The Ninth Inning

by A. J. Stewart

  “He can’t breathe?”

  “Essentially, that’s it. His brain is no longer able to send the messages to the muscles in his diaphragm that work to bring in air. Eventually those signals will stop, and the muscles will cease functioning altogether.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do about that?” asked Danielle.

  “In short, no, I’m afraid not.” The doctor clasped his hands together on his desk and looked between Danielle and Jane once again. “There are many issues that we should discuss with regard to your father’s end-of-life options. But I know this is a lot to take in. Perhaps after you’ve had a chance to talk it through, we can meet again.” He looked at each of them once more, and they both offered subtle nods. “Perhaps we can get together tomorrow?”

  Jane stood and Danielle followed, and I did likewise, moving my chair out of the way. Then the doctor showed us to his door, and we thanked him for his time.

  We walked back to the hotel in silence, each of us processing the morning in our own way. I wondered how far along in that process Jane was, compared to Danielle. My process was somewhat different. I had no real role to play, other than support, and I really wasn’t sure what form that should take. Having heard Danielle’s side of the story in various snippets over the years, I had all kinds of conflicting thoughts and images buzzing through my head, having now met her father, or at least been in the same room as him.

  When we got back to the hotel lobby, Jane said she wanted to go to her room to freshen up.

  I got the sense that I was somewhat of a third wheel, so I decided to be directed by Danielle’s wishes.

  “If you guys need some time to talk,” I said, “I’ll make myself scarce.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  “I know I don’t have to. It’s your call. But I know you haven’t seen Jane in quite some time, and I’m sure there are things to say.” I took her hand. “I’ll give you some time, and I’ll be here when you need me.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  I smiled. It didn’t feel altogether like the right expression, but I couldn’t help it. After everything we’d seen that morning, the fact that she was concerned about my welfare might have begged belief. But it didn’t. To me, that was Danielle.

  “I’ll be fine. You guys just take care of each other, okay? Call me if and when you need me.”

  Danielle nodded and dropped my hand. “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know this town. I guess I’ll just find a park bench and sit for a while.”

  Chapter Two

  I left Danielle and Jane to talk or not talk as they saw fit and headed out on foot. I had a lot going through my own mind, even though the situation wasn’t really mine to own.

  Lots of people have places they like to go to sit and contemplate life. In South Florida, plenty of people did that on the beach. Some did it sitting at a bar nursing a hard drink. Religious folks headed to church, or temple, or their local mosque. Sometimes for a service, but as often as not, sometimes just for the quiet such venues provided.

  I had my own version of a cathedral, where I was able to quiet the chattering monkeys and think things through. Since I had been a kid, that place had been a baseball field. A place where during the summertime, I would run and throw and catch, having the time of my life. Then for the rest of the year when baseball diamonds became disused fields, the bleachers became places for quiet reflection. I hadn’t ever intended it to be that way, but I found myself at various times in my life sitting three quarters of the way up a set of bleachers at my high school, my college, and each stadium that I had played in as a professional. I guess, in a way, I was looking for such a place now.

  But Mesa was a town I didn’t know. I walked down a road marked as Route 87 until I found myself between two open spaces of green. On one side was Mesa Country Club, on the other the cemetery.

  It might have felt morbid, had I been thinking about it on a conscious level, but I wasn’t. I turned and wandered my way through the cemetery. There were no headstones, just memorial plaques on the grass, and conifers as far as the eye could see. The place wasn’t overwatered, so the grass had a sickly yellow hue to it that fit my mood. I more or less took a straight shot right through the middle of the cemetery, not stopping to look at any of the plaques but absorbing the stillness of the place in the way I might have done in the bleachers of an empty baseball stadium.

  Sometimes people have supernatural powers, abilities that lead us to one place or another at a time when we most need it. As I wandered out the back end of the cemetery onto North Center Street, I realized that something in my guts had brought me to where I now stood. Perhaps somewhere along the line I had picked up some homing pigeon DNA. Either way, I found myself across the street from a baseball stadium.

