The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “Where you from, Zed?” I asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  “Nowhere? It’s gonna be difficult to deliver a check to nowhere.”

  “You’re gonna pay by check?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If it were blackmail, cash would be the thing. But for hush money? We pay by check. It’s what rich people do.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “First tell me, what is it you think you know?”

  “I know plenty.”

  “Tell me.”

  Graham looked around the bar like he was a Russian spy. “You want to hear about it in a bar?”

  “You think anyone here cares about your story? Pal, I’m being paid to be here, and I’m barely hanging on.”

  Zed Graham proceeded to tell me a story about a woman who he referred to as his woman. He told me that his woman had a son, a boy Zed believed to be his son, until his woman recently revealed that the child was in fact the progeny of Ricky Spence, late of the Modesto A’s baseball team.

  “And who is this woman? Your wife?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Why should I buy her story? If the kid’s not yours, he could be anyone’s. I don’t see any link to Ricky Spence.”

  “No, it’s Spence’s kid all right. You should see him play baseball. Besides, she remembered Spence by name. I guess you don’t forget the daddy of your kid.”

  I suspected if Zed Graham was in fact the child’s father, I could see a case for wanting to forget that fact.

  “You’re gonna need to do better than that, Zed. I’m gonna need something a lot more solid if I’m gonna write out a check.”

  I saw his eyes involuntarily glance toward my hip pocket, as if my checkbook were burning, ready to make him rich.

  “I know everything. I know the exact night, because she told me there was this country singer staying at the hotel in the club where she met Spence.”

  “A country singer?”

  “Yeah, Luke Barnes. You know him?”

  I knew the name. Barnes had been a big item fifteen years ago, in places like Modesto, California.

  “I’m sure Barnes was in Modesto a lot. It’s a country music town.”

  “Not that year. I checked it out. He was there one night only, and my woman and your guy were there too.”

  “She was there with who?”

  “With friends. He was playing blackjack or something. It was some kind of nightclub or hotel or illegal poker place.”

  He didn’t know it, but now Zed Graham was getting somewhere. He had details that only someone who had been there would know. Details that a person couldn’t make up if they hadn’t gotten them from the source. I knew that for a fact. Because I knew the same details.

  I recalled the place. I hadn’t thought about it in years, and it had remained fuzzy in my memory, like an out-of-focus photograph, when John Cashman had brought this whole sordid deal to my attention. But now as Zed Graham put the pieces in place, the images in my mind crystallized.

  The place had been an old Victorian mansion, built just outside of Modesto on what was probably a significant tract of land back in the day. By the time I’d gotten on the scene, the place was weathered and beaten, sitting across from the railway line on the road out to Shackelford. It no longer sat on a significant tract of land or in a line of pretty Victorian homes like something in San Francisco. It was alone and decrepit and ugly. A building that had once been a jewel, now a forgotten place amid a light industrial area of workshops and auto parts stores and mechanics.

  And that had been the whole point. It wasn’t in downtown Modesto, but it wasn’t too far away. Just far enough to be out of the mind’s eye, for the locals to turn their heads, for the local cops to accept payment as long as things didn’t get out of hand.

  It had been called Club Mediterrano back in the day. It was as Zed Graham had laid out, part nightclub, part hotel, and part illegal gambling establishment. Zed had left out the brothel part, and I wondered if that was because his woman, so-called, had also left that out of her story and whether there was a reason for that. The club had reminded me of something from the old West, part saloon and part boardinghouse. The big difference was that it had been run by the local mob. They were, if I recalled correctly, an offshoot of a family out of San Francisco.

  “So what happened, exactly?” I said.

  “She says Spence had a room in the hotel. She says he was gambling and drinking and chatting up the girls. She says he took a shine to her, and the rest you can imagine for yourself. Talking about it puts me off my beer.” Graham scrunched up his face like he was sucking on a sour candy and picked up his phone again, powering it on so it lit up his face in the dark bar. Not finding the distraction he was after, he put it down.

  “You waiting for a call?” I asked.

  “No. I just like to keep on top of the news.”

  I nodded. I saw that a lot these days. It seemed that people were no longer capable of being separated from their phones. Wherever I went in Miami, or West Palm, or even Phoenix, Arizona, people were ignoring other people in order to stare at their screens, walking along the streets with their necks craned, sitting in bars near but not with their friends, so they could keep up with the news. It was like everyone had become Walter Cronkite. As if the best of their lives were trapped inside this tiny device, desperate to get out if only they would touch the screen, like a genie in a bottle.

  “What’s this woman’s name?”

  Graham shook his head. “You don’t need to know that.”

  “Actually, I do. I need it for the NDA.”

  “What’s an NDA?”

  “A nondisclosure agreement. It means once you get paid, you won’t talk about this with anyone. It’s part of a hush agreement. But it can’t be just with you. She has to sign it, too. Since she’s the one who knows the story.”

  “And what if she don’t sign it?”

