by April Smith
“First thing you have to know, we’re a family of athletes. My dad played football for Notre Dame, I ran track and field. Our girls are into ice-skating and one of ’em might have a shot at the Olympics. She’s only four, but that’s what they tell me. We are also a religious family, Mr. Conners, and I have to tell you that all along, from the time Brad was six years old, it’s been our deepest prayer that our son could go on to pitch for the Dodgers—”
“Guys, I’m sorry,” Cassidy interrupts, “I’ve got to hop back up to the stadium.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Raymond wants to see me. Now.”
“You go along,” Lang Parker says. “We appreciate everything you’ve done, God bless.”
Edging toward the Explorer, “Mr. Conners is more than qualified to check Brad out.”
Travis’s hard features have taken on a reproachful stare. Cassidy knows what he is thinking: she is trying to screw him by leaving him alone with the windy dad.
“Dulce left a message saying it was an emergency.”
“Have fun.”
Cassidy climbs into the front seat.
She doesn’t tell Travis that her friend Dulce had been sobbing.
Or that nobody in the department had picked up, when she had repeatedly tried to call back.
11
Cassidy pushes through the glass doors.
Immediately she can tell there is tension in the waiting area. Nobody is at the receptionist’s desk. Phones are ringing and men with attaché cases are impatient to be seen.
Deep within the inner offices secretaries are gathered in groups whispering in Spanish. Cassidy doesn’t even bother to stop, buzzing all the places Dulce might be, finding her at last running water over paper towels in the ladies’ room.
Dulce stops when she sees Cassidy in the mirror. Coldly, “What are you doing here?”
“You were upset. You paged me.”
“Raymond paged you.”
“You left the message. What’s the matter?”
“Go see Raymond.”
“He’s not in his office.”
“Then he must be on the field.”
“Dulce—what happened?”
She presses wet towels against her puffy eyes and hot red cheeks. Water stains the white satin-polyester blouse.
“You are not normal.”
Cassidy laughs. “We knew that.”
“It is not funny! I feel sorry for you!”
Incredibly, Dulce is shouting. Still Cassidy cannot drop the smile. It is hard to process—this quietly competent, accommodating woman who runs a department full of brash male egos without ever losing her cool, suddenly throwing some kind of theatrical fit.
“You want to play a little boy’s game? Well, go ahead and play with the boys.”
A deep disquiet turns Cassidy’s gut.
“Did I do something?”
Dulce doesn’t answer.
Louder, “Do you mind telling me what I did?”
Cassidy lowers the backpack. She had suddenly become aware of the strap cutting into her shoulder.
Dulce stutters. She averts her face and gestures with both hands as if trying to turn off a faucet that had suddenly begun to spew sewage.
“This trash, this piece of filth comes to my house.”
“Are we talking about one of Alberto’s friends?”
“Not his friend! Who knows what it is? A disgusting videotape.”
“Oh.”
“My mother opens it. She thinks it is a cartoon, it comes in a box, like you get from a video store, with cartoons on it, she thinks it is for my son—”
“Let me guess—it turned out to be adult material.”
Fresh tears burst from Dulce’s eyes and Cassidy takes a step back. Try to be patient. You can imagine the shock it would be for a Catholic grandma to get a glimpse at the kind of pornography out there today.
“My mother had heart palpitations. My neighbor had to call 911.”
Okay, a big shock.
“Is your mom all right?”
Cassidy is holding her ground but mightily disgusted by the thought of yet another conversation with Alberto. Don’t get into fights in bars. Don’t get sent to jail. Don’t fall in with a bad crowd who would send stupid dirty tapes to the home of the people who are sponsoring you in this country. When is he going to get it?
“My mom’s okay.”
“That’s good.”
Dulce wipes her nose with another paper towel which seems to just about lacerate her skin.
“My husband doesn’t want me to work here.” She holds her face up, shiny with accusation. “He wants me to quit.”
