by L. L. Enger
They were coming down to the end of Round Four when the door opened wide and a slight figure in a wheelchair rolled in. The old man moved slowly, craning his neck, checking out tables. The black lacquered box was across his knees.
Toby Juling said, “Tomorrow, gentlemen,” and left two inches of beer in his glass.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Moses muttered. “Handicapped, my ass.”
“He’s after me,” cried Eddie Viken. “Must be. He’s already got you guys.”
The old man had them now and scooted leisurely among tables, taking his time. He arrived finally, swept aside Toby’s chair and pulled up. He twisted around in his suit, motioned the bartender. “You. Bring a round. Well, fellas,” he said, “how’s the game? How’re the legs? Still enjoying the wind sprints, are we?”
Rott said, “Tell you what, Geary, I liked this place a lot more before they put in that ramp. Remember those stairs they used to have? Nice narrow steep ones.” Rott made a flicking motion with his hands. “I could’ve helped you down.”
“You can go, Weiler. I’m not here to see you.”
Eddie Viken had on his first hopeful expression of the day. Weiler stayed.
“Gun Pedersen,” said Cleary, “it’s always so good to see you.”
Gun was silent. He saw that the old man wore a
striped tie today and checked the wheelchair. Still paisley. The bows of his glasses rode high on his temples. Hunched into the black box, glaring at baseball cards, he looked like the ripe fruit of insanity, ready to drop.
“Banks, Henderson, Kaline, Pedersen.” The Autograph Man had a handful stacked on the table. “Say, here’s a Rott Weiler. How’d he get into this august company?”
“Take the stairs, prick,” said Rott
“I’ll bet you don’t remember the day. I do. March seventh, 1977. Best wishes, Rott Weiler.’ Ah, now you recall.” Rott looked to be swallowing a batch of salty words. Moses had his eyes closed. The old man raised his voice. “Seven March Seventy-seven, a great day for our national pastime. Ferdinand Milievich ties a good strong knot and leaps from the press box at Tinker Field. This card,” Cleary said, studying the image of Rott, “gratifies my taste for the morbid. Mr. Milievich considers distances, affixes the knot, and swan dives, while in a swampy bar across Orlando Mr. Weiler grins and signs his card for a disgusting old man in a wheelchair.”
Gun saw Harold turn slowly toward Rott. It was the look of a man who didn’t want to be caught looking.
“Here’s a fact,” said Cleary. “There are better stories associated with these cards than the ballplayers themselves would be able to tell you.” He held up the Kaline, Al with the sun in his eyes and the bat confident upon his shoulder. “This fine Tiger was attending some asinine high-school sports banquet when I found him. Little town not an hour’s drive from Chicago. I lived there then. It was the middle of a very nasty winter and every street had ice. He spoke about cowardice, wouldn’t you know it, damning all draft dodgers; you ought to have seen the coaches. How they yawned! But afterward I followed him out to the car he was renting, a big Mercury, and apprehended him there. He was glad enough to sign, and in fact asked me what I’d thought of his speech.”
Cleary stood the Kaline on its head and glanced at Gun. “Well?”
“I told him it was brilliant. I was younger then. Listen, though: I was leaving the parking lot and a little boy, maybe seven years old, stepped out of the school and saw Kaline. Probably the only kid in the place who didn’t get an autograph and he came tearing. Kaline was having trouble with the Mercury, it wasn’t starting, and I thought: The kid’s got him. He reached the car and got hold of the door handle. Kaline never saw him, too distracted, and at last the car started with a gigantic roar and the little boy’s feet slipped on the ice. It was like a magic act, he just dropped, lost the door handle, and disappeared under the car. And then Kaline got it into gear and drove away.”
Moses breathed, “Aw, shit,” and the old man swiveled on him.
“Thank you for your intelligent commentary. You’ll want to know the boy wasn’t hurt. I went to him where he lay on the ice, his eyes squeezed shut as you might expect. He’d gone under and simply frozen there on his back, waiting for the car to squash him. I waited. It took him five minutes and not another soul around. He opened his eyes finally, and I told him to go.
