Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  Anyhow, Celia was the one member of the family who amounted to something, at least judging by bank accounts. By the time Peggy and her “black bastard baby” were being shown the door, Celia had managed to own a substantial house and several rental properties, one of which became the first haven for Peggy and me.

  Celia’s house was on the North Side, over near Richmond Memorial. Celia lived there by herself, having decided that male companionship was not essential to her happiness. Sometimes, she’d invite me over when I was a little kid. She’d make great meals, and she and her friend Connie did their best to make me smile and even laugh.

  One of the things they would do was play hide-and-seek with me. The house had three floors and a basement, and we would take turns hiding. Sometimes, I’d go to the third floor and wedge myself into the nook of an unused room full of books and clothes and age. They would find me, of course. They probably knew exactly where I was all along, just from listening to my footsteps, but they always dragged it out, finally pouncing on me as I squealed with glee.

  That memory of that smell is imprinted on my brain. Sometimes, when I’m in one of the older Prestwouldian’s digs, I’ll get a flashback to those days. It’s the smell of mustiness, comfort and drowsy Saturday afternoons.

  I’m afraid, though, that the smell will, in the future, evoke a less pleasant memory. I can thank Finlay Rand for that.

  “WELL, WELL, Mr. Black,” Rand says, still holding the metal pipe he must have used to coldcock me, “and how are we feeling?”

  I am handcuffed to something that isn’t moving. A blindfold isn’t necessary, although I am gagged. The Finlay Rand who hovers over me looks less helpless than I’ve ever seen him.

  I want to rub the large knot I feel growing on the back of my skull. I would like about a dozen Advils, a pint of bourbon and a cigarette. I am in a world of pain. I seem to be surrounded by the kind of crap Finlay Rand buys cheap and sells high.

  “I don’t know about you,” I manage to croak out through the gag, “but I’m feeling like shit.”

  “I’m sorry for your discomfort,” he says, “but it was important to bring you here. You’ve been very persistent, Mr. Black, so persistent that I find myself cornered. But, no worries. It had to happen sometime.”

  He sets down the pipe.

  “It would be a shame, though, to have this, this masterpiece go unrecognized. You see, I am an artist, Mr. Black, and my canvas is revenge.”

  He sighs.

  “I can’t know if you’ve called the police, and I surely wouldn’t trust you to tell the truth in your present circumstances. Whether you did or not, I don’t expect to have very long to lay out the breadth of what I have accomplished. How much, by the way, do you know? Surely you weren’t fooled for long by my fictitious tormentor, or by that unfortunate soul who happened to take the coat I left in the park. I can’t believe how long it took those feckless police to find that key.”

  He shakes his head and removes the gag momentarily.

  I tell him that all I know is that he killed an innocent man.

  “You mean Mr. Hacker. Ah, you would say that. But they were all there, Mr. Black. They all could have stopped it. And if a few relative innocents have to meet their maker along the way, well, as someone or other has been saying since The Crusades, let God sort them out.”

  I tell him that I know about the others. Hell, he’s got to know that anyhow.

  “Ah, yes. When you told me you saw me enter the Prestwould two days before the shooting, I knew that, as they say, the jig was up. I already knew that you were researching that benighted group of thugs. I felt certain that a hard-nosed reporter such as yourself would not rest until he got to the bottom.

  “Well, Mr. Black, you have found the bottom. Let me tell you a story.”

  LITTLE DAIRY Flynn adored his big sister. Frances Flynn was, I gather through the filter of an obviously biased witness, about the only thing worth having in the little boy’s life.

  “She was beautiful and sweet and wonderful. And then she left.”

  She came back, of course, but their parents made her leave again when they found out she was pregnant.

  “Dairy never forgave them for that, and after she died, after those knuckle-dragging animals killed her, nothing much mattered to him anymore. He became something of a, shall we say, problem child.”

  He drifted in and out of his family’s orbit. The last time he disappeared, working on a lobster boat, he came close to killing himself.

