Double Switch

by T. T. Monday

  Yonel Ruiz stares at me. He narrows his eyes, then breaks off the stare and looks down at his hands, flexing his fists like a boxer. This dynamic feels familiar. Fine, I think. I’m ready, batter up.

  “Adcock!” Tiff exclaims.

  Ruiz leans over and kisses her gently on the forehead. “Quiet,” he says. “You need to relax.” His English is actually quite good—which makes sense to me now.

  Tiff points to the bandage on her right shoulder. “The bullet hit me at an angle,” she says. “Had it been a straight shot, I would have lost a lung. Maybe more.”

  “How do you feel?” I look straight at Tiff, ignoring Ruiz.

  “Like I just had my shoulder shot off, but otherwise pretty good. I texted Yonel as soon as I woke up.”

  “We are in San Francisco this week,” he says. “Four-game series with the Giants. I’ll miss BP, but, you know, anything for Tiff.”

  “That’s my motto,” I say. “Anything for Tiff.”

  Tiff tries to laugh, but evidently it brings too much pain. She smiles and clutches her side.

  “The doctor said she’ll be back at work in a month,” Ruiz says.

  A month. Who will trim the beards while she’s gone? Maybe La Loba will decide to go straight and start poaching Tiff’s clients. Turnaround is fair play, right?

  “He’s right,” I say, still not looking at Ruiz. “You need to relax. Take it easy for a while. Maybe you could use some time off.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Adcock, but that’s such a male thing to say. Imagine I asked you to walk away from your career. What would your reaction be?”

  “I don’t have to imagine,” I say. “People beg me to quit every day.”

  “I told La Loba I would give up smuggling, but damned if I’m going to walk away from styling. I worked too hard to get where I am. Name another woman in baseball with the power I have.”

  “I admire your conviction.”

  It comes out sounding more ironic than I intended. Tiff shoots back, “Come on, Adcock, isn’t there anything you believe in? Any principle you believe is bigger than you?”

  “Nearly everything is bigger than me.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I believe in plenty of things. Honesty, fair play, justice. Which reminds me—I went after La Loba.”

  “You followed her out of the stadium?” Tiff sits up a little higher.

  “I had a tracer on her clothing. There was one on yours, too. She and her driver went south, to a little airport near Gilroy. They took off before I got there.”

  Ruiz shakes his head. “She is too quick, every time.”

  “She left something for me at the airport.”

  I pull the manila folder from my knapsack and pull out a piece of paper, which I lay on Tiff’s bed tray. It’s a birth certificate from twenty-five years ago, marking the live birth of a seven-pound boy, Pascual Gutierrez de Alcalá. It lists both parents’ names and occupations, and gives the place of birth: the municipality of Ponce, Puerto Rico.

  “Who’s Alcalá?” Ruiz asks.

  I remove a stack of photos from the envelope and spread them out on the tray. The first is of a boy in ratty swim trunks, holding a donkey by a rope. Dense tropical foliage can be seen in the background. The next photo shows the same boy a few years older, playing on the beach. Finally, we see the boy in a high school baseball uniform with an aluminum bat over his shoulder. His physique is eye-catching even then, forearms thicker than the barrel of the bat, seamed with veins.

  The boy is obviously Ruiz.

  And that’s only strike one.

  I turn over the photo of the high school player. On the back, written in a neat cursive hand, is the name Pascual Alcalá, a uniform number, and the year 2008.

  “I recognize myself in that photo,” Ruiz says, “but I don’t understand why it was signed like that. Someone must have gone to my school in Havana, taken a copy of this photo, and written the name of this other man.”

  “What school would that be?” I ask.

  Ruiz gives me his batter’s-box stare. “Santa Cruz de Olazábal, near the Plaza de—”

  I flip another sheet onto the tray. It’s a letter from the headmaster of the school he just named, stating with certainty that no student named Yonel Ruiz—or Pascual Alcalá, for that matter—ever attended his institution.

  I lay down another sheet, this one from the census bureau of Cuba, stating that Yonel Ruiz was first counted in the province of La Habana in 2010. No person named Yonel Ruiz can be found anywhere in Cuba before that. In the 2010 report, Ruiz’s age was stated as twenty-one, making him twenty-six or twenty-seven today.

