Double Switch

by T. T. Monday

  “Of course you are!”

  “I’m so glad I caught you. I was wondering if you could help me surprise Connie.”

  “She’s not home?”

  “She went to the gym. We were supposed to meet for breakfast, but I had this team meeting that went long….” My story is far from airtight; I’m hoping the neighbor’s sense of romance will inspire him to go with the flow.

  “Let me guess,” he says with a conspiratorial smirk, “you want me to let you into the apartment so you can make coffee and scramble some eggs, and then, when she arrives from the gym all sweaty and flushed, you will wrap her up in your arms and lift her off to paradise?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Fantastic!” He pauses. “However, there is one problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, there’s the matter of yesterday’s misbehavior.”

  How does this guy know I stood her up? I guess they’re closer than I realized. “I tried to call,” I say, “but the game went long, and we’re not allowed to use our phones—”

  “I’m referring to your behavior on the mound. You hit our young Cuban star with an unprovoked beanball.”

  “Do you follow baseball?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “No, I just…Connie never mentioned it.”

  “It’s a private passion. I have followed the Rockies religiously since their inception. And I have to say, this Cuban man is the most promising development since Tulowitzki.”

  “He’s a beast, for sure.”

  “I understand you may not like him, but surely you recognize that he deserves the chance to compete without the threat of decapitation?”

  “Of course I do.” I try to fill my voice with contrition, bowing my head before continuing. “Can I confess something?”

  The neighbor’s eyes shine. “Absolutely.”

  “You probably know it’s against the rules to throw at a batter. Pitchers never admit they hit a guy on purpose, but most of the time it’s not an accident. Usually, it’s payback for something the other team did.”

  “I’ve read about this. Baseball’s unwritten code of conduct.”

  “That’s it. I’m going to tell you something, but I need to be absolutely sure you can keep it secret. You can’t tell anyone. Not even Connie.”

  “John, most of the people in my life have no idea I follow baseball. You can trust me.”

  I lower my voice. “Remember Ruiz’s home run on Friday?”

  “Second inning, one-two pitch from Wheeler, I believe it was a slider?”

  He pays attention—perfect. “So you remember how he flipped his bat?”

  “What showmanship!” The neighbor grins.

  “Well, we don’t like that sort of thing. Pitchers especially. You don’t see us throwing our gloves when we strike someone out. The code says you don’t celebrate a home run, you just run the bases and take a seat on the bench. So, when a guy like Ruiz does that to my buddy…”

  “Then you hit him.”

  “Ruiz knows the deal. He’s making a choice when he flips his bat. Getting popped in the back is a price he’s willing to pay.”

  “I see.”

  “And, for the record, if I’d wanted to hit him in the head, I would have. I was aiming for his back.”

  The neighbor nods nervously. “Yes, you must have been.”

  “So does that help? Do you understand the situation a little better now?”

  We take the elevator up to Connie’s floor, and I wait as the neighbor fetches her key from his apartment. After he unlocks the door, he holds it for a moment before letting me in. “Let me ask you something, Johnny. Once you hit Ruiz for his indiscretion with the bat, is the score settled? How do you know that one of our pitchers won’t hit you in retaliation?”

  “That’s up to Ruiz. Watch his next home run. See if he flips the bat.”

  “I had no idea the code was real,” the neighbor says meekly.

  I slip into the apartment and shut the door. Through the peephole, I watch him retreat into his apartment. I hope I didn’t rock his world too badly, especially because it was a lie: the code is real, but Ruiz wasn’t due to get popped. Bat flips aren’t as controversial as they once were. Yesterday’s “misbehavior” was all mine. I hit Ruiz by my own free will.

  The air in Connie’s apartment is still and warm. Cozy, as usual. But when I turn around and face the living room, it’s like my worst nightmare has come true. Blood has been sprayed over the sofa and smeared against the walls. More blood has pooled under the coffee table. Directly above me, a woman in a familiar knee-length asymmetrical dress hangs by her neck from a rope.

