Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  It’s probably not the best time to ask if Roy Haas had his turn at bat with Frannie. Besides, I pretty much know the answer to that one.

  I’m just about ready to get off the phone. Cindy has slipped into something more comfortable, which is nothing at all. Duty calls.

  But Brenda Haas still wants to talk, and I’ve found that some of my best information over the years has come at the end of interviews, when we’re “just talking.” Guards get let down. You remember things you didn’t remember before, probably because you’re not trying so hard to remember.

  “You know,” she says, “I didn’t get any sympathy cards from anybody that knew Roy when he was playing. But I did get the damnedest thing in the mail. I wouldn’t have thought much about it, except for the ones I got before.”

  I motion for Cindy to stop doing what she’s doing, so I can concentrate.

  “The ones you got before?”

  “Let me back up. Three days after Roy died, I got this postcard. There wasn’t anything on it except a bunch of numbers, most of them crossed out. And I remembered Roy getting other ones just like it, now and then, over the years, but maybe with not so many numbers x’ed out. Neither one of us knew what to make of them.”

  “Do you remember the numbers?”

  “Not after all this time. But let me look. I saved all the cards people sent, and I probably put that in with them. Can you call me back?”

  I ask her if a couple of hours later will be OK, and she says that’ll be fine.

  “OK,” I tell Cindy. “As you were.”

  Later, I call Peggy on her cell phone to find out how Les is doing. She doesn’t sound too good. I ask her if she’s been home today. She says she hasn’t, but that Awesome Dude has brought her something to eat. Andi’s been by, too, as has Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon and a couple of people from the Hill.

  “They’re trying to get him up to do some physical therapy,” she says, “but he doesn’t really want to.”

  She holds the phone to Les’s ear so I can tell him to get some physical therapy, dammit, that I’m counting on him. It’s a hell of thing to say, but I have counted on Les. Everybody needs a father figure, even if some of us wait half a lifetime to find one worth keeping.

  Peggy says he nodded his head. I tell her to get some sleep. They have a cot there in the room for her, something they just brought in today. What I imagine my poor mother needs right now is some of that medical marijuana that’s becoming legal everywhere except Virginia.

  “I told them I needed to be with him,” she says. “I don’t trust them to look after him.”

  I argue in vain that they’ve got him pretty much triple-teamed night and day, but I know what she means. I don’t want to think about the unthinkable, but it’s hard not to. A nurse told me one time that, in her experience, people who are slipping away want to do it without anybody watching. It’s the friends and family who want to be there at the end, as if that will make things less painful for us than they naturally should be.

  Cindy is beside me. After I hang up, we just lie there, cuddling, for an hour or so, until it’s time to call Brenda Haas again.

  “I found it,” she says.

  The postcard was, as she thought, among the sympathy cards she got four years ago and put away.

  “Don’t know why I saved them,” she says. “I guess I thought I might take them out and look at them. I hadn’t opened that box again until today.”

  I ask her exactly what the postcard says.

  “It doesn’t say anything. It’s just these numbers. One through nine, like a list down the page. Most of the numbers are crossed out. Just the two and the nine, they’re the only ones not crossed out.”

  I ask her about the postmark.

  “It’s El Dorado Hills. Local. No return address.”

  “And you say you got others, over the years?”

  “Roy did. He showed me a couple of them, but neither one of us could figure out what to make of them. Sometimes, it’d be several years, and then he’d come in with the mail one day and say, like, 'Well, we got another postcard from the numbers man.’ ”

  I ask her if the others had most of the numbers crossed out, too.

  “I’m not sure. It was a long time ago.”

  After my second conversation with Brenda Haas, Cindy lays claim to my attention again. One of these days, I tell her, we’re going to have to spend a night together that doesn’t have an alarm clock at the other end.

  SOMETHING WAKES me up. The clock radio tells me, in numbers several inches high, that it’s 3:17. This normally would be good news. I can get up, take a piss and be back in bed and be asleep again in five minutes. The worst news the digital numbers can give you is that the alarm’s going to go off in ten minutes, because that’s ten minutes you’re never going to get back from the sandman. But 3:17? That’s usually gold.

  Tonight, though, something’s bothering me. I didn’t know it was bothering me until I woke up. Maybe it was a dream, or my subconscious, but that postcard somebody sent to Roy Haas has obviously been hiding in the bushes, waiting to jump my ass. Now it has my full attention.

  Cindy’s sleeping like a rock, snoring lightly, with her back turned to me. How, I wonder, did I ever in my brainless youth think that forty-five-year-old women were too old to be attractive? I slip out of bed, manage to find my pants, shirt and cigarettes in the dark and slip out the door.

  The lobby is empty when I walk through. The clerk, who looks like a college student, is snoozing at the front desk. Outside, it’s so humid that the car windshields are soaked. I follow the concrete walkway, lighting a Camel as I go. I’ve been trying to not smoke around Cindy, because being a smoker these days is right up there with eating raw garlic or not bathing on the how-not-to-get-laid scale. But I always think better when I smoke, and the electric jolt that woke me up requires some Class-A thinking.

