by L. L. Enger
“I’m not sure I understand, Gun. Your friend Gates didn’t hang this reporter. What does he have to worry about?” Carol Long was on the sofa in working clothes, black tights slender under a full-cut skirt, an Irish sweater almost as green as her eyes. A Macintosh computer blinked on the coffee table in front of her.
“I don’t know yet. At best, he’s about to get a nasty visit from the Ghost of Rumors Past. At worst, well, it doesn’t pay to speculate.”
“You think he’s in trouble?” Carol’s green eyes had a wary quickness, catching Gun’s when he didn’t want them to.
“He almost walked into an execution, Carol. I don’t know why he was meeting this Billy Apple, and I don’t know who else is involved.” Gun shrugged and went to the door. ‘That’s cop business. I’m just going so he’s not out there by himself.”
She got up and came to him, pushing her black hair back with one hand. She had the warm smell of wool and tea and held Gun with a good toughness that surprised him.
He’s your friend, I know. But if this is the second time... She looked into his face and a little fear put Be Careful in her eyes.
Gun gave her the easiest smile he owned. “Carol,” he said, “you know what a prudent sort I am.”
3
The descending DC-9 overshot West Palm Beach from the north, banked cautiously to the left and approached the airport from the ocean side, throttling back until the feeling of speed disappeared and Gun felt the plane was simply floating. It floated over a deserted freeway dimly lit by street lamps, then a line of tall hotels. “There’s a big H,” said the middle-aged woman next to Gun in a New York accent. “Hilton Hotel, there it is. Palm Beach is fulla green. My sister says they got hotels here, they put orchids on your pillow.”
It was 5:15 a.m. A little more than a three-hour flight. “I feel like I know your sister,” Gun said. And it was plain-out true.
The woman beamed. “You’re going to love Palm Beach. I just know it.”
The guy at the Avis desk eyed Gun and stroked his red tie smugly, like a man with a secret. He didn’t have any pickup trucks and he claimed to be fresh out of cars with legroom, but he decided to part with the secret.
“If you’re not Gun Pedersen, I’m a thin man,” he said.
“Sorry, that’s me.”
That perked Avis into a grin. “Gotta Chevy Beretta, Mr. Pedersen. Your legs’ll cramp but you’ll get there fast.”
Gun signed for the Chevy and went to wait for the shuttle. There was a bank of pay phones and he pulled the crumpled slip from his pocket and dialed Gates’s number. It rang twelve times before he hung up. He flipped up the heavy phone book and found sixteen Gateses in West Palm Beach. There was no listing for Moses but the number on Gun’s scrap corresponded with that for the Gates To Home Motel. Gun scribbled the address and found it on a map between the white and yellow pages, a spot on the Intracoastal Highway just north of West Palm. Then the shuttle arrived, a great tilting glassed-in milk truck, and Gun went to face the Beretta. It could have been worse. It could have been as uncomfortable, say, as the motel itself looked to be. Turning in off the Intracoastal Gun saw a white, narrow, single-story building in the shape of a block U. It had a green-shingle roof that was low enough to make Gun think about ducking his head. Around the inside of the U, and not far apart, were orange doors with black painted gothic numerals, 1 through 22. There were three cars in the lot. The Beretta made four.
He stepped out and stretched. Across the highway daylight glowed on the rim, the sun maybe an hour away. He heard a low groan. A small dog was squatting in apparent pain on a patch of stiff-looking grass next to a door that said office. Over the door a tube of dead neon said gates motel—a home run value. Gun thought: ballplayers.
At his fourth set of knocks a light went on somewhere behind the curtain and Gun felt steps. Another light, a merciless white one, went on right over the door and made him squint. Finally the door swung wide and Moses Gates filled it. “There ain’t a way to prepare for it,” Moses said. “Here I know you’re coming, and I remember you’ve got one hell of a high profile, and it still throws me when I look out and see you standing there in the dark. You coming in?”
In the kitchen Moses stood at the stove and spooned coffee grounds. He was a middle-aged black man of medium height who’d always had the catcher’s build; not narrow anywhere, wide from legs to shoulders and straight between, like a short hardwood tree. Since Gun had seen him, though, the tree had broadened some at the trunk. Moses’s belly tugged at his red T-shirt; his legs, in blue jeans, looked heavy instead of plain strong. Gun saw that his fingers were slightly unsteady on the spoon.
