The Tin Collectors

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “I think you have to pick up a little receiver first,” she said, smiling at him.

  “For thirty grand, Bob can come back here when I want to talk to him.” Then he kicked off his loafers and put the seat back. He had chosen to sit across the aisle from Alexa, facing backward so he could look at her.

  Suddenly the plane was hurtling down the runway, its wheels coming up immediately on takeoff, climbing fast. They flew out over the ocean, then the pilot made a slow turn and headed east.

  Shane and Alexa sat in the luxurious executive jet, sipping imported beer while the plane climbed to altitude and the lights of Long Beach gradually slipped away below the starboard wing.

  “I’m gonna try to get some sleep,” she said, putting her head back and closing her eyes.

  Shane could smell her perfume again; it drifted across the aisle like a carefully thrown net.

  “Mayweather’s dad was a cop in Illinois,” she said unexpectedly, without opening her eyes. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah,” Shane said. “Just another grunt in a blue suit, out there hookin’ and bookin’ assholes for the city.”

  “My dad was a cop in Hartford, Connecticut,” she said, her eyes still closed. “He was a patrol cop but never made sergeant. Couldn’t take tests. He froze every time he went up for the exam.”

  “Oh,” Shane said, trying to picture her father. What must he and Mrs. Hamilton have been like to have produced this iron-willed yet exotic-looking creature?

  “Did you have brothers or sisters?” he asked, hoping she would open up. After a long moment:

  “Two brothers.” She started slowly, then it seemed important for her to tell him more. “I was the youngest. My mom died in childbirth. For a long time I thought that was my fault. We had pictures of her all over the house. It was like a shrine. My brothers and I, we tried to imagine what it would have been like to have her around. I used to wonder if she was in heaven looking down, mad at me for causing her death, so I tried to make her happy by doing all the chores: cleaning up after Dad and my two brothers, doing dishes, washing clothes, trying to take her place but knowing I never could.” She stopped, the memory somewhat painful, then went on. “Dad remarried when I was fifteen, and we got Karen, who was nice but kind of distant. It was like Dad’s three kids were some sort of mistake that she was forced to accept in the deal. I went to college on a track scholarship at UCLA—sprints and hurdles. I was there about ten years after Mayweather, but they still talked about him on Bruin Sports Radio, particularly during Bruin basketball games. He was a big deal, even years after he graduated. They all said he should have made the pros, but he ended up on the police force instead….

  “It felt shitty watching him plead and beg down there…. Somebody special that everybody looked up to turns out to be a self-centered shitball. Down there in that tunnel, I lost something. I don’t know why it should affect me, but it does.”

  He was looking at her, wondering if she was ever going to open her eyes.

  “Is that enough personal history?” she said, shining her blues at him again.

  “Are you mad at me for some reason?” he asked. “You seem pissed off.”

  She sat still for several moments.

  “Yeah…I guess I am. I wanted this career, wanted to believe in it. I wanted Mayweather to be stand-up. I actually liked him once. Respected him. Life is full of disappointments. I’ll get over it. I wanted Santa Claus to come down the chimney with toys made at the North Pole especially for me.”

  He studied her, his dark, intense eyes trading her amp for amp.

  “But just so you don’t get the wrong idea, Shane, I don’t think it’s your fault this is happening. You just got put in the soup. You didn’t ask for this any more than I did. It happened to you, and I’m in this with you because to do anything else is unthinkable.”

  There was a long silence. He was trying to think of the right thing to say. Finally he just smiled.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  They didn’t speak again until they landed.

  Before he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he glanced over at her. Her shoes were off, feet up on the seat facing her, those restless ice-blue lasers sheathed now. She was breathing rhythmically, sleeping peacefully.

  He tried to picture her as a child, a little girl wondering if she’d killed her mother during her own birth, carrying that burden around with her. Just as he’d carried the idea that he had not meant enough to his own parents to have them hold on to him even for one day. He’d been left at the hospital like trash put out by the back door.

