Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  “How does he want to be paid?”

  “I’m supposed to wire the money to an offshore bank account.”

  “Won’t the government find out about it?”

  “Probably not,” Heather said. “Private financial transfers like that are still confidential.”

  “Don’t drug cartels and terrorist groups use those kinds of transactions?”

  “Sure,” Heather said. “The Feds want offshore transactions made public, like they are in Europe, but U.S. businesses are fighting it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want my competitors to know how much I’m spending, or why,” Kenwood said.

  “Kind of biting you in the ass now, isn’t it?” Sam said.

  Kenwood didn’t respond.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said, ‘Get rid of the private eye. You’re being watched.’”

  That meant the plot wasn’t necessarily a one-man operation. Babe Ruth could be anywhere, but he definitely had somebody in Boston.

  “Are you going to get rid of me?” Sam said.

  “I thought about it,” Kenwood said. “But you’re my only chance to get out from under this thing.”

  “All right, we’ve got five days,” Sam said. “It looks like I’m going to have to talk to Alberto Miranda. Anybody know where the Dodgers are this week?”

  “I’ll check,” Heather said. “Ellie can book our flight and our hotel.”

  “Are you sure Lou doesn’t need you here?”

  “No,” Lou said. “Heather goes with you.”

  Kenwood poured himself another drink and sat back down in his chair, hardly seeming to notice that Sam and Heather were still there. The Red Sox players were leaving the field while a few of the Toronto Blue Jays were emerging from the third base dugout to limber up for their turns in the batting cage. Sam asked Heather for a quick tour of the ballpark—mostly to get away from Kenwood’s despondency.

  Heather took Sam past the upstairs offices of club president Michael Donovan, but they didn’t stop in.

  “He doesn’t know we hired you,” Heather said. “It would be better if he doesn’t find out.”

  “Who am I, if anyone asks?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  “And why am I getting the VIP treatment?”

  “Because you’re my boyfriend.”

  They took the elevator downstairs to the basement offices of general manager Joe Pagliaro and his staff. The walls were covered with dry-erase boards bearing the names of every player in every major league organization. An oversized bottle of champagne with the label WORLD CHAMPIONS 2004 sat on a filing cabinet. Pagliaro was on his phone, alternately waving his free hand in the air and tapping his index finger on his desk to emphasize a point he was making. Heather gave Pagliaro a wave, and he returned it with a harried half-smile—polite, but with some effort, Sam concluded. Pagliaro probably didn’t like the authority Heather wielded in the organization, but it was at best a minor annoyance in a job filled with daily headaches.

  “He’s kind of a wreck these days,” Heather said. “We were the beloved underdogs a few years ago. Now everybody expects us to do it every year. It’s getting to him.”

  “Do he and Lou get along?”

  “Well, they used to. But after 2004, there were…credit issues.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know—who got most of the credit for bringing the championship back to Boston. Joe has his supporters in the media, and Lou has his. Lou hired Joe, so naturally it bothers him when a columnist writes that the Sox couldn’t have climbed to the top without Joe Pagliaro calling the shots. There are egos involved. Both of them like to think they’re the main reason we broke the Curse.”

  “And if somebody takes that 2004 Series win away…”

  “It could get very ugly around here.”

  They went back up to the concourse level and walked outside to Yawkey Way. The second floor of the souvenir shop across from the ballpark had a row of six-foot windows displaying color posters of each player in that night’s batting order. A five-piece jazz band played “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” while fans sat at umbrella tables in the middle of the street, eating food from concessions stands that had been upgraded significantly since Sam had been there last. Instead of standing in a half-inch of water in the murky bowels of the ballpark, customers now lined up on clean pavement at food stands that sold pizza, barbecue sandwiches, Philly cheese steaks, and even Luis Tiant’s own Cuban cuisine, in addition to hot dogs and beer. Success had turned a charming old dump of a ballpark into a merchandising gold mine.