“I look somethin’ terrible, don’t I, Gun? That’s another thing I can’t seem to prepare for. I run this motel now for seven years, it’s a business like a lot of people make a living and stay happy on. Only I can’t do either. I get up every morning, my dog’s outside the window trying to crap, it’s the moaning wakes me up.”
“You could shoot the dog, Moses.”
“All these years I been keeping the old ballplayer’s secret, Gun. You know the way it goes—the feeling that you quit before your time was up, that you still got your legs and your eyes. That you could still play. You’ve had that dream yourself.”
Gun shrugged his shoulders forward, felt the shift of tired vertebrae. “A time or two.”
“The Senior League’s not so bad. Course some of the guys are only here because they got out of the majors before one year’s salary could set you up for life. They’re broke as old china, here for the money, which is lousy anyhow. The rest of ’em, hell, they’ve still got some good ball left in ’em. They were a shade too old or too slow for the bigs, maybe a hot kid coming up looking for their spot. So a couple hotshots decide to set up a baseball league for oldies. And we miss playing. Hell, Gun, what else did we ever do?”
“Don’t apologize to me, Moses.”
Moses shook his head. “But it’s led to this. One day last fall I’m just another down-south motel man, poor as weak pee, and next day two guys come to me out of Orlando saying, ‘We got a new team on a new league and we want you to lead it.’ I’m back in baseball! And then by God people are interested in me again, I get a few calls from reporters.”
“And one of them’s Billy Apple.”
“Said he was an old fan of mine. You live renting out cheap rooms and fixing air conditioners a few years, Gun, you start to like being reminded that you used to have things like fans.” Moses glanced reluctantly at Gun. “You know the Hall vote’s coming up.”
“Cooperstown’s just a spot on the map, Moses.”
“I told myself that. Often. Hall of Fame’s nothing,
just another page in the scrapbook. Every time the sportswriters looked at my name on the ballot and voted for the other guys, every damn year, that’s what I said. A spot on the map.”
Gun went to a shelf of chipped white enamel and found a clean cup. He poured coffee, hoping it would make him glad he came.
“This Billy Apple, he’s sort of a local hot dog, okay? He’s with the West Palm By-Line, a columnist, and they work him loose. Mostly sports, but he does what he wants because he does it good. Couple years ago he writes a series on dopers in South America shipping coke into the States. Turns out it comes in with those soccer players, some trainer was swallowing the junk in a plastic bag and then pulling it back up on a string after customs. Nuts! But Apple figures it out and writes it up.”
“Makes himself a few enemies.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Moses seemed cheered at the thought. ‘That’s true. Billy didn’t tend to care who he dragged out in the sun.”
“But you don’t think it was dopers killed him.”
“He came to see me one day. Said he had a new story idea, and it was me.” Moses’s eyes gleamed and showed Gun years of wishing. “He ask me how come I always miss the Hall of Fame, and I told him it’s old Ferdie Millevich. You know this, Gun: You don’t have to kill nobody to be guilty. Peop
le see your face next to a headline with Grand Jury in it, it’s like they’re seeing a mug shot. That’s why I never make the Hall, I told Billy,”
The coffee was strong and better than what Gun brewed in his fish house. It hummed and put a fine alertness just behind the eyes, where it counted. “Billy,” Gun said, “decided to exhume the Millevich case.”
Moses nodded. “He said it needed clearing up.
For good. The coroner called it suicide, but it took him a week to do it, and who listened?”
“You mean Billy wanted to clear you. For something you never even went on trial for.”
“He thought it might help. Come Hall of Fame voting.”
Gun was quiet, sifting it down. It made some sense.
“I was his hero when he was a kid. A lot of people have said that to me, Gun. He was the first one who ever did anything with it.”
There was a sudden need for sleep, or breakfast. Moses provided eggs and enough cheese for a modest omelette, and also Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Cereal and whole milk getting ready to sour. And more coffee. They finished at sunup.
