The New York

by Bill Branger

  That’s when I benched him for his own good.

  He wasn’t particularly upset by it but we had a long talk about his decline in hitting.

  — I don’t understand it, either (he said).

  — I think maybe the motivation is gone.

  — I don’t see how.

  — Well, you got yourself married. That makes you happy. I’m happy that you’re happy and Maria is happy. But sometimes, to motivate ourselves, we have to be a little bit unhappy.

  — I was unhappy before, but I didn’t like being it.

  — You were hitting .452 before.

  — You think it’s because I am happy to be with my wife?

  — Well, you two have become party people. You’re always turning up in “Page Six” in the Post and other places. You might just be burning the candle a bit too much.

  — I understand what you say. Perhaps you are right. Maria is so much in love with this city. She is dazzled by everything and I want her to be happy.

  — Stay home some nights and watch television. Order in pizza.

  — Maria does not enjoy pizza.

  — Well, maybe she would do it just for you.

  But I could see that Raul didn’t think so, and, if truth be told, neither did I. Like I said, I did my best by benching him for a couple of games. I figured it might motivate him a little more.

  Instead, it got me a visit down at the Stadium from Maria herself. She was dressed to the nines in a little wisp of a thing like Saks is always selling on page three of the New York Times. I must say, as I have said before, she is an extraordinarily good-looking woman and quite a forceful presence in a small, windowless, uncheerful room like my manager’s office underneath the stands.

  She lit into me the way Charlene sometimes does when I order ribs. But this was not about eating.

  “You embarrass Raul when you will not let him play and you embarrass me. I don’t want to answer questions about why Raul cannot play, A man called me twice from a newspaper this morning. What do I know about baseball? Why are you trying to disgrace us?” Those are the words as I remember them but not the tone. The tone was fast and furious. She was just letting it all out.

  Like I said, if you’re the manager you have to take that shit from the owner from time to time, but I was damned if I had to take it from the player’s wife. Especially after all I had done for her and Raul

  “Look, Miz Guevara, since Raul and you set up house in the Plaza, his batting average has dropped about a hundred seventy points. I don’t make no connections, but I do think it might be a good idea to spend a few more days hanging around the house and not doing the party party party all day and night.”

  “Are you telling Raul and me how to live our lives?”

  “Yeah, something like that. I figure it’s only fair as long as you feel compelled to tell me how to manage my baseball team.”

  “You don’t manage except to insult a proud and sensitive man like Raul”

  “I don’t recall Raul sending back any of his paychecks — his new and improved paycheck, I might add — while he’s been hitting zeros.”

  “Raul was a happy youth in Havana. He had no desire to come to New York. But now that we’re here, we intend to enjoy the amenities of the city,” Maria said in that foot-stomping way of hers.

  “Fine, Miz Guevara. You do what you got to do and I'll do what I’ve got to do,” I said. She had riled me, I have to admit. I also thought that maybe by building a fire under her, she could light up Raul.

  I even went so far as to mention it to George.

  His Gila monster eyes fixed on me for a long moment before he said anything. Then, “It sounds to me like our problem, all of our problem with Raul, is right there before our eyes. That little señora is raining our ball player.”

  “Well, I don’t think she’s ruining him. He’s just got to find a way to balance his life. You know, the game and his social life and all,” I said.

  George just stared right through me.

  “I wish she’d go back to Cuba where she came from.”

  “We can’t do anything about that,”

  “Why not?” George said.

  I didn’t like the way this was going. “Look, George —”

  “I’ve got friends in the State Department. We can expel her as an undesirable alien.”

  “George, you already put the fix in to get all these Cuban bail players, you can’t start putting in the fix to send one of them home —”

  “I can do whatever I want,” George said.

  It was pretty ominous from where I was sitting. I know Baxter said this and that, but I didn’t really understand who had who by the balls. George was upset because the team was faltering. He was upset because he had signed a two-year, eight-million-dollar contract with Raul. Raul was the draw at the box office and I had benched him. Raul was flashing in the pan, so to speak. That made George look like a fool and George didn’t like it. That could set George off in a bad direction. I know people like that. They’re into control, and sometimes they get their wires crossed.

  33

  I don’t know what follows what in what happened next, a lot of it is still a mystery and some of it is probably top secret. I don’t want to know my government’s secrets as long as they don’t involve me.

  But it did end up involving me to an extent.

  Now, I can say I don’t know who George talked to about the Maria problem, aside from me. He might be whistling smoke about his famous connections. Then again, he is a man who once saw Abraham Lincoln in the White House, so what do I know?

  What did happen is that two men went over to the Plaza Hotel around nine, two nights after George and I talked.

  We were busy playing the White Sox in the Bronx. I had even un-benched Raul in the hope he might see the light, but he didn’t do a thing his first two times at bat.

  Now it seems that on the floor of the Guevara suite was a new maid named Elena Sanchez. She’s the one who goes into the room and puts that candy on your pillow and other things.

  Elena was Mexican, as it turns out, and she was in the Guevara suite, putting in new towels and such.

