The Setup Man

by T. T. Monday

  Marcus Washington pitched sixteen years in the bigs, the last four in San José when I was new to the league. He comes from a bygone era when all pitchers trained to be starters. The guys in the bullpen—especially the long relievers and setup men—were either failed starters or starters whose prime had come and gone. The pen was a kind of back pasture where old horses were put out to graze. By the time I met Marcus, he had not started a game in eight years. “The game is changing,” he told me. “Soon there will be seventh-inning specialists, eighth-inning specialists, first-out-of-the-ninth specialists.” I told him that had already happened. “Look at me,” I said. “This is my first year, and already I’ve got my slot. I’m destined to pitch the eighth for my entire career.” Marcus leaned back on his folding chair and said if that was so then he was finished.

  Marcus’s retirement plan had always been to open a bar. (The writers of Cheers were right to make Sam Malone a relief pitcher—bartending is a pretty common dream in the bullpen.) But after the Bay Dogs cut him loose, he realized that he was not quite ready to retire and accepted an offer to play in Japan for the Kintetsu Buffaloes. Thus our man Makasu (Japanglish for “Marcus”) enjoyed a second career in Japan, where, in addition to several years’ worth of top-quality Asian trim, he gained an important grain of inspiration: it was not just a bar he was supposed to open, but a sushi bar.

  Sushi Makasu opened right after the dot-com bust in a storefront on Jackson Street once occupied by Kozmo.com. Marcus pulled out all the stops in infusing the vibe of his native West Oakland into the neat order of San José’s Japantown. The lighting is subdued, even dark, and the sushi bar is a long zinc-topped number with rotating stools. All the waitresses are African American: Marcus calls them his “Afro-geishas.” They wear black Lycra tube dresses, platform heels, and cat-eye mascara. Hair pulled tight in a bun. Marcus trains the girls on what he calls “properness.” Properness means no talking back to a customer, no matter what he said, or what you think he said. It means apologizing if the food takes too long, or if the order was incorrect. Marcus told me these notions of service were foreign to the girls he had grown up with in Oakland—girls whose daughters he now hires. At first Marcus rolled all the sushi himself, but that got to be a bottleneck as the restaurant’s popularity grew. Eventually, he hired his brother Rich, a recent parolee, and showed him the ropes. Rich brought in another old boy, and so on. Marcus joked that the state should make him a parole officer. These days, with the restaurant humming along, Marcus mostly sits in his office, a windowless cell next to the restrooms, behind a door marked with a framed, autographed photo of his idol, the pitcher Vida Blue.

  I wave to Rich as I walk through the restaurant. He nods, no smile. On the stereo, Bill Withers laments that there “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.” All night I have been thinking of Frankie’s wife, how the problem of the porn film is still unsolved, and how I should be the one to solve it now that Frankie is gone. But when I think of calling her up—especially now that I know Frankie had a secret of his own—I start to smell tar. Maybe I don’t want to touch this baby. (“I know, I know, I know, I know, I know,” wails Withers.)

  I rap on the office door. Vida shivers in his Oakland A’s cap with his hard stare. Marcus opens the door all smiles, as jocular as his brother is dour. He has the classic pitcher’s physique—tall and lanky, wide shoulders, long legs. Marcus was famous for his herky-jerky delivery on the mound: the extra-high kick, limbs flailing out in all directions, before the ball shot forth like a rocket from a cloud. In retirement, he still moves that way. I see his motion as he swivels his desk chair and rises to greet me. His close-cropped natural and Cab Calloway mustache are shot through with silver, but his personal gravity is undiminished. He has been retired from baseball for ten years, and you would think his appeal would dim, but Marcus’s appeal was never just about baseball. He is one of a handful of players I have known over the years who would have gotten just as much action if he had never touched a baseball. Dark skin, bright eyes, a voice like Lou Rawls’s: Marcus was the original hound dog. He never married—says he never needed to. Even now his orbit is thick with impossibly young women. When I was new in the league, he showed me the ropes both on and off the field. He partied hard. Like a lot of ballplayers who came of age in the eighties, Marcus developed a weakness for coke, but unlike Doc Gooden (to name just one of his contemporaries), he never let it ruin him. By the time we met, his days of dissipation were largely behind him. He speaks of the late eighties like a veteran recalling combat. And he keeps his nose clean, mostly.

