by L. L. Enger
“Once upon a time.”
“Yes. Of those, there are still at least half a dozen whose messy signatures I’ve not got” He showed a scant handful of plastic-encased cards, men with bats on their shoulders smiling at a point over the camera. Gun knew most of them. “I get them to sign their cards, the cards from their best years. Some of these fellows, now, are playing for the local old-fart contingent; the others for the group out of Tallahassee, which will play our boys this afternoon. Batting practice begins in less than two hours.”
“Ought to afford a few scalps,” Gun said.
The old man broke into a giggle at that and giggled for some moments, literalizing the remark in his head. “Ought to indeed.” He chuckled. Getting control again he said, “Your being here surprises me, Pedersen. You don’t seem the type to be riding the nostalgia barge. If I’d known you were on the roster I’d have been ready with your card.”
“Not playing. I’m just here seeing an old friend. So you’ll have to be happy with your twenty-pound bond.”
The black box was stowed again and Gun was glad of it somehow. It gave him an uneasiness he couldn’t quite place.
“Of course,” the old man said, “you may run across me again. I’ll try to be carrying next time. There’s so much more spiritual value to the cards.” He had the chair started again and Gun walked next to him until they reached the By-Line.
“I get off here,” said Gun.
The old man spun his chair to face Gun straight on, peered up cynically through his black-framed glasses. “An old friend, you say? Tell me, and who might this be?”
“Moses Gates.”
“Ah, Mr. Gates.” Nodding, eyes closed for a moment. Then shaking his head the way grown-ups do when amused at children. “Coming to help the poor man out, I imagine, set things right Restore lost honor.”
Gun looked at the man for a moment, thinking, You’ve sure got it all figured. “When did you hear about the murder?” Gun asked.
“Me? Why yesterday, of course. I have friends everywhere. It’s my attractive personality”—he looked off in the distance, squinted—”and the pity helps, too.” He slapped the arms of his chair and turned his eyes back toward Gun. “What a marvelous emotion, pity.” He laughed. “Sincerely now, Mr. Pedersen, I am glad you’re here.”
“Why’s that?” Gun asked.
The man looked down at his lap and carefully smoothed out his red paisley tie between his index and middle fingers. “Unlike you,” he said, “I have no particular interest in Moses Gates, but I must say it is quite difficult for me to think of the man as a killer. I’m sure you agree?”
Gun did, and said so.
“Well.” The old man moved his hand to the controls, and his chair came to life. “Good-bye, Mr. Pedersen.” He nodded his head and began to roll away down the walk. “Your finest season,” Gun heard him say, “was 1968. Three thirty-nine, forty-four homeruns, one hundred twenty-six RBIs. World Series MVP.”
Gun stood blinking at the retreating wheelchair.
“Hold onto your hair,” the old man called.
7
Among the things the By-Line didn’t have, along with Billy Apple anymore, were a sense of order and a receptionist. A sign in the lobby had directed Gun to the top floor and when he stepped off the elevator it was to an empty hall and the smell of new paint. The hall led past several doors with bumpy-glassed windows that showed Gun light but nothing else. Finally, a door with lettering: news, city.
He went in and saw a room the size of a basketball court only squashed shorter by an artificial ceiling abundant with fluorescent tubes. Under the tubes people labored in cubicles, hunched toward computer screens. From Gun’s height it looked mazelike, a newsroom designed to confound white mice. There were several real offices around the perimeter, offices with real walls and real windows. Behind one window a man and a woman stood speaking, the woman facing out over the maze. She had pale perfect skin
and a tight knot of hair fighting gray and was talking, talking fast Gun told himself to stop watching, it’s an argument, let them have it themselves, but it was hard to look away, Lord, the chilly way her lips moved. The man was a big one, his back to Gun, hands clasped behind his head, thumbs massaging his neck under the lapel of an expensive suit coat. Rubbing hard while the woman talked on. Looked like a man who was losing, Gun thought, and then the guy half turned and Gun recognized him like a picture from a high school yearbook.
