I knew her. In fact, I knew her well—but unlike everything else familiar around New Haven, I didn’t know her from my childhood. I knew her after that. After college and after my time playing baseball in California and even after the stint with the Oakland A’s that had been the uneventful pinnacle of my baseball career.
Beccy Williams was part of my Florida past. She had been an up-and-coming sports journalist covering minor league baseball when I had been transferred to the St. Lucie Mets. We had been like ships in the night, except she was more like a rocket, headed upward in her career at a rapid rate of knots just as I was plummeting from my high, careening toward the end of my sporting life. For a brief moment we had been a perfect match, like a detonator and a fuse, explosive but never destined to end in one piece.
She was the last person I thought of when I recalled my home state, but here she was, doing what I knew her to be doing, despite never expecting to see her doing it here. I watched her as she watched the team and the band march by, down into the tunnel and out onto the field. The camera guy was getting some shots I assumed they would cut in later when the broadcast proper started, but Beccy watched the team as if she were doing a headcount. The focus and intensity I recalled were still there, and from my vantage point she still looked as good as she ever did, even if she always looked in desperate need of a meal.
The camera guy had dropped his lens again and the last of the band was marching into the bowl when Beccy looked across the plaza and saw me. She made no expression, as if seeing me at The Game was exactly what she expected to happen, despite us not having seen each other since she had left Florida when her career took off. The crowd broke behind the band and began criss-crossing the plaza as they made their way into the bowl, and we waited until the throng thinned before moving toward each other. The sound guy said something to Beccy and she spoke over her shoulder, but she kept her eyes on me as she walked in my direction.
“Of all the gins joints in all the world,” I said.
She smiled. “I thought you didn’t do Connecticut?”
Beccy knew a decent amount about my past. Not everything, not as much as Danielle knew, but a decent amount. We had dated for a few months, and we had had some of the conversations that people dating have, sometimes about the past but mostly about the future.
“I thought that, too. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Why not? I work here, you know that.”
“I thought you were living in New York City.”
“Not so much, but we’re doing Gameday.”
“You presenting?”
“Sideline.”
I nodded.
“You’re dressed like a grownup,” she said. “I like it.”
I looked at myself and realized she was referring to Coach Dunbar’s blazer. It was a choice between that and his high school sweater, and I had decided this was the attire that was more likely to get me where I needed to go.
“So why are you in Connecticut?” she asked. “You’re no Ivy League.”
“It’s a long story. Helping out an old friend.”
“Miami Jones, still trying to save the world.”
“One pitch at a time.”
She smiled. Her cheeks were tight across her face. She was a handsome woman, in that sideline-reporter-former-cheerleader kind of way. I always got the sense that the extra pounds the television camera put on her would have done her a lot of good in real life.
“I gotta get inside,” she said.
“Of course.”
“How about you? You watching the game?”
“I need to catch up with someone who’s inside, but I find myself ticketless at this point in time.”
She smiled again. “Wait here,” she said, and she spun around and marched back over to the sound guy, who I now suspected might have also been some kind of producer. Beccy spoke to him and he handed her something, and then she strode back to me and held out her hand.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Media pass, access all areas.”
“This won’t get you into trouble?”
“Don’t get arrested. But there’s one proviso.”
“Name it.”
“Have a drink with me after the game.”
There was a planet full of men who would love to have had a drink with Beccy Williams after the game. But I didn’t live on that planet anymore. Our lives had gone in opposite directions, and not just because of our careers. Being in Connecticut was causing me to be more introspective than usual, and I spent too much time in my own head already. I didn’t want to revisit the past with Beccy, and I knew that any discussion about the future would be about as deep as a greeting card. But I sure wanted to get inside the Yale Bowl.
“Okay,” I said.
She smiled again and flicked her long hair and handed me the plastic media pass with a blue lanyard wrapped around it, and then she turned without a word and went back to her colleagues. I watched them gather themselves up and make their way into the stadium. I gave them a minute, and then I slipped the lanyard around my neck and followed them inside.
Chapter Nine
Beccy was good to her word. The pass got me through the gate and into the Kenney Center without as much as a raised eyebrow. I took the empty stairs up to the third floor. My gut told me that Brett would be where the wealthiest of alumni were, and that would be in the Champions Room. It was a multipurpose function space, nothing special, except that the windows provided a panoramic view of the Class of 1954 Field.
The room was full of expensive aftershave and Yale school ties. There was a wide range of ages but it definitely skewed older, but not quite as old as the Round Hill Club. Unlike the Round Hill Club almost everyone in the Champions Room had a drink in their hand. No one was planning to go back to the office after a Saturday afternoon watching The Game.
