by Howard Owen
Anthony Bonesteel talks awhile more about his brother, filling me in on his childhood and the knee injury that kept him from being a big leaguer.
“The year they brought him up in September, it was 1962. They’d already clinched the pennant and was going to play the Giants in the World Series. We all went to the stadium, must have been twenty of us, aunts and uncles, Mom and Pop were still alive then, cousins. And Paulie got to pinch hit in the seventh inning, and he got a single, a frozen rope to right field. But he was already too old, and he was damaged goods, with that knee.”
I ask Anthony if he’d ever heard his sister-in-law, or Paul himself, say anything about getting some kind of postcard with numbers on it. He says he’s never heard of such a thing, and asks me why the hell I asked such a stupid-ass question. I don’t see much point in telling him about the scorekeeper, at least not right now.
I TRY the number in Dawson, Georgia, again. This time, a somewhat frazzled-sounding woman answers.
“Crystal Scoggins?”
“Yeah. Who is this?”
I try to explain. Although Rabbit Larue’s daughter seems to have no hearing issues, I have trouble getting my idea across to her.
“Is this going to cost me anything?” she asks, “ ’cause if it is, you can hang the hell up right now. Jackson Lee! Get off that coffee table!”
I assure her that I’m not trying to get money from her, and also assure her that she won’t be getting any from me. She seems to accept this break-even proposition.
She explains that she’s looking after her grandchildren and has to stop occasionally to yell at them and threaten them with various forms of corporal punishment.
Finally, I get her talking about Rabbit.
“Daddy was something,” she says. “Momma said he didn’t ever want to do nothin’ but play baseball. He tried his hand at this and that after he quit playing, but his heart just wasn’t in it. I was just a baby when he quit, and after that I just remember him sitting around the house a lot, and just disappearing for days at a time, whenever the mood struck him.”
He was forty-eight when he took his last trip. Crystal, who was then married to her first husband, was living in a trailer on the edge of Larue’s property. She said neither she nor her mother thought that much about it until Rabbit had been gone for three days.
“He was always back in three days or less,” she says. “When it got up to five, we called the sheriff.”
Rabbit Larue just disappeared. No note, no trace, nothing.
“There was all kinds of rumors,” Crystal says. “Some of the meaner folks said he’d had a girlfriend off somewhere and had left to be with her. Like Momma didn’t feel bad enough as it was. But we never believed that. For sure, he wasn’t no angel, but he never hit us unless we deserved it, and he did the best he could.
“And he wouldn’t of been the first fella to disappear on the AT, won’t be the last.”
It takes me about forty-five minutes to get to what has become the big question.
“You mean, like a regular postcard?” Crystal says. “With little numbers on the back?”
I tell her that’s what I’m talking about.
“Yeah.… Yeah. That’s funny. Momma did get one like that. She might not of remembered it, except she got one just like it, maybe three years later, and then two or three times more over the years, before she died, back in 2007.”
I ask her if any of the numbers were marked through.
“Yeah,” she says. “She’d show ’em to me, and it seems like, thinking back, that there was more numbers crossed through every time.”
Any of those postcards, Crystal assures me, would have been thrown away long ago.
“We just went up in the attic and pitched everything. It was just junk, anyhow, and we ain’t got anywhere to store any of it in the apartment.”
Crystal Scoggins is again distracted by her grandchildren, who seem to be doing something untoward with the cat. I thank her and hang up.
CUSTALOW’S IN the living room when I come in from my afternoon telethon.
I tell him what I know.
“And you think all those guys dying and disappearing is connected to Les being shot?”
“What would you think?”
“Well,” he says, “it does seem like somebody had it in for the Vees. But it doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
No, it doesn’t.
I have a couple of High Lifes with Custalow and then make my final call of the day, this one in person.
I have to buzz twice before Finlay Rand answers his door. He thanks me for coming. His manners are as immaculate as his dress pants, starched shirt and silk sports jacket. I imagine Rand wakes up crisp.