Harold Ibbins. Didn’t go back as far as high school but it almost seemed like it, those early years playing ball. Ibbins had been one of those guys he passed on the way to the majors, not a natural but a hard worker who’d gotten there finally and done utility jobs around the American League, mostly with the Twins until he had a hot streak and Griffith traded him. Nice enough guy, as Gun remembered him, though Moses swore Ibbins had once driven over the foot of a teammate “so he could get some innings. His agent told him to do it.”
Ibbins turned almost enough to catch Gun looking. Gun stepped back through the newsroom door and down the hall to the elevator, where he stood pretending concern over the directory on the wall.
Copy Room 403 Janitorial 405 City News 409-11
Well. Ought to have noticed that before. Gun looked it over another time before a door whined open down the hall and here came Harold, walking slow, one hand still rubbing his neck.
Gun turned and let his eyebrows go up. “Harold Ibbins. What’d you do, go newspaper on us?”
Harold had always had a grin. It arrived now,
though the eyes above it were preoccupied. “Gun. Nope, me and the media don’t share the same shower, no more than we have to. Now especially, I’m here to tell you.” The grin fading, joining the eyes.
“Why’s that?”
Harold kneaded his neck. “Aw, hell, Gun. These incompetent”—his eyes came suddenly sharp— “papers these days can’t print an ad right if you draw it for ’em in the sand.”
“Screwed up your copy, hey?”
Something in Gun’s voice made Harold hesitate. “Yeah.” He reached for the elevator button. “I’m in the land business now, Gun. You think: real estate, Florida, man’s doing fine, and I am. But hell, it’s still retail; you still got to advertise.” Close up his face showed capillaries the color of red wine.
Gun pointed down toward the newsroom. “Hope you reamed ’em out good.”
“Like an ump in hell,” Harold said. His eyes met Gun’s again and looked relieved when the elevator bell rang. “Adios,” he said, and it wasn’t until the doors were closed and Harold was sinking through the building that Gun smelled the man’s sweat on the air.
He stepped into the newsroom and she came toward him like Harold had just been the warm-up match. Khaki suit, he noticed now, and a don’t-waste-my-time stride.
“Taylor Johns,” she said. The voice matched the walk. “City editor. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Maybe. Were you Billy Apple’s boss?”
The stare she gave Gun made his neck muscles go tight. He thought of Harold, kneading. She said, “What, are you guys standing in line? Who’s next?” She craned angrily, looking past him.
“If we could talk,” he said.
She led him through the maze of cubicles and
phone whispers and clicking keyboards to one of the real offices. It was on the good side of the building. Gun recognized the red tiles of the neighboring mansion and beyond it the ocean. She closed the door and pointed to a chair of some kind of black Saran Wrap and he sat with trepidation.
“I was his boss,” she told him, “though he never seemed to think so. Maybe I didn’t either.” She looked at Gun and he saw some hope there, under the ice.
“I’m sorry about Billy.”
“I only heard last night,” she said. “A few people here still don’t know. I haven’t had the strength.”
Taylor Johns, Gun thought, looked like a woman who would have the strength.
“Billy was our boy,” she
said.
He let enough quiet pass to show respect and when she looked up, expectant, he said, “I’m here because of a story he was working on. A piece about Moses Gates, a ballplayer—”
“Moses Gates, the wrongly faulted man, wishes to reclaim place in the sun,” she said. Laying it out like that and sounding sick of it. “Never makes the Hall of Fame because too many people still blame him for teammate’s death ... that the piece?”
“Right. It was Moses Gates who found Billy.”
“Good for Moses. And you, you’re Gun Pedersen, I know you now. Friend of Gates, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Certainly. And you’re here because Billy interviewed you, and now you’re having second thoughts about being named as a source in the story. My advice, Mr. Pedersen, is not to worry. Billy never finished that story, or the box of others he had in the works. You needn’t fear.” She said it so fast that he could only sit in the plastic chair thinking, How can she talk that way? Like her lips are frozen. Poor nervous Harold, he hadn’t had a prayer.
He held up a hand. “I never talked to Billy. Was that what Ibbins was after?”
“Ibbins?”
