Play Dirty

CHAPTER 2

EXCUSE ME?”

“You heard correctly, Mr. Burkett. Another Coke?”

Griff continued to stare at his host until his question sank in. At least the crazy bastard was a courteous host. “No thanks.”

Speakman rolled his chair over to the end table and picked up Griff’s empty glass, carried it along with his to the wet bar, and placed both in a rack beneath the sink. He used a bar towel to wipe the granite countertop, although from where Griff sat, he could see that it was highly polished, not a single drop of liquid or streak of moisture on its glassy surface. Speakman folded the towel, lining up the hem evenly, and threaded it through a ring attached to the counter.

He rolled back to the table at Griff’s elbow and replaced the coaster he’d used in its brass holder, gave it three taps, then put his chair in reverse and resumed his original place a few feet from where Griff sat.

Griff, watching these maneuvers, thought, Courteous and neat.

“Let me know if you change your mind about another drink,” Speakman said.

Griff stood up, rounded his chair, looked back at Speakman to see if his lunacy could be detected at this distance, then walked over to the windows and looked outside. He needed to ground himself, make sure he hadn’t fallen into a rabbit hole or something.

He felt as he had those first few weeks at Big Spring, when he would wake up disoriented and it would take several seconds for him to remember where he was and why. This was like that. He felt detached. He needed to get his bearings.

Beyond the windows, not a Mad Hatter in sight. Everything was still there and looking perfectly normal-the emerald grass, stone pathways winding through the flower beds, trees with sprawling branches shading it all. A pond in the distance. Blue sky. Overhead a jet was making its final approach into Dallas.

“One of ours.”

Griff hadn’t heard the approach of Speakman’s chair and was startled to find him so close. Prison would do that to you, too. Make you jumpy. Linemen topping three hundred pounds used to charge at him bent on inflicting injury and pain, teeth bared behind their face guards, eyes slitted with malice. He’d been prepared for them and was conditioned to take their abuse.

But even in the minimum-security area of the prison, where the inmates were white-collar criminals, you stayed nervous twenty-four/seven. You kept your guard up and other people at arm’s length.

Of course, he’d been that way before prison.

Speakman was watching the jet. “From Nashville. Due to touch down at seven oh seven.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Right on time.”

Griff studied him for several seconds, then said, “The hell of it is, you seem perfectly sane.”

“You doubt my sanity?”

“And then some.”

“Why?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not wearing a sign that says sperm bank.”

Speakman smiled. “Not the kind of job you thought I’d be offering, huh?”

“Not by a long shot.” Griff glanced at his own wristwatch. “Look, I’ve got plans tonight. A get-together with some friends.” There was no get-together. No friends, either. But it sounded plausible. “I need to get going to make it on time.”

Speakman seemed to see through the lie. “Before declining my offer,” he said, “at least hear me out.”

He extended his hand as though to touch Griff’s arm. Griff’s flinch was involuntary, no way to prevent Speakman from noticing it. He looked up at Griff with puzzlement but pulled his hand back before making actual contact. “Sorry,” Griff muttered.

“It’s the wheelchair,” Speakman said blandly. “It puts some people off. Like a disease or a bad-luck charm.”

“It’s not that. Not at all. It’s, uh…Look, I think we’re finished here. I gotta go.”

“Please don’t leave yet, Griff. Do you mind if I call you Griff? I think this is a good point at which to shift to first names, don’t you?”

Speakman’s eyes reflected the bright light from the windows. They were clear, intelligent eyes. Not a trace of madness or the kind of wild glee that signaled insanity. Griff wondered if Mrs. Speakman was aware of it. Hell, he wondered if there was a Mrs. Speakman. The millionaire might have been completely delusional as well as compulsively tidy.

When Griff failed to reply to the question about his name, Speakman’s smile relaxed into an expression of disappointment. “At least stay long enough for me to finish making my pitch. I would hate for all my rehearsing to be for naught.” He gave a quick smile. “Please.”

Fighting a strong urge to get the hell out of there, but also feeling guilty for the physical rebuff he’d given the man, Griff returned to his chair and sat down. As he settled against the cushions, he noticed that the back of his shirt was damp with nervous perspiration. As soon as he could gracefully make an exit, he would adiós.

