Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  Then he frowned, which morphed into a tight smile.

  “Redshirt?” he asked.

  I gave him the old eyebrow raise.

  “Redshirt Jones,” he said.

  Brett looked around the group of men as if they too should remember the great Redshirt Jones. But that wasn’t going to happen. None of these men had gone to a state-run school. They were the products of private academies and Ivy Leagues. Brett was an imposter in their ranks, and I was something else entirely, like one of those chimpanzees that does sign language. He might be able to communicate with you, but you’re still going to wonder what the hell he’s doing in your golf club.

  Brett knew this. He knew it because he lived it. As the recognition took hold and he regained himself, I saw a veneer fall across his face. He had dragged himself into this world, and they wouldn’t let him forget it.

  “We played high school football together,” Brett said as way of explanation. He got a few nods in return.

  “Gentlemen, will you excuse us for a moment?” Brett told them, and then he turned toward the bar to lead me away.

  “Redshirt Jones,” he said again. “What are you doing here?” He was smiling with his mouth but his voice wasn’t full of joy.

  “That’s a hell of a welcome.”

  “Sorry, of course, it’s good to see you. But I heard you didn’t come back anymore. I heard it was some kind of life rule or something.”

  “Not a rule, just a guideline.”

  “Wow, all right. Great. So you’re back.” He glanced at the bar. The wood was polished like the deck on an expensive yacht, and the glassware that hung above twinkled like stars.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  I held up my water. “I’m good.”

  “Sure, good. I’m just going to grab one.”

  We stepped to the bar and Brett ordered a scotch and I half expected him to slam it down, but he sipped at it instead.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “It has.”

  I was waiting for him to ask the question, because I suspected he knew the answer, which meant he really wouldn’t want to ask it at all.

  “So you’re still down in Florida, was it?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Married, kids?”

  “Engaged, no kids.”

  “Plenty of time.”

  I said nothing.

  “You like it down there?”

  “I do. It’s home.”

  “Not so stuffy, like old Connecticut.”

  I said nothing.

  He sipped his whisky. He didn’t look nervous but I could see that he was conscious of time. Perhaps it was me, or perhaps it was his friends by the fireplace. He clearly wanted to be in the company of one and not the other.

  “Listen,” he said. “I need to chat to these guys about a deal I’m working on. Maybe we can catch up later?”

  “Is this deal using Coach Dunbar’s life savings?”

  He gave me the smile. It wasn’t quite as winning as it had been in high school, but it was endearing enough. If you were still in high school.

  “I don’t know what that means, but this is important.”

  “You taking Coach’s money and spending it on, oh, let’s say a two-thousand buck lunch? That sounds important to me.”

  “Look, Redshirt, I don’t know what you think you know, or what you’ve heard, but I’m not hurting Coach. I’m trying to help him. Honestly, he’ll be fine, he’ll be golden. He just doesn’t understand the intricacies of these things.”

  “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  Brett took a deep breath. “Absolutely. More than happy to. I’ll walk you through it all. You’re a big picture guy. You’ll get it. You’ll probably want in yourself, once you see it all laid out.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and we walked away from the bar. I started to feel like a sign-language chimp. We stepped toward the front door of the club. There was a well-dressed man standing at attention. He had been collecting tickets as the well-heeled patrons entered, and he gave me the once-over. I wondered if he had one of those eidetic memories and he knew that I had not entered past his keen eye, or if he just didn’t like the look of my mismatched blazer and khakis.

  “Let’s chat at my office,” said Brett. “What about this afternoon? It will be good to catch up.”

  He slapped my shoulder and put out his hand and we shook.

  “It’s great to see you,” he said. “It’ll be great to catch up.”

  He shot me the smile and dropped my hand and turned back toward the room and the fireplace and men in their tight little circle.

  I stood there for a moment. I had the most uncanny feeling that I had been glad-handed by an expert, like I’d just had a conversation with a member of Congress, telling me exactly what I wanted to hear but not actually saying anything. I glanced at the front door. The well-dressed doorman was still watching me. He seemed to be deciding if he should come to me or not.

  I didn’t wait for him to do it. I walked straight to him. The thing about looking like you belong is knowing when you’re done, when you’ve outworn your welcome. Then it was just time to get the hell out of Dodge. So strode purposefully toward the door. The doorman turned to face me.

  “Can I help you, sir?” he said in a tone that suggested he was going to be no help to me whatsoever.

  “The old man in the bathroom is out of hand towels,” I said, throwing him a curveball. I didn’t wait to chat about it. I just strode back out into the drizzle. It looked like it might get harder but it hadn’t yet. The valet stood to attention, ready to dash off to collect some high-end ride, but I strode right past them, across the lot and down the road, back to my Chevy Blah, unable to shake the sensation that despite the rain, I really needed to take another shower.

  Chapter Seven

  Greenwich, Connecticut, is home to more hidden, unheard of, below-the-radar investment firms than anywhere on the planet. That, of course, was my guess, not a stone-cold fact, because by definition it was hard to rank things that were hidden. But unlike the big, flashy firms in Manhattan, Greenwich firms tended to be low-key, often to the point of almost not existing at all. They had offices in vanilla-looking buildings and used purposefully dull names like ABC Capital or XYZ Investments. There were no billboards or TV ads. Some had boring one-page websites, and others had no websites at all.

