Ball Park

by John Farrow

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent titles by John Farrow

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: 1975

  A Special Joy

  The Gum Machine

  Whisky Spree

  The Getaway Boy

  On the Job

  The 80

  The Royals’ Ball

  His Last Tiny Marble

  Forty, On a Scale of Ten

  Clunker Free

  Paying for the Mercy

  Ezra’s Visitor

  Smashing Bones

  Confetti Money

  Homicide Won’t Know

  The Synchronicity of Events

  Part Two: The Ball

  Red Ants and a Silver Bullet

  A Painted Big Toe

  Jars of Honey and the Lurid Carcasses

  Russian Rabbit

  Mother-of-Pearl Inlay

  Nun Stories

  Plant 59

  Sacrificial Zinc

  Raising Horses

  Missing Werewolves

  Part Three: The Park

  Tombstone Ghost

  Mother Love

  The Money Jar

  The Prodigal Mouse

  Dieppe Revisited

  The Airwaves

  Tumblers

  The Role

  Otto’s Pitch

  Recent titles by John Farrow

  Émile Cinq-Mars thrillers

  CITY OF ICE

  ICE LAKE

  RIVER CITY

  THE STORM MURDERS

  SEVEN DAYS DEAD

  PERISH THE DAY

  BALL PARK *

  * available from Severn House

  BALL PARK

  John Farrow

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by John Farrow Mysteries Inc.

  The right of John Farrow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8889-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-627-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0320-5 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  This novel is dedicated to a certain gentleman

  who reads crime fiction voraciously

  and collects these books with a grand passion.

  Steele Curry, you are a writer’s reader.

  While you have read thousands of crime novels,

  know that this one is dedicated to you

  with boundless appreciation.

  PART ONE

  1975

  A Special Joy

  (The mysterious dark patch)

  Getting inside had been routine. The stress came in getting out.

  She had a near-encounter with a nude man who carried a pistol. Hiding from him was like having her nerve endings scraped raw by a hand file.

  Nerves were nine-tenths the battle. Hers were shot for the night.

  She had to remain dead silent. The woman in the house could return at any second. Quinn crept halfway up the staircase toward the lady’s bedroom then slipped out the open side window. The one she’d entered. Propped her bag on the ledge and lowered herself down from the sill. Then she clutched her bag of loot in one hand and held on with the other. Dangled off the side of the house in the moonlight. Fingers slipping. She looked down to locate her landing in the dark before shoving herself outward and dropping from a height above ten feet.

  Quinn remembered to flex when she hit the ground. She’d trained herself well. She toppled over – Nerves! – yet landed quietly on the grass.

  Checked herself out. She wasn’t hurt.

  Whenever a plan worked, a special joy thrummed inside her.

  The young woman spotted her boyfriend’s car. Her accomplice. Excellent. She walked a little faster than usual despite an effort to keep her pace casual. God! That guy had a gun! He was starkers! She had a story to tell. Deets, you won’t believe it! In a nick, Quinn slid onto the front passenger seat. Slammed the door shut.

  ‘OK, Trucker boy, let’s fly!’

  Deets failed to start up on her command. She looked at him. Suddenly her nerves, those nerves, flared across her chest and snared her throat in a vise. Deets didn’t budge. In the light of a streetlamp a mysterious dark patch across his chest pooled below his belly and fell off his right hip.

  That was blood. All over him. Blood.

  She caught on. She got this.

  Deets was dead.

  He was sitting there dead. He was crazy dead.

  Deets.

  Her getaway driver would not be getting away.

  Or getting her away. Not from this.

  The Gum Machine

  (Fake cargo)

  Quinn maintained a weather eye.

  She could operate in the heat of summer. Slip the latch on a frail back door. Cut slits in a screen, detach it, slither inside. In fall, storm windows were screwed on. Winter clothing was too bulky. Spring: mucky, she tracked footprints.

  She’d been raised wild, she loved to boast. In the Park Extension district of Montreal, a congested immigrant neighborhood in a French-English city, she’d hear close to a dozen languages on a few treks to the grocer. Portuguese and Italian. Ukrainian. Polish and Romanian. Japanese. Armenian. Yiddish. In the 1970s, Greeks were pouring in. On their heels, Indians and Pakistanis and the first trickle of Haitians. Each group arrived and moved on as they became established, although, as Quinn was fond of saying, ‘Not everybody gets established.’ As each fresh wave arrived and departed, a remnant was left behind.

  ‘We’re what’s left over from the day before and the day before that. The dregs.’

  She was seventeen. She had time to grow out of the place.

  Her dad? Less likely. He had his job, his union.

  Her mother passed away.

  Some people suggested that that was the problem. She thought otherwise.

