Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  The museum folks obviously weren’t thrilled to talk about it, but the room was apparently pretty much trashed, and anybody else who was there at the time couldn’t have missed it. One of them called the paper last night, too late to get anything into today’s paper. Sarah went over there this morning and found a college boy from VCU working the desk who told her most of the details. Sarah’s getting good at persuading people to tell her things. She’s especially good at it when they’re of the opposite sex.

  “I’d already checked with the police, and they arrested four of them, two from here, two from out of town.”

  “Seems fair,” I offer.

  “Think it’ll make A1?”

  “Probably local front.”

  I remind her that the tree-killing three-part series on the past, present and future of Richmond’s riverfront takes up two-thirds of the front page and three more pages inside. Having an A1 story beside it on a brawl at a riverfront museum might be a bit more irony than our publisher could take.

  “Oh, yeah,” she says, rolling her lovely eyes. “Shit.”

  Sarah still wants people to read what she writes. She’s twenty-six now and would like to be working at a larger paper somewhere. She has the brains and the A-personality for it. The fact that she’s attractive, funny and hot as hell won’t hurt her chances, either. I only hope there are some big-city dailies still breathing long enough for her to make a career out of this. Or, for her sake, maybe I don’t. Sarah ought to go to law school. Lawyers don’t do Saturdays and they don’t work for free.

  “How’s your mother’s friend doing?”

  Like the rest of the newsroom, Sarah knows my link to Thursday’s shooting.

  She asks me what I know.

  “Nothing so far,” I tell her. “But I think the cops are close to making some kind of announcement.”

  “Yeah,” she says, going back to her story. “Gillespie said tomorrow.”

  I talked to Gillespie yesterday, hoping he’d confirm or add to what Peachy told me. I’ve known him for thirty years. He had nothing. Like I said, Sarah’s getting good.

  The rest of my shift is almost too smooth. There isn’t anything vaguely resembling a chance to leave the office on business, although I hop over on my dinner break to check on Les. Andi’s still there, but she’s about to leave with Peggy, who is showing her age after a day in the hospital.

  I thank Andi for taking Peggy home. Les seems to be sleeping.

  “The doctor didn’t say much,” Andi tells me. “He just said Les was 'hanging in there.’ ”

  I just want to get Les home. He already looks like a different man, a husk of what he was three days ago. Les might have been losing it before the shooting, but a seventy-nine-year-old man who can still climb a ladder up to one of those Oregon Hill roofs, even if he’s driven by dementia and thinks he’s still running a roofing company, has a lot of juice. The Les before me looks like he’s been pitted and seeded.

  It’s barely eleven thirty and I’m playing my last game of solitaire on the computer, ready to call it a night, when the phone rings.

  I can barely hear Sarah’s voice. I finally determine that she and some of our coworkers are at Penny Lane and intend to be there until they are forced to leave.

  “Come on over,” she yells into the phone. “They’re asking about you.”

  I haven’t been to my favorite pub much lately. It’s part of the deal I’ve made with myself. No AA, but no Penny Lane, either, except on special occasions.

  I try to demur, alluding to my need to go home, have some warm milk and low-fat cookies and go to bed.

  “You’re not gettin’ old on me, are you, Willie?” Sarah says.

  Well, Saturday night can be a special occasion.

  Chapter Four

  SUNDAY

  Sarah Goodnight was right.

  I am awakened by a call from Peggy, who tells me that someone from the police department called sometime before nine and gave her an update.

  “They said the shots came from your building. They’re going to have something about it on the news, the guy said.”

  I’m thinking it’s a good thing they didn’t come by Peggy’s to tell her in person. You probably could smell the dope five feet outside the front door.

  “Did they say what floor?”

  “I think they said the ninth. Oh, Willie. Who’d want to shoot Les?”

  To my knowledge, no one in the Prestwould is packing. I tell her I’ll check into it.

