Change-up: Mystery at the World Series

by John Feinstein

  Even with a 7-3 lead the Nationals weren’t home free. Martis gave up a run in the sixth. Then the Red Sox scored single runs off the Nationals bullpen in the seventh and eighth. With men on first and second, and just one out in the eighth, Manny Acta brought in his closer, Joel Hanrahan.

  “He’s got no choice,” Maske commented. “He can’t trust anyone else at this point.”

  Hanrahan struck out Youkilis and got Pedroia to pop out to end the inning, and the Nationals clung to their 7-6 lead. Wanting to be sure the lead stayed at one, Francona brought in closer Jonathan Papelbon to pitch the ninth, and he held the Nats right there.

  “This won’t be easy,” Stevie said, looking at his scorecard as Hanrahan warmed up. “Ortiz, Bay, and Lowell.”

  Ortiz proved him right, crushing a 2-0 Hanrahan fastball into the gap for a double to start off the ninth inning. Hanrahan then walked Bay. Out to the mound came Manny Acta. Stevie hadn’t even glanced at the bullpen, since the Nationals already had their closer in the game.

  “Wow, look at this,” Svrluga said when Acta waved his arm in the direction of the bullpen. “This takes some guts.”

  Out of the pen came John Lannan-the Nationals’ number one starting pitcher. “He hasn’t pitched in relief all year,” Susan Carol said, her media guide already open.

  “It’s the World Series,” Maske said. “Those two runners score and the season is over. This is what they call all hands on deck.”

  Lannan came in throwing strikes. He was quickly ahead of Lowell with no balls and two strikes. His next pitch was a darting slider that Lowell tried to pull to left field. Instead he hit the ball right at Guzman, who flipped to second baseman Ronnie Belliard for a force at second base. Belliard’s relay to first easily beat the slow-footed Lowell. The crowd, which had been on its feet as Lowell came up, sat down. The tying run was on third, but now there were two men out.

  “Manny is magic,” Susan Carol said.

  “Not yet,” Svrluga said. “Lannan still has to get Drew.”

  And he did. Drew hit a long fly ball to dead center field. If he had pulled the ball to right field, it might have been a series-winning home run over the Green Monster. Instead Dukes, the center fielder, drifted back and made the catch, and just like that, Manny Acta was magic and the series was tied at three games apiece.

  Part of Stevie wished that the Red Sox had ended the series. But another part of him knew that a seventh game with Norbert Doyle pitching for the Nationals against knuckleballer Tim Wakefield pitching for the Red Sox was the way this series was probably supposed to end.

  There were two questions left: who would win game seven, and what would be the big story the day after?

  Stevie set the alarm for eight. They had decided that he and Susan Carol would go to the meeting with Kelleher and Tamara nearby if needed.

  “Felkoff may not like you, Stevie, but he hates me,” Kelleher said. “And I think Doyle will be less antagonistic to the two of you than to Tamara and me.”

  “Do you think we can ask all the right questions?” Susan Carol asked.

  “I know you can ask all the right questions,” Kelleher answered.

  The four of them met for breakfast at eight-fifteen. If there was one thing Stevie would miss about Boston, it was eating breakfast looking out at Boston Harbor. Just before nine, he and Susan Carol walked out the back door of the hotel to the picturesque little park that separated the Marriott from the residential section of Boston ’s North End. They left Kelleher and Mearns just inside the door.

  “We’re on your speed dial, right?” Kelleher said to Susan Carol. “Any trouble at all, hit that button and we’re there in about sixty seconds.”

  “Got it,” Susan Carol said.

  It was a brisk, breezy morning. It would be cold in the ballpark that night, but at the moment it was cool and, with sweaters on, quite comfortable.

  Doyle and Felkoff were standing by a bench that looked out at the water-a slightly incongruous pair, with Felkoff in an expensive suit and Doyle in sweats and a baseball cap.

  “Good morning,” Susan Carol said as they walked up. The response was a curt nod from Felkoff and a halfhearted wave from Doyle.

  “Maybe we should sit down,” Stevie said.

  “No need, we won’t be here long,” Felkoff said.

