Dying to Play

by Mark Zubro

  I said, “He is a shit.” I rocked the baby for a minute. I wondered who was helping her with the bills to be on her own now. I asked, “Who else was here?”

  “Some awful people who claimed they were from the league or the team or some kind of officialdom. Murray came. Connor Knecht. They accused me of all kinds of things. All of them! Accused me! And Murray should know better. You were nice to me the other day. You’re the only one who’s been willing to listen to me. Am I in trouble? Am I going to jail? Do I need a lawyer? What would happen to my baby if I got arrested? I can’t be arrested.”

  “You’re here, so you weren’t arrested. We can get you a lawyer.” Georgia was going to be busy.

  She paused then nodded. “I can’t pay for one.”

  “We’ll figure that out when we have to. What did they want to know?”

  “They wanted to know where I was before the bus left. They wanted to know where I was when Tyler died. They wanted to know if I knew Tim Czobel. They wanted to know if Tyler did drugs. They wanted to know how well I knew him. They seemed to know things.”

  “Or assumed them and bullied you into admitting things.”

  “They were all bullies and mean. That Murray! I’ll never forgive him, but I wouldn’t tell them anything. I’m not stupid. I demanded a lawyer. Those baseball people were mean.”

  “Was Tyler taking drugs? His wife says she injected him.”

  “Yes. He had this fear of needles. He was such baby. I injected him.”

  “Where did he get the drugs?”

  “Charlie Hopper. He took supplements that had to be injected.”

  “Do you know what they were?”

  “No, but he kept them here so they wouldn’t be found at his place.”

  “You don’t still have them?”

  “As soon as they left this morning, I flushed them all down the toilet.”

  “Rotella didn’t have a search warrant?”

  “He didn’t mention one.”

  Maybe Rotella didn’t want to find drugs that could be traced back to Hopper.

  “When did you last inject him?”

  “I didn’t kill him.” Tears began again. The baby began to fuss. I rocked it, stood, and swayed gently back and forth.

  “Are you sure you gave him the right dosage that last day?”

  “It was the same one he always took.”

  “Did he talk about the other players here taking drugs or who in the majors might be?”

  “He told me that if any of his teammates or any of the owners turned on him, he’d take down everybody. There wouldn’t be another Hall of Fame player for ten years. He’d name more names than Jose Canseco, and he’d have proof. He bragged that he’d been threatening the owners. Trade him, bring him up to the big team, or he’d start naming names. He did a lot of bragging so I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth.”

  So there could have been lots of people afraid of what Skeen knew. And maybe there were people fed up with him.

  DiMassi continued, “He was angry the last few times he was here. He was afraid his career was over.”

  “He was overweight and out of shape.”

  “He thought he could be a designated hitter.”

  I wasn’t about to dump on anybody else’s dreams, realistic or not.

  “Was he going to take you with him?”

  “He kept saying he would. I needed money.”

  I took a guess. “Did Tim Czobel pay you to make a tape of Skeen doing drugs?”

  “He offered me a lot of money.” She sniffed. “I didn’t know how much longer my thing with Tyler would last. I was desperate.”

  “Does anyone know where the tape is?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  She retrieved a flash drive with the video from under a plastic bag at the bottom of the garbage pail.

  “You made a tape for Czobel, but you didn’t give him samples of the drugs?”

  “They were in carefully counted-out vials with very specific doses. I couldn’t. If any were missing or short, they’d have been noticed.”

  She looked around the room, gave me a forlorn look. She said, “Things are never going to get better.” She got up, took a bottle of shelf-stable formula mix from the cupboard. I handed her the child. It settled into her arms and nursed.

  I took this new flash drive with the video on it to Duncan at the office. This too was password-protected.

  He had hooked the phone up to the computer with a device that I didn’t begin to understand. When I left he was muttering and cursing at the screen.

  I spent the early afternoon trying to talk to hospital administrators who had to be colluding if Skeen’s murder was to be covered up. The issue of protecting Frank Ericson, Murray’s contact on the hospital staff, didn’t come up because I didn’t get past the front desk.

  I tried Bill Rohden, the local doctor Skeen had been seeing. I didn’t get past the receptionist.

  I tried the local pharmacist. He refused to discuss the medicines of anyone in or out of the community.

  I stopped to talk with Bunny Fitzwilliams, the local dowager that Hopper had mentioned. The butler didn’t let me in the front door.

  Some days are like that.

  I got hold of Skeen’s cleaning service who turned out to be a seventy-five-year-old woman supplementing her Social Security by cleaning at Skeen’s place three days a week. She knew nothing about drugs, pills, or his lifestyle other than to say he lived like a pig.

  The mid-afternoon heat was being its unbearable self as I made my way to Jamie McDaniels’. Using a hose and nozzle he was watering a garden of scraggly plants. He wore white shower clogs and white athletic shorts. When the bright sunlight hit them right, they were transparent enough to reveal he wore no underwear. A fine sight indeed.

  I decided to push him. “You’ve been taking performance enhancing drugs supplied by Charlie Hopper.”

  “Who says?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “I’m winning on talent.”

  “I won’t deny you have a lot of that.”