  By the time I’ve sucked in two cigarettes’ worth of carcinogens and done a couple of laps around the parking lot, I feel pretty sure I’m on to something. Maybe I can even get back to sleep, as long as I don’t wake up the lovely and seemingly tireless Cindy Peroni.

  First thing on the list tomorrow, even before we crawl back in that rental car and head west for Alabama, is another call to Randall Whitestone Jr.

  Chapter Ten

  SATURDAY

  Randall Whitestone Jr. has no memory of his father ever receiving any kind of postcard with numbers on it. He even seems a little put out that I would wake him at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning to ask him about it. Must be a late sleeper.

  I ask him if his mother’s still living, and if she might have gotten anything like the postcards Roy and Brenda Haas received.

  “I think you’re nuts,” Randy Whitestone says. “What the hell has this got to do with some story about a damn minor-league baseball team?”

  It might mean nothing, I concede, but it might mean a lot. I don’t really want to go any deeper than that right now with Lucky Whitestone’s son.

  Finally, he tells me that his mother is still alive, although she’s married again, and been widowed again.

  “But for God’s sake,” he says, just before he hangs up, “don’t call her at eight o’clock, and don’t tell her I gave you her number. She’s pissed off at me enough as it is.”

  I check the Richmond paper online in the lobby and see that Sarah Goodnight had a full evening pinch-hitting on the cops beat. Two dead, one wounded in a too-usual overnight shootout on the South Side. It happened after one, which means a call to Sarah any time before noon probably would not be appreciated. It also means another freebie for the Internet, another reason for our web masters to crow about how fast our online “product” is growing without further explaining that they aren’t actually making any money giving our shit away.

  A year or so ago, Enos Jackson got a call from some bone-head who wanted to know why we couldn’t get all the good stuff in the paper, the way “those fellas on the Internet do.” Jackson says he used
to try to explain about early deadlines and space and time to the unwashed when they’d ask dumbass questions like that.

  “Now,” he said, when he related the conversation to me, “I just tell them those fellas on the Internet are just smarter than us.”

  IT TAKES us a little more than four hours to drive from Tallahassee to Mobile, then another half hour to find the little town where Phil “Wimpy” Holt was born and died.

  His widow is expecting us. It’s already summer hot by the time we get there a little past two. She takes us out on the back porch, screened to protect us from the mosquitoes, and brings us some iced tea. This far south, they don’t even bother to ask if you want it with sugar. I think we’re at the epicenter of the Diabetes Belt. The house is on a little lake, and the log out in the middle turns out to be Sally. Every community should have a pet alligator. Lurleen Edwards says Sally isn’t really much of a danger “although I wouldn’t advise letting a small dog run loose around here.” I trust her, but I do glance toward the lake every once in a while.

  Lurleen looks to be about seventy. She is attractive and well kept; it’s very easy to see why she was a beauty queen in her prime. And she’s kept herself in shape. There’s a photo on the wall of her finishing a 10K last year. She married again a few years after her husband was killed. Her second spouse, Walter, is out on the golf course that runs through their community. I ask if Walter can outrun an alligator. Cindy kicks me under the table, but Lurleen just laughs.

  “Oh,” she says, as she passes a glass of sugar water to me, “Walter says you don’t really have to be that fast, just faster than your partner. Gators can’t handle but one at a time.”

  She’s a nice lady, and I don’t want to do a bull rush on what I’m here to find out. We spend an hour or so chatting about Wimpy Holt’s career, interrupted occasionally by Cindy asking her about a particularly attractive knickknack or an interesting photograph.

  “They call him Phil around here,” Lurleen says. “He never did like that nickname.” Can’t blame him.

  Finally, though, I get around to that night in 1985, the one that ended Phil Holt’s career as a life form.

  “He didn’t really make that much money in baseball,” his widow says. “And he didn’t really invest it all that well. I’ll be honest with you: we were living in a condominium that was just a teensy bit bigger than this porch and falling behind on the payments.

  “But Phil was the love of my life. When he got killed, it just about took me with him. I never really got over that.”

  She asks me not to use the part about her late first husband’s place in her romantic pecking order, so as not to upset Walter, who obviously has done all money can do to heal a broken heart.

  Normally, I’m a hard-ass on people who tell me something and then don’t want to be quoted. This time, though, I’ll make an exception.

  Phil Holt was, as I’d been told by Jumpin’ Jimmy, managing a Kwik Mart, far from the bright lights of the majors. He’d have been forty-five that year, a good ten years away from the last paycheck he got in the bigs. He didn’t quite make it to the Promised Land of free agency, where a guy who won fifteen games for the Detroit Tigers could pick up a few million by just showing up alive at somebody’s training camp the next March.

  “Oh, he tried all kind of things to make a buck,” Lurleen says. “Amway. A baseball card shop. We finally went flat busted when some fella convinced him to take most of what we had left and plow it into a sports bar. Wimpy’s. Well, you can imagine Phil hated the name, but it was right out by the interstate, where they get lots of traffic, and people still remembered his name. In all the ads and the TV commercials, they’d say, 'Come have a beer with major-league all-star Phil Holt.’

