King of the Corner

by Loren D. Estleman

  Opportunity knocked during the American League play-offs.

  Confident that a lineup including Al Kaline, Jim Northrup, Stormin’ Norman Cash, and Willie Horton, together with a pitching staff headed by Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich, would lead the team to a pennant, Mrs. MacGryff entered a contest sponsored by Vernor’s Ginger Ale.

  First prize? Two tickets to Game 2 of the Series.

  Challenged to write an essay in 25 words or less entitled, “Why the Detroit Tigers and the Taste of Vernor’s are Unbeatable,” the Queen of Fandom, by then thrice a grandmother, declined all offers of familial assistance and locked herself in her house for two days, subsisting on coffee, doughnuts, and the enigmatic whispers of the Muse.

  At length, from a Vesuvius of discarded sheets of crumpled notepaper, she excavated her masterpiece: an ode to coaches, catchers, and carbonation.

  After laboriously two-finger-typing it on her old Remington, she sealed it up and sent it off, the best pitch in her repertoire.

  And it was a strike! Within ten days, she received her tickets by return mail.

  “Oh, it was a grand day,” rhapsodizes Mrs. MacGryff, who brought her daughter-in-law with her to the stadium. “We sat in the old green seats, you know, and I can still smell the sun and the old mustard stains on the fabric. It was especially sweet that day.

  “Willie and Norm and Mickey all hit homers with men on. It was Mickey’s first home run in the majors—I almost caught it, but I forgot my glove that day, and the ball went through my hands and bounced up into the higher seats. We won, eight to one.”

  But the glow of victory was short.

  When the die-hard rooter returned to her old house, she found it empty.

  In her absence, neighbors reported, a moving van had backed up to her front door and two men in coveralls had carried out furniture, rugs, appliances, even clothes, until all six rooms were as bare as that turn-of-the-century day her parents had moved in.

  Acquaintances on the block expressed surprise that she was leaving the neighborhood after so many years.

  Mrs. MacGryff had not won the Vernor’s contest; someone else had. The burglars, whom police surmised had local ties, took advantage of the scuttlebutt that Mrs. MacGryff had entered the competition, purchasing and sending her the tickets so they could work most of the day undisturbed.

  After all these years the octogenarian is philosophical.

  “If I had just caught Mickey’s home run ball it would’ve been worth losing all those family pictures and things.”

  (to be continued)

  PART THREE

  Screwball

  Chapter 14

  OKAY, SO BASEBALL WASN’T like sex. Nothing was. What Doc felt when his hand closed around the small hard sphere, wrapped in soiled white leather rubbed shiny and held together with stitches as tight as old scar tissue (and stamped Made in Taiwan), wasn’t what he had felt when the blonde who called herself Lynda first placed her palms on his naked skin in the massage parlor. It just made him think of it. And the release when he wound up and followed through and the ball whistled over the plate and struck Needles Lewis’ mitt with a report like a muzzled shotgun wasn’t orgasmic. It was more like stepping off the bus, hot and tired and aching all over, in front of his own house after a long time away. It was a cold drink and a familiar bed and a broken-down pair of loose shoes all rolled up into one.

  “Ball one!” bellowed Neal.

  “Ball, hell! I split the plate.”

  “Another inch lower and you would’ve.”

  “You ought to clean the grease out of your eyes before you leave work.”

  “Play ball,” Neal said.

  Doc’s brother, who worked only a half-day Saturdays, had come to the empty lot just in time to umpire the game. Before that, Doc, young Sean, Sergeant Battle and his son Charlie Junior—a reedy youth in a flattop and Fat Boys sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off who looked older than his fourteen years—the three young M-and-M’s from the funeral parlor, and Jeff Dolan, who arrived last, had spent four hours raking the cans and broken bottles and other less identifiable trash into a big pile off the playing field. Battle, dressed comfortably but carefully in a gray sweatshirt without lettering, stone-washed Levi’s, and black Nikes, had hesitated when he saw the three Marshals, all of whom he had seen around 1300 during drug sweeps, but Doc had talked him into staying on condition that Needles, Yarnell, and Creed stand for a frisk with their hands on the roof of the sergeant’s Chevy parked at the curb. Battle relieved them of a clasp knife with a five-inch blade, a set of brass knuckles which the owner, Creed of the dreadlocks and nasal jewelry, claimed was a paperweight he carried for luck, and a hypodermic syringe.

