by Howard Owen
I just hope that Mr. Ellis is bringing in steady income. Hell, they’re a two-lawyer family. Not to worry, even with a baby on the way.
I tell Kate that some people don’t deserve shit.
“I know how you feel, but you should see this guy, Willie. I’m not sure he could find the elevator to the ninth floor, let alone get his hands on a rifle and hit something—somebody—halfway across Monroe Park.”
I tell her it isn’t too damn hard to lay hands on a gun in Virginia. It’s probably harder to buy a pack of cigarettes.
“I know. I know. But he just seems so, I don’t know, helpless.”
“Les Hacker is helpless. I’ve seen helpless today.”
She sighs.
“I’m sorry, Willie. I really am. I just wanted you to know. Somebody’s got to make sure he really did do it.”
I tell her that’s what the police are for.
Kate Ellis, the former Kate Black, is always going to take on the hopeless case. She even took me on for longer than she should have.
I have the grace to ask her how the baby’s doing and when it’s due.
“October. I told you.”
I resist the urge to advise her that maybe she ought to take it easy for a while. Kate has never taken it easy.
Chapter Seven
WEDNESDAY
I drive Peggy over to the hospital. She asks me if I mind if she finishes her joint on the way over. Why the hell not? She probably needs some chemical support. I suggest that she might consider moving somewhere like Seattle, where her affinity for weed won’t be so much of an issue. She says she doesn’t like rain. Awesome Dude, riding in the back seat, helps her toke it down to what couldn’t even be called a roach about the time we park. A fume of illegal smoke follows us as we leave the car.
I spend a couple of hours at the hospital, then leave Peggy and Awesome there. Les seems about the same. Some cheerful uniformed soul came in and started chirping about rehabilitation. Her optimism did not seem to convey to Les, who mostly stared up at the ceiling.
I called Finlay Rand before I left home and arranged to meet him in his unit at noon.
Rand answers and ushers me in. He’s probably a little older than me but better preserved, with a salt-and-pepper mustache. What little bit of hair he has left is swept back and shouts out “sixty-dollar haircut.” He must have someone else to meet today, because he’s decked out in better threads than I’d wear to a funeral. I’m trying not to be self-conscious about my wear-it-’til-it-smells-bad shirt and the mustard stain on my khakis.
His unit and mine are twins of each other, but those twins must have been separated at birth.
Custalow and I have a lighted Miller sign facing the card table that works equally well for fine dining and poker parties. Finlay Rand has a table that might have belonged to one of the more affluent kings of France. Where it’s set up, he could make it as long as fourteen feet, and I have no doubt he has the leaves to do it. The frame for the art above it probably is worth more than my Honda.
Our hardwood floors’ scuff marks are mostly hidden by throw rugs from Target. Rand’s are covered with Oriental carpets so valuable he won’t serve red wine at parties. I’m surprised he doesn’t ask me to take my shoes off at the door.
The thirty-foot hallway leading to Rand’s living area is like an art gallery. He’s had special lighting put in to showcase modern shit that, for all I know, could be hanging upside down. Our walls don’t have paintings. Our walls need painting.
Rand shows me the chairs he says were “irreparably damaged.”
“It looks like someone sat on this one, and the leg broke,” he says. I’m imagining Gillespie plopping his fat ass down on it.
Still, Rand’s a congenial soul, not stuffy or snobbish so that it shows. He does, though, seem a bit agitated.
“I wanted to ask you for something,” he says. He offers me lunch, which I decline, and some (white) wine, which I don’t.
“You work at the paper. I know the, ah, shooting was a big story, but it is attracting the wrong kind of attention.”
I’m not sure what he’s getting at, but I’m sure he’ll get to it soon enough.
“I wonder,” he says, taking a sip, “if it would be possible for you not to mention my name in all the following stories. With the man caught and the trial coming up … well, I just don’t want that kind of publicity.”