  ‘I’m not a thief because my mom’s dead. I’m a thief because I want to be. Because I choose to be. Because I’m alive, you moron twit.’

  She went to school although she enjoyed stealing more. Smart in school, she believed she was smarter away from the classroom.

  Another beautiful thing about summer: no school.

  Growing up, she played in the lanes and on the last of the scarce fields before they were supplanted by apartment buildings. A section of small homes did exist, w
artime cottages that had been slapped together and since then reconstituted with this repair and that extension. She grew up in one of these and counted it a blessing. Her friends in apartment blocks kept quiet in their homes. They couldn’t bounce a ball on the kitchen floor or play music loudly. In her home, she ran rampant with impunity, and that’s what she meant by being raised wild.

  In winter, if the streets went unplowed, she skidded behind buses, hanging on to a bumper as the stupidest boys did. One lost both his legs above the knees – an event that left a hollow in her gut, although it didn’t stop her. Her dad saw it happen. He was shaken by the incident. Bus bumpers were altered then removed entirely to make it more difficult. She found a way to keep skidding to demonstrate that it could still be done. And then, victorious, she stopped. Secretly, that pair of crushed legs bothered her more than she let on. The way her dad had been affected had left an impression.

  Boys considered her a daredevil.

  She wore it proud.

  Quinn did a stint as a tomboy, primarily due to baseball. She didn’t throw like other girls who, coming from foreign countries, didn’t play the game. She didn’t throw like the boys either but developed a semi-rigid overhand toss that was effective. Her good arm allowed her to play the outfield in pickup games and to be a warm-up battery mate for aspiring pitchers.

  At fourteen, she coerced the boys’ team coach into letting her take batting practice; in exchange, she caught for a pitcher who wanted to work on his curve. She made contact, too. A few Texas leaguers. A pair of line drives. One grounder might have made it through an infield. A good day, until afterwards, outside the girls’ washroom as she leaned over the water fountain, the coach casually placed one hand on her bottom and slid the other across her chest. First, she twitched, then jerked up. She cut her lip and nearly chipped a tooth. She knew then why she’d been allowed to take BP. After that, she didn’t catch for the boys officially, only when one promised they’d be on their own. No more coaches. Following that incident she let her hair grow long. Being more like a girl, her father said. He noticed. She kept to herself that if grown men were going to treat her like a girl, and badly, she wasn’t going to spend time in their company as a half-boy. She’d keep her distance. Morons. Irrelevant, it was time. Never her plan to always be a catcher who wasn’t allowed to suit up with the boys in a real game.

  Around that time, she started stealing.

  Pure accident, the first occasion. The last in a line of old-fashioned gum machines. An antique that stood outside a drugstore during the daytime. Quinn dropped in a dime and pressed the lever down. A wee pack of gum slid onto a tray. She was talking to her friends at that moment, laughing hard about something hilarious that was probably stupid. She forgot to take the gum out of the machine. She pressed the lever again and gum dropped down. She noticed two packs of gum in the tray. She hit the lever again without putting in more money. Gum slipped out. She said nothing to her friends and covertly stuffed the gum in a pocket.

  Soon after that she disentangled from her pals on the walk home. Raced back to the gum machine. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Pounding. She pressed the lever down again. Gum came out. She glanced into the drugstore. Then pretended to insert coins repeatedly while pressing the lever. She made room on the tray for more gum by sliding the packs to one side. As the pile built up, she stuffed her pockets. When she had no more room in her pockets, she filled both hands.

  That was the best time ever. She felt so freaking alive. She didn’t know why.

  She walked down half a block to a hairdresser’s salon with her fists full of packs of gum and, with the bravado of a soloist in an opera, announced, ‘I got gum for sale at a discount! It’s for charity. Seven packs for fifty cents.’

  ‘What charity?’ some lady with purple-streaked hair under a pair of snapping scissors asked her. Moron.

  ‘Like I said,’ she told the woman, ‘they’re at a discount.’

  She sold three sets. A buck-and-a-half profit. Then scampered away at reckless speed, propelled so fiercely by her glee.

  Falling asleep that night, she knew she’d steal again. She liked the feeling all through her bloodstream. She’d been unhappy lately but no longer felt that way. Why she now felt good wasn’t something she could explain. Still, she wasn’t going to knock it. She was going to steal again.

  Discovering the flaw in his old machine, the druggist scrapped it. Quinn moved on from there.

  The first time she got caught she was adamant that her activity had no connection to her mother dying. She could have used that excuse for sympathy and escaped the pickle she was in, as she was being prompted to do. Quinn was having none of it. ‘Don’t be an idiot moron,’ she advised her accuser.

  ‘Don’t call me an idiot moron,’ the older woman who had nabbed her warned.