  Marcus of course has seen the night’s box score.

  “Now we know, Johnny Adcock,” he says as he pumps my hand. “Now we know what it takes for you to go a whole inning. A ten-run lead. That is your handicap, my friend.”

  “I appreciate your confidence, Pops.”

  “Come on, young man. After that one-pitch thing in Denver, I would have thought you needed at least twenty runs up. But, no, it turns out the skipper is a forgiving man, a kind and loving man. Like Jesus Christ.”

  “What could I do? Modigliani called it high and tight.”

  “And you couldn’t shake him off?”

  “My cutter is in dry dock. He wanted a fastball. Would you have shaken him off?”

  Marcus cranks up the wattage on his smile. “I shook everyone off.”

  “Yeah, well. Those were different times.”

  “Yes, they were.”

  “Marcus, I need a favor.”

  “Hold it,” he says, and then he reaches down and pushes a little button on his desk. It looks like a doorbell.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You want some tea?”

  I shrug.

  “You come in here, you drink tea. My rules.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “You are goddamned right about that.”

  Just then there’s a knock on the door, and one of Marcus’s waitresses walks in. She is a sister, of course, with dark brown eyes and an ass from here to Hunter’s Point.

  “Thank you, Miyako,” Marcus says as he takes the teapot and cups from the tray. The girl bows and leaves without saying a word.

  “Miyako?” I say.

  “Miyako. That’s her name.”

  “You gave it to her?”

  “She chose it. I gave her some options, and she chose that one. It means ‘beautiful night child.’ ”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that you make them change their names? I mean, who changes their name to work in a restaurant? Besides strippers.”

  “Common misconception,” Marcus says. “Geishas are not hos. Their job is to make the customer comfortable, that’s all.” He pours steaming tea from the cast-iron tetsubin pot into the two porcelain cups. “The geisha is there to help her client relax. I don’t doubt some geishas get down. But more often than not, they just serve tea.”

  “Isn’t tea a stimulant?”

  “My girls ain’t hos, John. Now tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “You heard about Frankie Herrera?”

  “I did. You know, Roberto Clemente was taken before his time. Thurman Munson also. Not bad company, come to think of it.”

  “Herrera was a good kid. Looked up to me, for some reason. He was always coming to me for advice.”

  Marcus smiles. “What comes around goes around.”

  “I guess so. The night before the accident, he came to me with a problem.”

  “Like, a problem problem?”

  Marcus knows all about my sideline. In fact, from time to time he has helped me out, serving as my local eyes and ears when I am on the road.

  I nod. “A matrimonial problem.”

  Marcus sips his tea. “I see.”

  “It seems his wife made some videos when she was younger. Herrera thought they had disappeared, but a few weeks ago someone posted one online and sent a link to his phone.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. And one mo
re piece of the puzzle: Turns out Herrera wasn’t alone in his car last night. He had a girl with him. Seventeen years old. You won’t read that in the papers.”

  “You put the gag on?”

  “Baseball fans are everywhere.”

  Marcus nods knowingly. “And you got the girl’s name, I assume.”

  “I could have, if I hadn’t pitched Kelton high and tight. Bastard patrolman ribbed me worse than you for that.”

  “How long are they going to keep it quiet?”

  “They said they were going to contact the girl’s family first, and then make a decision.”

  “So a day. Two tops.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “Have you talked to the wife?”

  “Not yet. She’s flying in tonight to claim the body. I expect she’ll turn up.”

  “I expect that’s right. So what do you need me for?”

  “Are you still in touch with Bam Bam Rodriguez?”