“Why? I mean, it’s not like it reflects on you. Could’ve been anybody’s apartment.”
He sets his glass down.
“But the kind of people I deal with, Mr. Black, they expect me to be like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.”
I tell Rand he’s so far over reproach that he couldn’t see it with binoculars.
He laughs.
“I know. I know. But just seeing my name in a story about something this … unpleasant could have an adverse effect on what I do.”
Since what he does is get rich people to pay $20,000 for the table he glommed for $5,000 at an estate sale, I get his meaning. I tell him, though, that I can’t just go in and tell the managing editor we can’t use someone’s name.
“But I’m an innocent bystander,” he says, frowning and spreading his arms for emphasis.
I tell him I’ll do what I can to keep him out of the limelight, but I’m making no promises.
He sighs and says he’d appreciate any help I could give him.
As I’m leaving, he says, “So, what do you cover for the newspaper?”
Obviously, he’s not a subscriber, which puts him in the strong majority in the greater metropolitan area. I explain, and he kind of wrinkles his nose.
“Must be awful,” he says. “All that blood.”
Finlay Rand looks as if he might faint if he cut himself shaving. I tell him you get used to it.
He thinks to mention Les.
“I’m so sorry about the gentleman who was shot. I understand you know him?”
I explain, as delicately as possible, my link to Les Hacker.
“Well,” he says, “almost like family.”
“Exactly like family.”
For some reason, I mention the story I’m doing on the ’64 Vees.
“Ah, yes. Baseball. I never was much of a sports fan myself. I must go over to the stadium and see a game sometime.”
I’m thinking right after pigs fly.
I tell him again I’ll do what I can, and he sees me out.
AFTER LUNCH, I get started. I Google Phil Holt and Lucky Whitestone and find out it’s pretty much the way Jumpin’ Jimmy remembers it.
Holt, who spent parts of five seasons with the A’s, was managing a Kwik Mart in his hometown, which is what you did before free agency when your arm wore out and you hadn’t bothered to go to college. He was in the store just before closing time, by himself, that night in 1985 when it happened. Somebody thought they saw a guy leaving the parking lot in a white or cream-colored car, but that’s about all they had to go on. Nobody found Holt’s body until sometime after two, when a cop noticed the lights were still on and investigated. Nothing I read indicated anybody was ever caught.
Lucky Whitestone’s hunting accident happened three years later. He had a little more money than Holt, I guess, from playing ten years in the bigs. At least, it doesn’t appear that he had been reduced to running a second-rate convenience store. He retired to Tallahassee, probably signed his old baseball cards at memorabilia shows, maybe got to be grand marshal of the Christmas parade.
At any rate, he was somewhere in the swamp or woods or whatever, deer hunting with a couple of buddies. One of them said he heard a shot and thought Lucky had bagged a buck. When the two of them got there, though, they found out that Lucky was the baggee, not bagger. As with Holt, the cops never seem to have found out what happened. There were a lot of hunters out that day, the first day of hunting season, but nobody saw anything out of the ordinary, other than one very dead ex-major leaguer with part of his head blown off.
The two guys Les remembere
d didn’t seem to have met with foul play, either accidental or on purpose.
Jackson Rittenbacker, the home run and strikeout king, lived to the ripe old age of sixty-one, retiring to his hometown, Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He was on a motorboat out on Lake Michigan, fishing, when he disappeared. He was presumed drowned, although they never found his body.
Roy Haas did, as Les remembered, die of a heart attack in 2008. He made it to seventy, making him a Methuselah among the 1964 Richmond Vees, from my research so far. He’d been one of the stars of the ’64 team, hitting over .300 with fifteen home runs, but then he hurt his knee in spring training the next year and never had more than a few September at bats in the bigs before he hung up his spikes.
In a story in the Sacramento paper, his wife said he’d had some health problems but nothing serious. Maybe he should have had a checkup or drunk more red wine.
