Double Switch

by T. T. Monday

  “But that’s not your job.”

  Feldspar looks at me. “Incorrect. My job is to protect you, and if you’re going to continue to place yourself in situations where you end up arrested or in jail, then it is very much my business to uncover your lies. And I will uncover them, Adcock. Make no frickin’ mistake about that.”

  The tenor of the conversation has changed just as quickly as the landscape: we are now skirting the misty hills of Tiburon, carving our way down to the bridge. The rental car goes dark as we plow into a tunnel.

  “You got lucky this time,” Feldspar says. “If I hadn’t once witnessed Jack Vasquez slipping his fingers into a stripper’s thong, you might be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. Lead story on SportsCenter, a disgrace to the sport, et cetera et cetera. Guilty or not, it doesn’t matter—your career would be over. And you know what? Nobody in baseball would give a shit. You’re nothing, Adcock. Kids don’t buy tickets to see you. The game would go on, remember that.”

  “Hold on,” I protest, “I went for a ride in the country on my day off, and you assume I’m acting out?”

  “Save your breath. That part of our conversation is over. I think I’ve made it clear what will happen if we catch you working a case. And, really, what are you hoping to accomplish, anyway? You get paid over a million bucks a year to throw a ball. Leave the crime fighting to the authorities. Do you know how many cops would quit their jobs to have your life? Assholes like you make me crazy. You don’t realize what you have.”

  Did this rental car come with a soapbox?

  “Same thing with these jackasses selling cars or whatever on TV….When I was playing ball, guys like George Brett and Jim Palmer did commercials because the pay was low, relatively speaking, and they knew their shelf life was limited. Nowadays, you all make so much in salary that it’s obvious when someone’s doing an endorsement out of greed.”

  Now and then you find yourself in a situation like this. The union advises players never to talk about their contracts, and this is one of the reasons why. The best strategy is to say nothing. It’s your right to remain silent, after all.

  “Maybe you’ve heard this story,” Feldspar says. “Do you remember Marvin Miller? You probably don’t. He was the head of the players’ association back in the day. Well, Miller was standing around the batting cage one day in San Francisco, and he said to the guy he was with, ‘You see Bobby Bonds over there? I’ll bet you one day that his son makes more money in a single season than Willie Mays has made in his career.’ And you know what? Turns out he was wrong! Turns out Barry Bonds made more in one year than the entire freaking Giants team made in their careers. And you’re saying that, on top of that, you need to sell me a car? It’s disgusting….”

  Of course, I’m not saying anything of the sort. No car companies are knocking on my door. In fact, my value to a brand may be less than zero. I recently had the displeasure to discover that in the Bay Dogs’ stadium shop a baseball autographed by me sells for less than an unsigned ball. But I let Feldspar finish his rant. I understand why he feels this way. I’d say the same things if I were in his shoes.

  “Times have changed,” I say.

  “You got that right.”

  “And about the other thing, don’t worry. I’m done with investigations. From here on, it’s just baseball.”

  “We’ll see, Adcock.”

  “Thanks for saving my ass. You know, it’s amazing what you’ve done, bridging careers and all.”

  “What do you say we cut the bullshit?”

  “Excuse me? I was trying to pay a compliment.”

  “Let me remind you that I put you on your ass once, and I’m trained, willing, and ready to do it again if need be.”

  “Hey, now—”

  “Now that we have some time to talk, why don’t you tell me what you know about the Magnusson case?”

  The SUV rumbles onto the bridge deck. Beside the roadway, tourists lean on cruiser bikes, taking in the view of Alcatraz. The San Francisco skyline sparkles in the distance, the bay spread out before it like a shark-infested welcome mat.

  “I know he was a friend of yours.”

  “Is it against the law to have friends?”

  “You sound like my teenage son. Murder always has a reason, Adcock. Do your friend a favor. Help me figure out why he was killed.”

  So the cops have determined he was murdered. I should feel vindicated, but I don’t.

  “I’d tell you why if I knew.”