  “Who told you I was?”

  “I’m not trying to get you in trouble. I’m trying to solve several murders.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “I don’t think you did, but I’d really like to know who your source was and how the drug distribution worked in town. My guess is the whole issue of drugs and the team is going to explode and Charlie Hopper is going to jail.” I spoke with more confidence than was justified.

  “You won’t tell?”

  “I’m trying to solve a murder.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  He turned off the hose and walked to the back of his car. He leaned against the trunk. His shorts clung tightly, revealing he was cut.

  I asked, “How did it work?”

  “It was Charlie Hopper. Since Tyler Skeen got to town a lot of guys tried stuff. Sure a few of them were using Charlie Hopper’s drugs, but…” He shook his head.

  I said, “If it was performance-enhancing drugs, nobody’s performance was being enhanced.”

  “Some guys said it was.” He shrugged. “But when Skeen got to town, he had the real thing. It was easier to get drugs, at least in this town, maybe more so than others. Supposedly the stuff I’m taking won’t show up in drug tests. Gotta be true. I’ve had a couple of tests and not one has come up positive.”

  I looked at his lanky frame. “And no evidence of body size change?”

  “No wild emotional swings. None of the usual crap.”

  “That’s because they were fake.”

  “Fake? You sure?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He laughed. “We were such dumb fucks. We were the distributors. What fools.”

  “Distributors?”

  “Yeah, on the team bus. We had guys pick up supplies from Charlie Hopper, and we’d sell them in the towns we went to. They were really fake?”

  “They were really fake.�
�

  “But Skeen’s weren’t?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I suspect Hopper was selling both fake stuff and real stuff. He could charge Skeen a fortune and be making real money.”

  “Yeah, we couldn’t afford much. We were so stupid. I only took what I thought was the real stuff a couple times. That’s what the fight was about between me and Skeen at his condo. He wanted more money. He was a shit.”

  SATURDAY 4:00 P.M.

  I stopped at the bed and breakfast. Duncan motioned me over to the desk he was using. He had three laptops open in front of him. Each screen showed something different. I moved a chair so I could sit next to him and look at the screens.

  He said, “Late this morning I got into Czobel’s flash drive from DiMassi.”

  “You didn’t call me.”

  “It was video of Skeen being injected. Once I broke into it, I went back into the first flash drive. I then assumed that one was Czobel’s as well. I did get into it after another hour, but I didn’t call you because all that he’d written was in code. About fifteen minutes ago I managed to begin translating some of it.”

  He pointed to the center screen. “He kept a daily log of each person that he talked to or interacted with or made observations about. There were maybe two hundred people he was keeping tabs on. Some only got a few sentences. He kept a master list of people.”

  He showed me a long list of names. “As far as I can tell most of them were from town. Then each day, he’d copy the names to that day and write what he got on them, if anything. He was very thorough. The ones with the longest entries are the players. You can also call them up by name instead of date. He had them cross-referenced.”

  He brought up Skeen’s name. “And he makes reference here to an interview with Skeen.” He pointed to the phone. “Maybe it’s on that.”

  “He had two phones?”

  “Maybe one was backup. I’d save my stuff off site if I had something valuable.”

  Czobel had told me none of this. Maybe I was the one who was being used.

  I read the entries for the past week on Hopper. I said, “He knew Hopper was making fake pills and real drugs and drugs that masked other drugs?”

  “He had suspicions. The results from some of the pills he sent off are here.” He clicked to a new screen. “They were sugar pills.”

  “Hopper had the whole town high on sugar?”

  “At least parts of it.”

  “What were the other pills?”

  “He wasn’t sure, but he had some of each kind. He was still trying to get samples and some were liquids, not pills. He was going to the condo that night to try and get more, plus look around for himself.”

  “He didn’t think the police would have confiscated them?”

  “He wanted to try.”

  “What about the stuff we sent off to the lab?”

  “I got an email an hour ago. They have more tests to run. They don’t recognize a lot of the substances. I checked online. The illegal-substance people try to keep one step ahead of the sports drug testing labs. They did say that one of them is a meth-like substance. They all have long polysyllabic names. You want those?”

  “Meth-like substance works for me.”

  He switched to another document. “Then I found this. Czobel was trying to get into Hopper’s records. He offered some unnamed grad student a lot of money.”

  I read the report for myself. Czobel was sure Hopper had been making synthetic substances. Banned in sports, but not illegal. Or substances that would mask those banned in sports, but again not illegal in a felonious you’re-going-to-jail way, but that could get you banned from the game. He’d gone to Hopper and told him he didn’t want to get him in trouble, but that he just wanted to reveal the truth about the players.

  Hopper had told him to, “Get the hell out.” Czobel also had extensive notes on the entourage. He was sure they were abetting Hopper and Skeen but he had no proof. There were several other references to an interview with Skeen done while the baseball player was drunk and high.

  Duncan pointed out notes that Czobel had made about me. They were before we’d had our few hours in bed together. Czobel’s preliminary observations were that I was hot but not too bright.

  “He put these in my duffel bag that morning?”

  Duncan said, “Possible. Maybe he thought they’d be safe there, and he’d be back the next night to retrieve them.”

