The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “Let’s just talk like regular people, okay?”

  “Is that what we are?”

  “Not even close, but let’s just pretend.”

  Cashman nodded like that was a fine idea.

  “I met with your guy, Zed Graham.”

  “I’ve only spoken to him on the phone,” said Cashman. “What’s he like?”

  “What was your impression on the phone?”

  “Trailer trash without a trailer.”

  “You’re in the ballpark. He’s pretty impressed with himself, given the standard of accommodations he finds himself in.”

  “And what did he have to say?”

  “He knew a lot,” I said, sipping my coffee and watching Cashman’s reaction. He gave none.

  “The information he’s got is pretty accurate. If I had to guess, I’d say the woman involved was there, for sure. How much she had to do with Ricky is TBD.”

  “Who’s the woman?”

  “I don’t have much more than a name yet. Graham wasn’t very forthcoming. But I have reason to believe she lives in Vegas.”

  Cashman cocked an eyebrow. “Vegas?”

  I nodded.

  “And is there really a kid?”

  “Not sure on that, either. But I’m not convinced the kid is relevant, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re not playing that angle at all. Graham is after a cash payment, a one-time hit. But if the kid really is Ricky’s, they could legally be entitled to child support. They could drip-feed off Ricky until the kid comes of age. Plus any arrears, given he hasn’t paid a dime to this point.”

  “Do we know how old the kid is?”

  “Like I say, I’ve yet to confirm the kid’s existence. But if the dates stack up the way they seem to, he’d be about fifteen.”

  “And the woman?”

  “What about her?”

  “How old is she?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You need to find out. You need to track her down and learn all you can about her. If this kid is real, we need to know for sure whether he’s Ricky’s. Whether or not she could’ve asked for child support and didn’t is irrelevant. She can do it now, and that could put a real dent in our plans.”

  “Okay.”

  Cashman pointed his fork at me for emphasis. “You get right up to Vegas, Miami, and get back to me. As soon as you can.”

  “I don’t need to go to Vegas. I can track her from here. There are these things called computers.”

  “No, no, that won’t do. I need you to scope it out. See if you recognize anybody. The woman, anybody else. Even the kid. Maybe he’s got Ricky’s eyes, his dopey smile. You were there that night, remember?”

  “I was, John, but I’m not gonna remember anyone I saw for about two minutes fifteen years ago. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I insist. Just bill me.”

  “Sorry, John, but no. I’m not driving all the way to Vegas and back. I’m in Phoenix to support Danielle, not to spend my days driving across the Sonoran desert.”

  “Don’t drive. Fly.”

  “Fly? Are you serious?”

  “Very,” he said. “Take my jet.”

  Now it was my turn to frown. “You have a jet?”

  “The agency has a jet. We have a couple, actually. Take it to Vegas and find out everything you can. How old this kid is, how old the mother is, whether there is any link at all to Ricky. You can do it all in a day and be back for dinner. I’ll call the pilots right now.”

  He picked his phone up off the table and started working the screen.

  “What gives, John? Why the full-court press?”

  “I told you, Miami. It’s Spence’s last payday. You know him, he’s no Rhodes scholar. He hits hard, but he really doesn’t understand the game, so he’s not TV material. And he’s no one’s idea of a team manager or a coach. So this is the last big paycheck for him. We can’t mess it up or allow anyone else to. Plus I owe him. He was my big break, you know that. When he signed with the Yankees, he didn’t just make his name, he made mine. Look, I would’ve made it anyway, but that’s how it happened. That’s how it went down. He and I are in this ride together, beginning to end. And for what it’s worth, he’s still a client, and I don’t let my clients down. I didn’t when I was a hungry buck way back then, and I don’t now.”

  Cashman tapped his screen a couple more times and then put the phone to his ear. He had a short, one-sided conversation with whoever it was he called. He said he needed the jet, and then he said the word Vegas. Then he hung up and put the phone back on the white tablecloth.

  Cashman was right. I knew his story and had played my own strange little part in it. And it was true that the Yankee deal with Spence had taken Cashman from the decidedly small-time straight into a corner office. And I had to admit there was a certain level of honor in making sure he did the right thing by his client not just on the good days but during the last days. He was spending a lot of energy on Ricky Spence, but I figured above and beyond any feelings of debts owed, I knew that if Ricky got cut by the A’s and word got out that John Cashman had failed to fight for Ricky’s last contract, Cashman’s stock would take a hit among all the other players he managed.

  I finished my coffee, and Cashman nodded and told me the pilot was on his way to the airport and I should get myself there directly.

  Chapter Twelve

  I left Cashman to his omelette and headed back out into the lobby. I was halfway to the exit when I saw her. I slowed almost to a stop in order to take a second look and confirm it was who I thought it was. My hesitation cost me. In other circumstances, I would have preferred to stride all the way out of the hotel and get on my way to the airport. As it was, Amber Spence turned from the concierge desk and glanced at me.

  Her double take was of the good old-fashioned head-spinning variety. She looked at me, then back at the concierge, and then straight back at me. She put a finger up in the air to illustrate her point and said something to the concierge, then she spun on her toes and strode toward me.

