Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  “How much do you have on the Indians?”

  “A honeybee. What’s up?”

  “I need to ask you about some recent World Series. Any sudden changes in the lines over the last six or seven years?”

  “Nah, nothing I can think of. Why?”

  “How about the Tigers and Cardinals in ’06? Tigers were a heavy favorite, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Any late money come in on the Cards?”

  “Not really. Tigers just played bad.”

  “Marlins and Yankees in 2003?”

  “Yanks were favored. Another upset, but the schmoes never saw it coming. I did okay.”

  “Sometimes the underdog wins,” Sam said.

  “That’s right. That’s why guys like me don’t need real jobs.”

  “Red Sox-Cardinals?”

  “Aw, Sammy, why you gotta bring up bad memories? I got killed on that one. Murdered. Lost the kids’ college fund.”

  “I didn’t know you had kids, Jimmy.”

  “I don’t. But if I did…”

  Sam heard the familiar foghorn voice of Wally the Beerman, the Dome’s most recognizable vendor, bellowing “Who’s ready?” as he passed Jimmy’s seat.

  “The Cards were underdogs, right?” Sam said. He was trying to steer Jimmy back to the subject at hand without sounding too focused on the Sox.

  “Slight. After the miracle comeback against the Yanks, the Sox were the feel-good story. The rubes bet enough to make the Sox 8-5 favorites. Hell, I was hoping the line would go even higher. The Cards had the best record in baseball that year. They won 105 games—a great underdog buy. Besides, I thought the Red Sox would never win a Series.”

  “And the line never moved much?”

  “Nah. I mean, maybe a little more St. Louis money came in after the initial line was set. But the dopes never stopped betting on the Sox. Pretty much 8-to-5 right up to the first pitch, if I remember right. What’s this about, anyway?”

  “Probably nothing. You know any bookies in Boston?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to talk to the guy who takes the most action.”

  Sam heard the pop of the catcher’s mitt over the phone. Jimmy must have had good seats. Not surprising.

  “There’s a guy named Sal Bucca—I bet Big East basketball with him,” Jimmy said. “I got his number on speed dial. Hey, you’re not a cop anymore, right, Sam?”

  “Come on, Jimmy, you know I left the force. You know everything.”

  “Yeah, but I gotta be sure. You’re not working for them on this…whatever it is?”

  “Nope. This is strictly private stuff. Nobody’s going to get busted.”

  Jimmy gave Sam the phone number for Sal Bucca, but told him to hold off calling for an hour or so. Jimmy wanted to call Sal first, to let him know he could trust Sam.

  “Tell him I’m staying at the Taj Boston,” Sam said. “I’ll call him from there.”

  Sam heard a sharp crack, heard the Metrodome crowd moan, and Jimmy shouted, “Double off the baggie! Gotta go, Sammy!”

  Sam shut his cell phone and put it on the desk next to the television cabinet. He picked up the remote and turned on the TV—not exactly the most productive or entertaining way to spend his first night in Boston, but he had time to kill, time while waiting to call Bucca.

  He was watching a rundown of the day’s home runs on ESPN and listening to the raindrops on his window when he heard a knock on his door. He hadn’t asked for anything from room service, and none of his old New England friends knew he was in town. He glanced at the shoulder holster he’d taken off and hung on the back of the desk chair.

  Sam walked to the door and looked through the eyehole. Heather Canby was standing in the hallway with a leather bag over her shoulder, wearing the same blazer she’d had on in Kenwood’s office. Sam opened the door.

  “Hello, Sam,” she said. She offered a cool smile, but still maintained the professional reserve she’d displayed in Kenwood’s office. “I brought some homework for you.”

  Heather walked into the room and placed her shoulder bag on the coffee table. Her neck-length blond hair swayed softly from side to side as she walked. Sam could have stared into those soft, silky strands all night, if it had been polite to do so. Or even if it weren’t…

  She pulled a DVD case marked Red Sox-Cardinals World Series out of the bag and went to the entertainment unit, opened the TV cabinet, turned on the set, and inserted the disk into the DVD player. She quickly punched some buttons on the remote and the screen filled with a scene of riotous celebration in the Red Sox locker room following Game 4, accompanied by the Standells’ recording of “Dirty Water.”

