Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  Elena felt the tension of the long trip start to seep away, the pain in her feet begin to recede, her eyelids begin to droop. They opened again when she realized the cab was slowing down and pulling over, still inside the tunnel.

  Flashing red lights reflected off the ceiling of the tunnel. Elena turned to look behind her. A Caracas Police van had pulled up behind them.

  “Policia,” the driver said.

  “What is wrong?” she asked him.

  “No se,” he responded with a shrug. “I have done nothing.”

  Three police officers emerged from the van and walked up to the cab with guns drawn. One of them smacked the butt of his handgun on Elena’s window several times, shouting at her to open the window. Terrified, Elena did as she was told.

  “You will please get out of the taxi,” the police officer ordered.

  “Por que?” Elena stammered. “Is something wrong?”

  “We will explain,” the officer said. “But you must leave the taxi and come with us now.”

  Elena looked at the officer. He was a copper-skinned, well-muscled man who wore a short-sleeved, navy blue uniform shirt and, like the other two policemen with him, a hard-shelled riot helmet with the eyeshade pulled down to conceal his face.

  Elena’s first thought was that something must have happened to Victor, or to one of her children. But how did the police know where to find her? And why were their guns drawn? Crime was terrible in Caracas lately—maybe this was the way the police had to do things now. But it was all so upsetting. She just wanted to go home.

  “Por favor,” Elena said to the muscular officer as she got out of the cab. “Tell me what is happening. Is my family all right?”

  “Into the van,” the officer replied gruffly. Another officer in an ill-fitting uniform took Elena by the elbow and walked her to the police vehicle. “All will be explained shortly.”

  Elena allowed herself to be assisted into the back seat of the van with one of the officers, a thin young man with a moustache, while the other got behind the wheel of the vehicle and put it in gear, pulling around the cab and then stopping a few yards farther down the tunnel. Elena was looking out the window in front of her, wondering why they had stopped again, and where the third officer was. It must have been after three a.m. now—they were the only two vehicles in the tunnel, as far as Elena could tell. If only they would tell her what was going on.

  She was so preoccupied with her concerns about her family that she didn’t notice that the muscular officer had stayed next to the cab. Because of the silencer on the officer’s handgun, she didn’t hear the bullet he fired through Juan D’Aquisto’s brain. She didn’t see the blood that spattered the inside of the cab’s windshield as though shaken from the end of a paintbrush.

  A moment later the muscular officer got into the passenger seat, turned to the policeman at the wheel and said, “Vamanos.”

  Chapter Four

  Boston, Massachusetts—

  Sam’s plane emerged from gray rainclouds and landed at Logan airport late the next afternoon. New England weather was holding form: When it was warm in Minnesota, it was usually crappy on the East Coast.

  During the flight, Sam had tried to put together the few pieces of this puzzle. Why would a major league baseball team—the Red Sox in particular—need a private eye? Especially one from halfway across the country? The Red Sox had been expected to win their division again, but were trailing the Yankees, and were in danger of missing the Wild Card, too. Maybe if they could develop a couple of home-grown sluggers—another Yaz, another Rice—they’d really become the dynasty the fans and writers expected them to be. But those problems were beyond Sam’s abilities to solve.

  Sam had picked up the Red Sox addiction when he was a student at Dartmouth. A freshman from Minnesota who knew no one when he arrived in New Hampshire, he’d spent September mornings sitting on a rocking chair on the porch of the Hanover Inn reading the Boston Globe. The Red Sox were in a tight pennant race that fall with the Tigers and Jays, and the Globe baseball reporters and columnists revealed to him a depth and intensity about the sport that surpassed anything he’d seen in Minnesota. Hanover was a two-plus-hour drive from Boston, but all the locals—from the college’s professors and administrators to the campus cops and janitors—hung on Ned Martin’s radio play-by-play of each game. On Sundays, the Globe’s Peter Gammons filled an entire page with inside dope from his notebook. Sam came to understand that the Boston Red Sox were more than a baseball team; they were the family narrative of New England.

