Parker Field

by Howard Owen

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” he said.

  “How about if we kick your ass some more?” Abe said. “Is it OK if we do that?”

  I suggested that maybe he should tell his jailbird father on us, come next visiting day.

  The newborn lamb does not fear the lion. Twelve-year-old boys don’t ever believe the gun is loaded. Abe started walking toward him, telling him if he didn’t put the shotgun down, he was going to take it away from him and shove it up his ass.

  Then, the gun went off. The noise and shock of it knocked me to the sidewalk. I looked up at Abe, halfway up the steps to Billy Ray by then. Somehow, the shot had missed him, and now he was just pissed off.

  Billy Ray Pitts might not have meant to pull the trigger. His father probably left the gun there before he went away and maybe gave Billy Ray a quick lesson in loading and firing it, him being the man of the house and all. But he had this, “Oh, shit. What did I do?” look on his face. He got inside the door, sans shotgun, just ahead of Abe. If Abe had caught him, I don’t think it would have been a positive outcome for either of them.

  Nobody ever got arrested. One of the neighbors called the police, and the shell knocked a hole in the house across the street, but all they could get out of any of us was that Billy Ray had been showing us his father’s gun and it accidentally went off. We might beat the little bastard senseless, but you didn’t collaborate with the cops. And our erstwhile tormentor had been well trained along those lines. He said he tripped on the sidewalk.

  “Yeah,” I remember the cop saying, “maybe seven or eight times, it looks like.” But they let it, and us, go.

  It was the last time Peggy ever hit me. Peggy never planned corporal punishment; it just happened. When she came home from work, after hearing the story from two neighbors before she’d even gotten in the door, she just dropped the bag of groceries on the floor and started boxing my ears. I let her, protecting myself as best I could. Then, she wrapped her arms around me so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  “You little shit,” she said. “If something happened to you, I’d die.”

  I once stumbled on a quote from George Bernard Shaw. I looked it up the other day:

  “If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.”

  Peggy never read George Bernard Shaw, but they had the same philosophy on child rearing.

  Abe Custalow and I survived our childhoods and have muddled through what probably is the majority of our adulthoods, wandering in and out of each other’s lives. Bringing him to share the apartment has worked out well for both of us, seldom more so on my behalf than right now.

  I PHONED Finlay Rand after I got home last night. He seemed to be in what Clara Westbrook or one of our other Prestwould grand dames would call “a state.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “He’s going to kill me. I know he is.”

  I told Rand all I’ve learned about who Raymond Gatewood has and hasn’t been talking to. It didn’t seem to appease him.

  “And the paper keeps running all those stories. Why can’t this just go away? And why do they always have to use my name?”

  I’m not very long on patience with Mr. Rand these days. I reminded him that the latest story ran because Les Hacker died, and that it was essential to explain why Les’s death was a big deal, especially to Mr. Gatewood, who is now facing life in prison or worse. I reminded him that this was a great personal sorrow to me. I refrained from telling him to go fuck himself.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, getting a grip. “And I am sorry for your loss. I didn’t realize. Where can I send flowers?”

  I gave him Peggy’s address and told him, once again, that I didn’t think he had anything to worry about. Custalow came in while I was still on the phone. He was frowning, and he had a couple of videotapes in his hands.

  Rand was still talking when I hung up.

  “That guy’s nuts,” I said. Abe just walked over to the TV.

  “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  He said that something was nagging him, right from the beginning, about the shooting.

  “They had the video of the guy in the wig and the sports jacket, leaving the building,” he said. “But where did he come from? When did he get in?”

  I said that I assumed he got in the same way he got back out again. Somebody’s always leaving that back door cracked open, either accidentally or on purpose.

  “Yeah. I know. I have to close it about every other day. But we videotape that basement door every day, not just the day Les got shot.”

  I thought about this for a few seconds. Then the twenty-watt light bulb that powers my thimble-size brain flickered on.

  “Yeah,” Abe said. “So, if we assume the guy got in the same way he got out, that would be on the videotape, too, right?”

  I nodded my head and wondered why Richmond’s finest didn’t figure this out. Or why the inestimable law firm of Marcus Green and Ex-Wife didn’t think of it. Well, hell. I didn’t either. It took the cranial capacity of Abraham Custalow to deduce the obvious.

  He went back two days on the tapes of the basement door, he said. He never saw anyone vaguely resembling Raymond Gatewood come in.

  “But this is what I did find.” One of the videotapes was for April 3, two days before Les was shot. He put it in and fast-forwarded it to a certain spot, then stopped it.

  “Watch this.”

  He started the tape again, at about double speed. It was like watching paint dry. But then I saw someone enter the door. Abe rewound, and we watched it at real speed.

  He ran it twice, just so I could make sure I was seeing what I was seeing.

  “Son of a bitch,” was all I could say.

  I SMOKED, drank and slept on it last night after talking to Abe. Didn’t get to bed until after two.

  Today, I went for a walk, had a late breakfast at Perly’s and then went into the office just to clear my head. It’s definitely time to have another discussion with Chief L. D. Jones, and another one with Green and Kate. But I’m stalling. Knowledge is power, and it almost gives me a hard-on to have this kind of information and not share it with anyone. I hoard information the way the Koch brothers hoard money, not wanting to let anyone have a slice until I can present the whole package with a nice bow on top, so everybody says what a smart boy I am.

