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Green Monster

Page 16

by Rick Shefchik


  “Kenwood’s thinking of paying,” Sam said.

  “Why the fuck would he do that?” Mink said. “Lemme tell ya, I watched those games, and there was no fix. The Cards played like shit, everybody knows that, but it was straight up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I see fifty-sixty games a year from this seat. The Dodgers even widened this one for me. I know baseball. If there was something funny goin’ on, I’d know.”

  “True or not, somebody’s shaking down the Red Sox. You know what would happen if a rumor got out about that Series being fixed.”

  “If Lucky Louie wants to throw his money away, it’s no skin off my ass.”

  But Mink’s eyelids were twitching as he stared off into center field. Like any baseball fan, it wasn’t lost on him that the public needed to believe in the integrity of the sport. And like anyone who made money from gambling, he knew it would be just as bad for his income as it would be for Lou Kenwood’s if fans lost that belief. Besides, if it was somebody in L.A. making $50,000,000 on this scam, they’d be strong enough to come after him next.

  On the field, the Dodgers had a runner on second with two out, and Alberto Miranda stepping to the plate. The buzz in the ballpark rose as the big right-handed hitter dug in. He looked god-like from this vantage point, a supremely well-proportioned warrior tightly packed into his dazzling home white uniform. The pitcher for the Padres appeared nervous, taking a long time between pitches as he repeatedly glanced over his shoulder to keep the runner close to the bag at second. The pink tint in the western sky was muted now, painting the blues, oranges, and yellows of the three main seating decks in even deeper shades. It was an idyllic place to be discussing the ugliness of cheating and blackmail.

  “Baseball’s a beautiful game—Skarda, is it?” Mink said. He jabbed his index finger into Sam’s upper arm, then pointed to the field. “It takes most of these guys four or five years in the minors just to learn enough to stay up here. If a pitcher figures out how to throw a ninety-four-mile-per-hour split-finger pitch just off the black, he’ll make millions. And the hitter who learns to lay off that pitch, get ahead in the count and drive the ball into the gap makes millions, too. The stands are filled with people who believe that what they’re watching is something so good, so perfect, and so fuckin’ hard to do, that it’s worth spending fifty bucks for a good seat to watch these guys do it.

  “Only some fuckin’ punk would tamper with that,” Mink said. “Nobody with any class would try to pull this shit.”

  Mink looked genuinely angry now. Did he suspect someone? A rival gangster? Sam wasn’t sure how hard to push for names, but as long as he had Mink’s attention, he might as well play off the man’s aggravation—and the alleged inferiority complex of the L.A. mob—to see what he could get.

  “I heard you were the guy who could help us out,” Sam said.

  “Yeah? Who told you that?”

  “Cops, reporters, bookies. Lots of people.”

  “What do they say about me?”

  Mink was too eager. Why should he care what people were saying about him? All that “Mickey Mouse Mafia” stuff must make Mink and his outfit insecure about their own status. It was time for Sam to pour on the bullshit.

  “You run a tight ship,” Sam said. “You don’t take shit from anybody. Everybody fears you—the cops, the unions, the Hollywood studios…”

  “They got that right,” Mink said. “Nobody fucks with me.”

  He pulled out a cigar and started chewing on the end, but didn’t light it. There were NO SMOKING signs scattered around the ballpark, just like at Fenway. Sam assumed Dodger Stadium had put their signs up first. And Mink, despite being a professional lawbreaker, showed no inclination to flout the stadium’s smoking rules.

  “I’ve got three days left to find out who’s behind this,” Sam said. “The payment’s due on Friday.”

  “How’s Kenwood supposed to pay off fifty million bucks—offshore bank account?”

  “That’s right.”

  “There are ways to find out who owns those accounts.”

  “I know, but Lou still has to keep this quiet, even if he figures out who Babe Ruth is.”

  “This kind of thing is no fuckin’ good for anyone,” Mink said. “I make plenty of money on suckers who want to bet on ballgames. I don’t need this shit.”