  This stadium, however, wasn’t empty. It wasn’t the silent cathedral of contemplation. It was Hohokam Stadium, the spring training home for the Oakland Athletics.

  For the briefest moment, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure that a baseball stadium full of cheering, happy baseball fans was where I wanted to be. But I trusted my pigeon DNA, so I crossed the road and wandered up to the ticket window.

  There weren’t a lot of people milling around outside, which suggested the game was already underway, but the noise from the stadium was muted, which suggested a break between innings.

  The attendant in the ticket booth told me the only tickets they had left were for the grass seating in the outfield, and he further informed me that the game had already started.

  “No refunds, no exchanges,” he said, helpfully.

  I wasn’t after a box seat, so I took the ticket and went in. The concourse was buzzing with early season fans. Spring training fans were true fans. Games in February and March didn’t count for squat, but the true fans who had been starved of America’s pastime since the previous fall came out in droves, like buds exploding with the first spring warmth. People who had been cooped up inside for far too long took to the grandstands and bleachers to watch old hands and new hopefuls, those who had made it and those who hoped to.

  It was the top of the third as I walked around the right field line, past the A’s dugout, and out toward the grass berm beyond the outfield. The crowd was in good spirits, clapping and joking and eating and drinking, and even watching a little bit of ball.

  The seating out on the grass was a family affair, picnic blankets and small children pretending to be the sluggers and fastball flingers of tomorrow.

  I found a space on the grass and sat down. When I’d first set off, I had thought that what I wanted was the solitude of an empty park. Sometimes we know what we need before we even really know it, because what I got was infinitely better. The life force of the crowd around me slowly ebbed its way into the pores of my skin. The sun was high, the sky was bright, and a gentle breeze kept the whole thing pleasant.

  From my position beyond right field, I looked straight across two levels of bullpens. I let the game continue and watched some of the pitchers practicing or warming up. I recognized a couple of the faces, but not from my playing days. The majority of the guys in the bullpens had faces that were unblemished by a lifetime of close calls and missed opportunities.

  I had spent a lot of time in bullpens just like these. Some of that time had even been spent with the Oakland A’s, but never at this field. My major-league career, as fleeting as it was, had been at the end of one hard season, fifteen years before. At the time I had thought that baseball was everything and that it was permanent. I couldn’t have known, and given the benefit of hindsight, shouldn’t have known, that within two years I’d be done with baseball altogether. If I had known, would I have tried harder, gotten further? I didn’t think so. I was a firm believer that even if you could, knowing more about your future was no kind of recipe for success.

  As my eyes drifted back onto the field and I watched a line drive drift lazily into the crowd, I thought about why I was in Arizona at all. I thought about D
anielle and Jane, and their dad, lying in his bed in a hospice. As an institution, it had but one function. To care for people who were most certainly, definitively, going to die, and die soon. To help make their last days as pain-free and as pleasant as one possibly could. It certainly did away with all the unnecessary pontificating and language gymnastics we did when we addressed questions of death. Everyone at the table knew why someone was in a hospice.

  I was there because Danielle was there. And sometimes all you needed to be was there. Nothing more, nothing less. There were times when people needed your wise counsel, the benefit of your expertise. This was not one of those times. This was a time to reconsider all that had come before while you still had the ability to do something about it. Because life, like baseball, was fleeting, a precarious and temporary state of affairs that we choose to assume is permanent.

  I tried to drag myself out of my own head and focus on the pitching style of the Milwaukee Brewer on the mound. The scent of hot dogs wafted across the field, and my stomach growled. I was hungry, not that it really mattered. For me, hot dogs at baseball games were mandatory. It was like going to a Cracker Barrel restaurant and sitting in the rocking chairs for a moment or two. It had to be done that way.