  They took the elevator back up to the suites level, walking past a gallery of Sports Illustrated covers featuring Red Sox ballplayers as far back as Jackie Jensen and as recent as Ivan Hurtado. At the far end of the concourse they emerged onto a metal walkway that led to the Monster seats atop the left-field wall. Sam had to get used to the idea that there was no longer a 23-foot net above the Green Monster to snag home runs that were headed for the windows across Lansdowne Street. Instead, there were now four rows of Monster Seats extending back from the edge of the wall. Heather picked out two unoccupied seats under the giant Coke bottles that were attached to the light standard near the left-field foul pole. Sam couldn’t see the left-fielder beneath them, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sun was setting over the seats along the right-field line, bathing the bleachers and center-field Jumbotron scoreboard in a soft, golden glow.

  Everything about Fenway seemed perfect from these perches: the pale green of the interior walls, the emerald green of the outfield grass, the red-brown dirt of the infield and warning track, and the red seats that stretched from foul pole to foul pole. The glassed-in luxury suites and press box behind home plate gave the park a more modern feel, but the asymmetrical layout of the playing field and outfield seating areas was unmistakable evidence that you were in a ballpark that dated back to baggy flannels and pancake-flat fielder’s gloves.

  “Why didn’t somebody think of this years ago?” Sam asked.

  “When Lou bought the club, everybody thought they were already wringing as much money as they could out of the place,” Heather said. “They were wrong.”

  Sam leaned over the wall to get a look at the most obvious nod to the past: the hand-operated scoreboard inside the Green Monster, directly below them.

  “I’ve always wanted to see inside the scoreboard,” Sam said.

  “Not much to see, really. But we can go out there after the game, if you want.”

  They watched the first inning from the Monster Seats, but when a couple arrived with tickets to the seats Sam and Heather were sitting in, Sam said it was time to talk to Hurtado. Heather nodded. They went back to the suites concourse and took the elevator down to the clubhouse level. A guard stood outside the door to the Red Sox clubhouse.

  “Andy, I’m going down the tunnel to talk to Gil for a second,” she said to the guard. “Sam, wait here. I’ll bring Ivan up from the dugout.”

  Heather disappeared down the ramp that led to the first-base dugout. In a minute she was back, trailed by a dark, wiry man wearing the blazing white home uniform of the Red Sox. He was obviously checking out Heather’s legs as she walked ahead of him. Sam had seen Ivan Hurtado dozens of times on television. He seemed bigger in person, and younger.

  “Let’s go in here,” Heather said, opening the door to the clubhouse.

  Inside the deserted clubhouse were rows of floor-to-ceiling cubicles with the players’ names and numbers on the facing edge of the shelves. There were chairs, tables, and couches in the center of the room, most facing a wall-mounted TV screen. Off to one side was the shower and the trainer’s room. Gil Mahaffey’s tiny office was just inside the clubhouse door, next to a table full of snacks: candy, gum, nuts, sport drinks, and pastries. The clubhouse smelled like a mixture of soap, sweat, styling gel, and deodorant. Sam had seen bigger dressing rooms at college gyms.

 
; Ivan Hurtado took off his Sox cap and plopped himself down in one of the armchairs, looking around in a bored, distracted way.

  “What’s thees about, man?” he asked Heather. The way he looked at her, Sam suspected they knew each other in a capacity other than player and team executive.

  “Ivan, I’d like you meet Sam Skarda. He’s going to ask you some questions about the Series in ’04.”

  “You a reporter, man?” Hurtado said. “Wait till after the game, like the rest.”

  “No. I’m doing some insurance work for the team,” Sam said. That would be vague enough.

  “Yeah, okay,” Hurtado said, still petulant. “Shoot.”

  Sam asked Hurtado to think back to the first game of the World Series and describe what happened, from the first inning, when the Red Sox scored five runs off Cardinals starter Alberto Miranda. He watched Hurtado’s expression intently as he raised the subject of the Series. There was no change; Sam could have been asking him about his electric bill.