  He turned to Joey and said something to him in a low voice that Sam couldn’t make out. He leaned a little closer, but just then Miranda smashed a curve ball into right-center field, and the runner on second scored standing up when the first baseman cut off the throw to the plate. The crowd roared its appreciation. Dodgers 1, Padres 0.

  “Gimme your phone number,” Mink said to Sam over the crowd noise.

  Sam recited his number while Joey punched it into his cell phone.

  “I’m on this,” Mink said. “When I got something, I’ll call you.”

  “Clock’s ticking,” Sam said.

  “Hey,” Mink said, grabbing Sam’s jacket. “I told you, I’m on it. Now get outta here.”

  Sam returned to the seat where Heather was waiting for him, and told her that Mink was going to help them find Babe Ruth. Heather was not impressed.

  “He’s probably just blowing you off,” she said. “We’re running out of time.”

  “Don’t worry—Mink’s humiliated. His authority has been challenged. He’s highly motivated.”

  Sam pulled out his cell phone and dialed Russ Daly. He got the answering machine and told the columnist he had one more question to ask. A few minutes later, Sam’s phone rang.

  “Daly,” the raspy-voiced columnist said. “You’re lucky I’m such a lovable, caring guy. After last night, I should get a restraining order against you.”

  “That’s hilarious,” Sam said. “Hey, I just talked to Sid Mink.”

  “You get his autograph?”

  “He says he’s not involved, but he thinks he might know who is.”

  “Is he going to let you in on it?”

  “He said he’d call.”

  “They always say that. Then you wait around, pass up calls from other mobsters, and end up missing the big dance.”

  Daly was right. Sam couldn’t wait around hoping that an L.A. drug lord would decide to help him find Babe Ruth. He had to get moving. At least he was sure of one thing: Whoever was trying to kill him, it wasn’t Mink. Sam wasn’t even sure Mink could pull off a hit if he tried.

  He looked over at Heather, who was nibbling from a box of popcorn and brushing stray kernels off her denim mini-skirt. He still wasn’t sure he could trust her. She could be playing all sides of this game, with the intent of being the last one standing when the Kenwood fortune changed hands. All the more reason to find Babe Ruth—now.

  “Where does Miranda work out?” Sam asked Daly.

  “At the stadium, like everybody else.”

  “No, I mean off-season—weight-training. He must go to a gym.”

  “Oh, that—there’s a gym in Glendale that a lot of the local jocks go to, called Roy Laswell’s.”

  “Any rumors of steroids being distributed there?”

  Daly snorted.

  “You know a gym that doesn’t have steroid rumors?”

  “You know what I mean. There are steroid rumors about Miranda. The cops must be looking at the place.”

  “Our federal courts guy says the government has been trying to nail Laswell for a couple of years now. Nothing yet.”

  “What’s the place like?”

  “Big, cushy, pimped out with all the newest machines, crawling with muscle-bound creeps.”

  “Is there a Roy Laswell?”

  “Yeah—unless it’s some guy playing Laswell in their ads.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sam snapped the phone shut and told Heather they were leaving. She nodded, stood up and put the popcorn box on the concrete in front of her seat. They squeezed past a couple of schoolgirls waving signs
at the TV cameras, and Sam glanced up at the JumboTron screen on the scoreboard to see if the girls had been selected. To his surprise, the camera was focused on Heather as she stood in the aisle, hand-combing her short blond hair, her elbows up in the air and her breasts bouncing slightly against her white cotton tank-top. The teenage girls next to them started yelling at Heather to move, and stuck their signs up in front of her. When Heather glanced up at the screen and realized what was going on, she laughed.

  “You’re blowing our cover,” Sam said.

  They walked up the aisle toward the exit.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was not quite nine when they got back to the BMW, illuminated to a shiny gleam under the arc lights in the Dodger parking lot. Sam slid in behind the wheel before Heather could and held out his hand for the keys. Heather shrugged and handed them over.

