by April Smith
Tired, Allen rubs his face all over like he’s taking a bath.
“I’m out of here. Look. I’m staying at the airport Traveler’s Inn. If it’s an emergency, call the local police.” He writes some numbers on a card. “Monroe is still at large. You saw the tape.”
He hands her the card, adding, “But I like your loyalty.”
She follows him. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“We’re developing a strong connection between you, Cruz and Galinis. You and Cruz have been threatened, and you and Galinis have a relationship. That puts you square in the middle.”
She sees the hardness in his eyes and wonders if she should be afraid of him.
“But what we don’t know is,” says Detective Allen, “the middle of what?”
Cassidy fights to hold his gaze.
“Joe doesn’t even know the General,” she says. “I admit he has a chip on his shoulder and he’s out to conquer the world, but he’d just never associate with a pig.”
“Business is business.”
“You don’t get it. Joe has to be in control. It has to be his way: elegant. Classy. Knowing all the right people. He collects art. Owns an amazing house at the beach. He and the General have nothing in common, they’re not even on the same planet.”
“Sometimes it’s a very fine line, between a competitor and a killer.”
She is walking him to the door. They hear the patrol car driving away. She leans against the jamb with faux insouciance.
“Really, Nate, why all the drama?”
“You’re a witness in a homicide investigation. It’s my job to protect you.”
She watches him retreat into the leafy shadow, as if she were standing in the front door of her parents’ house in Oregon after that mythical high school date she had imagined in the unmarked car—Nate Allen, captain of the tennis team, too short and too smart—but the heavy odor of night-blooming jasmine numbs that fantasy like curare.
And the fact that Detective Allen has reappeared, stepping back into the light.
“Which beach?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The house you said Joe has?”
“Near Balboa, why?”
“It’s just interesting.”
“Why?”
“To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of Joe Galinis owning a house at the beach. Good night.”
23
Lilac light condenses into fog. Cassidy, wrapped in an afghan, sits on the sofa and observes the marvel of dawn. Officers return and thrash around behind the house. She hears a crackling radio and the unit driving away. She gets up once to let Edith out, then comes back to the sofa and the afghan.
Sleep had been a tease that night, beckoning her under, spitting her out. No dreams, no explicit thoughts she could name, instead a looping ribbon of black that widened to a highway where she rode the air at deadly speeds.
At 5:30 a.m. she was starving, but there was nothing in the house since she’d been gone so long, so she dug some sun-dried tomato chicken sausages out of the freezer along with multigrain waffles and the old Aunt Jemima, a pretty weird combination with bancha tea since there weren’t any coffee beans, either.
It’s amazing how the traffic picks up, even on a back street like Shadow Lane; the ringing of the phone is muted by some huge-ass truck that seems to be idling with a roaring thrum right there in the impatiens outside the window.
It is Uncle Pedro, reporting on reconnaissance from Río Blanco.
“What did you find out?”
“There ain’t no Río Blanco. Everything is gone. Nothing but a big brown lake.”
“Gone?”
“Where the little houses used to be? Now they got nothing but islands made of mud.”
Cassidy can remember shanties painted lemon yellow, women at a water pump outside the farmacia, dusty alleys hung with laundry, strange-looking mongrel dogs, which, like everything else in town, looked as if they had been put together out of spare parts.
“The roads are all washed out with big rocks. I had to go by donkey. Poor donkey.”
“What happened to everybody?”
“Many escaped the floods but they don’t want to stay. The roof blew off the sugar mill, the company ain’t gonna fix. They got no jobs and nothing to eat. A lot of the people went over to a bigger town, El Seibo, so I went there too—”
“Oh, Pedro.”
“Well, I wanted to find out. Now I wish I listened to Rhonda and stayed home.”
Cassidy, rueful, “She usually knows what she’s talking about.”
“These families are so poor they think, If our boy plays baseball it’s gonna be all right, it’s gonna save us, buy us a big house …” He waits. The silence is unusual, for him. Then: “When I first saw him, Alberto told me he is eighteen. The truth is, actually, he’s twenty-two.”
Cassidy falters, “That’s not good.”
“Tell me about it.”
They had signed Alberto, like all prospects, based on the projection of how he would play in four or five years, when the training pays off and he starts to become valuable to the team. By twenty-one he should already have minor league experience. By twenty-seven, if he’s in the majors, he should peak. If the age is wrong, the calculations—tools, intangibles, playing time, hitting, baserunning, fielding, overall—are meaningless and the time frame slams down on your knuckles like a loose window.
“How do you know for sure?”
She is pacing. Her pits are damp.
“I went to El Seibo and I found some of Alberto’s relatives and people he knew from Río Blanco. Everyone was telling a different story about who was the oldest in the family—no, Alberto, no, his brother—so I start to get suspicious because I know this kind of thing goes on, so I become best friends with the postman there. The friendship cost twenty-five dollars. These are the kind of guys that usually run the black markets because they have connections all across the island, and I am right, last November, this man says he sold a fake birth certificate to Alberto Cruz. It cost the family two hundred dollars—more than they make in a year—but I am lucky, because he said to me that if I wanted to buy a birth certificate for any of my prospects, the price would only be one hundred fifty. He sells a lot to professional scouts.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Happens all the time.”