He offers me some white wine, troubling himself to tell me exactly what part of the Loire Valley it comes from. He’s using crystal. From sad experience during my conjugal days with Kate, I’ve learned that people don’t like it when you break their crystal, so I move with great caution. I have to admit, though, the wine does not suck.
After a brief but tedious amount of chitchat, Rand gets to the point.
“I think somebody is after me,” he says, taking a small sip and setting his glass down.
“After you?”
“You know, I told you—asked you—not to put my name in the paper. And now, I’ve started getting these calls.”
I wait.
“Whoever it is says he’s a friend of that man, the one who broke into my apartment. He said that if I don’t drop the charges against the man, he’ll make sure something bad happens to me.”
That’s ridiculous, of course. Whatever grievances Finlay Rand might have against Raymond Gatewood pale in comparison to attempted murder, which will move on up to murder if Les doesn’t pull through. And any friend of Gatewood’s would know whose apartment he broke into, with or without verification in the newspaper. A visit to or phone call from Gatewood would do the trick.
I explain this to Rand, who is far from mollified.
I ask him if he’s called the cops about this.
“No,” he says after a brief hesitation. “The man on the phone said I’d better not do that, either.”
I tell Rand that I know Gatewood’s defense attorney, and that I can ask her to have a chat with the accused, perhaps emphasizing that any future threats that can be traced back to him will only make his sorry plight worse. I can also check and see who has visited him at the city lockup.
“Well,” he says, “if you think that would help.”
Despite the fact that you could keep meat in here, Rand is sweating a little. I see the little half-moons on the armpits of that fresh shirt and wonder how many of those he goes through a day.
He clears his throat.
“Do they think, uh, do they think they’ll be able to wrap everything up soon?” he asks.
I tell him I’m not sure. I mention some of the more troublesome aspects of the case against Mr. Gatewood, such as his seeming lack of either the want-to or the wits to do what was done to Les. I don’t mention the fate of the 1964 Richmond Vees starting lineup.
Maybe, I say, he was telling the truth when he claimed somebody left that jacket on a park bench.
“Perhaps so,” Rand says. “But he certainly seems to have some malevolent friends.”
Rand shows me a couple of paintings he’s just bought from an estate sale.
“They were an absolute steal,” he says, and I’ll have to take his word for it. He says they’re abstract. They must be, because I wouldn’t know whether they were upside down or sideways. Kate always said my idea of high art was Dogs Playing Poker, but I can appreciate a velvet Elvis.
I promise to have a quiet chat with the defense attorney. Rand surprises me when he says he imagines the fact that she’s my ex-wife might carry some weight.
“It’s a small town, Mr. Black,” he says to my unasked question. I think I see the hint of a smirk, but maybe it’s just a nervous tic. Well, if Finlay Rand is smart enough to afford the Prestwould and silk
jackets, he can’t be as dumb as he seems.
Chapter Twelve
MONDAY
Normally, even if I weren’t on the world’s shortest sabbatical, I wouldn’t be here today. My days off, since I got busted back to night cops, are Sunday and Monday. My Saturday nights often don’t start until Sunday morning. But I try to make up for lost time.
Today, though, Ed Chenowith says he has some news for me. Ed once worked in the morgue, when we had one. Now, he’s a researcher in the newsroom. They let the whole library staff go, then hired Ed back, at two-thirds what he was making before, to, as he so eloquently puts it, “find shit.” He felt guilty about taking a job from the people who gutted his department, knowing the rest of his former associates were drawing unemployment or working at Walmart, but mortgage payments trump conscience every time. Ed’s good at what he does, though. He knows how to go deep, miles below the Google searches and Wikipedia biographies that pass for research among the reporting class these days.