  Sam called directory assistance on his phone and got the number for Laswell’s Gym. The gum-chewing girl who answered the phone at the gym said they were open till two a.m., and once Sam deciphered her Valley Girl accent, the directions weren’t hard to follow: Pick up the Golden State Freeway just north of the stadium, go north on the Glendale Freeway, and exit on Colorado Boulevard.

  He found the game on the radio. The Dodgers were now up by three in the bottom of the sixth. According to Vin Scully, Alberto Miranda had just hit a two-run homer to pad the lead—and a steady stream of cars was already leaving the lot. Dodger fans were famous for leading all of major league baseball when it came to beating the traffic home. Scully went through the American League scores. The Sox had beaten the Blue Jays for the third straight game, while the Yankees lost to the Orioles again. It looked like the Sox were crawling back into the A.L. East race.

  The drive to Laswell’s took about fifteen minutes. On the way, Sam told Heather about Daly’s description of the gym. He assumed Laswell would be a character similar to Kenny, the owner of Club Earache—tightly wound and protective of his famous clientele. Sam told her they would tour the gym as prospective customers, and see if they could strike up conversations with some of the regulars.

  The gym was on a wide commercial street where hot cars cruised back and forth, the drivers looking for excitement in the sultry coastal darkness. Sam parked in the gym’s adjoining lot, and they walked in to find a brightly lit, spacious main exercise room decorated primarily in blue with orange and yellow accents, with unseen fans forcing fresh air currents through the dense aroma of sweat and body oil. There were both free weights and resistance machines near the main entrance, with stair-climbers, treadmills, and elliptical machines farther back. Apparently Roy Laswell thought it was good advertising to put the oil-slicked hardbodies out front, and let the blubbery treadmill types slave away in the farther reaches of the big room.

  Sam went to the reception desk and spoke to a young woman who wore a plastic nametag that said “Kaylee.” She was thumbing through a Muscle & Fitness magazine. She had teased-up hair and wore a blue sleeveless workout suit—calculated to show off the definition in her biceps—that matched her eye shadow. When Sam said hello to her, she glanced up at him and revealed her yellow chewing gum when she smiled. She removed one of the ear buds attached to her MP3 player.

  “My wife and I are thinking of joining. Is there someone who can give us a tour?”

  “Not tonight.” Kaylee glanced at the clock by the door. “I’ve got to stay by the phone. The other staffers on duty are conducting classes. We do tours between nine and six o’clock. But you’re welcome to look around.”

  “I hear you have some pro athletes who work out here.”

  “Oh, yeah. Some of the Dodgers do. A couple of Lakers and Kings. Roy’s good friends with lots of them.”

  “Is Roy here tonight?”

  “No. You could try back tomorrow.”

  “We’ll just take a walk through, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  She turned back to her magazine, and Sam scanned the room, looking for guys who appeared over-supplemented. There were several possibilities; the sounds of guttural grunts and clanking metal drew Sam’s attention to the free-weight side of the room.

  “Are we interested in the one-month trial membership or the half-year introductory offer, honey?” Sam asked Heather.

  She gazed at a trio of rippling, sculpted specimens wearing snug singlets and broad leather belts spotting for each other at a weight bench, then reached over and squeezed Sam’s right bicep.

  “I think you’d better sign up for the full year,” she said.

  “Hey, easy,” Sam said. “Or I might not step in the next time you get manhandled.”

  “Handle this,” she said. She grabbed his crotch.

  One of the weightlifters happened to catch Heather’s quick strike and broke into a leering grin.

  “We interrupting something?” the guy asked.

  “She’s just doing some weightlifting,” Sam said.

  The three lifters didn’t even smile. Sam walked over and sat next to the weight bench where two of the men were spotting for the third. One appeared to be Hispanic, while the other two were white guys with short, buzz haircuts that revealed scars on their scalps, the kind most often acquired from a broken bottle in a bar fight. None of them was particularly big, but their muscles were. Heather might have been impressed, but to Sam, they looked like normal guys wearing fake plastic muscle suits—except that the veins and the bulges were real.