  “Alberto, man, he no have his good stuff,” Hurtado said almost by rote, as though he’d answered the question a million times. “I know, cuz you no can heet his stuff when he’s right.”

  “You dropped a fly ball that inning, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, I take my eye off it when Weatherby cut in front of me.”

  “How’d Alberto look after that inning?”

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean, the look on his face. Did he look disappointed? Tired? Disgusted?”

  “Oh, he disgusted, man. Like he no can figure out what the fuck is up with thees shit.”

  “Was he really bearing down?”

  “Shit, yeah, man. He just no have it.”

  Hurtado was relaxed now, as though sitting in the clubhouse and talking about the World Series he lost was better than sitting in the dugout watching some kid from the minors audition for his job. Sam took him through the remaining three games of the Series, games in which the Red Sox won 3-1, 5-4 and 7-0. In the middle two games, several plays could have turned the games around. Hurtado said the Cardinal pitchers had pitched well in those games, but Boston’s pitching had simply been better.

  “We played bad, man,” Hurtado said. “We coulda beat ’em. But they make a lotta great plays, and we fuck up too many.”

  “Infield play well?”

  “Yeah, man, they all played good, except Alberto, he make a couple of bad throws. Everybody see that.”

  “Miranda didn’t have a good Series, did he?”

  “Not too good.”

  “He didn’t hit well.”

  “No, man, but those Sox pitchers, man, they were fuckin’ great.”

  “Is that pretty much how all the players saw it?” Sam asked. “Just a bad Series for Miranda?”

  “Yeah, man, that’s all.”

  “How about you? Did you give it everything you had?”

  “What you mean, man?” Hurtado said. His eyes narrowed as Sam crossed into the taboo territory of questioning a professional athlete’s effort.

  “You and Alberto were the biggest stars on that team. Neither of you played well. I’m just wondering if there was a reason.”

  “No reason.” Hurtado shrugged off the implication and regained his unconcerned expression. “I try my best. Alberto try his best. If we both play good, I don’ think it make no fuckin’ difference. The baseball gods, they was on Boston’s side that year.”

  “I guess they were.”

  “Not thees year, though. Shit, we can’t do nothin’ right, man. I think we do better next year, but if they no want me here, I wanna go someplace else.”

  “I read that they offered you three years at $60,000,000, and you turned it down.”

  “It ain’t about the money, man. Is about respect.”

  “I have a lot of respect for $60,000,000.”

  Hurtado blew a raspberry with his lips and began stretching, pulling one leg up to his chest with his hands clasped around the knee, then the other leg.

  “If they want me, what the fuck am I doin’ up here talkin’ to you?” Hurtado said. “Maybe I go play with Alberto in L.A. He my brother, you know?”

  “You guys pretty close?”

  “Hell, yes, man.”

  “You see him in the offseason?”

  “Not so much anymore. We no play winter ball together since the Series.”

  “But you talk to him?”

  “Yeah, we call each other.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Not so good, man. They write fuckin’ shit about him, too. Reporters, man. It’s ‘steroids this,’ ‘steroids that’ all the time now. Alberto, man, he clean, but no one believe it.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “I just know, man. He don’ do that shit. He don’ need to.”

  “How about you, Ivan? Have you ever tried steroids?”

  “Oh, man.” A pained look crossed Hurtado’s face. “How many times I gotta say it? Never. No fuckin’ way. That stuff will kill you.”

  “It can make you great, too.”

  “Not if you ain’t great already.”

  Sam thanked Hurtado for his time, and the ballplayer stood up and looked around, as if trying to decide whether to return to the dugout or simply leave the ballpark. He gave Heather one more lingering glance, then turned and walked down the tunnel to rejoin his teammates.

  “You two ever go out for a milk shake?” Sam asked Heather after Hurtado left.

  “Once or twice,” Heather said. She smiled slightly. “I wanted to make him feel at home after the trade.”

