Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  OTHER BOOKS BY HOWARD OWEN

  Littlejohn

  Fat Lightning

  Answers to Lucky

  The Measured Man

  Harry and Ruth

  The Rail

  Turn Signal

  Rock of Ages

  The Reckoning

  Oregon Hill

  The Philadelphia Quarry

  A WILLIE BLACK MYSTERY

  PARKER

  FIELD

  HOWARD OWEN

  Copyright © 2014 by Howard Owen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Owen, Howard—

  Parker Field : a Willie Black mystery / Howard Owen.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-57962-361-6

  eISBN 978-1-57962-394-4

  1. Sportswriters—Fiction. 2. Baseball players—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Sports stories. I. Title.

  PS3565.W552P37 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2014007556

  Printed in the United States of America

  As always, to Karen

  Chapter One

  THURSDAY, APRIL 5

  There was only one shot. Everybody was in agreement on that.

  Nobody knows why he was in the goddamn park. Early April felt more like the middle of March. The wind stung like an inside pitch on an aluminum bat. Even the usual suspects wearing somebody else’s clothes were hanging out around the homeless shelters or hunkered down where the sun could reach them but the wind couldn’t. A week before, it had been eighty degrees. A balloon stuck in a tree and an abandoned Frisbee attested to Richmond’s faithless spring weather.

  I wasn’t there. Mal Wheelwright had called a staff meeting at two, and attendance was not voluntary. These days, staff meetings are never called to announce we’re getting raises and adding to staff. No refreshments are served. Still, you don’t want to be counted “absent” and find your ID card doesn’t work the next day.

  This one was relatively painless. We’re reducing the business section to three days a week to save newsprint. No jobs lost this time, Wheelie assured us, but the business news reporters and editors don’t look so sure. Might be a good time to take that PR job, guys.

  So I was in the newsroom when Sally Velez got the word. The police radio is pretty worthless these days. We get most of our tips from Twitter or our “friends” on Facebook, which is where this one came from. Sally was seated at her desk, half listening to Wheelie drone on about doing more with less while she scoured the electronic waterfront.

  “Shit,” I heard her say. I walked over and saw the tip: Shots at monroe park. man down. what’s up.

  “Better check it out,” she said.

  Chip Grooms from photo and I were more than happy to skip the rest of the meeting, now that we knew we weren’t losing our jobs, taking pay cuts or getting more “furlough” days.

  Since I had walked to the paper, we took Chip’s car. We parked next to the Prestwould, where I live, and crossed the street. Ninety percent of the ether tips we get lead nowhere, but this looked like the one in ten that beat the odds. An ambulance and six squad cars were in and around what was obviously a crime scene, having driven over the grass’s first pitiful efforts to paint the park green again.

  I spied my favorite doughnut-eating flatfoot and walked up, hoping to get inside the yellow tape.

  “Damn, Gillespie,” I said. “I didn’t know they made pants that big.”

  “Fuck you, Black,” he said by way of greeting.

  Then I saw the body.

  I ran past Gillespie before he could catch me, and two other cops had their hands on each of my arms, trying to haul me away before I convinced them that the man on the ground was a friend of mine.

  They were putting Les onto the stretcher. At first, I thought he was gone. But then I called his name, and he opened his eyes and looked at me.

  “Willie,” he said. “What the fuck?”

  Chapter Two

  FRIDAY

  For once, I don’t need the alarm. I’ve been up since six, an hour I rarely see in the A.M.

  Yesterday was wall-to-bleeping-wall.

  I rode in the ambulance, almost getting arrested before the EMTs relented. I reached Peggy on the cell phone on the way to the hospital and told her, as gently as I could, that Les had been shot, but that he was OK, he was going to be fine—something that I wasn’t in the least sure of. As I looked down at Les, lying there, with two guys trying to keep him from bleeding out, his eyes blinking at me but not definitely registering what was going on, I figured lying was my best strategy.

  “What hospital?” Peggy yelled three times before I could cut through the hysteria and tell her.

  “VCU. The big one.”

  She hung up in the middle of my baseless assurances. Neither my mother nor Awesome Dude, the guest who never left, has a car. They and Les usually depend on feet or buses or the occasional taxi—or, if all else fails, me and my hard-ridden Honda—to get them where they need or want to go. I wondered how she was going to get to the hospital, but I was focused on Les.

  They separated him from me for a few minutes after they wheeled him in. Even in Richmond, shooting victims get the kind of prompt attention that the medical profession rarely affords us, and a small army of competent people whisked Les away to try and save his life.

  By the time they let me come back, they had him sedated, which meant Les was more addled than usual. He’s been slipping into some kind of dementia for the last three years at least, and the combination of being shot in the shoulder by what seems to have been a high-powered rifle, finding himself surrounded by a horde of strangers and being heavily medicated was making him a little wild.

  By the time I got to his bedside, he was trying to rip the damn tubes out and get vertical.

  I said his name four or five times before he finally looked at me, blinked twice and said my name, repeating the same question he’d asked me in Monroe Park.

  I didn’t know any other way to say it.

  “Somebody shot you.”

  “Who?”