  “If they tossed his room, they might have found them. Maybe it was for safekeeping.”

  Duncan said, “And maybe Czobel’s place was tossed and maybe you were right. All that stuff was planted to make him look bad.”

  Georgia strode into the room. She wore a gray business suit, matching tie, shoes that gleamed as if they’d been polished a minute ago, and a starched white shirt.

  “How’s the legal stuff going?”

  “Complicated. The local police are swarming around that trailer park where a lot of the undocumented workers lived.”

  “Not the ICE?”

  “I haven’t seen any.”

  I said, “Hopper’s covering up his crime with Rotella’s help. That’s what it’s gotta be.”

  Georgia said, “I called Immigration. They were interested in what the hell was going on. They’ll be here. The whole situation is going to take a while to sort out.”

  I asked, “Did you see Edwin Hempil?”

  “Hempil’s father, the judge, doesn’t seem to have as much clout as he should.”

  “Probably part of the small town feud.”

  Georgia said, “I feel sorry for Edwin. My best guess is he got arrested because the poor guy had a lot of shit on his web site that was extremely negative about people in town. He doesn’t like a lot of them. In my opinion nothing on it was libelous and none of it proved he killed anybody, and nobody saw him actually cut any brake line. I think poor Edwin is the town’s ‘usual suspect.’”

  She shook her head. “When I spoke with him, he thought I was an FBI agent. And I bet he’s hot in bed. I wonder what that twitch would do.”

  I didn’t tell her I’d gotten a few hints.

  Georgia asked, “What have you guys found out?”

  We filled her in.

  She sat primly on the edge of a chair and said, “Let me try and sort this out. The factions or the leaders of factions in town are, but not necessarily limited to, the league, the big team, Knecht, anti-Knecht, Charlie Hopper, Rotella, the entourage, and various locals, and the factions are or aren’t loyal to each other based on the whims of the universe or maybe the phases of the moon.”

  Í said, “And you’ve got another client.” I told her about Deborah DiMassi.

  Jerry came in with news that his DEA connection from Madison had spent the day with his superiors working on evidence and search warrants. A supervisor was rushing up from the Indianapolis office to take charge. They hoped to have a contingent in town and ready to take action in hours. Between discussions with his contact, he’d been helping Duncan decode Czobel’s notes.

  SATURDAY 8:00 P.M.

  I fed Caesar at six o’clock and walked him on the very quiet, deeply shaded streets of the oldest part of town. When he and I got back, the humans present pored over Czobel’s notes. It took extra time because we had to decode them one by one. We ate takeout from Millie’s for dinner. Georgia had another lettuce leaf. Duncan, Jerry, and I had burgers.

  Around seven I said, “Make copies of everything and email all of that to each of us. Make sure it goes to at least one major sports reporter in the ten largest metropolitan areas in the country. Do it on a time release.”

  “For when?”

  “Tomorrow noon.”

  Jerry had a meeting with his DEA connection and the supervisor who’d been driving up from Indianapolis.

  Georgia wanted to get back to police headquarters to help with the situation with the newly arrived immigration officials and those who they might or might not be arresting or attempting to deport. If it wasn’t too late, s
he also wanted to stop and see or at least call Deborah DiMassi to introduce herself and begin any groundwork her case might need.

  Around eight thirty, one of the bed and breakfast owners knocked softly on the office door. He motioned for me. I stepped into his wildly-Victorian parlor. He wrung his hands. “There’s someone on the back porch who wants to see you.”

  I stuck my head in the office and told Duncan where I was going.

  All senses on high alert, I went out the back door. I took Caesar with me. Sitting in a chair in the deepest shaded part of the porch was Raul Sanchez, the cop who had been the worst wounded in the condo attack.

  I eyed every possible corner and hiding place on the porch and in the yard. I saw nothing untoward. I walked up to Raul. Caesar gave no indication that his protective instincts had been aroused.

  I sat next to Raul on a two-seater porch swing. I asked, “Should you be out of the hospital?”

  “No.” He winced in pain. “But I gotta talk to you.” He peered into the darkness. “I’m sure it was Rotella who shot at you and tried to kill me and Glinga.”

  “He’d kill some of his own?”

  “It’s the old town feud. I’m not really on Knecht’s side. He’s really sort of late to the game, but I don’t have anything against him or his team. I just pretty much thought this feud crap was bullshit. The damn town is inbred to the point of who-gives-a-fuck.”

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers together, and shook his head. “They will try to kill you and all the people you have here with you.” He sighed. “No, I don’t have proof. I have the experience of a lifetime in this town and a missing chunk of my shoulder.”

  “What is so fucking important?”

  “Ego. Pride. Status. Some of us were really pissed when Rotella became police chief. We tried to stop him from getting the job. He couldn’t fire us, not yet anyway.”

  “Why shoot at Glinga?”

  He gave the briefest of smiles. “Maybe just to shut him up.”

  “Is Rotella in league with Charlie Hopper?”

  “Yes. Legal and illegal drugs. Performance enhancing designer stuff and meth labs.”

  “Why haven’t you gone to the state police? Someone?”