  “We must have sold 200,000 of these.” Heather fast-forwarded through the introductory section. “But we never really looked at it before.”

  “We’re going to now?”

  “Is there somewhere you need to be?”

  “No.”

  “Then have a seat.”

  Sam and Heather pulled the arm chairs close to the TV and went through the entire DVD, studying each key mistake by the Cardinals in slow-motion and freeze-frame. There was nothing on the highlight reel that would have ordinarily caught Sam’s attention as being suspicious—but now, after reading the extortion note, several plays stood out. The first was the fly ball Ivan Hurtado dropped in the second inning of Game One. Alberto Miranda, the starting pitcher, was already on the ropes, having given up three hits and a walk. Two runs had scored, and the Sox had runners on first and third when Luke Bowdoin lifted a lazy pop fly to shallow right. It was an easy play for Hurtado, who called off Cardinal second baseman Paul Weatherby and then seemed to take his eye off the ball at the last second, possibly watching to see if the runner on third was going to tag up. The ball hit off Hurtado’s glove, and the runner on third scored. That made it 3-0 with runners on first and second, one out, and Miranda finished the Cards’ chances when he fielded a grounder back to the mound on the next pitch and threw it into center field.

  “I’ve seen stuff like that happen dozens of times,” Sam said to Heather.

  “I know,” she said. “But if you were trying to throw a ballgame, isn’t that how you’d do it?”

  Hurtado later homered, but by then the score was 7-1. The final was 9-2, and the Cardinals were off to a demoralizing start. Neither Hurtado nor Miranda had a significant hit in the next two losses, and then Miranda overthrew third base on a one-out force play in the first inning of Game Four. The right play would have been to throw to second to start a double play. Instead, the first two runs scored in what became a five-run inning, almost assuring the championship for the Sox.

  Heather replayed Miranda’s overthrow to third a dozen times, and though it was hard to explain how one of the best players in baseball could make such a dumb mistake, it didn’t look intentional. Then again, how could they tell for sure?

  “There’s no proof of anything here,” Sam said. “You can see what you want to see.”

  “I see a couple of All-Stars playing like Little Leaguers,” Heather said.

  “Didn’t Hurtado drop an easy one the other night? It happens.”

  “We’re expecting you to give us more than that.”

  Sam started to speak, but managed to hold his tongue. He didn’t need an office-bound twenty-something telling him how to do his job. If he had to report his every move to her—or worse, have her looking over his shoulder while he ran down every lead—he was tempted to catch the next plane back home.

  Heather dug into her leather shoulder bag and took out a folded bundle of yellowing newspapers. They were October 2004 sports sections from the Globe, Herald, and New York Times, with game stories about the Sox-Cardinals Series.

  “Lou and I have read through these, but we want you to look at them, too,” Heather said. She handed Sam the stack of papers. “See if you can detect any sign that the writers thought something funny was going on.”


  Sam had to agree that rereading contemporary coverage of those games was a good idea.

  “Why the Times?” he asked.

  “For a neutral opinion.”

  Sam skimmed through the game stories, looking for accounts of Hurtado’s muffed fly ball and the throwing errors by Miranda. All the writers ridiculed the horrible plays, but none suggested there was anything suspicious going on. As for Miranda’s pitching, the beat guys from New York and Boston agreed: In those two big games, Miranda just didn’t have it.

  “Nothing here,” Sam said, putting the papers down.

  “That’s what we thought,” Heather said. “Now what?”

  “A guy I know in Minneapolis gave me the number of a bookie here in town. I was about to call him when you dropped in.”

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  She gave no indication of leaving.

  Sam used the hotel phone to call Sal Bucca, assuming the bookie would probably have caller ID The bookie would know the cops weren’t likely to set up a sting operation at the Taj.

