by April Smith
The woman cop whistles. “Well, that’s funky.”
The thing appears to be a Barbancourt rum bottle, you can see the lettering underneath the red cloth in which it has been tightly wrapped. Lashed to the neck with hundreds of turns of black thread are two pairs of scissors, open wide. Dangling off the bottom on multicolored strings is a bizarre fringe of razor blades that flash like silver teeth.
Her partner says, “What is it? Some kind of punk thing?”
“Gang thing?”
Cassidy holds it very carefully. It spooks her in a deeply primitive way. Unlike the whimsical gourd with the belly-button mirror on her mantel, this bizarre construction is definitely broadcasting on an evil wavelength: the shape of the bottle like a human body. Meticulous tiny stitches in the cloth. The yawning jaws of the scissors, or are they supposed to be a woman’s legs pried apart? And the sinister razors, swinging free—are they supposed to cut her up?
Alberto is on his feet, moving forward with a look of astonishment.
The woman cop puts on a pair of rubber gloves.
“We better log this in.”
Carrying the bottle steadily to avoid being nicked by the twisting razor blades, she slips it into a Ziploc plastic bag, then packs it away in the panniers on her bike.
The cops leave a copy of their vandalism report and pedal off. Cassidy uses a sweatshirt to sweep the glass off the seats. It isn’t until she and Alberto are back in the Explorer ready to pull out that she says finally, “They don’t have stuff like that in Glendale.”
“It come from Haitian people.”
“You’ve seen that kind of thing before?”
She starts the engine.
“Lots of Haitian people living in my village. To them it is a religion. We call it obeah.”
“What does it mean?”
Alberto’s looking straight ahead, stroking his mustache.
“We got to pay.”
They sit for a moment, smelling exhaust fumes.
“They follow us. They want the money bad.”
Four cars are lined up behind them, waiting for the spot.
Cassidy puts the Explorer in reverse.
“You know what today is?” She backs out. “February first.”
Two months before, she had stood outside a sugar mill of rusted sheets of corrugated iron, holes in the roof open to one hundred years of rain, and heard the voices of the dispossessed and dead. Now, three thousand miles away, she is sitting in a parking structure listening to the rumbling of cars as they clamber over metal gratings.
But the voices are not distant. Somehow, they are here.
5
This time Raymond Woods doesn’t fool with it. He calls a meeting in his office with security consultant Mark Simms, the LAPD detective on regular assignment to the team.
Simms is a large man with a ponytail wearing a gray pinstripe suit and purple snakeskin boots, who maintains this greaseball image because when he is not on duty at a game—surveying the locker room for theft or alleged rig-watching by female sportswriters—he is working narcotics. Cassidy first met him during the “Fungus Fandango,” when a star pitcher had reported his cleats missing, only to have them surface several months later for sale in a collector’s magazine, prompting one TV commentator to observe that twelve hundred bucks seemed a lot to pay for athlete’s foot.
When the “Fungus Fandango” turned out to be an inside job, Simms was called upon to give a lecture on security—how to prevent slippage of officially licensed merchandise, such as an entire rack of jackets that never made it from the truck to the locker room. Mail fraud. Phone fraud. Player impersonators, like the guy who walked into a car dealership, identified himself as a Dodger, asked to test-drive a car, and drove off with a sixty-thousand-dollar BMW.
Extortion is pervasive, the chronic lower back pain of sports crime, Simms explains; if the vodou bottle had been laid on the hood of the Explorer rather than hurled through a smashed window, he would have taken note and gone back to surveilling crack dealers in Panorama City.
“—But an act of violence occurred,” Simms tells Alberto, who is sitting in a chair in the corner of Raymond’s office, bouncing so hard on the balls of his feet that he gives the impression of running in place sitting down, “Somebody broke glass.”