  “I’m sure you would. I’m just asking for your help. What if I told you that Yonel Ruiz lived with Erik Magnusson for a month last winter?”

  “A month? He said it was only a week.”

  “So you two talked about Ruiz?”

  “Only once, briefly.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Just that Ruiz stayed with him before he got his own place.”

  “How did that go?”

  “Fine.”

  “No arguments, fights?”

  “He didn’t mention any.”

  “So he didn’t say anything about Ruiz that would make you want to peg him in the back with a fastball?” Before I can answer, Feldspar looks me in the eye and says, “We both know the ball didn’t slip. And there’s no need to keep lying about it. You served your suspension—the case is closed. So you might as well be honest.”

  “I had my reasons.” There’s more I could tell him—about my batting-practice conversation with Ruiz, about Tiff Tate, about La Loba—and some of it may be useful to him, who knows? But to tell him any of it would involve admitting that I’m still working the detective beat. He’s been very clear about the consequences there.

  “Was it just your typical beef?” Feldspar suggests. “Remember, I was a pitcher once. I know the deal. It could have been that someone on the Rockies threw at one of your guys the day before. It could have been payback for a home run earlier in the game, I don’t know. But you have to admit, the coincidence is—what’s the word—conspicuous? Your friend Erik Magnusson is killed in his office, and the next afternoon you plunk Ruiz, who happened to live with Magnusson when he was fresh off the boat.”

  “Like you said, it’s a coincidence.”

  Feldspar exhales dramatically as he accelerates through the FasTrak toll gate. “You think I’m an idiot, don’t you?” He pauses. “Don’t say anything; I know the answer. I would probably think the same thing if I were you. Here’s this cop—because that’s what I am to you, right? And you’re not wrong, in a way. Here’s this cop who wants to spoil my fun. So why should I speak to him? What has he ever done for me?”

  “I thanked you, Feldspar. I appreciate what you did up there.”

  “I know you do. But I think you’re wrong about me. You and me, we’re not that different. I’m working to protect the game of baseball, the institution of baseball, this game we all love and cherish. I don’t know for sure, but I have a hunch you’re doing the same thing. I mean, why would you risk life and limb to chase some dead player’s wife to Tijuana? You don’t even bill your clients. It’s a labor of love, Adcock. I know what you’re doing, because I’m doing the same thing.”

  “I assume you get paid.”

  “I do, but it’s a fraction of what I could make in another position. Do you know how much ex–Secret Service guys can pull down as private security consultants? I have a friend who went to Abu Dhabi—do you know where that is?”

  “I get it. You’re one of the good guys.”

  “I know stuff you don’t know,” he says. “Through my network, through my position, I have access to information you don’t have. About Magnusson. About Ruiz. You don’t have to say anything. I’m done asking questions. But if you want to talk, you know how to reach me.”

  27

  Feldspar leaves me in front of my building. I’m surprised how calm I feel, given the events of the day, until I find myself alone in the elevator and my nerves start releasing what they’ve been holding back. I start to sweat. I keep think
ing of those bodies hanging from the wine tanks—a middle-aged man and his wife, the detectives informed us, not the owners of the vineyard but a couple of retired teachers who worked part-time in the tasting room.

  Maybe Feldspar is right. Maybe I should turn this one over to him and his buddies. I wouldn’t want a police detective pitching the eighth inning—what makes me think I can do their job?

  In a word: arrogance. Which isn’t necessarily a negative in sports. Without arrogance, how does someone like me think he can slip a ball past a monster like Yonel Ruiz? I heard an interview with a novelist who claimed that all writers are egomaniacs. Who else, he argued, believes that what he has to say is so important that it should be printed on millions of dead trees and sold for $26.95 per copy? Pitchers think that way, too. When a guy walks up to the plate with a bat on his shoulder, we think: Fuck that, I’ll show him who owns the zone. It’s infantile, but it’s never going to change. Ballplayers are babies, and everyone knows you can’t reason with a baby.

