Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  He had some money now, but he still played the same ’59 Strat through the same Deluxe Reverb amp, and he still lived in the same bungalow in South Minneapolis. Sometimes old things were better things. But after furnishing his office, he allowed himself two indulgences: He bought a new Mustang convertible, and he joined the White Bear Yacht Club, a 1927 Donald Ross golf course on the edge of the lake. It was the club where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had lived in 1922, until being evicted for throwing too many drunken parties. His office was a five-minute commute to the golf course.

  He performed two Friday nights a month with Night Beat at the Boom Boom Room, played golf three times a week at WBYC, and spent the rest of his time working on the stray cases that came his way—mostly divorce and missing-persons stuff. Nothing to get excited about, but enough to keep from using up the nest egg. He was not working all that hard at generating new business; he placed an ad in the Yellow Pages, let his former cop buddies know he was available for hire, then waited to see who rang the phone or walked in the door. At the rate it was going, he figured he could stay in business at least another year before he’d have to start hustling up clients or give up the White Bear membership. That would be incentive enough to work harder.

  His knee—surgically repaired after a shooting while he was a cop—still hurt like hell on rainy days, but it was as good as it was ever going to get. He knew he should be working out more, but as long as he walked 18 holes three times a week, he was able to keep his weight around 180 and his legs in reasonably good condition. There wasn’t a lot of running involved when you were staking out a cheating husband.

  Now that he was no longer subject to the police department’s rules, his sandy blond hair had grown out, as his cop pals continually reminded him. It wasn’t rock-band long yet, but it was getting curly and harder to keep under his golf hat. He meant to go to the barber more often, but now that he didn’t have to, it kept slipping farther down the priority list. He still kept himself clean-shaven, however. His golf tan accented his pale blue eyes and helped divert attention from the bridge of his nose, which was crooked from an old break.

  He’d flown to Tucson in August to visit Caroline, the woman he’d met at the Masters. She’d gone back to using her maiden name after divorcing her golf-pro husband—a hopeful sign—but the rest of the picture was still cloudy. She had sold the ostentatious house at the private golf club that she used to share with her ex, and had stopped smoking—with a few backyard lapses—when she moved into her new house. She had a new job, too, working for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on border issues. Caroline was enjoying her life for the first time since long before her marriage broke up. She needed more time, she’d told Sam, to figure out what she wanted from life—and how a long-distance romance with an ex-cop fit into it. She said there was a chance—more than a chance, really—that he would be part of that life, but she wasn’t ready to say when.

  Sam wanted to be in Caroline’s life. He was in his mid-thirties, and finding it lonely to be away from the police force. He had been used to not having anyone to greet him when he came home at night, but at least there’d been the crude jokes and camaraderie with his fellow cops during the day. Now he was thinking about getting a dog. When he was a kid, he’d had a German shepherd named Bart—a former police dog, brought home by his dad after it was injured in a chase. If he could find a dog as smart and loyal as Bart had been…but detective hours were unpredictable. Did he want to have to worry about running home in the middle of a stakeout to let the dog out? Or finding someone to take the dog when Sam had to leave town?

  The band was his primary release, but not from job stress, like Hargrove and the others. Sam was battling boredom, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He didn’t want to be a cop again; he liked the freedom of being a private investigator. He could be relentless when a job had his full attention, and, working on his own, he didn’t have to worry about being told to speed up or slow down on a case.

  It was the cases themselves that were sucking the life out of him. When he was being honest with himself, he could admit that he didn’t care whether Beth Cheslak was screwing Brian Johnson at their real estate agency, even if Beth’s husband Bob was paying him $100 an hour to find out. It was tawdry work. But, it wasn’t the prying and skulking that bothered him; it was the reason he was doing it. As a cop, he was Preserving civic order and Protecting the citizenry. He was helping a grieving wife, mother, or father find a small measure of relief by hunting down and locking up the murdering thug who’d ruined their lives. But catching Beth Cheslak coming out of the motel with Brian Johnson? That was a pay day, nothing more.