“How’d it go with the cops?” Gun said. He felt fresh enough to be curious again.
“Fine. It helped that the kid who handled me grew up in Minnesota. Another fan.” Moses smiled. “He wanted to know where I was when Billy got killed. I said, I was with a woman. He took my statement and sent me home.”
“They have any ideas?”
“Not ones I know about. They’ve kept a pretty good lid on it so far, too. No press. I turned my phone off, though, for when it gets out, probably this morning.” Moses went abruptly silent. For the first time Gun noticed the changes in his face, the folds of skin on the eyelids, the two-day brush of whiskers white now across his chin.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
The chin settled down closer to the chest. “I was asleep on the pull-out there, it was maybe one in the morning. This lady’s with me, woman I saw a lot of for a while but not really no more, and first thing I know she’s shovin’ me awake sayin’, ‘Answer the phone, hey.’ I sleep heavy, see. But it’s Billy, saying he’s at the airport, just got in, he’s all thrilled about something. It’s the big break on the Moses Gates story, he says, can I meet him? I say damn right, ten minutes, and then he says wait—he’s got to run out of town for something, he’ll be back at his place in three hours, can I be there? He promises it’ll be worth the four a.m. run. So I get up then and I’m going nuts here, Gun, I’m tellin’ you. Pace the floor, lots of coffee, I’m thinking about my bronze in the Hall of Fame. Linda wanted to sleep but I dragged her out, poured some champagne. Even the damn dog got a beer.”
“Where’d Billy go?”
“I don’t know. I’m not thinking about his errands then, I’m thinking about getting out from under all the hangman crap’s been on me for the last fifteen years. Anyhow at quarter to four out I go, driving fast, and I get to Billy’s place, nice little spread, his car’s out front. But nobody answers the door. It wasn’t locked. What would you do? So in I go, and there’s Billy in the living room, and the first thing I think is what’s he standing on, up so high? Your mind quits on you, like. He’s up against the chimney and sort of lit from below, see, from the fire. I almost think he’s playing a joke until finally it hits that he’s hanging, really and truly, he’s as dead as he’s ever gonna get.”
“And then you called the cops.”
“I tell you about the smell in there? Listen. When I walked in the first thing I heard was that big fire crackling, and then I breathe and it’s like somebody laid a bad pig on the luau. Sweet and burnt. Billy’s feet, you see, down by the fire ...all bare and crispy. There were fingernail scrapes on his ankles where they’d yanked his socks off.”
Gun got up and went to a small window looking east. The sun was turning the Intracoastal gold and white. “What do you think he found out? He say anything at all about his ‘big break’?”
“Uh-uh. I don’t even know what direction he was going.” Moses poured himself the last of the coffee. “They turned his place over pretty good, I mention that?”
“What for?”
“The more you ask, the more I don’t know. They really did it, though. Messed up paintings on the wall, pillows on the furniture all ripped up. They were looking for something.”
“What, notes? He was a reporter.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Moses squinted at nothing. “You think the Millevich thing got him killed somehow?”
“No idea. Guys like this Billy Apple, sounds like there are plenty of people might not like him. Let the cops figure it out. What is it?”
Moses was staring at him.
“Billy’s notes,” he said. “I know where he kept them.” Moses got to his feet. “It’s nothing fancy, no safe or anything, just a little panel behind the medicine cabinet. I was over there one night, he was interviewing me. He had this cognac he said he kept for his big stories ... We drank too much of it and had some good lies and big laughs. Then all of a sudden he says, ‘You wanna see a paranoid guy?’ Well, sure. So he takes me in the can and pulls out the aspirin and Pepto-Bismol and there it is, a little piece of plastic comes right out the back of the cabinet. There’s a hole in the Sheetrock back there. He says, ‘Some of the pricks I write about, you’ve got to practice discretion.’”
“He have anything in there?”
“Naw, not then. It was weeks ago, though.”
Gun reached in his pocket and rubbed the keys to the Chevy. “Did you mention the medicine cabinet to the cops?”
“Never thought of it. Too damn sorry.”
“Can we get in and take a peek?”
Moses frowned and Gun knew he’d rather
not go back to Billy Apple’s. Then he reached for the phone, slowly, and punched up a number.