Speakman reopened the dialogue by saying, “I can’t father a child. By any method.” He paused as though to emphasize that. “If I had sperm,” he added quietly, “you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Griff would just as soon not be having it. It wasn’t easy to look a man in the eye while he was talking to you about losing his manhood. “Okay. So you need a donor.”

“You mentioned a sperm bank.”

Griff nodded curtly.

“Laura-that’s my wife. She and I didn’t want to go that route.”

“Why not? For the most part, they’re reputable, aren’t they? Reliable? They do testing on the donors. All that.”

Griff knew little about sperm banks and wasn’t really interested in how they operated. He was thinking more about what had happened to Speakman to put him in that chair. Had he always been paraplegic, or was it a recent thing? Had he contracted a debilitating and degenerative disease? Been thrown by a horse? What?

“When the male partner is incapable of fathering children, as I am,” Speakman said, “couples do use donor sperm. Most of the time, successfully.”

Well, apparently he wasn’t embarrassed by or self-conscious about his condition, and Griff had to give him credit for that. If he was in a situation like Speakman’s, needing somebody like Manuelo to “tend” to him, he doubted he could be as accepting of it as Speakman appeared to be. He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk about it so freely, especially with another man. Maybe Speakman was simply resigned.

He was saying, “Laura and I desperately want a child, Griff.”

“Uh-huh,” Griff said, not knowing what else to say.

“And we want our child to have physical characteristics similar to mine.”

“Okay.”

Speakman shook his head as though Griff still wasn’t quite getting it. And he realized he wasn’t when Speakman said, “We want everyone to believe that the child was fathered by me.”

“Right,” Griff said, but there was a hint of a question mark at the end of the word.

“This is extremely important to us. Vital. Mandatory, in fact.” Speakman raised his index finger like a politician about to make the most important statement of his campaign. “No one must doubt that I’m the child’s father.”

Griff shrugged indifferently. “I’m not going to tell anybody.”

Speakman relaxed, smiling. “Excellent. We’re paying for your discretion as well as your…assistance.”

Griff laughed lightly and raised both hands, palms out. “Wait a minute. When I said I wouldn’t tell anybody, I meant I wouldn’t tell anybody about this conversation. In fact, I’m not really interested in hearing any more. Let’s consider this…uh…interview over, okay? You keep your hundred grand, and I’ll keep my sperm, and this meeting will be our little secret.”

He was almost out of his chair when Speakman said, “Half a million. Half a million dollars when Laura conceives.”

Arrested in motion, Griff found it easier to sit back down than to stand up. He landed rather hard and sat staring at Speakman, aghast. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“I assure you I’m not.”

“Half a million?”

“You have blue eyes, light hair. Like mine. It’s hard to tell now, but I’m taller than the average five feet eleven. We have similar genetic makeups, you and I. Similar enough anyway for a child you sire to be passed off as mine.”

Griff’s mind was spinning so fast it was hard to hang on to a thought. He was thinking dollar signs, Speakman was talking genes. “Those sperm banks have books.” He pantomimed leafing through pages. “You go through them and find what you want for your kid. You pick out eye color, hair color, height. All that.”

“I never buy anything sight unseen, Griff. I don’t shop from catalogs. Certainly not for my child and heir. And there’s still the risk of disclosure.”

“Those records are kept confidential,” Griff argued.

“Supposedly.”

Griff thought of the gate with the disembodied voice, the high wall surrounding the property. Apparently privacy was a real issue with this guy. Like neatness. The psychologist at Big Spring would have had a field day over the obsessive way Speakman had removed the drinking glasses from view, folded the towel, and replaced the coaster.

Intrigued in spite of himself, Griff studied the millionaire for a long moment, then said, “So how would it work? I’d go to a doctor’s office and jerk off into a jar and-”

“No office. If Laura was inseminated in a doctor’s office, there would be talk.”

“Who would talk?”

“The people who staff the office. Other patients who might see her there. People love to talk. Especially about celebrities.”

“I’m a fallen star.”

Laughing softly, Speakman said, “I was referring to Laura and me. But your involvement would certainly add another element to a delicious piece of gossip. It would be too tempting even for people bound by professional privilege.”

