The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  A black guy in an immaculate BMW SUV picked me up. The idea of buying a fancy European car and then using it as a taxi perplexed me, so I asked the guy about it. He told me he had been a computer programmer in the Bay Area but the whole town had gotten too expensive and too stressful, so he switched to being a rideshare driver and part-time DJ. As he drove, he played with his phone in its stand, checking our route and destination.

  “Chanteuse?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Sorry?” I asked in return.

  “Your destination. It’s Chanteuse?”

  “No, I think it’s called Club Mediterrano.”

  “Not in a few years,” he said. “It’s gone a bit upmarket since then, and it’s now called Chanteuse.”

  “Are you telling me that even Modesto is getting gentrified?”

  “It ain’t what it used to be,” he said. “You’ll see your fair share of BMWs and Audis alongside the odd tractor or pickup. Not that the two get along all that well.”

  It didn’t take long, and it wasn’t a far drive. We headed into the downtown area and then back out again, southeast toward Shackelford. I recognized the low-rise light industrial nature of the area. That part hadn’t changed. It still felt grimy and low rent, as light industrial areas often did. There were automotive mechanics and transport companies in steel sheds. And then, somewhat incongruously, between all the sheds was a Victorian mansion.

  I thanked the driver and wished him well and then got out and stood on the street for a moment. Across the road, train tracks branched off from the main line and headed south through farmland, ending at an agricultural chemical plant. There was a large diesel engine with three freight cars attached to it sitting on the track about a quarter-mile south from where I stood. It wasn’t moving, and I wondered if the track was even still in use.

  It was hard to tell which side of the tracks were the wrong side. The buildings looked sun bleached, and dust whipped up on both sides of the line. I turned around and took in the Victorian mansion in front of me. It looked about as out of place as a building could.

  Fifteen years ago the building had been the color of a cloudy day, with peeling white trim. I had wondered if keeping it in a sad state of repair was some kind of camouflage for what was going on inside. Things had changed. The whole house had been given a paint job, not in the past few months but certainly within the past few years. It was now a deep Cape Cod blue, and the white trim was fresh and glossy. The steps up to the door had been repaired, and the whole place reeked of gentrification. Someone had hung a shingle on the front porch that told me what the rideshare driver had already let me know. The club or bar or brothel, or whatever the heck it was now, was no longer Club Mediterrano. It was indeed called Chanteuse.

  I was standing on the sidewalk in the midday sun, wondering if a club like this was even open during daylight hours, when my phone rang.

  “Hey, Sal.”

  “Back at you, kid.”

  “What do you have?”

  “So, turns out I know a guy who knows a guy who knows the guy who runs the place you’re looking for.”

  “I’m standing out front of it,” I said. “It’s not called Mediterrano anymore. It’s called Chanteuse.”

  “That’s what I hear,” said Sal. I heard the sound of a hacking cough down the phone line and then something that sounded like a cowboy spitting into a spittoon.

  “Anyway, my guy says to use his guy’s name. Tell them that a friend of a friend of Gino Tavola recommends you.”

  “Gino Tavola. Got it.”

  “Just don’t go getting into any kind of trouble,” said Sal.

  “You don’t want your good name besmirched?”

  “Aach, I don’t care about that. But I don’t know these guys directly, so you get into a pickle, you’re kind of on your own.”

  “I’ll play nice, Sal. Don’t worry. I doubt these guys will even remember anything. But I appreciate it.”

  “You got it.”

  He hung up without any further word, and I put my phone away and looked up at the house. It could have been mistaken for a fancy B&B—if it had been in San Francisco, or Boston, or even West Palm Beach. But no kind of discerning clientele was going to stay at a B&B opposite rusted-out train tracks. I wondered what secrets lay within its walls. I figured it was time to find out.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  There was no doorbell, so I just rapped my knuckles on the door and waited. It took longer than was necessary but eventually the door opened. The guy behind it was a big unit. He might have been a bouncer or even a kitchen hand. He was dressed in all black such that it made it difficult to discern where he ended and the interior beyond began. I told him that I was a friend of a friend of Gino Tavola, and I wanted a quiet word with the boss. The guy looked me up and down, perhaps assessing whether I was a cop or some other ne’er-do-well, and then he jinked his head to suggest I should step inside.

