Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “I like to keep in shape,” he said, by way of apology, I supposed.

  “Hey, I’m impressed,” I said.

  Petrie walked up to a pair of parallel bars protruding from one of the Nautilus machines and began to do dips—his feet tucked behind him, his legs bent, his arms doing all the work of raising and lowering his body.

  “So,” he said, “what’s so important?”

  “I’m getting some mixed signals about Bill Parks,” I said.

  “Mixed how?”

  “Some people seem to think that you guys hired me to finish his career.”

  “Which people?”

  “Walt Kaplan, for one.”

  Petrie stopped exercising and lowered himself to the floor. He stood there for a moment, his arms resting on the parallel bars, his red face pouring sweat. It took me a moment to realize that he was angry. So angry that he couldn’t find his voice.

  “Who gave you the authority to talk to Walt Kaplan?” he finally said with barely controlled fury.

  “Nobody.”

  Petrie gave me an astonished look. “He’s the enemy, for chrissake!”

  “To me, he was a lead.”

  “I don’t know about you, Stoner,” Petrie said, tugging at the skin on top of his head as if there were still hair there to be pulled out. “Why do you think we hired you? Who the hell’s side are you on?”

  “I thought you hired me to find Bill Parks as quickly as I could.”

  “That did not mean you were to negotiate with his fucking agent!”

  “I didn’t do any negotiating, Hugh. He called me up, and I went to see him.”

  “How the hell did he know you were on the case!” Petrie almost shouted. He took a deep breath. “Don’t answer that. I don’t think I want to know.”

  “Kaplan claims that Parks left camp over the contract dispute. That you know that, and that you hired me to pressure Bill into signing.”

  “Pressure him how?” Petrie said.

  “Presumably by employing me to dig into his past, possibly into a drug problem, and then by using what I get on him to bring him back to the bargaining table.” I stared at him. “Is that your strategy, Hugh?”

  Petrie didn’t answer the question. “What the hell do you care what Kaplan said? Just find Bill, okay?”

  I shook my head. “Not okay. I told you before, if you think that Parks has a drug problem, you go to the league or the DEA. I’m not interested in blindly involving myself in a cocaine case.”

  “Did Kaplan say that Parks had a nose problem?” Petrie said with curiosity.

  “No. But he gave me the impression that Bill’s career could be ruined by my investigation. Given the current atmosphere, I assumed that meant drugs.”

  Petrie eyed me for a moment. “That’s probably a safe assumption,” he said dryly, and walked over to the bar on the far side of the room. He poured himself a beer out of an open can on the bar and sat down on a wooden stool. “You want something to drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t know why I should be surprised by this crap anymore,” he said.

  He seemed genuinely aggrieved, although I had trouble believing that he hadn’t speculated in the same way that I had about Parks—and probably about some of his other players too.

  He must have guessed what I was thinking, because he drew himself up on the chair and gave me a cold look. “You know, Stoner, I don’t owe you an explanation of why we hired you. The team doesn’t owe you anything but your salary.”

  “I don’t have to keep working for the team, either,” I said.

  Petrie laughed. “A cop with principles—there’s a change.” He took a sip of beer and put the glass down on the bar. “As far as I know at this time, Bill Parks is clean. We have heard rumors about a second grand jury investigation, following up on another DEA sting. Several sealed indictments are to be handed down in the near future. Whether Bill is part of that package I don’t know.”

  “But it wouldn’t surprise you,” I said.

  “Like I said, nothing should, anymore.” Petrie turned on the stool so that he was facing me, one foot cocked in the rungs, the other leg stretched to the floor. “Five, six years ago I would’ve gotten really worked up over this kind of thing. Kicked in a TV set or broken somebody’s jaw. Now I just don’t care.” He cribbed his hands around his knee. “The human race sucks. Let’s face it. So fuck them all. I run my business. I make a good profit. I’m fair to the players. I give them a chance to make a lot of money. And when things go wrong, I look for a reasonable solution. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to beat myself over the head because of somebody else’s hard luck, or greed, or stupidity. If it turns out Bill has a drug problem, we’ll trade him. Or maybe we’ll let him play out his contract and then trade him. You wanted to hear the truth. That’s the truth. We’ll know in time, won’t we?”