I weaved my way around the room, not finding any sign of Brett Pickering. I reached the windows overlooking the field below. The bleachers were filling up and the bands were taking turns belting out a tune. A large blue Y and a crimson H had been painted onto the middle of the field. Both teams were on the gridiron, warming up, throwing balls or catching balls or crashing into each other as if doing it during a game simply wasn’t enough.
I turned back to the room. It was possible that Brett Pickering wasn’t here. It was also possible that he had been here and had moved to one of the Skyboxes that flanked the function space. Checking each of those was going to be a chore, so I figured I’d give the room a bit more attention before the game started.
There was a table with a selection of hors d'oeuvres on it. I picked up a couple of little sandwich rounds as I wandered by, partly to give my hands something to do and partly because I was getting hungry. I was offered a beer by a barman which I declined. Then a microphone was turned on and tapped, and I expected to hear someone say testing, one, two, but they didn’t. They simply said “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”
Everyone hushed down and turned to the window overlooking the field. A tall man in a pressed blazer held the microphone. He was bald on top and gray at the sides and carried the stoop of a man who had fought gravity for too long and eventually succumbed. He gave his name and his class year, and I did the math and figured I must have forgotten to carry a number because he couldn’t have been that old. He went on to welcome everyone to the Big Game, and the rest was just white noise to me. From my position near the sandwiches I could see about two-thirds of the room from the front. I took the temporary distraction to survey the faces.
None of them seemed overly interested in the rambling of the old man with the microphone, but they all had either the good breeding or the good education or at least the good grace to keep quiet anyway. I checked out as much of the room as I could without looking like a weirdo, and then the old man asked everyone to enjoy the game and there was a polite smattering of applause. I scooched along the wall away from the sandwiches and the table where the guy was serving the drinks—just
enough to not be obvious but close enough to see.
Now that the speeches were done with, I figured two things would happen. Again, like at Round Hill Club, there was a mass exodus to the bathrooms before the kickoff. I also figured people would make their way to wherever they planned to watch the game, and before people did that, they would hit the bar.
Like all good college functions it was a beer-and-wine type event, no hard liquor, so the job was easy and the line moved fast. Alumni and guests wandered over to the windows and others left the room to find a proper vantage point to watch the game.
Brett Pickering was in a group of four men, all similarly aged and attired. They looked happy and healthy and rich as hell. They looked like the kind of guys whose wardrobes were full of suits, pressed button-up shirts and polos, and not a single palm tree print to be seen. They each collected a beer and weaved their way toward the windows. I followed.
The four men took a position around a tall cocktail table. They could see the field from where they stood but only between other people, so I guessed they were only partially interested in the game. Harvard kicked off and Yale received the ball in the end zone, and the cheer subsided in an anticlimax. Brett Pickering didn’t notice.
He had the floor. He was waxing lyrical about returns and timings and leveraging, and about contacts with mayors and contractors. At one point he told one of the other men to tell the other two about the Caribbean, which he summed up in the phrase, it was pretty sweet.
I stood just off Brett’s flank like a leopard assessing its prey, close enough to pounce but comfortable in the knowledge that it was completely camouflaged. He was an interesting study. I remember the golden boy from school, the winning smile, the easy posture. He was the biggest fish in a small pond. I had been a similar fish, too, before I swam out into the world and found that there were other people who threw better and ran faster and worked harder. I hadn’t been born with all the advantages—just some—and I had ignored many others I had been offered. It hadn’t been an easy road.
For Brett, either. I could see it in his eyes. He was acting all relaxed and casual like this was just the guys shooting the breeze, but the truth was he was selling the hell out of it. He had the eyes of a quarterback who was going to bite off more than he could chew and push the pass, throw the interception. It was a look of desperation.
Which was my cue. I stepped forward from the sea of suits, and he caught my eye and like he had done at Round Hill, he frowned. This time it wasn’t his mind trying to place a face he hadn’t seen in twenty years. This time he was trying to figure how on earth I had found him. He had stopped talking mid-sentence, so the three other guys were watching and waiting. They turned to look at me.
“Redshirt,” Brett whispered, as if he might be the only one in the room who could see me. He wasn’t that lucky. I slapped his shoulder like we were old buddies.
“Pickering,” I said with a grin. “It’s been too long.”
He nodded but said nothing.
I said, “So, how’s the Ponzi scheme coming along?”
It was like I had shot him with a Taser. He stood bolt upright and his eyes opened like saucers. But he was quick, and he gathered himself with a half-hearted chuckle.
“You’re a card,” he said, and then he turned to his fellow blazers. “He’s an old school friend.”
The three guys all nodded like they fully understood the idea of inappropriate banter between old school friends, but their faces still wore the shock of hearing the word ponzi. I would have had less effect in this room if I had yelled grenade. I waited for a moment and then I asked if I could borrow Brett for a moment. I got nods but no words.