Winter workouts have begun at the stadium for players in the Los Angeles area, and Alberto is wearing clean cleats, stirrups, blue pants, a blue cage jacket and a Dodgers cap of soft new wool, having been called to the office from the field. Cassidy almost gave him a hug of pride when she saw him in uniform for the first time. But only guys can do that. So she had touched his shoulder and said, “Major league.”
“How good’s his English?”
Simms has insolently addressed the question to Raymond, who keeps both big palms flat on the oak. The legendary desktop is empty. Not even a pencil cup. For a moment nobody says anything, posed like a snapshot of today’s multiply divorced and reblended baseball family: ethnic tensions and global reach and high-stakes corporate anxiety around the money sitting in the corner chair.
“Good enough,” Raymond replies. “You can talk to him.”
Simms removes a small pad from his pocket.
“I’m going to take a crime report,” he says. “Standard PIR.”
“Is it usual?” Alberto asks.
“Usual?” Simms smiles.
Cassidy notes that Simms smiles often and not always with warmth.
He takes Alberto through the preliminaries with slow professional deliberation: birth date and place of birth, address in the United States (Dulce’s), how long he has resided there, any idea who would want to hurt him or threaten him for money?
Alberto shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“The notes say you did something—”
Alberto jumps out of the chair. “I do nothing!”
“Calm down, take it easy,” Raymond admonishes. “Everybody’s on the same side.”
Alberto sits, shaking his head.
Simms goes on: “Who knows how to find you in the United States?”
“Mi familia.”
“And the pharmacist,” Cassidy remembers suddenly.
Again Simms smiles. “ ‘The Pharmacist’? What’s that, a handle for a drug dealer?”
“He was the advisor to the family when we made the deal.”
Simms: “Did this pharmacist get money?”
Alberto nods.
“Maybe,” Raymond suggests, “he didn’t think he was getting enough.”
Alberto makes the slow dismissive finger wave.
“He like a father.”
“Señor Gómez,” Cassidy recalls. “Río Blanco, DR.”
Simms writes down the name.
“What about your family, Alberto? How do you get along?”
“No problem.”
“No jealous brothers who think maybe they should be playing ball in the United States?”
Scoffing, “No way. They happy because they know I gonna take care to them.”
“What about your pals, the guys you used to hang with?”
Alberto shifts uncomfortably. “They ask me for things. When I sign. They think I rich. People want to be friends. They tell you, ‘I need two hundred pesos to fix my house, my kids are hungry …’ People think, you are a ballplayer, you are a star.”
“So nobody comes to mind who might be angry or upset that you got signed?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Cassidy says, “What about those Haitian guys?” She has been thinking about it the last two days. “The team I saw Alberto play against. Rough trade.”
Simms: “Which team is this?”
“From a town called Las Lomas.”
“Who are they?”
Alberto shrugs. “Brazeros.”
“Sugarcane workers.”
“Any one specifically?”
“The pitcher.”
“Know his name?”
Cassidy and Alberto shake their heads.
<
br /> “But he was Haitian and pretty out there. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just two strands of beads crossed over his chest, like ammunition. And he was smoking a cigarette.”
Simms chuckles. “On the mound?”
“Can you picture it? The crisscrossed beads, the cigarette? He was upset when I said we were just loaded with pitchers right now.”
A less-than-pleased look from Raymond.
“What? He must have been fifty years old! They threw rocks at the windshield when we left.”
Simms writes quickly, pleased to have a theory.
“Let’s say they do have a grudge. These are poor people,” Raymond points out. “How could they get all the way to the United States, find Alberto, and follow them to the Glendale Galleria?”
Simms: “They have relatives. They send a message to this young ballplayer—we’re going to make trouble for you if you don’t pay.”
Raymond looks doubtful. “Is there a large Haitian population in Los Angeles?”
Nobody seems to know.
Simms stops writing and looks at Alberto.
“It must be somebody in your culture, or who knows your culture very well, to be messing with this vodou-type stuff.”
Alberto swivels his head impatiently. If anybody else in the room had tried it they would have ruptured a disk.
