by T. T. Monday
“Forgive the mess,” she says. Tiff clears clothes off the barber’s chair. “Here, sit.”
“What about you?” I look around. There are no other chairs in the room.
“It’s fine. I’ll kneel.” She does, and looks comfortable. I am not. The combination of the teenage-bedroom disorder and Tiff’s J-Lo getup makes me feel like the clueless boyfriend in an after-school special about teen pregnancy.
“So,” she says, finally catching her breath. “I have to say, I was thrilled when you called. I thought you’d never speak to me again.”
“Connie left me.”
Tiff shrugs. “Don’t take it personally. Ballplayers and librarians don’t mix.”
“Do you know that for a fact? Have you had clients who dated librarians?”
“You’re the first.”
“I’m not your client. It’s the other way around, remember?”
Tiff looks at me. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her that you tricked me.”
“What about the doll?”
“I didn’t have the heart to mention it. I explained that she is not, and never was, in any danger.”
“Is she back in Denver?”
“She’s not going back. If you can get someone over there to clean the apartment, I can arrange to have it opened.”
“I’ll do that.” Her eyes well up. “I don’t deserve this, but thank you.”
“One more thing—I have an idea about La Loba, a way for you to make peace. It’s simple, really: you two need to sit down and talk.”
Tiff gives the corner of her eye a surgical wipe with the back of her hand. “This isn’t the UN, Adcock. La Loba is a criminal, and I’m—well, you know what I am.”
Actually, I think, I have no idea what you are.
“Let me arrange a meeting.”
“You’re welcome to try, but I can assure you she doesn’t want to talk.”
“Just trust me. I can get her to come.”
32
Back at home, I turn on ESPN and watch highlights from today’s games. I call this baseball pornography, because what you see on SportsCenter is as much like a real ballgame as porn is like sex. Most of a game is foreplay, but ESPN just airs the money shots: the home runs, third strikes, and double plays. It can be stimulating to a point, but after that it’s just noise. The noise stage is what I like best. More than silence or reading or meditation, it helps me think.
I review the details of the case—what I know, and what is left to discover. I start at the beginning, when Tiff approached me in the bullpen dressed as a field reporter. She said she had a client, Yonel Ruiz, whose family was being held hostage in Cuba by the criminals who smuggled him off the island. That turned out to be a lie. Tiff smuggled Ruiz out of Cuba, which wouldn’t have been a big deal except that she aggravated the woman who controls the Cuban smuggling racket, a ruthless operator named La Loba. Tiff tried to apologize to La Loba, but La Loba wanted her dead as a warning to future competitors. Frightened for her life, Tiff hired me—ostensibly, to find Ruiz’s tormentors; actually, she wanted me to kill La Loba, but first she had to give me a motive. So she placed an anonymous call to my cell phone, which allowed me to witness La Loba chopping up her latest victim. Then she sent Connie away under a false premise of danger. She put a blood-filled sex doll in Connie’s living room, and had her driver take me there after helping me buy a pistol. I was supposed to put two and two together and run out and kill La Loba. But I found Connie’s airline itinerary and concluded, correctly, that Connie wasn’t dead, just AWOL. When Tiff found out that I’d given my gun to her driver and flown back to California, she became desperate, dressed up like Connie, and threw herself on my doorstep to confess and beg for help.
Meanwhile, bodies are piling up—and not just the competitors chopped up by La Loba. My friend Erik Magnusson was killed in his office at Coors Field, hanged from the ceiling joists like a game animal. A few days later, two employees of a Sonoma winery were murdered the same way. In the latter incident, the killer lured me to the scene of the crime and then called the police—clearly an attempt to set me up.
What else? The night after Magnusson was killed, I saw Ruiz and La Loba together in a French restaurant in Denver. She claimed to be his sister. They left before placing an order. Is it possible that La Loba was negotiating with Ruiz for access to Tiff? When I, ahem, visited her later that night, she was as interested in Tiff as she was in me. Maybe more.