  My phone ran out of juice in Sonoma. I wasn’t able to check my messages during the long ride home with Feldspar. When I finally plug in, I see a missed call from Briggman at the Marriott and another from Anibal Martín. It’s too late to call Cuba, so I dial Salt Lake. Briggman answers on the first ring.

  “Adcock, I found your lady.” He laughs. “You didn’t tell me about the hair!”

  Imagine a senior citizen with the hairstyle of a 1960s Bond girl, dyed coal black and teased from the roots. That’s Kitty Marlborough, and, despite the ghastly appearance, she’s a pleasure to be around, kind and soft-spoken with a laugh that comes easily and often. At charity dinners she is always the first wife to welcome the parents of the cancer-stricken child, the disaster survivors, the widows of the fallen marines. I never would have pegged her for an adulteress. Maybe she’s not. Maybe this will be the exception that proves the rule.

  “I’m going to send you a clip. Hold on a sec….” I hear rustling on Briggman’s end, and then my phone vibrates with a new message. On the screen I see a grainy video frame. I press play.

  We are in a hotel conference room, looking over ten or fifteen rows of spectators toward a dais where the presenter stands at a podium. The unmistakable bouffant of Kitty Marlborough looms behind the microphone. Some kind of digital filter has been applied so that Kitty’s head appears brighter, like there’s a spotlight trained on her face. She is smiling, gesturing with both hands as she speaks. She’s wearing business attire, a double-breasted suit over a light-colored blouse. Next to the podium, an older man sits at a table. Behind them, a projector screen displays some kind of map. The security camera must be located somewhere high on the rear wall, or maybe in the ceiling, because we’re watching this from high above.

  “Is there sound?” I ask.

  “Just watch,” Briggman says.

  Kitty finishes her presentation—or I gather that she finishes, because the map disappears and she walks away from the podium. The man at the table stands up. They shake hands. He leads the audience in a round of applause.

  “It’s neat what OmniSentry is trying to do with this system,” Briggman says. “They’re addressing the problem we have in the security industry of too many cameras and not enough time. You can cover every square foot of a property with cameras, but someone needs to watch the footage if you’re going to get any value out of it. OmniSentry does all that for you. You upload a couple photos of someone, and it creates a mathematical fingerprint of that person’s face, then searches all the footage and cuts together a montage. Or you can just watch in real time, following the person through the facility. It’s kind of brilliant.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so, but I’m twisted.”

  Cut to another camera, this one a view of a lobby carpeted in a wide geometrical pattern, elevators in the distance. Well-dressed men and women drift into the frame from the right. Briggman’s software highlights Kitty’s face in the crowd. She is shaking hands and smiling—working the room, as I’ve seen her do so many times.

  Another cut and we’re in a hallway; this picture is grainier than the last two, and, unlike the others, it is only black and white. We watch the empty hall for a few seconds, and then Kitty’s hair rises quickly from the bottom of the frame. She’s walking down the hall, away from the camera.

  Cut again and we’re seeing the same hall from another angle. It’s a floor of guest rooms—there are numbers and card readers on the doors. Kitty stops before one of the doors and taps a card to the reader. She opens the door and disappears inside.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” Briggman says.

  “She just went into a hotel room.”

  He snorts, but before I can ask him what’s so funny, the door opens again. Out walks a different woman, a housekeeper in a knee-length uniform skirt with a kerchief tied around her head. I check the timecode at the bottom right. Ten minutes have elapsed since we saw Kitty go in.

  “What just happened?” I ask Briggman. “Who’s this maid?”

  “Keep watching.”

  The housekeeper smooths down the front of her skirt and checks her apron tie. She leaves the frame.

  Cut back to the lobby scene. The realtors are still mingling. Our housekeeper enters stage left, her head spotlighted by the software. She walks purposefully toward one of the realtors and taps him on the shoulder. I recognize him as the man from the dais. They exchange a few words, and he follows her out of the room.

