Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  Miranda looked at the address and said, “This time of night, twenty minutes, half hour.”

  “We’re in Pacific Palisades,” Heather said to Mink. “We can meet you there at…about three. Good. See you then.”

  She closed Sam’s phone and handed it to him. Where he’d failed, a beautiful woman with a million bucks to throw around had succeeded. So much for a dozen years of police training.

  “Where we going?” Sam asked.

  “Laswell’s gym.”

  Sam did a quick calculation. Laswell’s was obviously a comfortable hangout for Navarro. Those human dumbbells he’d bumped into at the gym must have been members of Frankie’s gang. Sid apparently wanted to take Navarro back to his own turf to lure the rest of his oiled-up freaks out of hiding. It didn’t much matter to Sam who came out of that meeting alive, as long as Frankie was one of them. As for the rest, it couldn’t happen to nicer guys. Sam had a passing thought that they ought to invite Kenny and his thugs at Quasar to the party, too.

  “All right, this is going to be bad,” Sam said. “Heather, you’re staying here with Alberto. Write out a check to Mink for a million bucks, or an I.O.U.—whatever mobsters take. I’ll bring it with me to Laswell’s.”

  “What are you talking about?” Heather said. “You know I go where you go. That’s the deal.”

  “Not to a mob hit, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Everywhere.”

  Maybe Mink and his crew would get there first. With any luck, the shooting would be finished by the time he and Heather arrived.

  Miranda wanted to come, too, but Sam told him they’d call him as soon as they knew anything.

  “Be smart about this, Alberto,” Sam said. “You won’t do your mother any good if you get shot in a mob crossfire. And if things go down the way I think they will, the cops will show up. When they find you there, you’ll make the papers all over the country—‘Dodgers All-Star at gangland slaying.’ Your family doesn’t need to read that.”

  Miranda nodded helplessly. He looked exhausted. Sam wasn’t even sure how he’d found the energy to play ball the last few weeks, and still go out to clubs at night. Well, on second thought, there was the HGH …

  Heather walked over to Miranda, whispered something in his ear, and kissed him.

  “It will be all right,” she said aloud. She held Miranda’s hand for a lingering moment. “We’ll call you as soon as we know something.”

  As she and Sam headed to the front door, the ballplayer slumped onto a couch in the living room and picked up a remote control. He pointed it at the floor-to-ceiling audio unit built into the wall, surrounding the wide-screen video monitor. Hip-hop music filled the house. His knees were bouncing up and down, though not in time to the music, and he rubbed the side of his head with the remote. Sam could only imagine what it had been like for this man, with both his career and his mother’s life hanging on the edge of extinction for weeks on end. No wonder he’d finally opened up to Heather. He was a ’roided-up bundle of nerve endings, ready to blow.

  They were a couple of miles from Miranda’s house, Sam driving the BMW down West Sunset toward the ocean, the stars blinking through the light haze overhead and Heather sitting beside him, when he asked the question he couldn’t hold back any longer.

  “What did you mean, he couldn’t do it?”

  “I mean, I think the steroids have made him impotent,” Heather said.

  “How far did you get?”

  “Far enough. I suppose you want to know how big he is?”

  “Sure. I can’t get enough of celebrity penis stories.”

  Sam heard Heather sigh, and even in the dark, he could sense the disgusted look on her face. He’d seen photos of bodybuilders on stage with their enormous muscles and their minuscule swim suits. That wasn’t the only thing that was minuscule; Sam had always assumed that the supplements those guys took to increase muscle mass had an inverse affect on their equipment.

  “He’s no bigger than you, if that’s what you want to know,” Heather said.

  “I didn’t…”

  “But he can’t do it. He wanted to, and to be honest, so did I.”

  “I’m having trouble dealing with all this flattery.”

  “Hey, don’t get all possessive on me. It’s not about you. Anyway, I just feel bad for the guy.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Mansion in Pacific Palisades, $20,000,000 per year contract, world-class athletic ability, adored everywhere he goes…”

  “You know what I mean. His mother.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to be more sensitive.”

  “How are we going to get her free?”

