Green Monster

by Rick Shefchik

  “Musclebound shitheads,” Leon said, speaking for the first time.

  “You don’t scare an ambitious punk,” Mink said. “You get rid of him. I don’t like it when it comes to this, but here we are.”

  Sam’s cell phone rang, and he looked at the incoming number. It was Heather.

  “Sorry, I have to take this,” Sam said. He got up from the table.

  “You comin’ with us, or you just want to read about it in the papers?”

  “Hold on a minute,” Sam said.

  He walked to the bar by the host stand on the other side of the room, took a stool, and asked Heather where she was.

  “I’m at Alberto’s house in Pacific Palisades,” she said. “He wants to talk.”

  “That was fast.”

  “He likes me.”

  “He’s a man.”

  Heather sighed.

  “It’s not like that. And I tried.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I was ready to go to bed with him, but…” Her voice trailed off, and then Sam heard her footsteps and the rustle of her clothes. It sounded like she was walking through a hallway, with the phone held to her side.

  “Sorry,” she said, in a quieter voice. “I don’t want him to hear this. He’s…not capable.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “No, we…he couldn’t do it. So we started talking. He brought up the World Series. I mean, it started pouring out of him. He kept saying the same thing—he tried his best, he didn’t throw the Series. But he was getting really upset. He won’t tell me what’s going on, but he wants to. He’s in trouble.”

  “What now?”

  “Can you come over?”

  Sam glanced back at the booth where Mink sat with his boys. They looked like they were ready to leave.

  “Things are popping here, too.”

  “Where are you?”

  “At a Mexican restaurant in Inglewood with Sid Mink and his two buddies. He told me who’s running the scam.”

  “Who?” Heather said. Sam listened closely to her voice to see if there was any hint that she was worried about Sam learning who Babe Ruth was, but he couldn’t detect it. She sounded excited.

  “A local mob wannabe named Frankie Navarro.”

  He let the name hang in the air. After a pause, Heather said she’d never heard of him.

  “Ask Alberto if he’s heard of him.”

  “Okay.”

  He could hear Heather asking Miranda the question, and he heard the ballplayer say something in an agitated tone of voice.

  “That’s it,” Heather said. “He knows him.”

  Her phone was silent again for a moment as Miranda said something to her. Then Heather spoke again.

  “He wants you to come over, now. He says he’ll tell us what’s going on.”

  Sam thought he had the pieces put together now, or most of them. Navarro had somehow gotten to Miranda. Steroids, probably. Maybe it was true—maybe Miranda had thrown a game in the Series to keep Navarro from exposing his steroid use. But it still didn’t explain why Navarro thought Miranda would be willing to admit he’d thrown a World Series game if he wasn’t willing to admit he’d used steroids. Steroids got you suspended; throwing a ballgame got you kicked out of baseball for life. Even a jock ought to be able to figure that one out.

  Sam looked at Mink again. If Mink killed Navarro tonight, Miranda’s problems might be over, and so would Lou Kenwood’s—if, in fact, Navarro was Babe Ruth. Maybe that was the easiest way to let this play out. But whatever Mink did tonight, Sam couldn’t be there. He had to talk to Miranda.

  He got directions to Miranda’s house from Heather, and told her he could be there in less than an hour. Then he put his cell phone in his pocket and returned to the table.

  “I’ll have to decline your invitation, Sid,” Sam said. “Something’s come up.”

  “Suit yourself,” Mink said, shrugging. “You’re the guy who said you had to talk to Navarro. Could be your last chance.”

  “I can’t be two places at once. Can I call you later tonight?”

  “You got Joey Icebox’s number in your phone.”

  Mink threw down some bills and got up from the table.

  “If you got something you wanna say to Frankie,” Mink said, “you better call early.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The L.A. freeway system is known for apocalyptic gridlock, road rage shootings, and high-speed chases taped by TV choppers, but late on a Wednesday night, a private eye with a fast car could get from Inglewood to Pacific Palisades in under thirty minutes. Sam took Century Boulevard toward the airport and got on the San Diego Freeway going north. Keeping an eye out for CHP speed traps, he held the BMW at a steady seventy-five, with the iPod pumping out the Eagles’ “Desperado.” He was in the mood for L.A. outlaw music. He didn’t much care for “Hotel California” and all the bloated radio hits the Eagles put out after that, but early Eagles was a different story. Cops—and ex-cops—resonated to songs about Wild West gunslingers.