  Cut to the hall, the two of them walking side by side. Then a shot before a hotel-room door. It’s the same room, same number as before. The maid waits patiently while the man finds his key and taps it to the reader. He holds the door open for her, and she takes a step, but before she can slip inside, he seizes her in his arms and kisses her neck passionately. Her head rolls back with pleasure, and I see her face clearly.

  “Jesus, it’s Kitty.”

  “That’s another great thing about OmniSentry,” Briggman says. “You can’t fool the algorithm. A suspect can be disguised, and the system will still pick him out. Or her, as the case may be.”

  Quick cut. Half an hour has elapsed. Door opens again, and this time I see the man standing there in bathing trunks with a towel draped over his shoulder. He scratches his saggy old-man tits, looks at his watch, and leaves the frame.

  Another cut, same camera, ten minutes later. Door opens, and there’s Kitty Marlborough, back in her double-breasted suit. Her hair has been restored to its full architectural glory.

  “What do you think?” Briggman asks when the video ends. “Should we buy this thing? It’s expensive, but it’s hard to argue with the results.”

  Something occurs to me. “Does it require special cameras?”

  “No, it’s all standard equipment. OmniSentry is really just signal-processing software.”

  “You said it works in real time as well.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I wonder if it could work remotely. Like, could you direct camera feeds from somewhere else into the system?”

  “Interesting question. I’ll ask the rep.” Briggman pauses. “Come to think of it, I’m sure they’ve thought of this use case. OmniSentry’s parent company makes drones.”

  “You should ask them to throw one into the deal!”

  “A drone?” Briggman laughs. “I’d love that. Not sure what my boss would think, though.”

  28

  I call Don Anibal, the Bay Dogs’ Cuban scout, first thing in the morning. It is 7:00 a.m. California time, but Cuba is three hours ahead, so I figure Don Anibal is either at the office or on his way there. The one and only time we’ve met in person, at the Bay Dogs’ spring-training facility in Arizona, he told me that he works out of a trailer parked next to a municipal ball field in suburban Havana. I started to express outrage at the inadequate facilities—shouldn’t the Bay Dogs provide him with a real office? He stopped me and explained that the trailer works better than a suite in some air-conditioned office building. “The
players in Cuba,” he said, “they feel better if you look like their uncle, if you act like their uncle. If you act too big, they feel threatened. Is better, this trailer, más cubano.”

  When Don Anibal picks up the phone, the ping of aluminum bats in the background summons a vivid scenario: teenage boys in ragtag uniforms running drills on a dusty diamond, while Uncle Anibal reclines in a beach chair outside his trailer like a retiree in a campground. Cigar in mouth, straw Panama hat on his greasy bald head, he looks like Hannibal Lecter at the end of Silence of the Lambs—a look he claims the boys find soothing.

  “How are you, sisterfucker?” Remember those machine-gun rants of Ricky Ricardo’s on I Love Lucy? Cubans really speak that way, like their tongues are on fire. No time for trailing consonants.

  “Doing well, and you?”

  “Not bad, not bad. Bet you are glad to be back from fucking Colorado, eh?”

  I don’t know if he’s referring to the case, the fact that we dropped two of three in Denver, or the general displeasure of pitching at five thousand feet. “Yes, I’m glad to be home.”

  “Eh, socio, I have some news for you about our friend Pascual Alcalá.”

  “Oh yes? What did you learn?”

  Don Anibal laughs. “Not a fucking thing. I could not find anyone by that name. No ballplayers, not even a fucking plumber! I looked everywhere—birth records, death records, even high-school baseball rosters. Nothing, nobody, nowhere.”

  “Government records are bad in Cuba, no?”

  “For births and deaths, that is correct, but for baseball—fuck me, that’s a different story. Baseball is a very important priority for the party and everyone in power.”

  “Because of Fidel?”

  “You got it. He wanted to play professional ball, you know. So the records of the baseball championships are very accurate. Trust me, if your friend Alcalá had played ball on this island, I would have found his name.”