  “That’s not what you hired me for.”

  “We’re paying you to end this, and it doesn’t end until Miranda can tell Babe Ruth to fuck off. So what’s your plan?”

  “I’m really hoping something comes to me by the time we get to Laswell’s.”

  First things first: They had to find out who had bankrolled Frankie—assuming Sam’s theory was correct—and then find the bankroller, preferably before the night was over. When the sun came up, it would be Thursday. Then they’d be down to twenty-four hours.

  They reached Laswell’s gym a little after three. They’d put in a very long day, and Sam should have been feeling the fatigue by now, but the adrenaline pumping through him had kept his eyes wide open on the drive across town. Nothing like the prospect of walking into gangland warfare to hold your attention.

  The lights in Laswell’s main exercise room were still glowing, though the hours painted on the glass doorway said 6 AM - 1 AM. Sam didn’t expect to see Mink’s Cadillac on the street in front of the building, and he was correct. If Mink had already brought Frankie here, they must have used an employee entrance behind the building. There was another car on the street by the front door—a dark blue Chevy Impala. Sam parked behind it and got out to look in the Impala’s windows. He saw several CD jewel cases by Latino and hip-hop artists in the front seat. Two gym bags and a creased copy of Monster Muscle Magazine were visible in the back seat. It looked like Frankie’s pals had already arrived.

  Heather had gotten out of the car and was walking to the front door.

  “Hold it,” Sam said. “Let me go in first.”

  “Fine with me.”

  Sam drew his Glock and held it down at his side. He put his left hand on the door handle and gave it a turn. It was open. He pushed the door ajar and took a step into the vestibule. There was an inner door that led to the reception area, where they’d met Kaylee hours earlier. Sam could see through the inner door that she was not around anymore. He couldn’t see anyone else, either, though the lights were blazing throughout the building. He opened the inner door and motioned to Heather to follow him. There was no sound anywhere in the gym, but Sam knew people had to be inside, somewhere, or the front door wouldn’t be unlocked. The question was, how many of them were alive?

  Sam walked cautiously over to the reception area and picked up the receiver on the telephone. He heard a dial tone and gently replaced the receiver. His gaze turned past the idle exercise machines and weight benches to the doorway at the back of the room, the door Roy Laswell had emerged from. That must be where the action was—or had been.

  “Hey! Anybody here?”

  Sam instinctively dropped to his knees when he heard Heather’s piercing shout from a few feet behind him. Maybe Sam hadn’t adequately explained the likelihood of encountering trigger-happy wiseguys.

  “Shut up,” he hissed at her. “Trying to get us killed?”

  Heather ignored him and walked down the center row of machines toward Laswell’s office. Sam got up from his crouch and followed her, holding the gun out away from his side so he could either drop it or use it, as the situation dictated. Heather reached the door to the back offices, opened it and went down a short hallway. Sam had nearly caught up to her when she turned to her left in an open doorway, looked inside, and put her hand to he
r mouth.

  “Oh. God,” she said. She backed into the hallway.

  Sam could smell them before he rounded the corner.

  The room had a desk, filing cabinets, track shelving with weightlifting and bodybuilding trophies, and the bodies of two men lying on the floor. Both had been shot in the face, one lying atop the other, their blood pooling together in a dark circle beneath them. Sam recognized the guy on top as one of the weightlifters who had tried to push him around earlier. He didn’t recognize what was left of the face of the guy underneath. Was it Frankie?

  “See, I always thought muscles were overrated.”

  Sam heard Sid Mink’s voice coming from a room on the other side of the hallway. The sign on that door said “Roy Laswell, Owner” but when Sam crossed the hall and looked in the office—plastered with photos and posters of pro athletes and barely human strongmen—he didn’t see Laswell. Instead, he saw Mink, Joey Icebox, and Leon, with a brawny, dark-haired man tied to a chair and a gag stuffed in his mouth.

  “Skarda, meet Frankie Navarro.”