  Back in the day, Amber Spence had been a pretty and soft-angled coed, the kind of girl who had been homecoming queen at her high school and who led the cheerleading team at her college. She had lost the softness in her features, replaced by a harder edge in her eyes and a tightness across her cheeks like she hadn’t had a decent meal in a decade. It was the kind of attractive face that looked great on television. But Amber Spence wasn’t on television and, as far as I knew, had never aspired to such a career. She had taken a back seat to Ricky from the very get-go.

  She walked up to me in such a deliberate fashion that I thought at the last second she was headed toward someone behind me, but she stopped on a dime right in front. I had my weight on one foot, ready to walk on, but there was no going anywhere.

  “Miami Jones,” she said.

  “Amber Spence,” I replied. “I assume John Cashman mentioned I was here.”

  “No,” she said. “I remember you.”

  She had full lips that offered me a generous smile, and I imagined there were a lot of guys who enjoyed the idea of being remembered by Amber Spence. I might have been one of them had I actually believed she remembered me.

  “I hardly think so,” I said.

  “Oh, I do.”

  “Ricky and I didn’t play together for that long.”

  “I know,” she said. “But you were somewhat memorable.”

  “You think?”

  “I do. You stuck in my mind because I once saw you reading a book. You don’t see a lot of that in professional baseball.”

  “I seem to recall a lot of guys reading back then.”

  “Reading, yes. But a book? Not so much. Anyway, I saw you at the stadium the other day.”

  I nodded. I needed to tread carefully. If the entire object of this exercise was to keep an infidelity—or worse—away from the attention of Amber Spence, I needed to make sure I wasn’t the one who blew the lid off
it.

  “I know something’s up, Miami. I’ve been in this game too long. I want to help.”

  “I’m not really sure how—”

  Amber grabbed me by the bicep and dragged me across the lobby, past the concierge desk, and down a wide corridor lined with expensive boutiques. She stopped at a double set of doors, pulled one open, and directed me inside.

  The room was high-ceilinged and empty. It looked like one of those ballrooms that could host a thousand or a hundred depending on how they worked the partitions. Someone had used the room for an early morning business breakfast, if the U-shaped configuration of the tables and the coffee and pastry selection in the corner of the room were anything to go by. The U-shaped table was covered in disused coffee cups and crumbs.

  Amber waited for the heavy door to slam home, then she turned her gaze on me. “I want to help.”

  She used the word want as if she were offering assistance rather than demanding to be involved, which is how it felt. I figured she had a right to do that, but it wasn’t my right to acquiesce.

  “Honestly, Amber, there’s nothing for you to do right now,” I said.

  She stared at me long and hard. Her face was like polished granite until she broke into the smile.

  “Then I need you to fix it.”

  She didn’t ask what it was, and the demand gave me the impression that this wasn’t her first go around on the Ricky Spence carousel.

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  “I don’t need your best, Miami. I need you to fix it. Whatever it is.”

  “I don’t even know what it is right now, Amber.”

  “Then I need you to find out.” She let out a breath and allowed her shoulders to sag some. It made her more human, less like a force of nature and more like a woman. I knew from personal experience in my own relationship that a person could be both of those things, but the human side was always nicer to deal with.

  “You know that Ricky has been signed by the A’s?”

  “I know they have an option.”

  “Exactly. An option. An option we need them to pick up. This is Ricky’s last shot. His final payday, you might say.”

  I probably wouldn’t have said, but I knew Cashman had described it in exactly those terms. “I don’t get it, Amber. Ricky got paid a hundred million dollars by the Yankees. How can everyone be so worked up by a couple of million here and there in his final season?”

  “A hundred million sounds like more than it is,” she said.

  It sounded like plenty to me. I had played my six years in the pros in what were affectionately called the bus leagues. Affectionately by everyone except those who traveled on the buses. It was constant travel, constant practice, constant games, constant rooming with guys who snored, or gnashed their teeth, or spoke in their sleep. It was getting paid to play but not paid enough to pay rent in a small town like Modesto, California. We had lived six to an apartment that really should have housed two, but we made it work because we spent most of our time on the road and the rest of our time at the ballpark. And getting paid even a pittance to play was a treasure for guys living their dream. So it was hard to conceive of a hundred million dollars, let alone believe it was less than it sounded like.

  “It sounds like plenty,” I said.

  “It sounds like plenty,” she said, “but after agent’s fees and expenses and taxes, big-league baseball comes with a big-league lifestyle, and that costs a lot of money.”

  I couldn’t help but think the big-league lifestyle was a choice rather than a mandate, but I decided against saying so.

  “Look,” she said. “You know Ricky. You know his prospects. He is a baseball player. A guy who can pick up a piece of wood and hit a little ball four hundred and something feet on a semiregular basis. He’s not a heart surgeon or a computer whiz. He’s a baseball player, nothing more. Sure, we’ve invested here and there, but this is the last time anyone will ever pay him millions of dollars to do anything. And we’re hopefully only a third of the way through our lives. We have to save our pennies, and we can’t let any freeloaders or bitches take that from us.” She gave me the smile again, and while it was disarmingly cute, her choice of words was ringing in my ears.