  “Trouble was, Phil had a lot of beers with a lot of people who wanted to shake his hand, and he didn’t spend a lot of time checking the cash register. The fella showed up one day and said they were broke, and there wasn’t any way Phil could prove they weren’t, although we heard later the same fella opened another sports bar up in Huntsville a year or so later. Phil was kind of naïve. And he didn’t have a lot of patience. Walter says he didn’t pay attention to the bottom line, which was true.”

  Lurleen stops and swallows. She seems to be about as close to losing her composure as she’ll ever get.

  “But he was something,” she says, then pauses and waves her well-tanned right arm as if she’s pushing the past away. “Let’s move on.”

  The night it happened was in late October. Phil was working the night shift by himself. The kid who was supposed to come in and close the place down, so Phil could go home at nine, called in sick.

  “I still see that boy. Well, he’s a grown man now, obviously, and he still kind of avoids me, like he knows it might have been him instead of Phil.”

  She shows me the stories from the Mobile paper. “Ex-major leaguer killed in robbery.” “Police seek suspect in Holt murder.” “Man questioned, then released in Holt case.” And then, a year later, “No new leads in Holt killing.”

  “They questioned this one fella, because he was seen in the same block and he had held up a liquor store and done time ten years before, but nothing ever came of it.

  “And then, I think they just stopped looking.”

  The crazy thing, she said, was that almost nothing was taken from the register.

  “He was good about locking the cash up in the safe every couple of hours or so,” she says, “and there wasn’t any sign that whoever shot him even tried to get at that. Phil wouldn’t have gotten himself killed trying to protect the Kwik Mart’s money, I can tell you that. And there wasn’t any sign of a struggle.”

  Eventually, she said the police told her that it might have been some crack addict from Mobile or New Orleans just stopping to get enough money for a rock, and then he just got spooked or something and started shooting.

  It’s past four thirty when I get around to asking her about postcards.

  I describe the kind of cards Brenda Haas says she’s gotten over the years.

  Lurleen gets a strange look.

  “Yes,” she says. With her sweet-tea accent, it comes out “Yay-uss.” “There was a card, like what you’re talking about. It came right after Phil’s death, along with all the sympathy cards, just like she’s talking about. I remember how peculiar it was, with no return address, just postmarked Mobile. And it did have those little numbers on it. It’s just like she said, one through nine. And I think the one was crossed off. I got another one, just like it, maybe two or three years later, and I think that one had two numbers crossed off. Like maybe the one and the five or the six?

  “I think that’s all I got. It wasn’t long after that that Walter and I started seeing each other, and then I moved.”

  She asks me why I’d ask about something like that. I tell her that I’m not sure, but that I will tell her what I know when I know something.

  “If it’s about finding who killed Phil,” she says, lowering her voice as if the neighbors might be listening, “I’ll do anything I can to help catch the son of a bitch.”

  BEFORE WE head out for what we’ve been told is the best fish camp in the general area, I make my call to Lucky Whitestone’s widow back in Tallahassee.

  She’s been expecting my call.

  Thelma Boyle is, I’m estimating, about the same age as Lurleen Edwards. She sounds a little more world-worn, though. She has a voice that sounds like it’s been filtered through a few million cigarettes and a truckload of bourbon.

  But she has what I need.

  “Hell, yeah, I got them cards,” she says. “Still gettin’ ’em.”

  I ask for some more detail. The then-Thelma Whitestone says she got a postcard like the one Phil Holt’s and Roy Haas’s widows got right after Lucky’s fatal hunting accident.

  “But it wadn’t the first one,” she says. “I’d got one a couple of years before that. The one after Lucky got killed, it had two numbers crossed off. I don’t remember about the first
one.

  “But the other ones, after that, they would have more and more numbers marked off.”

  I ask her how many she’s gotten, over the years, and she says maybe six or seven. The last one, she says, was maybe four years ago.

  “I remember that one, because it made me curious,” she says. “It had everything marked off except the two and the nine.”

  She’s heard from her son that I’m doing a story on some minor-league team Lucky played on. She says she can’t really tell me that much, because she wasn’t with him in Richmond.

  “We’d dated and all,” she says, “and we had sort of an understanding, but I never went up there. I’m sorry I can’t tell you much more. Randy can tell you what you need to know.”

  I tell her that she’s been a big help.

  “Are you going to talk to Randy again?” Thelma Boyle asks me.

  I say that I’m not sure.

  “Well, if you do,” she says, “tell him to get his butt over here and mow my damn grass. He promised to do it on Tuesday.”

  I HAVEN’T had anything of note to drink in the last two days. I’ve been so good that I decide to reward myself. Many of my problems over the years have started with me rewarding myself.

  I have a couple of Early Times on the rocks while we wait for a table. Cindy nurses a glass of white wine that, tragically, comes from Alabama. Ever the trouper, she says it’s not bad.

  Another ET at the table and most of the bottle of chardonnay we’re supposed to share, and I’m feeling good, although from the looks Cindy’s giving me, maybe I’m not sounding and looking as good as I feel. She doesn’t try to stop me from having another ET after our fish dinner. She doesn’t even try to stop me from driving when we get in the rental car.