Dying to Play

by Mark Zubro

  “It’s tough to get people to take action. The town disputes have gone more from feuding sides to most everyone being frightened of Hopper and the police. The few people left to fight live in fear. Knecht kind of stepped into the middle of all this. He wouldn’t play ball with Hopper so they decided they wouldn’t let him play ball in town, but Knecht had plenty of money, and he did bring lots of jobs.” He shook his head, sat back up, and winced again. “I came here to warn you that you’re in danger.”

  “What do you think they’ll try to do?”

  “I heard about the bus. I don’t think they’d stop at anything.”

  “They arrested Hempil.”

  “I feel bad for Edwin. He’s been the butt of the town’s cruelty since he was in first grade. Edwin is harmless.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “I got a ride from Malcolm Dowley from the team. He’ll drive me back. We’re buddies.”

  SATURDAY 9:30 P.M.

  Around nine-thirty, one of the bed and breakfast owners knocked. He said there was a call for me on his cell phone.

  It was Judge Joshua Hempil. He wanted my help with his son.

  “Has he been released?”

  “No. Would you please come to my home?”

  I remembered the pathetic progress the old man had made with his cane, and his equally pitiable son. He gave me his address.

  Duncan would stay at the computer. Neither Georgia nor Jerry were back from their separate forays to help or get information. Again I told Duncan where I was going. Getting into my car, while driving over and parking, and while approaching the house I once again eyed every possible corner and hiding place on the porch and in the yard. I saw nothing that aroused my suspicion.

  Judge Hempil lived in a vast Victorian home on the west side of a square filled with trees supplying acres of blessed shade. The park had ancient oaks and newly planted elms scattered over about a quarter acre with a white-painted gazebo in the middle.

  I parked in the driveway. The judge answered the door and asked me in. He led me down a wainscoted hallway to a set of doors on the left. We entered a library with a thick, rose-patterned rug and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on three walls. Tall windows that started near the floor told me this was an old home.

  The air was stuffy and still but not as brutally humid as it was outdoors. He used his cane to help himself limp to one of two leather-covered easy chairs near a six-foot fireplace that took up most of the fourth wall. He sat and motioned me to the other chair.

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “If I can do anything, I’d be happy to try.”

  “You already have.”

  “Is your son still in jail?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  He heaved a great sigh. His hands trembled. He clutched them around the head of his cane. He said, “It has not been easy for me. Edwin was a child who came late to my wife and me.”

  “Where is Mrs. Hempil?”

  “She passed some years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was just after Edwin was born. She shouldn’t have had another child at her age.” He wiped his face with his hand and after a pause continued. “I married her and came here to practice law fifty years ago. She was on the opposite side of the town faction from Rotella and Hopper. It’s a crazy town. There’s no need for the madness. As the old song says, the peace for their children they could take at their will.”

  He sighed. “They never have. But I was a good lawyer and navigated the town politics tolerably well.” He spoke in a deep, low voice that seemed to reverberate in the room.

  “I was a good judge, but it’s been years since I was on the bench. The politics in town has gotten more strident and more angry in the past few years. I guess our little town isn’t too different from the rest of the country, but here the old town feuds fueled the animus.”

  Another sigh. “But I was old and thought I was well out of it. I was wrong. And Edwin couldn’t seem to shut up.” He shook his head. “Edwin is a good boy. Strange, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone, ever. He never has. He never would.” He wiped his face again, regripped the head of his cane. He stared into the empty fireplace.

  “But they arrested him.”

  “Yes, they need a villain for the piece, and they decided it would be my son. They will let him go, however.”

  “Without being charged?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “All I have to do is deliver you to them. That seems like a good trade to me.”

  I heard the ka-ching of two shot guns. Charlie Hopper and two big burly guys entered the room. I saw the stun gun in a minion’s hand and felt the electric charge for a second or two before falling unconscious.

  SATURDAY 11:57 P.M.

  “You’re going to be arrested,” I said.

  Charlie Hopper gave me a pleasant grin. “For what?”

  We were in a room built of cinderblocks with two small casement windows high up on the wall on my left, through which I could see black nothing. My arms were pulled behind me, and I was handcuffed to a kitchen chair by both arms and both legs. My shoulders ached from the strain.

  I searched the space around. There was a set of stairs going up ten feet to my left. The room itself had bare dim lightbulbs spaced high up on walls that stretched into the distance to the right. There were lots of tables with containers of various sizes and shapes and scientific-looking equipment.

  “Ah, my dear young man. You don’t get it, do you?”

  “I guess not. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  He put half his butt on the edge of a wooden workbench and swung a leg free while propping himself on one foot. He was still smiling.

  “Now some of the stuff I’m making, I wouldn’t be arrested for, not even if I was caught taking a bath in it. The placebos for the public were harmless. Those meds for people like Skeen’s, well sure, most of those were illegal. That took finesse and expertise. Rich athletes can afford the best. Toward the end, Skeen was paying twenty thousand a month. I was supplying him long before he got here. For the drugs to mask illegal drugs, the key is my nerds doing the manufacturing needed to be ahead of the nerds doing the testing. There’s always chem majors from Minneapolis to Madison who need to make a little money.”