“Fifteen years later, in this very city, a thin punk in an alley tried to take that Kaline away from me. He had a gun. Would you like the story of what happened to him?”
No one cared to hear it.
“That’s all right. No offense taken.” Cleary extracted a Thick Fingers Garza, 1982, and handed it over. “Would you be so good?”
Garza signed.
“Thank you.” He backed his chair from the table, turned, traveled unhurriedly toward the door and daylight.
Eddie Viken rose and followed.
Outside the Dugout Gun stood squinting with Harold Ibbins against the sudden sunlight. “Well, Harold,” he said, “how’s the advertising?”
Harold was quiet. Not far down the walk Eddie Viken had caught up with the Autograph Man. The chair was at a standstill.
“Look at that poor jerk,” Harold said. “You know what he’d give to be asked for his autograph?”
“You want to tell me about your talk with Billy Apple, Harold? All about Ferdie Millevich, wasn’t it?”
Ibbins had his eyes on the sidewalk. “It’s a hell of a thing, Gun. You know how you can start remembering something a whole lot more than you want to? Billy Apple, now, he was out at my place not more’n a week ago. I liked him, man, honest to God I did.”
“You didn’t want your name in the paper.”
Harold showed Gun his face. It was tired, the capillaries a little redder, a little closer to the surface. “Tell you what, Gun. I got to go home, sit in the tub, talk to my wife. There’s been too much happening.”
Down the walk Eddie Viken was doing the talking. They could hear the dull wash of his voice. The old man was looking up at him with his face going dark.
Harold said, “I live down on the water—thirty-two twenty-five Coastal. You come by early tomorrow, Miss Mary will feed you breakfast, we’ll have a little history. There may be,” his voice soft as flannel, “some necessary doings.”
They looked up to see Cleary reach his boundary of patience and cross it without hesitation. He pointed a
thin index finger at Eddie Viken and his voice appeared to them with evangelical clarity.
“I don’t know you,” he said. “Depart from me!” And Eddie quaked and pulled away.
“Lord,” said Harold Ibbins. “Lord, Lord.”
16
Gun woke the next morning with the smell of bad fish and salt brine curling through the window. A carload of boisterous Okies bent on cod had seized two of the rooms at the Gates To Home and was scraping the innards from each day’s catch into Moses’s green Dumpster. He went to shower. Behind the plaster wall he could hear someone, not an Okie, crying. Nothing frantic. Just a plain, miserable soak. It seemed at home here. He drowned it with the hiss of warm water—it didn’t get hot at the Gates To Home—and pot his mind on Harold Ibbins.
The way Moses had it, Harold and Rott had roomed together on the road for a couple of seasons. It worked out, Harold being forgiving enough to live with Rott’s hammock and his ego. Then one day after a September loss to the Orioles Rott had simply lost his sanity in the clubhouse, grabbed onto Harold and started hitting. No reason, was how Moses remembered it, just plain sudden hatred that hadn’t been there before. Rott started rooming with Ferdie Millevich after that.
“And now Rott sits next to Harold in the bar?” Gun had asked.
And Moses had said with a sour smile, “Harold’s
rich now, see, living on the water in one of those old-boss mansions. You see what money can buy.”
Moses said this last part with the clipped complaining tone some people use when speaking of another’s succes
s.
Gun shut off the water and reached for a towel. It was apple-crate stiff. He forgave his friend his jealousies, dressed, and left.
The Coastal mansions were, as Moses said, mostly old money. Oil, railroads, shipping. What Harold had done to merit his own fragile piece of Atlantic frontage was not to play baseball particularly well, but to play it for long enough to teach himself the traps and pathways of the Florida real estate morass. Spring training would come and the Twins would head for Orlando, and while his teammates spent their free hours in pursuit of the pretty magnolias that hung about Tinker Field, Harold would be sitting at the feet of local land merchants. He told everyone it was his fallback career, waiting down south for the day he got cut from the team. Then Florida made one of its exponential leaps in desirability, as if one dark day in January everyone in Michigan and Maine and Minnesota suddenly looked up and saw the same TV ad from the Florida Chamber—”Paradise was never lost, you just haven’t been here yet,”—with the woman in that brief bikini and all that beach, not a shadow on it anywhere. Everyone became a believer all at once, the pilgrimage was on, and Harold Ibbins turned to his fallback career. For a utility infielder, lifetime average .227, it was like rolling off a wood cot and landing on a Sealy.