  “This why they call you Needles?” he asked the youth with the checkerboard haircut

  “I’m a diabetic.”

  “Where’s your insulin?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Two concealed weapons and drug paraphernalia,” Battle said. “With priors, you might all be out in time for basketball season. Hell of a team you got here, Doc.”

  Doc said, “That’s kind of chickenshit. You didn’t find any drugs.”

  “Shit. Shit.” Battle snapped the needle off the syringe, crumpled the barrel, and pocketed it along with the knife and brass knuckles. “With my luck the chief’ll drive by.”

  “Tell him you’re undercover. He’s got his own problems.” A federal grand jury was investigating an alleged connection between Chief Hart and $2.6 million missing from a secret police fund.

  They walked away from the car. “You might’ve told me who I’d be playing with.”

  “I didn’t know until yesterday,” Doc said. “I can’t send them away. They brought the equipment.”

  “This could cost me a lieutenantcy.”

  “That mean you’re staying?”

  “I’d go home, but my wife would make me put up the screens.” The sergeant picked up his fielder’s glove.

  Since they had only eight men—nine, when Neal showed up—it was less a game than batting practice; but since the thing had started as a one-on-one baseball lesson for Sean, Doc wasn’t complaining. With a complete rotating outfield playing in close to monitor the bases, it beat chasing the ball through the tall grass most of the day.

  The diamond they had laid out reminded him of the weekend sandlot games of his boyhood. First base was Needles’ Pistons warm-up jacket, stripped off during the heat of the cleanup and raveled in the cuffs. Second and third were broken shingles and home plate was an old rubber car floor mat. The pitcher’s “mound” was level with home and Doc had used up half his warm-up pitches learning to compensate.

  Jeff Dolan was batting when Neal made his “ball one” call. The big Irishman had on sweats, worn Reeboks, and a Tigers home cap, team issue, not one of the mesh-backed adjustable jobs they sold at the concession stands. He had a crouching stance and choked up high on the bat. Doc blew two past him after the first call, then delivered a split-finger that connected and would have been no problem with a professional outfield and a shortstop, but took a slow loop and dropped in between second and third. Yarnell was still chasing it in from left field when Dolan reached first. For a giant the accountant could run.

  Battle was next up. Doc went fishing with his first two pitches, got him to swing at a duster, went to first to keep Dolan from stealing—no chance for the pitchout, since he had to telegraph the move to allow Charlie Junior to come in from right field—caught the sergeant looking on the next, and fanned him out when he went for another one in the dirt. He stalked away cursing himself.

  Sean stepped up reluctantly. The boy was wearing a dumpy madras shirt with the tail out and elastic jeans stretched tight across his large buttocks. Neal spent some time showing him how to hold the bat, which drooped in his son’s hands the moment Neal let go of it, then stepped back behind the catcher looking worried. Doc thought that if his brother had been that unsure of himself when he and Billie were discussing whether Sean should be a
llowed to play, the boy would be home right now annihilating enemy spacecraft.

  Doc fed him an easy one waist-high, slow enough to read the lettering on the ball. Sean swung, missed, and sat down on the plate. Creed, out in center field, laughed.

  Neal and Doc both took a step toward the boy and stopped. Sean got up and looked at the ground. The bat dangled.

  “Play ball,” Neal said.

  When the bat came up, Doc tried to hit it and succeeded. The ball bounced up and landed in Needles’ mitt.

  Neal hesitated, then: “You’re out.”

  “All right, another Cecil Fielder!” Creed called.

  Sean dropped the bat and shuffled away.

  The outfield rotated. Battle went out to cover left field and Charlie Junior came in from right to bat, tossing his father his glove on the way. Doc supposed that the amount of energy the elder Battle might spend putting his son out depended on what kind of relationship they had.