“Well, Carlos is a macho man,” says Cassidy with an easy shrug, a joke they have shared before.
“He’s right.”
Could that be hate in Dulce’s hard amber eyes?
“Why should I work in a place where I can’t trust my friends? Some people around here, it doesn’t surprise me that they would keep me in the dark, I’m only a secretary, but you I can’t believe.”
“Hey,” says Cassidy, “I didn’t send the freaking tape.”
“The only explanation I can see for why you didn’t tell me is because you don’t have children. You don’t have children, you don’t know how to feel. Not like a mother.”
Talk about free fall. Talk about plummeting a hundred miles an hour.
“Check it,” spits Cassidy with a downward jab through the air. Adrenaline-torqued, prancing.
“Maybe it’s a cultural thing,” Dulce says, smug, arms folded.
Suddenly it is a cultural thing, as if they’d never known each other, never gone to lunch, talked about fathers, shared family occasions like first communion for Dulce’s little girls, looked out for each other around the office a hundred different ways, gossiped about movie stars and TV personalities, and ballplayers and ballplayers’ wives—alliances that had been shyly built over two years, snapped.
An unfamiliar rage tornadoes Cassidy’s body.
“What? Spanish women have a lock on having babies? Is that what you’re saying? Because if I said that I’d be stripped naked and run out of town. I’m not a mother, so I don’t know how to feel? You have no idea how it feels.”
She pulls the door so hard it slams open against the wall and scrapes her knuckles.
Dulce continues to grip her own elbows with a stony expression.
“You knew it was dangerous for Alberto Cruz to be in my house.”
Cassidy turns.
“—I mean the danger to my family of having Alberto Cruz stay in my home. You knew it. You said nothing.”
Cassidy remembers how Detective Simms steered her out of Raymond’s office. “Let us handle it,” he said.
“They specifically told me not to tell you.”
“Good!” Dulce throws up her hands. “So you are still a member in good standing of the boys’ club.”
“Dulce. What was on that tape?”
“It is an atrocity.”
Both hands fly up to cover her crumbling face. Cassidy attempts to touch her shoulder, but Dulce pushes past and out the door.
Down in the dugout level a group of minor league kids is waiting to hit cage. They are big, six feet and taller, the bench is too small for all of them but they squeeze together, doing their best to look cooperative in preseason grunge of goatees, pimples, baggy shorts and sagging socks—overgrown adolescence concentrated as ammonia. These are not men yet, don’t have the smoothness of men, the knowledge and confidence of men, they can’t see beyond their own strike zones, or what their agents put before their eyes—they don’t have the global picture, as a man would have, like Joe. Cassidy strides past with “Hihowyadoin?” but none of them will meet her gaze. Only in baseball is the quaint custom preserved of looking you in the chest, not the eyes.
Even during a three-second pass-by Cassidy cannot resist checking out the hitter—looking to make Double A this year by the way he’s trying to hit the cover off the ba
ll. All that separates her from the deadly arc of the bat is a rope curtain. She registers again how instinctual it is, the swing, how brutal, forceful and primitive. The hitter steps and connects. Sound explodes in the enclosed space.
When the regular season starts this corridor will be closed off and heavily guarded, but now there is free passage from the cage to the bull pen where the sun glares off the smooth blue walls as if they were sheet metal.
“Just throw soft,” a pitching coach is saying—white hair, skinny legs, buttless—but even soft you can hear the whistle on the ball. A few spectators lean over the seats. A video camera. The omnipresent dad.
Cassidy opens the gate to the playing field and enters ballpark space. The red dirt track is mealy from three days of heavy rain. Skirting wheelbarrows and sandbags, she makes the long walk toward first base, where, on a patch of dry between orange stanchions, half a dozen two-man teams play catch. Raymond and LAPD Detective Mark Simms, both conspicuous in civilian clothes, have pulled Cruz out of practice, talking to him close and low. He gestures, dismissive, impatient to get back on the field, but they keep him shouldered in.