“I’d like to speak to Sergeant Morrell, please,” he said. “Tell him it’s Moses Gates calling.”
It was a short conversation. Morrell, the Minnesota boy, was about to go off duty. He didn’t ask questions. He said he’d meet them at Apple’s house in half an hour.
“Your faithful public.” Gun grinned. “They never let you down.”
Moses had splashed his face and brushed his teeth and was pulling a fresh T-shirt over his belly when somebody knocked, tentatively, as though afraid to disturb this early. Moses scowled at the clock and at Gun and the knock came again, two shy taps. Moses crossed to the door and opened it to empty air. Nobody. From inside Gun could see the splitting concrete sidewalk, brown dead grass, and the night-blue hood of the rented Beretta. Then Moses stepped out and had strong hands all over him, from right and left, and the hands picked him up and pitched him face-first on the hood of the car, and the shock took his wind so that he didn’t resist or yell for Gun, though Gun came anyway.
4
There were four of them busy on Gates in the new sun and with the dog still squatting on the grass Gun went to work. The nearest was a dense meaty man who had Moses’s left knee over the wheel well of the Beretta
and was slowly convincing it to bend forward; Gun wrapped a hand around the man’s forehead and pried him back, swung back his own knee and buried it in a fleshy kidney. The man dropped and crawled, face to the ground like he was looking for his lost breath, found it at last and screamed. It brought the attention of the others. One of them, a lanky Hispanic with an overconfident face, let go of Moses and looked up at Gun unfazed. He said, “Tall mothah.” He started for Gun and another followed, a teenage white kid with a T-shirt that said you hug you die. Behind Gun the kidney man tried to sit up. The dog moaned and crouched.
The kid with the T-shirt was coming straight in now with his face nervous while the Hispanic angled in from the side. One guy still had Moses, was lining his head and smashing it down into the Chevrolet, doing it again, again. The white kid dove in and pulled Gun’s mind from the Hispanic who was right in there then and had a silver thing in his hand. The silver thing arced and Gun saw it close up, a soc
ket wrench, duck it duck it but six-feet-six doesn’t duck easily and he twisted to catch the wrench on the upper arm. The white kid had hold like a damn Chihuahua now, clawing and clinging, not biting yet but being one hell of an irritation and Gun knew he had to take the Hispanic out or he’d lose this one and hurt mightily when he woke up on the sidewalk. He let the Chihuahua hang on his waist and feinted for the Hispanic, then when the socket wrench was out of range swung down and swept the white kid’s legs into the air. He held them before his face shins-outward, the kid still gripping his waist upside down and gasping with the effort of it. The Hispanic let go of his smile and got both hands on the grip of the wrench. He faked moves left, right, came in straight and swung for the head the way Gun needed him to for this to go easy. Gun tightened his hold on the Chihuahua’s legs and offered them up to the wrench, which had enough speed to splinter both shinbones and turn the kid into thick jelly. The Hispanic saw his buddy go into shock and swing loosely from Gun’s grip, said, “Ahh, dahmn the lady,” and tucked the wrench into his acid-washed jeans while backing away toward the Intracoastal.
In his corner sight Gun saw Moses still facedown on the Beretta. The big blond-haired guy was done pounding him now and was bent down with a hand on Moses’s neck, talking earnestly into his ear. Gun saw Moses nod twice, his nose rubbing metal. He laid the kid with some gentleness on the brown grass next to the dog, who came over to sniff, then started for the car and got surprised again when Moses’s left arm came to life. The catcher’s paw at the end of it rose up wide and strong and found a hank of blond hair. Leverage enough. Gun saw the muscles move in that left arm and the blond man’s face twist and go down hard against the windshield. Moses braced and pushed himself upright, very ugly in the face just now, and took a new grip against which the blond man wiggled.
Gun said, “Can we wait a minute, here?”
Moses was panting with the stress of the unexpectedly battered. “Not gonna wait no minute.” He fumbled with the man’s head for a second and raised him upright. Gun realized Moses had him by both ears and was shaking him hard. “Ought to tear them straight offa your skull,” Moses shouted.