Gun understood something of money but turning south on Coastal he came at once into elegance of disturbing proportions. In the new Atlantic sun the white mansions shone copper and seemed to lean like tombstones away from the ocean. Some of them were
so vast he felt he could see the curve of the earth in their rooflines. He met no cars. No one appeared in die big sun-dazzled windows. Lawns stretched away green and sweet with dew, and Gun thought: No one walks on them.
Harold’s mansion was only a little less immodest. It was high white stucco with black trim and black shingles that looked like slate, three tall stories with an iron-fenced widow’s walk on top and a bed of hibiscus and oleander at the bottom. The flowers went all the way around, contained by a row of some veined jagged stones that poked up unevenly from the earth like emerging bedrock. Gun parked at the curb and didn’t lock the Beretta. In this neighborhood, people didn’t even see Berettas.
He was looking up as one had to do in front of such a place—get this close and it took up so much sky—and didn’t recognize that something did not belong until he’d pulled his eyes back down to the doorway. He turned left, right. Still no cars, no people, no noise but the sea, no motion but the wind. A salt spray reached and dizzied him. He felt he had seen something but lost it before it got to his brain. He looked back to the mansion and a tiny thing fluttered, high up. His eyes grabbed it and hung on. Up on the peak, on one of the iron spikes that bordered the widow’s walk, hung a stocking. The wind caught it and it whipped to the west like a little black flag. A man’s stocking. It moved again, and to Gun it looked like the last living thing in old-money Florida.
Harold didn’t answer the bell and neither did Miss Mary. A rising ache in Gun’s gut told him to get inside the house, and when the door swung open unlocked, it surged up and told him: too late. There was a smell inside of blown-out candles. A cheap old-masters print had come off its nail there in the hall and lay cracked at his feet.
“Harold,” Gun called.
Nothing, and he was afraid of what he’d find.
The elegant high-ceilinged dining room faced the ocean. It had a dark wood hutch exhibiting old plates painted with Wisconsin wildflowers. Next to it a massive oaken table had been tipped up on its side. On the floor a bone pile of forks, knives.
Through an arch and down a hall Gun found the stairway and slipped going up on something wet trickling down the steps. He rubbed his fingers, sniffed. Water. Chemical smell.
There was more abuse on the second floor. Someone had thrown a rocking chair and put a deep bruise in the wall. At the landing above the steps an enormous aquarium lay angled on the floor, water seeping slowly from a prodigious crack. Goldfish gaped and trembled, going dry.
On the next set of stairs Gun felt in his ears the plain preoccupied hum of happy insects. The house felt suddenly far too warm. He shut his eyes and breathed in through his nose and understood about the bugs. It was not an overpowering smell, not yet, but heavy and still. Ripening. He stopped there on the steps, thought of police and Moses and sickness and every just grounds for turning back. A solitary buzzing broke from the pack and Gun looked up to see a fly, a lone bluebottle, heading downstairs. It was big and a slow flyer, tilting a little from side to side as it went, like a satiated partygoer looking for a place to lie down. Nearing him the fly swerved carelessly at his head and he snapped back in something like panic. His head cracked against the wall, steadied him: Up you go.
And then he was up and going room to room and here was Miss Mary at last, in a guest bedroom where all the guests were bluebottle flies. She was on her face, half under the bed. Gun saw four dark pockets
on the white muslin spread and knew they had seen her hiding underneath and simply shot her through the bed, and she died trying to climb out. Miss Mary had hair dyed an unnatural black. It was pulled back from her face, like they’d checked to make sure it was all done before they left. The skin on her cheeks was gray-white and shrunken like stressed leather. Her eyes were half open, brown. Beneath her, blood had wicked into sky-blue carpet, and the color was deepest
Harold was nowhere.