  I said nothing for a moment. I got the sense that I might have pushed it too far. There was every chance that Graham was in this blackmail caper by himself, using this woman’s story and her information to feather his own nest without her knowing. If he thought she wasn’t interested in a payday, it might make him nervous about the deal.

  “Let me ask you this. Do you have the right to negotiate on her behalf?”

  I saw Graham look into the distance, trying to figure out what the right answer would be. “Yeah, of course. I’m handling the negotiations.”

  “Okay, then. Her name needs to be on the agreement, but you can sign for both of you. Since you’re in charge.” I saw his eyes light up, as afternoon drinking eyes often do. But I knew it was because he liked the idea of being the guy in charge.

  “Her name’s Lily Barkin.”

  I nodded and took a sip of my beer. I waved to the bartender to get Graham another.

  “Do you still live in Modesto, Zed?”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “What about Lily?”

  “This about where you gonna send the check?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Why can’t we arrange to meet in Phoenix?”

  “We can,” I said. “Like you say, you’re in charge.”

  “Okay, then. You don’t need to know where she’s moved to. And don’t be thinking that you can screw me over, neither. I’m not gonna wait all week. If Spence won’t cough up, there’s a tabloid news guy who will pay big money.”

  I had no intention of making Zed Graham wait all week. But I wasn’t worried about a tabloid news outlet, either. The story wasn’t that interesting, that salacious that the tabloids would be really interested. Apart from Amber Spence, I couldn’t think of a single person who could give a damn about Ricky’s love life from fifteen years previous.

  The bartender brought Graham another beer, so he necked the one that he had, then his eyes drifted toward the televisions above the bar. I waved off another beer and thought about Ricky Spence.

  I remembered the night
in question well. Ricky had been an up-and-coming slugger, a player with considerable upside, enough that he had attracted the interest of a number of agents. The most likely was a young stud by the name of John Cashman. Although very few minor-league players had agents, Cashman saw in Spence a big-league payday. I had attracted a little bit of major-league attention around the same time, and John Cashman had suggested that if I were to land a big-league deal, I should call him and he would negotiate it for me. He had given me a card, and I had used it. But not to further my baseball career.

  I had used it to save Ricky Spence’s backside. Ricky had developed a fondness for gambling and a talent for losing. He had been at Club Mediterrano, losing what little money he got from his minor-league contract and opening up tabs with the local Mafia on the back of the then yet-to-be-signed major-league contract. With Ricky Spence seemingly happy to dig his way to China, the mob guys had eventually called in their marker. I remembered John Cashman telling me about the double standard in baseball: that involvement with gambling and the mob was the kind of thing that got a new guy blacklisted from the recruitment lists of major-league teams, but the exact same activity from a ten-year player, a World Series winner, or a Cy Young recipient, would just see said player be described as colorful.

  The truth was I didn’t know if the world cared anymore. Things had changed in the fifteen years since that night in Modesto. People didn’t seem to see racking up gambling debts and sleeping with hookers as poor character traits anymore. I wondered if the new recruits now would also simply be described as colorful. And the fact was Ricky Spence was at the other end of his career. He was the old hand. So the tabloids weren’t going to give a damn, and Zed Graham’s only play was the hope that Ricky’s wife might.

  I remembered the panicked phone call from Ricky to the tiny apartment six of us shared. I had called John Cashman, and he had directed me to get down there and to get him out. By the time I arrived, Ricky was in a hotel room, half-naked on a bed with a woman who might generously have been described as a lady of the night.

  The woman had been most uncomplimentary about the interruption, and I suspected she had gone to get some rather beefy help to evict me from the premises. I had already given the mob guys all the money that I had as temporary payment of Ricky’s debt. In lieu of what, I wasn’t quite sure, but I suspected a beating. But when I saw a news van arrive in the street outside, I had dragged Ricky out the second-floor window and we had taken off into the night along the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

  I sensed Zed Graham shift in his seat, and I glanced to see if he was leaving. He slipped off his stool and burped loudly and told me he had to pee.

  “Let me get you another while you do your business,” I said.

  Graham’s eyes rolled back in his head as he considered this, then he nodded his affirmation, burped again, and stumbled away toward the restrooms. I glanced back to the bartender and held up one finger. As the bartender turned away to retrieve another bottle from the glass-front fridge behind the bar, the focus of my attention dropped to the halfway point between the bartender and me, where Zed Graham’s cell phone sat unloved and unwatched on the bar.

  I picked it up. My own phone had all kinds of security features on it that were supposed to make it hard for anyone else other than me to unlock it. I found the security features to be very stringent. Half the time I wasn’t able to get into my phone myself. But Zed Graham fiddled with his phone so often the security functions had been temporarily disabled. Perhaps he got sick of typing in the four-digit number every time he wanted to check the news. Either way, I touched the screen and it came to life.

  I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, until one of the icons on the screen gave me an idea. I opened the maps application and checked just where it was that Zed Graham had been lately.