  His curiosity wasn’t satisfied that time, however. Charlie Junior jumped on the first pitch, a fastball up around the letters, and knocked the ball over the roof of the house next door. He and Dolan both scored while Creed went to look for the ball. It was the only one they had.

  Doc pitched most of the afternoon, quitting the mound just before five o’clock when his arm started to ache. Sean struck out four times, hit a ground ball finally that bounced and rolled to a stop ten feet in front of the mound, and was thrown out while he was waddling toward first. Creed had a laugh and a comment for every failure until Neal went out for a talk with the M-and-M, who was silent afterward; the mechanic outweighed him sixty solid pounds, and Creed was weaponless. When it came Sean’s turn to play right field, Doc had a talk with Dolan, who was next up, and the accountant hit another looper that dropped almost at the boy’s feet. Doc wasn’t sure which one of them tripped and fell the most times, Sean on his way in to tag the runner out or Dolan on his way to first. At that it was still a near thing when Sean dropped the ball with one foot on the base. Dolan, fresh out of subterfuges, waited patiently for the tag.

  That was the last play of the game. Sean, flushed with exertion if not excitement, came in holding the ball, and Doc took it from him with a “Good work.” He suppressed the urge to make more of a fuss. The boy was clumsy, not stupid.

  “What did you say to Creed?” Doc asked his brother.

  Neal rolled his thick shoulders. “I said if he didn’t shut up I’d rip that fucking diamond out of his nose and ram it up his ass.”

  Needles announced there were cold drinks in the cooler in the box of his pickup, a green 1976 Dodge club cab parked behind Battle’s Chevy, rusted as holey as antique lace around the wheels and missing its tailgate. The sound system inside the cab had cost more than the truck, and after a couple of minutes Battle reached inside and switched the radio from the rap station Needles had turned on to one that played Motown. The sergeant had stripped off his sweatshirt early in the game. Slabs of muscle jumped and twitched under his soaked undershirt when he used the heavier garment to mop the sweat from the back of his neck. He opened the cooler. Cans of Stroh’s, Coors, and Coca-Cola stuck up like the prows of bright-colored submarines through the ice.

  “How old are you?” he asked Needles.

  “Sixty-two. I take care of myself.”

  Battle handed him a Coke.

  “Shit. I paid for the beer.”

  “Who sold it to you?”

  “I ain’t your snitch.” He popped the top and walked away from the truck.

  The sergeant gave Cokes to Creed and Yarnell and got out a Stroh’s for Neal and a Coke for Sean, but Neal said they were going home to wash up for supper. He held up a hand and left with the boy. For a second Doc thought that his brother was going to drop the hand to Sean’s shoulder, and so did Neal, but after hovering in the vicinity for a beat it fell to his side. Their father had never been one for displays of affection either.

  Battle offered a beer to Dolan, who pleaded an evening appointment to do someone’s taxes, shook hands with Doc and the sergeant, and started across the lot to where he had left his car. As Charlie Junior approached, his father tossed him a Coke and the youth spun around and caught it behind his back.

  Grinning, he sat down on the Chevy’s front bumper to drink.

  “Kid’s a hell of an athlete,” Doc said. “Any aspirations?”

  “He’s even better on the court. Wants to be the next Isaiah, but I don’t know.” Battle handed Doc a Stroh’s and opened a Coors for himself. “I had a shot at a baseball scholarship at Michigan but I put myself through the U of D.”

  “Why?” After his ignominious first time at bat, the sergeant had hit a double, forced in two runs, and scored all the way from first on a sacrifice by Dolan. He had a good eye and fast reflexes.

  “I don’t know. My uncle was a pro wrestler, that qualify as an athlete? He was always bitching about cheap hotel rooms and rotten food. He raised me. I guess some of it took.” He chugged down half his beer and belched, a good deep one. Guy thing; Doc figured he didn’t get to do it at home. “I wouldn’t try too hard to make that nephew of yours into a player. Some kids just aren’t cut out.”

  “He stinks, all right. I just couldn’t stand watching him rotting in front of the tube. That’s not healthy.”