  Sam had to see this phenomenon for himself. He persuaded a guy from his dorm to drive them down to Fenway for a game in late September. Under the stands, Fenway was as dank as a bus station toilet, but out in the open air it was vibrantly alive, even as it retained the intimacy of a corner booth. It had everything he’d missed at the Metrodome, the sterile plastic auditorium where the Twins played. The stands buzzed with baseball chatter from fans who knew more about the players than they did about their own children. At Sam’s first game, Ellis Burks won it for the Sox with a high, arching homer into the net above the left-field wall—known since Ted Williams’ time as the Green Monster because, at 37 feet, 2 inches high and just 310 feet from home plate, it seemed to loom over the pitcher’s shoulder.

  From that night on, Sam was a shirt-tail relative of Red Sox Nation. Years later, he understood exactly what that curse-busting 2004 World Series meant to New England.

  Now the team’s owner had summoned him from Minneapolis to help him with a case that his assistant had described as more important than life or death. That was a nearly redundant way to describe Red Sox baseball. But he still couldn’t guess what the problem might be, and why Heather Canby had insisted on secrecy.

  After retrieving his bags at the carousel, Sam spotted a man in a dark suit, wearing a cap and holding a sign that said SKARDA. Sam hoisted his garment bag over his shoulder and approached the man.

  “Are you Paul?”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Skarda?”

  “Call me Sam. Ready to go?”

  “This way, sir.”

  Paul O’Brien seemed a bit stiff. His thick, red hair was conservatively—and freshly—cut above his ears and his crisp white collar. Both the haircut and the suit must have cost a lot of money, but Kenwood apparently wanted a driver who could handle a car and look good doing it.

  Sam tried to make conversation as they walked to the short-term parking ramp.

  “Everything okay with Mr. Kenwood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know why he wants me to meet him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Sox win today?”

  “Yeah, 6-5. Luke Bowdoin hit a grand slam in the fourth, and Ken Adams struck out two guys in the ninth with a runner on third.”

  Paul’s clipped responses and proper diction had evaporated, replaced by the universal language of New England—how the Red Sox did that day. Now his “r”s were starting to disappear; “fourth” sounded like “foth,” and “third” sounded like “thad.”

  “Did Hurtado play?”

  “Nah, they’re sitting him down for a few days. The bum.”

  When they reached the Lincoln, Paul reverted to his chauffeur role, putting Sam’s bags in the trunk and opening his door for him. Still, Sam felt as though he knew Paul now, or had known lots of guys like him. Red Sox Nation was a melting pot, bringing together M.I.T. professors and dock workers who couldn’t communicate with each other about logarithms or bulkheads, but knew how many RBIs Jim Rice had in 1977.

  Paul started the car and skillfully blended into traffic, heading for the Ted Williams tunnel.

  “How’d you end up working for Mr. Kenwood?” Sam asked.

  “I’d been driving truck for a few years,” Paul said. “My cousin is the fleet dispatcher for the concession company that supplies Fenway. He heard Mr. Kenwood was looking for a driver, and he got me an interview.”

  �
�Let me guess—you’re from South Boston.”

  “Southie born and raised,” Paul said, his accent thickening with each word. “How’d you know?”

  “I spent some time out here.”

  In fact, Sam could still be living in Boston if things had worked out differently. Instead of going to law school like so many of his fellow graduates, Sam moved to Boston, found a cheap apartment off Mass. Ave., and tried to put a band together. He’d found a compatible bass player and singer named Terry Donaghy, but the guitarists and keyboard players they met were either too egomaniacal or too introverted, while the drummers abused everything from cough syrup to their girlfriends. Sam took a crappy job cleaning an office building in Somerset, and played his acoustic guitar in the door wells around Harvard Square for spare change, hoping that a band would somehow congeal around him. It didn’t happen. He was at a low ebb when his father, a Minneapolis cop, came out to visit him.

