Almost thirty years later, the lefthander had found me.
“Wilkins,” I said. “Randy Wilkins. I don’t believe it.” He looked about twenty pounds heavier, and the curly black hair he once had was mostly gone. What was left was cut close to his scalp. As if to compensate for the loss, he had grown a mustache and goatee.
The eyes, they hadn’t changed. He still had that look in his eyes. Some days you’d call it a twinkle, other days you’d call it insanity. Which was totally appropriate considering the side of the mound he threw from. There are some simple truths in baseball, after all. One of them, whether it would be considered politically correct these days or not, is that lefthanded pitchers are not normal. They can’t throw the ball in a straight line, for one thing. Everything a lefthander throws has a little movement on it, no matter how hard they try to throw the straight fastball. A lefthander, being a total freak of nature, is fragile and more likely to hurt himself. One bad throw and the arm is done forever. I’ve seen it happen.
And lefthanders think differently, too. They might be a little absent-minded maybe. Or eccentric. Or downright crazy.
“Alex McKnight,” he said. He grabbed my shoulders and didn’t let go. “How long has it been?”
“It’s what, almost thirty years?” I said. “How in the world … What are you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood,” he said. “I thought I’d drop by.”
“In the neighborhood, huh? You wanna try that again?”
“Do I get a drink first?” he said. “It’s been a hell of a long day.”
“A drink,” I said. “Of course.”
I introduced him to Jackie. “This man right here,” I said, “played ball with me in Toledo, believe it or not. He was a pitcher.”
“Pleased to meet ya,” Jackie said, shaking his hand. “What are you drinking?”
“Whatever Alex is having,” Randy said.
“Alex is having a beer,” Jackie said. “A beer from Canada. Alex doesn’t drink beer if it’s bottled in America. He makes me go all the way over the bridge just to pick him up a case of beer every week.”
“He doesn’t need the sob story,” I said. “Just get him the beer.”
“You look good,” Randy said to me. “You’ve been working out?”
“Working out, ha!” Jackie said from behind the bar. “Alex McKnight working out. That’s a good one.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Randy said. “This man right here was one hell of a catcher. I don’t think I ever saw him give up a passed ball.”
“Too bad he couldn’t hit his weight,” Jackie said as he brought the beer around.
“Just give the man his beer,” I said. I sat him down in front of the fire and watched him take a pull right out of the bottle.
“So this is Canadian beer,” he said.
“Can you taste the difference?”
“Um, sure,” he said.
“You’re lying,” I said. “No matter how long it’s been, I can still tell when you’re lying.”
He laughed. “I can’t lie to my catcher.”
“Damned right,” I said. “But seriously. It’s great to see you. Except for that mustache and that goatee thing.”
“Makes me look pretty smooth, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, in a Satanic serial killer sort of way. What’s that on your arm, a tattoo?”
He looked at the back of his left wrist. There were three parallel lines. The line farthest from his hand had a gap in the middle. “That’s a trigram,” he said. “You know, from the I Ching. It’s called ‘the joyous lake.’ A Tibetan monk used a needle dipped in spider blood.”
“You’re lying again,” I said. “I told you, don’t even try it. I can see right through you. Even thirty years later.”
“How about I got drunk one night in San Francisco?” he said. “When I woke up, I had no wallet, no shoes, and a brand new tattoo?”
“That’s sounds more like it,” I said.
He laughed again. It was the same laugh. For one year of my life I heard that laugh at least twenty times a day.
“So tell me already,” I said.
“What?”
“What’s going on? How far did you have come to get here, anyway?”
“Well, I’ve been living in L.A. for the last few years,” he said. “I was watching a Cactus League game a couple weeks ago, and the guy on TV was talking about how a good catcher is a pitcher’s best friend. I said to myself, ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ and I started thinking about the old days in Toledo. I was wondering whatever happened to you, so I started poking around on the Internet to see if I could find you. I saw your Website, man, and I figured, hey, I’m gonna go see him!”
“Whoa,” I said. “Back up. My Website?”
“Yeah, I did a search on Alex McKnight and it came up.”
“Randy, I don’t have a Website. I don’t even have a computer.”
“I’m talking about your business Website, Alex. Prudell-McKnight Investigations.”