  I open my mouth to scream.

  Then I look closely. It’s not a body but a vinyl blow-up doll, a sex toy. It’s hanging low and heavy on the noose, more like a sandbag or an Italian cheese than a balloon. I realize that the doll is filled with liquid. Blood, or something standing in for blood, is leaking from a tiny hole in the doll’s left foot.

  The details are eerily accurate: The dark wig has the same cut and styling Connie wore the night before last. The eyeglasses are a close match, and there’s a library book taped under one arm. It’s an odd effect; I can’t decide if it’s meant to be horrifying or Rocky Horror. Despite the costume, the doll cannot overcome that fuck-me face, the eternally puckered mouth, the innocent anime eyes. It’s like Betty Boop dressed as a librarian for Halloween. But when you consider how this must have looked to Connie, any irony drops away. A line of blood runs from the doll’s mouth over her chin and down her neck. Effigy—that’s what this is called. Connie has been murdered in effigy.

  I bend down and touch the “blood” on the sofa. It’s dry. The puddle under the coffee table is still sticky in the middle, where the drip hits, but the rest is congealed. It feels like latex paint.

  I spin around and reach for the door, but my hip knocks the edge of the unsteady little table where Connie drops her keys and purse. The table falls over, and the surprise—I’m jacked on adrenaline—knocks me backward against the hat rack on the opposite side of the doorway. The hat rack topples over, and now I’m on my ass in a sea of coats and farmers’-market tote bags, hoping the neighbor is back in his apartment out of earshot.

  Then, on the floor, I see something, a single sheet of paper that must have fallen off the table. It’s an itinerary from an airline website. The flight departed yesterday, at 3:05 p.m. The destination was San Francisco, and the passenger, printed plainly in black ink, was OCONNELL, CONSTANCE/MS.

  21

  “Airport, huh?” Keith twists around in the driver’s seat. His orange hair is lit up like a halo by the mile-high sun. “Don’t you have a game?”

  “My arm hurts, so they’re sending me ahead.”

  Since Keith raises no objection to this logic, I proceed with my plan. “I have a present for you.” I reach up and hand him back his holster—and, inside it, the Glock.

  “Mr. Adcock, I can’t take this.”

  “Sure you can. You don’t have to tell Tiff.”

  “No, I mean, I really can’t. We’d have to file paperwork to get the ownership transferred. It’s a huge pain in the ass.”

  “You can accept it as a gift, or you can watch me throw it in the river. Those are the options. I have no luggage to check, and I can’t take it on the plane with me.”

  “The river? Christ, no…”

  “Your choice.”

  After a long pause, he says, “How about this? I’ll hold this weapon for you, and next time you’re in Denver, I can give it back.”

  “Like a gun share? I like it. It’s Zipcar for firearms.”

  “If that’s how you want to think of it, sure. But, technically, it’s still your gun.”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “And legally?”

  “Legally, it’s also still mine.”

  He smiles. “You’re a good guy, Adcock. Good things are coming to you, mark my words.”

 
“I hope you’re right.”

  He taps the holster on the passenger’s seat. “Hope’s got nothing to do with it.”

  —

  The next flight to the Bay Area (San José, as it turns out) doesn’t leave for two hours, so I take a seat near an unused gate and make some phone calls. First, of course, I try Connie. Still no answer. I don’t know what to make of the fact that she left town without telling me. So much for the theory that she was angry because I stood her up: she herself was a thousand miles from Denver when we were supposed to meet for dinner. Her father lives in a small town north of San Francisco. I suspect that’s where she went, but it still doesn’t explain why she isn’t answering my calls. Life in Healdsburg is slow, but they do have cell service.

  With some time to kill, I decide to do some digging on Kitty Marlborough, Jock’s allegedly unfaithful wife, following the leads he gave me last night. A Google search leads me to the website of the San Mateo County Association of Realtors. Apparently, Kitty Marlborough gave a presentation last night at a Marriott in Daly City, as part of a daylong training on changes to the county’s zoning ordinances. Jock is lucky the meeting was held at a Marriott. Five minutes later, I have Ken Briggman on the phone—Ken is head of security for Marriott’s Western region. We met several years ago, during a bomb scare at the team hotel in Seattle. Since then, I’ve cultivated him with tickets and club passes. Now it’s time to pay the scalper.