  “Come home,” his dad said. “This isn’t the life for you.”

  Sam was twenty-two and not inclined to take career advice from his father, but he knew Dad was right. His own musical ability was limited, and his chances of success rested on the brilliance and unreliability of more talented musicians. Most were into drugs as much as they were into music, and even then Sam was beginning to resent the waste and sleaze of that lifestyle. It wasn’t something he wanted to be around. His father had always hoped Sam would go to the police academy after college, and after the squalor of his musician’s life in Boston, Sam decided it wasn’t a bad idea. He went home with his father and signed up for the academy the following week.

  Paul took the tunnel under the harbor into downtown Boston, arriving at the hotel as the streetlights were coming on. Paul opened the door for Sam and got his bags out of the trunk.

  “You can check in and get settled,” Paul said, once again the servant. “I’ll wait here for you. We should leave in twenty minutes.”

  A cool wind was stirring the treetops in the Public Garden across the street as couples walked by on their way to dinner or a show. Sam was reminded of a similar autumn Saturday almost twenty years earlier when he’d gone to the same hotel, then known as the Ritz-Carlton, to have dinner with a friend’s parents after the Harvard-Dartmouth football game. The old girl still looked like the prototype of an elegant big-city hotel. The exterior, at least, hadn’t changed since the days when longtime Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey lived and drank there: the suspended marquee above the entrance, the sidewalk-to-ceiling lobby-level windows, and the granite gray façade that gave way to brick around the upper-floor windows.

  Sam checked in and went up to his suite on the eighth floor. The living room had a wood-burning fireplace with marble inlays and an ornate wooden mantel, brass wall lamps on the built-in wooden columns on both sides of the hearth, and an oil portrait of some Revolutionary War figure hanging above the mantel. A glass-topped coffee table with a bowl of real fruit stood a few feet in front of the hearth, with two plush armchairs and a couch arranged around it. There was a walnut entertainment unit on the wall opposite the fireplace, and a matching desk and chair next to the draperied window that overlooked the Public Garden across Arlington Street. After admiring the view of the changing leaves and the swan boats in the Public Garden lagoon, Sam went into the bedroom, put his clothes in the closet and drawers, took off his sport jacket, and put on the shoulder holster and Glock 23 that he’d packed in his suitcase. He put his jacket back on and took the elevator down to the lobby.

  The drive around the Common and down Boylston Street to One Financial Center took just a few minutes in light Saturday evening traffic. Paul had the car radio tuned to a classical music station.

  “You like classical music?” Sam asked him.

  “Not really,” Paul replied. “It’s what Mr. K. likes to listen to, so I don’t change the station, except on game nights.”

  “I took piano lessons, and I still have trouble telling Mozart from Beethoven.”

  “Who are they?” Paul asked. The Boston inflection was creeping in again as he laughed at his own joke. “I’ll take AC/DC.”

  A light rain began to fall, and Paul turned on his intermittent wipers. Other drivers began turning their headlights on, reflecting off the slickened streets. Boston could be a lot of fun, but it could be a gloomy town, too.

  They parked in the underground garage and took the elevator up to the Kenwood Companies office suite. Paul directed Sam into Kenwood’s office, where Sam immediately noticed the World Series trophy and the photo wall. You couldn’t avoid the impression that Kenwood was a man who wanted to remind himself every day that he’d performed a miracle.

  An older man and a young woman sat on a leather couch next to a low mahogany table with a tray of glasses and an ice bucket. An array of liquor bottles stood on a hutch next to the couch. The man stood up and walked over to Sam, holding out his hand.

  “Hello, Mr. Skarda,” he said. “Lou Kenwood. Thanks for coming on such short notice.”