“I do the right thing. I give these letters to the organization. The organization say not to worry. They gonna take care. But they not take care. Now this happen and we got to pay.”
“Detective School, Day One: Never pay a blackmailer.”
“Then I go home.”
“Alberto—”
“They could hurt his family,” says Cassidy. “That’s what he’s saying.”
“Let’s go back to when you both were in the Dominican,” Simms says smoothly. “We’re looking for a link. Who else, besides your family and people you know in town, were you in contact with when you signed?”
Alberto’s hyper breathing slows. He scratches at a sideburn, forces himself to think. Only his feet keep tapping the floor.
“Pedro Pedrillo.”
“The Latin American scout? Okay,” says Simms, and plunges into an increasingly troublesome string of questions: How long has Pedro worked for the Dodgers? How long has he known Alberto? What is his relationship with Cassidy? Does he have financial problems?
“What’s this got to do with Pedro?” Cassidy interrupts.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
The smile.
Simms folds the notebook.
“This is what I’m going to say to you, Alberto.” Then he says it: “Pay close attention to your surroundings. Strange cars in the neighborhood. Late night phone calls. If you or your friends think there’s anything suspicious, let the police know immediately. Do you understand?”
Alberto nods.
Simms gives him a card.
“This is a special 800 security number Major League Baseball set up for players and umpires. You call this number, you get a cop, twenty-four hours a day.”
“Thank you. I can go?”
Raymond: “Go.”
Mumbling, “Adiós, Señorita,” Alberto is out of there.
Through the open door Cassidy waves to Doc Ramsey, a locker-room attendant who had been sent to escort Alberto up from the field to make sure he didn’t get off the elevator on the wrong level and wind up in a terrifying pitch-dark warren of laundry carts and floor waxers. Nice to see guys in uniform around the office again.
“Good kid,” Simms remarks. “And he’s young.”
“Eighteen years old. Could go all the way,” Cassidy says encouragingly. “Good bat. Fast. We have hopes for him at spring training, don’t we, Ray?”
Raymond isn’t interested in discussing Alberto’s tools just now. He is standing with arms folded. Bigger than Simms and a couple of restive steps ahead.
“What do you think, Mark? Does this make sense? Why would anyone go after an unknown like Cruz?”
“How much money you say these kids get?”
“Eight hundred a month. Plus the signing bonus.”
“It’s a clumsy attempt,” agrees Simms. “But shouldn’t be that hard to nail it, we’re looking at a relatively small window of time. Alberto signed on Friday, Cassidy left on Sunday. Right?”
Cassidy says, “Right.”
Simms waits. “So what happened in between?”
“In between?” Suddenly she feels warm. “I stayed overnight in the pharmacist’s house. The next day I went to a ball game in San Pedro de Macorís.”
“Alone?”
Offhand, “With a guy.”
“What guy?”
“This guy from LA I met in the Miami airport.” The business type who kept buying drinks. “I ran into him again in the DR. We went to a ball game, no big deal.”
“Does this guy have a name?”
“Joe.”
“Do we know his last name?”
“I don’t remember.”
She becomes aware of Raymond staring at her.
“We were together maybe a total of six hours.”
“The next day you left?”
“The next day I left.”
Simms is done with it.
“In my opinion, we’re dealing with someone who had to have known Cruz down there. Could be a grudge, could be a lark. Hit him up, see what happens. Pretty typical. We’ll check out these names and the postbox address. Which means dealing with the Dominican authorities, which, by that time, we’ll all be dead.”
The detective wraps his right arm around his own head and under his jaw and cracks his neck with a sickening pop! so Cassidy and Raymond both flinch.
“But whoever is doing this is here in the United States,” she says. “They followed us. They crossed the line. They broke glass.”
Simms, again talking to Raymond over her head, “Does she want protection?”
“No, I don’t!” snaps Cassidy. “But I’m worried about Alberto’s family and also about Dulce.”
“Dulce, the secretary, Dulce?”