  “Is this Ken? Johnny Adcock here.”

  “Adcock! Long time, hombre. Qué pasa?”

  Before I go any further, I have to explain that Ken Briggman is the whitest man I’ve ever met. His hair is the color of rice noodles, and his eyebrows are translucent. He’s Mormon and lives in Salt Lake with his wife and six kids. I’m on his Christmas-card list. The glare from the eight blond heads is blinding.

  “Got a favor to ask, Ken. A friend of mine has a problem with his mother. He thinks she’s fooling around behind his dad’s back.”

  “This another player?”

  “A future Hall of Famer, as a matter of fact.”

  “No kidding. Is it Modigliani?”

  “I can’t give you the name, but I sure would appreciate your help.”

  Briggman turns serious. “Absolutely. What do you need?”

  “There was an event last night at the Junípero Serra Marriott….”

  “Property 00564. Daly City, California. A hundred guest rooms plus a conference facility including an extensible ballroom and half a dozen breakout chambers.”

  “That’s the place. If I send you a photo of someone, would you be able to find her on your security tapes?”

  Briggman chuckles. “Officially, no, but—confidentially?—00564 is one of three facilities in the region where we’re piloting OmniSentry.”

  “OmniSentry?”

  “It’s a military-grade surveillance-and-analysis package. Multi-angle video, infrared filters, facial recognition. It’s the same system they use at the Pentagon. The corporate guys in Maryland are considering it for deployment across all our conference facilities next fiscal year, but they wanted some site testing first. The vendor agreed to let us do it, but only under the condition that we do it silently. I guess they don’t want it known that we’ve installed the system without federal clearance. See, because this was originally DOD technology, there are all kinds of clearances….”

  “I understand completely.” (Not at all, but I don’t have time for details.) “Can you find her if I tell you when and where she did a presentation? I’m interested to know where she went afterward, and with whom.”

  “You know,” Briggman says, “this could actually be super-useful to us. I mean, the whole rationale behind the system deployment is to give us the capability to track persons of interest—as in suspicious characters, but also high-value targets like presidents and foreign heads of state, that kind of thing.”

  So Kitty Marlborough will get the head-of-state treatment. Not bad for a philandering realtor.

  “You’ll do it, then?”

  “Like I said, officially, no. But send me the photo, and we’ll see what falls onto my screen.”

  22

  By late afternoon, I’m in downtown San José. My apartment is on the twenty-first floor of a new building a few blocks from the ballpark. For me, the five-minute commute makes this place a no-brainer, but most of my teammates prefer to rent homes in the hills, where the neighborhoods are full of culs-de-sac and pregnant wives in workout clothes. That I own my condo is even stranger; these days, ballplayers change teams so often that they rarely own real estate, except back where they grew up or in Florida or Arizona, one of the spring-training locations. I know guys whose “homes” are storage lockers in Tempe. Another guy belongs to a country club in Scottsdale but doesn’t have a permanent address. “You can always find a hotel room,” he says, “but not a tee time.”

  The apartment smells like cleaning solution. The housekeepers come once a week, whether or not I’m in town. Aside from a few personal artifacts (mostly in Izzy’s room) and the fact that I own it, this place might as well be a hotel. But the sterility doesn’t bother me. If you live on the road long enough, you learn to give up sentimental attachments to place.

  I turn on the TV and watch my team getting thrashed in Denver. Baseball looks so neat and tidy on television, with the two dozen camera angles and all the relevant counts and scoring encapsulated in that corner display. Out on the field, you keep track of the count, the outs, and the runners on base, and that’s it. At home you’ve got the players’ statistics and history, the weight of all those numbers on the screen, plus whatever the announcers are saying. On the field it’s almost silent between pitches, even on the mound. When you’re pitching well, it feels like jogging, just you and your body, moving as you have trained it to move. This is what pitchers mean when they talk about finding their rhythm. It’s about finding a way to be alone with yourself with forty thousand people looking on.

