Goldengirl Read online

  Goldengirl

  Peter Lovesey

  © Peter Lovesey, 2002

  Peter Lovesey has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2002 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Author’s Introduction

  Goldengirl, about the creation and packaging of an Olympic superwoman, was the first of three books written under my pen name Peter Lear, and I still have an affection for it. As a child I was taken to see the Olympic Games and so began a lifelong interest in athletics. The novel was ahead of its time (1977) in predicting the use of HGH, the human growth hormone, by athletes to improve their physique. HGH was not a banned substance and was not tested for, in spite of its dangerous side effects. The problem began to be given serious attention in 1984 and is still a matter of concern. But if that was prophetic, the notion of an American athlete competing in the 1980 Moscow Olympics was not. In that year the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the US boycotted the Games. In Consequence, the feature film of Goldengirl, directed by Joseph Sargent and starring Susan Anton and James Coburn, was never released in this country. Occasionally it is shown on TV. I read somewhere that Susan Anton trained five hours a day with an Olympic coach to prepare for the film. She is on my conscience.

  P.L.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 1

  A girl in a white vest and gold satin shorts stood alone in a narrow corridor thirty meters in length. Across the floor in front of her was a thin metal strip with two small terminals at the left end. Behind it, a set of starting blocks. Ahead, a rubber mat, flush with the floor. The wall at the end of the corridor was padded.

  “Na Mesta.”

  The instruction in Russian came from behind a glass observation panel to her rear. She advanced to the blocks and got into the hunched position for the crouch start, with her fingertips splayed on the metal strip.

  “Gotovo.”

  She raised her buttocks and leaned forward, distributing her weight on a tripod formed by the front foot and two hands. The only movements were the pulsing of her temple and a strand of blond hair that slipped from her left shoulder.

  The crack of a shot.

  The girl screamed in pain, cannoned from the blocks and crashed heavily on the mat.

  “I got a reading of point seventeen,” the voice indifferently announced from behind the panel, speaking now in an American West Coast accent. “You’re not going anyplace this way. On your feet and try again. When your reaction is down to point fifteen, you’ll beat the electric shock. But if you come away slower, by Jesus, I’ll step up the impulse.”

  The girl was still prostrate on the mat. Her back gave a series of small tremors.

  “Action, Goldengirl!” the voice ordered. “You’re going to make point fifteen before we finish this session, and point fourteen tomorrow. It’s a fact of life that good gun response is essential to a top-line sprinter.”

  She got up slowly, biting her lip. She went back behind the starting line without looking up toward the observation panel. Her eyes were moist.

  “I tell you, chick,” said the voice, “by the time you get to Moscow you’ll be out of those blocks like hot cowshit.”

  *

  At one-thirty on the afternoon of Thursday, June 12, 1980, a classic cream-and-maroon Mercedes SSK swept out of Alameda Street, Los Angeles, and slotted into one of the eight lanes of the Santa Monica Freeway. The upright lines of the SSK, conspicuous in the procession of streamlined sedans, were those of the 1933 model. But between the chrome flex exhaust tubes projecting from the hood throbbed a Chevrolet V-8 engine, for this was a modern “derivative,” a Brooks Stevens Series III Excalibur. As it approached Santa Monica, its owner, Jack Dryden, of the Dryden Merchandising empire, registered that he was about to join the Pacific Coast Highway by pulling open his shirt. A whiff of sea on the gasoline fumes endorsed his feeling of release.

  Traffic four lanes wide still snaked ahead, tires zipping over the antiskid grooves, radios tuned to local stations for news of diversions and delays beamed from the Sigalert helicopters patrolling overhead. But at intervals from this point on, there were stretches of sea and shore unscarred by gas signs and hamburger stands.

  At six, if California 1 was clear, he would order a Rob Roy at Dick Armitage’s tennis ranch two hundred miles up the coast at Cambria Pines.

  The trip to Cambria wasn’t to improve his forehand. Armitage, the 1979 U.S. champion, stood high in the organization’s list of clients. He had phoned early on Wednesday morning. Between the French Championships and Wimbledon there was a nine-day interval, and he had flown in on Tuesday night. Unlike most players on the circuit, Armitage took the first plane back to California when there were intervals between tournaments. This time he would need to work on a faulty return of service which had put him out at the semi-final stage in Paris.

  “But this isn’t about that,” he had told Dryden. “I called to tell you I might be able to send some business your way. Could you possibly get out here for the weekend, Jack? You keep busy, I know, but I figure this might be worth the trip. I’d rather not discuss it now, if you understand me. How about checking in for dinner Thursday night and making it a long weekend? It’s time you saw the ranch, anyway.”

  “I’ll clear my calendar,” Dryden had promised.

  He reckoned Armitage would introduce him to some young player with ambitions on the professional circuit who was looking for an agent. He would go through the repertoire of his strokes on court, and Dryden from the sidelines would nod politely and agree to act for him. With upward of twenty agencies scouting for clients, a tip from the U.S. champion couldn’t be ignored. Now that tennis ranches were firmly established up and down America as the places where anyone with Grand Slam ambitions learned to use a racket, the pros in residence were well placed to study form.