  There was a list of recent addresses, places I assumed that Graham had entered into the app in order to find them. The most recent addresses were all in Phoenix. There was the Hohokam Stadium ballpark and the old motel across the street from the bar. Before that there were two addresses in Las Vegas, Nevada. I flipped over a beer mat and jotted down the two Vegas addresses. Then I scrolled further down the list and found address after address in Modesto, California, and Stanislaus County, California. It seemed most likely, then, that Graham still lived in Modesto, or somewhere nearby. But something had taken him to Las Vegas and then directly here to Phoenix. The addresses didn’t look like they belonged on the Strip, but I had no idea where they were, and I didn’t want Graham to return and find me using his phone, so I switched it off and placed it back on the bar.

  When Zed Graham returned from the bathroom, he clumsily slipped up onto his stool and took a long pull on his new beer. I finished the last of mine, threw some cash on the bar to cover the tab, and thanked the bartender. He gave me one of those bartender nods that said a thousand words or simply “No worries,” and I slid off my stool. Graham watched me and then wiped his wet lips with the back of his wrist.

  “Don’t you take too long.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  Chapter Ten

  I went back to the hotel to meet up with Danielle and Jane. We discussed dinner arrangements, and Jane said that she felt like going for a walk and doing the happy hour hors d’oeuvre thing. Danielle, on the other hand, said she wanted to go somewhere where there were people. I could relate to that. As often as not, I was perfectly happy living in my bubble. I had my solid group of friends, I had Lizzy in my office to keep me on the straight and narrow, and I had Danielle. It was rare that I needed to come out of my bubble for air. Longboard Kelly’s usually gave me all I needed. But sometimes we need to be around others. We are a social species, herd animals, designed to roam in packs. Not solitary like tigers. Sometimes I liked to walk around Miami, along Bayshore, down by the water, or through Little Havana, and soak up the noise and the smells of the city that beats to the rhythm of a million separate hearts.

  We found a lively little Italian place near the university in Tempe. It looked like one of those little tavernas you find on every second street in New York City. Although it was still mild outside, the interior felt warm and inviting. The room was lit with small candles in little red jars on each table, and there was a raucous hum emanating from the kitchen. I heard the sound of laughter and the popping of a wine cork leaving its bottle over the background soundtrack of chatter.

  I could see Danielle’s spirits lift before we’d even received our menus. We ordered a bottle of wine and a shared house-made Caesar salad, and Danielle went with the pasta special, and I with the chicken piccata.

  I sniffed the wine and gave it a sip, then asked Danielle how her afternoon had been.

  “We saw Dad.”

  “How was he?”

  “Not great,” she said, offering a dejected shrug.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But he was better this morning?”

  I nodded. “He was.”

  “So what did you guys talk about, exactly? Apart from Walt Whitman?”

  “Like I said this morning, we chatted about baseball a bit, and life in general.”

  “Life in general?”

  “He asked me about you.”

  She frowned, and the little dimple appeared between her eyebrows. “About me?”

  “Yeah. About how long we’d been together and what our situation was.”

  “Our situation?”

  “Do you intend on repeating everything back to me all evening?”

  She sat back in her chair and sipped her wine and looked across the top of her glass at me. “What did he want to know about us?”

  “The things a father would want to know, I suppose. He wasn’t sure if there were things that he might have forgotten.”

  “So he knows he’s forgetting?”

  “Yes, he knows.”

  Danielle’s eyes dropped to the candle between us, and she watched the flame flicker slowly back and fo
rth. Then she glanced back up at me. “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him what I knew. I told him that we had been together a long time, that we didn’t have kids, and that we weren’t married.”

  “Yet?”

  I heard the query in her voice, and I wasn’t sure if it was for the concept or the fact that I hadn’t used the word yet myself.

  “Is that it?”

  I leaned my elbows on the table so I was closer to her. She didn’t reciprocate the move. “He told me that he didn’t think he had been a very good father.”

  Danielle nodded and sipped her wine. “He’d be right.”

  “He told me he wasn’t sorry that it had happened.”

  “Really? He wasn’t sorry?”

  “No,” I said. “He said he had regrets, but he wasn’t sorry. He loved you all, and he regretted letting you down, but he wasn’t sorry that he’d had you as his family.”

  “He wasn’t, huh?”

  “No.”

  “So what am I supposed to do with that information, MJ? Act as if it didn’t happen? As if he wasn’t so distant from his wife that she felt her only happiness could be found away from her family? What Jane and I felt was real. It’s not so easily dismissed.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “And I don’t think he was trying to diminish what you felt or how badly he had let you down. I think he was merely trying to articulate it.”

  “Why? Why with you?”

  “I’m guessing here. Reading between the lines. But I got the sense that there were two reasons. One, the same traits that prevented him from being there when you were young maybe prevent him from opening up even now.”

  “Looks like he could open up to you.”

  “And maybe that was the point. That the things he couldn’t say to you, he could say to me, because I’m not his daughter, not his son. I’m more like one of his students, or one of his contemporaries. The conversation we had was under the pretext of some kind of intellectual debate or conversation. I think that was the only way he really knew how to communicate. I suspect he was using that as a vehicle—using me as a vehicle—to say to you what he needed to say.”