“Alberto’s been staying with her.”
“Rampart Division will send extra patrols by the house.”
Cassidy objects. “Dulce should know about this.”
Simms gives the smile. “Let us handle it.”
Cassidy: “She has two children.”
“I hear you.”
“He hears you.”
Raymond moves Cassidy toward the door.
Dulce looks up from her desk. “How’d it go?”
“I’ve had better days at the dentist.”
“Why did they want to talk to Alberto?”
Cassidy hesitates. Not an easy call. She can’t tell Dulce about the extortion threats. She can’t risk Raymond finding out she had gone against the chain of command one more time.
“They were concerned about some adjustment problems, but they think it will work out once he gets to Vero Beach.”
“I am also concerned. It happens so many times.”
“What does?”
“They get homesick.” Dulce’s voice catches. “These boys, they are just babies.”
In the garage, in the side pocket of the black duffel bag (squashed flat beneath a twenty-pound bag of dog food), Cassidy finds the brochure for the Gran Caribe Resort the businessman named Joe had given her at the bar in Miami. His company had a controlling interest in the Gran Caribe, he explained, and if she had any free time at all while she was in the Dominican, she was more than welcome to stop by.
“It’s a four-star resort, rated number one in the Caribbean,” he told her.
For a four-star fuck, she had thought.
She unfolds the glossy pages. On the cover a man and woman ride a white horse across a beach, she with breasts spilling out of a bikini, he bare-chested. Inside they play tennis, dine by candlelight, sail, get massages on a patio decked with bougainvillea. Then you see them back in their room—tropical florals and ceiling fan—looking at
the sunset, drinking wine and contemplating yogic acts of pleasure in the private Jacuzzi.
The man in the pictures has dark curly hair and a soft open nice-daddy smile. You can imagine him modeling five-hundred-dollar cashmere sweaters with three or four kids piling on his back.
Joe was dark-haired too, strong good features, similar creases around the mouth, but he was a loner and his smile was taut. Maybe that is why, when he dropped her off abruptly after the game, she ultimately did not make the move; something, she had sensed, too complicated there.
Beneath the logo for the management company, Omega Development International, he had written Joe Galinis in amethyst fountain pen ink.
It takes one phone call to reach his office on Olive Street in downtown Los Angeles.
6
Two weeks later an assistant calls back and leaves a message that Mr. Galinis would “definitely love” to see Cassidy again, could they meet at a party at his attorney’s home in Studio City?
The assistant faxes a map showing a tangle of roads going into the hills, but Vista View comes up too quickly to avoid a screeching left turn, the traffic behind Cassidy continuing to trample past like a mad steeplechase that will stop for nothing. The signs for Vista, Vista Drive, Vista Point and Vista Terrace are all obscured by foliage or have been bent into the darkness by car crashes, but finally she finds the driveway, her ears popping as it curves up through a majestic gate.
A valet opens the door of the Explorer. Cassidy swings her brown suede heels to the ground and takes a moment to steady herself with the familiar acorny night scents of the California chaparral. A Rolls-Royce and a catering truck are parked in front of a triple garage. A Mercedes coupe pulls in and a lady in a vanilla suit pops out, linking arms with a bulky guy with a beard, slip-sliding in tandem along the cobblestone drive, passing Cassidy as if in a decathlon in which dinner at Harvey Weissman’s house is just one more grueling event.
High heels are a problem on the smooth rocks. It does take determination to make it to the door. Picking her way carefully, she remembers meeting one of her idols, an Olympic skating champion, at a multimillion-dollar house like this. Cassidy had followed her career with awe—such athletic jumps, such incredible flow—envying the Olympic spotlight. By the time they had met at the party, the skater had become an international celebrity. She had been wearing thirty thousand dollars worth of jewels and a pink Chanel suit with high heels. She still radiated that magical quality, she had achieved greatness, she was turned out like a princess, but all the guests could look at were her thighs. Thick, muscular, developed thighs.
