by L. L. Enger
Once his clothes had dried enough to put back on, he and Carol had driven the snowmobile back to Leo’s, which was closed up. They found Jack in his truck in the parking lot, half asleep and half frozen. He listened to their story, unimpressed as usual, then asked two questions. First, was Gun going to let anyone know about Neil Faust? Gun explained what Jimmy Boone was going to do in the morning. Second, Jack wanted to know, could he go home to bed now?
“Not that I’ve done a blessed thing. But if it’s all the same to you, I’m ready to call it a night.” He was behind the wheel of his truck, and Gun and Carol shared the wide seat with him. “In fact,” he said, “I might tap you to drive us back, Carol. You seem a little perky, still. I’m afraid I’d just run us off the road.”
Gun told Jack thanks and kissed Carol good-bye, once on the mouth and once on the forehead. With his thumb he smoothed away the vertical lines there. Then he got out of the truck and watched them pull away, north toward Stony. He was still standing in the parking lot when Jack’s Scout came to a stop fifty yards up the road and Carol and Jack switched places. But then instead of moving forward, the truck backed up until it was next to Gun again. Carol, in the driver’s seat, rolled down her window. She said, “My grandpa always did that, kissed me on the forehead before I left.”
“I like your forehead.”
“You’re not my grandpa, though.”
“True enough, and I’m grateful for that.”
“Gun, I’m glad you’re all right. I don’t know what I’d do ...” Carol wasn’t a woman who cried, but the shake in her chin did some damage to Gun’s control. He clenched his jaw and swallowed, then reached for her face.
“Now leave the right impression, or I’m not going anywhere,” Carol said.
He leaned down and took his time with the kiss, thinking, Remember this when you see Diane Apple.
Neil Faust’s address was easy to find, just a few blocks off Highway 81 in a neighborhood of large older homes and mature trees. Gun parked a block north and approached the house by way of the alley.
There was no fence to block his way, and plenty of light to work by, thanks to a gas lamp in the backyard. No neighbors to worry about, either; the house was separated from those on both sides by tall evergreen hedges. He simply walked up to the rear porch, broke the window of the door with a mittened hand, and
unlocked it. Inside, he jimmied a storm window with, his pocket knife, then hoisted on the sash, popping its lock. Crawling through onto a white corduroy couch, he told himself he should really spend some time learning the finer points of breaking and entering. It made him uncomfortable, wrecking things like this. The point was to get inside, not advertise that you’d been there.
He searched quickly, using the small flashlight he’d picked up on the drive down at an all-night gas and grocery along with a quart of buttermilk and a ham and cheese. The first floor gave nothing. The telephone stand held a small Rolodex but it seemed to have been weeded. Not more than a dozen names were left, all of them local sports or news figures. On the second floor Gun found a study, two walls of books and two covered by photographs of a smiling Neil Faust posing with various jocks, mostly Twins and Vikings from past and present. Kent Hrbek, Kirby Puckett, Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Herschel Walker, Fran Tarkenton. Also Greg LeMond, and a mammoth-size, bald George Foreman. No Moses Gates, though. And no Rott Weiler.
A careful look through the desk produced nothing of interest except for a small brass key that opened an oak file cabinet in the bedroom one door over. There Gun found an unorganized nightmare of old check stubs, tax forms, utility and credit card bills, insurance records. He didn’t spend long sorting through it all, but just before he gave up, he came across a notebook he couldn’t pass up, a small one, the kind reporters took notes on, and this one had only a few pages filled. There were names of resorts and hotels, mostly in the Caribbean, and next to each name, food-and service-rating quotations from a travel guide. There were tentative flights and dates, cost calculations. And on the inside cover of the notebook was written funds for fun in the sun, much embellished with an ink pen, and followed by a phone number with a Florida prefix. Gun tore out the page and stuck it in his wallet. He made a cursory search through the rest of the house before leaving.
At the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, he bought a nonstop flight for West Palm Beach, then found a phone. He dialed the Florida number and waited five rings for someone to pick it up.
