Die Like an Eagle

by Donna Andrews

  “You idiot!” Biff began, and then he began to berate the umpire, dropping the F-bomb twice in his first sentence.

  “Coach,” the umpire broke in. “Take a step back and lose that language.”

  Biff paid no attention and continued his tirade.

  “Take a hike,” the umpire said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the parking lot.

  Biff uttered an incoherent howl and lurched at the umpire, both hands outstretched as if to grab him by the throat.

  Chapter 20

  Apparently Biff’s assistant coach had an inkling that something like this could happen, because he was already halfway to the plate when Biff lost it. For that matter, the two Nats coaches were already running in from their base coach spots at first and third. The umpire managed to escape throttling by setting a new world record for the standing backward broad jump, and then the three sane coaches grabbed Biff and kept him from doing any physical damage. The three of them half-led, half-dragged Biff back to the dugout. Several men from the Yankees bleachers raced into the dugout and hustled Biff through it and out into the parking lot.

  Mr. Witherington was still standing just behind home plate, fingers twined into the chain-link fence as if he needed to hold onto something. He glanced back and saw me looking at him.

  “Is this customary in your league?” he asked.

  “Lord, I hope not,” I said. “I think I’d have heard about it before now if it was.”

  He nodded and looked back at the field. We could still hear Biff’s angry voice ranting out in the parking lot.

  “I guess he’s under a lot of strain right now,” I said. Why was I making excuses for Biff? Perhaps because I didn’t want Mr. Witherington to think too badly of us. “With his brother’s death and all.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Witherington said. “His brother’s death. It would be nice to feel certain he wasn’t in any way responsible for that. ‘Summerball League President Arrested for Killing Brother’ would be such an unfortunate headline.”

  “He’s alibied,” I said.

  “I see. Still, ‘Summerball League President Hires Contract Killer’ isn’t much better.”

  I made a mental note of his words so I could repeat them to Randall, along with the satisfying news that, just as I had predicted, Biff was doing a fine job of making our case against him to Mr. Witherington.

  I glanced over at the Nats bleachers, where Chief Burke was sitting. I noticed that he had his little notebook out and appeared to be writing in it. And glancing over at the Yankees bleachers. Taking note of Biff’s known associates, perhaps? Because, yeah, the idea that Biff had found someone else to kill Shep was definitely on the table, and if I were the chief I’d definitely start checking out the small band of stalwarts sitting on the Yankees bleachers, glaring daggers at the rest of us.

  And I noticed that the Pruitts weren’t among the fathers who’d gone out to the parking lot to help calm Biff down. All three of them were sitting in a small clump on the side of the bleachers farthest from the dugout. Two of them looked untroubled, and the third was actually grinning.

  The chief also seemed to be studying them with a thoughtful look on his face.

  “Looks like the cat who ate the canary, doesn’t he?” Randall said, returning to lean against the fence beside me.

  “Would that happen to be Adolph Pruitt?” I asked.

  “Ah, so you’ve met the newly paroled jailbird?” Randall said.

  “No,” I said. “Just a lucky guess.”

  As I watched, a fourth Pruitt strolled over and showed a piece of paper to the three sitting on the bleachers. Two of them burst into laughter as soon as they glanced at the paper. Adolph had to stick his nose a couple of inches from the paper and stare at it for several seconds with his eyes scrunched up before he burst into chuckles.

  I glanced over to make sure the chief had seen that one of his prime suspects—well, one of mine, anyway—was incredibly nearsighted and could easily have mistaken Shep for his brother.

  “I’d have pegged Adolph for just a loudmouth myself,” Randall said, as if reading my thoughts. “Just trying to cause trouble for Biff. Cephus says he’s been stirring up the two Pruitts who have kids on the team. Convincing them that their little darlings aren’t getting their fair share of playing time. Which they’re not, but if Biff did give them equal playing time, the Pruitts would be the first to complain that the team wasn’t winning.”