  There was a terraced rack of round free weights next to the bench, and another low rack of dumbbells against the mirrored wall. The guy on his back looked to be benching 300 pounds.

  “We’re thinking of joining the gym,” Sam said. “You guys like it here?”

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” one of the spotters said. “Membership fee’s not bad. They keep the equipment up to date.”

  “Some of the pros work out here, I hear,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, a few.”

  “Some Dodgers?”

  “Yeah, they come in.”

  “How about Alberto Miranda?”

  “Yeah, he’s in here a lot in the off-season.”

  “You guys know him?”

  One of the spotters turned to the other and gave him a look. His companion looked back at Sam and said, “Yeah, we know him.”

  They didn’t seem to want to continue the conversation. “You guys get like that just lifting weights?” Sam asked.

  “What do you mean?” one of the spotters said. The guy on his back set the barbell down in its holder and swung himself to a sitting position. He didn’t look friendly.

  “Oh, you know,” Sam said. “What about those supplements? Creatine, HGH, steroids—“

  “Hey, FUCK you!” the weightlifter said. He pushed Sam backward hard enough to make him nearly fall off the weight bench he was sitting on. Sam got to his feet, looking for something to defend himself with as the three bodybuilders advanced toward him, but Heather stepped in front of him.

  “Cool it, guys, okay?” she said. “He didn’t mean anything.”

  “Nobody comes into our gym and tells us we’re on juice,” said the Hispanic-looking weightlifter. “Get the fuck outta here.”

  “Nice friendly place you got here,” Sam said. He wasn’t ready to back away.

  A door banged open at the back of the gym. An older man with a shaved head and a gray Fu Manchu moustache, wearing a black tank-top and black running pants, walked as quickly as he could past the exercise machines to the weight area where Sam and Heather were being confronted by the Bash Brothers. The man’s hands were balled into fists, and his angry gaze bounced back and forth between Sam and the lifters. Sam tried not to laugh; the man had muscles, but his skin hung loosely on his neck, and his shoulders and biceps had the surface consistency of oatmeal. He must have been on the cover of magazines when he was forty years younger, but now he looked like one of those tabloid photos of an aging, sagging movie star caught sunbathing.

 
; “I told you guys I don’t want no more fights in here,” the man said to the trio of lifters. “I’m sick of this shit. What’s goin’ on here, Jesus?”

  “Sorry, Roy,” the Hispanic bodybuilder said. “But this dickhead here started asking us about steroids. I ain’t gotta listen to that bullshit.”

  Roy turned to Sam and said, “What’s your problem?”

  “No problem,” Sam said. “I take it you’re Roy Laswell?”

  “Yeah—so what?”

  “The receptionist told us you weren’t here tonight.”

  “Maybe I came in when she wasn’t lookin’. Now, what the fuck do you want?”

  What did Sam want? His cop instinct was to suggest they go back and talk in Roy’s office—but then what? Sam would ask him if Alberto Miranda had gotten steroids from anyone connected with Laswell’s gym, and he knew damn well what the answer would be. The Three Stooges would be asked to escort Sam to the curb. He’d already lost some face with Heather, and he couldn’t see the wisdom in pushing things to a point where he’d have to bounce his fist off one of these rock-hard goons to maintain his dignity. That was the problem with being in private practice: Everybody else had people. Kenny had three guys, Mink had two guys, and now Laswell had three guys. Sam had Heather. Heather had her own talents, but they weren’t of much use here.

  “Look, I’m sorry, Mr. Laswell,” Sam said. “We were just checking the place out to see if we wanted to join. Maybe I was out of line. You read so much about bodybuilding supplements, so I just asked a question.”

  “My husband’s an idiot,” Heather said. She shook her head with a slight eye-roll. “He says the first thing that pops into his mouth.”

  Laswell was looking steadily at Sam, using whatever remaining brainpower he had, mixed with whatever muscle-growth cocktails he was downing, to try to get a fix on him.

  “I don’t think this guy’s no idiot,” Laswell said. “I think he’s an asshole. I want you both outta here—now. And don’t come back.”

 

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