  “Government records are horrible in Cuba,” Ruiz says. “This means nothing.”

  “Maybe not, but the government of Puerto Rico reported that Pascual Alcalá, whose name had appeared in the two previous censuses, was not found in the 2010 survey.”

  “Same problem, different island.”

  “She knew you’d say that.” I bring out the final document, a twenty-page medical report from a company in Colorado. “This report establishes with ninety-nine-point-nine-percent certainty that the person known as Yonel Ruiz, living in Denver and employed by the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, is descended from Maria and Jorge Alcalá of Ponce, Puerto Rico.”

  “How would they know?” Ruiz barks.

  “Hair samples. It’s all in the report.”

  “I don’t believe any of it.” Ruiz turns to Tiff. “And neither should you. These are lies told by a killer!”

  “You grew up in Puerto Rico,” I say. “You played baseball, and you hoped to sign a pro contract with an American club on your sixteenth birthday. Maybe you even enrolled in one of the baseball academies. But when your birthday came, nobody called.”

  “That’s crazy. Who told you that?”

  “A guy named Luis Peña, head scout for the Bay Dogs in the DR and Puerto Rico. I called him this morning. He said he remembers you—that is, he remembers Alcalá. He said when all the scouts passed you over you were crestfallen.”

  Ruiz looks at Tiff.

  “It means upset,” Tiff says.

  “Here’s what I think happened after that. Your parents said you weren’t meant to play ball, that you were meant to learn a trade, or become a farmer. But you wouldn’t give up the dream. You knew you had talent, and you’d heard about Cuban players attracting the interest of the Americans after their sixteenth birthdays. Sometimes long after. Because the Castro government prohibits emigration, those players weren’t waiting around to be discovered. They had to make a reputation in the Cuban League first, then sneak off the island and sign. You weren’t afraid of hard work. You were willing to put in your years. You had no doubt you could make a name for yourself in Cuba.

  “That name turned out to be Yonel Ruiz. You arrived sometime before 2010 and eventually made your way to the Industriales, the Yankees of the Cuban League. You played well. By the time Tiff found you, Cuban baseball players had become a precious commodity, and you were well positioned to realize your dream. You liked Tiff’s proposal to travel in disguise, because you were already comfortable using an assumed identity.

  “Tiff did right by you. Here you are playing in the major leagues. Until recently, you had never even heard the name La Loba. But she knew about you, and, more important, she knew that someone else, someone other than her, had smuggled you out of Cuba. She found Tiff and set about trying to make an example of her. At the same time, she began gathering information on you. Imagine her surprise when she discovered that you weren’t Cuban at all. I think this upset La Loba even more than Tiff’s dabbling in her business. As any trader knows, the best way to lower the price of a commodity is to increase the supply, and you figured out a way to do that for Cuban ballplayers. Think what would happen if word got around the Caribbean that anyone could become the next Cuban phenomenon—even Puerto Ricans! Cuba would be flooded with talent, which would be great for the owners of the Cuban teams, but horrible for La
Loba.

  “So she assembled this file. She could have just mailed it to ESPN and been done with it. They would have broken the story, and you would have been exposed. But that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted you to break the news yourself. She was waiting for you to go public and admit the crime, as a warning to players all over the Caribbean not to attempt what you did. That’s what you were negotiating that night I saw you at the restaurant.” I pause. “Your family isn’t being held at gunpoint, are they?”

  “They moved to Miami the week after I signed.”

  “So the hostage crisis—that’s a story you made up for Tiff?”

  Ruiz lowers his head.

  Strike two.

  “Yonel,” Tiff says, “why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Where I’m from, you get signed when you’re sixteen or you don’t sign at all. Nobody wants a twenty-year-old player from Puerto Rico. This was the only way.”

  “Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.,” Tiff says. “Does that mean you have a U.S. passport?”

  Ruiz nods solemnly. “Correct.”