  The Rockies triumph, 11–4, and the Adcockless Bay Dogs fall three games behind the Dodgers in the National League West. Skipper is not going to be happy. Nobody’s going to be happy. I’m angry with myself, even if the loss is not my fault, because my anger isn’t just about the loss. Ordinarily, I don’t feel too bad when investigations turn sour—when the trail goes cold and I have to report failure to my client. Normally, I can just say: Well, what did you expect? I’m not a detective, I’m a relief pitcher! But today I’m not even a pitcher. I’m just a guy on his couch, watching baseball on TV. And this time the case touches me personally. I should be out searching for my girlfriend. I had every intention of getting on my bike and driving up to Sonoma to look for Connie, but I’m drained. The last twenty-four hours have been exhausting.

  And then the impossible occurs.

  The intercom buzzes. I mute the TV and go to the door. Through the fish-eye lens of the security camera, I see a woman with chin-length dark hair and fair skin. She’s wearing glasses, a short skirt, and a tight-fitting sweater set from Benetton or H&M. The back of my neck tingles. The resolution on the tiny screen isn’t very good, but when she looks up at the camera, the eyes are unmistakable. It’s Connie.

  I tap the button. The elevators in my building are fast, and she shouldn’t have to wait long at this hour. What time is it, anyway? Five-thirty? It’s unlike Connie to make a surprise visit. Then again, I believed it was unlike her to disappear without telling me.

  The doorbell rings as I’m fiddling with the stereo, looking for something with female vocals, something emotional. Izzy sent me an album by a woman called St. Vincent, who has the face of Peter Pan and the hair of Albert Einstein. The music is interesting, lots of syncopated drums and processed guitar sounds. Not exactly soothing, but it will have to do for now.

  I check my hair, my teeth, my fly. I open the door.

  Standing in the hall, backlit by the lights from the elevator lobby, is not Constance O’Connell but Tiff Tate. The resemblance is uncanny: her cheeks have the same
freckles, her hair the same color and texture. The makeup is Connie’s, as is the reticent smile. The eyes must be contacts, but the color match is perfect. Still, there’s no question it’s Tiff. Her shoulders are wider than Connie’s. She’s fuller in the breasts and hips. The disguise isn’t meant to be foolproof. It was meant to fool a security camera, and it passed that test handsomely. Tiff steps past me into my apartment. She takes it in with a sweeping glance.

  “Nice place,” she says. “Do you have any idea what this would cost in New York?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She whirls around and gathers the front of my shirt in her fist. “I did a bad thing, Johnny.” Her voice is full of sex, but her eyes are wet, like she’s going to cry. “I was mean and inconsiderate, and it’s eating me up inside.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lifting my shirt with one hand, she slides the other down the front of my jeans. My body reacts as conditioned. (As I said, she looks a lot like Connie.)

  “I screwed up,” she says.

  “What did you do?”

  “Let me relax first,” she says. “Bedroom’s which way?”

  She follows me into the master suite, where she pushes me onto the bed. We begin kissing, first softly, then with increasing force, until she is pulling my tongue deep into her mouth. I relieve her of the sweater and skirt. She’s not wearing any underwear. I see that she is in shape, not ripped but attractive. Her breasts are larger than I expected and almost certainly natural, with wide, dark nipples that suggest—if I’m reading them correctly—that she may be dark-complexioned in her default configuration. She has no tan lines anywhere. I tug off my jeans, grab a rubber from the nightstand, and slide inside her. She moans hoarsely—I guess the Connie impersonation is over—and asks me to bite her nipples. It’s like a magic trick: she comes right away. She allows me to finish, and I roll off.

  “Feel better?” I ask when I’ve regained my breath.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “What’s so horrible that you had to be hammered flat before you could tell me about it?”