There are other bits and pieces: the chipped tooth I found in the video room where Magnusson was killed; Mags’s musings on the whiteboard about Ruiz and someone named Pascual Alcalá; the strange posthumous note from Mags in which he admits to lying about the phone threat. You might also say the bottle of wine from Domaine Amphora was a clue, but at this point I think it was just a lure.
The big question for me is Mags. I feel bad for Tiff—she was in over her head the minute she set sights on Cuba—but, let’s be honest, Mags is the one who got screwed here. He didn’t ask to be caught up in identity fraud when he offered his spare bedroom to Yonel Ruiz. I find it hard to believe he was killed simply because he knew that Ruiz had changed his name, but unless Mags produces another letter from beyond the grave, that’s my hypothesis.
Of course, all of the above may change tomorrow night. Jock Marlborough texted with the news that he has secured a suite for my “party” after the game. I call him to confirm. “It’s the Comcast suite, right?”
“No, the one next door. It belongs to one of the owners. When do you need it?”
“Is eleven-thirty okay?”
“I don’t think that will be a problem,” he says. “Listen, Johnny, I wanted to thank you again. I confronted Kitty about Jim Hunt, and she confessed the whole thing.”
“Did she?”
“And get this: she says Jim is a selfish lover and she wants me back.”
“That’s great news.” I pause. “Is it great news?”
“We’ll see. I’m not much of a Casanova myself. You know, women become more difficult to please as they get older. Could be Jim Hunt is twice the lover I am at this point and nobody’s good enough for Kitty.”
I picture Jim Hunt pounding away behind Kitty Marlborough, his doughy tits swinging in time with hers. When I was at Fullerton, there was a band called The Lowest Pair that played house parties off campus. Those guys would have loved Kitty and Hunt. Nothing’s more punk than old people fucking.
“Well, I’m glad,” I say. “I hope it works out for you and Kitty.” Matrimonial cases don’t usually end in happy reunions. Usually, they catalyze divorce. It’s refreshing to be on the other side for a change.
33
Next morning, when I arrive at the Bay Dogs’ clubhouse, the pregame rituals are already under way. Modigliani is on the trainer’s table, where an assistant in a yellow polo shirt massages his haunches. The young assistant’s face remains expressionless even when he stretches Diggy’s leg high in the air, leaning on the limb with most of his weight, so his nose comes within inches of the catcher’s naked ass. The term “jock sniffer” isn’t a figure of speech. The assistant trainer probably could have been a doctor, and look what he’s doing instead.
I walk down the center aisle, nodding to teammates relaxing in front of their lockers. At a folding table in the middle of the room, Chichi Ordoñez is playing poker with two rookies. No one but a rookie would play cards with Ordoñez, a wiry Puerto Rican with the quickest hands on the team. All the veterans know he cheats. The young guys might know it, too, but what are they going to do? Sometimes you have to pay your dues in real money.
“Hey, Adcock,” Ordoñez says. “You better hurry if you want to say something to your boy Cunningham. He’s on his way to Fresno.”
It was bound to happen. It’s been five days since Thick Will went to see Tiff Tate, and, batting-practice heroics notwithstanding, the makeover hasn’t made a difference in his hitting. Skipper has been sitting him against lefties, platooning him with Jo
aquín Morales, our right-handed utility infielder. But Will hasn’t hit righties, either. He’s mired in a one-for-twenty stretch, with an alarming number of strikeouts. I feel like, as soon as he steps into the batter’s box, he’s down 0-2. He continues to stroke the ball in BP, suggesting that the problem isn’t physical. If Magnusson were still around, I would have asked his advice.
I find Cunningham packing the contents of his locker into a black tote bag. He’s wearing one of Tiff’s tracksuits. His movements are deliberate, head hanging low over his work. His neighbors—the players with lockers on either side of his—are conveniently occupied elsewhere. They’ll come back once he’s gone. Baseball players think failure is an infectious disease. Harsh as that may sound to laypeople, there’s some truth to it, psychologically.
“I heard the news, Will.”