  “You jocks are all the same. Lots of people lead perfectly normal lives without ever knowing what a locker room smells like. Kid’ll probably discover a cure for AIDS. Maybe he’ll invent another pet rock and you and your brother get to retire before you’re fifty.”

  Doc let it slide and drank. He only liked beer when he was hot and it was cold and he was in the company of guys. He’d heard a psychotherapist on Donahue refer to it as male bonding. Leave it to the shrinks to ruin a good thing with a sissy name.

  “What were you and Ance doing at Wilson McCoy’s funeral yesterday?”

  Battle was looking away when he asked the question, tipping his can. Doc’s experience with the police during the investigation of the death in his suite at the Westin had taught him that they were most dangerous when they didn’t seem to be paying attention to their own words. He nodded. “I thought I saw some of your men. I drove Ance there. He was invited.”

  “What’d you think of Beatrice Blackwood?”

  “She was okay. Everybody’s nice at a funeral.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She said she’s having her eyes operated on.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Starkweather Hall’s name didn’t come up, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Is that what I’m asking?” He was looking at Doc now.

  “I don’t think Ance knows where he is. What am I supposed to do, ask him?”

  “Just look and listen. He had some reason for introducing you to that circle. I wish I knew what it was. Anyway, you’re doing fine. Yesterday you didn’t know any Marshals, and today here you are playing ball with three of them.”

  “They’re just kids.”

  “Your boy Needles was in for questioning just last month on a drive-by shooting in Ferndale. Somebody put a bullet in a six-year-old girl’s head from the backseat of a ’68 Impala. Turned out it was the wrong neighborhood. They were looking for an eleven-year-old runner who lived in the next block. Yeah”—he emptied the can, crushed it, and tossed it into the pickup box—“they’re just kids.”

  “Did you look into the ownership of these lots like I asked?” Doc said after a moment.

  Battle wriggled into his sweatshirt. The late-afternoon air was cooling. “City property. The federal funding was for the two houses they tore down to shoo out a crack operation. Buying land from the city is like digging a trench in quicksand. No civic grunt’s going to put himself out to profit the treasury.”

  “I don’t want to buy it. I don’t have enough for a security deposit on an apartment. I’d just like to know if I decide to clear the space for a ball field that some guy in a hard hat’s not going to march in and turn it into a
parking lot. I want official sanction.”

  “Going to blow away evil with the clear cold redeeming wind of baseball, that it?”

  “I wasn’t thinking that, but look at the M-and-M’s. They’re not running dope when they’re running bases.”

  “Cute,” Battle said. “Make it your slogan. You penitent exjailbird ballplayers give me a pain. They must have some world-class chaplains in stir.”

  “Penitent hell. Last week on the news some judge decided a guy that strangled his wife was unfit for trial and turned him over to Ypsi State. The shrinks held him three days, said he was sane and let him go. All I did was throw a party and they put me away for seven years. I just want to have something to do with the game.”

  “I’ll look into it If you will.”

  “I wish I knew what I was looking for.”

  “If you don’t know, you haven’t seen it.” He scrubbed a sleeve across his thick-boned forehead. “I wonder what Alcina Lilley was doing slumming with a bunch like the Marshals. She never acknowledged their existence before.”

  Doc said, “Maybe it was McCoy she was there for. You said he shot up the Sicilians for what they did to Mahomet”

  “Yeah, well, I got that wrong. I looked it up. McCoy offed Patsy Orr before Mahomet got his. That may have even been the reason the Sicilians killed him. Which makes her showing up at the services a big-time mystery.”

  “Ask her.”

  “She doesn’t talk to cops. Cops and her late husband didn’t get along. And we can’t apply pressure to the widow of a saint.”

  “He’s been dead what, twenty-five years?”

  “Twenty-four this August. Some people want to make it a holiday. Nobody knows what day he was born.”

  “She doesn’t look a day over thirty-five.”

  “I don’t think she’s forty,” the sergeant said. “She was just a kid when they married, I mean a kid. No one even knew he had a wife until she came forward after. They married somewhere down South where it was legal then.”

  Doc wanted to ask him more questions about Alcina Lilley, but Charlie Junior had joined them. “Dad, the movies. You said I could go.”