  “So why bother to look for him?” I said. “Why not let nature take its course and wait for the grand jury to release its findings?”

  “Who knows exactly when that’s going to happen?” he said. “Besides, given what I now know, I have to presume that he’s after more money, that he—or Walt—is planning to take advantage of the fact that we’ve lost three starters, and is going to try to blackmail us into renegotiating.”

  I eyed him suspiciously.

  “You don’t believe me?” he said with a laugh.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I said.

  “Look, you want to know what this contract dispute with Bill is really about?” Petrie said.

  “It would ease my mind some, yeah.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. Why not? Three years ago, Parks came into my office and told me that he wanted a raise. Now it just so happened that I liked Bill. He’s a good football player—you can’t take that away from him. When he came up as a rookie eight years ago, he was a late-round pick with nothing but the game on his mind. He signed for peanuts, played hard, and worked his way into a starting spot in two years. Off the field he was a maniac. A lot of them are, including your friend, Otto. But he did his job—kept himself in hard muscular condition the year round, hunkered down in training camp, and never gave less than a hundred percent on the field. He deserved a raise. Not as much as he was hoping for, but a decent chunk. Anyway, we negotiated for a couple of weeks. And then Kaplan got into the picture. Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. One week Bill was training with him—the next, Kaplan was his agent. As soon as Kaplan stepped in, the whole process changed. You met the man, so you must know that his whole act is intimidation, physical and intellectual intimidation. He’s a strong-arm thug with a shrewd line of patter. And when the patter doesn’t work, he’s been said to take more drastic measures.”

  “What kind of measures?” I said curiously.

  Petrie shrugged. “It’s just scuttlebutt, but two guys from Youngstown who tried to set up a rival health club turned up mysteriously dead in a Little Miami culvert a couple of years ago. It was an unsigned picture, but Walt was generally given the credit.”

  “He killed them?” I said.

  “That’s how the story goes,” Petrie said without batting an eye. “I know for a fact that he’s worked over several guys who got on his bad side. He’s got a couple of goons on his payroll who are built like refrigerators.”

  “I think I met one of them,” I said, thinking of Mickey. “He’s never threatened you guys, has he?”

  “Not with violence,” Petrie said. “Walt’s too clever for that. Plus he’s made friends in the media. You know, it used to be that your average fan dreamed of being a football star. But the yuppie of today has set his sights higher than that. He doesn’t want to be a player, he wants to be an owner. He wants to buy and sell flesh, he wants to run a team. Most of your media men understand that, and so does Walt. In fact, the first thing he did during the last negotiation was get himself on the Trumpy show, where he could wail about the incompetence of ownership. He called us names i
n the Enquirer. He got interviewed by Dennis Jansen on the tube. There was nothing unusual about his tactics—negotiating through the press, fueling fan resentment. He was just a little better at it than most of them are, a little smoother and a little smarter and a little more reasonable-seeming. And then he got lucky. Somehow, the national media got hold of the story, and SI had an article using Bill as an example of the inequity of the player-management setup. The whole thing snowballed, and we ended up with a public relations nightmare, while this dumbbell with three assault arrests and his smooth-talking thug of an agent played the put-upon innocents. Eventually Bill got most of what he wanted—a raise, a bonus, incentives, the works. Of course, we got a piece of what we wanted too—a long-term agreement to protect our investment.”