“I know, and contracts get terminated.”
“Sometimes, if they’re good enough, the front office looks the other way. In one regard it’s understandable, why Alberto thought he had to do it.”
Then Pedro is quiet.
“I didn’t see it, either, Cassie.”
She is quiet, too.
“Does Raymond know?”
“I wanted first to talk to Alberto. I called the minor league office in San Antonio but they say he is on his way to LA. They’re sending him to a specialist for this problem that he has.”
Cassidy snorts, “Black magic?”
“They think maybe a parasite in his gut.”
She sighs heavily.
“If he lied about his age, what else is he lying about? What else did he think he had to do?”
Pedro, soberly, “I know what you mean.”
“Joe is very upset, he wants me to force Alberto to go to the police and get this over with. But I’m afraid that Joe is lying, too. Or maybe he is, I don’t know.”
“About the accident?”
“No, something else. It’s stupid. Not important. A house he might or might not own. I don’t know what to think.”
“You’re trying to protect them both.”
She doesn’t answer.
“You can’t remember who was driving?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Then you gotta find out the facts.”
“That’s exactly what I’ll never find out!”
“Remember what I told you, Always kick the tires.”
She laughs. He’s not kidding. And she’s done it. You meet the prospec
t’s family. You sit around the kitchen table, talk, get their background, economic level, a sense of their commitment to baseball, then, as you leave, you pass the family car and check out the tires.
It tells you if they’re telling the truth, Pedro would say, if they have what they say they have—or maybe don’t have. It tells you how they take care of business, what they think is important — those are the things you want to know because those are the things that get passed to the son.
“Does this Joe own the house,” he’s asking now, “or is he making up a story? Is it important? We don’t know unless we check it out.”
Cassidy continues pacing, head down, staring at the floor.
“Get this: The police actually think you and I might be involved. Can you believe it? Like we’re blackmailing Alberto because we think he’s worth a lot of money?”
Pedro says, “Find out about the house.”
Eleven o’clock in the morning, still not dressed, she calls Harvey Weissman.
His voice is cordial. “How are you, Cassidy?”
“I need to talk to you about Joe.”
“What did he do, I’ll break his neck.”
“It’s not about our relationship. So much. I need to know if he owns some property at the beach.”
“I can’t discuss a client, that’s a breach of confidentiality. Have you asked the man himself?”
“No.”
“What are you, shy?”
“I’m not sure he would tell me the truth.”
Harvey laughs. “You’re calling his lawyer, asking for the truth?”
“This is something I really need to know.”
“Well, property ownership is public information. Go to City Hall and check out the records.”
But it’s not so easy to figure out which city hall when you don’t exactly know which beach the house is technically on, nor, exactly, the name of the street (you could find it if you drove there), so you try to describe it to a clerk who ultimately transfers you to the courthouse in Costa Mesa, but then that’s not correct, so maybe the jurisdiction is Newport Beach, and you wind up caught in phone trees of complex and bewildering choices, put on hold, disconnected, until you finally reach a recording that says the assistants at the property records department are all busy assisting other inquiries, but please be patient and stay on the line because your call is important to them.
At 2 p.m. Cassidy downs a frozen diet entree, takes a shower and is grabbing her keys to drive up to Newport Beach before the zoning office closes at three when the phone rings.
“Grizzlies rock!” shouts D. J. Reed.
Hearing that gruff throaty voice instantly time-tunnels Cassidy to the summer of 1970, the two girls riding to Lithia Park on their bikes with a baseball card clipped against the spokes by a clothespin to get that professional thwick thwick thwick, and a mental treasure map unfolds of the slopes, slides, swings, wading pool, Japanese garden, patch of sword ferns, where each station of childhood took place. The “boys’ ship” and the “girls’ ship.” Fifteen-person hide-and-seek. Cool woodland and a lively creek, antidote to the hot red dust of the diamond where they’d usually play two games a day, with a break for Orange Crush and Jujubes.
Along with this sweet burst of memory is also a hulking dread and an almost physical need to get off the phone and run.
“D.J.! Great to hear you!”
“Had to call. Had to take the shot.”
“It’s great.”
“Is this a bad time?”
“No.”
“Well, you know, it’s been a while.”
“How’s the team?”
“Finished first in the conference.”
“Congratulations.”
“My girls didn’t take to losing. They were crushed by our first loss, I had to tell them the biggest learning lessons are the losses, not the wins. Takes more of an athlete to go through a loss.”
Wistfully, “How is it being head coach?” thinking of the simple pleasures of small-town high school sports, kid-size problems, manageable goals, team breakfasts, caring for your girls, going to their plays and choirs and water polo games, and oh those green, green leaves of Lithia Park.
“It’s amazing to think I hold enough respect to be a mentor. Gained a lot more confidence in myself. And you?”
“Fighting the fight.”
Excited, “You know who I ran into at the mall? Patty White. She’s got three kids and one more on the way.”
“She was tough. What’d she weigh, about one-fifty?”