“Okay, so I don’t go to the doctor’s office with you. You could take my semen in and claim it as yours. Who’s to know?”

“You don’t understand, Griff. That still leaves room for speculation. My condition is obvious. A specimen I claimed as mine could have come from the pool boy. A skycap. Anybody.” He shook his head. “We’re emphatic about this. No nurses, no chatty receptionists, no office open to the public. At all.”

“So where? Here?” Griff envisioned taking a dirty magazine and a Dixie cup into one of the mansion’s bathrooms, the mute manservant standing outside the door, waiting for him to finish and deliver the specimen.

No way, José. Or rather, No way, Manuelo.

But for half a million bucks?

Everyone had their price. He’d proved he did. Five years had decreased it considerably, but if Speakman was willing to pay him five hundred grand for doing what he’d been doing for free for the past five years, he wasn’t going to let modesty stand in the way.

He’d walk away with six hundred thousand, counting the “signing bonus.” The Speakmans would get the kid they desperately wanted. It was win-win, and it wasn’t even against the law.

“I assume you’d have the doctor check me out first,” he said. “For all you know, I could’ve taken up with a lover in prison and have HIV.”

“I seriously doubt that,” Speakman said drily, “but, yes, I would require you to undergo a thorough physical examination and bring me back a clean bill of health, signed by a physician. You could say it was for medical insurance.”

It still seemed too easy. Griff wondered what he was overlooking. Where was the catch? “What if she doesn’t get pregnant? Do I have to return the first hundred grand?”

Speakman hesitated. Griff tilted his head as though to communicate that this could be a deal breaker. Speakman said, “No. That would be yours to keep.”

“Because if she doesn’t conceive, it might not be my fault. Your wife may not be fertile.”

“Who negotiated your contract with the Cowboys?”

“What? My former agent. Why?”

“A piece of advice, Griff. During a business negotiation, once you’ve won a point, drop it. Don’t mention it again. I’ve already conceded that you could keep the initial hundred thousand.”

“Okay.” They hadn’t covered that in the release preparation sessions.

Griff weighed his options, and they boiled down to this: he didn’t have any options, other than saying no and walking away from mega cash. To turn this down, he’d have to be crazy. Crazy as Speakman and his old lady.

He raised one shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Then if that’s all that’s required, we have a deal. One point, though. I want to do my thing in the privacy of my own bathroom. The doctor will have to come to my place to pick up the stuff. I think you can freeze it, so I could give him several samples at one whack.” He laughed at the inadvertent double entendre. “So to speak.”

Speakman laughed, too, but was serious as sin when he said, “There won’t be a doctor, Griff.”

Just when he thought he had this figured out, Speakman hit him with something like a linebacker coming around on his blind side and knocking him on his ass. “What do you mean, no doctor? Who’s gonna…” He made gentle thrusting motions with his hand. “Put it where it needs to go.”

“You are,” Speakman said quietly. “I’m sorry for not making this clear from the beginning. I insist on my child being conceived naturally. The way God intended.”

Griff stared at him for several seconds, then he began to laugh. Either somebody had set him up for a whopper of a practical joke or Speakman was out of his frigging mind.

Nobody in Griff’s life cared enough to play an elaborate joke on him. No one in his present life would go to the trouble. No one from his past would give him the time of day, much less invest the time it would take to set up this bizarre scenario and talk Speakman into going along.

No, he was betting that Speakman went beyond being an eccentric millionaire and neat freak and was, in fact, certifiable.

In any case, this was all one huge waste of time, and he’d lost patience with it. Flippantly, he said, “My job would be to fuck your wife?”

Speakman winced. “I don’t care much for the vernacular, especially in-”

“Cut the bullshit, okay? You’re hiring me to play stud. That’s basically it, right?”

Speakman hesitated, then said, “Basically? Yes.”

“And for half a mil, I guess you get to watch.”

“That’s insulting, Griff. To me. Certainly to Laura.”

“Yeah, well…” He didn’t apologize. Kinky sex was the least offensive factor of this whole interview. “About her, does she know your plan?”

“Of course.”

“Uh-huh. What does she think about it?”

Speakman rolled his chair toward an end table where a cordless phone stood in its charger. “You can ask her yourself.”