“Tall gay, suit coat. You just talked to him.”
“Harry, he said. Yes. Came in saying he’d been interviewed and then had changed his little mind about being on the record. Told me more about the Gates piece than I’d ever heard from Billy. Wanted us to cut the story, not that it matters now.”
“He didn’t know about Billy?”
“Seemed not to.”
Gun remembered Harold’s sweat and the way his finger shook pressing the elevator button as if from drink or fear. “Does Harold run his realty ads in this paper?”
“Ads?” Her mouth looked like it had found a bad taste. “Don’t ask me about ads. Ads are two floors down. Why are you here, Mr. Pedersen?”
“Moses Gates is an old Mend of mine. He thinks Billy was killed because of the story he was working on.”
She eyed him sadly, almost with pity. “Well of course he was,” she said. “It was always a story, the boy had nothing else. But Mr. Pedersen, which story? The blessing of Billy was that he could do anything, and he did, all at once. He was everyone’s buddy, everyone gave him tips, everyone was a contact He always had a dozen stories in the hopper, or three dozen.”
“Moses thinks it was the baseball story.”
She sighed and turned from mother to editor.
“All right. Why?”
“Well, because Billy called him at home that night. He was excited, wanted to see Moses. Only when Moses got there ...”
“Mr. Pedersen, I can see how it looks to you. But the Moses Gates story was something Billy was doing, well, from the heart. He was sick of writing stuff about drugs and guns and wanted to do something that had some sweetness to it.” She turned her eyes on Gun and they were getting soft again. “Did you ever see a silly movie about two guys, they dressed in black suits, wore sunglasses, drove around the country putting their old rock group back together? They kept saying they were on a mission from God.”
“Yeah.”
Taylor Johns shook her head. “Billy was that way. He could go out and do the big important story and get praised to the skies, but he really lived for the sweet stories, the ones he felt. He wanted Moses Gates to get into the Hall of Fame. No danger there, just a little harmless crusading. Billy was always on a mission from God.”
“He didn’t tell you what he had on the baseball piece? Who he was talking to, what direction he was taking?”
“He didn’t tell me squat about what he was doing,” Taylor said, with the intermittent bitterness of the bereaved. “Not a damn thing! Most days he didn’t even come in. He was home writing or out talking, playing the deep-cover man. Half the stuff he wrote, I wouldn’t have approved it if he’d told me.”
“Like the South Americans,” Gun said.
“Sure, the South Americans. And the point shaving at the U, and that mobster business, when they tried to buy the Dolphins. I told him, ‘You don’t have to be Jack Anderson, okay?’ It gets dangerous. But he’d get a wild hair, and besides his stuff always turned out so good. I didn’t rein him in.”
Gun thought he felt the plastic chair sinking under him and so he stood up. “Who did he talk to? Here, I mean. Was there someone he might’ve talked to about the baseball story?”
“I hired Billy. I taught him newswriting and
moved him up the ladder to columnist. When he wanted to say something, he said it to me.”
“Could I see his office?”
She stood, smiled wearily, spread her arms. “You’re in it,” she said. “The police were through, of course. Look around.”
from a corner, her graying twist beginning to unravel. The office surprised him; it was so empty Gun had assumed it wasn’t being used, though it must have been coveted by the white mice out there in the maze. The desk was bare except for an electric typewriter and a tan phone whose cord ran nakedly over the floor to the wall. There were no photos of family, no framed journalism awards, no Far Side cartoons taped up anywhere.
“The cops cleared everything out, or what?”
“No. Billy didn’t keep office hours. It’s like I told you: He liked to work at home. Sitting in the dark at night, talking into his machine.”
There was nothing else but a steel four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with old story clippings and too much thick paper addressing William E. Apple’s company retirement plan. He shoved and the drawers rolled shut long and cool and solid like the drawers in a morgue.
“What about family,” he said, smelling her exhaustion now, not wanting to push.
“He didn’t talk about them much. His folks were from Florida, Orlando I think, they divorced when he was little. It was his older sister he was close to, Diane. They lived with the mother and the dad went up east someplace. Diane moved up there, too, after her schooling. I think she’s still up there.”
