Paydirt

8

As sensitive as a swallow to a change in the wind, Christine had been concerned about Bobby's shifting moods for the past several months. But as hard as she tried, she still couldn't figure him out. Did he hate his job or hate her father? Was he insecure when measuring himself against Daddy?

Oh Bobby, don't you know I love you just the way you are?

She sat at the vanity mirror in her dressing area, brushing her blond hair, now loosened from its clips. She wore a peach-colored silk bathrobe and her knee was throbbing. The pain pills made her groggy, but she forced herself to focus on what Bobby was saying. She sensed that the tides of change were about to sweep Bobby in some new, uncharted direction, and it frightened her. He had always been so dependable. No drinking bouts with the guys from the office. No affairs. Now he seemed lost and needed her support more than ever.

Listening to his mournful monologue, Christine quickly realized he wasn't just having a case of mid-career blues. When he came out of the locker room, there was something different about him. A seething anger, seemingly directed at himself.

"I'm responsible," he had told her, pacing in their bedroom after midnight. "If I hadn't gotten Nightlife off, he'd have gone to jail, and this never would have happened. Now he thinks he can get away with anything, but why shouldn't he? I'm the one who enabled him."

She measured her words like a baker with the sugar. "You're too hard on yourself, Bobby. You keep looking for perfection in the world and in yourself."

She'd always accepted Daddy's explanations about the players' antics. They were easy pickings for the media and for women setting them up for lawsuits and extortion. At heart, the players were just a bunch of fun-loving, God-fearing, hard-working boys. But Daddy had fiddled with the truth, she knew.

Sometimes, in the car, she listened to radio talk shows, where callers attacked the team's character with nasty jokes:

Q. What's another name for a Texas Crime Ring?

A. A Mustangs huddle.

Q. How do you get 45 Cowboy players to stand all at once?

A. Will the defendant please rise?

"I know how you feel about violence against women," he said, after a moment.

Do you ever! You knew it the moment you charged into my life.

The thought brought back a memory, and it send a spidery shiver up her spine. The blurry outline of another man's face came back to her then, the image she had seen when Nightlife seemed ready to strike her. It was Lowell Darby nearly a dozen years earlier.

The spoiled youngest son of a Fort Worth banking family, Lowell was fifteen years her senior. Handsome, single, rich, the perfect match, her father told her. Only after their high-society engagement party did she discover he was also a passive-aggressive alcoholic with bipolar disorder. Given to binges, Lowell would become sullen and depressed. He rose from the abyss of his own self-pity by attacking those he loved, or more accurately, those who loved him. It began by pushing, then slapping, then a fist to the stomach. Even drunk, he was careful enough not to leave any marks.

"Why do you make me do this?" he would cry, smacking Christine across the room.

At first, Christine thought it was her fault. If only she were more caring and less demanding, if only she thought of him first, if only this, if only that…

One night, she was working late, alone in her Mustangs Center office, when Lowell staggered through the door wearing a disheveled tux. Had she forgotten their date for the symphony or had he forgotten to tell her? It didn't matter. He shattered a vase against a Remington sculpture of a cowboy on a bucking bronco. He slapped her, raising a welt on her cheekbone, then shoved her across the office where she fell, knocking a computer monitor to the floor.

"I only do this because I love you!" Darby shouted, as he pulled her head backward by the hair. She fought him off, clawing his face with her fingernails and screaming.

In the corridor, headed toward the parking lot, the new associate in the general counsel's office heard the commotion and burst through the door, finding Lowell clutching her throat, squeezing the life out of her. She blacked out and never saw what happened, but when she came to, the lawyer was scooping her up into his arms. Lowell lay moaning on the floor, blood spurting from a broken nose, three teeth missing from his predator's smile.

"Are you all right, Ms. Kingsley?" Bobby Gallagher asked, carrying her gently toward the door.

She looked up at the shaggy haired young man with warm, sad eyes, placed her head on his shoulder, and said, "I am, now."

To this day, two of Bobby's knuckles carried a scars from Darby's canines.

In the mirror, she could see Bobby behind her. He had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling himself off.

"It's not your fault, Bobby. Now we know what a thug Jackson is. But two years ago, how could you have known? You played by the rules and did your job."

She could hear him exhale as if he had started a word, then changed his mind. "Didn't you, Bobby?"

"I paid an investigator twenty thousand dollars to find an alibi witness."

"That seems like a lot for…" She felt her hairbrush stop in mid-stroke and she turned to look at him head on. "You mean you paid for false testimony."

She tried to make eye contact, but his gaze wouldn't meet hers. "My P.I. found a limo driver who claimed he was driving Nightlife on a club-hopping tour and never lost sight of him all night. No perfume clerk, no hotel room, no rape."

"And it was false?"

"All I know is that the driver's memory improved with each thousand dollars, and by the time of the final draft of the affidavit, his statement was so convincing that Nightlife was never even charged. No messy trial, no bad publicity. The prosecutor practically apologized for our inconvenience."