  The interior of the house was like a movie set. It looked like one of those old nightclubs, with the little cocktail tables covered in red tablecloths and candles in the middle. There was an ornate candelabra illuminating the space in a very half-hearted fashion. To one side, a set of stairs went up to the next level, and to my left I saw a drawing room that had been set up with a card table, the kind of thing where I half expected to see a magician doing tricks.

  Someone had done some renovations somewhere along the way, because the space that had once been the front room was now at least twice the size it had been fifteen years before. At the end, toward the back of the house, there was a stage. A woman was on the stage behind a retro-looking microphone. She started singing an old Cole Porter tune, and I couldn’t help but feel like her talent was wasted in the outskirts of Modesto.

  The bouncer/kitchen hand weaved between the cocktail tables and led me back to where two men sat watching the woman sing. They didn’t look like patrons. The whole thing felt like an audition.

  A lot of silent communication went on between the two guys at the table and the bouncer dude who had brought me in. I reintroduced myself and mentioned Sal and this Gino Tavola guy, and the guy closest to me offered me a chair and told me to sit.

  “So what brings you to Chanteuse?” he asked. He said the name of the club with a thick Brooklyn accent, so it came out chant-ooze. I noted he was probably about fifty years old, but he still had a thick head of hair and broad shoulders that felt proportionate to his wide belly. He was dressed in a suit, as was his partner. I had lived in Modesto for four years back in the day, and I liked the small-town nature of it. I had also liked the fact that there weren’t that many people who wore suits. Like South Florida, it got too damn hot in the summertime. Even the local golf club allowed you to wear shorts. I wasn’t sure if these guys were a sign of the gentrification of Modesto, which now found itself as a sort of long-distance commuter suburb to the Bay Area, or if the sharp suits were just part of the shtick of the whole nightclub.

  “I’m looking into something that happened here about fifteen years ago.”

  “We wasn’t here fifteen years ago,” said the guy.

  “Neither was this stage,” I said. “The whole place feels like it’s gone upmarket.”

  “Fifteen years, you say? Yeah, I’d say things have changed. You gotta move with the times.”

  “You still got the brothel upstairs?” It was a hell of a direct question, and one that might not make me any friends, but I felt like tiptoeing around the subject wasn’t going to get me too far.

  The guy didn’t flinch. “Nah,” he said with a shrug. “That’s all gone online. The strip acts that we used to have, that stuff all got moved out near the airport. This place, if you can believe it, is pretty much as legit as they come. We get acts in from the Bay Area, and New York, and even New Orleans.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Ain’t like the good old days.”

  “So you guys weren’t here fifteen years ago?”

  “No. What is it that you�
��re looking into?”

  “It’s about a guy who ran up a bit of a gambling tab,” I said.

  My new pal nodded his head like a wise sage. “The guy still owe us money?”

  “Afraid not,” I said. “He got paid out free and clear.”

  The guy closest to me half turned and half leaned across the cocktail table to his well-dressed colleague. “Don’t we got some guys who handled the books back then?”

  The second guy nodded. He was equally broad in the shoulders but had a voice like Tinkerbell. “Yeah, we got two guys who ran the books back then.”

  “Can I speak to them?” I asked.

  The second guy shrugged. “One of them’s dead,” he said. “Shot. Occupational hazard.” The guy turned to the darkness of the room and snapped his fingers, and the bouncer/kitchen hand reappeared at his side. They whispered with each other for a moment. I was only a small cocktail table away, but I heard nothing. They either had a special sonar-based bat-like language or excellent hearing. The bouncer ran away into the darkness, and the second guy turned back to me. “Give it a minute.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You want a drink?” asked the first guy.