“Yeah, Casper’s place,” a woman said. “Casper?”
“That’s what I said, didn’t I? Who is this, anyway?” “Casper Johnson?” Gun said, fishing. The woman laughed at him. “Pal, you got the wrong Casper. Adios, now.”
29
When Gun woke up the wheels of the Boeing were just hitting the runway and the white glare of Florida was coming in all over. Sleeping in the air was a talent he’d learned flying around the American League those seventeen years—trust the plane, let it hum you to sleep, turn on the overhead air and aim it at your eyelids. He’d got on the plane needing the rest and used it to forget Neil Faust for a while. Awake now he had Neil with him again, and when the big door opened and warm ocean air washed into the plane he had Harold Ibbins there, too, and Miss Mary. He got up and out with his duffel bag and the heavy air stuck to his skin like flies.
At the motel he took a long warm shower. He heard the phone ringing and thought, Let it wait.
It waited half an hour.
“Gun Pedersen,” he said into the phone.
“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you all for two days here. Name’s Pastor Floyd Wedfield, Harristown, Pennsylvania? I understand you’re inquiring after a Weiler.” The man spoke quickly for a southerner, and his voice was high and confident.
“That’s right, Pastor,” Gun said. “Thanks for—”
“Which one exactly you want to hear about?” he asked. “Lots of Weilers and Weiler relations, some of them following fairly clean lines and others awful muddied up, you know what I mean? Ever hear of that song, ‘I’m My Own Brother’s Dad and My Sister Calls Me Uncle’?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“But you get the idea.”
Gun said, “Robert Weiler’s the one I’m wondering about. I just wanted to know if you remember him and whether you knew his parents.”
“I knew him and I know them. You make it sound like they’re buried already.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Oh, they might wish they were, some days. Sam’s got a bad old pump that puts him to bed every few weeks and Almona’s hands are curled up like crabs from writin’ letters to her kids, but I guess for their age that’s not so bad.”
“We’re talking Rott’s parents now?” Gun asked. “Robert Weiler: Minnesota Twins, San Francisco Giants, Philadelphia—”
“Biggest thing ever happened to Harristown, Pennsylvania. Biggest head ever to come forth from between a woman’s thighs.”
“Rott told me his parents were dead,” Gun said.
“He always figured he deserved better than what he got himself born into. That sort of kid, that sort of
man. I don’t think his folks’ve seen him in a decade. Longer. And they still live in the same board shack on the same rented land. No phone or flush pot.”
“He’d have you believe he comes from Civil War generals, old plantations, slaveholders. Cotton money.”
“Well, now. There is money someplace. Not here, mind you, but somewhere. Rumor’s got it that some relations—don’t ask me what kind or when—moved down to Florida and got rich there—and don’t ask me how, neither. I can’t begin to guess.”
Gun thought about Rott’s farm and the year it was built. “Any way I could talk to his parents?”
“I’m not even gonna tell them you called. These people don’t need to hear what you’ve got to say, and what could they tell you anyway? Look, Robert’s got them killed in his mind, and I think they’ve finally let him die in theirs. Can’t we just leave it like that?”
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He stopped at the By-Line office on the way to Indiantown. Taylor Johns met him at the entrance and led him up the stairs and into her office with a stern briskness that made him feel he was about to be reprimanded. Closing the blond-wood door on the cubicle maze she put her back to it and faced him.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “I appreciate the tip. Billy would’ve appreciated it more. He worked that way.”
Gun tried not to put anything on his face she could read.
“All our experienced reporters were tied up. I was showing our new kid around when I got your message about the Ibbinses.” She was pretending to look around the room, but the corner of an eye was always on him. He said nothing. She said, “He was promising. The new kid. Straight out of a Tallahassee classroom, but he smelled a story and volunteered to go out and get it. He wanted to make front page on his first day.”
“Ambitious,” Gun said.