  He took the Santa Monica Freeway west and headed toward the ocean, picking up the Pacific Coast Highway within a block of the Loews hotel. He flashed back to that morning, when Heather had come into his room for another tumble. He’d assumed that she’d had sex with him back in Boston to eliminate any suspicions that he might have had about her relationship with Kenwood—and it had worked, for a while. So yesterday she’d admitted she was going to marry Kenwood—but was that true, or a necessary cover story because he was getting too close to the truth about the extortion? It was a lot easier to sleep your way into money than steal it, at least if you had Heather’s skills. But he only had Heather’s word that she would someday be Mrs. Lou Kenwood. If she was lying, she took a chance that he wouldn’t dare ask Kenwood himself. Did he dare? It might get him kicked off the case, but he’d been shot at and pushed around—he had a right to know for sure where all the loyalties lay in this mess.

  But that was for tomorrow. Tonight, he was headed north on the Coast Highway toward one of L.A.’s swankiest neighborhoods to have a come-to-Jesus with one of the world’s richest athletes. That was enough to worry about for the time being.

  The lights of the coastal homes reflected off the ocean as the highway bent to the west near the seaside town of Castellammare. The vegetation-shielded bungalows along the beach seemed to be just waiting to be buried under the sandy cliffs on the opposite side of the road, which looked as if they could collapse across the highway in a light drizzle. He took a right at West Sunset Boulevard and headed up into the hills, following Heather’s directions until he came to Palisades Drive. From there it was three miles of thick hedges and palm trees to Miranda’s ornate, Spanish-style mansion in the shadows of Topanga State Park. He pulled into the circular driveway in front of the house, and a motion-detector light came on. Then the service door next to the four-stall garage opened, and one of the men who had been with Miranda at Quasar the night before—a tall, dark-skinned guy with a black nylon skull cap who looked like an ex-Laker—emerged to look him over.

  Everybody had guys.

  “Alberto’s waitin’ for you,” the man said, motioning for Sam to follow him. They went through the service door, avoiding the main entrance with its pillared steps and tile-roofed overhang.

  They walked through the kitchen—large enough to be the galley for a cruise ship—down an open hallway past a spiral staircase to the second floor, and out onto the patio that overlooked the lights of Pacific Palisades and the ocean beyond. Heather was sitting on a lounge chair next to Miranda when Sam walked out. She stood up and came over to him.

  “Alberto, you remember Sam,” she said. She touched Sam’s arm the way one would communicate to a child that the person who’d just walked in was not someone to be frightened of. Miranda nodded, but did not stand up. He turned his head toward the ocean and ran his hands across the top of his head from front to back, apparently trying to
clear his mind of something.

  “What’s up?” Sam said. He was feeling impatient. Frankie Navarro could be dead already; he needed to know what Miranda knew, now.

  Heather walked back to Miranda and sat next to him, putting her left arm over his shoulders and talking soothingly to him.

  “You’ve got to confide in someone, Alberto,” she said. “We can help you. Just tell us what’s going on.”

  Alberto looked up at Sam.

  “That son of a bitch kidnapped my mother.”

  “Which son of a bitch?”

  “Frankie Navarro.”

  The story began pretty much the way Sam had it figured. Then it dropped off the table like a knuckleball.

  Miranda admitted that he’d begun experimenting with steroids a year before the Dodgers called him up, but he didn’t find the right mixture until he started working out at Laswell’s gym. A couple of the older Dodgers introduced him to a Dr. Seth Whitlinger, a friend of Laswell’s who ran his own lab and came up with an undetectable human growth hormone. Whitlinger began shopping it around to pro athletes, insisting the stuff was the best in the big leagues; in addition to 30 or 40 major league players, Miranda said, Whitlinger’s HGH was being used by more than 100 NFL players, several Olympic track champions, and dozens of Tour de France bicyclists.