“Up where?” he asked, but Taylor was away somewhere, chin high, one hand dreamily searching a pocket of the khaki suit. He excused himself and she was back suddenly, apologetic.
“I don’t remember... New York or Baltimore, Boston. Bad news will find you, wherever,” she said. Her hand came up out of the pocket holding a peach-colored tissue. She twisted it around a finger and dabbed her eyes.
“See now, it’s starting,” she said.
8
Twelve-thirty p.m.
Ballparks like this one made Gun happier than he had a right to be, even put him in a mood sometimes that made him question whether he’d done right by himself, leaving the game as he had. Today the sky was untouched by clouds, as clear and blue as an ocean from the window of a jet, and beneath it the well-traded grass of the field was so bright Gun’s eyes hurt to look at it. From the highest row above third base he looked at the neat concrete shell surrounding the infield. No upper deck here, unless you counted the press box, and all the seats good ones, same cheap price, two and a half bucks. There was room for five, maybe six thousand, enough people for some noise but not so many you forgot what you came for.
Gun turned around and saw that Moses Gates was still trapped outside the park near the ticket booths. Reporters had blocked his path to the locker room and, amazingly, Moses seemed to be handling them just fine. He wasn’t even trying to cut through the crowd, but just stood there, hands behind his back,
answering questions, his head nodding once in a while. Friend, it’s going to get old fast, Gun thought.
When the home team started taking their swings in the cage and the sun rose to its most damaging height, Gun walked down to the concession stand and bought an orange Patriarchs’ hat with a green P on it, then took a seat behind the third-base dugout where he could stretch his legs a little. He knew the park well. During seventeen springs he’d played his share of games here. In his last one—it would have been 1980—he’d hit a ball into the battery of lights high above the left-field wall. The home run
hadn’t counted in his own mind because it came off an arm whose name no one remembered anymore, a kid with good speed but no hop.
“Hey! Gun?” Even before turning, Gun matched the voice to a face, but when he saw it he was still surprised. Everything had gotten bigger, cheeks and chin and nose, and the extra flesh crowded in on his eyes.
“Rott,” Gun said, offering his hand. The man took it and shook vigorously. “You put on weight, Rott.”
“Don’t look so good yourself. What happened to your hair? The cold turn it white? Damn, it’s good to see you!” Rott straightened his body self-consciously and sucked his belly in. He was jammed into a uniform that said Tallahassee Toucans across the chest, and he looked at Gun through those same small milky blue eyes you could never quite lock onto. Hard to know, hard to not like.
“Understand you’re a boss man now,” Gun said. “Good club, too, I hear.”
Rott Weiler smiled, pointed to the team’s name on his jersey. “Hootin’ right, and we’re the best you’ll find in this horseshit league.”
“Papers this morning tell me you’re down a couple games to West Palm.”
Rott took a snort of warm salt air and laughed, leaned forward confidentially and flicked his eyes in the direction of the parking lot. “You want to get technical, sure. But let’s be honest, Gun. Old Moses’s got one hell of a monkey on his back, and if I know him, he ain’t smart enough to say uncle. He’ll take his team right into the cellar with him. I mean, look at his guys right now”—Rott pointed at the field—”look at ’em, dragging their asses like a bunch of widows. They read the papers, too, they know what’s coming. Believe me, West Palm’s done for the season.”
“You never lacked for confidence,” Gun said, “and I admire that, but I don’t guess you’re an expert on Moses Gates.”
“Hey, don’t get me wrong. I hope Gates ain’t the guy they’re sayin’ he is. I hope to God he’s innocent, just like you do, but you’ve gotta admit, things look real funny, this writer getting strung up like Ferdie was. Hell, though, guilty or not, I know one thing. If it’s me in his position—shit going on in my hie—I’m gonna clear out of the clubhouse for the sake of the team. How about you?” Rott’s eyes quickened out of their haze for an instant, glimmered. Gun didn’t answer, just looked at him. Rott shook his head, wincing a little. “I didn’t mean it personally, Gun.”