“Not anymore. Now he’s in therapy, asking his analyst whether he should join the Peace Corps or sue his alma mater for educating him in a field so jolting to his psyche. He found them,” she said, “just as you must have. Kid on his first story. Do you know, after we went to press, how many people wanted the identity of the mysterious tipster?”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth. That we didn’t have a name.” She came away from the door and somehow summoned enough height to look Gun in the eye. “I don’t know why you were out at the Ibbins place, but I’m sure it’s because of Billy’s Moses Gates crusade. No. I don’t want to know. But you’re doing things just how Billy would’ve done them, and look where it got him.”
She subsided like a slow echo and gave him his first chance to say why he’d come. He pulled a folded By-Line clipping from his pocket.
“Why’d you run this last week?”
She squinted forward, took the clipping. “The Faust editorial.” She sighed. “It’s infuriating. Not at all what Billy would’ve liked.”
“So why run it?”
“Not my decision. It’s a local issue, so the Op-Ed people look for interesting angles on it. This is the sort of thing that gets readership.”
“It’s inflammatory, it’s misinformed—” he began.
“Yes, yes,” said Taylor Johns, a bit of hard business coming into her face, “and it’s also, in a way, what kept me from telling the cops you tipped us the Ibbins story. I’d forgotten that when Billy first pitched me this Moses Gates thing, he showed me a sample of the sort of hatchet job some of the writers did on Gates back in seventy-seven. Trial by press, he said, and in
retrospect that’s just what it was.” She had a file drawer open and was prospecting intensely, her fingers scissoring through newsprint. She slowed, plucked a file. “Look.”
It was a photocopy of an old City Beat editorial. Minneapolis, 1977. The heading in bold capitals read simply faust, with a photo of smug Neil over the letters. Above the picture a teaser:
Columnist Reveals Source, Motive
Orlando—Watch. They’re going to call it a suicide.
Three nights ago Jerry Gammer, who locks up Tinker Field when our Minnesota Twinkies are through with practice, was making a last check of the stadium when he found outfielder Ferdie Millevich hanging by a power cord from the press box. The discovery understandably caused violent distress to Mr. Gammer’s digestive system, and has in fact unsettled the rest of baseball society as well.
Here’s why I, for one, am feeling queasy.
In recent weeks, this column has taken more than a casual glance at the preseason fire storm that is the Minnesota Twins’ training camp. You, faithful reader, have been treated to a major-league display of internal combustion, which is good for engines but not baseball teams. And things overheated.
It started when a Twins player began speaking out in this space about problems that’ve pestered the Minnesota organization for years. He spoke on the condition of anonymity, and some of the things he said put both the front office and the other players on edge. He said: 1) that Twins’ owner Calvin Griffith regularly does other than he says during contract negotiations, 2) that Cal is a practicing bigot who’s wanted for years to trade that uppity Rod Carew, and 3) that several key players have said they’re going to lie back this season and not play all-out, since it’s plain old Cal will just trade them anyhow if they start, somehow, to win.
You can see why the player wanted anonymity. None of what he said was exactly new to people who know the Twins, but none of it was very nice, either. It doesn’t matter now, because the player’s name was Ferdie Millevich, and he is dead.
It’s this prophet’s guess we’re going to hear that poor Ferdie was so unhappy that he did himself in. Don’t believe it.
It’s no writer’s duty to project doubt on the innocent, but read on and see if you don’t think a little projecting is in order here. This spring I’ve spent more time in the clubhouse with Our Gang than the Beat or any other decent paper would pay me for, and the word for the way Ferdie got treated I’d get spanked for using. The trouble with being an anonymous source is that it’s hard to stay anonymous. Things tend to get loose in clubhouses. Things like who’s bad-mouthing whom. Ferdie might have thought he had a secret, but the Twins knew.