  “Skeen’s wife and his girlfriend have blabbed, and we have Czobel’s notes on what he found and who he got to talk to him, and a video of Skeen being injected.”

  “I’ll never see the inside of a jail. Am I on the video?” He answered his own question. “No. And some dead reporter’s notes? Who cares? He can’t testify. He’s delightfully dead.” He chortled. “It’ll never be enough, and it certainly won’t matter to your corpse.”

  “You really think you’ll get away with multiple murders?”

  “People around here are really stupid and the sheriff is an old buddy. What could go wrong?” Charlie shifted his butt on the bench and smiled some more. “You’re the reason we had to kill anybody. Czobel wanted me to play ball with him. I was not going to lose a lucrative business because of him. He knew too much. He had to die. We figured we could pin everything on you.”

  “Where’d you hide Czobel’s body?”

  “In a cooling shed underground here.”

  “And all the pills in Czobel’s room?”

  “We wanted to make him look bad. Make it look like he was a drug dealer.”

  “Why move the body at all?”

  “Are you really that dim? It was a bonus that you stumbled into the condo a few minutes after we killed him. Once you and Murray escaped, we wanted a way to implicate you. It would have been better that night, but you were all randy with Campbell. He was in the way.”

  “A whole lot of innocent people could have died in that bus crash, not just me.”

  “Yes, well, not every plan is perfect. We figured the crash would destroy the team as well.”

  “You were prepared to be a mass mu
rderer?”

  “I didn’t do it,” Charlie said. “Hempil did.”

  “Why?”

  “Poor Edwin would do a great deal to end the hell of his life. Unfortunately, like so many things he did, he screwed it up. It was supposed to be another prank, and no, he didn’t do any of the others. The brake line was supposed to be cut, and they wouldn’t get out of the parking lot, or at the most have a fender bender at the first intersection.”

  “Or run over an innocent pedestrian.”

  “Well, that didn’t happen.”

  “And you let them drive away?”

  “I didn’t let them. I presumed he fucked it up, and it wasn’t cut at all.”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “We had to make sure we could keep him quiet, and make sure he understood that he’d be arrested for murder and attempted mass murder.”

  “He could turn in whoever told him to do it.”

  “Who in this town would believe him?” Charlie asked. “He has no witnesses. Everybody knows he’s a useless shit. No, none of the townspeople knew the whole plan. I’m not sure I always did. I’ve always been kind of a whimsical guy.”

  “So people died because you felt like it?”

  “Just following in George Bush and Dick Cheney’s tradition.”

  Fury flashed and if I hadn’t been immobilized, I’d have throttled him. I took several deep breaths then asked, “Why kill Skeen in the first place?”

  “He was weakening. He’d get high and take more drugs and then claim he was going to expose everybody. He was an erratic nut case. He believed his own lies. We couldn’t be sure what he’d told Czobel. When Skeen got drunk and high, he’d never shut up.”

  “Why didn’t he just stop taking the drugs?”

  “I made sure to put addictive properties in his daily cocktail. He couldn’t stop. He was an addict.”

  “How’d you kill him?”

  “In his last several batches, I kept adding a little of this and a little of that. We had a delivery to Ms. DiMassi that day. We just mixed the wrong stuff with the wrong stuff and poof, he died,” Charlie said. “I tried to do a timed release dosage, but it was more serendipitous luck than anything that he finally keeled over at the game. Satisfyingly dramatic. I think his fat kept him alive a bit longer. I’ve been making this stuff and experimenting for years. Sugar pills with caffeine are easy. Some of the more high-end stuff takes expertise.”

  He shrugged. “I cornered the market on meth around here years ago. That’s the least of my illegal stuff, but it keeps the local younger set semi-employed.”

  “They could accidentally blow something up.”

  “There’s more stupids where they came from. No, we had a full set-up here. The placebos which the town took, and I sold on the Internet. The fake performance-enhancing drugs. Real performance-enhancing drugs. And synthetic drugs to mask the real drugs. I was making huge profits. You know how much it costs me to manufacture these drugs? A few pennies. I’d sell them to the people in town fairly cheap and to players at all levels. That’s where the real money was to be made. The higher the level, the higher the price. The drugs to mask the drugs were even more expensive.”

  “Many on the team here thought they were using drugs.”

  “I haven’t stopped laughing,” Charlie said.

  “I saw the representatives from the team here with you last night.”

  “Oh, my yes. They pay even better than the players. The big club wanted to get rid of Skeen. They were in on it too. They wanted to prevent those few more hits and save themselves tons of cash. They wanted a real drug case where he’d get caught. They were paying me to fuck him up. I’d get half of whatever they saved on Skeen’s contract.” Hopper laughed. “It was worth plotting his destruction. Dead was a bonus.”

  “Why were guys on the team getting threats?”

  “To destroy Knecht. Who knew what would get him to quit and go away? I think it’s even funnier that some of the players were selling drugs and making a profit. That’s why they had more money. Not because they were taking bribes. We changed our tactics with Jamie McDaniels. He’s a shit. He wanted to make money from selling drugs but remain all pure and above it all. It was great hearing about him running around confronting players who had no idea what he was talking about.”