  Miz Guevara was out, not at the ball game, naturally, but dining in the restaurant in the hotel.

  This probably explains how it was fouled up, but it doesn’t excuse anything.

  The two men — I will get to them in more detail later — went into the Guevara suite on the fifth floor of the Plaza just as Miz Guevara was dining on her turtle soup and Mr. Guevara was striking out his second time at bat.

  What was only explained much later was that Miss Sanchez was wearing the very same little black dress that had so impressed me when Maria wore it down to my office in the Stadium.

  The details get very murky here. Maybe Miss Sanchez shouldn’t have been trying on Miz Guevara’s dress, but it doesn’t seem that much, if you ask me. When you live in a hotel, you expect that your life is going to be a little less private than when you live at home.

  I went over this with Charlene after the season and she said she once caught a maid trying on her fur coat the time she was at the convention of nutritionists in Las Vegas. It seems to me that nutritionists shouldn’t meet in places like Las Vegas because it tends to take away from the seriousness of their conventions, but that is another matter entirely.

  Well, what it came down to is that the two men went into the suite and they grabbed Elena Sanchez. She cried out something to them in terrified Spanish a moment before they maced her.

  The Spanish only added to the kidnappers’ impression that they had the right person. Because that’s what they were going to do, kidnap Maria Guevara and hold her.

  They would have done it, too, except for the circumstance of Miss Sanchez being in the right suite at the wrong time in a $325 little black dress from Saks.

  They took the struggling woman down a service stairway and gave her a shot of something that rendered her halfway unconscious.

  Well, I didn’t know any of
this was going on at the time and neither did Raul. We were just playing baseball and beating up on the Sox, despite the fact that, once again, Raul went oh for 4.

  The game ended around eleven and I cleaned up and changed into civvies and drove home to Fort Lee. I guess I put the car in the lot at the Holiday Inn around 12:30 A.M. I just went up to my apartment and flaked out, which is why I was in bed sleeping at 2:30 when I got a call from Maria Guevara. I had guessed it was George calling because of the odd hour so I said something like, “What do you want now?”

  “The police have come,” Maria said. “They are searching our rooms. This is such an insult, they say that we have kidnapped our maid. We have no maid!”

  “Whoa, Maria. Where’s Raul?”

  “He is here as well. A policeman is speaking to him, but Raul doesn’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand!”

  “They are going to arrest us. This is terrible, this would never happen in Cuba. I wish we had never left Cuba,” she said, and it was not the Maria of stamping feet and cold disdain but a rather young woman on the edge of panic. I said something to calm her down and said I would be right over.

  You can make good time in New York at 2:30 in the morning. It took fifteen minutes to get from the parking lot of the Holiday Inn to the Plaza Hotel — although it took a bit longer to get in a parking garage.

  The cops were still in the suite with Raul, who was looking sick and haunted, and Maria didn’t look quite as stylish as the last time I saw her.

  I told the cops who I was and one of them said a maid in the hotel had disappeared during her shift.

  “Why are you figuring it was here? Or that it involved these people?”

  “The maid was Mexican, been here only a month, and she worked this part of the fifth floor,” a cop named Brennan said. “So we went up and down the floor and knocked on doors. This is where we found her maid’s uniform.”

  “Her uniform?”

  “Yeah. In the closet.”

  I looked at Maria and Raul and then at the uniform the cop held in his hand. It was gray and the kind of dress that maids always wear. Except there was no maid inside it.

  “Raul was at the park, we had a game —”

  “I know, I know. We won 3 to 1 but Raul went oh for 4,” the cop said. He was either a fan or a good questioner. “He said when he got home here, his wife was asleep and he just crawled into bed without waking her.”

  You could see the way the cop looked at Maria just then that he was thinking about the act of crawling into bed with her.

  “But this doesn’t make any sense, what would they have to do with someone disappearing?”

  “Look, Mr. Shawn, it’s this way. Someone has disappeared, leaving behind her dress. It just doesn’t happen in the normal course of things. And Mrs. uh Guevara says she didn’t notice the maid’s dress in her closet.”

  Why was I having a sinking feeling?

  It had something to do with something that I didn’t really want to think about. But there I was, thinking about it, and the cop was watching me think.

  The cop said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing. What if the maid was in this suite just when someone was coming in looking for someone else?”

  “Someone else who?”

  “Someone who speaks Spanish.”

  The cop saw it. He looked at Maria in her terry cloth robe and then at Raul and thee at the dress in his hand. He held up the dress in front of Maria and she took a step back.

  “This could fit you,” he said.

  “I’m not a servant,” she said with a little of her old fire.

  “You have any clothes missing?” the cop said.

  Maria looked oddly at him and went to the closet and looked through the dresses hanging there. She had accumulated a decent-size wardrobe for only being in New York seven weeks. It was a testimony to the shopping power of rich women.

  “My black dress, the dress from Saks,” she suddenly said. “My black dress is gone. The maid must have stolen it!”