I’m going down the opening-day starting lineup, and there are a lot of guys on the DL—Dead List. The starting pitcher, Holt, and the shortstop, third baseman and center fielder, Whitestone, Haas and Rittenbacker, all taken from us.
This isn’t like trying to track down World War II vets. Two of these guys didn’t make it to fifty, and the other two fell way below the average life expectancy of male human beings in the United States.
I’m starting to wonder if there’s a member of the starting lineup with whom I can actually converse without conducting a séance. Only Les is above ground, and he’s sure as hell in no condition to talk.
I can’t find out anything much about Jack Velasquez after he retired. His full name was Joaquin Diego Velasquez, but someone probably figured he had a better chance at acceptance in the US of A if he went with “Jack.”
Velasquez hit for a pretty good average and was a slick fielder, which might have worked if he’d played second or short. But he was a first baseman, and he was expected to deliver the long ball. Jack Velasquez delivered the short ball instead, hitting only five home runs in 1964. He played three more years in the minors and then went home, to a place that my US map shows is near Miami. And then, nothing.
I still have a second baseman, a right fielder and a left fielder to track down, in addition to Velasquez, but I promised Peggy I’d come by and get her, and I want to spend some more time with Les.
AT THE hospital, I talk with Les, but it’s pretty much a monologue. When I tell him I’m going to do a story on the 1964 Vees, he shakes his head and says something that sounds like, “Long time ago.”
The doctor who comes by doesn’t seem too concerned, or at least not concerned enough, about how a guy who was strong as an ox, albeit a slightly addlepated one, six days ago is now drooling.
“These things happen sometimes,” is about as close to expert medical advice as I can get from him without squeezing his neck. I refrain.
Andi comes around four. We’re playing tag team a lot. She’ll take Peggy and Awesome home later.
Awesome Dude really is rising to the occasion, as much as a guy can who’s about two beers short of a six-pack. He’s right at Peggy’s side, and he keeps up a steady stream intended to cheer up Les. When I walk out of the room, he follows me.
“He’s gonna be OK, though, right, Willie?” he asks me just outside the door.
I can’t make any such promises. I just tell Awesome that Les is tough, that he can lick anything.
“Yeah,” Awesome says. “He’s a tough dude.”
I look in the room over Awesome’s shoulder, and Peggy looks at me and shakes her head. She looks like she’s about as close to crying as I’ve ever seen her. I wish there was more I could say to either of them.
I thank Andi for coming and ask her how school’s going.
“Not bad,” she says. I ask her if she can tell me more.
“I think I want to go into social work,” she says. “It might be nice to use my degree to help somebody, you know?”
I try not to show my dismay.
“Isn’t that going to take awhile?” I ask, thinking about all those now-worthless courses in English and psychology.
She looks at me and shakes her head.
“Dad,” she says, obviously exasperated that I doubt her ability to chart her academic course. “I’ve figured it out. I’ve done all my electives. I can get an undergraduate degree by the end of the next school year if I load up on degree courses.”
I’m about to say how swell that is. She could finish in five years, only one more than I’d hoped for. One of my rare good deeds has been paying Andi’s tuition and fees. It’s weak payback for all the years I was an invisible father. When she graduates, I’ll be getting a big raise.
But then I remember that there was an extra word in Andi’s last sentence.
“Undergraduate?”
“Well,” she says, “you really can’t do much with a social work degree if you don’t get a master’s.”
I’m about to say that you probably can’t do much with a master’s, either. I’m kind of glad my only offspring isn’t inclined to be a money-grubbing MBA, but not being a ward of the state wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
“But,” she goes on, seeing me on the verge of a swoon, “I can do it in one extra year, and there’s loans and all. I can help out.”
I ask her if she’s still going to spend half her time as a waitress.
“Dad, they call them servers now, or waitstaff. And I can cut back a little on that. Plus, Tee’s got a good job.”