  “He actually stood on the edge of the pier, with a cinder block tied around his neck, teetering on the edge. But he couldn’t make himself do it.

  “And then he met Walter LeForge.”

  LeForge was a wealthy yachtsman and confirmed bachelor. Dairy, a handsome lad who resembled his sister, had taken one odd job after another around the docks, where he often came in contact with people who could afford to do nothing but sail. One day, he caught LeForge’s fancy. He took him on as what might be thought of euphemistically as a cabin boy.

  “Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” Rand says now. “It’s really all the same, you know, when you close your eyes. One does what one has to do. And he taught little Dairy some things. Other than in bed, I mean.”

  LeForge, born into money, had made a small fortune larger as an art dealer. He recognized soon after taking Dairy Flynn on that the boy had a natural intellect and an almost eerie ability to pick the wheat from the chaff.

  By 1975, when Dairy turned twenty-one, he changed his name. He didn’t want anyone who ever knew him to find him again.

  “Dairy thought they might get curious about how his stepfather, the upstanding Roger Fairchild, died. It was best that he disappear and be reborn. I’d tell you the whole story about poor Roger, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  He laughs at his own joke, the only time I’ve ever seen him laugh.

  “Suffice it to say that, fine swimmer that he was, Roger couldn’t overcome handcuffs and a pair of cinder blocks. If it was good enough for Dairy to consider for himself, surely it was good enough for his dear old stepdad.

  “He hadn’t seen me for two years when I surprised him on his boat that night. He begged for mercy, and then, when he realized that he was going to be thrown overboard helpless and alive, he begged me to shoot him.”

  Finlay Rand wipes his forehead. We could use some air conditioning in here.

  “It was almost erotic.”

  LeForge adopted Dairy Flynn and took care of changing his name and his whole identity.

  “He wanted me to change it to LeForge, but I persuaded him to let me name myself. I though Finlay Rand was rather clever. You did get the joke, didn’t you, Mr. Black? No one else did.”

  I nod my head. Adair Flynn becomes Finlay Rand. Willie Black nominated for the Word Scramble Pulitzer. Posthumously, apparently.

  “And, of course, Walter LaForge had to be done away with, if I was going to have the life I wanted, the life to which I was entitled. By this time, I’d gotten rather adept at disappearances at sea. LaForge’s family threw a fit, of course. He had a brother and sister who could have used the money I inherited. But neither of them had spoken to poor Walter in five years. They deserved what they got, which was nothing. There was nobody but his heartbroken adopted son on board when Walter went over in the middle of the night. People had their suspicions. A cursory investigation was conducted, but I made very certain that no body ever surfaced.”

  He sits on one of the dusty antique chairs. It’s covered in plastic, I guess so the priceless fabric will be untouched by human ass. He’s calm and mad as a hatter.

  “You see, I had a dream. I dreamed that one day all those subhuman bastards who caused Frannie to end her life, really end my life, too, would pay the ultimate price. It was only fair.

  “I had money, and I had time.”

  He said he got most of what he knows about Frannie’s demise from his mother, who had managed to get in touch with the last girl Frannie roomed with in Richmond
. Frannie had told the girl, who knew she had gone to Florida with the expectation of marrying Lucky Whitestone, what happened down there. Then Frannie ignored the girl’s pleas to stay and went to her suicide bed.

  “Perhaps your, uh, friend wasn’t as culpable as some, but nobody stepped in.”

  He pauses and looks off into a dark corner of this dreary room.

  “Frannie wasn’t perfect, but she had a good, trusting heart. I knew that when I was ten years old, Mr. Black. She came to my room, the night before she ran away. She said she had to see something bigger than Wells, Vermont, and that someday I’d understand. I didn’t really blame her. Our father was capable of almost anything, and Mother always seemed to take his side. It was Frannie and me against the world.

  “She left me this.” He pulls on the necklace around his neck and extracts a ring. It’s a high school ring, the one Frannie must have gotten before she dropped out and went south.

  “I’ve been wearing this for forty-seven years. She said she’d be back. And she would have come, if they hadn’t killed her.” I try to speak. Rand loosens the gag and sits down again. “They didn’t kill her. She killed herself.”