  The call picked up on the first ring, and a heavy Boston accent said, “Yeah.”

  “Sal Bucca?”

  “Who wants him?”

  “Sam Skarda. Jimmy the Rabbit said to call this number.”

  “Hold on.”

  Sam waited about a minute, and then a different, raspy voice said, “Sal.”

  “Sal, my name is Sam Skarda. I’m a private investigator—I think Jimmy told you I’d be calling.”

  “Yeah.”

  They weren’t a talkative bunch at Sal’s place.

  “Can I ask you a few questions over the phone, or do you want to meet someplace tomorrow?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What you wanna know, and why.”

  “I can’t tell you why. It’s confidential. But it has nothing to do with the cops. I need to know about some betting lines a few years back. No names. Just some numbers.”

  “What, you think we keep records on that stuff?” Sal uttered a harsh laugh.

  Time to sweeten the pot.

  “You think you could remember for ten grand?”

  Sam looked across the room at Heather. She gave him a scowl and mouthed, “Ten grand?”

  Sam nodded emphatically. She tilted her head to the side and put her palms up in resigned agreement.

  “Still depends,” Bucca said. His interest was now oozing through the phone. “I gotta see the money first.”

  “I can meet you tomorrow anytime before five p.m.”

  “You’re at the Ritz, right?”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s the Taj Boston now.”

  “You must be workin’ for Bill Gates.”

  “Not even close.”

  “Meet me at eleven tomorrow morning in the Common, corner of Tremont and Park.” Bucca said it as “conna of Tremont and Pack.”

  “How will I know you?”

  “Fat guy with a Sox cap smokin’ a cigar.”

  “That sounds like lots of guys in Boston.”

  “I’m the ugliest one.”

  “Eleven o’clock,” Sam said, and hung up.

  “So who was that you were talking to?” Heather asked.

  “A local bookie. Recommended by a friend of mine.”

  “If you go asking this guy a lot of questions about the World Series, isn’t he going to get suspicious?”

  “Bookies are born suspicious. But I’m not just going to ask him about the Sox and Cardinals. We’ll go over the lines for a lot of games and different sports. He won’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “He’d better not. Remember, the whole point of your investigation is to keep this story from going public.”

  “Look…” Sam said, but then thought better of telling her she was a beautiful but useless appendage, that he knew what he was doing, that he understood the assignment perfectly, and if she wanted the job done right she should head back down the stairs.

  “What?” Heather said. She cocked her head innocently. “You don’t like being told how to do your job?”

  “No, I don’t. That’s why it’s called private investigation.”

  “But the client pays your salary. You have to satisfy the client, don’t you?”

  Something about the way she said it caught Sam’s ear, and by the expectant expression on her face, Heather knew it.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Want a drink?”

  Heather reached into her leather bag and pulled out an unopened bottle of Woodford Reserve.

  “Compliments of Mr. Kenwood. Do you have some ice?”

  “No,” Sam said, after some rapid contemplation about what he might be getting into. “I’ll call down for some.”

  He picked up the phone and called room service for a bucket of ice.

  “Hungry?” he asked Heather, covering the mouthpiece. “I haven’t eaten yet.”

  “Neither have I. The pan-fried scrod is terrific. And you should ask for the Fireplace Butler.”

  “The what?”

  “The Fireplace Butler. He brings whatever kind of wood you want, and lights the fire for you. I’ve always liked the cherry, but birch is quicker.”

  Sam put in the order for two servings of scrod and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé, and asked to be transferred to the Fireplace Butler. After hearing a rundown on the various woods—birch, cherry, oak, and maple—he went with Heather’s cherry. He was in no hurry. The butler said he’d be right up.

  “You do this a lot?” he asked her after hanging up.

  Heather was seated in the armchair by the rain-spattered window, her feet up on the ottoman, her blazer unbuttoned, and her shoes on the floor. She couldn’t have looked more comfortable if she’d been in a bubble bath in her own home.