Ah, yes. Tee. Andi’s “roommate.” I don’t even want to know. I did make the mistake once of asking her if his parents were so poor that they could only afford one letter for his first name. She informed me that his full name, if it was any of my business, was Thomas Jefferson Blandford V. I guess they ran out of Toms and Jeffs and Trips and such. Anyhow, I’m pretty damn sure somebody with a roman numeral five after his name isn’t after Andi’s inheritance.
But it looks like I’m going to have to keep Grubby from firing me for another couple of years, at least.
I promise my daughter we’ll make it work. At least that’s more honest than promising Awesome and Peggy that Les is going to pull through.
I CAN hear Penny Lane whispering my name on the way home, but I’m on a mission. I have some people to find.
When I get back to the Prestwould, though, Custalow informs me that there has been “a little excitement.”
It seems that Finlay Rand had an extra key. He kept it in this big-ass Chinese vase that sat in the hallway next to the elevator, between his unit and the other one on the ninth floor. He said he left it there so the cleaning lady would be able to get in when he was gone.
When he realized it was gone, he called the cops, who were mightily interested in why he’d waited so damn long to tell them about the extra key. This led to a couple of detectives conducting what was apparently a rather rigorous interview.
Feldman, our very own McGrumpy, overheard much of what was going on, partly because he was lurking on the landing below. Feldman has never been one to shy away from potential gossip.
And, when the cops finally left, McGrumpy was able to “console” Rand and, in the process, hear the whole story.
Feldman being Feldman, within half an hour two different widows from different floors of the Prestwould are calling Rand to tell him how sorry they are for his troubles.
The way Abe relayed it to me, Rand caught Feldman in the lobby and threatened to slap his toupee off if he didn’t mind his own business. He was loud enough to draw the attention of Marcia the manager, who called Custalow. Unfortunately, he arrived before Rand could actually do damage to McGrumpy.
“Couldn’t you have walked a little slower?” I ask Abe.
I could see the cops’ point. If there was another key to Finlay Rand’s apartment, somebody obviously used it to get in and shoot Les. And that somebody would have known the key was there. I’m thinking somebody is already rattling the cleaning lady’s cage. But how knowledge of that key made its way to Raymond Gatewood down in Monroe
Park eludes me. Of course, all of it pales in elusiveness to the mystery of why anyone would shoot the world’s kindest ex-minor league catcher in the first place.
I call Kate.
“I didn’t think you’d be speaking to me,” she says.
I tell her that I wouldn’t mind having a conversation with her client.
She seems surprised. She says she’ll check with Marcus Green to see if she can set it up.
Kate wasn’t born yesterday.
“Something’s changed.”
I tell her maybe, maybe not.
“Well, if you see fit to tell me more, it might make an interview with Gatewood possible.”
“Just give me a few minutes with him,” I tell her.
“Why? You’re not going to hurt him, are you?”
“I just want to make sure about something.”
“I thought you said that’s what the cops were for.”
“Touché.”
So I tell her about the key.
“I wonder why he didn’t tell the cops about it before,” Kate says.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
I’ve barely gotten off the phone with my latest ex-wife when Rand calls.
“I need to talk with you,” he says.
WHEN I get there, he’s a little more pale than he was the last time I saw him. Being grilled by Richmond’s finest seems to have faded some of his spa-grown tan.
“I just didn’t want any more publicity,” he says. He has a glass of red wine in his hand, which is shaking a little. He doesn’t think to ask me if I want one. “I forgot about the other key until I realized it was Della’s day to clean. I thought about not telling the police at all, because I know it’s just going to bring more notoriety. But I knew that wouldn’t be right.”
I tell him what I’ve learned from covering cover-ups of one kind or another for more than half my life. Truth will out. You think you’ve got the bastard locked up in a steel cage, then you turn around and it’s running bare-assed naked down the street for everybody to see. Politicians in particular seem incapable of learning this, but it seems to hold true for the general populace as well, even well-heeled antiques dealers.