  This can be a problem, but it’s my problem.

  Sarah comes in while I’m looking stuff up. Ed Chenowith isn’t in today, but with Sarah’s help I’m able to find much of what I was looking for.

  “Hurry up,” she says, and I know she’s not talking about my little search. “Wheelie’s got me covering city hall and your beat, too, and he says Grubby won’t sign off on overtime. He said I could take comp time later, and then he gave me some bullshit speech about working for myself, not wanting to wake up one day and realize I’d just punched a clock. I wanted to punch him.”

  I tell her they used to work that scam on me, too, although they did pay for overtime back then. They’re supposed to now, but in our business-friendly state, your employer has the right to work you like a dog and hire somebody else when you don’t roll over and fetch.

  I also tell her, though, that sometimes you really do have to play their game to get where you’re going. If you work overtime for free and win a Pulitzer Prize, you can go to the copier, pull your dress up, pull your panties down, hop up and photocopy your bottom. Then you can take the photocopy, march up to Grubby’s office, hand it to him and tell him to kiss it.

  “Nice image,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’d probably get him excited.”

  “It’d do it for me,” I say.

  “Oh,” Sarah says. “I thought you’d retired.”

  “Just trying to flaunt my self-control.”

  I ask her if she and Mark Baer are still an item.

  “An item? How old did you say you were, anyhow? Yeah, we sti
ll hang out, you know.”

  It’s like talking to Andi. Whenever I try to delicately extract information from my daughter about her boyfriend, roommate, drinking buddy, whatever, Thomas Jefferson Blandford V, she gets as slippery as a greased eel.

  “What are you doing, anyhow?” she asks, looking over my shoulder.

  I explain as much as I can without giving it all away.

  “I’m sorry about that guy, Les, by the way,” she said, putting one of her warm hands on my neck. The slight connection of bare skin to bare skin is like an electric shock, enough to trigger a flashback. Must be age appropriate. Must be age appropriate. “I met him once. He was with you at a Squirrels game, I think. He seemed like a really good guy.”

  I assure her that he was. It is too much information to add that he was the closest thing to a father I ever had, but I say it anyhow.

  She gives out the kind of “awww” that women seem to emit when they see kittens, babies or orphaned fire victims. It’s a multipurpose sound apparently indicating empathy of one kind or another. She hugs me. I wasn’t fishing for one, honest.

  I thank her for her concern. She asks me when the funeral is. I tell her and assure her that she won’t be written out of my book of life if she doesn’t come. She tells me to shut up, but in a nice way.

  She walks away. It is a pleasure to watch Sarah Goodnight walk away, especially on casual Saturday, when jeans are permitted.

  Someone clears his throat behind me. I don’t know how long James H. Grubbs has been standing there. Not too long, I hope.

  “So,” he says “are you back with us? Or have you decided to spend the rest of your working career, however long that may be, chasing ballplayers?”

  I remind Grubby that I am, after all, on my own dime now, burning up what little vacation time I’ve accrued since my last luxurious sojourn, which I spent on Andy Peroni’s houseboat on Lake Anna. It’s moored just below the nuclear plant. Even if the kids didn’t pee in the water, it’d still be warm.

  “Nevertheless, we do expect you back in the not-too-distant future,” he says. “Your beat isn’t covering itself.”

  “No, it’s being covered by a kid who’s still naïve enough to work for free.”

  “We pay our employees well. Some of them, too well.” He gives me his best gimlet-eyed laser beam.

  Grubby doesn’t want to know his newsroom managers are running afoul of the National Labor Relations Board, which has succeeded in spanking our ass on occasion when some of our corporate types have gone beyond even the Pluto-distant boundaries of what is and isn’t allowed in our right-to-work paradise.

  I can imagine his conversation with Wheelie re: Sarah Goodnight.

  Wheelie: If she covers night cops and city hall, we’re going to have to pay her overtime.

  Grubby: We don’t pay overtime.

  Wheelie: Well, how are we going to do it?

  Grubby: That’s up to you.

  Grubby (unspoken): Just don’t tell me about it.

  “At any rate,” Grubby continues now, “it won’t be a problem for very much longer, one way or the other.”

  “One way or the other?”

  “One more week,” he says, holding up his index finger. “Then you’re back.”

  Message received. For some reason, journalism schools—excuse me, mass communications schools—are still turning out bright-eyed, hungry newshounds who would do my job for half of what I require.

  I might be back with a story that’ll knock your dick off, I want to tell him.

  KATE is in her makeshift quarters at Marcus Green’s office. It’s just up the street, and I thought I might be able to catch the great man himself. But it’s a fine day for golf, and I know Marcus is now a jovial, backslapping member of one of the local country clubs that would only have let him in as a caddy in the not-too-distant past.

  What I want to know is why Kate is spending a fine Saturday indoors.

  “I’m researching,” she says. “Marcus can sell ice to the Eskimos, but he’s not so good on dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s. That, I can do.”