  “A guy comes into this suite, say when Mrs. Guevara is eating downstairs, and he sees a Spanish-looking woman in a dress and thinks it’s Mrs. Guevara,” the cop said. He shook his head.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “We’re all going to have to talk downtown with Immigration. I don’t want to get in the middle of this,” the cop said. I knew the feeling.

  “The police want to talk to you some more down at the police building. It’s down near where we saw the ships that time, Raul.” Then I realized that Maria would understand and not Raul. She didn’t bother to translate.

  “This is terrible, they can’t arrest us.”

  “They’re not putting you under arrest, they just need to talk to you some more —”

  “But this is terrible, this is like in the days when people disappeared —” She stopped, her hand on her mouth. “Oh my God, someone wanted to kidnap me?”

  “Or kidnap whoever was in this suite. Maybe it was a sex thing,” the cop said. I thought it was a bit too cheerful a way to put something like that because it sure wasn’t reassuring anyone.

  Raul, who had been looking on helplessly from the sea of English swimming around him, said to me:

  — What is happening, Señor?

  — The police want to talk to you and Maria more about this down at the police station. It’s all right, Raul. I’ll call George and get a lawyer down there.

  — Why do I need an attorney?

  — It’s the usual thing.

  — For someone under arrest.

  — They just want to talk to you. A woman has disappeared and they need help to find her.

  This went on for some time. I sort of shepherded the couple around to find their clothes and get ready to go with the police, telling, them everything was going to be all right and asking the cops exactly where this station house was located where they would be talking to the Guevaras.

  I left the hotel and then grabbed a cab. I went to the Tapas bar on Third. It was getting ready to close, but Jose Marti Riccardo was still there. He must have been drunk, but he was still ambulatory and coherent.

  “Señor Riccardo, the cops have picked up Raul and his wife and they’re talking to him down at police headquarters. You think you can go down there and interpret for them?”

  “Oh, I heard about Señora Guevara. She doesn’t need me,” he said.

  “She’s a kid, Jose. She needs someone who can talk to the cops for her.”

  I told him what happened.

  “Who would do something like that?”

  I gave him a hundred dollars in twenties.

  “Of course I will help,” he said. “I know many of the police. They are friends.”

  “I hoped so. You call me when it’s over. I don’t care when it’s over, you call me.”

  “Gracias, Señor,” he said. “But I’ll need cab fare.” I gave him another ten. I had just about enough to get back home with.

  I didn’t get to call George until after four. I admit there was pleasure in waking him up, but it didn’t overcome the sick feeling I had felt rising inside me the last hour or so.

  I told him what had happened.

  “You mean someone kidnapped the hotel maid thinking she was Raul’s wife?” he screamed into the phone. I had to hold it away from my ear.

  “That’s about it,” I said.

  “Who could be that stupid!” he shouted again.

  “Hey, George, I don’t know from stupidity, I just know that Raul needs a lawyer.”

  “Why, what are they going to do? Arrest him? He was at the ballpark when this happened —”

  “Nobody knows exactly when this happened.”

  There was a pause then.

  I thought of Jack Wade and the IRS and notes written to Miss Charlene Cleaver by Miss Roxanne Devon of Brunswick, New Jersey.

  I was definitely feeling sick.

  “Nobody knows, do they George?”

>   “Can you imagine nincompoops kidnapping the wrong person? All because she was Spanish and that was who they were looking for? Can you believe people would be that stupid?” He was screaming all this at full throttle. It didn’t seem that he actually wanted me to answer any of these questions.

  “George, you didn’t —”

  “I didn’t what? What are you accusing me of?”

  “George, you wouldn’t have done this, would you?”

  “Done what, done what?”

  I just shook my head. It was a stretch to go from sending phony letters to Charlene, to siccing the IRS on Jack Wade just because he offered me a job, to something like this. On the other hand, who would have believed all that stuff about Richard Nixon if it hadn’t have come out the way it did?

  On the third hand, I was talking to a slumlord and a baseball team owner rolled into one, a deadly combination.

  “George, the maid is named Elena Suarez.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you told me —”

  “George, are you going to get a lawyer to help out Raul? I mean, if they’re talking to Immigration, then maybe this is a big deal.”

  “The big deal, you son of a bitch, is that Raul is hitting .295 and dropping and I want to win the fucking pennant. That is the big deal. And this bitch Maria Guevara is raining everything with her fucking social engagements and driving my star hitter crazy in bed every night!”

  “George, you don’t want to win the pennant.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Your friend Baxter”

  “I took care of Baxter, the little shit. He thinks he can fuck with me, I got friends he never even heard of until they came down on him.”

  “Now you want to win the pennant?”

  “I wanna look good. I want the Yankees to look good.”

  “George, you got to get a lawyer —”

  “I'll get him a lawyer, I’ll get him twenty lawyers, the stupid son of a bitch. Can you imagine someone kidnapping the wrong fucking person, a fucking maid?”

  34

  I am glad to report that Miss Elena Suarez was released unharmed around four in the morning in the terminal of Newark International Airport.

  She reported that her kidnappers were big men but she was not very good on descriptions because they had kept her blindfolded, driving around half the night in New Jersey.