  Sam looked Frankie up and down. He was clean-shaven with a dark complexion, at least part Hispanic, and his black hair was moussed up in trendy little spikes. He wore a silver cross on a chain around his neck, and a black sleeveless shirt that showed off his bulging biceps, one of which had a fresh, ugly bullet wound through it, leaving partly dried streaks of blood down his forearm. He had on a pair of navy blue jogging pants with a red stripe on the side, and white running shoes that were spotted with blood. The expression in his eyes was wild and desperate.

  Mink sat behind Laswell’s desk under a poster of Alberto Miranda dropping his bat and striding out of the batter’s box. Mink’s curly silver-and-gray hair gleamed like a crown under the fluorescent light overhead, and his eyes sparkled with a renewed vigor that Sam hadn’t seen at Dodger Stadium or at the restaurant. The act of snuffing Navarro’s posse had seemingly dropped ten years from Mink’s round face.

  Joey Icebox sat on the edge of Laswell’s desk, one foot on the floor next to Frankie. Leon was on the other side of the room, holding a Walther PPK as though he wasn’t through using it yet.

  “Put your gun on the desk, Skarda,” Mink said. Sam did as he was told.

  “Who’s the babe?” Joey Icebox asked.

  Heather was standing behind Sam in the doorway to Laswell’s office. Sam was trying to think of a way to get her out of there without having to reveal her identity when she said, “Heather Canby. I work for the Red Sox.”

  Sam could have groaned out loud.

  “I gotta pat you down,” Joey said.

  It was obvious that Heather had no place to conceal a weapon, but Joey Icebox crossed the room toward Heather as though headed to a buffet line. She sighed and pulled up her top to show her bra, turned around, then hiked up her skirt. She turned back to Joey and said, “Satisfied?”

  “Not yet,” he said with a grin, but Mink growled, “Joey, calm down.”

  Mink now had the identities of two witnesses to a gang slaying—just the kind of thing someone in his position would normally find inconvenient. Then again, the more people he killed tonight, the more ways the cops would have to come after him.

  “You like Leon’s work, over there across the hall?” Mink said. “Face shots are an old custom in this business. Now their mothers can’t have open caskets.”

  Sam knew the best way to get out of this alive was to convince Sid they were on his side.

  “Before you kill Frankie, let me ask him a couple of questions,” Sam said.

  “Be my guest,” Mink said. “We’re not going anywhere—for a while.”

  Sam kicked the underside of Frankie’s chair, causing the front legs to elevate several inches off the floor and slam back down. The kick had the dramatic effect Sam had hoped for, but it also made his big toe hurt like hell. Sam ignored the pain and got his face right into Frankie’s.

  “Are you Babe Ruth?”

  Frankie shook his head violently. Sam reached out and pulled the gag out of his mouth. A torrent of words gushed out.

  “It wasn’t me, God, I swear it wasn’t me, I was just doing this for another guy, and I was gonna cut Sid in, even though he would never have known about it, but I had to go behind Sid’s back at first because this guy made me swear not to tell.”

  “What guy?” Sam asked. “I need a name.”

  “Babe Ruth.”

  Sam picked up his other foot and slammed it into the seat of the chair between Frankie’s legs, shoving him back against the wall so hard that a bodybuilding trophy fell from a shelf overhead. The trophy landed on Frankie’s shoulder, near the bullet wound. Frankie cried out in pain.

  “That’s what he called himself,” Frankie whined. “I don’t know his name. I swear to God!”

  “Then why did you agree to blackmail Miranda?”

  “For the money, man. Why else?”

  “We’ve been through all this, Skarda,” Mink said. He pulled a fresh cigar out of his pocket and lit it up, throwing the match on what had been an immaculately clean floor. Laswell might have allowed some dirty characters to hang around his gym, but he didn’t like a dirty office.

  Between puffs on the cigar, Mink explained that he had brought Frankie to the gym after Sam’s phone call. Using a key Frankie had for the back door, they’d let themselves in and made Frankie call Mikey and Gino, his two remaining associates—the other one, Jesus, having experienced his own sudden demise earlier that evening. Frankie told them to meet him in Laswell’s office, but when they arrived, they met Leon instead, who herded them into the room across the hall and put an end to their greedy, insubordinate lives—using the gun they found in Jesus’ SUV, of course.