  I looked back at the field. The stocky left fielder, who hadn’t moved his feet since plodding out to his position at the start of the inning—almost certainly a young Pruitt. As I scanned the rest of the players, the remaining Yankees coach went out from the mound and took the ball from the pitcher. The three Yankees on the bench—one of them, by the shape of him, probably the other juvenile Pruitt—looked up expectantly, then slumped again when the coach gestured to the right fielder. The pitcher and the right fielder jogged to exchange places.

  The new pitcher began warming up. He started off a little wild, probably because he was paying as much attention to what was going on in the parking lot as what was happening on the field. But then so was everyone else, including the umpire, who let the pitcher have a few more practice throws than usual. Someone turned on the sound system and the opening bars of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” succeeded in drowning out Biff, which probably helped the new pitcher find his rhythm.

  Still, “Glory Days” had given way to the first pounding chords of “Don’t Stop Believin’” by the time the umpire finally shouted “Play ball!” The fans sent up a rousing cheer—well, except for the parents on the Yankees bleachers, who were huddled together with shell-shocked looks on their faces, as if not quite sure how to cope with this strange new order of things. And Adolph Pruitt was still whispering to the other two Pruitts. Neither of them appeared very happy, but Adolph, looking like a cross between Machiavelli and an overgrown frog, seemed to be having the time of his life.

  The rest of the game went smoothly. The new pitcher gave up three runs in his first inning, putting the Nats ahead ten to two, but after the first inning without Biff, the Yankees rallied—in fact, they actually seemed to be having fun out on the field—and the lead shifted back and forth in what turned out to be an exciting and surprisingly unacrimonious game. Either the Yankees’ assistant coach was a nicer guy than he’d allowed us to see with Biff around or he’d accurately read the prevailing mood and was feigning niceness.

  During the bottom of the fourth inning, one of the Yankee fathers appeared and talked to Mr. Witherington in an undertone. I didn’t catch most of what they said, only a couple of sentences.

  “He is still the league president,” Mr. Witherington said. “I see no problem with him performing tasks appropriate for that job. But he stays off the field until the game is over and he doesn’t communicate with anyone on the field.”

  Having overheard that, I was probably one of the few people not surprised to see Biff appear behind the outfield fence at the start of the fifth inning, carrying a black plastic garbage bag and one of those trash pickup sticks with a sharp point on the end. I didn’t exactly find it reassuring to see someone with Biff’s anger management issues toting a tool that could so easily be used as a weapon, but at least he was far away from the crowd—the few people hanging around behind the fence made themselves scarce as soon as he appeared. And while he definitely did more watching and muttering than trash collection, at least he was staying to the letter of his exile.

  During the bottom of the fifth, I realized I needed to use the bathroom. After a scornful glance at Biff’s porta-potty, which was as deserted as if someone had put an invisible fence around it, I headed for the other end of the field, where Randall’s superior porta-potties stood. He’d even put a couple of benches nearby so people could wait in greater comfort, although having three porta-potties meant that there usually wasn’t much of a wait.

  On my way there, I spotted Gina, Biff’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. She was sitting in a fold
ing camping chair on the Yankees’ side of the field, but far out along the first baseline, so she wasn’t near any of the other team parents. Not surprising, if many of them were Biff cronies. A kid about Josh and Jamie’s age was sitting at her feet, almost clinging to them. Neither of them seemed to be paying any attention to Biff, who was standing behind the centerfield portion of the fence, staring at the game and rhythmically stabbing the ground at his feet with his litter stick.

  Had the chief talked to Gina yet? Obviously she was a potential gold mine of information about both Biff and Shep—their relationship to each other, their cronies, their enemies. But he’d need to sift what she had to say carefully. She’d said some pretty negative things about Biff—how much of that was accurate and how much was driven by her anger against him? Or would she soft-pedal the truth to protect her children? And how much had Biff even let her know about his business or the way he ran the league? He didn’t strike me as the type of guy who came home and shared his deepest thoughts and aspirations and worries with the wife. But you never knew.

  The chief’s problem, not mine—thank goodness.