  This doesn’t seem to please him. He stands, walks over and gives me a not-so-light tap on my head with the pipe, then regags me when I scream.

  “She would have come back. But they killed her spirit. She had no place left to go. Our parents would not have taken her back, damn their souls.”

  He sets the pipe down again.

  “But Frannie has been avenged.”

  Like so many people I’ve interviewed over the years, he is dying to tell his story. He just needs someone to shut up and listen—in this case, someone who has no choice. I am not optimistic that I’ll be telling this to anyone else, but Rand offers me a little hope.

  “You might live to regale your readers with this, uh, adventure, Mr. Black. I haven’t made up my mind yet. One thing is certain, though. I won’t be telling it.”

  He lifts his jacket and I see the pistol.

  “Bullets for two,” he says. “Maybe I’ll use them both, maybe not.”

  You first, I’m thinking, but it hasn’t been my lucky day so

  far.

  “So, it’s story time, Mr. Black.”

  He took over much of Walter LeForge’s business. It was a trade that allowed him to travel widely.

  “It suited my purposes. And dealing with an extensive variety of valuable items enabled me to become adept at some things that might surprise you, like weaponry, detective work and even spycraft. And I knew a good bit about nautical matters already.

  “And, I was patient. No need to hurry. Life is long. And what’s the saying? Revenge is best served cold?”

  He sits down again.

  “I had been Finlay Rand for ten years when I started. I’d been putting it off for years, just because I could, but one day I woke and decided I had to follow my dream.”

  He smiles at this, obviously cracking himself up. He’s a riot.

  Rand was living in Atlanta, and he had the same 1964 Richmond Vees opening-day lineup he’d been carrying around in his wallet since not long after Frannie’s suicide.

  Phil Holt, he discovered, wasn’t living that far away, and Rand often went to Mobile to buy old shit.

  “The first time is always the most memorable,” he says. “The adrenaline rush was amazing. I mean, I had dispatched people before, as you and I know, but this was a mission, and I saw it as my sacred duty. Sacred, Mr. Black.”

  He says Holt never really knew what hit him. He thought he was being robbed at gunpoint.

  “He seemed to know what to do. It probably had happened to him before. It was a sad, nasty little store. I gathered that Mr. Holt had squandered whatever riches he might have gained playing that silly game.”

  With just the two of them in the store, Rand says he had time to explain to Holt who he was and why Holt was going to die.

  “I don’t think he 'got it,’ though. And finally, I just shot him. Once in the heart and once in the head. I was halfway back to Atlanta before they found the body.”

  He waited three years.

  “I knew that Mr. Whitestone was the worst one,” he says. “I knew he was the one who promised to marry her and then instigated that cruel trick on what she thought would be her wedding night. I wanted him to suffer the most of all, but you have to take your opportunities where you can find them.”

  Where he found his chance with Lucky Whitestone was in some swampy woods west of Tallahassee. Rand had tailed Whitestone off and on for most of those three years, either while on business in Tallahassee or on impromptu trips down from Atlanta.

  “I knew he went hunting most Saturdays in the fall, and I knew where he went. On the day of his demise, I was already in the woods when he and his friends parked.

  “I had gotten quite good with a long-range rifle, an item I bought from the estate of a well-to-do timber baron from Savannah, using a pseudonym, of course. What a great country we live in, Mr. Black, where you can purchase such a weapon and never have anyone know you bought it.

  “I was at least 600 yards away when I blew his head off. I was rather proud of my marksmanship. It’s a shame that Mr. Whitestone didn’t suffer more, but it was important that I do the least risky procedure that would send him to hell. And at least I deprived him of the posthumous pleasure of an open casket.

  “He was not, it turns out, very 'Lucky’ at all.”

  Rand ticks off the others.