It showed in how they talked to him. Once upon a time there was gladness in the Twinks’ clubhouse; they seemed to be happy with themselves even if nobody else was. Not this spring. Walk in after practice and you better have your chain mail on because everybody is in a biting mood, and it seemed like Ferdie Millevich was bleeding the most. You want incidents? Think. Who was it shortstop Donny Miner threatened to take a piece of moments after the Twinks’ first spring-training loss to Cincinnati? Ferdie Millevich. Who’s locker was humor-lessly packed with a fresh load of junk straight from the dairy-barn floor? Ferdie’s. And what was it our own venerable catcher, Mr. Moses Gates, had to say after reading the first of our “nameless source” columns?
What was that, Moze?
If memory serves, and it usually does, Moses said the troublemaker we were quoting ought to be strung up. Strung up.
Don’t mind me, folks. I’m just doing a little projecting. Thinking out loud while we wait for the coroner’s report.
If they say suicide, I’m gonna be sick.
“To be nailed like that,” said Taylor Johns, seeing him finish, “without defense. It’s unimaginable. Billy was absolutely right. Moses never lost the shadow.”
Gun breathed deeply. Reading the old column had sunk him right back in the wreck of 1977. And his own, three years later. He felt old shards of anger working through, anger at the thing in people that always wanted to know the worst, or make it up when necessary. He said, “So. Why didn’t you tell on me?”
When she answered it was softly. “Because Billy was right, and because you’re doing it just as he would’ve.”
“And look where it got him,” Gun said.
“Yes. Be careful.”
He told her he would, of course, and going out into the uncomplicated Florida sun he let a little of the anger go off from him. Because, he remembered, there was Diane to see, and Neil Faust for all his nastiness was drifting in a deeper, colder Hell than he’d ever hoped to grace.
Diane had chilled the wine he’d bought at Cliffert’s but they didn’t feel much like drinking it.
“You’ve been to Minnesota?” she asked. She wore a pale yellow skirt cut full and a loose white blouse. She’d freed her hair from the braid and some of it blew forward over her shoulders like a cinnamon breeze. The deck of the Long Napper was soaped and glowing in the sun slant.
“There was a man there I had to talk to. Newspaper man,” Gun said.
“About Moses? Or Billy?”
“Both. This was one of the guys who made things hard for Moses back when Ferdie Millevich died. Jumped on him like he’d seen Moses do the deed himself.” He shook his head. “Columnists with a grudge make you wonder pretty hard about freedom of the press.”
&
nbsp; “You, especially,” she said.
He’d imagined that Diane didn’t know enough of his background to understand his dislike of journalists. Some journalists. He saw her smiling at him and there was some new comprehension in her face, a grasp of him that had not been there before; but there was the smile, too, and so he smiled back and said, “Me, especially.”
“Did he know Billy?”
Gun leaned his head back and followed the line of the Mapper’s mast with his eyes. He still felt grimy and thick with all the travel and what he had to tell her wasn’t going to improve things.
“Diane, he more than knew him. I think he gave your brother the information that killed him.”
She leaned forward. “He told you this?”
“No. But I think he was the guy Billy had just come back from seeing before he was murdered.”
“Wait—”
“It’s what Moses said. That your brother called him that night saying he’d just gotten back, that he’d gotten the big break on the story. I think Faust was the break.”
“Billy’s last interview,” she said. She was soft for a moment and then was on her feet, stalking around the
deck. “I never actually believed it. That he died because of some broken-down ballplayer he felt sorry for. It just didn’t seem right, not when there were so many stories out there that were so much more— more threatening.” She spoke faster, pacing. “You talked to this Faust? What did he say? Listen, I’m going tonight, to Minnesota I mean—”
“There’s no need,” Gun said quietly.
She stopped and stood facing him with the sun behind her hair.
“Faust’s dead.”
She backed to the rail and gripped it, the fingers going white with pink half dimes beneath the nails.
He said, “I never got to talk to him. We were out on the ice, he was trying to lose me.”
She didn’t say anything. It was hell to explain.
“The ice broke. I couldn’t reach him.”
Diane turned and looked over the water. Gun came near her and the wind brought her hair back until a few strands of it touched his arm. She was so quiet Gun didn’t know she was crying until she spoke and it was in her voice. “I can’t get used to this,” she said. “All these people dying.”