  “Meg! There you are!”

  I turned around to see Caroline Willner.

  “Any progress in your project?” I asked.

  “Not so much,” she said. “He didn’t wear the jacket with the tag in the pocket today—it’s back at his scrapyard. And my minions have been lurking in the parking lot for the last couple of hours, trying to find an unguarded moment to slip under Biff’s car.”

  Her minions. Why was I picturing the Artful Dodger and the rest of Fagin’s juvenile gang?

  “Have you considered the possibility that the longer they lurk, the more people will notice them?” I asked aloud. “And that the more people notice them, the less likely they’ll be to leave their cars unguarded?”

  “It’s just Thor and Eric,” Caroline said. “They’re pretending to be bored with the game and killing time until they can leave, and you’d have to be pretty paranoid to find them suspicious.”

  I glanced over to the parking lot. Yes, there was Thor, the college student who served as chauffeur and general factotum to my grandmother during summers and school breaks, doing something on his iPad. Eric, my teenaged nephew, was looking over his shoulder. Whatever they were doing didn’t seem to hold their attention very well. Both of them kept stealing glances across the parking lot at a battered brown pickup with BROWN CONSTRUCTION painted on the door. And also glances at a nearby station wagon which seemed to serve as the headquarters for a mixed party of Yankee and Stoat families who were having some kind of morose little tailgate party. As I watched, two Yankee fathers arrived holding Coca-Cola cans. They handed them to a Stoat father, who pried empty Bud Light cans out of what were obviously only Coke-can shells, popped the tops of new beer cans, and sent them on their way with their new beers camouflaged.

  “The park’s supposed to be an alcohol-free zone,” I said. “County ordinance. Not necessarily one I’m all that keen on myself, although I suppose it’s a small price to pay to keep beer out of the hands of people with anger management issues—Biff, for example. But—”

  “Eric and Thor have plenty of videos of the illegal drinking,” Caroline said. “I suppose we could have reported them to Chief Burke, but that would interfere with our retrieval mission. We almost got a chance a little while back—something exciting must have been happening on the field, because they even left the beer cooler unguarded, but just as Eric was about to nip under the car, they all came back dragging Biff, and it’s been pretty busy ever since.”

  Just then Thor and Eric both glanced over, with apologetic expressions on their faces.

  “I think I know a way to help them,” I said. “Back in a sec.”

  I strolled over to the Twinmobile and fished in the back for a couple of the tennis balls Michael always kept back there. We often used them to entertain the boys when we were stuck in boring circumstances—waiting for a tow, for example, or enduring a family gathering with few other kids, or even just killing time in the parking lot of the Caerphilly Market while one of us did the grocery shopping. I wasn’t sure if it was premeditated on Michael’s part or just a happy by-product of his scheme for keeping the boys amused, but all those games of catch had definitely honed their baseball skills.

  “Hey, Eric,” I said. “You still thinking of trying out for your high school baseball team?”

  Eric looked up, startled. He shook his head slightly and indicated the tailgate party with his eyes as if to remind me that he was on duty.

  “Here,” I said. “Catch this.”

  I fired a tennis ball at him. Thor leaped away and hugged the iPad protectively to his chest. Eric caught the tennis ball.

  “Not bad,” Caroline called. “But let’s see how you throw.”

  Eric lobbed the ball back to me. I caught it and fired it back. Eric started to look annoyed, and threw it back harder. I caught it, then fumbled it—deliberately—and had to reach slightly under the bumper of the car behind me to retrieve it. I could see Eric’s eyes open wide as enlightenment struck. Thor, too, caught on. He stowed his iPad in a knapsack and stepped forward as if to join the game.

  “Not bad,” I said as I fielded Eric’s latest throw. I moved a little until I was standing in front of the car next to Biff’s truck and lobbed it back to him again.

  Eric, Thor, and I threw the ball around a few more times until I saw my chance. I deliberately bobbled the ball again, and then managed to kick it under the car next to Biff’s truck in a way that I was pretty sure looked accidental.