  Even in sneakers Susan Carol was a couple of inches taller than Felkoff. She walked over to him, looked down, and said, “Mr. Felkoff, we need to ask our questions, and we need to tape-record Mr. Doyle’s answers so we get this story exactly right. So the three of us are going to sit down on the bench and talk. What you do while we talk doesn’t really matter; you’re free to stand if you like.”

  Felkoff stared at her for a second, then snapped, “Now look, we can just call this off right now if you’re going to cop an attitude-”

  “It’s okay, David,” Doyle said, finally speaking up. “Where do you want me to sit, Susan Carol?”

  She pointed to a spot on the bench, and he sat. She sat next to him, with Stevie next to her. She produced a tape recorder and put it on the bench between them. Felkoff stood behind the bench, arms folded, looking extremely unhappy.

  “If you’re going to record, I’m going to record too,” he said, pulling a tape recorder out of his suit pocket.

  “That’s fine,” Susan Carol said.

  Susan Carol looked at Stevie, who nodded that she should begin.

  “We didn’t want it to come to this,” she said to Doyle.

  “Then why has it?” Doyle said. “What did I do to deserve having the two of you digging into my past?”

  “You weren’t honest about your past,” Stevie said, leaning around Susan Carol to make sure Doyle could look him in the eye. “If you had told the truth about the accident from the beginning, we wouldn’t be sitting here today.”

  “And Disney, DreamWorks, and Universal might not be in a bidding war for his story either,” Felkoff said angrily.

  “I guess they won’t be after tomorrow, will they?” Doyle said.

  “I don’t know,” Susan Carol said. “Sometimes the truth makes a better story than a fantasy. I know you feel terribly guilty about what happened, I understand-”

  “No, you don’t!” Doyle shouted. “How can you know what it feels like to be responsible for the fact that the mother of your children died when they were two years old! Do you know how that feels!?”

  No, they didn’t.

  Susan Carol took a deep breath. “I apologize. Bad choice of words.”

  Stevie stepped in now. “Would you tell us what happened that night? Can you help us to understand?”

  For a moment Stevie thought Doyle wasn’t going to answer. Finally he nodded and started to talk very slowly.

  “We’d gone out to dinner,” he said. “We needed to talk about… things. It was a long night, a difficult one. I don’t think, to tell the truth, I could tell you how much I had to drink. At that point I had a pretty high capacity.”

  “Did the conversation end well?” Susan Carol asked. “I mean, did you resolve things?”

  “I don’t want to get into that,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the accident.”

  “It might,” Stevie said. “It might explain why the accident happened.”

  “The accident happened because I was an alcoholic,” Doyle said flatly.

  “Did it also happen,” Susan Carol said, speaking very slowly, “because of Joe Molloy?”

  He stiffened and gave them a funny look. “Why would you ask about Joe?”

  “We heard that you suspected there was something between Joe and your wife…”

  “Oh-that.”

  “Is it true? Is that what you were arguing about at dinner?”

  “No. I might have thought that once or twice, when I’d been drinking, but it wasn’t true. We weren’t talking about Joe.” Doyle paused a moment and then let out a breath he’d been holding.

  “Analise told me in April, right at the start of the season, that she was g
iving me until her birthday-August twelfth-to get sober, even if it meant going to rehab and missing part of the season,” he said. “That night at dinner she told me she was done, she was going to leave me. You’d think that’d be enough for me to set my glass down, but no. Instead I got drunker. It was a terrible night. Analise was drinking too-which was unusual for her.”

  He stopped, and Stevie wondered if he was going to keep telling the story, but after a bit he continued.

  “When we were leaving, the manager tried to take the keys from me, but I wouldn’t let him. He said he’d call someone to take us home…”

  Tears suddenly appeared in Doyle’s eyes. He put his hand up to wipe them away, then buried his head in his shoulder.

  “Come on, Norbert, let’s go,” Felkoff said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Enough is enough.”

  “No!” Doyle said fiercely, pushing Felkoff’s hand away. “I’ve had enough of slippery half-truths…”

  They gave him a while to compose himself, before Stevie prompted, “So, the restaurant manager said he’d call someone to drive you home…”

  “Yeah. Jim Hatley’s always felt that if he’d gotten there sooner, he could have prevented the accident, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t give up my keys to the manager, and I might not have given them to Jim either.”