  I go to the newspaper’s website. Sure enough, the police must have sent over a press release in the last hour or so. “Police closing in on shooter,” is the headline put on it by the kid in charge of giving away free news.

  The gist of it:

  “Richmond Police Chief L. D. Jones said, that, based on forensic evidence gained over the last few days, it has been determined that the assailant fired one shot from a rifle from a window on the ninth floor of a dwelling at 612 West Franklin Street.”

  Home sweet home.

  I lean out the bedroom window and have my first Camel of the day, making sure that none of the smoke stays inside. Kate, my landlady and last ex, would approve.

  I hear voices above me. When I look up, there’s the fat, sweaty face of Gillespie peering out a window three floors up. He looks down, sees me, and ducks his head back inside.

  I swallow two aspirin with the coffee Custalow’s already made for me. The night, as nights often do, turned out to be longer than expected. Three hours after I’d expected to be sleeping the sleep of the just, I was just getting in. Four of us went back to Sarah’s place after Penny Lane kicked us out at closing time. Chip Grooms from photo and Becky Whitehouse, who covers prep sports, were there. They and Sarah might be seventy-five years old, combined.

  When I left, they were still going strong. Sarah walked me to the door.

  “Should you be driving?” she asked me, standing close enough that I could smell her perfume. “Maybe you ought to stay over. You don’t need another DUI.”

  I was tempted to agree. I have been known to be very agreeable, especially with younger female employees.

  I asked her for a rain check. She’s barely older than Andi, my big brain whispered, but most of my big brain’s victories are short-lived. And Sarah and I do have a bit of history, God forgive me.

  I TAKE the utility stairs up to the ninth floor. I have forgotten whose unit it is until I open the door onto the foyer the two units in this tower share and come face to face with a piece of art that looks like somebody did projectile vomiting on the canvas.

  Finlay Rand.

  He’s one of two art-and-antiques dealers living here. Most of what I know about Rand comes from Clara Westbrook, who makes it a point to know everybody and everything connected to the Prestwould.

  “I like Finlay,” she told me once, after a couple of Scotches. “He doesn’t bother anybody, and that’s about all I ask of my neighbors.”

  Rand is a confirmed bachelor, it seems, and Feldman, my nosy neighbor, conjectures that he might be a tad light in the loafers, but Clara said she knows for a fact that he has had overnight guests of the female persuasion.

  “Besides,” she added, “what’s wrong with it if he does like men?”

  Indeed, I said, and we toasted tolerance.

  CRIME TAPE is across the open door to Rand’s apartment. I duck under it and am halfway down the hallway when one of the cops, who looks like he’s about nineteen, intercepts me.

  “It’s OK,” I tell him. “I live here.”

  “You’re …” he looks at his notes. “You’re Finlay Rand?”

  No, I explain to him, as I walk him the rest of the way to the living room—which has the best view of Monroe Park—I live in the building, not this particular unit.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, grabbing my arm.

  A voice booms out behind me.

  “He of all people shouldn’t be here.”

  I turn to see my favorite flatfoot coming out o
f the kitchen.

  “This jerk’s a reporter,” Gillespie tells his young associate. “What the hell did you let him in for? You think this is an open house?”

  I tell Gillespie to get the stick out of his ass, that I’m off duty, just trying to find out what happened. I remind him that Les is practically family.

  “How did they figure it was the ninth floor?” I ask Gillespie.

  “The angle. These guys can figure out that shit. Math majors.” He says it with the same tone he’d have used to say “pedophiles.”

  A lieutenant comes up. He’s Gillespie’s boss even though he looks like he’s barely half his age, and he finds out I live in the building. He asks me if I know anything about Finlay Rand. I tell him that he’s an antiques dealer.

  “Do you know if he knew the victim?”

  “I doubt it. Les wasn’t much into antiques, unless maybe they were old baseball cards.”

  I explain to the lieutenant my connection to Les Hacker.