  “So I didn’t need to smuggle you anywhere….” She stops, but I follow her thought: if she hadn’t smuggled Ruiz out of Cuba, she wouldn’t have antagonized La Loba. For months, she’s been blaming herself for the peril she’s in. Without question she’s guilty, but Ruiz shares much of the blame.

  A nurse arrives with a bedpan. She says she can’t wait any longer. We have to leave for a few minutes, but we can come right back.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I need to get going.”

  “Me, too,” says Ruiz.

  “Call me!” Tiff calls after us. I don’t know who she means—me or Ruiz—and I really couldn’t care.

  38

  It plays out exactly as I hoped. The elevator is near the nurses’ desk, and while we’re waiting, Ruiz asks if there’s a stairwell.

  “Good idea,” I say. “Let’s walk.”

  Realizing that he can’t escape me—that we both need to get downstairs—Ruiz decides to wait. The elevator arrives, and we step inside. We’re alone.

  “What I couldn’t figure out for the longest time,” I say, “is how Erik Magnusson fit into this. I mean, he told me that you stayed with him last winter—but so what, right? Even if he knew you changed your name—hell, even if he knew you were Puerto Rican—that’s no reason to kill him.”

  Ruiz stares at the floor numbers above the door.

  “But Mags had fallen on hard times. I’m not sure you knew the full extent of it, but his wife left with the kids shortly before you came to stay at his house. I’m sure you know how tenuous the job of hitting instructor can be. One slump too many and he’s out on the street. An unemployed former jock with a tarnished reputation.”

  Still no reaction from Ruiz. The bell dings for the third floor, and the doors open, but no one gets on. Maybe someone got tired of waiting and took the stairs.

  “I think Magnusson was blackmailing you. I think he figured out about Pascual Alcalá, and he threatened to expose you. Maybe he kept raising his demands? I heard a story recently about another extortionist who did that. At any rate, you reached a breaking point, and you killed him in the video room. You hanged him from the ceiling to make it look like suicide. Later, when you realized the gravity of what you’d done, you began searching for a way to duck suspicion. You learned that Tiff had hired me. Given my reputation, you figured that I was no stranger to sticky situations. If you could frame me for a similar murder, the cops might pin the Magnusson job on me, too. You sent me a bottle of wine under Connie’s return address, and arranged to have the tasting-room workers killed.”

  “Arranged how?”

  “Come on, Ruiz. You make eight million a year. More with endorsements, thanks to Tiff. I’m sure you could find someone to do your dirty work.”

  The bell dings for the ground floor. Ruiz turns his head and says, as cool as can be, “You can’t prove shit.”

  He smiles. I notice that his front tooth is broken.

  “Maybe not,” I say as we step out of the elevator. “But take a look at this.” I pull out my phone and show him the picture I took of Magnusson’s whiteboard. He killed Mags to keep his secret safe; if he’d erased the board, I never would have figured it out.

  Ruiz looks at the photo but does not react. The hospital’s main entrance is around the corner from the elevator lobby, and right up until the moment he takes that corner, Ruiz remains cocky. “I don’t know why you’re so upset,” he says. “You would have killed that juicer, too.”

  And then he sees it, behind the sliding glass doors: the throng of police, the reporters with lights and cameras—and a tall, handsome man in a dark wool suit.

  39

  Jim Feldspar sits across from me in the air-conditioned conference room. We are in the Bay Dogs’ administrative offices, a part of the stadium I rarely visit. He is calling this meeting a “debrief,” but to me it feels like another interrogation. He writes notes in his leather-clad legal pad, pausing now and then to take sips from a sweating can of Diet Coke. I haven’t touched the glass of water in front of me.

  Ruiz is in custody, but no charges have been announced. The police sergeant at the hospital told reporters that Ruiz was “a person of interest” in “a developing situation,” and no details were available right now. I get the feeling the cops are waiting for direction from Feldspar. This is his prisoner, so to speak.

  Feldspar sets the can on the table and looks up from his notes. “So tell me, how did you figure out that Magnusson was blackmailing Ruiz?”

  “Just a lucky guess,” I say. “I couldn’t think of any other reason why Ruiz would have killed him.”