  “But it wasn’t Jim the manager called,” said Susan Carol. “It was Joe Molloy.”

  “Who told you that?” Doyle seemed genuinely surprised.

  “He did. And Jim Hatley confirmed it. But Jim said that Joe called him instead of going to the restaurant himself.”

  Doyle was silent for a moment. “Huh,” he said. “Well, there are parts to the story even I didn’t know, I guess. But that would explain why Joe was there later.”

  “At the accident scene, you mean?” asked Stevie.

  “No, before then.”

  Now Stevie was completely confused. But Doyle pressed on with his story.

  “I insisted I was okay to drive home, which, believe it or not, I probably was. I knew how to drive slow and careful when I was drunk. I’d had a lot of experience.”

  “Only this time you weren’t okay,” Susan Carol said.

  “I don’t know,” Doyle said. “I never got to find out.”

  “What do you mean?” Stevie said, struggling to keep up.

  “We got about a mile down the road,” he said. “I was driving carefully, but all of a sudden a police car came up behind me and pulled me over. I couldn’t figure it out. I really thought I was driving fine.”

  “And?” Stevie said, hoping he didn’t sound as impatient as he was.

  “It was Joe Molloy,” Doyle said. “He asked how much I’d had to drink. I told him not that much, and he asked if I’d take a sobriety test. I really didn’t want to do that, but I bluffed and said, ‘Sure, fine.’ Then Molloy said, ’Tell you what, since we’re old teammates, I’ll cut you a break. Let Analise drive home, and I won’t test you.”

  “Oh my God,” Susan Carol said, the truth hitting her at the same instant it hit Stevie.

  “I agreed,” Doyle said, starting to sob. “Analise might not have been as drunk as me, but she’d probably never driven drunk in her life. We’d gone a couple miles when we came around that curve too fast and…”

  His voice broke up and he buried his head in his hands.

  “Feel pretty good about yourselves?” Felkoff said low in Stevie’s ear.

  “Shut up, Felkoff,” Stevie said. “You’re not helping.”

  Susan Carol had her arm on Doyle’s back.

  “So, Analise was driving when the accident happened?” she asked softly.

  He looked up at her, tears rolling down his face. “Do you understand?” he said. “If I’d been driving, we probably would have gotten home okay. But I didn’t want to take that sobriety test. A DUI would have got me suspended, heck, maybe released. It wasn’t like I was pitching all that well. So she drove. And she lost control of the car.”

  “But the police report?”

  “I asked Jim not to tell anyone Analise was driving. It was my fault, and I didn’t want the blame to fall on anyone but me. I never even told Jim that Molloy pulled us over… I don’t know if he knows…”

  “Do the kids know? Any of this?” Stevie asked.

  Doyle shook his head. “No. When they were little, I told them there was another car involved-it just seemed easier than the complicated truth. When they were older and figured out that I went to rehab right after the accident, well, I’m sure they put it together. I’ve told them some of my memories about the accident scene because they seemed to need to know, but I’ve never told them all that led up to it. And I certainly never told them Analise was driving. Now I guess they’ll know everything.”

  “Not if they can’t prove you said all this,” Felkoff said. He reached down suddenly and swiped both tape recorders off the bench and began running. Stevie jumped off the bench and chased him. It wasn’t hard to catch him-Felkoff was overweight and over forty. Stevie tackled him halfway across the minipark, and they rolled in the grass.

  Stevie saw one tape recorder fly out of his hand. He twisted Felkoff’s wrist and heard him scream in pain. Then Felkoff kicked him in the stomach, and it was Stevie’s turn to yell in pain.

  Then, all of a sudden, someone was pulling Felkoff off of him. Had Susan Carol been able to call Kelleher that quickly?

  No. Stevie looked up and saw Felkoff struggling in Norbert Doyle’s arms. “Stop it, David,” Doyle said. “Look at yourself. It’s not worth it. It’s over.”

  He looked at Stevie, who was sitting up with a bad stomachache.