It’s funny. We used to have to work the phones harder than a telemarketer on commission. That’s how you “found shit.” Now, most of it’s at our fingertips. The only problem, and I’ve seen it happen even with the talented Sarah Goodnight, is that younger reporters aren’t really communicating, getting to know their sources. Their sources are websites. I wonder often, sometimes out loud, if people younger than forty are losing the ability to communicate via eye contact and vocal chords.
And, of course, they wonder when antiques like me are going to stop boring them to death with stories about how it used to be before the earth’s crust cooled.
“How old are you, anyhow?” one smart-ass metrosexual asked me one day last month when I was fascinating myself by giving a brief, unsolicited history of pneumatic tubes.
Still young enough, I reminded him, to kick his ass. Unfortunately, he took my jovial riposte seriously, and I had some ’splainin’ to do to the HR folks, whose job it is to correct our antediluvian tendencies.
I’m surprised to see Sarah also in on a Monday. Since she’s covering for me until I finish with the Vees project, she should be doing something worthwhile today rather than working.
“Oh,” she says, sighing, “I still have to get that damn feature done, the one on the ninety-year-old identical twins.”
“Yeah, there might be a time element on that one.”
“They could go any minute,” she says. “I mean, ninety probably seems old even to you.”
When I give her a dirty look, I see the hint of a smile.
“It’s really cruel to torture old people,” I tell her.
“I know. But I just can’t help myself. It’s just too easy.”
Ed Chenowith is sitting in the little broom-closet office they’ve made for him. The library used to be on a separate floor. When they brought Ed back, it seemed easier to put him in the newsroom. But he wanted to be able to shut the door from time to time, because reporters were asking him to do everything but wipe their butts. The last straw was when Wheelie found out the sports guys were leaning on him to set up a program for their fantasy baseball league. So Wheelie took one of the old one-on-one interview rooms and stuck him in there. He can lock the door from the inside.
Ed’s not very chatty, but he and I get along well. I used to spool my own microfilm reels, which qualified me, compared to most of my compatriots, for the Nobel Prize for Not Being Aggressively Needy.
“That guy,” he says, “the one down in Florida? I think I found what you need.”
Joaquin “Jack” Velasquez, the 1964 Vees’ slick-fielding, banjo-hitting first baseman, was from Mexico. He returned there not too many years after his season in Richmond, where a .288 batting average and a nimble glove were not enough to offset a mere five home runs.
“He was somethin’ diggin’ balls out of the dirt,” Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon said in his assessment of Velasquez. “But you know, good fielding first basemen, they’re like tall midgets.”
What Ed Chenowith has found is what is almost certainly the last chapter of our former first sacker’s checkered life.
Velasquez, according to the records Ed’s been able to locate, moved back to the States sometime in the early nineties.
He was arrested twice in the Fort Myers area, once for possession and once for possession with intent to distribute.
“He got sent back after he did twelve months in prison.
“But then, he must have come back again.”
This time, in 1996, Jack Velasquez wasn’t arrested. He was sliced and diced.
“They made the ID based on a tattoo,” Ed says, showing me the documentation. “Part of him, his torso apparently, washed up somewhere on the Gulf coast, and they found a tattoo of his Social Security number on his chest, from back when he was playing ball here, I guess. They never found the rest, but they were pretty sure it was Velasquez.”
Yeah, odds are you wouldn’t tattoo somebody else’s SSN on your body. Putting your own number there also seems counterintuitive, though. I mean, you couldn’t remember it?
“So, did anybody ever get arrested for impersonating a butcher?”
Ed shrugs.
“Apparently not. There didn’t seem to be a lot of follow-up, from what I can find.”
I tell Ed he’s found plenty and promise to buy him a drink sometime.
“I could use it,” he says, then goes on to vent a little about Mark Baer.
“The son of a bitch,” he says, lowering his voice, “wants me to go county by county, locality by locality, through the whole state and get numbers on all the people who were arrested for going more than ninety miles an hour last year. I think he’s trying to win the Pulitzer for highway safety coverage.”