  Petrie picked up the beer again and drained the glass. “Three weeks after we’d signed the deal and all the publicity had died down—three weeks, mind you—Parks came in to talk to me. He told me he was broke, and asked if I could arrange an interest-free loan for him. Now, I’d just got done signing a bonus check with his name on it for over one hunded fifty thousand dollars. I said to him, ‘How the hell could you be broke, Bill?’ You know what he told me? He’d signed the entire bonus over to Kaplan. Not only that, but Kaplan got a healthy bite out of his first year’s salary to boot. And that, my friend, is why Bill Parks wants to tear up the deal his agent blackmailed us into and renegotiate now. To get back to even.” Petrie laughed with disgust. “The hilarious part is that Kaplan will probably do the negotiating again. And I’m not about to sit around and get raped by that son-of-a-bitch a second time. This time we’re going to talk directly to Bill. And if Kaplan tries to pressure us through the media again, we’ll pressure back. This is one we’re not going to lose. A man’s word has got to mean something, even if he is a fucking football hero.”

  “Kaplan gets that big a bite of Parks’s contract?” I said.

  “Fifteen percent, right off the top. But even if Kaplan hadn’t soaked him for a couple hundred grand, somebody else would have. Somebody is always ready to spend a man like Bill Parks’s money.”

  “Couldn’t you do something about that?”

  “Like what?” Petrie said. “Talk him out of it? Who are you going to listen to? The guy that tells you to plan ahead because someday the money’s going to dry up? Or the guy who tells you that they can’t pay you enough? That management is just sitting back and raking in the dough?”

  I looked around the room. “Seems like you’re doing all right.”

  “I make a good living,” he said. “I don’t apologize for that. But so do they. Answer me this, Stoner—how much is enough? How much do you have to pay in order to pay someone what he’s worth? Can you put a dollar figure on it?”

  “Whatever the market will bear, I guess.”

  “We offered Parks three hundred thousand dollars a year, plus incentives, for five years. Is that enough? A million and a half dollars for playing a fucking game that he’d play even if nobody paid him a dime? Should I be penalized because he doesn’t have sense enough to think for himself? Because he can’t run his own life? Or because he has ‘personal’ problems, and a thief for an agent?”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  Petrie got off the stool and walked back over to the machines. “Look, I got things to do tonight,” he said, as he boosted himself onto a chinning bar. “I gave you the facts. Are you going to stay on the case, or what?”

  “I’ll stick,” I told him. “But I’m still not going to involve myself in a drug case. If I find out that Bill does have a nose problem, I’m going to throw him back to you.”

  “Fair enough,” Petrie said and went on with his dips.

  I walked back upstairs and showed myself out.

  9

  I HAD dinner at In The Wood in Clifton and spent a couple of hours listening to Katie Laur sing jazz at Arnold’s on Eighth Street. Around nine, I drove down to the Waterhole to find Laurel Jones and try to weasel the name of Parks’s girlfriend out of her.

  There was a new doorman standing beneath the canopied entryway of the club. Which was probably a break for me. He didn’t look any different from the other one, right down to the red suit and the billycock hat. As I walked up to him, I caught a whiff of cheap cologne coming off his mottled face, a smell like rotten bananas in a straw basket. I must have winced a little, because he smiled the way people do when they think they’ve embarrassed themselves but aren’t sure how they’ve done it.

  “You waiting for valet parking?” he said, as if he thought that that was why I’d given him the funny look.

  I shook my head.

  “‘Cause we don’t have valet service.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m not waiting for it.”

  He nodded uncertainly.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m looking for a friend, a girl named Laurel Jones. Do you know her?”

  “They’re a lot of girls in there, mister,” he said without interest.

  I dug a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet and slapped it into his palm. I must have pressed the right button, because his mangy little face lit up like a store window going on for the night.

  “Laurel Jones?” he said, as if he were scratching his head. “Blond? Early twenties? Nice build?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Yeah. Come to think of it, I think she might be here tonight.” He grinned at me. We were pals now. We’d broken bread together. “Tell you what, you ask Clay the bartender. Tell him Willie says you’re okay.”

  “There’s a recommendation,” I said.