“Weighs a lot more now. Remember when we had that plan? We were going to allow Patty White to have a breakaway lane and whichever one of us was closest, we were going to demolish her—”
“And Melody Wolf gets whomped instead.”
“Old Melody, man, she had no fear—Patty’s going for the layup and Melody’s right behind her and she just tramples her and they both go sliding across the floor and Patty gets up and Melody stays down and the ambulance comes and she tore part of her knee … We planned it from the git-go and the wrong person got injured.”
“Good plan.”
“So what’d we do? Put horse manure on Patty’s car.”
Cassidy laughs. “I forgot about that.”
“Well, look. I’m sure you’re busy. I just wanted to call.”
“That was nice.”
“June eleventh.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Are you okay?”
“I miss him every day, so this is just … another reminder … about how long I’ve been missing him.”
Damn D.J., making her throat ache, draining her resolve.
“Doing anything special?”
“No, not really. Maybe take a walk along the beach,” she lies. As soon as they hang up she’s going straight to Papa’s.
“Jim and I went up to the cemetery. There were lots of flowers on Gregg’s stone. Isn’t that nice? Red ones. Grizzlie red.”
“Always.”
“Gonna call your mom?”
“I saw her at Christmas.”
“Well.”
“We don’t make a thing about it anymore.”
Because Maggie has already entombed the memories of her son and husband in the Hollywood Stars Inn and Baseball Museum.
Eleven o’clock Christmas night Maggie was still in the kitchen, filling tins for tomorrow’s breakfast muffins with an oversized spoon, no drips, when Cassidy, restless, grabbed another bottle of Oregon gold from the refrigerator and walked into the darkened museum. It was overheated and smelled of cat food. She pulled the chain on a floor lamp and a soft yellow glow filled the room.
There were Gregg’s baby pictures and trophies on a shelf, and Smoke Sanderson’s intimate life on display inside specially made oak cabinets: letters from a baseball camp in Kansas, his Pacific Overseas Air Force Command patch, dog tags, a photograph taken with a swami, his violin, soft black leather cleats, a thick jersey with an H in the center of a black and red star, a telegram care of the Hollywood Plaza Hotel in which the young pitcher was fined twenty-five dollars “for the use of abusive and profane language, which you will remit immediately or stand suspended,” his high school diploma and a Louisville Slugger bat; his boyhood mitt, brown as an acorn.
Cassidy tapped her fingers on the glass that separated her from him. She could hear his voice, garish as in an old film clip, coaching first base: “Cassie! Be the one!” standard chatter to the kid at the plate, but after Gregg died it carried a special message she alone could hear. At the clap of his hands she was alert to his sadness, at the sound of his voice the force of his hope—that she might be the batter who would turn the game. That she would be the one to grip the opportunity. To heal his grief. To change, everything.
She sat in an easy chair and swigged the brew. The house was quiet. Their type of guests tended to go to bed early. A sweet baking scent blossomed through the doorway and she listened to the dishwasher thrumming along. Display cases glinted in the lamplight, art
ifacts sealed in time. She couldn’t touch any of it.
D.J. is saying, “I still think about Gregg every day. He was like my brother—only better than my brother.”
“Get out of here, your brother’s way cool.”
“Not when you had to live with him,” says D.J. The throaty voice goes even more husky. “I love you, kid.”
“I love you, too.”
24
It is early for Papa’s, that harsh twilight when daytime alcoholics who have been at the bar three, four hours are working on winding it up for the time being and the evening regulars have yet to settle in. Golden light layers the streets. It is the hour when choices can still be made although most people will choose to go home. Dry cleaners and grocery stores are busy and there is plenty of traffic but none of it (the hometowny routine) seems to have anything to do with Cassidy.
In the last hour she has left eleven messages for Joe, alternating between his beach-home answering machine and an increasingly hostile secretary who has repeatedly said Joe is at a city council meeting and cannot be reached. Nevertheless Cassidy has continued to call, like taking a hammer to a steel door just to savor the bone-ringing futility of it.
The pub at this hour looks rudely exposed, someone caught in the middle of a yawn, showing speckled tongue and worn fillings. Cassidy does not like the daylight on the smeared red tables nor the stink of disinfectant coming from the rear, remembering with a bitter jolt the gambling casino at the Gran Caribe, carpeted in black and freezing cold twenty-four hours a day—no matter what the heat or humidity outside, escape to the dark ice womb was always available. There, the General had put down a coffee cup and smiled with satisfaction. There, unlike at the sugar mill, we no longer had the need for human sweat and rusty apparatus. There, in that postmodern refinery (if Detective Allen is correct), computer-driven slot machines turn pure white powder into a jackpot of gold.
At the moment the only other folks in Papa’s are three drunks doing Wild Turkey with Coors Light chasers. The female of the trio is one of those lank toughies who looks like she’s spent the last sixty years riding horses in the sun.
“The cops were following her,” she is saying in a loud smoky voice, “and she like fell into the driveway like, Oh fuck they can’t do anything to me now I’m in the fucking driveway—and her son Christopher was home in the house.”