I just looked at him for a long moment. And then it came to me. “Oh my God,” I said. “What did he do now?”
“Your partner, Leon?”
I closed my eyes. “Yeah, my partner, Leon.”
“Well, it looks like he’s put a nice little Website out there advertising your services. There’s this drawing with two pistols on it, pointing at each other. It kinda looks like they’re shooting at each other.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “He used the same thing on our business cards.”
“I gave Leon a call,” he said. “Real nice guy. He told me you’d be here. I made him promise not to tell you I was coming. I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Well, you certainly did surprise me. But why—”
“There’s something on there about you having a bullet in your chest, too. Is that true?”
“I’m going to kill him,” I said. “He is absolutely dead.”
“So you do have a bullet in there?” He snuck a look down at my torso, the same way everybody does when they first hear about it
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a long story.”
“All right, save that one, then. Are you married? You got any kids?”
“No and no,” I said. “Married once, divorced. No kids. How about you?”
He looked at the ceiling for a moment. “I’m divorced, too. Three kids. Jonathon just passed the bar. He’s a lawyer in San Francisco. His wife’s expecting a baby soon. Can you believe that, I’m gonna be a grandfather! Annie’s a chef, just got a new job at a really nice restaurant down in San Diego. And Terry just went off to school at UC-Santa Barbara. Hey, guess what.” He reached over and punched me in the leg.
“Ouch. What?”
“Terry’s a ballplayer. He’s on the freshman team. Guess what position he plays.”
“Oh great,” I said. “Another pitcher. I bet he’s a crazy lefthander.”
“He’s a catcher,” he said. “Can you beat that?”
“That’s even worse,” I said. “He has to catch crazy lefthanders.”
“He’s a switch-hitter,” he said. “God, he can drive the ball, Alex. Just like you used to.”
“I see your memory went along with your hair.”
“Oh man, you haven’t changed, Alex.” He took another pull of the bottle. “Canadian beer. I can’t believe I’m in Michigan drinking Canadian beer. And why is it so cold here, anyway? Haven’t you guys heard of spring?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just wait until June.”
“Hey, Jackie!” he yelled. “Get your butt over here so I can tell you some stories about your boy Alex here. Stuff I bet you never heard before. And bring some more beer while you’re at it.”
Anybody else who came into the place for the first time and talked to Jackie that way, he’d be back out in the parking lot in ten seconds, wiping the gravel off his ass. But Randy had always had this knack for making you feel like you’ve known him your whole life, even if you just m
et him. I saw it all the time when we were playing together, and even more when we became roommates. Randy had already gone through a couple roommates by the time he got to me. Something about the way he’d keep talking all night, even if you had to get up early the next morning and ride on a bus all day to the next game.
But you couldn’t hate the guy for it. As much as you wanted to kill him sometimes, he’d always say something funny and disarming, or even worse, he’d put his arm around you and sing in your ear. “You know you love me, Alex,” he used to say. “You’ve got the hots for me. You dream about me all night long. That’s why I drive you crazy.”
A whole busload of guys in their twenties, most of them from farms or little towns around the midwest, all of them dirt tough or at least trying to act like it. And I get Randy Wilkins for a roommate.
So now almost thirty years has passed, and out of nowhere he’s sitting in the Glasgow Inn on a late Tuesday night in April. It’s taken him exactly twenty minutes to feel comfortable. Hell, in twenty minutes he owns the place. Even a crusty old goat like Jackie is treating him like royalty. I kept waiting for him to tell me why he had come so far to see me, after all these years, but he kept talking about baseball, the games we had played in, old teammates I had all but forgotten.
“So tell me, Randy,” Jackie said at one point. “Did you ever make it up to the big leagues?”
There it was. I knew it would come up eventually. I certainly wasn’t going to mention it myself.
“Why, yes,” Randy said. “As a matter of fact I did make it up to the big leagues. I pitched in one game.” By this time, Jackie had pulled a couple of the tables over by the fireplace, and at least twelve men were sitting there listening to him. “You want to tell this story, Alex?”
“I wasn’t there,” I said. And that’s all I said, because I didn’t want to touch it. I had never even heard him tell it before, because after that September call-up, I never saw him again. Until tonight.
Winter of the Wolf Moon: A Mystery Page 25