  Javier “Bam Bam” Rodriguez had been the Tony Modigliani of the late-nineties Bay Dogs—the team I joined when I came up from the minor leagues. We were not a great team, but Bam Bam, a Puerto Rican import, was the star attraction. His was the face on the car-insurance billboards, the filthy dreadlocks pulled back into a semi-respectable ponytail, the bulging eyes Photoshopped to look trustworthy. Like most ballplayers, Bam Bam had plans beyond the baseball diamond. His particular ambition was to move south to the San Fernando Valley and become a pornographer. “I jus’ love the fucking,” he would explain with a shrug. Because I was new and did not want to be rude, I would let him bend my ear for hours: in the trainer’s room, while he was getting his daily massage; in the hotel lobby, waiting for the bus to the airport; in the moldy visitors’ clubhouse in Philly, waiting out a rain delay. “Lord Jesus, he want me to have two life, Johnny, the béisbol and the fucking. Two life, ju understand?”

  Last I heard, his dreams had come true. Fancy that.

  “We’re friends on Facebook,” Marcus says.

  “Track him down. Tell him you’re looking for a girl. Don’t tell him she’s Herrera’s wife until you’re sure he’s for real.”

  “Oh, he’s for real,” Marcus says. He swivels in his chair, grabs the mouse on the desk, and shakes the computer awake. “Take a look at this.…”

  “That’s okay—just tell me what you learn. I want to know who posted that clip.”

  “Am I allowed to pay for this information?”

  “He won’t need our money,” I say, “if he’s got any information worth buying.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I rise to go, but Marcus stops me.

  “Do yourself a favor,” he says. “Shake off Modigliani once in a while. Don’t let him think you’re his bitch.”

  “What if I am?”

  Marcus clicks his tongue. “You young fellas are too conservative. Too damn conservative.”

  “Tell that to Frankie Herrera,” I say.

  6

  By the time I leave the sushi bar, the light rail has stopped running, so I walk home. I take shit from my teammates for not having a car, but on nights like this I’m glad I don’t, because I have the city to myself. At 3 a.m., even the homeless in St. James Park are bedded down for the night. The only waking soul in sight, a lone hooker on the corner of First and St. James, peers into the white glow of her cell phone. For better or worse, this is San José at full tilt. A hooker texts her pimp, a relief pitcher leaps across the trolley tracks, and in the office parks north of town millions of computers cycle and whir, turning electricity into money.

  I touch my keycard to the scanner in front of my building, and the door clicks open. In the elevator, I start thinking about Marcus, and whether it was wise to get him involved in this case. He has a tendency to get in too deep, and he usually ends up expanding the mess rather than helping to mop it up. But I love the guy. He is the reason I’m still playing ball. You burn out if you take anything too seriously, baseball included. I never understood that until I met Marcus. Now I worry that I understand it too well.

  I am so wrapped up in this line of thinking that I do not even notice that the deadbolt on my apartment door has already been opened. I just turn the knob, flip the lights, head straight for the bedroom. We have a matinee tomorrow; I have to be at the park by ten-thirty in the morning.

  “I thought you’d never come home,” says a voice from the bed.

  “Oh, hi,” I say, too tired to be surprised.

  “That’s all I get? I’m nude.”

  “You’re always nude.”

  “I am not. Today I wore a pantsuit.”

  “A pantsuit?”

  “A Dolce & Gabbana pantsuit. And a silk blouse.”

  “And under that?”

  “Under that, I was nude.”

  “See?”

  I throw my jacket on the back of a chair, start unbuttoning my shirt.

  “How was work?” she says.

  I love it when she says that. It makes me feel like an honest man.

  “A little better than usual,” I say. “Skip gave me more outs than I expected, but it went well. Better than the last night in Denver. You?”

  “I heard a pitch from a couple of Stanford biochemists who have developed a pill for BO. They’re calling it ‘medical deodorant.’ ”

  “Are you going to fund it?”

  “Not sure yet. I have to see if it works.”

  “I know some guys who sweat a lot.”

  “Maybe they can help.”

  “We have rules against taking drugs not prescribed by a doctor. Are you a doctor?”