Cassidy goes forward and backward at the same time, impelled toward the tight little trio while simultaneously drawing what comfort she can from the stories of empty seats, a buffer against the dread of getting there.
It goes way back, this profound security of being on a diamond, to being carried by her father through a crowd of giants dressed in white, over the green grass. She was high up, safe, part of him and the exhilaration and privilege of being the one for whom all that benevolence came radiating from the fans. Astride his shoulders, she would wave unabashedly. Or throw on the track with her brother Gregg, who, at eight, was destined to be a star. He had a crew cut like his dad, and Smoke’s strong, flexible body and a serious focus you don’t see that young. His fine boy’s cheeks were usually scarlet, wet with perspiration or hose water. He owned first base, mature, taking care of business. Cassidy was the little sister with an arm, freakish and cute, a pregame sideshow attraction.
They lived in a run-down blue Victorian on a hill (before it was designated the “Historic District”) in Ashland, Oregon (before real estate prices tripled). The casement window in Cassidy’s old room had been generous—not like those energy-efficient sliders Maggie put in after Smoke died and she remarried and turned the place into a B&B—big enough so children could climb right through to the airy secret world of the back-porch roof.
Cassidy always remembers the irony, that Gregg had been doing her a favor for once, gathering leaves from the rain gutter for her doll’s soup. There he was, poised at the edge of the roof in tendrils of trumpet vine, late summer light showing through the hot red membranes of his ears. Too good a target. Cassidy—strong enough at four to ride a two-wheeler and sock a ball—had slid confidently down the shingles and popped him into space. A delicious sweetness burst from the base of her tongue. She never forgot the illicit taste.
Games, all kinds of games, were a way of life in the Sanderson house—poker, pickle—arguments resolved by contest. If you won the toss, the race, the mumblety-peg, rope swing, thumb wrestle, breath hold, sit-ups-per-minute, if, in water polo, you drowned your sister, then you had made your point, and you were right.
The game of baseball was the creed by which they lived, the stadium their personal and public shrine. Maggie would be down there making jokes with the ushers, and Smoke would be signing balls, and that’s who they were in 1964, that family, moving through that moment in time.
Later on, when things went bad for that family, the only place that still made any sense at all was the ball field, and that’s why Cassidy came to live more and more within the white lines, where events are orderly and nothing happens that cannot be explained in a book of rules.
The men look over, guarded, as she joins them.
Simms says, “We have a situation.”
Raymond says, “Let’s talk about this,” and leads them into the empty dugout.
It can be a thrill to sit on the same comfortless hard cushions as the multimillion-dollar stars, but Alberto refuses, putting one foot, then the other, up and down on the step like he’s doing aerobics. Raymond and Simms have assumed the spread-leg stance, two spans on a bridge; only Cassidy sinks onto the bench.
“What’s going on?”
“Alberto got another threat.”
“Does this have to do with the videotape?”
“You heard.”
“A little, from Dulce. But she was too freaked to really tell me.” Cassidy looks questioningly at each but no one wants to speak. “What was it?”
Finally it falls to Simms.
“A dead woman laid out on a cot in a shack. We’re assuming this is in the DR. It looks as if someone beat out her brains with a baseball bat. There are candles and bottles and crap all around her like they’ve made some kind of altar. Human skulls. Crosses wrapped in chains. A man wearing a ski mask rubs the body with what looks like blood. Then, basically, he ejaculates.”
“Is this supposed to be real?”
Raymond snorts and looks away.
“The film?” Simms gives her the blank cop blink. “Yeah. It’s a real dead woman with her head beat in. And there’s a message, which I’m not at liberty to quote, but it’s basically the same as the notes.”
Cassidy: “Alberto, have you seen this?”
Alberto has been looking at the field and muttering in Spanish.
Simms answers for him, “He wasn’t able to identify the victim.”
Raymond: “Kind of hard when she doesn’t have a face.”
“They beat her up as a threat?”