  ‘What kind of a moron are you, then?’

  ‘Watch your tongue, young lady.’

  ‘In my mouth? How? You got a mirror?’

  ‘Don’t be so damned smart!’

  ‘I should be dumb instead? Give me a mirror. I’ll watch my tongue if you think it’s so important. Will that be dumb enough for you?’

  ‘I have half a mind to call the police.’

  ‘I agree with you. You have half a mind.’

  ‘The impudence! You’re in trouble now.’

  ‘Fine. I’m in trouble now. Just don’t blame my mom. My mom dies, and what? I go steal something? Do I look like an imbecile to you?’

  A friend of the woman she robbed, who caught Quinn going through her purse, clucked her tongue and spoke up. ‘It’s in her genes.’

  Quinn didn’t think she meant her Levi’s. ‘What genes?’ Almost a snarl.

  ‘Her dad,’ the woman making the point replied. She turned back to Quinn. ‘Isn’t that right, honey?’ Back to her friend: ‘He’s a criminal.’

  ‘Was a criminal,’ Quinn told the woman, her teeth clenched, her fangs bared. She was quick. ‘Was.’ She used her rising adrenalin to burst past the two women and out of the potential arms of the law, if that’s what they had in half their minds.

  Her father received a call that night. He put the phone down after listening respectfully, saying a few words, thanking the caller. Within earshot, Quinn picked up the gist.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked her. He was always tentative with his daughter, not knowing how he was doing as a single parent; if he could handle this, her.

  ‘She called you a criminal,’ she explained. ‘Yesterday’s news I told her.’

  The explanation seemed to settle something. Her father went quiet, more deeply than usual. Two things emerged from the episode. Quinn understood that getting caught was a serious drag, and after that she had no intention of letting it happen again. The second lesson was that stealing from women’s purses at the laundromat was now, like stealing gum, ancient history.

  She still got a kick out of it, pilfering. She just needed a bigger, better, buzz.

  Quinn broke into an unlocked home. The best time ever.

  She repeated the crime often, gaining experience.

  Then she pulled off a daring heist.

  Kids often climbed up in the few trees that grew in patches of backyards next to the lane. Once up in the branches, climbers were all but invisible. They passed the time there. She calculated that if she could climb higher and shimmy onto a certain limb without it breaking, she could drop down to a rooftop. Once up there, she could walk across the flat roofs of dozens of duplexes, from one end of the lane to more than halfway down the block without facing a gap or a higher wall. In the middle of the rooftop, no one below could spot her.

  She had a destination in mind.

  Though dexterity was required, it would not be difficult to climb down a pole that supported an upper-floor porch. The porch was not accessible from below, only from an upper-level door to the inside. On a hot summer day, only the screen door was used. She noticed residents come and go without lifting a latch or sliding a bolt. She was posi
tive it was never locked. All she had to do was keep an eye on the front door while the man of the house was off at work, wait for the woman of the house to leave – with her shopping bag would be ideal – then run to the lane, climb the tree, race across the rooftops, slide down the porch pole when no one was looking, enter the house, and steal whatever she could fit in her pockets.

  She took money. A small wad of fives and tens. She took cheap jewelry and a ladies’ wristwatch that potentially had value and a pair of porcelain knickknacks. Fragile items she protected within stolen towels. She snitched a pillowcase off a bed and stuffed it with her loot and a case of genuine silverware. Then she monkey-climbed the porch pole again with the sack in one hand, which she slung up onto the roof, cracking a knickknack, and made her escape.

  The robbery became the big event in community lore.

  Everybody was talking about it.

  Even her father, who wasn’t well connected locally and commuted elsewhere to work, heard the story.

  Quinn said, ‘Probably some neighbor had it in for them.’

  Her father disagreed. ‘Nope. That thief came from another part of town.’

  ‘How do you know?’ He was wrong, but why did he think that way?

  ‘Looks professional to me. A professional thief won’t rob in his own neighborhood. Partly for his own protection. If he steals local and someone sees him, he gets recognized. But mostly he won’t do it because it’s not honorable. Thieves have honor. It’s not right to rip off your neighbor. That’s true everywhere in the world.’

  Her dad’s words had an immediate effect. She had planned to take the silverware to a pawnshop on Jean Talon Street. Suddenly, the flaw in her strategy hit home: not far enough away. Her dad stayed out of her room; but if he was ever suspicious of her, or if he was sending subliminal messages, he might decide to have a peek under her bed or in her closet. There, he’d not only find the stolen goods from the infamous balcony robbery, but also from a string of break-ins. She had to get the loot out of her room, and the closest pawnshop was the wrong solution.

  She checked the Yellow Pages. And began to explore her city.