  “He’s a damn reporter,” Gillespie says.

  I tell the lieutenant that it’s all off the record, that I’m just here because Les is family.

  “I doubt if Finlay was the shooter,” I tell them.

  “How come?” Gillespie asks.

  “He’s on vacation. Won’t be back until Wednesday.”

  Custalow told me. Rand asked maintenance to hold his mail until April 11. Said he was going to some place in the British West Indies for a month. Virgin Gorda, I think. Antiquing must be doing better than newspapers.

  “Well,” the lieutenant says, “somebody apparently broke in. Whoever it was must’ve used a silencer, because nobody heard anything. And he left everything here. Winchester .30-30, spent shell, everything.”

  I WONDER out loud why he didn’t shoot more than once, if he went to all that trouble.

  “C’mere,” Gillespie says, beckoning me to the window.

  He points down to the park.

  “See that big oak tree there?”

  I nod.

  “Well, when the victim got shot, he rolled forward, and that tree was between him and the shooter. He couldn’t hit him, and we guess he didn’t feel like he had a lot of time to waste up here.”

  “Les Hacker didn’t have an enemy in the world,” I tell them, “unless maybe it was some base runner he threw out trying to steal second in 1964.”

  “Well,” the lieutenant says, “I’d say he had at least one, wouldn’t you?”

  I am warned that all this is on the QT. I promise not to publish it, but I don’t promise not to tell Les and Peggy as much as I’ve been able to ferret out about this whole screwed-up affair.

  I’m still there when the chief, L. D. Jones, shows up. His full name is Larry Doby Jones, named after the guy who was the first black player in the American League. Old farts like me, though, we still remember him from high school days as Long Distance Jones, second-team all-state guard from Maggie Walker. We go way back. These days, he looks like he’s smelled spoiled meat every time he sees me. My second time around as night cops reporter has led to some unfortunate conflicts of interest between the chief and me. L. D. wants to keep every single detail of every case buried deep until he can call a press conference and do the we-got-him victory lap. I just want to get the story in the damn paper before I see it in living color on TV.

  I tried to explain this to L. D. once, a couple of years ago. I was still able to draw on a small account of good will from my first stint as night cops reporter, thirty years ago, when the chief and I were both young pups who still could kid each other about my late black father making the two of us one-and-a-half African Americans.

  “Why should I give it to the damn newspaper first?” he said. “You all are a dinosaur. I might as well send it out by Pony Express.”

  He seemed to think that was funny.

  He’s not laughing now.

  “What is he doing here?” he says now by way of greeting.

  The lieutenant tries to explain that I’m a relative, that this is all off the record. Gillespie slips into the kitchen, trying to make his fat ass invisible.

  “I don’t care if the victim was his got-damn daddy!” L. D. says, going into full James Earl Jones mode, bouncing up and down as he gets in the lieutenant’s face. “Nothing’s off the record with this son of a bitch. Get him the fuck out of here.”

  The chief doesn’t even look at me as I leave.

  I PICK up Peggy and Awesome Dude and take them over to the hospital. On the way, I give Peggy the news that Les seems to have been shot from the very building where I sleep, in the currently vacant apartment three floors up.

  “The Prestwould?” she asks. “Those rich bastards don’t go around shooting people.”

  “Rich bastards” is the way Peggy sees my fellow owners and renters. To her, the place seems like the Taj Mahal, with its Oriental carpet in the lobby and full-time staff. I have told her more than once that the place is full of widows on fixed incomes.

  “Well,” she said the last time we had this discussion, “I bet it’s fixed a lot better than mine is. Social Security doesn’t fix it too high, I can tell you that.”

  I assure my mother that the police are on top of it, that they’ve got the weapon and it’s only a matter of time until they find out who shot Les.

  “I hope they find out why, too,” she says. I have to agree that I’m also kind of short on possible reasons.

  “Ought to string the bastard up,” Awesome adds.