  He had often tried to picture his parents…. Who were they? Did they go to college? Were they just teenagers who got careless and conceived him in a drive-in movie and decided to run? Were they hicks from Alabama, driving a pickup and drinking sour mash from a jug, with no money to raise him? Was he part Jewish or Italian or Irish? Did his mom and dad ever think about him and feel bad about what they’d done?

  Why had they left him without even a first name pinned to his shirt?

  He’d spent his life struggling to move past it, struggling to overcome it, finally using Chooch as a way to pull himself up, until he discovered that Chooch had become more important to him than the whole tired problem that had been weighing him down in the first place.

  Alexa had been struggling, too. Internal Affairs was the perfect place for her. Weeding out the bad ones, making another house clean, all the time looking up, wondering if her mother hated her…wondering if she was good enough to be forgiven.

  He admired her for it, but it also made him sad.

  The sound of the huge jet engines hypnotically hummed in his ear. I wonder if, despite all that’s happening, I’m actually beginning to feel something important for this woman.

  Then Shane Scully, whose first given name was Infant 205, finally closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  Shane dreamed about Chooch. The boy was on a vast beach, flying a kite over the ocean, but the kite was all black and dipping dangerously, diving toward the surface before straightening up again. Each time it seemed to get lower and lower.

  “Shane, help me!” he was yelling. “It’s going to crash!” Shane was moving toward him, but the faster he ran, the farther away Chooch seemed to be. If Shane didn’t stop the kite’s wild flight, he knew it would all end in disaster.

  41

  The Last Dot

  Miami was baking in heat, the temperature in the mid-nineties, the humidity intense. They walked down the steps of the Gulfstream 3 into an invisible wall of moisture. A rent-a-car arranged by the FBO in Miami was waiting for them—a bright yellow Thunderbird. Shane signed for it; then, after locking the suitcase containing the rest of the money in the trunk, he got the map of Miami out of the glove compartment and looked for the Coral Reef Yacht Club. It was a large piece of property marked on the map in orange, located east of Highway 1, south of the wealthy town of Coral Gables.

  “You navigate, I’ll drive,” he said to Alexa, getting behind the wheel.

  The car was a hardtop, and somebody had been chain-smoking in it. The unpleasant smell of old tobacco hung over them, wet and onerous. The air conditioner needed Freon and put out a stream of tepid air. They pulled out, and she directed him to Seventh Avenue, which turned into Cutter Road.

  The sky was that special tinsel-blue that you can only get in Miami, where the land is so flat that no pollution can stay trapped above the city, instead blowing across the state, dissipating in the ocean breeze, leaving Miami glistening in bright sunshine and mirrored glass architecture.

  Clouds floated by intermittently, huge white formations of indescribable beauty moving slowly across the flat horizon like whipped-cream galleons.

  The Coral Reef Yacht Club was just down the road from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Introduction Station. The yacht club sat on man-made levees and fronted a dredged ocean cut that was enclosed on three sides. Nestled among this lush
marine setting were clusters of old Florida-style buildings made of coral bricks, with overhanging eaves. Boats of all shapes and sizes were moored at dock fingers in front of the exclusive club.

  Shane pulled through an open gate with a guardhouse but no guard. The parking lot was jammed; he finally found a spot way down by the docks. There were several news vans parked a hundred yards away, by the main building.

  Shane and Alexa got out of the Thunderbird and moved up a crushed-gravel drive, where they found a man leaning against one of the mobile units, having a smoke.

  “They inside?” Shane asked vaguely.

  “Yep. It’s going down right now.”

  “Yeah? The…uh…NFL owners’ meeting?”

  “No. The owners’ meeting was in July. This is the new team announcements,” the man corrected, taking a closer look at him.

  “Right, that’s what he meant,” Alexa said; then they moved past the man into the yacht club.

  There was a large hall off the entry called the Trophy Room, and it was packed. There were a dozen news teams—network as well as local Miami stations—with cameras and mikes marked CNN, ESPN, and WNS (World News Service). There were also radio and print media. Close to two hundred people were milling about in the room under exposed beams and slow-turning paddle fans.