He twists his head to stare at me with one eye. “I don’t blame them,” he says. “I would have sent me down, too.”
“You had an option left?”
“Yeah. Last one, though.”
Every professional baseball contract includes a certain number of “options,” or times that the club can send the player back down to the minor leagues.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You’re going to crush it down there. We’ll see you back in a month.” I certainly hope it works out that way, but the truth is that Will’s facing a tough road back to the majors. Because he is now out of options, it will be even more difficult for him to get promoted. The club knows that if they call him up again they must either keep him on the big-league roster permanently or risk losing him to another club on the waiver wire.
“Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t happen right away,” I say. “It could take a few weeks to find your groove.”
“What groove?” Will says. “I have no groove.”
“Take a walk with me.”
“Nah, I gotta pack up—”
“Five minutes. Come.”
I lead him up the tunnel to the dugout. At this hour, the groundskeepers have the field to themselves. A long hose connected to a pulsating sprinkler chops water over the outfield grass. Will and I stand behind home plate, near the Bay Dogs’ on-deck circle.
“Look at that.” I point to an LCD screen in right-center field. It’s displaying an ad for a hotel chain in which a comely young brunette settles her head onto a feather pillow. Below this, the hotel’s slogan appears in white letters. “Will, read me what it says on that screen.”
Will squints. “Mission Hotels, let us fuck you in tonight. Hold on—is that for real?”
The “f” is supposed to be a “t,” but a few of the pixels are broken thanks to one of Will’s batting-practice rockets. “You did that,” I say. “With your bat.”
“No shit.”
“Now everyone knows what you’re capable of. There’s the proof right there.”
I’m not sure if he believes me—if self-confidence was so easy to fix, we’d have no need for psychotherapy—but I think I see a little spring in his step as he heads back down the tunnel.
34
We win the game, 6–4, and move into a tie for first place. I don’t pitch, which is a good thing, because by the seventh-inning stretch my mind is already upstairs. At 11:00 p.m., as the cleaning crew crawls the seats, I make my way to the club level. A skybox is really two spaces. There’s the balcony, where twelve stadium seats are arranged in two rows, and out there, with a cup of beer in your hand and some peanut shells under your feet, it might be possible to forget for a few moments how truly, unbelievably rich you are. Inside is another story. Inside, there’s no forgetting. Imagine you’re a middle-school boy and someone tells you that you’re going to be a billionaire when you grow up. You will be able to buy whatever you want and put it in a private room at your favorite major-league baseball stadium. What would be on that list? Arcade games? Multiple cinema-sized TV screens? Framed posters of SI swimsuit models? Add in a few items that a twelve-year-old might not have considered, like a full bar, a mirror-topped coffee table, and a cream leather sectional couch, and you’ve just decorated your very own luxury suite.
It’s a surprisingly versatile space, with enough room for a corporate team-building exercise, a saucy game of Twister—whatever strikes your fancy. The rent runs thousands per game, and you can’t rent for just one game. Most of the suites are leased by corporations, but this one, as Jock pointed out, is the private redoubt of Rob LaPlante, a reality-TV mogul who joined the Bay Dogs’ ownership group several years ago. LaPlante is known as the most sociable and down-to-earth of the owners, a genuinely friendly guy who never takes for granted that he is living out his childhood fantasy. On the other hand, he’s kind of a sleaze. He made his fortune with the Completely Naked!!! series of reality shows, in which contestants perform everyday tasks such as folding laundry, making dinner, and giving performance reviews to employees…in the nude. When the shows first aired, the cable networks asked LaPlante to blur out nipples and genitals, but eventually he stopped doing it and discovered that nobody complained. Now he owns the Bay Dogs. We all keep waiting for the cameras to arrive with orders to strip, but so far he has kept us in uniforms.
My setup is minimal. I draw the drapes over the glass wall for privacy and sink some bottled waters and sodas into a tub of ice set out earlier by the catering staff. Marlborough made sure I understood that there would be no waiters available at this time of night. I told him that this was fine, that it was just a meeting.