  “Write the story,” he said. “Twelve years of lying is enough.”

  Susan Carol was standing right behind him-with the tape recorder in her hand-and Stevie could see Kelleher and Mearns sprinting toward them.

  Doyle pushed Felkoff out of his grasp, turned, and walked away.

  24: GAME SEVEN

  DAVID FELKOFF DUSTED OFF HIS SUIT, glared at everyone, then took off after Doyle without saying another word.

  “What the hell happened?” Kelleher asked.

  “Let’s go back to your room and we’ll tell you,” Susan Carol said.

  As they walked back, Kelleher couldn’t help but tease Stevie about his inability to conduct an interview without getting into some sort of fight. “Let’s see, you’ve been chased down by a dog, been slapped by a girl, wrestled with someone in Faneuil Hall, and tackled an agent,” he said as they headed up the escalator to the lobby. “In all, a pretty good week.”

  “Can’t wait to hear your parents’ reaction when you tell them about it,” Susan Carol put in.

  “Oh sure, I’m going to tell them,” Stevie said. “That way the next time I cover a sports event, I’ll be thirty.”

  She put an arm around him for a moment and said, “Would it help if you tell them I’m proud of you?”

  “Doubt it,” he said, but he wrapped an arm around her too, and that did help.

  They walked Tamara and Bobby through the entire meeting and played them the tape, in part to make sure it hadn’t been damaged during Stevie’s tussle with Felkoff. When they were finished, Kelleher looked at Mearns and said, “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a pretty tragic story. And a tough call,” Mearns said.

  “You mean whether to write the story at all, don’t you?” Susan Carol asked.

  Kelleher stood up and walked to the window, gazing out at the harbor for a moment. Then he turned and faced them. “Look, you guys have done an amazing reporting job on this,” he said. “Stevie, you’ve done everything but go to the hospital to ferret out the truth.”

  “Give me a little more time and I can probably oblige,” Stevie said, forcing a smile. He wasn’t sure where Kelleher was going, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t going to make him happy.

  “There are two questions you have to ask when you publish a story, especially a story like this one,” Kelleher continued. “
First: is it true? The answer there is easy. You’ve got the truth, you’ve got it from the main source, and you’ve got it on the record. The story won’t even need to be lawyered. You’ve got Doyle on tape telling you what happened that night.”

  “And the second question?” said Susan Carol.

  Kelleher sighed. “Is a lot more complicated. Is it necessary? Does the story serve a purpose?”

  Stevie had been wondering about that one since his first trip to Lynchburg. But now that the hard-won truth was in their hands, he didn’t want to give up on it.

  “Of course it’s necessary,” he said. “Doyle lied about his past. If he’s selling his story to Disney or DreamWorks and it isn’t true…”

  “Exactly right-we shouldn’t let him do that,” Kelleher said. “That’s the reason the story was worth pursuing in the first place. But what if he’s not? What if, after this morning, he tells Felkoff to buzz off. What if he decides to tell the truth: that he’s a recovering alcoholic and that he’s always felt responsible for Analise’s death?”

  “You mean leave out the rest?” Susan Carol said. “Leave out the fact that she was drinking that night too, and that she was driving because Molloy made her drive?”

  “That’s the part I wonder about,” Kelleher said. “Did he lie? Yes. Did Hatley lie on the report? Yes. But why did they do it?”

  “To protect the kids later on,” Stevie said.

  “To allow them to remember their mother in the best way possible,” Susan Carol added.

  Kelleher nodded. “That’s not evil. This isn’t a team owner covering up drug test results. It certainly isn’t blackmailing a basketball player or faking a kidnapping.”

  “It’s a lot easier when it’s clear-cut,” Stevie said.

  “Good-versus-evil stories are pretty simple to write once you’ve got them,” Susan Carol said.

  “Right,” Kelleher said. “Do either of you think Doyle is evil?”

  “No,” they both answered, Stevie with some extra vigor, remembering Doyle pulling Felkoff off of him.

  Tamara had been quiet throughout the conversation, letting Kelleher lead Stevie and Susan Carol to what he clearly thought was the right decision.