  He wasn’t likely to forget that Armitage himself had joined the list from John Gardiner’s prestigious Camelback ranch in Arizona. Back in 1975, Ken Rosewall was the professional there. One baking afternoon that August, Dryden had taken a call which resulted in a helicopter flight over the mountains. To his eye, Armitage had looked no different from the dozen other willowy youngsters hammering shots at each other across the nets. Assured the boy would make it when he had grown some shoulders, he had taken him on. That first season in 1976, Armitage wasn’t even among the national seedings. It had been difficult to squeeze one thousand dollars from the Dunlop people for using their racket. Now they were glad to pay two hundred thousand dollars.

  So once again he was off prospecting. And because he had struck gold with Armitage it didn’t mean he was shouting Eureka this time. He would agree to add the boy to his list provided he didn’t hold up banks or do something sponsors wouldn’t care for, but he had been in the business long enough to know how many talented teenagers discover tennis isn’t the whole of their lives.

  Still, he didn’t pass up a chance like this. Not in tennis. It was the number-one growth sport, bigger even than golf. In 1970, ten million Americans had played the game; in 1979, close to
forty million. The industry was grossing in the region of two billion dollars. Sponsors were paying in excess of fifty thousand dollars a minute for commercial spots in nationally networked tournament matches. With that amount of money changing hands, agents were zeroing in on anyone who could hold a service game.

  Whatever the outcome of the present trip, it would be interesting to look over the ranch his enterprise had helped build. For Cambria was financed before Armitage had clinched the 1979 championship at Forest Hills. Each endorsement, every consultancy fee, was won in the teeth of competition from Sports Headliners, International Management, and the others big enough to have a second line of clients. Dryden Merchandising had done well for Dick Armitage. From descriptions, the ranch relegated to the status of an ancient monument the wooden clubhouse reeking of rubber shoes and egg-and-cress sandwiches where Dryden had once enrolled for Saturday afternoon one-setters in England. The brochure Armitage had sent him when Cambria opened spoke of luxury casas, with four bedrooms, casitas, with two massage rooms, saunas, a gourmet restaurant, swimming pool, and, almost superfluously, ten grass courts and five hard.

  It sounded like an ideal place to take a girl. The conspicuous gap in Dryden’s itinerary was the one beside him in the passenger seat. Thirty-two, with features that projected virility even from the pages of Business Week, with reddish-brown hair and a mustache more brown than red, he generally had no trouble arranging company for weekends. Apart from his southern English diphthongs, which he had tried to moderate until he found they worked better than alcohol in advancing a relationship, his principal asset was the deceiving blueness of his eyes, so pale that they seemed incapable of distinguishing anything so sordid as the main chance. He dressed to fortify the illusion, in discreetly patterned shirts and gray lightweight suits.

  But this time there was the empty seat. After receiving the invitation, he had looked at his schedule for the rest of the week and rapidly telescoped three days into one and a half, but left no time for making social arrangements. He was happy to leave his personal secretary to make the adjustments on his calendar, arrange a service for his car, order a pair of new shirts — but not a female companion. Not even in California. He flicked a wistful eye over the talent making for the beach at Malibu.

  No chance. He wasn’t going to hazard his reputation by arriving with a pickup. He silenced the CBS news and lit a Winston. Christ, if he couldn’t survive one weekend without a woman …

  His former headmaster in England, a man more gifted in sarcasm than educating boys, had neatly encapsulated his school career in the words “Dryden Found Wanting” on his final report card. Within two years of that, he had a diploma in marketing, a controlling interest in three pop groups, and any girl he liked in Oxford. At twenty, he was negotiating film contracts from an office in Jermyn Street. Before the merchandising boom happened, he opened his agency, and cornered the London market. As the pace quickened in the seventies, he got a foothold in New York, and then shrewdly moved the center of his business to Los Angeles, where the biggest American agencies only had subsidiaries. By 1977, the Dryden machine was humming in Paris, Rome and Tokyo. As backups, he had eleven companies dedicated to managing, promoting and insuring the sixty-three celebrities in his clientele. They included superstars of TV, cinema, fashion and music as well as sports. Now, in 1980, he had a pre-tax turnover exceeding twenty million dollars.

  Going past Carpinteria Beach, he had the agreeable thought that Armitage’s rising star on the tennis scene could be a girl. Half a mile on, he shook his head and stubbed out the cigarette. There was something about women tennis players.

  He filled up at Santa Barbara and bought four packs of cigarettes. At Gaviota, he followed U.S. 101 inland, since he had no reason to take the more spectacular route through the flower fields.

  The coast came into view again soon after five. Pismo Beach. He was making good time.

  Before six, he saw the first streamers of Spanish moss suspended over California 1 from the pine forest beyond the small dairy-farming center of Cambria. According to the brochure, there was a left turn soon.

  A white notice confirmed it. No modest plaque hammered to a tree, but a thing the size of a billboard. THE DICK ARMITAGE TENNIS RANCH. TRY THE CHAMP’S WAY. HALF MILE LEFT.

