Dead Ball

by R. D. Rosen

  “She never showed,” the police detective said, his voice crackling. “I got here just before nine, and no one has seen her. I tried Coffman’s cell, but got his voice mail. Where are you?”

  “Over Gary, Indiana.” Harvey looked at his watch. It was almost nine—ten on the East Coast. “Look, he’s probably got her. He said he’d call me to let me know where he’d gone. I don’t know whether to thank him or kill him for getting involved. Just stand by, Josh, till you hear from me.”

  The beverage cart docked next to his seat. Harvey drank his Scotch and pressed his forehead against the window, watching Indiana’s farms darken. He tried Coffman’s cell phone again and got his voice mail. He called Avis and arranged to have a rental waiting for him at the curb on his arrival. He tried to reach Mickey without success. He felt her out there somewhere below him, where one of the blazing bouquets of floodlights announced a baseball stadium.

  For the next hour and a half, in the dim floating cabin, as respectful as a church, Harvey squirmed silently in his seat.

  T. F. Green Airport at midnight was a harshly lit ghost town of shuttered kiosks through which a few weary travelers, drugged by distance, dragged their wheeled suitcases. Harvey clicked down the empty corridor past posters of far-flung destinations. He called Coffman again and couldn’t get through. Then he called Providence directory assistance and asked for the residence number of a John Bartoli, giving two possible spellings. There was one listed in Olneyville, not where you’d expect a mob lawyer to live. Anyway, it was almost midnight and too late.

  Harvey snaked up I-95 in his rental car, troubled he couldn’t reach Coffman. He still had no idea where he was going. The assortment of buildings that passed for the Providence skyline slid into view ahead of him. In the distance, off to the right, the light towers of The Jewel Box stood at dark attention against some feathery moonlit clouds. On his left was the New England Pest Control building, on top of which a huge blue sheet-metal bug wearing an outsize Jewels cap crouched over the traffic like the first ominous sign of the alien invasion in a Japanese horror film.

  His cell phone rang. It was Coffman finally, saying, “You land yet?”

  “I’m here. Cherry Ann all right?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “No problems?”

  “None, but, you know, maybe you could take over.”

  “Well, where the hell are you?”

  “I’m over in Wayland Square. A friend’s place.” He gave him the address. “You know where that is?”

  Harvey’s heart stopped. How could he be so stupid? He was out of practice—there was no other excuse for letting himself be set up like this. Wayland Square. Jesus, how could he have missed every clue before this one?

  “Harvey?” Coffman said. “I think I lost you for a minute. I asked if you know how to get here.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Good.” Coffman repeated the address. “The front door’s open.”

  And now he remembered why he had come to hate this work, where things always ended badly. Even success—discovering the truth—was no protection against the black hole waiting for him at the end of every case, a hole that sucked into itself all the world’s alleged order and grace. And this was where he was headed now. Harvey touched the gun tucked inside his belt.

  “I won’t be able to get there for twenty minutes or so,” Harvey said. “You okay until then, Snoot?” It would take him less than ten; he wanted to catch Coffman off guard.

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” Coffman said and hung up.

  It all made terrible sense now. Chirmside had obviously alerted Coffman that Harvey was getting warm, and Snoot was panicking. Snoot had to do away not only with Cherry Ann, but with Harvey as well. He had to get rid of the two people with a chance to match the second lyncher’s face to his own. Harvey hoped to God Cherry Ann was still alive as he took the fork to I-95 East, which brought him within a few hundred yards of the hulking black freighter of a stadium where the Jewels played.

  His cell phone startled him by burping out the beginning of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me, Bagel Boy. Where do I tell this cabbie I’m going?”

  “What cabbie?”

  “I’m at Logan.”

  “You’re in Boston?” An hour away by cab.

  “I left after the second inning, but I couldn’t get a nonstop to Providence. It took me half an inning to figure out where I belonged.”

  “Get your ass down here.”

  “Where?”

  “Andy Cubberly’s house. You know where that is?” He gave him the address.

  “Is she okay?”

  “I’m sure she’s all right,” Harvey told him. “She’ll be fine. And, Moss?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I—I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, so make a quiet entrance.”

  He exited at Gano Street and took Waterman to Wayland Square, driving the residential streets in a state of growing anxiety. He stepped on the gas, accelerating past Wayland Square’s low-slung business district, turning at last onto the street of the man Harvey was now sure had gone through Cooley’s locker for Snoot and found the photo. The minor-league bigot, capable only of throwing paint-filled water balloons at a parade, a child’s prank, and not the real violence of which he might have dreamed. Only a few men were capable of that, and they weren’t always the ones you might expect them to be.

  Cubberly’s bleak Tudor was dark except for the porch light and a dim glow in one of the upstairs windows. Harvey rolled past and parked a hundred yards beyond the house. The price he had to pay for not being smart enough to understand the problem until now was that he was going to have to solve it himself. He didn’t know what he was going to find in Cubberly’s house, but he knew he had to find it before Moss arrived.

  He wondered if Coffman, knowing Cubberly’s past, had recruited him all along in his campaign against Cooley, confident that Cubberly wouldn’t ask questions. Or was there something more between them, a white supremacist bond, a social relationship, enlivened perhaps by some shared aspersions over dinner? Or was it something less? Was Cubberly nothing more than Coffman’s unwitting cover story?

  Harvey opened and closed his car door gingerly, making little sound, and walked back toward Cubberly’s house, staying in the shadows. He hugged the outside of the house and made his way around to the back, listening for sounds from within, but there were only crickets, cicadas, and the sound of Jay Leno’s voice and studio laughter dribbling out of a neighbor’s window.

  He paused at the back of the house, under the eaves, trying to settle his pulse. He dreaded what he might find inside, and what he might not find. He climbed the stoop stairs carefully. For the second time in ten days Harvey opened the back door with his lock-pick set and entered the ancient kitchen with his gun in his right hand. He left the door ajar behind him. Then he removed his shoes and padded across the worn linoleum into the empty dining room. He stopped, remembering his cell phone. He took it out of his pants pocket and shut it off. Holding his gun up near his face, he eased into the living room, searching the black forms of the furniture and the deep shadows. His eyes landed on the heavy wooden front door. It was closed tight, but the chain of the brass chain lock dangled free.

  At that instant he heard a soft thump coming, he thought, from the second floor. Harvey turned and looked up the stairs at the base of the spindly floor lamp and a furry edge of carpeting that caught a hint of moonlight from the landing’s casement window. As he put his stockinged foot on the first step, he felt the sudden cold pressure on his neck, just below his right ear, against his mandible.

  “Please don’t turn around, Harvey,” Coffman said behind him

  “Fine,” Harvey replied.

  “I’m going to take your gun now, so be still.”

  Harvey let him take his revolver, saying, “Would you like me to put my hands up?”

  “Every little bit helps, Harvey.”


  “Where is she, Snoot?”

  “Upstairs. Let’s go. One step at a time. Remember, I now have two loaded guns.”

  “Okay.” He started climbing, trying to swallow this humiliation.

  “Straight ahead,” Coffman said on the landing. “Into the bedroom. Open the door yourself.”

  Even before he opened the door, Harvey could hear a muffled straining inside Cubberly’s room, like the distress of a small animal. The bedroom was bathed in the dull light of a gooseneck desk lamp, whose bulb Coffman had lowered to within inches of the desk. Cherry Ann Smoler was lying on Cubberly’s bed, bound hand and foot with duct tape. A silver smear of tape sealed her mouth. She was wearing a black T-shirt and white jeans, knees streaked with dirt.

  “Hello, Cherry Ann,” Coffman said. “I believe you know each other.”

  Cherry Ann looked at Harvey with terror. He was no more useful than she now—an inmate of Coffman’s small asylum. Harvey managed a smile and nodded at her, as if to suggest he might actually have the situation under control. But the catastrophe was now dawning on him, like a deep cut that takes a few seconds to fill with blood.

  “Sit on the bed, Harvey.”

  Harvey sat on the king-size bed, facing Coffman for the first time. The paunchy broadcaster stood just inside the door, a gun in each hand, false mustache askew, the underarms of his short-sleeved shirt blooming with perspiration, like a cartoonist’s parody of a gunslinger. He seemed to recognize the absurdity of his pose, for he quickly pocketed Harvey’s gun and kept his own, an automatic with a nickel finish, pointed uncertainly at the detective.

  Harvey tried to find in Snoot’s fat, sweaty face the lyncher’s leaner one. “Aren’t you going to tape me up?”

  “Tape you up? Why, I’d have to put down my gun to do that.”

  Just as it took more than one man to lynch a Negro. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “What is it?” Coffman pulled up Cubberly’s desk chair and sat on it, ten feet from the bed.

  Harvey could see now in Coffman’s broad movements that he’d been drinking, enough to make him dangerous, not enough to render him harmless. “My question is: What the hell are you doing?”

  “Doing?” Coffman wiped his mouth with his free hand. “I’m—I’m—Cherry Ann thinks she saw me in a photograph.”

  Cherry Ann shook her head violently, her denial stifled by the duct tape, but Harvey knew there was no percentage in pretending.

  “The lynching photo of Isaac Pettibone,” he said.

  Coffman’s head twitched.

  Then it hit Harvey. How could he have missed it? Another ball, right under his feet. “Chirmside was there, wasn’t he?”

  Coffman’s mouth twisted. Harvey had to think hard to remember that the man before him was now a well-known radio broadcaster with a wife and two daughters.

  “C’mon, Snoot. We don’t have any secrets anymore. Chirmside was there too, wasn’t he?”

  His head wobbled for a moment on his neck before finally forming a nod.

  “You can tell me.”

  Coffman swallowed once and said, “Clay drove.”

  “Clay drove, that’s right. And you and old Ed Felker strung Pettibone up?”

  Coffman steadied his gun hand and aimed it straight at Harvey’s head.

  It was Harvey’s turn to swallow. He worked up some saliva and said, “C’mon, Snoot, you don’t honestly think you’re going to solve anything by getting rid of the two of us.”

  Snoot pulled a half-full Seagram’s miniature out of his pants pocket, untwisted the cap with his teeth, and said, “It’s a damn good start.”

  Next to him, Cherry Ann wriggled in fear, and Harvey put his hand on her knee to calm her. “Let me take the tape off her mouth, Snoot. Will you let me do that if she promises not to scream?”

  “No.”

  “How about undoing her hands? No harm there. You’ve got the guns.”

  Coffman shook his head.

  “I don’t understand you, Snoot,” Harvey said ruefully. “It’s not just Cherry Ann and I who know. What about Moss? And my friends down at GURCC. I called to let them know I’d found their man.”

  “You did not.”

  “You’re in play, Snoot. Your photo’s just about to be all over the fucking place. We’re just going to have to come up with another solution.”

  Coffman stared at them.

  “So Clay drove,” Harvey said.

  He nodded.

  “You and Clay have got to be the two luckiest guys in the world. I mean, they nab your buddy, and he goes away for thirty years while you get to go free and grow up to broadcast Providence Jewels games. How’d you swing that?”

  “Ed kept his mouth shut.”

  “I understand that. He did you a major solid. But what was in it for him?” He turned to Cherry Ann. “What do you think?” She shrugged as best she could. “What was in it for Ed, Snoot?”

  “Honor.”

  “Really?”

  “Ed was one of the finest men I ever knew.”

  “Not like Clay, right? Clay sold you out for a thousand bucks ATM cash.”

  “Sold me out?”

  “I won’t say he named you,” Harvey said, “but he nailed you nonetheless.”

  “Don’t piss me off, Harvey.”

  “Can I have a drink? You got a drink?”

  Coffman reached into his pocket, pulled out another Seagrams’ miniature, and tossed it to Harvey.

  “Thank you.” He unscrewed the top and took a slug of it. “Here’s what I think. You were sending Connie Felker dough all these years. I’m right, aren’t I? She’s pretty well fixed up for a retired hairdresser.”

  “Jesus, Harvey.”

  “What?”

  “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Harvey stole a glance at his watch: a quarter to one in the morning. “You know, Snoot, you’ve got half the cops in Providence looking for you right now.”

  “No, I don’t. Anyway, they’d never find me here.”

  “You don’t think I told them where I was going?”

  “No.” Coffman looked startled, woozy. He pulled on the Seagram’s. His eyes were glazed. He was beginning to deteriorate.

  “You know, I’ve been in this house before. I thought Andy might be behind the lawn jockey.”

  “Cubberly’s a dabbler.”

  “Not like you, huh?”

  “Hate’s an art, Harvey.”

  “Really?”

  “But that was a long time ago.” Coffman took a nip.

  “You’ve got a family now. Millions of listeners.”

  “I made a terrible mistake.”

  “I think people will understand that. Take it into account.”

  “No, they won’t.”

  Hate might be an art, but Coffman’s real medium was words, and Harvey was beginning to think he could talk his way out of this. Unless Snoot totally freaked. But Cherry Ann didn’t know this, and he could feel her growing alarm on the bed next to him.

  “Do you want to know what’s going to happen to you, Snoot?”

  He shrugged, stealing another nip.

  “There’re two ways this can go. First option: you can shoot us, then spend the next day or two on the run until they catch you and convict you of three murders.” Harvey ignored Cherry Ann’s muted sob. “Unless of course you resist, in which case you’ll die in the proverbial hail of police bullets. If you don’t resist, they’ll only put you away forever. You’ll never be with your wife and kids again. I don’t know how much dough you’ve put away, but your family won’t have a Snoot Coffman to support them, like you supported Connie Felker. They’ll know that their husband and father not only made a terrible mistake thirty years ago but is still a killer. Imagine what that would do to them. Your beautiful daughters having to spend the rest of their lives dealing with a knowledge that will color everything they feel about themselves, make them doubt everything they know, every past act of your
love. Nothing sweeter than family, Snoot. That’s what you’re looking at there. I’m not even talking about the loved ones Cherry Ann and I will leave behind. What a fucking mess, Snoot.

  “Option two,” Harvey went on. “You let me take you very quietly into custody. We see if we can convince Cherry Ann here to forget that tonight ever happened. You follow me? Cherry Ann, is there a possibility that if Mr. Coffman here lets you go, you won’t report his abduction, won’t press charges?”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “Snoot, I think she’s on board. That would make you completely clean in the here and now. But of course, you’d have to give me both guns. Funny thing is, Snoot, I think you’ll feel a lot safer that way. It removes the temptation for you to do something stupid.” He looked at his watch: one o’ clock.

  “Cherry Ann here, Snoot, I bet you didn’t know she’s going to be a chef. She’s studying at Johnson and Wales. As for Teasers, well, what can I say? Nobody’s perfect. You go with what you’ve got. I’ll tell you something funny. My brother Norm, Snoot, he’s the chairman of a university English department, and he once had a Ph.D. candidate who moonlighted as a dominatrix. Now she’s a tenured professor in California with a closet full of dusty whips. You never know about people, right?”

  And, really, Harvey thought, he wouldn’t know about Snoot now if it hadn’t been for a daisy chain of chance events. Chance had led Snoot to Providence and to Teasers on a night when Cherry Ann Smoler, whom chance had led to work there, was mentally recording every ringside customer with that photographic memory for men’s faces refined during a childhood of chance improprieties. Then chance led Moss Cooley to Cherry Ann. Chance led Moss’s friend Charlie Fathon to GURCC, where chance also led Moss and Cherry Ann to visit on one of the days Clay Chirmside was there because chance had ended the life of Ed Felker and led his wife to a box that contained photos that, by chance—who could have predicted the moment when her guilt reached critical mass?—she had donated to GURCC, where, by chance, Chirmside had observed Cherry Ann dimly recognize the face of his old partner in crime. If it were a novel, no one would believe it.