  “Sorry,” Eric called. “Bad throw.”

  “Blast!” I leaned down and peered under the car, and then under Biff’s truck. “Can you see which one it’s under?”

  “The car,” Thor said.

  “Looked like the truck to me,” Eric said. “Or maybe that car on the other side.”

  “Well, can one of you crawl under there and look?” I asked. “I am not in the mood to grovel on gravel today, and by the looks of it you’ve already been doing that.”

  Eric started by looking under the car and then crawled under the truck. Thor made a big show of crawling under several nearby cars. All the while, they kept up a running dialogue.

  “Yuck! There’s chewing gum under here.”

  “Aunt Meg, are oil stains hard to get out?”

  “I found a toad!”

  “Hey, I think I found that foul ball no one could find.”

  “Maybe after this we should find a better place to play catch.”

  Eventually Eric crawled out from under the car.

  “Give me a hand up?” he asked.

  I did, and was delighted to see the little geotracking device in my palm when Eric took his away.

  “That was probably a good idea, playing catch someplace else,” I said.

  “And if you want to hit the Snack Shack on your way to that someplace else, it’s on me,” Caroline said, handing each of the boys a folded bill.

  Thor retrieved his backpack, and the two ambled off toward the Snack Shack. Caroline and I followed more slowly.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem,” I said. “Mind if I keep the you-know-what for a little while? I want to show it to someone who might have a chance to pick Biff’s pocket.”

  “Be my guest,” she said.

  Back at the bleachers, Caroline and I took a seat in what had been the Nats bleachers. I wasn’t sure which team we’d be rooting for next—the Flatworms were playing the Wombats at three thirty, but I couldn’t tell from the gear in the dugouts which team was which. Not a problem. The boys had friends on both teams. If we wanted to be nonpartisan, we could play musical bleachers halfway through the game.

  But meanwhile, we were relaxing. Family members were catching up on news while watching the Flatworms and Wombats warm up. Even Grandfather was here, though he didn’t exactly look all that interested. More likely he was just trying to make sure Cordelia didn’t mono
polize too much of the boys’ time.

  “Mommy, can I have some gum?” Josh asked.

  “I’ll buy you some gum,” Grandfather said. “On two conditions.”

  “O-kay.” Josh sounded slightly dubious.

  “First, you have to get a pack for your brother as well,” Grandfather said.

  “Okay,” Josh said, more cheerfully.

  “And second, you have to bring me a hamburger and a Coke.” Grandfather pulled out his wallet and handed Josh a bill.

  “We’re all going to have a picnic right after the game,” I said. “Mother and Rose Noire are on their way with the food.”

  “And if they bring anything more substantial than cucumber sandwiches, I’ll join you,” Grandfather said. “But I’m in the mood for a burger, and I want it now. Ketchup and onions,” he added to Josh.

  Josh scurried off. Jamie was watching a Grasshoppers pitcher warming up in the bullpen—their game wasn’t till six, but the bullpen wasn’t needed for the coach-pitch Flatworm/Wombat game. Jamie was drinking it all in, and making little arm movements as if mimicking the Grasshopper. Grandfather’s eyes were flicking back and forth between the two. I suspected that by dinner time he’d have some new observations on the similarity between what Josh and Jamie had been doing all day and the learning behaviors of other immature primates, but as long as he didn’t make any comments too insulting to the boys, he was welcome to observe them all he liked.

  I surreptitiously fished the little tracking device out of my jacket pocket and studied it, with my fingers carefully curled so no one else could see it. Yes, it did look like a random bit of mechanical junk. I tucked it back in my pocket again. I pondered the notion that if Biff actually did find it in his pocket, he might not recognize what it was. And if he did find it, who was to say that he hadn’t accidentally picked it up out at our house? In fact, what if I started showing the little device to everyone who’d been at our picnic and asking them if they’d picked up one just like it by mistake? I could say that Caroline had brought me two to try out with Spike and the llamas, and we’d dropped one somewhere.