  Without having to discuss it, Shane and Alexa separated. If one got thrown out, the other probably wouldn’t. They took up positions on opposite sides of the room.

  There was an NFL banner behind a makeshift stage. All around the room were yachting trophies and pictures of past commodores of the club, smiling out of their lacquered frames, wearing their captain’s hats with too much braid on the visors. The room was elbow to elbow. Shane’s cop mind noted that they were dangerously over the fire regs.

  Up on the stage, a man was droning on. Shane tried to catch the flow of his remarks:

  “…as they said…which, of course, made us very sure we had embarked on the right course as far as that program was concerned…”

  Shane looked around for Tony Spivack or Logan Hunter, whom he remembered as a slim, somewhat handsome blond man from pictures he’d seen in the newspapers.

  “…So, Don and Fred, who will be speaking to you in a minute, took all of those factors into account. These decisions, at their core, are difficult at best, because community pride is always involved. That’s why we have been so deliberate on this issue.”

  Shane waited, crushed in between a florid-faced man in a Hawaiian shirt and a news crew from WKMI-TV.

  “…That having been said, I’d like to present, with great pleasure, our very own commissioner of the NFL, Mr. Paul Tagliabue.”

  There was a smattering of polite applause. Shane was scanning the podium now. There were twenty-nine men and two women seated in leather club chairs behind the main speaker. He was beginning to recognize some of the faces from TV or the sports pages: Wayne Huizenga, owner of the Miami Dolphins; Alex Spanos of the San Diego Chargers; Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys. All the owners of the thirty-one NFL teams were up there.

  “Thank you, Lee,” the commissioner said. “Okay, now for the moment we’ve all been anticipating. We have, as you all know, decided to award three new expansion franchises to three deserving cities: Houston, Los Angeles, and Oklahoma City. We have picked three facilities and ownership structures to be the homes of these new franchises. In Houston, we are proud to announce that we are awarding the NFC expansion franchise to the syndicate headed by Keith Fowler and Martin Fisk.”

  There was a gasp from the room, and then a whoop went up from the back of the hall. Shane turned and looked as the two men went up onto the stage.

  The Houston winners had named their new expansion team the Houston Blaze and were holding up uniform jerseys and doing their photo op as news crews swarmed.

  Shane looked over at Alexa on the far side of the room, just as a gray-haired man with a belt buckle the size of a small serving platter stepped to the mike and started throwing out Texas homilies:

  “Now that we got this here thing safe in the corral, guess it’s time ta wash off the war paint and throw us a shindig,” he said. “We’re set up like pigs in a mud bath over at the Four Seasons Hotel, so y’all come on over and help us raise the roof.” He went on to thank half a dozen people.

  Shane finally spotted Logan Hunter. He was dressed in a tan suit tailored to his wispy frame, without one sag or wrinkle. He had an abundance of too-blond hair and was wearing a mint-green shirt with no tie. There was something exotic in his carriage. Logan Hunter wore his millionaire film-mogul status like imported cologne; it wafted around him. He was boyish and, except for the wrinkle lines around his eyes, would have appeared to be in his mid-thirties instead of the fifty that Shane had read he was.

  “In L.A. we had a terribly difficult choice.” The commissioner was now back at the mike. “We had two competing franchises—one from Bill Kaufman, who proposed a restoration of the L.A. Coliseum. Bill has made a wonderful presentation, showing how that grand old lady could be brought up to millennium standards. And I’ve gotta say, a lot of incredible thought went into that plan. The other group, headed by Logan Hunter and Tony Spivack, have proposed a fresh site, a new development at the now-deserted Long Beach Naval Yard, which has recently been ceded to the city of L.A. I’m pleased to add that the mayor of Los Angeles, Clark Crispin, is with us today, and I’m going to let him announce the winner of the new L.A. expansion franchise. Clark…?”

  A door opened at the side of the room, and Clark Crispin came onto the stage. Shane had seen him at many official L.A. gatherings and had even worked his security detail one weekend during his second election campaign. He was tall and angular, and when he smiled, his face always radiated warmth. He was dressed in hit-man black, his Armani pinstripe relieved by a festive red tie.