  “So, you know him. Do you believe him?”

  “Honestly? He’s too proud to intentionally play bad, and he’s too emotional to keep quiet about it if he did.”

  “I didn’t think he was lying, either. But I’ve been wrong before.”

  “Do you want to talk to any of the other players?”

  “No, I got what I needed here,” Sam said. He stood up and began walking toward the exit. “We need to talk to Alberto Miranda.”

  “How do you know he’s the guy?”

  “If a fix was on, they couldn’t have done it without him.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lou Kenwood was no longer alone when Sam and Heather returned to the owner’s suite. Paul sat at the bar on the upper level, and a woman in a wheelchair sat next to Kenwood, watching the game. An oxygen tank with two round gauges was attached to a holder behind the wheelchair, and a tube extended from the tank under the woman’s arm.

  “Oh, there you are,” Kenwood said. The woman next to him did not turn around. “Paul, would you leave us for a while?”

  “Sure thing,” the chauffeur said. He got up from his stool, walked out of the suite, and closed the door behind him.

  “Did you talk to Hurtado?” Kenwood asked Sam.

  “Yes.”

  Sam approached the woman in the wheelchair and extended his hand. Heather remained at the back of the suite.

  “I’m Sam Skarda.”

  “Excuse my manners,” Kenwood said. “Sam, this is my wife, Katherine.”

  Kenwood’s voice was a bit slurred. He might have been on his third or fourth bourbon.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Sam said.

  “Hello, Sam,” Katherine said. “I’m so glad to meet you. I hope you can help us.”

  Katherine Kenwood’s grip was not forceful, but she did not simply lay her hand in Sam’s palm, either. She put what strength she had into it.

  She had definitely been a beauty in her day, and—except for the inevitable wrinkles, an age spot here and there, and the oxygen tube that ran under her nose—that day had not yet officially passed. Her hair was an elegant gray with silver streaks. Her eyes were a bit watery, but the hue remained a vibrant blue. She had the small, pert nose of a debutante, and her mouth, though widening with age, looked like the inviting kind that many men would once have wanted to kiss, and probably
had. Her jaw line was sharp, almost regal, with no obvious signs of facial work so common to wealthy women of her age. What she had was what nature had given her, and nature had been generous.

  “What did Ivan say?” Kenwood said.

  “He said the Cardinals played hard, and he and Miranda tried their best. They just didn’t have it.”

  “Would you expect him to say anything different?” Katherine said.

  “I would have expected him to show some reaction if he knew the Series had been fixed,” Sam said. “He didn’t. I believe him, for now.”

  “So do I,” Kenwood said. “Are you going to talk to any of the others?”

  “No. After watching the DVD and reading the game stories, it would have to be Hurtado and Miranda. Definitely Miranda.”

  “When are you going to talk to him?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  Sam pulled up a chair and sat next to Katherine. Heather asked from the bar if anyone wanted a drink. Sam declined.

  “Make mine a martini, sweetheart,” Katherine said.

  “Do you think you should?” Kenwood asked.

  “Why the hell not?” Katherine said. She laughed in a low, rumbling tone that didn’t sound as much bitter as resigned. “I’m dying, Sam. I smoked two packs a day for thirty years, and it caught up with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. He noted the slight rasp in her throat as she spoke.

  “So am I. Christ, I don’t want to die. I wanted to be around to see us win another championship. But it had to be this year…”

  Sam didn’t know what to say, but he appreciated Katherine Kenwood’s bluntness. She was making the best of the cards she’d been dealt, facing death with the kind of grace everybody hopes they’ll have.

  They sat in silence for a while, watching the game. It was in the sixth inning; the Blue Jays were leading 6-4, and the Sox had runners on second and third with one out.

  “Gil should put on the squeeze here,” Kenwood said.

  “It’s a bad play when you’re down two runs,” Katherine said. “What is it with you and bunting, anyway?”