  I had to tell him I didn’t know. No one saw anybody anywhere around him before he reportedly collapsed on the park bench like, well, like a man who had been shot. A student fifty yards away thought Les had had some kind of seizure, then called 911 when she got close enough to see the blood.

  “You’re going to be OK, though,” I told him, continuing my policy of constructive lying. I persuaded the nurses not to strap him down, assuring them this would only make his confusion and terror worse.

  They rolled him up to his private room as I followed. I was having flashbacks to the scary time last year when Andi, my daughter, spent several days up here after getting T-boned by a careless driver. There are few places I’d less rather be than a hospital.

  A doctor came in and asked me if I was a relative. I told him yes, which isn’t much of a lie. Les Hacker has been more of a husband to Peggy than her three actual, legal husbands were, and saying he’s been more of a father than my asshole stepdads is damning him with very faint praise.

  I walked out in the hallway. Just because Les was addled and had lost a couple of quarts of blood didn’t mean he was deaf.

  I asked the question everyone asks when someone they love is hanging by a thread. “Is he going to be all right?” really means, “Please, please, save him.”

&n
bsp; The doctor didn’t jump right in with a hearty affirmative.

  “He needs some time to recuperate. He’s had a terrible shock to his system. We’ll know more in a couple of days.”

  I explained to him, as quickly as I could, that Les sometimes isn’t hitting on all cylinders upstairs.

  “Has he been seen by a specialist?”

  No, I told him, we’ve been meaning to, but …

  “Well,” he said, looking a little impatient, “we’ll need to look into that, too. We have some medications we can give him.”

  I figured the meds were going to be more to make Les behave than to really help him, but I wasn’t sure giving the good doctor medical advice was going to be in Les’s best interests.

  The doc said he’d look in on him later.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, in an almost-human show of sympathy. “He’s in good hands.”

  I’d barely gotten back in the room when I heard Peggy down the hall, being loud.

  “Les Hacker,” she said, using her outdoor voice. “H-A-C-K-E-R. Am I going too fast for you?”

  I retrieved her before they called security. Awesome Dude was with her, looking almost as stoned as Peggy. At first I didn’t recognize the other guy and then realized it was Jerry Cannady, Peggy’s neighbor and Oregon Hill’s official pain in the ass. I figured Peggy must have been really desperate to get here in a hurry.

  I thanked Jerry for driving them to the hospital. He grunted something like “you’re welcome.” I don’t guess I ever apologized for threatening to pinch Jerry’s head off and shit down his neck last year after he made such a fuss about Les’s increasingly erratic behavior. Maybe I’ll do it later. Apologize, I mean.

  Abe Custalow, my corenter at the Prestwould, came and got us when it was time to go. When we left the hospital, Les was “resting comfortably.” Peggy looked about as close to crying as I’d ever seen her. I had to convince her that staying by his bedside all night might not be good for her health or his, that he needed to sleep.

  My mother has bid soon-to-be ex-husbands adieu with no evident regrets beyond wondering how we would pay the rent. (Usually, she could pay it better without them.) But I know Les is the one she doesn’t want to get away. Even now, even while he isn’t always sure where he is or where he’s going, he adds some kind of crazy stability to my mother’s house, perhaps because he’s the only one there who isn’t always stoned.

  Theoretically, Peggy and Awesome Dude could go off the wacky weed and be a lot more dependable than Les. Theoretically.

  AFTER I dropped them off, promising that we’d go back again today, and every day, as long as it takes, I went back to the office and wrote my story.

  “He’s your mother’s, what, boyfriend? Jesus,” Sally Velez said. “How old is your mother?”

  I told her Peggy’s as old as she’ll be some day, if she’s lucky.

  “Do you think they’re still … you know.”

  I told Sally to mind her own business.

  I dropped by the hospital later, but Les was sleeping. I sat and watched him sleep for a couple of hours, then went home. I heard Penny Lane Pub call my name as I drove by, but for once I ignored its siren song. I’ve only recently become entitled to drive our streets again for anything other than work, fallout from my having been apprehended by our finest last year while trying to drive back from Penny Lane to the Prestwould, eleven blocks west, on an eastbound street, then spectacularly failing a sobriety test.

  Chuck Apple had volunteered to cover for me on cops last night. His reward, I see in my morning paper that whacked against my door sometime after five, was a double-homi on the South Side. There’s only a short on it on B1, which means it happened after ten, but Chuck probably had to spend half the night sending out tweets and Facebook postings and updating the tablet version of our creaking, wheezing rag. I owe him one.

  The suits are sure the tablet is the answer, that we can get the suckers—er, readers—to pay to read us on their iPads and such, since they sure as hell aren’t going to pay for our website after we’ve given it away for free there for more than a decade.

  Putting stories on the tablet requires a lot of extra typing and clicking and dragging. They probably could train monkeys to do it for bananas, but the brain trust would rather have professional copy editors and night editors do it, giving them less time to—what’s the word I’m trying to think of? Oh, yeah: edit.

  Enos Jackson says he would like to give tablets to the suits. Cyanide.