  “Thanks, Paul. What a day for L.A. We, of course, have missed having a pro team in our city since you took the Raiders back north, Al.” He smiled at Al Davis, who barely returned it. “Or since Georgia moved my beloved Rams to St. Louis and won a championship…” She smiled warmly, but there seemed to be a definite “fuck you” in the mixture.

  “So now we have a new opportunity. Will it be the Coliseum, with Bill Kaufman, or the Web, with Tony Spivack and Logan Hunter? The envelope, please,” he said, grinning, and there was a mild groan in the room.

  “It is my honor to announce that the new Los Angeles AFC expansion franchise, and soon-to-be Super Bowl football team, will be the L.A. Spiders, playing at the Web. Tony? Logan? Come on up. Tell us how it feels.”

  Suddenly, as the two of them made their way to the stage, a side door opened and ten Spiderettes, dressed in their new black and red minicostumes, came onto the stage. Music played through a speaker system as they began to dance, waving black and red pom-poms. The crowd loved it.

  The TV crews were circling, gunning footage, and then as the music stopped, the girls fell back, and Logan Hunter went to the mike.

  “Thank you, Clark. Well, who would’ve thought this day would come?” More cheering and applause.

  “Please,” Shane said derisively under his breath; then the nickel dropped, and he knew what the missing piece was.

  “I’m delighted we’re going to be bringing football back to L.A.,” Logan Hunter said. “We’re going to deliver a top-flight product. We’ll spare no expense to build a first-rate franchise at the Web. If you buy season tickets today, we’ll guarantee you a spot in the stands when we kick off in our new stadium in the fall of 2001. We’re gonna be up and ready. We break ground tomorrow. Tony, you wanna say a few words?”

  Spivack, who had just put on a new Spiders football jersey over his suit and tie, came to the mike. “I don’t have much time to talk. I better get back and grab a shovel if I’m gonna meet Logan’s date.”

  There was a ripple of laughter.

  “Commissioner Tagliabue…one question!” Shane shouted. “How come you didn’t choose the Coliseum? That’s a national historic landm
ark, built for the ’32 Olympics…. Plus, the people with businesses in that neighborhood count on Coliseum events to survive.”

  The room fell silent. Spivack stepped back and handed the mike to Paul Tagliabue. “There were other factors involved. It was a complicated decision,” the commissioner said. “We don’t want to get into that right now.”

  “Was it the high crime stats down there?” Shane persisted, rolling the idea up to the stage like a live grenade.

  “The growing crime rate around the Coliseum certainly entered into our decision,” he said. “But there were many factors. We’ll have a question-and-answer session after the announcements are concluded. Now, moving on…We come to the last franchise, in Oklahoma City—”

  “Why do you suppose crime in that neighborhood rose so dramatically?” Shane was pulling the pin now.

  A police officer appeared at his elbow. “May I see your pass, sir?”

  “Don’t have one,” he replied.

  “Whatta you doing here?”

  “I’m a mental patient. We sorta wander around.”

  “Not funny. Let’s go.” He led Shane out of the room, walking with a firm grip on his elbow. They moved past Alexa, who was standing next to a WMI Radio team. She caught his eye and smiled as he was ejected from the room.

  Once they were outside, the cop glowered at Shane. “You can leave, or you can take a ride with me. Your choice.”

  “Why don’t I just leave…”

  “Why don’t ya,” the cop said.

  Shane walked to the yellow T-bird, took a piece of paper out of his pocket, and wrote Alexa a note. He shoved it under the car, got behind the wheel, and rolled over the note, then drove out of the parking lot, up the winding driveway, and parked on the street outside. He sat in the front seat in the oppressive heat, with the lousy air conditioner blowing a foul tobacco smell, until he couldn’t bear it any longer. He got out of the car, threw his coat off, and looked down at his sweat-soaked shirt. He tried to get cool under a Japanese banyan tree while he contemplated what he had just learned. It was maddeningly simple once you had all the pieces: