by Pete Bowen
I asked her, “What do you want to do, now? We’re going over to see Jerry Cochran to see if he can fill us in on what Tony might have been up to for the last month. You want to stay with us?”
“Jerry and Penny Cochran are my two favorite people in the world. I’d love to see them,” she said. “I don’t think Jerry knows much or Penny would have told me.”
Jerry Cochran lived 10 minutes away in Sunnyvale. We rang the doorbell and the whole family answered the door. Jerry stood holding a baby and a two year old stood at his mother’s knee. Penny Cochran immediately burst into tears hugging Liz while Jerry welcomed Roger and me into the house. Cochran was big. Six feet four, handsome, well spoken, he was a Media Studies major out of USC. He was often on TV and radio as a Team spokesman. You just knew he had a future in broadcasting. After Penny, it was Jerry’s turn to hug Liz. “I loved him, Elizabeth,” he said. “I’ve never been so torn up about losing anyone before,” he said and started to cry, “sorry,” turning away and wiping away tears. “I’ve been a mess all day.”
“You guys were close, Jerry, it has to hurt,” Liz said as he held him in her arms, the baby between them. “Oh my God, this baby is cute,” she said taking the baby from Jerry’s arms. Liz knelt down to the toddler and said, “your sister is very beautiful, JJ.”
“She has a vagina,” said JJ. We all laughed. Leave it to a kid to sum things up.
Cochran, Roger and I left the woman and children in the kitchen and went into a den. “Man, what a day,” he said shaking his head. “This really, really sucks,” and wiped a tear away.
“What’s going on with the team?” I asked him.
“I would say, we’re stunned,” he said. “In this league, you get used to seeing people come and go, but not die! I couldn’t even talk to the press. What is there to say? The leader of the team and my good friend is gone. Someone murdered him? I can’t get my head around it.”
“I’m sorry for your loss man,” was all I could think of to say.
He went around the small bar and pulled out a beer handed one to me and a Coke to Roger. “I guess all there is left to do is to get drunk,” he said shaking his head.
“Jerry, let me ask you something,” I said. “You guys were friends; do you have any idea what Tony was up to for the last month?”
“I don’t, Tom. He was pissed off about the contract and he said he was going to get away for a few weeks. I thought it was a good idea. I think he needed a change of scenery. I’ll tell you this, something was really bothering him after the Championship. I think he was more upset about Elizabeth than the contract bullshit. He should have been the happiest guy in the world but here he was moping around like a sick sow. I didn’t understand it, the whole separation from Elizabeth thing. I asked him, what’s wrong with you, how could you leave her?”
“What did he say?”
“He said they were having some issues but I knew they weren’t. Penny talks to Elizabeth. He was having issues and he wasn’t talking about it and he wasn’t himself.” He crushed the beer can, got himself another, popped it open and said, “it was like he was depressed or something. Anyway, one day he bugs out, we don’t hear anything from him for a month and this morning he turns up in his driveway murdered. What the fuck?” No one said anything. The three of us just sat. We could hear the kids in the other room.
“What are the prospects for the Team this year?” I asked.
“Beats the shit out of me after today. Tony got us there last year. I don’t have a lot of confidence in Isackson. It’s tough enough without this kind of a distraction.” He thought about it for a moment. “Maybe it’ll be motivation. Doesn’t feel like it today.”
“I’m going over to see Isackson tonight,” I said.
“Don’t tell him what I said. Not my best day,” Cochran said.
“I’m thinking Tony would have wanted you guys to suck it up and kick some ass,” I said. I handed him my business card and told him to get in touch if he heard anything. The girls were in the kitchen. Each had a child in their arms. I said, “We need to push on, I’d like to talk to Paul Isackson.”
Penny and Liz looked at each other. Penny said, “Say hello to Lydia for me.”
Liz grimaced and said, “I’ll wait in the car.” The girls laughed. I had no idea what was going on there. Everyone said their goodbyes with promises to meet up in a few days. I told Jerry I would probably see him around the Team offices until this thing got solved.
Once again we were on the road. Roger on the computer. Liz staring out the window. We took 101 to Menlo Park. Houses in this area were very expensive. We pulled up in front of a big house on a quiet street. Liz said, “I’ll wait in the car.”
“You were serious back there,” I said.
“Yes, I’m not a big fan of Lydia Isackson,” she said.
“Okay. We’ll try and make this quick.”
“Take your time, I could use a few winks,” she said as she stretched on the long cabin seat. Roger and I went up to the front door.
A Team security guard who I recognized from yesterday came out of the dark and said, “Good evening Mr. Mullins, Mr. Isackson is expecting you.” I thanked him and rang the doorbell. It was answered by the most drop dead beautiful blond I think I’ve ever seen.
“I’m Lydia Isackson, please come in.” I was a little overwhelmed to be honest. She shook hands with both of us. “I saw you on TV, Roger. You were great.” Even unflappable Roger Goody was tongue tied. “Come this way, Paul is watching baseball.” The house was right out of Architectural Digest. Every room was perfect.
“You have a beautiful house, Mrs. Isackson”
“Please call me Lydia and thank you, Tom. Paul told me you were working with the team on the murder. It’s such a shock,” she said, as we walked into the den where Paul Isackson sat watching a baseball game on a huge LCD screen.
“I’ll say it was a shock,” said Paul. “We went to bed last night thinking we were going to Miami and woke up this morning and found out we were staying here.” He stood and shook hands with Roger and me. “So how’s it going, did you guys solve it yet?”
“At this point, the most important thing is just making sure the team is secure,” I said. “That’s our first priority.”
“Well, with security outside and an arsenal inside, we feel secure,” said Isackson. Lydia sat next to her husband. They were an attractive couple. “I’ve been a hunter and a gun collector all my life, so heaven help the jihad motherfucker that tries coming in after me and my family, right Babe?” he asked his wife. She smiled and put a hand on his leg and he looked back at the baseball game on the huge LCD screen.
“How is Elizabeth doing, Tom?” she asked. “I feel so bad for her. I’d bet anything Tony and her were going to get back together. I’ll bet that’s why he was there last night.”
“She has been very upset,” I said. “This has been a big shock for her. She’s going through the grieving process.”
“We were very close. I just feel terrible about all this,” Lydia said. “What are the plans for the services?”
“That’s really still up in the air. They haven’t even released the body,” I said. “I wanted to ask you, Paul, if you may have heard where Tony has been for the last month?”
“I really didn’t hear a thing,” he said. “I have a private trainer so wasn’t around the offices much. We were back in Utah before training camp started. I wasn’t talking to any of the rest of the team. All I can do is my job. My job is to be in shape and get ready to lead a team with my God given talents. We’ve been praying a lot on this contract situation, and I can’t help but see the hand of God in how this worked out.” I was stunned by the last remark and couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Well, I hope it works out for you and the Team and best of luck on the upcoming season,” I said and stood up to go.
He and his wife stood and he said, “Thank you and I’ll pray you find the murderer quickly so we can all get back to football.�
�
“I’ll show you to the door,” said Lydia. “Please give my condolences to Elizabeth if you see her. She’s in our hearts and prayers.”
“I will,” I said, “and thank you for your time.”
When we got to the car, Roger said, “She was really beautiful.”
“And he’s a fucking idiot,” I said.
“Well that pretty much summarizes things,” Elizabeth said.
“He thinks it’s the hand of God that had a part in Tony’s death. God didn’t want him to go to Miami,” I said.
“What did you think of her, Tom?” Liz asked.
“The beautiful, doting wife. She said you and she were close and wanted me to pass on her condolences if I saw you.”
“We were close?” Liz said. Were is the operative word here. We saw them socially a couple of times and I sat with her during the games at the beginning of the season. We went to a couple of charity functions together. As I got to know her, I started to see what a back stabbing, nasty person she was. She rarely had something good to say about anyone. She was just mean. By the time of that fourth game, when Paul, then Jeff was injured, I was dreading sitting by her at the games.” She sat looking out the window as the car started to move. We had one more stop tonight.
“You okay Liz?” I asked. “I want to go see Matt Benson and then we’ll call it a night.” She nodded her head and continued to stare out the window. The silent treatment; I knew the silent treatment. The silent treatment usually meant one thing when it came to me and women. I had fucked up somehow. “Anything new, Roger?” I asked as he typed away on his computer.
“They may be close to finding Higgs Boson.”
I looked over at Liz, “Higgs Boson?” She shook her head. “Third baseman for the Devil Rays?” I asked.
Roger laughed. “Higgs Boson is the ‘God Particle’ thought to be critical to forming the cosmos after the Big Bang. Higgs Boson has only been theoretical up to now, but they’ve been making big jumps forward in the science at the LHC.”
“The LHC?”
“The Large Hadron Collider project in Geneva. It’s a 15 mile looped tunnel that creates mini-Big Bangs by smashing together particles. It’s only operating at half speed now because it’s new, but in the next few years as they begin operating it faster, at conditions that recreate the Big Bang, the scientists are pretty sure they’re going to find it. You have to look for the Higgs in the low mass region where many people think the Riggs is.”
“Yea, I don’t think it’s there,” I said.
“Why not?” asked Roger.
“I think it’s in Milpitas.”
Roger ignored me. “They think they have just detected the Top Quark-a massive, short lived particle. The Higgs is a theoretical energy particle. This is exciting stuff, Mr. Mullins. The more they raise the energy, the closer they get to the conditions of the Big Bang. The more likely they are to find the Higgs.”
“And why do we want to find this, Roge?”
“Because then we’ll know how the cosmos was formed 10 billion years ago after the Big Bang. The Higgs gave mass to the disparate matter spawned at that time.”
I thought about it for a moment. “What is the practical application of knowing this stuff?”
“What’s the practical application of knowing why an apple falls from a tree? It furthers our knowledge of all life to know how and why we got here and the principles in which the world operates.” He looked at me with the sarcastic look worthy of the dumbass I am. “And, Anthony Reilly received a speeding ticket in Los Gatos a month ago,” he said, “a 95 in a 45.”
“Find out who gave it to him,” I said. “Maybe he told the cop where he was going to be for the next month.”
I looked at Liz still staring out the window. I picked up the intercom and spoke to the driver, “Eddie, coffee, Starbucks or something.” Jesus quickly found a place and I handed Roger money and told him to get coffee for us. When the Roger closed the door and walked off, I slipped beside Liz and said, “Something I did?” She looked at me for a moment, smiled and rose up and straddled me. Facing me now, she took my head in her hands and kissed me hard in a long lingering kiss. It almost hurt it was so hard. She put her hand inside my shirt and thrust her tongue down my throat. Then after playing for awhile as she had me pinned into the seat, she abruptly stopped and sat back down next to me again as Roger opened the door and got back in with a bag of food.
Liz was staring out the window again. As we started to drive off, she said in a quiet voice, “I think I know who killed Tony.”
Chapter 15
That fourth game of the season. The day that Baltimore’s Dometrius Daniels, alias Dominent D, alias Mr. D, alias DD, came to town. Three hundred and five pounds of mean speed and muscle. You can make an argument that he is the best player in football. He is certainly the dominant defensive football player in football. With fourteen sacks of the quarterback last year, he’s a player that you have to know where he is, all the time. He has to be double teamed on every play.
On the Thursday prior to the Baltimore game, Jeffery Chang, the San Francisco Pro bowl left tackle, pulled his hamstring. Hamstring is that big muscle in the back of the thigh. Chang limped off the field and in stepped rookie Clarence Pierce to take Chang’s position in practice. Clarence Pierce was a 325 pound fourth round draft pick out of Nebraska. A likable young man, he is exactly what he appears to be: a big old farm boy. Someday, Clarence may become a good lineman, but he was not prepared to take on the best defensive player in football that Sunday.
The left tackle on the offensive line is charged with protecting the quarterback’s blind side. Right handed quarterbacks turn to their right to throw the ball. The right defensive end, lined up against the left offensive tackle has an advantage because he’s often charging to the quarterback, unseen by him or not seen till the last second. DD Daniels has made a living making crushing sacks on quarterbacks, who never saw him coming. If Daniels doesn’t sack the quarterback, he’s disrupting plays with his defensive pressure.
When DD heard that the San Francisco guard was on the injury report, he wasted no time finding out all about Chang’s replacement and was overjoyed to hear that it was a rookie. DD would study all the information he could find on his opponent including all his personal family history, because there was an aspect of DD’s game that no one could measure up; that was talking shit. He was absolutely relentless. He would use the opponent’s wife, mother or grandmother and begin as soon as the game started to describe to his opponent explicit recent sexual encounter he had with that person. Usually, this involved an oral or anal rape of that person in which the person begs for more. “You’ll never guess where I was the day before yesterday, Clarence. I was in your Mama’s ass. I was in there most of the morning while your Daddy was out to work. You know what Clarence? You’re Mama doesn’t like Mr. D’s big black dick in her ass. Oh no, she LOVES Mr. D’s big black dick in her ass. I love when a woman knows what she wants. She wanted Mr. D’s big black dick so far up her…..”
So along with a constant stream of derision directed at his mother, Clarence Pierce was being beaten on every play. DD was being double teamed with a full back. This tactic worked for the first few sets of downs in which San Francisco went nowhere. They punted on their first three possessions and had a total of minus 26 yards. Clarence had been caught holding twice already and the first quarter wasn’t over. DD was schooling him.
On their fourth possession, San Francisco tried a screen play, to DD’s side. DD figured this was probably coming, when he felt the boy’s lack of effort against him, thought screen, retreated a few steps and jumped up, tipping the pass up into the air and then down into his hands. He ran the ball back 20 yards and three plays later, Baltimore found the end zone.
As the second quarter began, San Francisco still had no answer for DD. He was in the backfield on every running play and had pressure on the quarterback on every pass attempt. At one point, Clarence Pierce blocked out DD long enough
for the team to complete a crossing route for a first down, their first of the day. DD congratulated Clarence. That was excellent footwork Clarence. “Your mother is going to be very pleased and believe me Clarence, I know when your mother is pleased. It takes work. Just like you showed me there. You used leverage and technique. You know what? That’s what I used when I was fucking your Mama’s ass, leverage and technique.”
On the next play, DD used a swimming move to flow by Clarence Pierce. The San Francisco full back was just able to nudge DD enough on the double team for DD’s helmet to hit the quarterback in the lower leg. Paul Isackson’s tibia snapped like a match stick. A pin would have to be inserted to hold the bone together. The next day Isackson would be put on Injured Reserve which officially put him out for the season. It had been a clean hit. DD had actually been blocked into the lower leg. A cart hauled Isackson off the field. He was writhing in pain. DD Daniels stood impassionately with his hands on his hips staring at the scene of medical people around the injured quarterback. The crowd was hushed. This looked like the end of the season for San Francisco.
DD Daniels had two sacks, four tackles, intercepted a pass, pressured the quarterback half a dozen times and had now taken out the QB for the season and there was still eight minutes to play in the second quarter. Daniels was having a career game but he wasn’t done yet. The veteran Kyle Schular came out to replace Isackson. He was a ten year veteran who had played with five teams. He had once led Buffalo to the playoffs where they had been eliminated in the first round. He had a strong arm but was slow and in his first year with the San Francisco.
On Schular’s first play, DD Brown hit him as he was throwing. The interception was run back for a touchdown. Baltimore up 14. On third and 14 on the next possession, San Francisco went with a screen pass to the right side. DD Daniels had come up the middle on a switch and untouched, he charged into Schular, picking him up and driving him into the turf, breaking his collar bone and leaving him unconscious. Roughing the passer and unsportsmanlike conduct got an outraged DD Daniels thrown out of the game. The following fight on the field between the two teams resulted in offsetting unsportsmanlike conduct penalties. You don’t often see the benches empty in a full out brawl in football. Including Daniels, five players were thrown out of the game, two from each team. The normally well behaved crowd was in a frenzy. They began throwing everything not tied down onto the Baltimore bench. Almost 20 minutes went by before things were sorted out and the final five minutes of the first half could be played.
