’t been written, and you can’t write it.”

  “Who’s going to stop me?”

  “The LPGA.”

  “The LPGA?” I said with a chuckle. “You must be kidding. The LPGA can’t stop hand-holding.”

  “The LPGA with the help of the United States of America.”

  “Oh, them.”

  “The United States doesn’t want to embarrass a Chinese athlete, particularly since there’s no solid proof she’s done anything wrong.”

  I said, “Why don’t you walk me through this so I’ll know exactly what we’re talking about? And give me a damn cigarette.”

  Grinning, she handed me a Capri and her Bic. I lit up, took a drag.

  “Jesus,” I said. “These will cure emphysema.”

  Thurlene l
it a fresh Capri for herself, crossed her legs, and said, “All right then. Last September at the Good Grub Classic in Oklahoma City—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “The Good Grub Classic?”

  “You’ve never heard of Good Grub?”

  “If it happens in September and doesn’t have anything to do with the Ryder Cup or college football, I don’t hear about it.”

  “Good Grub is a new restaurant chain. It’s very good.”

  “What kind of restaurant? Like a Taco Bell? The Alamo was the first Taco Bell, in case you don’t know. That’s what made it worth dying for.”

  Ignoring that, she said, “Good Grub is like, uh…I would say it’s in the same ballpark with a Cracker Barrel. The food is down-home wonderful. I’ve bought stock in the company for Ginger.”

  I said, “Okay, you’re at the Good Grub Classic in Oklahoma City. What golf course?”

  “A new one. Grain Hills Country Club.”

  “The Good Grub Classic at Grain Hills Country Club. Hard to go up against that for charm.”

  She leaned back on the bench, smoked, and waited for my full attention. Satisfied that she had it, she related how Debbie had introduced Ginger to Tang Chen and said the Chinese girl was lonely and needed friends on the tour. She asked Ginger to be nice to her. Ginger said sure.

  Ann Wendell, Debbie’s mother, had taken the three girls to dinner a few times on the tour. Sometimes Thurlene went along, and she recalled listening to Debbie and her mother try to make conversation with the Chinese girl. And although she thought nothing of it at the time, she was now certain that she overheard Tang use the word “doo-shoo-chang” in conversation with them.

  Ginger had been leading the Oklahoma City tournament after the first round by two strokes over—I might have guessed—Debbie Wendell. And that evening Thurlene took the three girls to a movie at a theater in the Cowbarn Mall, which wasn’t far from Grain Hills Country Club. Thurlene drove them in the courtesy car the sponsor provided for the contestants. Ann Wendell had left the Oklahoma tournament after the first round for some business reason, which was unlike her. It would usually take a death in the family to drag Ann away from a tournament where Debbie was a contender.

  In any case, the girls went to a movie Thurlene didn’t care to see, and Thurlene went to a different movie in the same theater complex.

  I said, “Let me guess. The girls went to the riotous high school comedy where Kelli, Meghan, and Stacie tell their parents to fuck off and their boyfriends to eat shit and die.”

  “That’s the one,” Thurlene said dryly.

  I said, “But you went to the grown-up movie…where the rooms are dark, you can hardly hear the dialogue, and you still can’t understand why Julia Roberts would want to screw that scruffy asshole.”

  “May I continue?”

  “If you would.”

  She said, “I wasn’t in my seat twenty minutes before Debbie found me and told me Ginger was really sick in the ladies’ room. I rushed in and there she was, curled up on the floor with a burning fever and having spasms and vomiting.”

  It looked like it might be food poisoning. What had she eaten? Debbie said Ginger had a Coke and popcorn. They all had Cokes and popcorn.

  Instead of calling an ambulance, which might have wasted time, Thurlene obtained directions to the O.U. Medical Center in Oklahoma City. She drove Ginger to the hospital, to the emergency entrance, and in something of a crazed state managed to demand immediate assistance from a group of trauma people who were not as recognizable as the doctors, interns, and nurses you see on TV but were helpful nonetheless.

  They did all the IV and EKG and blood pressure and suppository things to Ginger that emergency rooms do. They got her resting easily, out of danger, and took the liberty, while they were at it, of zapping the hysterical mom with a jumbo antianxiety pill.

  Twenty-four hours later, Ginger was on the road to recovery, but she had withdrawn from a tournament she was leading, leaving the contest to Debbie Wendell and others.

  To this day it delighted Thurlene that Ginger’s withdrawal hadn’t done Debbie Wendell any good. She didn’t come close to winning the Good Grub Classic. Peaches Crowder came from behind in the last round to edge Suzy Scott by two strokes. Debbie choked badly and finished in a tie for seventeenth with Su Lee Kim.

