Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  Just about everybody watched the ambulance leave, and most of the crowd missed Tommy’s exit. He left in handcuffs, escorted by ten or a dozen cops, and they took him out through the dugout and the locker room so nobody really knew what was happening.

  And then we finished the game.

  There was some criticism later about that, some people arguing that the game should have been called on the spot, but how could you do that? For one thing, I think you’d have had a riot on your hands. You don’t call off a game every time a batter gets hit by a pitch.

  Some rookie, a skinny guy named Hector Ruiz, was announced as a pinch runner, and he was awarded first base. And our closer, Freddie Olendorff, came on in relief. He took his warmup throws, and I got a hunch and called for a pitchout on the first pitch, and sure enough, Hector Ruiz was off and running. I threw down to Pepper Foxwell at second and we had him out by four feet.

  The next two batters grounded out, and that was it for the Bobcats in the top of the eighth. They brought in a new pitcher in the bottom of the ninth and he walked the bases loaded, and we scored two more runs before they managed to stop the bleeding. Then Freddie went out there and shut down the Bobcats one two three, on a pair of ground balls and a foul pop that I caught for the last out.

  We were in the locker room and the crowd was out of the stadium and halfway home before we found out what had actually happened that afternoon. That Bemis was dead, which was what we were all afraid of, of course, but didn’t know for a fact, not until the word filtered through to us. And that Tommy Willis was in a jail cell, charged with murder.

  That was hard to believe. I think everybody knew it wasn’t an accident, that he’d thrown that ball at Wade Bemis on purpose. And some of us knew he hadn’t been trying to just brush him back, but that he meant to hit him.

  And I knew just how intentional it was, because I knew what pitch I’d called and where I’d set up. And Tommy didn’t even bother to shake off my sign. He nodded and went into his windup and threw the ball straight at Bemis.

  But since when did you charge a pitcher with murder for hitting a batter? There’ve been pitchers fined for throwing intentional beanballs, and there have been some brief suspensions, but criminal charges? That’s something I’ve never heard of.

  But of course it wasn’t Wade Bemis that Tommy was charged with murdering.

  It was Colleen.

  That was why the cops were out on the field almost before Wade Bemis hit the ground. They’d been waiting since the fourth inning. It was around then that police officers went to the Willis house in Northbrook in response to a neighbor’s complaint. They found Tommy’s wife, Colleen, in the bedroom with a carving knife stuck in her chest.

  A pair of detectives came straight to the ballpark, but they had the car radio tuned to the ballgame, so before they got there they knew Tommy was pitching, and that he hadn’t allowed a hit. They got a lot of flak later on for not arresting him right away, and there’s no question but that Wade Bemis would be alive if they had, but I can see why they did what they did.

  On the one hand, there was no rush. Tommy wasn’t going anywhere. All they had to do was wait until the game was over, or at least until he’d been yanked for a pinch hitter, and he could be taken into custody without making a public spectacle of the whole thing. That’s what you’d have if you arrested him in the middle of any game, and it would be even worse given the game he was pitching. Can you imagine the crowd reaction if the police interrupted a no-hitter and led the pitcher off in handcuffs? And this wasn’t just any no-hitter, it was a perfect game in the making.

  You could easily have a riot on your hands.

  And suppose Tommy turned out to be innocent? Suppose somebody else stuck the knife in her, and when it was all over he’d lost not only his beautiful wife but his chance for baseball immortality, all because a couple of eager-beaver cops couldn’t wait a few innings?

  And here’s another thing. If they had the game on the radio, it probably means they were fans. And what kind of fan is going to screw up a perfect game?

  The way it turned out, the way it goes in the record book, Tommy Willis and Freddie Olendorff combined to throw a no-hitter. That’s rare enough, but this was a no-hitter where they only faced twenty-seven batters. The one man who did reach first—not on a hit, a walk, or an error, unless you call a hit batsman a pitcher’s error—that one man was thrown out stealing. So you’d have to say the game the two of them pitched was the closest possible thing to a perfect game.