  Yeah, I agree. They should.

  At the hospital, I’m surprised the nurses can’t smell the marijuana that permeates my mother’s clothes. The way they look at her, maybe they do. But she and Awesome are both more or less straight.

  We don’t have that much to talk about. Normally, I see Peggy once every week or two. Being together every day for several hours has already emptied the shallow reservoir of chat we might have been storing up.

  Peggy mainly sits and holds Les’s hand, talking to him when he’s coherent and knows who she is, otherwise just sitting there. The TV is on, but she doesn’t seem to be focused on much of anything.

  I asked her once, years ago, why she and Les never married.

  “Honey,” she said, “I don’t want to jinx it. Me and husbands don’t have such a track record, you know?”

  I know. The best adjective you could affix to any of my three stepfathers would have been “negligent.” There were days I prayed for negligence. Oregon Hill in those days was a place where putting bread on the table—even if it was from the past-due-date store—gave you permission to administer tough love to kids, sometimes without the love.

  Now, with the best man in her checkered adult life doing no better than “hanging in there,” my mother looks old. It’s all relative, I guess. She’s almost seventy, and she’s long had a weather-beaten look that she earned wrinkle by wrinkle. But she’s always been lively, even when she was stoned. Now, though, her natural high-beam energy looks like it’s down to about the level of a night-light.

  I’m about to take my third smoke break in the last two hours when Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon, whose voltage has not been diminished in the least, comes vibrating into the room.

  “Hey!” Jimmy says, jolting us out of our torpor. “How’s the old Hacker doing? Ready to catch both ends of a double-header?”

  Les opens his eyes and smiles at the sight of his old friend.

  “Might need to warm up a little,” he manages.

  Jimmy dives into a discussion about the Flying Squirrels, whose home opener is on Thursday.

  “The Rats look good,” he says. “Got some talent coming up. Got some arms.”

  “Rats” is short for “Tree Rats,” which is what Jimmy and other old-timers call the Double-A team that is Richmond’s latest minor-league offering. Even the sports department balks at the tendency to name minor-league ball teams like they’re characters in a Saturday morning kids’ TV show. The sports guys have motives that are more selfish than aesthetic, though.
The problem they have is that you can’t get “Squirrels” into a one-column headline. Management has not yet approved using “Rats” in heads, as in “Rats/edge/Sens/in 10.”

  The Atlanta Braves pulled their Triple-A team out of here three years ago. They moved it to an Atlanta suburb, and we got demoted to Double-A.

  You could see the train wreck coming ten miles away, but nobody put on the brakes. The city and the surrounding counties don’t play well together on a good day. The counties owe most of their growth to white flight, leaving the urban centers to stew in their own juices in a state where it’s almost impossible for cities to incorporate an inch of suburban topsoil. Parker Field evolved into The Diamond back in 1988, the previous time the parent club gave us a fix-it-or-lose-it proposition. Richmond and the counties buried the hatchet and built a new stadium together, but they didn’t bury it forever, or even deep.

  This time, the shakedown came in the midst of what feels like more than just a recession if you’re not a trust-fund baby. When tax money started drying up, regional cooperation was the first thing to go. Several plans failed, some cooked up by greed heads who saw a way to make a buck with blue-sky schemes that promised a hell of a lot more than they could deliver. The city had no money, the counties pleaded poverty, and the R-Braves packed up and left.

  It took about two minutes for the Giants to agree to move their Double-A team here from some beaten-down northeastern city with bigger problems than ours, and now we are the proud host city of the Richmond Flying Squirrels.

  The kids love the mascot, Nutsy, and I guess that’s the whole idea. I just hope they still love him when they’re old enough to actually know the rules of baseball.

  And, of course, the Giants brain trust already is harrumphing about the fact that we’re not stepping lively to build them a new stadium.

  If it weren’t for the game itself, I’d have stopped following baseball a long time ago.