  Kenwood shook hands the way you’d jostle a sleeping person to wake him up. He had a full head of white hair, a ruddy complexion, the requisite age spots on his forehead and cheeks, and a glint of determination in his eyes. He hadn’t exactly jumped off the couch, but Sam sensed a raw energy from Kenwood that wasn’t often present in men his age.

  “I’d like you to meet Heather Canby, my executive assistant,” Kenwood said. He turned to the young woman who remained seated on the couch. “You spoke with her on the phone.”

  Score one for the detective. As Sam had guessed, Heather Canby was somewhere south of thirty. She was also gorgeous—honey-blonde hair that was parted on the left and curved gently inward to the nape of her neck at an appropriate business length, light brown eyebrows—a sign that there wasn’t that much dye in the hair—soft blue eyes set apart by a small, slightly upturned nose, and an upper lip that curved in a gentle semi-circle, as though in anticipation of something.

  Heather wore a dark blue blazer and skirt, and sat with her legs crossed. Great legs—the kind a guy could spend too much time looking at when he was supposed to be focused elsewhere. Sam reached across the table to shake Heather’s hand. He looked in her eyes and sensed both skepticism of his abilities and defiance about her own, as though she were daring him to dismiss her. He was trying not to judge her by her looks, but so far the effort was failing. He could tell she knew it.

  “Pour yourself a drink, Mr. Skarda,” Heather said. She said it politely, while demonstrating that she wasn’t there as a cocktail waitress.

  “It’s Sam,” he reminded her. “And I’d be happy to. It’s been a busy day.”

  He put ice cubes into a glass and found a bottle of Woodford Reserve on the liquor hutch. He poured himself a couple of fingers, took a sip, and sat down in a chair opposite the couch.

  “I don’t drink on the job,” Sam said, in case his prospective employers were wondering.

  “That’s not iced tea in your glass,” Heather said.

  “I haven’t taken the job yet,” Sam said. “What’s this about?”

  Kenwood pulled a black envelope from inside his suit coat pocket and put it on the table in front of Sam. Sam reached over, picked it up, and read the extortion note in white ink that was signed by “Babe Ruth.” He put it back on the table.

  “Has that been dusted for fingerprints yet?”

  “No,” Kenwood said. “I don’t dare show it to anybody. I don’t think I can trust anyone to read the message and not tell someone about it.”

  “I can do it for you, if I can get my hands on a fingerprint kit,” Sam said. “If there are any prints on it besides yours and mine, I could lift them and send a scan to a friend of mine with the Minneapolis cops. He wouldn’t have to see the note.”

  “No,” Kenwood said. “I’m afraid someone would talk. Whoever wrote that note is right: A gambling scandal would devastate baseball, and ruin what I’ve—what we have built here.”

  Sam took anot
her glance around the office, which seemed to be a shrine to Lucky Louie Kenwood as much as it was to baseball or the Red Sox. No doubt a gambling scandal would seriously damage the game, but it was Kenwood who would be devastated.

  “It would be like the Curse was never broken,” Heather said.

  “Well, you’ve won twice now,” Sam said.

  “The first one was the one that changed everything,” Kenwood said. His voice nearly cracked with emotion. “If this—this lie—should become public, the press would tear that accomplishment to shreds. The newspapers, the twenty-four-hour cable channels—every day for weeks, for months, the story would be about investigations, gambling, and cheating. Here we’ve put together the best organization in the game. We’re finally on top. Instead of celebrating our success, we’d spend all our time defending ourselves, while the media digs through our garbage.”

  “You know how the press is,” Heather said. “They’d start questioning everything that’s happened here since 2004.”

  “We beat the Rockies so easily, they’d probably start investigating that one, too,” Kenwood said.

  “The fans would stay with you.”

  “If anyone’s more cynical than the Boston writers, it’s the Boston fans,” Kenwood said. “On top of everything else that’s happened to this franchise, a thrown World Series would be ten times worse. I can’t put our city and our fans through that.”