  She’s looking for an angle, some way to make Raymond Gatewood a little less guilty than he appears. And if he’s found guilty, a way to make him seem as crazy as possible. She’s looking for precedents.

  I can’t bear to let Kate work this hard for no good reason. I tell her who didn’t come in the basement door for at least two days before the shooting.

  She rewards me by throwing a rather hefty law book in my direction.

  “How long have you known all this?”

  “Not long,” I say, picking it up and handing it back to her. “And you really shouldn’t be lifting something that heavy.” Let alone throwing it.

  I wonder aloud why neither she nor Marcus had thought to check on that.

  She throws her hands up.

  “Hell, I don’t know. We should have. We’re just not as smart as you, I guess.”

  I let her off the hook by telling her that checking the previous days’ tapes wasn’t exactly my idea.

  “So he hadn’t come in the basement door for two days before this happened? But maybe he was in there for several days. Or maybe he came in the front door.”

  I remind her that it’s a little harder for a guy who looks every bit as homeless as he is to get past our crack security guards, let alone have a fob or get himself buzzed into the building. I also remind her that it didn’t appear that anyone had been there for very long before the shooting. No food strewn about. The place wasn’t trashed. The toilets were flushed. No one had taken a dump on the Oriental rug. And there’s something else, something that didn’t occur to me until Custalow showed me that tape. When Awesome began living at Peggy’s place, she and Les soon became aware that he had to start becoming more intimate with soap and water. The English basement smelled like holy hell for a month after he got there. By the time I walked in on the cops inspecting Finlay Rand’s place, it smelled like I imagine Finlay Rand’s place always smells, like a tastefully done French whorehouse. No eau de bum.

  It’s time to tell Kate who was seen coming in the basement door of the Prestwould on April 3.

  “Are you kidding me?” she says. “Really?”

  Yes, I tell her. Really.

  “Well,” she says, “maybe it’s time to have another chat with your good friend L. D. Jones.”

  “He’d probably just tell me to go fuck myself.”

  “I imagine people do that all the time.”

  I tell Kate that I’d rather wait a day or two. The cops aren’t going to turn Raymond Gatewood loose on the flimsy evidence I can show them on the videotape. They don’t want to turn him loose at all.

  “This is bullshit,” she says. “You just want to do it all yourself, don’t you?”

  “I just want to have something a little more solid to go on.”

  “Nah. Nah. I know you. You’re going to be Mister Solo.”

  I remind her that I’ve already told her more than she was ever going to figure out on her own—what happened to the other Vees, who did and didn’t come in through the Prestwould’s basement door in the two days leading up to Les’s shooting.

  I explain that the only reason her client has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting out from under Les Hacker’s murder is because of my unpaid, vacation-burning dedication.

  She is quiet, which is unusual for Kate.

  “OK,” she says at last. “You’ve earned the right to say that, although I believe we eventually would have thought of looking at those other tapes. But we need to bring the police in.” “One more day,” I tell her, holding my index finger in the air, Grubby-like.

  I walk back to the paper in the remnants of a beautiful spring afternoon. The Squirrels are home tonight, and it’d be great to take in a few innings, at least until the night chill rolled in to remind us that it’s still April. But I have promises to keep.

  I’m to be over at Peggy’s by six, so we can lock in on some of the memorial plans. Monday�
��s just two days away. One of Les’s brothers, a few years younger, is flying in from Wisconsin, along with his daughter. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing off the hook at Peggy’s. It appears that Les knew approximately half the damn town, and now we’re wondering if the Baptist church will be big enough to hold everybody.

  I made sure that I called Buck McRae to tell him the sad news. He said he was coming up. I tried to dissuade him, and it seemed to offend him.

  “Whoever shot Les,” I explained to the ancient right fielder, “might still be out there. I have reason to believe that.”

  “Bullshit,” Buck said. “I’m coming. It’s like they say, if we’re afraid, the terrorists win.”

  I start to ask him what the hell this has to do with terrorists, but maybe he’s right. Whoever goes around killing old minor-league baseball players is as much a terrorist as the late, hell-residing Osama bin Laden.

  I told Buck that he and whoever drives him up here are welcome to stay with Abe and me.

  “I can drive my own damn self up,” he said. “But I thank you for the invitation.”

  I tell him to be careful.

  “I didn’t get this far,” he said before he hung up, “by being careful.”

  BEFORE I go over to Peggy’s, though, I need to do some more research. There is still a lot of “why?” to unravel.

  I’m back at my desk, scribbling on the pad next to me, collecting printouts and going back over notes from my odyssey so far. I am, in short, trying to make sense out of lunacy.

  I’ve written down lots of names: All the 1964 Vees and their survivors, then August Harshman, Eleanor Harshman Flynn Fairchild, Dairy Flynn. I cross out Dairy and write in his real name.

  I used to pass the time in windbag legislative sessions and later waiting for the next East End shooting by doing the crossword puzzle and then the word jumble. You take six or seven random letters and try to make the biggest word you can out of them. I got pretty good at it. I got so it was almost like instinct.

  Now, looking at Dairy Flynn’s given name, it hits me.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Chapter Eighteen