Gun crouched next to the woman and shut his eyes. His stomach was jumping all over him and it needed to stop for him to think. There wasn’t a reason for such slaughter, and yet somehow he didn’t feel surprised. A fly landed on the side of his nose, another on his forehead. They wanted to stay and he had to push them off with his fingers. Damn greedy things, and hundreds of them. They made a racket beyond belief, and even here facing Miss Mary he had to wonder how they’d all got in. And wondering this, he remembered what had seemed so wrong before.
And he knew where to look for Harold.
The steep stairs that led to the roof were behind a narrow door in what he’d taken to be a closet. He went up them in the fresh Atlantic sunlight coming from an open trap at the top. Flies were entering, swooping down. Twelve steps and his head came out into the wind. He saw the weather-smooth walk, its iron handrail. He saw the black sock waving. He pulled himself to the roof, stepping softly on the slate. The widow’s walk went straight along the peak to a huge brick chimney and crossed itself in a , reaching east and west along high gables. West. At the back edge of the roof Gun braced, leaned as far as he could over the handrail, and saw Harold Ibbins lying on his face among the hibiscus. The arms of his bright sun-colored robe were stretched forth like wings. His head
had met the jagged bedrock. And even from on high Gun could see the ripped skin of Harold’s legs, where he’d tried to snag the iron rail and left only a sock snapping on the salt wind.
17
He was thinking as he drove and waiting for a phone booth to show itself, and finally, just when he thought his luck would hold, he saw one. It sat all by itself on a corner with busted-up curbs, out on the west edge where Palm Beach gives out and turns to flat land and weeds and thin roads heading elsewhere. He dropped in coins, information gave him some, and he dropped in more.
“By-Line,” said a young man’s voice. Preoccupied.
“I’d like to leave a message for Taylor Johns,” Gun said.
“She’s in. You can talk to her yourself.”
“I’ll leave the message.”
“Whatever.”
Gun stooped in the phone booth. He wasn’t sure this was the thing to do. Still, someone had to know; and cops could eat your day whole, asking questions. He said, “Tell her to look into an address, Three-two-two-five Coastal. It’s the home of Harold and Mary Ibbins. She’ll probably want the police to go in first—”
The young man snapped out of his dreamy voice. “Sir, you really should talk to her—”
“Tell her Harold was a source in the story Billy
Apple was doing when he got kille
d.” On the line, a pen scratched paper. “The sweet story,” he said, remembering how she’d put it. The one he felt.” He hungup.
Indiantown was more familiar this time around but that didn’t make it nice. The main street had a hot afternoon stink. Gun drove straight to the marina, which smelted of good water and clean diesel engines.
Diane was topside on the Long Napper, kneeling, soaping the teak. She looked up when he stepped
“Back so soon,” she said, not thrilled about it
“Feel like a break?”
She stood a little stiffly with her auburn braid falling forward over a plain blue cotton pullover. The sleeves were pushed up over her elbows. Her hands and forearms glowed with oil soap.
“Billy liked this strange Mexican beer. There’s some cold.” She nodded at the hatch and he went below.
When he came up with two brown bottles she was sitting with the shirt tucked into a pair of drawstring sailor’s pants. Her feet—bare and brown toed, not pale Easterner’s feet—were propped on the teak handrail.
“You look at home here,” Gun said.
“I should. The boat’s half mine.” She accepted a beer. “All mine now, I guess. Billy was all crazy to have a boat but he didn’t have the money. I’d just sold my first script, so I helped him out.”
She had a low clear voice that was good to listen to.
“That’s what you do? Scripts?”
“When it works out. I tutor part-time in Boston, but it’s a flexible job.”
“Theater,” Gun guessed, stalling. He wanted it to be pleasant, being with her.