  Some perfect game.

  Colleen was having an affair with Wade Bemis, and Tommy found out. And they had a fight about it, and you know how it ended, with the carving knife stuck in her chest. And maybe if Bemis hadn’t said what he said at his last at-bat, Tommy would have just hung in there and pitched to him. The way he was throwing, you’ve got to figure he’d have gotten him out, and five more after him, and completed his perfect game and got his cheers and gone off quietly with the arresting officers.

  Or maybe Bemis would have gotten a hit, and, with the no-hitter out of reach, Tommy would have come out of there. Maybe the Bobcats would have rallied and broken things open and won the game. I mean, it’s baseball.

  Anything can happen in a baseball game.

  Headaches and Bad Dreams

  Three days of headaches, three nights of bad dreams. On the third night she woke twice before dawn, her heart racing, the bedding sweat-soaked. The second time she forced herself up and out of bed and into the shower. Before she’d toweled dry the headache had begun, starting at the base of the skull and radiating to the temples.

  She took aspirin. She didn’t like to take drugs of any sort, and her medicine cabinet contained nothing but a few herbal preparations—echinacea and golden seal for colds, gingko for memory, and a Chinese herbal tonic, its ingredients a mystery to her, which she ordered by mail from a firm in San Francisco. She took sage, too, because it seemed to her to help center her psychically and make her perceptions more acute, although she couldn’t remember having read that it had that property. She grew sage in her garden, picked leaves periodically and dried them in the sun, and drank a cup of sage tea almost every evening.

  There were herbs that were supposed to ease headaches, no end of different herbs for the many different kinds of headaches, but she’d never found one that worked. Aspirin, on the other hand, was reliable. It was a drug, and as such it probably had the effect of dulling her psychic abilities, but those abilities were of small value when your head was throbbing like Poe’s telltale heart. And aspirin didn’t slam shut the doors of perception, as something strong might do. Truth to tell, it was the nearest thing to an herb itself, obtained originally from willow bark. She didn’t know how they made it nowadays, surely there weren’t willow trees enough on the planet to cure the world’s headaches, but still . . .

  She heated a cup of spring water, added the juice of half a lemon. That was her breakfast. She sipped it in the garden, listening to the birds.

  She knew what she had to do but she was afraid.

  It was a small house, just two bedrooms, everything on one floor, with no basement and shallow crawl space for an attic. She slept in one bedroom and saw clients in the other. A beaded curtain hung in the doorway of the second bedroom, and within were all the pictures and talismans and power objects from which she drew strength. There were religious pictures and statues, a crucifix, a little bronze Buddha, African masks, quartz crystals. A pack of tarot cards shared a small table with a little malachite pyramid and a necklace of bear claws.

  A worn oriental rug covered most of the floor, and was itself in part covered by a smaller rug on which she would lie when she went into trance. The rest of the time she would sit in the straight-backed armchair. There was a chaise as well, and that was where the client would sit.

  She had only one appointment that day, but it was right smack in the middle of the day. The client, Claire Warburton, liked to come on her lunch hour. So Sylvia got through the m
orning by watching talk shows on television and paging through old magazines, taking more aspirin when the headache threatened to return. At 12:30 she opened the door for her client.

  Claire Warburton was a regular, coming for a reading once every four or five weeks, upping the frequency of her visits in times of stress. She had a weight problem—that was one of the reasons she liked to come on her lunch hour, so as to spare herself a meal’s worth of calories—and she was having a lingering affair with a married man. She had occasional problems at work as well, a conflict with a new supervisor, an awkward situation with a co-worker who disapproved of her love affair. There were always topics on which Claire needed counsel, and, assisted by the cards, the crystals, and her own inner resources, Sylvia always found something to tell her.