Just a meeting with two of my closest friends.
I check my phone. There’s a text from Enriqueta. She’s downstairs. I leave the suite and walk to a bank of private elevators. During business hours, there’s an usher sitting in the elevator, an older African American man in a straw hat and a blue-and-yellow Bay Dogs vest. You wouldn’t think a stadium built in the early 2000s would need an elevator operator (come to think of it, you don’t need an operator for any elevator built since World War II), but you also don’t need an old man to hand you a towel in the bathroom at your country club. It’s bizarre what rich people require.
The elevator opens onto a secret food court under the stands, available only to field-box and luxury-suite ticket holders. Here the ultra-rich can purchase the same fare as elsewhere in the stadium, but without the long lines and prying eyes of the hoi polloi. At this hour, the counters for hot dogs and garlic fries are dark and silent. The concierge desk, normally bursting with bright helpful blondes, lies empty. I walk to the VIP entrance, a surprisingly inconspicuous portal that is staffed by a security guard 24/7. Per MLB rules, there is a metal detector over the door. Tonight, I’m grateful for the extra caution.
I press the crash bar to open the door, and there stands La Loba, chatting amiably in Spanish with the guard. She is dressed like a sexual cat burglar, in black from her skintight turtleneck to her cigarette jeans. Her riot of hair has been tamed somewhat, braided loosely and twisted up. She’s wearing dark lipstick, mauve shadow, and a thick stripe of coal-black liner around each of her mismatched eyes. She does not smile when she sees me, but simply parts ways with the guard, walks to my side, and says in Spanish, “Are we ready?”
“Everything is ready,” I say.
“You told her I’m coming?”
“It’s just as we discussed. She thinks I’m bringing a hired girl.”
Now Enriqueta smiles—a devilish grin that makes her eyes sparkle, the blue one a little more than the brown. “Very good,” she says. “I’m excited to see you again, Adcock.”
I don’t know if she saw me running away from the warehouse that night after my gun went off. If she did, she hasn’t let on, just as I haven’t let on that I know her as anything other than Yonel Ruiz’s sister.
The elevator whisks us upstairs. The hallway of billionaires is deserted; the carpeted floor masks our footsteps. We stop in front of a door marked JOHN ROCKENBUSH.
“Who’s Rockenbush?” Enriqueta asks.
“Nobody,” I say.
Rockenbush, of cou
rse, is Tiff’s signal to me. I knock softly and push open the door. The room is nearly dark; the lights are much lower than I left them. Music drifts from speakers hidden in the walls. I clear my throat. “Hello, Tiff?”
A voice comes out of the dark: “Johnny! Did you bring a friend?”
A pinprick of blue light moves up and down in the darkness. At first I think it’s a laser sight, but when I turn the lights up, I see that it’s the LED tip of an e-cigarette. Tiff raises the device to her lips and inhales, making the end glow more brightly. She’s barefoot, wearing a pair of white Capri shorts and a halter top. Her hair is blond again, this time held up in a French twist. She exhales a thin stream of vapor.
“I hope you don’t mind the extra company,” I say.
“Not at all. Come over here and introduce us.”
Our plan was simple: I would lure La Loba here with the promise of Tiff, the prey she has been unable to catch. Then, assuming La Loba didn’t immediately haul off and kill us both, Tiff would get her chance to beg for forgiveness. As a bonus, I would have the opportunity to ask La Loba about her relationship with Ruiz. I wasn’t sure how the subterfuge of Enriqueta-as-prostitute would play out. I assumed that the charade would be over as soon as the two of them were face-to-face, but it appears that neither Tiff nor La Loba are willing to drop their roles just yet.
“I’m Enriqueta,” La Loba says. Her English is heavily accented but confident. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Tiff.”
“Nice to meet you, Teef.”
“You have a beautiful voice,” Tiff says. “Are you from Mexico?”
“Venezuela.”
“I hear Venezuela is an exciting country. Dangerous, though.”