  He smiled feebly, as if he didn’t quite catch the joke. I pushed past him into the club.

  The place was even more crowded than it had been on Thursday night. I worked my way through the maze of tables surrounding the dance floor over to the neon bar with its chrome stools. Clay, the impassive bartender, gave me a small smile. I crooked a finger at him, and he leaned toward me.

  “Is your friend Laurel here?” I shouted over the din.

  He nodded. “Upstairs with Stacey, in the game room.” He pointed to a spiral staircase at the far end of the bar. “How’s that friend of yours doing?” he asked with a grin.

  “He’s all right. I still don’t know what got him so pissed off last night.”

  “I heard he was looking for Bill Parks, and just wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Could be,” I said. “You haven’t seen Parks in here tonight, have you?”

  “Nope. Haven’t seen him in weeks.”

  He flashed me the peace sign and turned back to the bar. I couldn’t figure out why he’d been so agreeable, until it occurred to me that Laurel must have told him I was a cop.

  I walked down to the end of the bar and climbed the spiral staircase. The second floor of the Waterhole was little more than a railed, four-sided balcony overlooking the dance floor. Pinball machines and video games were stacked against each wall. Most of the machines were occupied, and the noise was incredible—an electronic farrago of beeps, buzzes, sirens, and bells. Every now and then a computerized voice would issue a command or utter a threat in a robotic monotone.

  It took me a while, but I finally located Laurel Jones standing with a girlfriend in front of a Galaga machine. She was dressed in a pink short-sleeve sweater and skintight blue jeans, and with her shaggy blond head bobbing over the video screen and her cute little butt swinging in time to the music drifting up from the first floor, she looked very young, very sexy, and very easy. Her friend was a redhead, dressed in a black leotard and black satin pants. She had affected a punk look, but it didn’t go very deep, judging by the expert makeup job on her face and the manicured gleam of her long red fingernails.

  I stepped up to blond, beamish Laurel and tapped her on the arm.

  “Watch it!” she squealed, without looking up. “You’re going to make me lose this rocket.”

  She’d apparently forsaken her vow of maturity, for the time being at least. I stepped back a
nd let her finish the game. Her red-haired friend smiled at me in a speculative way.

  “Damn!” Laurel said, when the last rocket had exploded. “Just once I’d like to beat this sumbitch!”

  She looked up at her friend with a grin, realized that her friend was looking at me, and turned around.

  “You!” she said with surprise. She put on a stern, toe-tapping face. “I don’t think I want to talk to you, Harry. You lied to me.”

  Her friend arched an eyebrow at me from behind Laurel’s back, as if to say that she’d be happy to talk to me if Laurel wouldn’t.

  “You told me you weren’t a cop,” Laurel said, wagging a finger under my nose.

  The girlfriend’s eyebrow collapsed, and her face went as blank as a chalkboard.

  “I didn’t lie to you,” I said. “I’m not a cop. I just told the police that to keep them from killing Otto. Do you think they would have arrested me if they thought I was a cop?”

  “And there’s another thing,” she said. “I don’t like your friends, either.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be much about me that you do like.”

  She squinted at me, and her friend squinted too. “I didn’t say I didn’t like you,” she said. “I just don’t want to get in any trouble.”

  “Well, at least let me buy you and your friend a drink, to make up for last night.”

  Laurel pretended to think it over. She turned to her girlfriend and said, “What do you think, Stacey?”

  Stacey grinned. “I think he’s neat.”

  Laurel jabbed her with an elbow. “Don’t you know anything, girl,” she said with disgust. “All right.” She turned back to me. “We’ll have a drink with you. But I’m still mad.”

  We went back downstairs, the three of us, and found an empty table in a dark corner of the barroom. I got drinks from Clay, who for some reason didn’t need a translator on this evening, and brought them over to the girls. They’d apparently been talking about me while I was gone, because Stacey giggled wildly when she saw me come up to the table, and Laurel jabbed her again—hard—with her elbow.