  “Oh, before I forget,” Claire said, “you were absolutely right about wheat. I cut it out and I felt the difference almost immediately.”

  “I thought you would. That came through loud and clear last time.”

  “I told Dr. Greenleaf. ‘I think I may be allergic to wheat,’ I said. He rolled his eyes.”

  “I’ll bet he did. I hope you didn’t tell him where the thought came from.”

  “Oh, sure. ‘Sylvia Belgrave scanned my reflex centers with a green pyramid and picked up a wheat allergy.’ Believe me, I know better than that. I don’t know why I bothered to say anything to him in the first place. I suppose I was looking for male approval, but that’s nothing new, is it?” They discussed the point, and then she said, “But it’s so hard, you know. Staying away from wheat, I mean. It’s everywhere.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bread, pasta. I wish I could cut it out completely, but I’ve managed to cut way down, and it helps. Sylvia? Are you all right?”

  “A headache. It keeps coming back.”

  “Really? Well, I hate to say it, but do you think maybe you ought to see a doctor?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I know the cause, and I even know the cure. There’s something I have to do.”

  When Sylvia was nineteen years old, she fell in love with a young man named Gordon Sawyer. He had just started dental school, and they had an understanding; after he had qualified as a dentist, they would get married. They were not officially engaged, she did not have a ring, but they had already reached the stage of talking about names for their children.

  He drowned on a family canoe trip. A couple of hours after it happened, but long before anybody could get word to her, Sylvia awoke from a nightmare, bathed in perspiration. The details of the dream had fled, but she knew it had been awful, and that something terrible had happened to Gordon. She couldn’t go back to sleep, and she had been up for hours with an unendurable headache when the doorbell rang and a cousin of Gordon’s brought the bad news.

  That was her first undeniable psychic experience. Before that she’d had feelings and hunches, twinges of perception that were easy to shrug off or blink away. Once a fortune-teller at a county fair had read her palm and told her she had psychic powers herself, powers she’d be well advised to develop. She and Gordon had laughed about it, and he’d offered to buy her a crystal ball for her birthday.

  When Gordon died her life found a new direction. If Gordon had lived she’d have gone on working as a salesgirl until she became a full-time wife and mother. Instead she withdrew into herself and began following the promptings of an inner voice. She could walk into a bookstore and her feet would lead her to some arcane volume that would turn out to be just what she needed to study next. She would sit in her room in her parents’ house, staring for hours at a candle flame, or at her own reflection in the mirror. Her parents were worried, but nobody did anything beyond urging her to get out more and meet people. She was upset over Gordon’s death, they agreed, and that was understandable, and she would get over it.

  “Twenty-five dollars,” Claire Warburton said, handing over two tens and a five. “You know, I was reading about this woman in People magazine, she reads the cards for either Oprah or Madonna, don’t ask me which. And do you know how much she gets for a session?”

  “Probably more than twenty-five dollars,” Sylvia said.

  “They didn’t say, but they showed the car she drives around in. It’s got an Italian name that sounds like testosterone, and it’s fire-engine red, naturally. Of course, that’s California. People in this town think you’d have to be crazy to pay twenty-five dollars. I don’t see how you get by, Sylvia. I swear I don’t.”

  “There was what my mother left,” she said. “And the insurance.”

  “And a good thing, but it won’t last forever. Can’t you—”

  “What?”

  “Well, look into the crystal and try to see the stock market? Or ask your spirit guides for investment advice?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “That’s what I knew you’d say,” Claire said. “I guess that’s what everybody says. You can’t use it for your own benefit or it doesn’t work.”

  “That’s as it should be,” she said. “It’s a gift, and the Universe doesn’t necessarily give you what you want. But you have to keep it. No exchanges, no refunds.”

  She parked across the street from the police station, turned off the engine, and sat in the car for a few moments, gathering herself. Her car was not a red Testarossa but a six-year-old Ford Tempo. It ran well, got good mileage, and took her where she wanted to go. What more could you ask of a car?