  Les’s shooting is above the double-homi on B1. This is partly because the double-homi happened late, but partly because Monroe Park is more or less on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus and Les is white.

  I drive over to Oregon Hill. The weather, fickle as ever, has turned from late winter to full-blown spring overnight. Along Laurel Street, the camellias are blooming and the trees seem to have turned into a yellow-green canopy, shading the sidewalks their roots are slowly destroying. Everything looks better on a warm day, I guess, although Les’s condition is a cloud that kind of mocks all the beauty.

  I see R. P. McGonnigal’s Jeep Cherokee parked in front of Peggy’s. With Jerry Cannady spreading the word, I’m sure everyone on the Hill knows about Les by now.

  I give my old friend a man hug and thank him for stopping by. Several neighbors have brought over various casseroles and baked goods, which Peggy and Awesome seem to have already tucked into. A banana pudding seems to have been decimated, hapless victim to the munchies.

  “What the hell happened?” R. P. asks me.

  I tell him I’m damned if I know. Yesterday, the cops were still trying to figure out where the shot came from. After that, maybe they can tell us who would want to try to kill, or at least maim, a 79-year-old ex-minor-league catcher and roofer who, to my knowledge, didn’t have an enemy in the world.

  Out Peggy’s front window, two kids who should be in school are walking up Laurel, throwing a baseball to each other as they go, keeping a desultory eye out for traffic.

  “This would be a great day to take in a game,” R. P. says, knowing full well that we both have other responsibilities. “Birds are home. Afternoon game. We could be there in time to have a couple of Nat Bohs at one of those little bars next to the stadium …”

  “Stop it.”

  It is a perfect day for what McGonnigal suggests. The notoriously inaccurate weather page we run in the paper said seventy-five degrees and sunny, and it looks like maybe we got it right for once. If Les weren’t in the hospital, I swear I’d call in well, get in the Cherokee and be off to Baltimore.

  R. P. sighs.

  “Yeah, I know. We must be a couple of old farts. We wouldn’t have thought twice, a few years ago.”

  “Maybe twenty years ago.”

  “Aw,” R. P. says, “not that long. When did we go to Bo Brooks for crabs that time, in the middle of the week, day kind of like this, maybe a little later in the year, then scalped those tickets down the third-base line?”

  I tell him I think it was 1995.

  “See? That was just … Shit, seventeen years ago. How did it get to be 2012?”

  I tell him I don’t have a clue. It did seem like we used to get away once or twice a year to see the Birds, and the less planning involved, the better. It was like throwing down a flag on the top of Mount Don’t-Give-A-Shit and laying claim to the youth that all logic indicated had passed you by like a runaway freight train.

  “One of these days,” I tell him. “We’ll do it again, I swear. Soon.”

  “Well,” R. P. says, looking at his watch. “If you’re going to pussy out on me, I guess I’d better get my ass to work.”

  R. P. works for an ad agency. I can’t remember which one, because it’s a different one every time I see him. He’s smart and I’m guessing pretty valuable, but an ad agency might be a less stable place to work than even a daily newspaper newsroom. The wind shifts, and twelve people lose their jobs.

  I walk him to the door. He’s already in his Ch
erokee when I remember I should have asked him about his latest “friend,” partner, whatever. The idea that R. P. McGonnigal, bosom friend of my misspent youth, is playing for the other side kind of throws me sometimes. I hope it doesn’t show. Shit, I just want for R. P. what I want for just about everybody. I want him to be happy.

  The only neighbors who are still there leave. I go into the kitchen, to help Peggy wrap things up and refrigerate anything that might spoil.

  “Damn,” she says, as we do a little triage and figure out what has to be either pitched or sent home with me, “you’d think somebody died.”

  As she says it, there’s a little hitch in her voice. I put my arm around my mother and tell her everything’s going to be all right.

  Awesome Dude, who has been down in his English-basement living space and appears to have even showered and shaved, comes in and awkwardly puts his arms around both of us. On a normal day this nice, Awesome would have headed over to the park or gone down to the river to reunite with old acquaintances who haven’t been as fortunate as he has. Stepping back and watching him comfort Peggy, though, I’m thinking that my mother has gotten more out of her generosity than just somebody to smoke dope with. Awesome has a roof over his head when he wants one, and Peggy has somebody to share her pain.

  BACK AT the hospital, Les is in and out of consciousness. It’s hard to tell how much of it is just Les and how much is the work of some of our more potent pharmaceuticals.

  He thrashes about a bit, and a lot of what he says is incoherent. But then he’ll look up at Peggy and tell her everything’s OK, that he’ll be home before she knows it.

  The doctor comes by while we’re there. He’s still playing it pretty close to the vest, afraid to promise more than he can deliver. It’s OK for me to assure my mother that Les will be all right. If I’m wrong, nobody will sue me for malpractice.

  Les is still not quite clear on what happened, but then neither are we. I’ve checked with the police, and they’re still trying to figure it out. The Richmond cops have plenty to do above and beyond figuring out how somebody almost got killed. There are plenty of successful homicidists out there. This one will get some attention, though. Most of the bullets that hail down on our fair city do not land in an area frequented by college kids.