  “This is my favorite hotel in the world,” she said.

  A bellhop knocked on the door and left a bucket of ice. Sam poured a glass of bourbon on the rocks, handed it to Heather, and poured one for himself. She clinked her glass against Sam’s and said, “Let’s get to the bottom of this.”

  “The drink?”

  Heather actually laughed. It was a rich, throaty chuckle, which suggested to Sam that perhaps she wasn’t the ice queen he’d feared. But despite the drink and the laugh, she was still a business executive who had a $50,000,000 problem to solve. Maybe she was trying to find out whether Kenwood could really trust Sam to do the job. Whatever her purpose for visiting his room, Sam had done as much as he could do for the night, and it was time to unwind a little. If Heather didn’t like a detective who was able to relax when he was off the clock, she could go back to the yellow pages.

  There was another knock on the door, this time by the Fireplace Butler, a man in a plaid shirt and suspenders, carrying a basket of wood. He displayed a smile of practiced satisfaction, as though he’d just chopped down a cherry tree in the Public Garden, split the wood himself, and carried it up to Sam’s room. He opened the glass fireplace doors, arranged the logs in the fireplace and used kindling to begin a small blaze. Sam found a $5 bill in his wallet and handed it to the man, who nodded, put the bill in his pocket and picked up his basket.

  “Just call if you need more wood,” the Fireplace Butler said as he left.

  Sam picked up the remote and checked the in-house video menu for music channels. They had the usual stale formats: blues, rock, contemporary, country, and smooth jazz. There was also a jack for an MP3 player. He plugged his iPod directly into the TV sound system.

  “Want some jazz?” Sam asked her.

  “Not that Kenny G crap…”

  “No, I meant jazz.”

  He dialed up the jazz playlist from the menu and started with Cannonball Adderley’s recording of “Autumn Leaves,” with Miles Davis on trumpet.

  “Now, that’s not bad,” Heather said when the music began filling the room.

  Sam went to the window and pulled the drapes wide open so they
could see the lights of the city through the streaks of raindrops.

  “Do you work out?” Heather asked him.

  “Not much,” Sam said. He felt a flush of pride that this attractive younger woman seemed to be admiring his form.

  “You should.”

  I walked into that one, Sam told himself.

  When the waiter arrived with their scrod and their wine, they set their plates on the marble table in front of the fireplace and talked as they ate. She asked Sam how long he’d been a Minneapolis cop, and he told her about himself: about his father being a cop, about going to the police academy after college, about becoming a homicide detective, about being shot in the knee and taking almost two years off to rehab—mostly on golf courses.

  “So why didn’t you go back to the force?”

  “It’s in my blood, but not in my makeup. I need to call my own shots.”

  He changed the subject and asked Heather about herself. She was from Connecticut, and had grown up in a household with divided loyalties, including baseball. Her father was a Red Sox die-hard and a Yaz fan, while her mother loved Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. They’d divorced for other reasons, but Heather always thought the Yankees-Red Sox split played at least a small part. While the marriage was coming apart, Heather was attending a prep school in Massachusetts, and then Harvard. She came to side with her father after her first few games at Fenway.

  “I learned to hate the Yankees,” she said. “Paul O’Neill, Don Mattingly, Tino Martinez—and I really hated Wade Boggs when he went over to the dark side. And A-Rod—I bought one of those T-shirts from a street vendor, the one that said A-ROD DRINKS WINE COOLERS.”

  “How about Derek Jeter?”

  “He’s not so bad. I’m not blind.”

  She’d graduated with honors and then enrolled in Harvard Business School. The next summer she applied for an internship with the Red Sox, and got the position after a personal interview with Louis Kenwood himself. He asked her to apply for a fulltime job with his company when she graduated. She did, and within three years she’d become his executive assistant.

  Sam’s expression must have implied his suspicions.

  “Lou’s devoted to his wife,” Heather said. “She has emphysema. Probably won’t live to see spring training. I feel sorry for him. First his wife, and now this.”