  “What do you recommend?”

  “This time a day? An espresso.”

  “That sounds great, thank you.”

  There was more finger snapping and rushing around, and then three tiny coffees arrived at our small table. I had to admit it wasn’t just the building that had changed. The business might not have gone quite as legit as they claimed, but certainly the guys running it drinking coffee rather than something harder was a step toward respectability. Or maybe it was like a drug dealer not sampling the merchandise, but I well and truly kept that thought to myself.

  The coffee took me all of about eight seconds to drink, so I leaned back in my seat and enjoyed the woman singing on stage. She was dressed in sequins, which seemed like overkill for the time of day, but perhaps when an artist is auditioning, the costume is half the act.

  About three songs later, a guy shuffled out from somewhere behind the stage. He didn’t appear to be older than sixty, but he looked broken, like he’d had a really tough life or had recently been in a car accident. He came over to our table, and neither of the guys sitting with me offered him a seat.

  I explained to him the satellite-level view of the night in question. He didn’t seem to remember all that much. Lots of guys came in looking for girls, and lots of guys ran up bar and gambling tabs, he said. Lots of guys had to have the ramifications of not paying those tabs explained to them in great detail. I asked him about the high school graduation, but that didn’t seem to clear matters up any. Lots of high school graduation parties had made their way to Club Mediterrano, a.k.a. Chanteuse.

  So I played my last card and told him about the baseball player.

  “Ricky Spence,” I said.

  It took a moment, but eventually he slowly started nodding his head, more and more, like a snowball effect, as if once started he didn’t know how to stop. Given the state of his movement, it looked like far too much activity being exerted on his spine by the time he said, “Him I remember.”

  “You do?”

  “He was some kind of big shot, right? At least he thought he was gonna be. I remember him telling everyone that he was going to join the Yankees. It didn’t seem to impress many of the guys at his poker table, but there were a good number of us working here who came from New York, you know? The Yankees got some street cred. But calling yourself a Yankee and actually being one ain’t the same thing. This guy was writing checks he couldn’t cash, gambling money he didn’t have. Being the big man on campus.”

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “I kinda remember it now, now you mention the ballplayer. I remember him racking up a serious tab. No, I remember something else.” The old guy leaned over like he was trying to find a light switch in the darkened room, except he was leaning in my direction.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “How do you know me?”

  “You were here. You’re the guy who paid his debt.”

  “Some of it, yeah.”

  “That’s right. Another guy came in the next day and paid the rest off in cash.”

  I figured that was Cashman but didn’t say so.

  “You cost us some serious money that night.”

  “Paying off the principal of the debt often does,” I said.

  “No, no. Not that, not the book. I remember, Mr. Big Shot couldn’t pay his tabs. Gambled plenty and spent plenty on booze. So we were setting him up. One of the old stings.”

  “One of the old stings?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He’d been pumping some broad back in the john, and I remember we dragged him upstairs to one of the old hotel rooms. Set him up with one of our girls, you know?”

  I remembered the bedroom and the girl, who I had thought to be a hooker at the time—rightly, it would seem.

  “Why were you setting them up? Some kind of gag?”

  “No gag. If it was true that he was headed to the Yankees, we figured it might turn out useful to have some nudie pictures on file. You know what I mean? But you, Boy Scout, you came in and paid off half his tab, and this I remember. While we were taking care of that, you and the guy disappeared.” The old man straightened up and stretched his back. “How the heck did you get outta here?”

  “The window.”

  “It was on the second floor.”

  “Don’t remind me. But the press had arrived, and I thought they were the only ones interested in pictures.”

  The first of the guys sitting with me grunted. “This Spence,” he said. “He did make it to the Yankees, didn’t he.”

  “He did.”

  “That would’ve been worth some dough.”