  He had to travel less than two hours north of Atlanta to stake out Rabbit Larue. He took two years to cross Larue off the list. The old second baseman was something of a loner, but Finlay Rand befriended him by buying him Knob Creek on the rocks a couple of times at a honky-tonk bar where Rand was surprised they even carried it. Rand mentioned, a few drinks in, a fine stand of wacky weed that he was growing on a private patch down a side path off the Appalachian Trail. Larue needed money and did not think every law needed obeying, so an offer to help Rand harvest and then prepare the stuff for distribution later was met with cautious enthusiasm.

  Larue met him at the trailhead and led him down the side path, where he says he beat his brains out with a large rock.

  “Oh, it was a mess. I had the foresight to leave a shovel nearby earlier, and it took hours to give Mr. Larue an improper burial. I suppose some day a bear or a coyote will dig up his bones, if they haven’t already.”

  With Paul “Boney” Bonesteel, it was just a matter of finding the right time. By this point, Rand had moved to New Jersey and opened a shop in the lower end of Manhattan. He had tracked Bonesteel and knew he was, unlike most of his former teammates, pretty good at making a buck with something other than a bat and a glove. He followed Bonesteel from the city to his large suburban home on Long Island several times over a period of three years before he finally found the right circumstances: an empty platform, an oncoming train.

  “I’m surprised someone on the train didn’t see me walking away just as Mr. Bonesteel was merging with the Long Island Rail Road.”

  The deaths of Jack Velasquez three years later and Jackson “The Ripper” Rittenbacker five years after that were simply a matter of managing to insinuate himself onto first a boat off the coast of Florida and then one on Lake Michigan. It involved a fair amount of traveling but, as Rand points out, folks in his business travel a lot.

  “People are so willing to come to the aid of a distressed sailor,” Rand says. “And the Atlantic Ocean and our Great Lakes are very large and convenient places for dumping trash.”

  The fact that Velasquez was found floating in several pieces didn’t really surprise anyone. As Rand and many others knew, Jack Velasquez consorted with people who could turn murder into a creative art form. And everyone assumed that Rittenbacker just fell out of his boat and drowned.

  “And then came my only failure so far, although I suppose I can only get half credit for your friend.”

  He traveled to North Carolina severa
l times and became familiar with the too-predictable patterns of Buck McRae.

  “He came out of that bar at the same time every night. I only had to drive up perhaps half an hour beforehand, and there was usually no one else in the lot.

  “I thought I had killed him, but a moving target on a dark night was too much for me.”

  Rather than try again to kill the old right fielder, Rand moved on. He spent a couple of years in northern California, where he did a thriving business selling colonial antiques that seemed older on the West Coast than they had back east. He was there, though, for Roy Haas.

  “This was my finest hour,” he says. “If the list had been complete, I would have retired after that one.”

  Among the many wealthy and sometimes eccentric individuals Rand came in contact with as a major-league antiques dealer was a man living in King George County on Virginia’s Northern Neck, near the Potomac. He few from San Francisco to Washington because the man, whom he had met before, said he had something no one else in the world had. He wouldn’t tell Rand what it was. Rand was intrigued.

  “He was old-school CIA, and he wanted to sell me some artifacts that had come into his hands. They were fairly worthless, many of them tied to John Wilkes Booth and his cohorts, for whom Mr. Cheatham had an unpleasant and unnatural affection. I was not impressed.”

  But then he told Rand that he had something that might be more rare than any of the furniture in his hilltop home with views of two rivers.

  “He started telling me about a particularly wicked assassination the CIA had pulled off, involving a sort of dart gun that implanted a frozen poison into the bloodstream. The murder implement literally melts.

  “And then, he got a strange gleam in his eye, and he told me he had one, and that he knew how to produce the poison and use it.”

  Rand smiles.

  “Maybe he saw me as a kindred spirit, or maybe it was because he was old. He was starting to lose his memory, and he had, I think, alienated himself from the rest of his family. Whatever the reason, he traded this blatantly illegal instrument to me, only knowing that there was someone I wanted dead, and he showed me how to create the frozen poison bullet. It hurt me, Mr. Black, to part with $75,000 in cold, hard cash, but this was too good to pass up.”