  “Actually, yes. But not the kind you need.”

  “What kind of doctor are you, then?”

  “Come here and I’ll show you.”

  The conversation goes on like this until she gets tired of talking and stuffs a sock in my mouth. As promised, she is naked. Soon enough, I am, too. We do the needful, and the next thing you know it is four-thirty.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” I ask.

  “You know I’m bionic, Johnny.”

  This is the truest statement I have heard all day. Bethany Pham is not only the most intelligent woman I have ever met, she is also the best lay, and it’s not even close. The best part—or worst, if you’ve had a long day—is that she requires zero sleep.

  “I’m not complaining,” I say. “It’s just that I may have to work for ten or fifteen minutes this afternoon.”

  “Poor baby. Come here and let me make it up to you.”

  “Again?”

  “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No, I just—”

  At five-fifteen, garbage trucks rumble in the alley behind the building. The window pinks and then turns gray. Bethany reaches over and gently squeezes my cock, then swings her legs over the edge of the bed. She stretches her arms above her head, sniffs her pits. Her back is sculpted by the mile she swims every morning, which itself is only a warm-up for a ten-mile jog. Her glossy black hair shines with a hundred colors in the angular light.

  I push myself up on my elbows.

  “Go to sleep,” she says. “You need rest, weakling.”

  Bethany is a San José native, the only daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. Officially, she is a seismologist with a Ph.D. from Caltech, but she makes her living sniffing out bullshit. As a partner at a venture-capital firm in Menlo Park, she hears a thousand business plans a year and invests in less than five. She has never thought it’s strange that I face one batter per game. She understands about making it count.

  I watch as she pulls a black Speedo up her lean, muscular legs, writhing like a snake until the straps snap over her shoulders. She keeps a full set of workout clothes in my apartment and little else. Like me, Bethie is divorced and swears she will never marry again. Like me, she supports her ex with generous monthly checks. Also like me, she is secretly glad she has an ex to support, because she does not know what she would do with her money if she were allowed to keep it all. She lives her life
at the poles of intellect and physicality: pie-in-the-sky technology and punishing exercise. If Bethany has a problem, it is that she has little patience for anything in between. I don’t know if I love her, but I do feel something for her that I don’t feel for the rest of the women in my life. It might just be proximity. I may never know. Neither of us wants to ruin a good thing with too much scrutiny.

  “Will you be around later?” I say.

  “Around where?”

  “Just around. I may need to ask you for something.”

  She shrugs. “You know my number. No promises.”

  “Of course not,” I say.

  I watch her gather her things into a big, expensive-looking handbag with a small gold clasp. She slips a wide cloth band over her head to keep her hair out of her eyes.

  “Farewell,” I say.

  “You are too sentimental, John. Had I known that when I met you, I might never have …” Her voice trails away. I hear the front door open, and then, quite unexpectedly, another woman’s voice.

  “Is this Johnny Adcock’s apartment?” The voice is young and slightly squeaky. It belongs to no one I know.

  “It is,” I hear Bethany answer.

  “Is he here?”

  Bethany yells, “Next!”

  I scramble. The jeans are on the floor, where I left them last night. This morning. A few hours ago.

  Heels click in the hall. The squeaky voice calls out: “Mr. Adcock?”

  I have my pants on and half my shirt buttoned up when she appears in the bedroom doorway.

  “What time is it?” I say. That’s as good as any other first line, considering.

  “Six o’clock. I’m sorry it’s so early, but I have a flight. My kids are waiting for me at home.”

  I realize I am standing before the widow Herrera.

  7

  The widow is petite, not more than five feet and a hundred pounds. She looks to be about Frankie’s age, certainly not more than thirty. All her parts are real, although her coffee-colored hair may have been straightened. She has neat, sculpted brows, black eyes, and dark tones on her lips and lashes. This morning she wears a black silk blouse, black jeans, and a pair of dark slingback sandals. Open-toed shoes seem like a strange choice for a woman in mourning, until I notice that her nails are painted black as well.