Jake poured them each another rip from the bottle. Greg picked his up and had a few sips.
“Good scotch,” he said.
“Yep,” Jake said. “Hard to believe it started its life back in 1970 as a bunch of mashed up barley.”
Greg pondered this bit of wisdom for a moment and then nodded. “Well put,” he said.
“Thank you,” Jake replied.
Greg had another sip, a larger one this time. He took another puff on his cigar and let the smoke drift away in the wind. He then took his eyes off the ocean and looked over at Jake. “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about,” he said.
“You suppose correctly,” Jake said. “Are you ready to talk about it?”
“No,” Greg said, “but I think I have to. I’ve gotten myself into a situation that ... well ... I don’t see any way out of.”
“That’s never a good thing,” Jake said. “But sometimes there is a way out of things that you can’t see.”
Greg shook his head. “Not this time,” he said.
“Does this have anything to do with Mindy Snow?” Jake asked.
Greg sighed deeply and took another slug of his scotch, draining more than half the glass. “It has everything to do with Mindy Snow,” he said.
“You said you didn’t fuck her again,” Jake said. “Were you lying?”
“I was not lying,” he assured him. “It turns out that ... well ... that one time was enough.”
“Come again?”
Greg drained the rest of his glass and then held out the glass to Jake. Jake picked up the bottle of scotch and poured him another hit. Greg quickly gulped down a quarter of it and then set down the glass. “Mindy called me on the phone the other day,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Greg said. “On my private number, the same one you called on. I never gave her that number, but she had it anyway.”
Jake nodded in sympathy, remembering how Mindy had known exactly when he had returned from New Zealand long ago and had shown up on his doorstep. “That sounds like Mindy all right,” he said.
“She told me that she needed to meet with me for lunch; that it had to do with the upcoming Oscar nominations.”
“Uh huh,” Jake said.
“I was very reluctant to do so. I suspected that she would try to seduce me again. I even told her that nothing like that was going to happen. She actually laughed at me. Told me she had no interest in sex right now, but that it would be in my best interest to hear what she had to say. I tried to get her to give me some idea of what it was about, but she wouldn’t. So ... I agreed to meet her for lunch. She had me meet her in some out of the way place up in the hills, in a little town called Sleepy Valley. I’d never heard of it before. It was like I’d stepped into Mayberry or something.”
Jake nodded knowingly. “She took me there a few times when we were dating,” Jake said. “Good meatloaf.”
“I had the chicken fried steak,” Greg said. “Very common and white trash, of course, but it was quite delicious.”
“Anyway?” Jake encouraged.
“Right,” Greg said, that miserable look on his face again. “That’s when she told me her news.”
“And what news is that?”
He took another gulp of his scotch, another hit off his cigar. He then looked back at Jake. “She’s pregnant.”
“Pregnant,” Jake said slowly. He was not terribly surprised by this revelation, but it was still a shock.
“That’s right,” Greg said. “And, so, naturally, I told her congratulations and asked her who the lucky guy was.”
“And she told you that you were the lucky guy?” Jake asked, though it was really not a question.
He nodded. “She said she was three months along, that she had known since late in November but kept it to herself. But now she’s starting to show a little. She actually pulled up her shirt and showed me the baby bump. She’s carrying it quite well, and her belly still looks sexy as hell, but it was there, and it was unmistakable. She was not lying. She really is pregnant.”
“And she’s sure that it’s yours?” Jake asked. “I mean ... seriously, Mindy gets around, and you only fucked her that once, right? There’s a really good chance that if she’s pregnant, it’s not yours.”
“I brought that up,” Greg said. “And what followed was one of the most disturbing and creepy conversations of my life.”
“What do you mean?”
Another gulp of scotch, emptying the glass. Another glass held out for Jake to pour more into. Another gulp following that. Finally, he said, “She wanted me to get her pregnant. It was her goal from the moment she heard that I was named the lead in Us and Them.”
“She wanted you to get her pregnant? You personally?”
“Me personally,” he said. “She laid her whole scheme out for me like she was explaining how she would finance a house or arrange for a trip or something. Completely without remorse or apology or shame. When she found out I was going to be Haverty in Us and Them, she knew that I was the one who should father her child. You see, her biological clock is ticking—as she put it—and she wanted to have a baby while she was in her early thirties still and at her peak of healthiness. And she wanted the baby to have good genes.”
“Good genes?”
He nodded. “She and I are both attractive, we’re both intelligent—although I’m starting to question that aspect in my own self these days—and we’re both extremely good actors. It is her belief that, by having my sperm and her egg make the connection, she will give birth to a beautiful and smart child who will be a natural actor of the likes that the world of cinema has never seen.”
“That’s insane,” Jake whispered.
“Not in her mind it isn’t,” Greg said. “She plotted out the whole thing. Even back when her ex-boyfriend, that personal trainer guy, started spouting off to the press about how she had a crush on me ... that was all at Mindy’s direction. She paid him money to talk to those reporters and tell that story in the hope that if I heard she had a crush on me it would make me more vulnerable to her advances.”
“Wow,” Jake said, shaking his head in disgusted awe at the level of her conniving.
“Unfortunately—for Mindy anyway—I foiled her plans to some degree. Her plan was to seduce me into a sexual relationship with her while we were filming the project. That would have given her ample opportunity to have unprotected sex with me over a month or two and virtually guarantee I would get her pregnant. But I didn’t take the bait then. The premier was her last real chance with me. She deliberately got me drunk and used her information about ... you know ... things that Celia won’t do to break down my defense. And it worked. Goddammit, it worked. She told me that she didn’t even think she was in the right part of her cycle when she finally got me to ... you know ... put it in her, but that it worked anyway.”
“So ... she wasn’t taking any birth control then?”
“No,” Greg said plainly. “That probably would not have helped out her agenda.”
“Yeah, I guess not,” Jake said. “But ... how do you know it’s yours? Again, Mindy gets around. It seems more likely that it could be her goddamn limo driver’s baby than yours. I mean, you only fucked her that once.”
“Well ... the dates add up, that’s one thing. The other is that Mindy assures me that she has had no sex of any kind with anyone but me since the last time she and her trainer did it two weeks before she reported for primary photography. She wanted to make sure that there would be no accidental conception by anyone with ‘substandard genes’. She wanted mine and she got mine.”