"You never told me," she said, looking at her naked husband. He had started going soft around the middle, and now, his shoulders slumped. She wanted him to say more. She loved him, but even after all these years, she still didn't know exactly what made him tick. Why was he so difficult to reach?

"Does Daddy know?"

Bobby's laugh was empty and humorless. "He gave me the cash for the payoff. Your father regards his players' criminal charges as public relations problems, not moral issues."

"Don't do that, Bobby. Don't shift this to him. We're talking about you. What else have you done?"

"Everything dear old Daddy wanted me to."

"Then confront him directly. Anything else is cowardly."

Bobby blinked twice as if a flashbulb had startled him. Immediately she regretted what she had said. "I'm sorry, Bobby. I didn't mean that you're-"

"No, Chrissy, you're right." He lowered his head, and his voice was barely a whisper. "I'm afraid of your father. I owe him so much I don't know how to stand up to him, and I blame him for my own weaknesses."

"Talk to me," she pleaded. "Tell me everything."

"'What shall it profit a man,'" he said, his eyes distant and unfocused, "'if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'"

She stared at her husband as if she did not know him. He was not one to quote Scripture. He seemed to be disintegrating before her eyes. "How have you lost your soul, Bobby?"

He didn't speak, didn't seem to be able to form the words.

"I'm not just your wife," Christine said. "I'm not just the mother of your son. I'm your best friend, Bobby."

"Locked up in the marketing office all day, you've been insulated from a lot of what's been going on."

"I read the papers. I know we've been embarrassed. And I listen to you after you have a second martini on a Saturday night, and you start whimpering that you're going to quit your job and join the Peace Corps."

"Now you're mocking me."

"I'm not! I'm trying to draw you out of your cave. I'm trying to get you to talk about your feelings. What is it you've done or think you've done?"

Men! Why do they have such difficulty expressing their emotions? Other than anger, that is.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor. When he finally spoke, his voice was parched. "I've paid witnesses to leave town and others to testify about events they never saw. I've fabricated drug tests and suborned perjury. I've carried piss for your father."

"What?"

"I've peed into bottles and switched urine samples with half-a-dozen players. As far as the league knows, the Mustangs have no drug problem but suspiciously high cholesterol."

"Oh, Bobby," she said, feeling his humiliation. "Why didn't you talk to me before?"

"I've repressed it. I convinced myself how wonderful life was because I love you and Scott so much. I even like some of the work. But the fixing and cheating is eating away at me. And now, this! There's a woman in the hospital, beaten and raped, because of me."

Christine used a cane to stand up at the vanity table, then hobbled over to the bed, sitting down next to him. His eyes were red and puffy, and sitting there, naked, he looked like as vulnerable as a lost little boy. She put her arms around him and stroked the back of his neck. She would do anything to breathe life back into him. This was the man who had saved her from an abusive man, who fathered her son, who teased her and made her laugh. "Don't you understand that I love you no matter what? This only brings us closer together. Your problems are mine. Your pain is mine. We can work through this."

She held his hand as they talked, felt the warmth of him. This is what marriage was all about, she was sure. Bonding in times of crisis.

"If you want me to talk to my father, I'll-"

"No, Chrissy. This is my battle. I'm going to handle it myself."

"Fine. But don't threaten Daddy," she cautioned. "That doesn't work with him. And don't just stake out the high moral ground. You need to give him business reasons for every decision."

"I'm not crawling on hands and knees to kiss his ring. I'm through being afraid of him."

There was an edge to his voice that frightened her.

Oh Bobby, how can I protect you?

She worried that he was too undisciplined and impetuous to confront her father. When directly challenged, Daddy always lashed back.

"What are you going to do, Bobby?" she asked.

Bobby took inventory before answering, tallying the bounty of his life. His wife and son, of course, and a deep love for them both. Then, the material items. A gorgeous home with a lap pool, a Jacuzzi, and a tennis court. A garage shielding his Lexus and Chrissy's Mercedes from the Texas sun. An expense account and pension plan. Cocktail parties and business lunches and a closet full of expensive suits.

For years, he had been stuck in a web of finely spun gold. The road to ruin is paved with foie gras, he concluded. The pursuit of victory-on the field, at the ticket window, in the courtroom-had become paramount. Corruption was the handmaiden of success. He had gone along, handing up his balls along with his self-esteem. A man can rationalize almost anything.

Hey, this is the big leagues. This is the way the game is played.

Tonight, he had stood fifteen minutes under the scalding water in the shower but could not scrub himself clean. He heard terrified screams in the roar of the faucet, saw the face of an anguished woman rising from the steam. With those visions still etched in his mind, a plan began to form.

He would reclaim his manhood. Maybe he'd lose the material possessions but he'd still have what mattered most to him, the love and tenderness of his wife and son.

"I'm going to take a stand," he said. "I'm going to change my life."

"Do it," Christine said, reaching out to stroke his cheek. "But remember, it's my life, too."

"The Cowboys are America's Team. Dallas has the babes, the glitz, the uniforms. The Cowboys are the American Dream."

— Tony Kornheiser, sportswriter