  The amount of money being moved around was so astounding as to be impossible to get my head around. I stood outside a three-story office building on Steamboat Road that was so gray it was camouflaged by the sky. There was a street number but no name and no tenant list. The only company I could find listed at the location via a web search was a boutique investment firm. I took the word boutique to mean small and specialized, but the company still claimed to have a portfolio under management of thirty-two billion dollars. It made our little studio apartment investment in Miami look like chump change from chump change.

  Mrs. Dunbar’s grapevine knew things that the internet didn’t, like where the hell Brett Pickering’s office was. He had conveniently forgotten to mention it at the golf club, so I had grabbed a hot dog near the Greenwich waterfront and taken a walk to while away some time. The drizzle had moved on into New York on the back of a building nor’easter, but it still wasn’t exactly a glorious day. After that I had driven to the location given by the grapevine and found this dull building that gave nothing away.

  With no tenant board and access via magnetic card, I didn’t have much to go on. There was an intercom at the front door, but I didn’t know who to call, or how. I was mulling over using the old UPS delivery trick when a brown van pulled into the lot and an actual UPS delivery guy carried some documents up to the door.

  I hustled across the lot as the door buzzed, and I pulled out my phone and pretending to be in the middle of a call. I grabbed the door handle and pulled the door open for the delivery guy and nodded for him to go first, and he whispered thanks, man, not
wanting to interrupt my very important call.

  I waited in the lobby for him to get in the elevator, offering umms and aahs and ahas to my silent phone. Once the elevator doors closed, I headed for the stairs. Fortunately it was only three floors, so I figured it wouldn’t take long to check them. There were acetate nameplates next to each office door. The first floor was an accountant on one side and the boutique investment firm on the other. The second floor was the boutique investment firm solely.

  I found my mark on the top floor. One side was Something Something Capital, and on the other side, Pickering Investments, LLC. The door was solid wood with thin frosted windows on either side. I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside, so I hit the doorbell. I didn’t see any kind of intercom but the doorbell spoke to me anyway.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Ah, yes. I’m here to see Brett Pickering.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Pickering is out for the day.”

  “When do you expect him in?”

  “I don’t.” I wasn’t feeling a lot of love from the mystery voice.

  “That’s funny because I met him today at a function at the Round Hill Club, and he suggested we meet later at his office.”

  “You say you met him at the Round Hill Club, sir?” It’s not what you know . . .

  “That’s right.”

  “And your name, sir?”

  “Rutherford. Look, I’m flying to Dubai at lunchtime tomorrow. Perhaps he’s around in the morning?”

  “No, unfortunately, he’ll be at the game tomorrow.”

  “It must have been my misunderstanding, then.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I’d call him but I know for certain he is indisposed this afternoon and won’t possibly be able to get back.” I’d seen the whisky lunch he was having. Indisposed was one way of phrasing it.

  “I would be happy to have him call you.”

  “I have his number,” I said. “I’ll call him when I’m back in town.”

  I didn’t wait to say goodbye to the voice. I strode back down the stairs. Now I was seriously annoyed. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do, but it confirmed for a fact that Brett had played me at the golf club. And it was fair to say that I didn’t like being played.

  The late afternoon was heading rapidly for evening, and the temperature felt like it was dropping. I got the sense that the rain might turn to snow if things kept going that way. I turned the heater on in the car and reconsidered my plan. Brett knew I was back in town, and he knew why. So now he was actively avoiding me. He wasn’t the first person to do that. It’s an occupational hazard. But I generally have a knack for turning up in the lives of those who would rather not see me again. The question was when and how, not if. It was a two-stage process. First, I just put it out to the cosmos. I’m not a big believer in the ethereal, but sometimes you need the universe on your side. More often than probability would suggest, the universe provided. Short of that, the second stage was to do some good, old-fashioned detective-type work.

  I didn’t know where he was, but I had a lead on where he would be. The mystery voice in the doorbell had mentioned him attending some kind of game the following day. I had no idea what exactly that meant, so I used the cosmos and the detective thinking all together and called Mrs. Dunbar to see what the grapevine knew.

  “No idea,” she said. “I don’t even know where he lives, just the office. What he does on weekends is anyone’s guess.”

  “It’s the weekend tomorrow?” I asked, more to myself than to Mrs. D.

  “You get jet lag flying up from Florida?”

  “I’m out of my routine, I guess. His office mentioned he’d be at some game tomorrow.”

  “Some game?”

  “Yeah, some game. He’ll be at the game, that’s what she said.”

  “He’ll be at the game?”

  “Aha.”

  “The game?”

  “Yeah, the game. Does that mean something to you?”

  “Have you been gone that long that you’ve forgotten everything? Are you telling me that the game doesn’t mean anything to you?”

  It didn’t. Until it did. The cosmic tumblers fell into place and my brain got out of my own way and I remembered my childhood again, and the difference between a game and the game.

  “The game,” I said.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said Mrs. Dunbar.

  “That’s tomorrow?”