  Marcus Hargrove brought “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” to its sudden ending, drawing cries for more from the dancers. He gave Sam and the band the signal for “Land of 1,000 Dances,” and they all hit and held a B-minor.

  “One, two THREE!” Marcus sang into the mic, and then Sam and the band let a solid D chord hang in the air while Marcus sang “ONE, two, three…” Then Bear played the descending bass riff, Stu began hammering the snare and hi-hat and the band kicked into the set-closer—you couldn’t follow Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1,000 Dances” with anything except “Shout,” and they always saved that one for the end of the night. When Marcus had finished screaming the final “ah, HELP me!”s, they put their instruments down, left the stage to the yells and applause of the exhausted dancers, and went to the bar for their beers—on the house.

  “Phone call for you, Sam,” Ted Tollefson said as he poured him a glass of Bass Ale from the tap.

  “When did it come?” Sam said. He wiped his sweating forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “During ‘Twist and Shout,’ I think.”

  “Did they leave a number?”

  “No. It was a woman. She’s still on the line. Said she’d wait.”

  Sam took a deep gulp of his beer and then reached across the bar for the phone receiver that Ted held out to him.

  “Hello?”

  “Sam Skarda?”

  “That’s me. You’ll have to speak up. It’s real loud in here.”

  “Are you…Boston…tomorrow?”

  “What’s that?” Sam said. “I didn’t catch that. Louder, please.”

  “…fly…tomorrow!”

  “No, sorry, still not hearing you real well. Call me on my cell phone, and I’ll take it outside.”

  Sam gave her his cell number. He was pretty sure she said she’d call him back, so he let Ted hang up the phone and took his beer across the room and out the front door. Sam sat down at one of the wrought-iron tables on the sidewalk in front of the bar, sipped his beer, watched the condensation drops trickle down the glass, and waited for his phone to ring. Something about going to Boston. He hadn’t been there in ten years. Who did he even know there anymore?

  The cell phone rang, and he said, “Sam Skarda.”

  “Hello, Mr. Skarda.” It was a younger woman’s voice. “My name is Heather Canby. I work for The Kenwood Companies in Boston. We have a job for you, if you’re interested. Can you be here by tomorrow?”

  “Depends on the job, I guess. Who did you say you work for?”

  “Louis Kenwood.”

  Now the name registered. Lucky Louie Kenwood, owner of the Boston Red Sox. Why in hell would he want to hire Sam?

  “The Red Sox owner?” Sam asked, to make sure.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What you need is a young power hitter, not a detective.”

  “This is serious, Mr. Skarda.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone sounded all of about twenty-five. It sounded pretty, too. “Please, call me Sam. Now, what’s the problem?”

  “I can’t talk about it on the phone,” she said. “It’s…extremely delicate.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I talked to a Lt. Stensrud, at the police department.”

  “Doug, my former boss. How’d you get my name
in the first place?”

  “You were recommended by a very good friend of Mr. Kenwood.”

  That would almost have to be David Porter or Robert Brisbane, who had hired Sam at Augusta National. None of his contacts in Minnesota were pals with Lucky Louie.

  “I guess I could catch a plane tomorrow,” Sam said. He took another long sip of his beer.

  “We’ll cover all your expenses,” Heather Canby said. “We’ll put you up at the Taj Boston.”

  “Where’s that?’

  “Just a few blocks from our downtown offices. It’s the former Ritz-Carlton.”

  “I know the place.”

  “We have a day game tomorrow. If you could be at our office by eight tomorrow night, we’ll explain everything to you.”

  “You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Why not get a local guy?”

  “Mr. Kenwood doesn’t trust anyone here for a job like this. That’s why he consulted with…friends.”

  “David Porter?”

  “That’s correct,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “He said we could trust you with our lives.”

  “Is it that serious?”

  “No. It’s more serious than that. Please call us the minute you arrive. We’ll have Mr. Kenwood’s chauffeur meet you at Logan and drive you into the city.”

  She left the Kenwood phone number.