  Meanwhile, back at the hospital, a doctor concluded that Ginger had been poisoned.

  With what, he wasn’t certain, but tests showed traces of strychnine and what sounded to Thurlene like “mono flora tetra metha motorhome.” Words that nobody understands but doctors.

  The doctor had said, “It could be rat poison, but I can’t imagine how she would have been exposed to it.”

  The mom could imagine it, but kept it to herself.

  Thurlene researched the rat poison later and found that it came in the form of white powder, was easy to acquire in China, a cinch to smuggle into another country, and was odorless and tasteless. And it didn’t take much of the dust to make a person ill, and not much more to kill someone.

  I said, “Nobody else who ate the popcorn in the theater that day or night got poisoned?”

  “Nope. I made sure of it.”

  “You were alone. That must have been a terrible night for you.”

  “It wasn’t the best night of my life.”

  “When did you get in touch with Ginger’s dad?”

  “I tracked him down the next day in Dallas. He happened to have his cell with him while he was getting picked like a chicken on the back nine at wherever he was. Do you know what he said when I told him what happened? He said Debbie wouldn’t do a thing like that. Ginger must have eaten something that didn’t agree with her. He was relieved Ginger was okay, but he said I shouldn’t blame Debbie or her mother for what happened. Ann Wendell was our good friend, our dear friend. We had all been so close for so long. How could I forget that? Guess what? That’s when I realized the sorry bastard had been screwing Ann Wendell for at least three years.”

  I said, “Well, he did look like Nick Nolte.”

  11

  We weren’t through talking and smoking. As we sat on the bench and watched other hotel guests walk by and admire the cacti, a slow-moving waiter appeared. He asked if we needed anything. He looked like someone whose surfing days might not be over if he could only get back to the beach.

  “You’re the writer, somebody told me,” he said.

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “See, that’s what I want to be,” he said. “I’ve got these really good ideas for books and movies. Any advice you can give me?”

  I said, “You want to write, get a job on a newspaper, go from there.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  He limped away, looking injured, confused.

  Thurlene said, “You blew him off quick enough.”

  “Yeah, well, most people who say they want to write would rather talk about it than do it,” I said. “You were saying you went to see the commissioner about the poison deal?”

  She said Ginger left the tour for three weeks. Thurlene took her to their condo in Palm Beach, where the kid recuperated. They did beach time and Worth Avenue’s shops and cafes, and Ginger practiced at Emerald Dunes, the club they’d joined. While they were in Florida, Thurlene drove up to the LPGA headquarters in Daytona.

  It was easy to find. If you took away the palm trees and windows, it looked like the one-story office building in Dallas where she would go to see her dentist or dermatologist.

  Thurlene let the commissioner in on the scoop that the tour had two dangerous young girls on its hands. One American, one Chinese.

  I interrupted her to ask who the LPGA commissioner was these days. I didn’t keep up with it. The last one I remember was some guy, but it seemed like there’d been two or three since him.

  “Marsha Wilson. She’s new. She’s been in the job a year. She replaced Karen Bassler.”

  “What happened to Karen Bassler?”

&nb
sp; “She resigned to become Queen of Norway…I’m sorry. Bad joke. The players never liked Karen. They could see from the start she was only using the job as a stepping-stone to something bigger.”

  “Did she find it?”

  “I don’t know where she is now.”

  “Where did Marsha Wilson come from?”

  “Marketing. She’s supposed to be a marketing whiz.”

  “What did she market?”

  “I understand her greatest success was selling the world’s biggest driver for Callaway. Bertha’s Hindenburg.”

  “She did that? I remember the slogan. ‘There’ll be a hot, hot time on your country club course when your Hindenburg lands today.’ Some marketing people have it, some don’t.”

  The commissioner had listened patiently to the tale of poison and intrigue. She took notes. She said it was hard to believe, but she conceded that the circumstantial evidence was worth considering.

  It was a delicate thing, the commissioner said, one of the girls being Chinese. The commissioner would “float a balloon” through her legal department to see what the lawyers thought, and since she had friends in Washington, D.C., she would “stick her toe in the water” around the State Department and hear their “soundings” on the matter.

  The commissioner ended the meeting by saying the situation was something they needed to “keep an eye on.”

  I said, “You should have reminded the commissioner that ‘they needed killin’ is a valid legal defense in Texas.”

  Thurlene said she wished she’d thought of that. She also said I didn’t have to walk her to her room. She was tired. A little woozy from the wine. Tomorrow was a big day. And she wasn’t in the mood to be hit on.

  I said I had no intention of hitting on her. She and her daughter were merely the subjects of a story to me. I never mixed business with pleasure.