“Looks that way.”
Cassidy whispers, “Guys, it’s ten thousand dollars. Why don’t we just freaking pay?”
“Against policy.”
“That’s just stupid—” But she stops, thinking of Joe, and then because Alberto’s head is bent and tears are falling to the ground in two pale columns.
“Chico,” she says softly, and starts toward him but Simms blocks the way.
“Tell us about it, Alberto. You’ll feel better.”
“Him?” says Cassidy incredulously. “He has nothing to say.”
“Let Alberto answer.”
“We’re all on the same side,” the scouting director puts in.
“How I play? How I play with this?” Alberto pounds his forehead.
Cassidy: “It’s not your fault.”
Simms: “Here’s how: You tell us who talked to you, who pressured you, put you in this position.”
“I know nothing!”
“Drug dealers have the power.” Alberto is bent over. Simms has a hand on his back. “They make you do things you don’t want to do. They start small. Threaten your family. It goes from there. But you know what? We can take the power. You and me, working together, we can take the power away.”
Simms’s hand, hovering, tightens into a fist.
“Somebody don’t want me to play ball. That all I know.”
Alberto straightens, wiping his eyes.
“Screw ’em,” Raymond says suddenly. “Get out there.”
“For real I can go?”
Raymond jerks a thumb toward the field. Alberto is gone.
Simms cocks his head at Raymond. “Why did you do that?”
Raymond replies, “He’s a good kid,” and Cassidy wants to hug his big bear chest.
Simms: “I didn’t say he wasn’t good, I said, Maybe they got to him. Maybe they said they’d kill his mother and rape his sister, so he sticks a bunch of cocaine down his throat, delivers it to Los Angeles, swears he’ll never do it again. Then it’s, Too bad, sucker, we’ve got this on you, pay or you’re history.”
Raymond considers. “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t.”
“I have pretty good instincts about these boys.”
“And I’ve been working narcotics seventeen years.”
Simms scrapes one muddy boot on th
e step.
“No question in my mind, when we get to the bottom of this extortion thing it’ll be about drugs. Has to. Nothing else that big could be at stake. Besides, you’ve got a whole new drug route going through the Dominican. The Colombian drug lords used to be in bed with the Mexicans but that ain’t happening because the Mexicans started taking the business, so the Colombians went to the DR—it’s a joke down there. Security is so lax they’ve got people at the airport fixing the X-ray machines. And they’ve penetrated this country so now Dominican drug traffickers are operating the east coast all the way the hell up to Maine.”
“That’s not Alberto.”
“This town of Nagua, where the notes allegedly came from—?”
“Did you find out who owns the post office box?”
“We’re working on that. It’s the biggest port of export of illicit cargo on the island—I’m talking human illegals as well as heroin and cocaine—because of its geographical location. Say that’s circumstantial. But this tape. I gotta tell you”—Simms shakes his head—“it’s a similar—technique—if you want to call it that—we see drug dealers using to influence the common folk all across the Caribbean. Those spirit bottles, like the one they left in your car, that can be a legitimate religion, I checked it out, but the dealers use them for intimidation.”
Shadows have been thrown across the infield. It has become chilly in the dugout, Cassidy’s hands are cold and stiff. The kids are playing pepper, Alberto among them. Their shouts echo percussively in the empty bowl, while underneath, like a drone, come the scraping of shovels and the thrum of a riding mower.
Raymond: “Alberto needs protection.”
“Yes, and frankly? I have concern for the other players. I would recommend removing him.”
“No!” says Cassidy, jumping up. “If you’re talking about sending him home, you can’t. This is his shot! You wouldn’t back off a starter who got the same threats, you can’t just back off Cruz because he’s a kid and he’s cheap. Raymond?”
Raymond steps out of the dugout. They follow into the brightness of late afternoon. Farther away, where the sun hits the outfield, small waves of heat are steaming off the grass. At their feet are deep squooshy puddles in which float fat pink worms.