  That got Frankie’s tongue moving. Blackmailing Miranda before the World Series was his own idea, but when it didn’t work, he decided to let it go. Miranda figured he didn’t have to worry about Dr. Whitlinger’s injection records, as long as the league wasn’t requiring him to take a blood test. He could just deny he’d ever taken HGH, and it would be the word of an international baseball superstar against the word of some nutty chemist that no one had ever heard of.

  That’s when “Babe Ruth” had contacted Frankie with an offer to split $50,000,000 if he went back to Miranda with a different offer: Go public that you threw the Series, or your mother dies.

  “How did Babe Ruth find you?” Sam asked Frankie. “Who knew about the World Series blackmail plot?”

  “Just those guys,” Frankie said. He gestured out the door with his head. “And Jesus, my bodyguard.”

  “Could one of them have talked to somebody?”

  “Ask him,” Frankie said. He glared at Mink, who shrugged.

  “How did you know for sure that Miranda’s mother was kidnapped?”

  “Babe Ruth put me on the phone with the guy who has her. I heard her crying.”

  “Could be an act.”

  “They sent a photo. I showed it to Miranda. It’s her.”

  “Where’s the photo now?”

  “I burned it.”

  Sam looked at the plain, white-faced clock on the wall opposite Laswell’s desk—four a.m. It looked like the night cleaning crew had already been through the building, but Laswell or someone else was likely to arrive soon to re-open the gym. They had to get Frankie out of there and figure out how to find Babe Ruth. And Sam had to get Heather away from what was sure to become a highly publicized crime scene.

  “Do you have any idea where Babe Ruth lives?” Sam asked.

  “Somewhere in L.A., that’s all I know,” Frankie said.

  “Did you have a phone number for him?”

  “No. He always called from pay phones. I checked the numbers—different every time.”

  “How were you going to get paid?”

  “There was gonna be a drop-off somewhere. He was gonna call me when the Red Sox paid up.”

  “And Babe Ruth was sure they were going to pay?”
r />   “Yeah. He said, ‘I know these people. They’re afraid of bad publicity. They’ll pay up.’”

  Anybody could have guessed that, but something about the way Frankie relayed that conversation resonated with Sam. He’d felt all along that there was something too inside about the case—the way someone seemed to know everything that he did, and everywhere he went. He kept thinking about Paul O’Brien. The guy had seemed totally loyal to the Kenwoods, but Sam still didn’t know enough about him to rule him out as the insider.

  “Say, sweetie, you mentioned something on the phone about a million bucks,” Mink said to Heather. “I kept this scumbag alive for you. Time to pay up.”

  Sam had wondered how Heather was going to handle this moment—ask Sid if he accepted American Express? But Heather had already figured out her play.

  “Not yet, Sid,” Heather said. “Not until we find out who Babe Ruth is. If you want to kill Frankie now, go ahead. But he’s the only link we have to Babe Ruth, and to Miranda’s mother. If you kill him now, Miranda’s mom dies, the whole thing becomes public, and the offer’s off the table.”

  “You weren’t going to pay, anyway,” Sid said angrily.

  “That’s not true. Lou Kenwood keeps his word, and I speak for Lou Kenwood. You’ll get your money when we get Babe Ruth.”

  “That’s a different deal. Make it two million.”

  “One-five.”

  “Two.”

  Heather held Mink’s gaze, waiting for a sign that he was bluffing. Finally she said, “Done.”

  “Cash.”

  “How am I supposed to get my hands on two million in cash?”

  “Lucky Louie sits on the boards of half the banks in this country,” Mink said. “You’ll find a way.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d let us take Frankie back to the hotel with us,” Sam said to Mink.

  “Look, Skarda, you should be glad I let the punk live this long. Don’t push me.”

  “Why are you so determined to kill him?” Sam said. “You killed his boys. I think he gets the message.”

  Mink sighed and leaned his forehead on his hand, tapping his head with his fingers. He flicked an ash on Laswell’s desk, took a deep breath and pointed the end of his cigar at Frankie.