I can relate. Baer used to ask me, every time he went anywhere on company business, how to fill out an expense form. Again, aggressive neediness.
So, I’m thinking maybe Velasquez decided to become a drug entrepreneur, and maybe he ran into some guys who had their MBAs in evil. Poor Jack Velasquez. Good field, no hit, no brain.
And then there were two. Les and Buck McRae, whom I’m going down to North Carolina to see tomorrow.
Time to talk to the chief.
I call Peachy Love, police flack and former reporter, and ask her what my chances are of talking with our police chief, Larry Doby Jones, sometime today.
“I don’t know,” she says, but I tell her that I have some evidence that Raymond Gatewood might not be Les’s shooter.
“Oh,” Peachy says, “he’s not going to want to hear that. He hates that shit.”
Well, I can sympathize. The leader of Richmond’s finest loves to call press conferences to announce the department’s latest nab, and sometimes he calls them a wee bit too early, which leads to an egg facial.
Still, the truth will out. Or it will if you give it a little help.
“Tell him I’m getting ready to write a story about how Gatewood couldn’t have done it.”
That’s a bit of a stretch, but it gets Peachy’s attention.
“OK. Let me run it by him. Damn, Willie. You don’t give us much of a break over here, do you?”
I remind her of how it was, and is, on the other side, something she experienced as our first African-American female cops reporter. Her memory just needs a little jogging.
“Message received,” she says, “but it’s still not going to sit well with the chief.”
I remind her that it’s not my job to please L. D. Jones. I also ask her if she can check and see who, if anyone, Gatewood has called while he’s been locked up. She asks me why and I say I can’t tell her, other than it’s not for publication in the newspaper.
“Anyhow,” she says, lowering her voice and shifting gears, “when are you going to stop by for a little nip? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
Peachy Love is a fine woman, and we’ve shared the sheets on occasion. We probably will again, if Mr. Johnson is willing, but not right now. I tell her I’m seeing someone at the moment.
“Seeing someone? Like going steady? Are you going to ask her to the prom?”
“You seem amused.”
“Well, I’m just goin’ on history here.”
I’m reminded of what Jumpin’ Jimmy Deacon said the other night, when we were watching the Squirrels’ home opener. The Curve had a leadoff hitter who managed to get himself picked off first base twice in one three-inning stretch.
Jimmy, ever the philosopher, shook his head.
“Those that’s too dumb for history are condemned to repeat themselves,” he said.
Yeah, I know what Peachy’s talking about. I do sometimes wonder if I’m condemned to repeat myself.
Still, as Peggy once said when the fifth or sixth surrogate parent of my action-packed childhood had moved in and then moved on, “You’ve got to try or die.”
Peachy calls me back thirty minutes later and says the chief will see me in an hour.
At two, I’m waiting in Jones’s outer office. I think about how well we used to get along. We could have a drink or two, commiserate over lost wives and mourn simpler times.
Fate, though, has intervened. Because I’ve been involved in freeing a couple of people the Richmond police had already trotted before the cameras as “case closed,” things are a little testier these days.
When I’m ushered in, he doesn’t get up, doesn’t even speak to me. After I’ve helped myself to the only chair in the room his butt’s not occupying, he finally seems to notice my presence.
“What do you want?”
I explain, as succinctly as I can, about all those dead ex-ballplayers, taken before their time in a variety of manners, some mildly suspicious. I don’t mention the threatening phone call Finlay Rand got. I’ll wait for Peachy to check that one out, plus I want to talk to Gatewood himself.
If I was expecting L. D. to jump up and pin a citizen-helper award on me or make me an honorary member of the Richmond police department, I am bitterly disappointed.
“So what?” is Chief Jones’s assessment of my accumulated knowledge. “So a bunch of old ballplayers died. Some of them were close to a natural death anyhow. Didn’t one of them have a heart attack? And the one out hiking, he could’ve had one, too.”