  “Lucky you guys are into the legit business now.” I said it with a touch too much glee in my voice, and the guy gave me a frown like he was starting to question my bona fides. I decided to hit the old guy up with my questions before I got asked to leave.

  “Do you remember the woman who was in the bathroom with him before you dragged him out?”

  The old guy shrugged. “There were a lot of girls. There were always a lot of girls. All I can tell you is she wasn’t one of ours.”

  I thought of Lily Barkin. A drunk girl celebrating her high school graduation in a bathroom with a big-talking baseball player. It wasn’t making me any kind of fan of Ricky Spence.

  “So you don’t remember what this girl looked like at all?”

  The old guy shook his head. “The girls were a dime a dozen, my friend. They weren’t the ones who ran up the tabs, so they were never my problem.”

  I decided I’d gotten as much as I was likely to get, so I thanked all the guys for their time, and I left them to their cabaret.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I stood on the sidewalk out front of the house as I had done before, this time blinking hard to reacclimatize my eyes to daylight. I wondered how Batman did it. I looked up at the old Victorian building that didn’t look quite so old anymore, and once again I thought about Lily Barkin. I believed her about the dates not working to match Ricky Spence as her son’s father, and I believed her story about a drunken engagement with him. It would seem the old guy in the club had confirmed what Lily couldn’t remember. I didn’t want to put such a memory in her head, but I couldn’t help but feel that I hadn’t yet heard the truth behind whatever it was Cashman and Spence wanted to hide from the world.

  I took out my phone and called Lily Barkin.

  “It’s Miami Jones,” I said.

  “How did you get my number?”

  “I’m a private investigator. Are you sure the last thing you remember is being on the sofa with Ricky Spence?”

  “Why are you dredging this up?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “It’s just an itch I’ve got to scratch.”

  “Well, it’s an itch I scratched a long time ago,” she said. “I do
n’t really want to open it into a wound. You understand?”

  “I do. Listen, one last thing. Who were you with that night?”

  “I told you, some high school friends.”

  “You still in touch with them?”

  “I don’t really keep in touch with many people from Modesto anymore.”

  “None at all?”

  “Well, there is one, sort of. We’re Facebook friends. We don’t really talk.”

  “You got a number for this friend?”

  “No. That’s what I’m telling you, we’re just friends on Facebook. Not real friends. Not anymore.”

  “Do you know her Facebook details?”

  “I don’t have it memorized, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Can you look on your phone? Text it to me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s worth getting into.”

  “Just this one person,” I said. “Then you have my word, you won’t hear from me again.”

  “Okay. Just this one.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Listen, did you give my son your business card?”

  “I did. In case he wanted some instruction on his pitching technique.”

  “I would prefer that you not contact him again.”

  “He’s got my details, Lily. I don’t have his.”

  “Still. Do I have your word that you won’t contact him?”

  “You have my word.”

  “Okay.” I could hear her breathing on the phone for a moment. “When you said he would find his own mentor, were you talking about yourself?”

  “As his mentor? No. I meant I had had some myself, and they had done the right thing by me. I meant he would find someone like that, eventually.”

  “I really don’t want Zed circling back on him.”

  “You have my word on that, too,” I said. “I’ll do everything I can to set Zed straight.”

  I thanked Lily for her time, and she hung up. I stood in the sunshine, the heat radiating off the gravel beneath the train tracks on the other side of the street. I wondered if I should just return to the airport, go back to Danielle, and leave the whole thing alone. There was a decent chance that I was headed for a dead end, that I wouldn’t find out anything significant, or that perhaps there wasn’t anything to find out after all. And I seemed to be upsetting a few people along the way, people that really didn’t deserve it. I looked down the street toward the general direction of downtown Modesto. Had I been somewhere else, I might have just turned and headed for home. But this place was part of my life, my memory. I heard the ghosts of days past calling me, and I figured I’d take a walk just for old times. Old times, and because I was getting hungry. I’d go and get something to eat, and then if I still felt the same way, I resolved to get the next flight back to Phoenix.