  Inside, she talked to two uniformed officers before she wound up on the other side of a desk from a balding man with gentle brown eyes that belied his jutting chin. He was a detective, and his name was Norman Jeffcote.

  He looked at her card, then looked directly at her. Twenty years had passed since her psychic powers had awakened with her fiancé’s death, and she knew that the years had not enhanced her outward appearance. Then she’d been a girl with regular features turned pretty by her vital energy, a petite and slender creature, and now she was a little brown-haired mouse, dumpy and dowdy.

  “ ‘Psychic counseling,’ “ he read aloud. “What’s that exactly, Ms. Belgrave?”

  “Sometimes I sense things,” she said.

  “And you think you can help us with the Sporran kid?”

  “That poor little girl,” she said.

  Melissa Sporran, six years old, only child of divorced parents, had disappeared eight days previously on her way home from school.

  “The mother broke down on camera,” Detective Jeffcote said, “and I guess it got to people, so much so that it made some of the national newscasts. That kind of coverage pulls people out of the woodwork. I got a woman on the phone from Chicago, telling me she just knows little Melissa’s in a cave at the foot of a waterfall. She’s alive, but in great danger. You’re a local woman, Ms. Belgrave. You know any waterfalls within a hundred miles of here?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. This woman in Chicago, she may have been a little fuzzy on the geography, but she was good at making sure I got her name spelled right. But I won’t have a problem in your case, will I? Because your name’s all written out on your card.”

  “You’re not impressed with psychic phenomena,” she said.

  “I think you people got a pretty good racket going,” he said, “and more power to you if you can find people who want to shell out for whatever it is you’re selling. But I’ve got a murder investigation to run, and I don’t appreciate a lot of people with four-leaf clovers and crystal balls.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “Well, that’s not for me to say, Ms. Belgrave, but now that you bring it up—”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t have any choice. Detective, have you heard of Sir Isaac Newton?”

  “Sure, but I probably don’t know him as well as you do. Not if you’re getting messages from him.”

  “He was the foremost scientific thinker of his time,” she said, “and in his later years he became quite devoted to astrology, which you
may take as evidence either of his openmindedness or of encroaching senility, as you prefer.”

  “I don’t see what this has to—”

  “A colleague chided him,” she said, brooking no interruption, “and made light of his enthusiasm, and do you know what Newton said? ‘Sir, I have investigated the subject. You have not. I do not propose to waste my time discussing it with you.’ “

  He looked at her and she returned his gaze. After a long moment he said, “All right, maybe you and Sir Isaac have a point. You got a hunch about the Sporran kid?”

  “Not a hunch,” she said, and explained the dreams, the headaches. “I believe I’m linked to her,” she said, “however it works, and I don’t begin to understand how it works. I think . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid I think she’s dead.”

  “Yes,” Jeffcote said heavily. “Well, I hate to say it, but you gain in credibility with that one, Ms. Belgrave. We think so, too.”

  “If I could put my hands on some object she owned, or a garment she wore . . .”

  “You and the dogs.” She looked at him. “There was a fellow with a pack of bloodhounds, needed something of hers to get the scent. Her mother gave us this little sunsuit, hadn’t been laundered since she wore it last. The dogs got the scent good, but they couldn’t pick it up anywhere. I think we still have it. You wait here.”

  He came back with the garment in a plastic bag, drew it out, and wrinkled his nose at it. “Smells of dog now,” he said. “Does that ruin it for you?”

  “The scent’s immaterial,” she said. “It shouldn’t even matter if it’s been laundered. May I?”

  “You need anything special, Ms. Belgrave? The lights out, or candles lit, or—”

  She shook her head, told him he could stay, motioned for him to sit down. She took the child’s sunsuit in her hands and closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply, and almost at once her mind began to fill with images. She saw the girl, saw her face, and recognized it from dreams she thought she had forgotten.