  “I’ll sort it out,” I said.

  She nodded, re-upped her smile, and rubbed my bicep gently.

  “I know you will.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I took a cab from the hotel to the airport. I had to question the wisdom of doing so. The rideshare vehicle that had brought me to the hotel had been spotlessly clean and smelled like a fresh desert breeze. The taxi, however, badly needed new springs, and the driver badly needed a shower.

  The taxi headed up onto East McKellips Road and then drove east away from downtown. Cashman’s jet wasn’t at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. I assumed that gateway was reserved for commercial flights. Cashman’s ride was parked out at a small commuter airport called Falcon Field in Mesa.

  It was a short fifteen-minute drive to the neat, modern terminal. I paid the taxi driver with a credit card, which elicited a groan and took almost longer to process than the journey had. The terminal was small, closer to a fancy first-class business lounge than an airport terminal. There was none of the hubbub of a regular commercial space. There were bright photographs of desert landscapes hanging on the white walls and comfortable seating, most of which was vacant.

  I had a head start on the pilot, so I stood by a large window overlooking the airfield and watched both corporate jets and smaller prop-driven planes landing and taking off. I had just watched a sleek gray jet land and taxi to within twenty feet of the terminal when a guy in a white shirt and blue trousers approached me. He had blue epaulets on his shoulders and a pilot’s hat tucked under his arm.

  “Mr. Jones?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “My name is Phil Smith. I’m the captain.”

  “Great.”

  “I just need to finish filing some paperwork, and we’ll be on our way. Las Vegas, Nevada. Is that correct?”

  I nodded, and Captain Smith headed away to wrangle the bureaucracy. Evidently he knew his way around such things, because he was back within five minutes.

  “Shall we?”

  The pilot led me outside and along a marked walkway on the edge of the tarmac. We strode through the morning breeze, and I glanced at a windsock that was hanging like a dead man’s arm.

  Captain Smith approached a small jet and stopped at the stairs leading up into the cabin. He gestured for me to step up inside, so I did just that.

  The interior of the jet was as plush as anything I had ever been inside of in my life. There was lots of polished rosewood and fine leather. If it had been a commercial aircraft, it probably could have fit about twenty or thirty passengers, but based on the four forward-facing lounge seats and the two sofas that lined the wall at the rear, I estimated this puppy never held more than eight.

  Captain Smith stepped into the cabin behind me and told me to take whichever seat I liked. I took the first aisle seat available, figuring I was unlikely to get a drinks trolley in the elbow, and watched the captain open the cockpit door and speak to the guy already sitting inside, who I assumed to be the copilot.

  Captain Smith left the cockpit door open and sat down, hung a large pair of headphones around his neck, and proceeded to do a series of checks with his copilot. The whole process took longer than I thought it would, and I couldn’t help but wonder that if we all went through similar processes before driving a car, there might be a lot fewer accidents. I knew my insurance company would be more than happy with such an arrangement.

  Captain Smith took off his headphones and came out to let me know that we had approval for takeoff and would be leaving shortly. He asked if I wanted coffee or soda, and I told him I was fine without.

  “Strap in, then,” he said. “We will have you in Las Vegas within the hour.”

  He returned to the cockpit and this time closed the door, so I could no
longer see the computer readouts and such. It made no difference—it looked impressive, but I had no idea what I was looking at—so I turned my attention to the view outside and watched as we slowly rolled across the tarmac to the end of the runway. We sat for no more than thirty seconds, then the pilot hit the gas and the jets roared, and we hurtled down the runway faster than what felt necessary. We lifted away, and almost instantly I felt a slight shudder as the landing gear went up. The plane banked, and we headed north toward Sin City.

  The pilot spoke over the intercom about forty minutes later to tell me we would be landing at North Las Vegas airfield, and we touched down before lunchtime.

  I had no idea which pilot was doing the steering once we were on the ground, but he drove like a Formula One driver, and I felt the aircraft lean as he zigged and zagged his way toward a modern concrete terminal building that resembled a gray pueblo. We stopped just short of the terminal, and once the aircraft had powered down, Captain Smith reappeared and told me that there would be a car-rental representative inside waiting for me. He then handed me a business card and asked if I had an approximate return flight time in mind.

  “Later today, I hope,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said. “Just give me a call when you know you want to leave. As much notice as possible is appreciated, but we can be ready within thirty minutes.”

  I thanked him for the flight, and he dropped the steps open and I strode down into the terminal.

  It wasn’t like McCarran airport, Vegas’s main flight gateway. That terminal was like the rest of Las Vegas, a gambling hall with a few other things to do. Here there were no slot machines, just bland white walls—no art—and almost no people.

  A young guy in a cheap but well-pressed suit was waiting for me.

  “Mr. Jones?” he said, as if unsure which of the passengers getting off might be me.

  I held my arms out as if to say, I’m it, pal, and he directed me to a small car-rental desk.

  “I’m afraid we had a rather large golf convention this week, so we haven’t gotten all our cars back yet.”