Greg actually chuckled a bit. “Put with your usual dignity and tact,” he said, hefting his glass in salute.
“Right,” Jake said, offering a chuckle of his own. “Anyway, she knows you were scammed and taken advantage of. I think she even forgives you for that. Maybe if you two were Joe the plumber and Mary Jo the librarian, she would take you back. But you’re not. You’re A-list celebrities and your every move is printed or otherwise reported on. She has to divorce you for the sake of her own image and reputation. She can’t be seen as the poor slob whose husband is a serial cheater and knocked up another woman but who remained by his side through all that. No one would ever buy one of her CDs again.”
“But I’m not a serial cheater,” Greg insisted. “I did it twice in the eight years I’ve known her, both times while drunk. Poor judgement and self-control? Yes. Serial cheating? No. I would, in fact, suggest that my rate of infidelity is quite remarkable for the crowd I’m a part of.”
“Maybe,” Jake allowed, “but you’re talking about reality and I’m talking about public perception. In this situation, reality has little relevance. Mindy was going to make you look like a chump and Celia look like a pathetic, naïve housewife. You twisted the tables on her when you announced the situation first and gave your version of events. It made it pretty much impossible to lay down whatever cockamamie story she was going to tell about how the conception happened. True, her original goal of letting the world know that her child carries your genes has been met, but she is certainly not coming out of this thing smelling like a rose. In fact, she’s scrambling just to keep from being seen as what she really is: an all-out, manipulative slut.”
Greg smiled a little at this. “Yes,” he said, “she is doing a lot of backpedaling these days. I’ll tell you, I felt very dirty, very sleazy at lying to those reporters about the condom, but damned if it didn’t work.”
“You shouldn’t feel bad about any of this,” Jake said. “You’re simply using Mindy’s weapon against her. Obviously, she was not on birth control pills, right? She’s lying about that.”
“If only there was a way to prove that,” Greg said. “That would be the final blow against her.”
Jake simply shrugged. “I don’t see how that could be done,” he said. “It would take an act of God or something.”
“I suppose,” Greg said with a sigh.
“Don’t worry though,” Jake told him. “She’s getting pretty hammered in the court of public opinion as it is. Having Stinson tell his story was brilliant, particularly the part about how he got the clap from her.”
This actually made Greg giggle a little. “Yes, I must admit I enjoyed that little tidbit. It is amazing how being burned by Mindy will convince a person to tell a bald-faced lie to a reporter about her with only a little prompting.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Jake said. “And then there’s that chick you boned in Alaska. Something else we didn’t count on but that helped your cause tremendously. And then there’s the whole thing with Jerry Claw and Smooth Operator. Can you imagine if that actually bears some fruit? If some of the men and women Mindy has fucked come forward and tell their stories and that sleazeball can actually corroborate? Golden!”
“Also true,” Greg had to agree. “Do you really think people will come forward?”
“I have no doubt,” Jake said. “He’s offering twenty Gs. That’s a lot of money just to come forth and say you got to tear one off of Mindy Snow. The hard part will be verifying they were together. But have faith in our friends in the entertainment press. They know how to dig.”
“Yes, they certainly do,” Greg agreed. “Still, the whole birth control thing would be nice to break open. Combine that with the condom story and she would literally have to hide in shame.”
“Well,” Jake said with a shrug, “I guess we’d better pray that the Big Guy gets involved in this thing then, right?”
“Maybe He doesn’t like Mindy either,” Greg said.
“I’m sure He doesn’t,” said Jake.
But, as it turned out, information on the subject of Mindy and her birth control did not quite rise to the level of divine intervention. All it took was a pharmacy clerk and a little bit of Karma.
After splitting off from Interstate 5 in the San Fernando Valley, State Highway 14 headed northeast, passing through the east side of Santa Clarita, not terribly far from the office park that housed the office and rehearsal studio of KVA Records LLC. It was the route that Jake and Laura used to take to get to the studio when they lived in the Nottingham Drive house prior to moving into their Oceano home. It was also the route that Mindy Snow took to get from Hollywood to her home in the hills near the national forest. As such, it was natural for her to patronize the east Santa Clarita outlet of Lister Pharmacy, one of the regional chains striving to go national. Mindy chose Lister, not because she was supporting local business or because she liked the way they did business, but because of simple convenience. Lister Pharmacy was the closest pharmacy to her secluded house, and it was more or less on the way to and from Hollywood and central Los Angeles.
Carmen, Mindy’s domestic servant, was usually the one who picked up Mindy’s monthly prescription of birth control pills at the Lister. She did this while she was shopping for groceries in the same strip mall. On occasion, however, Mindy sometimes had to swing in and pick up the pills herself for various reasons. It was on one such occasion, two years before she had even been cast in the role of Lyndsay in Us and Them, that she had come to meet Daniel Marks, a twenty-three-year-old inventory clerk who worked keeping the shelves stocked and the floors swept in the Lister.
Daniel Marks was no rocket scientist. He would likely never stroll up onto a stage in Stockholm to collect a prize. But he was a very good-looking young man, well-built, strongly muscled, and, at the time, in top physical shape as he was playing for one of the local community college football teams in the hope of being picked up by one of the big football colleges and then, after doing his time there, the NFL. Neither of these goals ended up being accomplished, as it turned out, but he did catch the eye of Mindy Snow that day she came in to pick up her prescription because Carmen had been in Guadalajara that week visiting her dying mother.
Mindy chatted up the handsome clerk for a bit while pretending to look at the cheap scented candles in the aisle where he was stocking. He was initially star struck to be speaking to her but warmed up when she started blatantly flirting with him. When Mindy left the store with her prescription (but no scented candles) fifteen minutes later, Danny (as he liked to be called) had a piece of paper in his possession. On this paper were specific, easy to follow directions to a house up in the forest off of State Highway 14. There was very little ambiguity as to what Mindy wanted to do with him when he arrived there after finishing his shift.
Danny was a likeable guy then and now. Though not very smart, he was polite, was not arrogant about being a football player, was not prone to bullying or making fun of people, and he really liked it when people liked him. He was particularly fond of Emily Strough, the chubby brunette with the glasses who worked in the actual pharmacy part of the pharmacy, ringing up customers and giving them their little white bags with their pills and potions. Emily was smart and he enjoyed talking to her. She was a friend. He had no idea that Emily, who was kind of nerdy and shy, wanted nothing more in life than to get her hands and mouth on Danny’s well-muscled body and her vagina on his athlete’s cock.
Shortly after Mindy left that store on this fateful day, Danny, his head still reeling over what Mindy had just suggested to him (and Little Danny still refusing to retreat back to normal size), worked his way over to the pharmacy, where Emmie (as she liked to be called) was sitting behind the cash register at the counter doing some sort of paperwork. There were no customers at the moment and the pharmacist, an old, haggard looking shrew who had never spoken a single word to Danny, was in her little cubby, putting pills into bottles.