  I was contemplating a hot dog, and further contemplating whether a cold beer would be acceptable, sitting on a grass bank, watching spring training, when my phone rang. I assumed it was Danielle, so I pulled it out.

  It wasn’t Danielle.

  I answered the call with a “Miami.”

  “Miami, it’s John Cashman.”

  John Cashman was a sports agent of considerable repute, based in Miami. He had been an up-and-coming agent back when I had been an up-and-coming player. In the minor leagues, very few players had agents. Three percent of not very much money was almost nothing. But agents liked to hang around the hot prospects, just in case their stars rose. Mine hadn’t, not to the point that someone like John Cashman took me on as a client. But I did have the opportunity to get one of his up-and-coming prospects out of a pickle back in the day, and when I’d needed some help in the sports management field during a recent case, Cashman had repaid the marker. What he wanted now was anyone’s guess.

  “How goes it?” I asked.

  “We need to talk,” he said. “I’ve got some work for you.”

  “You mean PI kind of work?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You don’t owe me work, John.”

  “I’m not throwing you a bone, Miami. This is something I think only you can deal with.”

  Okay,” I said. “I’d love to help you out, but I’m not in Florida right now.”

  “Neither am I. I’m out at spring training. But this can’t wait.”

  “You at the Grapefruit League?”

  “No, Cactus League.”

  I felt my spidey senses tingling. “Which team?”

  “Right now, the A’s.”

  “Are you at Hohokam Stadium?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “I assume you’re not in the outfield bleachers?”

  “There are no outfield bleachers at Hohokam.”

  “Then the grass bank.”

  “What’re you talking about? I’m in a suite.”

  “Well, take a look out your lofty perch at the lawn seating just behind the bullpens, right field.” I stood up and slowly waved my hand in the air, like a drowning man.

  “Holy crapola. You’re here?”

  Chapter Three

  Cashman told me to come to the suites up at the top of the grandstand on the left-field side of the press box. I made my way back around the field into the concourse behind home plate, where an officious woman with pinched eyes refused to give me access to the suite level.

  “Can you call them?” I asked.

  “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that one,” she said. There was a little too much joy in her voice for my liking.

  I took out my phone and called Cashman, and in typical agent style he sent down an underling to collect me. The woman holding fort looked neither pleased nor displeased that I had gained access, so I told her to keep up the good work.

  The corporate suite was anything but palatial. Not like major-league parks, with their leather movie theater seats and flat-screen televisions. This one was more like a multipurpose room that happened to offer a view of a ballpark. It looked like it had been painted by a guy on his first day on the job, the carpet was the industrial stuff you find in dive bars, and a solitary Oakland A’s flag had been pinned up on the wall as a concession to team colors.

  There was a small bar and a tray of finger food that might have been purchased at the local grocery store, but there were wide windows overlooking the field and a door that led out to stadium seating, so actual fans of the game could leave the antiseptic environment of a suite and enjoy baseball the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

  I could feel John Cashman’s presence in the room. He was one of those guys. Not overly tall, broad rather than tubby, the kind of guy who oozes charm without being anyone’s idea of a matinee idol. He was holding court with a gaggle of baseball hangers-on I didn’t know, and he left them with some kind of zinger that had them in apparent stitches and came over to me.

  “Thanks for coming, Miami,” he said. “You get out to the Cactus League much?”

  “Never been before,” I said. “I’m in Phoenix on a personal matter.”

  “It’s a long way to come to watch the kind of games you can see right at home,” he said.

  “So what brings you here, John?”

  “A mutual acquaintance,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder despite the fact I was an inch or two taller, and leading me over to the bar. “A drink?”

  “How serious is this conversation going to get?”

  “It’s business, but you’ll get a handle on it pretty quick, I’d say.”

  “A beer, then.”

  Cashman nodded at the guy tending the bar, and he opened a bottle of beer and poured it into a plastic cup. Then he poured a shot of tequila for Cashman.