I stepped away to the corner of the room, away from the window and the field. Brett followed. He didn’t look happy. He looked like a guy who had bet a good sum of money on a golf game and then shanked his first tee shot into the rough. He was angry but in the wrong place to let it out.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he spat between clenched teeth.
“Apart from rapidly becoming vitamin D deficient, you mean?”
“What? You can’t come in here and say things like that. I’m trying to do business.”
“Yeah, about that. We need to chat.”
“Make an appointment.”
“I did that. You didn’t show.”
He frowned like I’d caught him out. “You need to leave.”
“No, we need to talk.”
“Not now.”
“Yes now. Right now. I gave you a chance yesterday and you played me. So now, this is how it’s going to go. I’m going to walk around this room asking every single person here if they have gotten into Pickering’s Ponzi scheme. Then, I’m going to turn up at every meeting, tee time, luncheon, and barbershop appointment you have. I’m going to be there when you’re washing your hands in the john, and every time I’m going ask whoever you’re with the same question. And I’ll keep doing it and doing it. I can be very persistent.”
“What do you want, Jones?”
“I told you. We need to talk. Now.”
“Not here,” he said, looking around as if the walls had ears.
“Fine with me.”
“Somewhere private,” he said.
“I know just the place.”
I gestured to the door. I wasn’t walking out first. I flat out didn’t trust him to lock it behind me and make a run for it. He walked out and I pointed him to the stairs. We walked down and I used my media pass again, and we stepped through a series of corridors before coming out in the bowl tunnel.
“Here?” Brett asked. “You want to talk here?”
“You wanted private.”
It was private, in a way. The tunnel led from Jensen Plaza where the players had marched, down the steps and out onto the field. It was dark and echoey, and a bright light shone from one end, making the walk out onto the field feel like some kind of near-death experience. I had walked through this tunnel more times than most Yale players. It always gave me the same sensation. Coming from the darkness the sky always looked brighter, even though it was usually cloudy, and the grass field looked more vivid and the bowl with its blue bleachers rose above like a coliseum. As a boy I had wanted to take that field, to wear the Bulldog blue. The chips hadn’t fallen that way.
But I knew during The Game there would be no one in the tunnel. It would be as private a place as you could find in a 60,000 seat stadium. Plus it was dark and foreboding, which suited my purpose.
“Listen,” Brett said. “You can’t keep turning up like this.”
“Actually, I can.”
“I’ll get a court order.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
“Because then I’ll get one. And mine will involve the Feds, and indictments and Grand Juries, and you spending time in a minimum-security prison.”
It appeared he had nothing to say to that.
“So you need to wise up, and you need to tell me what the hell is going on. What have you gotten yourself into? What have you gotten Coach Dunbar into?”
“I told you yesterday, I’m trying to help Coach. You’re screwing that up.”
“Listen, Brett, and listen good. I don’t care about you. I really don’t. That’s not a negative thing, it’s nothing more than indifference. We were teammates once, back at school. My memories of you are pretty good. But I moved on. I forgot you, like you probably forgot me. It happens. Not everyone is pivotal to everyone else’s life. So where we are right now is, I’m indifferent. You could go on and live a nice and prosperous life, or you could wind up in a ditch somewhere, sleeping under a refrigerator carton. It’s all the same to me. But you have one thing going against you, and one thing going for you. The thing going against you is that you are screwing with Coach Dunbar’s retirement, and that’s bad. I owe him pretty much everything, so I can’t stand by and let that happen. But the thing in your favor is that Coach loves you. He really does. He looks at you lik
e a son. He’s proud of you. And even though you’re screwing him over, he’s still proud of you. Or at least he wants to be. He doesn’t want to believe you could let him down. And he doesn’t want you to fail. He doesn’t want your whole world to coming crashing down. And because I owe him everything, I don’t want him to have to see that happen. So despite my better judgment, I’m here to help you. I’m here to help you get out of whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“Redshirt, there’s nothing to get out of—”
“Pickering,” I said, stepping in close to him. “I’m willing to help you. But only if you do the right thing. And the right thing is to admit you have a problem, and then find a way to fix it. But if you don’t, if you try to play me again, I will take Coach’s money out of your cold dead hands and then bury you where you’ll never be found and tell Coach you’ve moved to Tuscany or somewhere.”
“What happened to being indifferent?”
“I am indifferent. I’ll take either solution. Makes no difference to me.”
“Look, Jones. I can handle it.”
“Do you know what caused banks to fail during the great depression?”
“What is this, a history lesson?”
“Do you know?”
“They couldn’t cover their deposits.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Jones, I have an MBA, I think I know this stuff.”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? All these MBAs and yet all the same mistakes happen time and time again. No, genius, it wasn’t that they couldn’t cover their deposits, because no bank can do that. There isn’t a bank on the planet that keeps enough cash to cover the deposits of its customers. Because banks lend out that money, don’t they?”
Red Shirt Page 6