Another coughing spasm took over. The cripple hacked his head off, coughed up spittle several times into his handkerchief, wiped his brow with his arm, and took some more deep breaths.

“Was she okay?” asked the producer.

“Yes, she was fine,” muttered the cripple, still discouraged after all those years. “She only fainted. That was the bad news.”

“What was the good news?”

“It’s when I thought of The Death Game.”

II

Time evaporated as it is wont to do.

Time evaporated as it is wont to do.

So did Theresa Mendavey’s romance with biker Rex Redmond. Of course, Theresa never expected her fling with Rex to last. They really had nothing in common. She went with him to spite her father. Anyway, shortly after Theresa Mendavey’s romance with Rex Redmond ended, she disappeared off the face of the earth.

Just like that!

One morning, a little after the noon hour in 1990, Theresa Mendavey’s mother woke up in her pitch-black bedroom (electrified blackout curtains) and realized she hadn’t heard hide nor hair from her sixteen-, no…seventeen-year-old daughter in maybe six months. That bothered Edna greatly, to a certain extent. The sudden awareness of a missing daughter caused her to toss and turn, which was irritating. Being unable to sleep when she wanted to was one of Edna’s major annoyances, of which there were many. Eventually Edna was forced to do something about the nonsense of feeling guilty about her daughter before she lost any more sleep. So she got out of bed, pulled down her nightie, which had gathered up under her armpits, and walked in her bent-over, half-asleep position to the bathroom. Safely there, she turned on a light, which was pure torture, and opened the medicine chest. She sneaked a look at her face, filled with sleep wrinkles and devoid of makeup, and wasn’t pleased. She opened the mirrored cabinet and squinted at the shelves jammed with prescription drugs until she found the 10-milligram Valium container. Edna took one from its small plastic container, broke it in half, changed her mind and swallowed both pieces with some water, returned to bed, and slept like the proverbial log.

More months rolled by without any sighting of or word from Theresa.

Then early one Sunday morning, Theresa appeared in the lobby of an apartment building at Ninetieth and Park Avenue in Manhattan, where her aunt Evie Walton lived. Evie Walton was the married sister of Theresa’s father, Hector Mendavey.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Theresa would say whenever Evie Walton’s name was mentioned, “my aunt Evie is nothing like my brainless idiot of a father.”

Evie Walton was a pleasingly plump woman in her late forties. She had beautiful prematurely gray hair and was extremely intelligent, quite attractive, and extraordinarily affectionate.