  Feldspar writes something down. “And you confronted Ruiz in Miss Tate’s room at the hospital?”

  “No, it was after we left, in the elevator.”

  “But you were bluffing.”

  “About the blackmail, yes. But I’m positive he killed Magnusson.”

  “You have evidence?”

  I pull the tooth from my jacket pocket and shoot it across the table to Feldspar. “I found that on the floor of the video room at Coors. It belongs to Ruiz. Check his mouth. Right lateral incisor.”

  Feldspar rotates the tooth with the tip of his pen. “You think Magnusson hit him?”

  “I’d like to believe Mags wouldn’t go down without a fight.”

  “So your scenario is that there was a scuffle in the video room, in which Ruiz lost a tooth. But Ruiz eventually overpowered Magnusson and strung him up from a ceiling joist.”

  “Something like that. You saw the body, not me.”

  More writing. “And you’re suggesting that Ruiz’s motive was blackmail. Magnusson discovered that Ruiz was lying about his identity.”

  “Check the whiteboard in the video room. Magnusson knew the score. Ruiz isn’t Cuban. He’s from Puerto Rico. He moved to Cuba and changed his name after he wasn’t picked up as a sixteen-year-old.”

  Feldspar winces. “You’re almost correct there. Actually, he did receive an offer from the Pirates, but only if he changed positions and became a pitcher. Apparently, Ruiz—or Alcalá, as he was known then—refused to do it.”

  “Hold on—you know Ruiz isn’t Cuban?”

  “It isn’t public knowledge, but the commissioner’s office knows, yes.” He pauses. “You look surprised. Cuba is hot, Adcock. It’s a fantastic story, with the sharks and the daring escapes. You can see how it’s better for baseball if we let him be Cuban.”

  “I guess that’s the difference between us,” I say.

  “Don’t be naïve. You’re in show business. Just ask your friend Tiff Tate. She gets it.”

  Tiff is going to be getting plenty, I realize, if Feldspar lets Ruiz “be Cuban.” He wouldn’t have to do much—maybe call his friends in the passport office, get them to delete the record of Pascual Alcalá….If only Ruiz had known that Feldspar could hook him up, he might have spared Magnusson. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. We Americans look d
own our noses at countries like Cuba, where truth is relative, but it’s the same shit here: Feldspar is just Anibal Martín without the fedora and cigar.

  “So you’re going to let him get away with it?”

  “With murder? No! Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t fix that. We’ll make sure he has a lawyer, but it doesn’t look good for Ruiz at this point.” He produces a plastic baggie from a pocket behind the legal pad and scoops up the tooth as though it were a dog turd.

  “Can I go now?” I ask.

  “Yes, you can. Pitch well tonight.”

  Oh, that. How nice of him to remember.

  Feldspar adds, “Adcock, I appreciate what you did this morning. Calling me was not only the right thing to do, it was also a mark of maturity. I want you to know I won’t forget it.”

  If I’m hearing him correctly, we’re good. No more threats to shut me down. It’s a pleasant surprise. But I still hate him.

  40

  Less than one week later, it appears that Jim Feldspar has already forgotten. I get a call from Todd Ratkiss, who informs me that the commissioner has received a recommendation from his security team that I be banned for life.

  “Good news is that the union has already negotiated it down to administrative leave.”

  “What’s administrative leave?”

  “It’s like the disabled list. You get paid, but you can’t play.”

  “No way.”

  Ratkiss sighs. “Hasn’t this gone far enough?”

  “Let me handle it,” I say.

  I hang up and get Pete Gretsch on the line. Gretsch is someone I’ve known for a long time. Over the years, he has served in many different capacities at MLB’s New York offices. Recently, he was appointed to the post of deputy commissioner. He’s a trim man in his late fifties, with steel-colored hair and sharp eyes. He and his wife, a big-shot oncologist, live in Scarsdale with their two precocious teenage daughters. The girls play violin, first and second chairs in the Greater Westchester Youth Orchestra. Both have straight A’s in all subjects (but especially science and math) and intend to follow their mother into the medical field, if Juilliard doesn’t snatch them up first. In short, the Gretsches are your typical high-achieving Westchester County family.