  He swung the Excalibur onto a descending road so thickly overhung that he needed headlights. The tires purred over pine needles. Past a firebreak, left again, another notice, trees dusty brown where the light never penetrated, and then the scene opened up like curtains parting.

  The ranch lay below at the edge of the forest. Red-tiled roofs jutted among conifers. An arc of buildings sited at contrasting levels and angles, with obvious respect for the landscape. In the center, the tennis courts, smooth-surfaced like the piece of sea claimed by a fishing village.

  Dick Armitage was at the gate as he drove up, unfamiliar in a floral Hawaiian shirt and black denim slacks. He made a movement that identified him as assuredly as an all-white outfit, raking his left hand through the length of his sun-bleached hair. On court, it would have drawn a rapturous murmur from his teenage following.

  “You should carry a racket,” Dryden called out. “You’re not one bit like the guy on the cover of Tennis World.”

  “No more than you resemble the owner of that Third Reich automobile,” Armitage responded, grinning. “The mustache is all wrong. I’m glad you made it, Jack. If I may get in, I’ll show you where we’ve located you.”

  Dryden liked the ranch just as well in close-up. No gingerbread. The entire layout functional, yet visually pleasing.

  He was housed in a casita overlooking the swimming pool. White-washed walls, rush carpets, original abstracts, the smell of pinewood furniture. “How do you persuade your guests to leave?” he asked.

  Armitage saluted the compliment with a smile that put creases in the places the sun hadn’t tanned. “The cocktail lounge is there, beyond the pool. Look me up when you’re ready.”

  Dryden carried his case upstairs, decided which of the two bedrooms he would use, washed, took a green Shan-su shirt from its wrappings and slipped it on, picked up a pack of cigarettes and made for the lounge.

  “Seems quiet,” he commented to Armitage as the whisky in the cocktail supplanted the chill of that first, long sip. He didn’t mean to offend, but he would have expected more guests to congregate there before dinner. Someone in a blazer who looked like staff was drinking Schlitz, and there was a couple with glasses of sherry in the bench seats behind the door.

  “I discouraged reservations this weekend,” Armitage explained. “The few you’ll see around are residents, more or less.”

  “You want to work on your strokes in private before Wimbledon?”

  “Unkind!” said Armitage. “Okay, I wasn’t putting it together in Paris, but I caught Raul on top of his form. He just can’t serve like that two championships in a row. Sure, I’ll be doing some homework, but there’s another reason for clearing the place.”

  “The reason I’m here?”

  “Check,” admitted Armitage, peering into his beer. His conversation, like his tennis, progressed in phases, with intervals between points. He resumed: “I invited you here to meet — look, Jack, you’ve helped me a lot. That Dunlop contract a year or two back. Gave me security, a hedge against a sudden loss of form. You know?”

  “I took my commission,” Dryden reminded him, curious why Armitage thought it was necessary to express gratitude. He wasn’t in the business from altruism, and he thought his clients understood that. “I don’t suppose Dunlop are sorry about it, either. It was a long shot, but on target. They aren’t all, and the trade understands that. There’s no such thing as a stone-cold certainty. The days when Dunlop, Slazenger and Spalding waited for the seedings to be announced before they drew up endorsement contracts arc history, Dick. Or legend. With so much going on in the game now — the Grand Prix, WCT, team tennis, the Federation Cup — they can’t afford to stand aside. There’s a fortune invested in tennis j
ust now, enough for any young player of promise to take a cut.”

  Armitage nodded solemnly, but ignored the cue. “How’s the auto-racing scene? I notice Jim Hansenburg won the Monaco Grand Prix last month. He’s a Dryden man, isn’t he?”

  “Hansenburg? Yes, he’s on the books,” said Dryden indifferently. “And what your golfers are raking in between them I wouldn’t like to guess.”

  “It keeps me in cigarettes, Dick.” He wasn’t used to having his organization analyzed by clients.

  “You must be one hell of a smoker.” Armitage planted a sinewy forearm between them on the table and leaned over it confidentially. “Now tell me this. What happens when those guys hang up their clubs or whatever? They’ve been around a long time.”

  “Since Nicklaus was king,” Dryden confirmed, beginning to see where this was heading. “Careful — this is a sensitive area. When a top-liner retires, there’s a draft. You feel it no matter how big your agency is. It just happens that I have three or four on my list who could pack it in anytime.” He poked his finger at Armitage’s chest. “Not you. I’m counting on tennis to keep me solvent. If I could find another Dick Armitage, I’d throw my sleeping tablets away.” He wasn’t sure why he was doing this. It was more from habit than necessity. He just wanted to bring Armitage to the point.

  “You’ve specialized in golf and auto racing. Would you want a bigger stake in other sports?”

  “If you mean tennis —” Dryden began.

  “How about track?”

  “Track?” Armitage might as well have mentioned medieval jousting. “Did you say track?”

  “You know, running — how do you say? — athletics?”

  “There’s no money in it, whatever you call it,” Dryden flatly said. “It’s an amateur sport. Olympic Games. The honor of taking part and all that crap. Yes, there’s a small professional side, I grant you, but not enough to make it a merchandising proposition. It’s on a par with circuses.”