  “Don’t you want to know my rates?” Sam asked.

  “That’s not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  “Whatever you charge, Mr. Kenwood will pay you substantially more.”

  “That works,” Sam said.

  “One other thing,” she said. “You can’t tell anyone you’re meeting Mr. Kenwood. Don’t even tell anyone you’re going to Boston. I mean it. This has to be kept absolutely quiet.”

  “I’ll have to tell my faithful Filipino houseboy where I’ll be the next few days,” Sam said. The beer was starting to have an effect.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” She was too young to get the Green Hornet reference, or too serious to have ever read a comic book. “I won’t tell anyone anything. That’s one thing we private eyes are good at.”

  “See you tomorrow, Mr. Skarda.”

  Sam was supposed to meet with Bob Cheslak Monday morning to tell him all about Beth and Brian. He wouldn’t mind blowing that off.

  Sam went back inside the bar and saw the rest of the band heading for the stage. Time for another set. They blasted through a string of dance-party oldies: “Good Lovin’,” “Walking on Sunshine,” “I’m So Excited,” “Authority Song,” “What I Like About You,” “Satisfaction,” and “Mony Mony.”

  When the set was over, Sam’s shirt was clinging to him as sweat trickled down the small of his back. He grabbed another beer and headed back out to the tables on the sidewalk in front of the bar. Marcus Hargrove got a beer of his own and joined him. They sat at a table with an Amstel Light umbrella and watched the cars go by, some headed north toward the lights of the theater district, the others headed south past the technical college toward Loring Park, maybe to Uptown, with its funky shops and restaurants.

  “Good set, good set,” Marcus said, his head nodding in appreciation. “I still wish we could find a cop who played the sax.”

  Marcus stretched his long legs out onto the sidewalk. He had a shaved head and a gold earring, which might have made him stand out in the Minneapolis Police Department ten years earlier, but not anymore. The other cops considered him a prima donna because of his fondness for the media, and his tendency to break into Prince songs and moves as he strolled through the office. But when it came to dealing with street gangs, he was the best cop the department had. Some cops didn’t like to work with him because he got himself dangerously deep into the neighborhood gang culture, straddling a fine line between being a liaison and a target. Sam knew him mostly through the band, but he would have been happy to work with a cop who put as much into his work as Marcus did.

  “Yeah, a sax would sound great,” Sam said. “We could do some of that old Junior Walker stuff.”

  “Add a trumpet, and we could do more Stax material.”

  “They wouldn’t need to be cops. I’m not a cop anymore.”

  “You’ll always be a cop,” Marcus said, with his infectious cackle. “You just wear different threads.”

  “Hold it, Marcus,” Sam said.

  He took his hand off his beer and tapped Marcus’ forearm.

  “You see that car parked across the street? The green Civic, in front of the sandwich shop?”

  Marcus flicked his eyes in the direction Sam had suggested, without moving his head. A young, bare-headed black male sat in the driver’s seat, looking at Sam and Marcus, turning away briefly and then looking at them again. The traffic was light for a late Friday night.

  “I see him,” Marcus said. “I don’t like him.”

  “Maybe he’s waiting for somebody inside,” Sam said. He took a sip of his beer without taking his eyes off the car.

  “I don’t think so. He’s staring at us.”

  A Metro Transit bus went by, and as the bus passed the parked Civic, the young man at the wheel suddenly put the car into gear, did a squealing U-turn in the middle of the street and swung the car along the sidewalk in front of the Boom Boom Room. He raised his right hand and pointed a semi-automatic handgun out the open passenger side window.

  “Get down!” Marcus yelled. He dived into Sam, knocking him off his chair and onto the sidewalk.

  Sam heard the “pop pop pop pop” of four shots fired, clanging off the iron table and spraying chips from the brick front of Tollefson’s bar, then the squeal of tires as the shooter stomped on the gas. Sam automatically looked for the license plate, and got a good read on it as the car roared away.