  “Yes, it’s tomorrow.”

  “Home or away?” I asked.

  “Home,” she said. “Here, in New Haven.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Game was an annual college football match between the Yale University Bulldogs and the Crimson of Harvard University. It was one of the longest running rivalries in sports, and although neither school held a lofty place in the football establishment anymore, it was still taken pretty damned seriously in New Haven and Boston.

  Most people had heard of the Ivy League, the group of eight prestigious universities in the Northeast that were synonymous with high-end academic achievement. What many people didn’t know was that the name Ivy League was actually first used to denote the sporting competitions between the old schools. Before it was a moniker for academic excellence it was just an athletic conference, and the biggest rivalry in it was Yale-Harvard football.

  Yale University’s campus sat just to the north of New Haven’s downtown. The sporting fields were a few miles away across the West River, and at the heart of the sporting fields was the Yale Bowl. Yale football’s home ground was truly a bowl, where spectators entered at ground level and the grandstands fell away into a bowl at the bottom of which was the playing field. The stadium had been dug into a big bowl in the ground, a testament to the durability of concrete. It had been the basis for the design of the famous Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and gave its name to the college bowl games that ended every season, and ultimately to the NFL’s Super Bowl.

  The open fields around the old bowl were abuzz on the Saturday morning of The Game. Tailgate areas had been set—one area for students, and a separate marquee area for alumni and sponsors. There was plenty of Yale blue and a little Harvard crimson on shirts and flags and body paint.

  The bowl was walking distance from the Dunbar residence, so I left the rental car behind and wandered over to the bowl. I took it as a given that if Brett Pickering was going to be here, he wasn’t going to be in the student area. My memory regarding his college career was patchy, so I couldn’t recall exactly where he had gone to school, but I knew it hadn’t been Yale. Given that, it could be assumed that he wouldn’t be in the alumni area either, but if my visit to the Round Hill Golf Club had told me anything, it was that Brett would follow the money—and at The Game, the money was in the alumni area.

  But not any old alumni area. Not where the former students would congregate under marquees behind temporary picket fences, before they headed for their seats in the concrete bowl. The real money would make its way into the Kenney Center at Jensen Plaza. It was a mouthful of a name, but when deep pockets fronted the cash to renovate buildings, benefactors had to be looked after.

  The Kenney Center was the centerpiece of the Yale Bowl facility, housing meeting spaces and the Champions Room and the skyboxes, where corporate sponsors and well-heeled alumni could watch the games. It also housed one of those anomalies that pepper college campuses, the strange things like pathways that don’t go in straight lines between buildings. In Yale’s case, the bowl had been designed without any locker rooms for the players. I had no idea if it had been a deliberate oversight or one that had only been spotted after the hole had been dug, but it had become part of Yale lore. The players dressed and prepared in a building that was erected adjacent to the stadium, and then walked across to the plaza and through what became known as the Yale Bowl Tunnel, which provided the players with access to the field. Even when the Kenney Center had been built, and the opportunity to put locker rooms in the actual stadium had presented itself, lore and tradition had trumped prac
ticality in the way that it only can in centuries-old institutions, and the march across the plaza and down into the tunnel had remained.

  There was, of course, a flaw in my plan. Unlike the rowdy students walking over from the campus, or the fans and alumni arriving by car, I didn’t have a ticket. Not for a regular bleacher and certainly not to access the Kenney Center. I decided my best bet was to mull around the plaza in the hope that Brett Pickering had not arrived before me, and that I would be able to pick him out of a crowd that was all rugged up for a chilly autumn day.

  My feet grew numb and I wiggled my toes inside my shoes to keep the blood flowing as I watched the crowd arrive and the energy build. The clouds had split but not departed completely, so the day moved through cycles of sunshine and overcast, but I was fairly sure the only person who noticed was me.

  I waited for a couple hours. I saw a hundred people that might have been Brett, but not a one that was definitely him. Students and fans began congregating between the Walter Camp Memorial and Jensen Plaza. Anticipation for the game was rising. I started looking for a student trying to sell a spare ticket as my options to get inside began to dry up.

  Then I saw the camera crew. There was a sound guy and a camera guy with his equipment on his shoulder. A woman had set up a portable lamp in front of the Kenney Center, and the bright light diffused across the space and the fourth member of their group who stood in front of it. It was another woman. She had her back partially to me, but I could see she was blond and thin and dressed in a stylish woolen coat with a scarf wrapped around her neck. I assumed she was a presenter for whichever sports network was broadcasting the game. I watched as the sound guy pointed at her, and she began speaking to camera, and the crowd around her started waving and cheering as they got their fifteen seconds of fame.

  The woman did her bit, and then the sound guy gave the thumbs up and the camera guy dropped the lens from his sights and the woman with the lights switched them off, and the presenter ran her hand through her hair and stepped over to her colleagues. Then she, along with all the fans lining the route, turned their eyes away from the stadium and toward the sound of brass instruments, as the Yale team did the Bulldog walk into the bowl backed by the Yale marching band. The crowd gathered outside cheered as the band played and the players marched. I didn’t take in any of it. I just watched the television presenter on the other side of the plaza.