  The stuff was expensive, but Miranda was willing to try almost anything to make it in the Major Leagues. Life in Venezuela was abysmal. He wasn’t going back there.

  After a half-dozen injections, Miranda could tell the HGH was improving his power and stamina. His arm bounced back much more quickly after pitching, and he had more than enough energy to play third base and bat on the days when he didn’t pitch. The Dodgers didn’t know how to use him, however, and shipped him to the Cardinals for established pitching. Miranda kept up with the injections in the off-season, and quickly became a star in St. Louis.

  But then the urine screening done by the Commissioner’s office became more sophisticated, investigations were stepped up, and players started getting caught for steroids and suspended. Miranda didn’t know what to do; he didn’t want to bring shame and disgrace to his family, but he knew he couldn’t continue to play at his current level without the HGH. He had become a celebrity jock, and he loved the money, the cars, the house, the women, and the lifestyle too much to risk becoming a mediocre player. His mother and father were so proud of him. He could finally buy them things, like the ranch outside of Caracas. He was a hero in his homeland.

  Even though Dr. Whitlinger assured him that he’d never get caught—it took a blood test to find HGH, and the players’ union would never agree to blood testing—Miranda always feared that one day he’d wake up from this dream. Someone would rat him out, or they’d develop a new test, or the players’ union would cave in. Then, just a few weeks before the playoffs, when the Cardinals were in L.A. on their final West Coast road trip of the season, his fears were realized.

  Roy Laswell called him at his hotel and asked him to come by the gym. Something about a promotional appearance that would pay him a lot of money. Miranda didn’t particularly want to do it, but Laswell had befriended him when he was nobody, and had introduced him to Dr. Whitlinger. He owed him—and the tone in Laswell’s voice suggested that this was one of those times when the debt was being called in.

  In Laswell’s office, Miranda was introduced to a muscular dude named Frankie Navarro. Navarro was not a fan, and not a nice man. He told Miranda he knew all about Whitlinger’s HGH formula. He had a copy of Miranda’s injection schedule, in Whitlinger’s handwriting. The Commissioner’s office wouldn’t need a blood test to suspend him. If the Cardinals made the World Series—and at this point they were almost a cinch to win their division—Navarro wanted Miranda to see to it that the Cards lost. Otherwise, Navarro said, he’d blow the whistle on Miranda’s HGH use. He’d be suspended from baseball. He’d be disgraced.

  Miranda walked out of the meeting in a daze, terrified that he was going to lose his career. Yet he was not willing to let down his teammates.

  “I say to myself, ‘Alberto, just see what happens,’” he told Sam and Heather. “Maybe this guy, he’s bluffing.”

  On the day before the World Series began, Navarro called Miranda at his house.

  “He say, ‘Last chance, Alberto. Throw the Series, or I tell the world you’re a drug cheat.’ I tell him, ‘Stick it up your ass, man.’”

  Then Miranda played terribly in the World Series anyway. He was embarrassed, but he swore that he played as well as he could. He just couldn’t get Navarro’s threats out of his mind. The harder he tried to concentrate and block out his possible suspension from baseball, the more nervous and tentative he became.

  “You can’t play this game when you think about something else all the time,” Miranda said.

  He got up from his lounge chair and walked to the balcony overlooking the lights along the coast. A cool ocean breeze had dropped the temperature, and Heather began to shiver.

  “So you tried as hard as you could, but you played like crap and lost anyway,” Sam said. “That should have made Navarro happy, right?”

  “No, man,” Miranda said. “He call me again, after the Series, and say he lose millions of dollars.”

  “Betting on the Cardinals?”

  “No, because he don’t bet on the Red Sox. When I told him I was not gonna throw no games, he decide not to bet. He say, ‘If I know you gonna play like that, I coulda made millions.’ He say I screwed him.”

  He’d heard nothing from Navarro after that—not until last month, when Navarro called him again, right after Miranda’s mother had come to L.A. for a visit, and then left to fly back to Caracas. This time, Navarro told Miranda that he had better be prepared to go to the Commissioner’s office and admit he’d thrown the World Series. When Miranda laughed at him and asked why he should do that, Navarro asked about his mother.