  “Who was your contact in the locker room?”

  “McDaniels until he turned on us. Saldovi since he got here. Smith, of course. A few other guys. Saldovi did most of them. That kid never sits still even when I don’t give him pep pills. We used a simple computer device to distort voices.” He gave me the condescending smirk the Republicans have mastered so well. “When I heard what you did that first night at the park, I knew you were trouble.”

  “Why didn’t you kill Murray?”

  “Him!” Charlie laughed. “The kid’s an incompetent fool. There was no need.”

  “And you used your labor force to sabotage the park?”

  “Yes, easier that way.” He pointed to a button on the wall next to the workbench he perched on. “In a few minutes you will join the fireball that destroys everything that might possibly be illegal anywhere near here.”

  “The forensic people will find evidence.”

  “Rotella will never investigate.”

  “The Feds will be here.”

  “Good luck to them. Meth labs come. Meth labs go.”

  “You’re telling me all this, why?”

  “Because now you’re going to die,” Charlie said.

  “Why not just kill me to begin with?”

  “We did try. You were lucky and better than we thought.”

  “And what was the problem with Knecht?”

  “Old town feud.”

  “And all those people at last night’s meeting were in on it?”

  “To varying degrees.”

  “Why were those two cops shot?”

  “Collateral damage. Rotella did the shooting. They were on the wrong side in the disputes, and they were getting suspicious about Rotella’s connection to me.”

  “How’d you know they’d be there that night?”

  “Rotella had them on duty. We knew it would be them.”

  “Were players getting favorable treatment?”

  “Just another cover-up rumor. It was funny to watch Murray run around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  I strained to look out the casement windows.

  “You think your minions can save you? Five or six guys?”

  Five or six? Then I realized he thought all of Georgia’s disguises were different people.

  I said, “This makes little sense. I’ve got operatives, people working for me. My people will come for me.”

  “Not if we get them first.”

  His cell phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and without a word walked up the wooden stairs. I heard a door close.

  SUNDAY 12:38 A.M.

  From the threat he issued moments ago, I figured I didn’t have a lot of time to escape. I shook the chair. It was bolted to the floor. The handcuffs weren’t going to magically come undone.

  I thought about death. I thought about all the things I wouldn’t be part of.

  My eyes searched for any possible bit of assistance. I listened for any sounds.

  For a second or two, I thought I heard the full-throated baying of a basset hound. Then moments later sirens roared to life. Someone was breaking in somewhere in the complex. Through one casement window I saw a brief flash and heard a tremendous boom. In the other window I saw the face of my basset hound.

  Minutes later Caesar trundled down the stairs. With his short stubby legs, he couldn’t really dash down them. He even managed to step on his own left ear and stagger for a second, but then he was yelping and licking my face.

  A few moments later Georgia rushed down the stairs. She had a safari hat pulled low over long flowing blond tresses.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We decided to attack first and ask
questions later.” She did a quick inspection of my plight then her eyes darted about the room. “No key for the handcuffs, no bolt cutters.” She picked up a chair that sort of matched mine except it wasn’t attached to the floor. She smashed it at the back legs of the chair to which I was attached. A feather-light drag queen she might be, but in many ways, she was physically as strong as Jerry. The chair’s back legs broke, I tilted backwards and thumped to the ground. I still had handcuffs on, but I was free.

  “They didn’t leave someone to guard me?”

  “While most of them rushed off to the points of attack, there was one left. He’ll wake up eventually.”

  I said, “Hopper’s got this place set to blow up.” I pried open the box that encased the button on the wall. I saw a mass of wires. Caesar whined. I ripped out all the wires. All the lights went out, but nothing exploded.

  Before we ran up the stairs, Georgia explained. “Jerry set off the alarms in several places but all on one side of the farm. That was after he placed several charges under a few of the scientific pole sheds. He spaced those far apart. He won’t have killed any cows.”

  I was happy for the cows, but more concerned about getting away.

  Georgia added, “We called the fire department before we started the ruckus. We wanted to make sure there was all kinds of activity.”

  Dog and humans rushed up the stairs. We were in the kitchen of Hopper’s cabin. I heard shouts and sirens and the rumble of fire engines. Through windows on two different sides of the room, I saw flames licking up in the distance.

  Jerry tumbled in the back door. He saw me, assessed the situation, and produced a key to undo the handcuffs. “You carry around a universal handcuff key?”

  “Don’t need much.”

  “How’d you guys know there was a problem?”

  Georgia said, “I stopped at the jail before going to see Deborah DiMassi. Hempil had been released. I called Duncan to see if he knew why. He told me about your call from Judge Hempil. I wondered what the hell he needed your help for. Jerry, Duncan, and I met. We knew you weren’t at the jail. I would have seen something. The place isn’t that big. I tried calling your cell, but you didn’t answer. We noted the phone’s GPS signal before it went out. They either smashed it or turned it off after you got here. They should have smashed it when they first grabbed you.”