  “Welcome to the Cactus League,” he said, holding his shot glass up and throwing it back in one hit. He put the glass down and then led me back over to the windows so we could see the field as we spoke.

  “So, a mutual acquaintance?” I asked.

  “Do you remember when we met?”

  “I do. Modesto, right?”

  “More specifically?”

  “I was pitching to a young hotshot who could smack a fastball out of the biggest stadium man has ever built but couldn’t hit a curve to save his life. You came and chatted to me on the mound about how he was going.”

  “And you were making him look like a fool.”

  “I think that was the point, wasn’t it? The guy had no patience. He needed to learn some.”

  “You remember getting said slugger out of a pickle one night?” he asked.

  “I remember. So what of it?”

  “Do you remember the player’s name?”

  “Of course I do. He learned some patience, and you got him a contract with the Yankees. A one-hundred-million-dollar contract. He went on to win a World Series there. Made his name, and I guess yours, too.”

  “That’s about it,” he said. “He did his time with the Yankees and then spent two years in Houston. He just got traded to Oakland.”

  “He’s still playing?”

  “This is certainly the ninth inning of his career. His swan-song season, you might say.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, John, I’m always happy for you to buy me a beer. And I’m more than happy to spend some time traveling down memory lane, especially at a ballpark. But do you want to tell me what the hell this has to do with me?”

  “It’s Ricky Spence.”

  “Right, Ricky. Your hundred-million-dollar boy. What of him?”

  “He’s getting blackmailed.”

  Cashman left the word blackmailed hanging in the air and then turned his attention to the game goi
ng on outside. I sipped my beer and looked down at the A’s as they ran onto the field, but I saw no sign of Cashman’s client, Ricky Spence.

  I had to wonder if blackmail had become a crime du jour. Everyone seemed to be trying it on. This wasn’t the first blackmail case to have landed in my lap. It hadn’t been that long ago that I had, in fact, run into John Cashman during such a case. Perhaps that was the reason for his call.

  “What’s the nature of this blackmail?” I asked.

  Cashman explained that a guy had passed a note to Ricky Spence during an autograph session after batting practice. “The players either sign things and hand them back or they don’t look at them at all,” he said. “Ricky passed the note onto a team assistant to deal with. Usually it’s fan mail, or a marriage proposal, or some girl’s phone number and the name of the hotel that she’s staying at.”

  “But not in this case?”

  “The team assistant passed this one on to me. It was a blackmail note.”

  “Was the team assistant able to give you any kind of description of the guy?”

  “Oh, yeah. We know who the guy is. I have his phone number.”

  “You do? Okay. So what does he want?”

  “Money.”

  “And what does he have on your guy?”

  “The guy is claiming that Ricky slept with his wife.”

  “When?”

  “Fifteen years ago.”

  “Was the guy married to his wife back then?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So how is this blackmail? I mean, who cares?”

  “You do recall that Ricky was married when you played together, right?”

  “He was?”

  “Amber.”

  I nodded. Suddenly I remembered. There were plenty of guys in the minor leagues who were married. But there weren’t that many who were in their first year. Guys fresh out of college sometimes had girlfriends, but they never really seemed to last. Ricky Spence was different. He had married his college sweetheart during their senior year. I hadn’t remembered because, frankly, I didn’t really care about Ricky Spence. He wasn’t a friend, in any sense of the word. He was just a guy I played baseball with for a very brief time. But his wife, Amber, she had been memorable. Now that I was picturing her in my mind, I recalled that she was quite the looker. She hit all the high notes for a baseball wife. Blond, check. Thin, check. Looked fantastic in a tight pair of jeans, check. But there was something else that I recalled about Amber Spence, above and beyond being the stereotypical trophy wife. She was smarter than the average bear. If she had known a thing or two about the baseball landscape, I remembered thinking that she could have been Ricky’s agent herself. She picked things up quick and didn’t take any crap. I liked her a lot more than I liked her husband.