  “He say, ‘How’s Elena doin’. I say, ‘How do you know my mother’s name?’ Then he tell me he had her kidnapped.

  “I say, ‘She just flew home yesterday after she visit me.’ He say, ‘Try to call her.’ I call my mother and father’s house. She never came home. My father is upset, but he don’t know where to look, what to do. Then somebody call him and say, ‘Don’t call the police. Your wife is safe. She will come home when we get our money. But if you call the police, we kill her.’”

  “I don’t know what he want me to do, man,” Miranda said. He was facing Sam now, anguish etched on his face. If it hadn’t been so dark on the deck, Sam thought he’d have been able to see tears in Miranda’s eyes. “I did not cheat, but I will tell the Commissioner anything if they let my mom go free.”

  Now it made sense, in a bizarre, mob-think kind of way. Navarro was pissed off that he’d missed his big payday, so he came up with an idea that could land him an even bigger pile of cash. Big enough to give him the leverage he’d need to take down Sid Mink. Of course Miranda would cooperate with Navarro if his mother’s life was on the line. But why was Miranda spilling his guts now? Sam glanced at Heather, who’d gone over to stand next to Miranda. He saw that she was shivering, and took off his own jacket and put it over her shoulders. There was something between them, and apparently it wasn’t just sex—or sex at all, if he could believe Heather’s story.

  “You won’t have to go to the Commissioner,” Sam said. “Navarro is bluffing. He wants the Red Sox to pay him to keep you quiet.”

  “If they pay, will he let my mother go?”

  Sam didn’t say anything. He wanted to be reassuring, but who knows what they were planning to do to Señora Miranda? If she disappeared, she could never testify. Her best chance to come out of this alive was getting to the kidnappers’ location before they knew the plot had fallen apart.

  Sam checked the time on his cell phone—almost two. He’d been there over an hour.

  “Heather, we’ve got to call Sid Mink,” Sam said.

  “Why?” />
  “When I left him, he was on his way to kill Frankie Navarro. If that happens…”

  Alberto Miranda finished Sam’s thought.

  “If that happens, my mother’s dead, too.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Frankie Navarro sat in a lounge chair beside the small, six-foot-deep pool in his fenced-in back yard, sipping an energy shake and watching his girlfriend Fawna, who was perched on the edge of the pool in a yellow-and-red bikini, swishing her legs back and forth in the tepid water. Dead bugs, orange leaves, and a few of Fawna’s cigarette butts floated on the pool’s surface, backlit by the underwater lights. The water seemed to ripple to the rhythm of the Def Leppard music that throbbed out of the speaker he had placed in his living room window.

  As usual, Frankie felt hemmed in by the redwood fence that separated his back yard from his neighbors’. Fawna’s scrawny, matted Pekingese had left a little pile of crap in just about every square foot of dirt and dead grass around the pool deck. He’d yell at her to clean it up, and she’d do it for a day or two, and then forget again. The neighbors—Russian émigrés on one side, a gay couple on the other side—didn’t like the noise when he yelled at Fawna, or the loud metal music he liked to play at night, but he didn’t give a shit. They were afraid of him; after coming over to complain once, and seeing the muscles on Frankie and the guys who hung out with him, the neighbors didn’t come over again.

  He’d wanted to be close to the movie action, but West Hollywood was becoming a zoo, and this was no way for a crime lord or a successful actor to live. But it wouldn’t be long now…

  Frankie’s cell phone rang, and he thought about not answering. Let it ring. It’s almost midnight—he didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and it would just cost him minutes on his cell plan. Besides, in two days he’d be so fucking rich, he’d have to hire guys who’d hire other guys to answer his phone for him.

  Ah, fuck it—he picked up and said, “What?”

  “Hey, Frankie, it’s Larry.”

  Frankie’s agent, Larry Eldin, hadn’t called in months. Hell, Frankie wasn’t even sure he was a client anymore. The last gig Larry’d got for him was a two-scene, one-line role in a grade D sorcery flick called “Wizard Killer.” He played a warrior whose big moment was getting his own head cut off in a sword fight. The papier maché model of his bloody head, jammed onto a pike on the wall of the castle, got more screen time than Frankie did. Straight to video. Even his mother never saw it.