  The cops inside the bar ran out to the street; one in uniform drew his service pistol and fired two shots at the Civic as it sped north on Hennepin and took a hard left at the first intersection, causing two oncoming cars to veer onto the sidewalk.

  “Christ, are you guys all right?” the cop with the gun asked Sam and Marcus, who were lying in beer and broken glass on the sidewalk under their overturned table.

  “I’m good,” Marcus said. “Sam?”

  “The punk was a lousy shot,” Sam said.

  “Lucky for us,” Marcus said. He got to his feet and shook his arms to get some of the beer off his shirt. “Man, those fuckers are getting bold.”

  “You piss off some Crips today?”

  “I piss somebody off every day,” Marcus said, shaking his head. “But that’s the first time this has happened.”

  Sam and Marcus agreed on the license plate number. The cop with the gun called in the drive-by shooting, describing the car, the driver, and passing on the license number. By now a dozen people had come out of the bar to see what the noise was about. The other band members appeared to be more shaken up than Sam and Marcus were.

  “You want to call it a night?” Bear asked them.

  “Hell, no,” Marcus said. “Nothin’ more we can do about it now.”

  “Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Sam said.

  Chapter Three

  Caracas, Venezuela—

  Elena waited for her matching red travel bags to descend onto the American Airlines carousel at the Maiquetia Airport. She glanced outside through the terminal windows and wondered whether she would be able to find a taxi so late at night—and would the driver be a fast-talking bandit, like so many of them these days?

  Her flight from Los Angeles had begun at 9:15 the morning before, and had been delayed in Miami for several hours by a mechanical problem. They had finally descended over the pitch-black Caribbean and into the airport fifteen miles north of Caracas at two a.m. Now Elena just wanted to get to her house, call her son to let him know she had arrived safely, and get off her tired, swollen feet.

  Wh
en the bags eventually arrived, Elena shouldered the smaller one and wheeled the larger one to the Arrivals area of the nearly deserted terminal. No one was there to help her at the yellow Corporación Anfitriones desk, where travelers were advised to pay for their cab rides in advance. She wasn’t going to wait for someone to show up; she had not slept a minute on the flight and wanted desperately to get home.

  She walked out the front door and onto the sidewalk in front of the terminal. As soon as the automatic doors opened, the muggy September heat wrapped around her like a damp shawl, and the exhaust fumes assaulted her nasal passages, reminding her that she was back in urban Venezuela, land of pickpockets, muggers, and car-jackers.

  A black cab with a yellow Taxi Astrala logo on the side was idling a few feet from the door. As soon as Elena signaled to the cab, the driver emerged from his vehicle and walked quickly to her.

  “Allow me to assist with your bags, Señora,” said the driver, a thin, younger man with a dark moustache, a white short-sleeved shirt, and a small-brimmed straw hat. He popped open his trunk, put Elena’s bags inside, and opened the back door for her. Elena was surprised and impressed by such willing, attentive service. The Caracas cabbies were not famous for their courtesy.

  “Where may I take you, Señora?” the cabbie asked.

  She gave him her address in southeastern suburban Caracas and settled back for the half-hour ride home. Her husband, Victor, would have been asleep hours ago. She would have to de-activate the security system when she arrived.

  The cab pulled away from the curb and merged into the sparse traffic exiting Maiquetia Airport. The driver, whose license identified him as Juan D’Aquisto, followed the Autopista/Caracas sign and stopped at a toll booth, then proceeded through the Boquerón I and Boquerón II tunnels. He took the left lane as they entered La Planicie tunnel, which would take them through downtown Caracas. For that reason, at least, Elena was glad that they were making this drive at night. She hated to look at the hillside shantytowns that ringed the downtown area—they reminded her that she had grown up in one of those tin-roofed hovels, with no water or electricity. Now, when she drove past, she could hardly believe that she or anyone else could possibly have lived like that. The shanties were piled on top of each other to the peaks of the surrounding hills, looking like a schoolgirl’s slum diorama made of dented shoeboxes, with holes punched out for windows. Maybe someday she and her family could find a way to help those poor wretches…