The Setup Man

by T. T. Monday

  I can’t help smiling. Jesse has always had a talent for stating what everyone is thinking but would never say.

  I reach in to open the little toy door of the Porsche, and then something catches my eye. A flash of white in front of Luck’s house. One look and I recognize our guy. In broad daylight, he is trying to jimmy the screen off one of George’s front windows.

  Rather than risk another high-speed footrace, I duck behind the car and observe him for a minute. He manages to pry the screen off, placing it neatly next to the wall. Next he reaches into his back pocket and takes out an object like a double-A battery with a black wire hanging off one end. It looks like one of those microphones they clip on your shirt for TV interviews. He places the device in the lower right corner of the window, fiddles with it a moment, then moves to the left side and places another. When he is satisfied, he replaces the screen and stands back. For at least ten seconds he just stands there, admiring his work. Then he walks off.

  I turn off the radio, lock the Porsche, and walk over to Luck’s front door. I have decided that I will knock, just in case any neighbors are watching, and then check the window. I walk up the steps, open the screen door, and reach for the knocker. There is something stuck under it—a tiny envelope of thick, expensive paper, like the reply card in a wedding invitation. Inside the envelope is a business card with a headshot of a pretty Latina. There’s a phone number, but no explanation. I assume it’s a gift from an overzealous realtor and am about to toss it away when I recognize the name under the digits: Alejandra Sol. This is one of the names Bethany gave me—an alias of the dead girl in Frankie’s car. I look more closely. The back of the card is a full-color photo of the same woman in a bikini. Her body is turned away from the camera, and she is looking back over one shoulder. She has glossy dark hair and a gleam in her eye that tells you she’s selling much more than condos.

  I raise the knocker and give it a few good whacks for appearance. I take another look at the card. It might be a coincidence. “Alejandra” is a common name. Two of my colleagues on the Bay Dogs’ pitching staff have girlfriends named Alejandra. And “Sol” is pretty common, too; there was a guy who played for Milwaukee named Pedro Sol. He could never hit my changeup, bless his little heart.

  But what if it’s not a coincidence? What if this is the same girl who died with Frankie Herrera? It seems impossible. Even the most frequent-flying whore couldn’t serve johns in L.A. and San José at the same time. But if there was a network of girls, up and down the state, marketed to certain clients …

  Or what if she marketed herself exclusively to professional baseball players? Why not? We certainly have the money, and we’re fairly discreet. Not to mention lonely.

  I am coming down Luck’s front stairs, head full of theories, when I run into the little pimp. He looks surprised to see me here, which I can hardly believe, because what kind of moron returns three times to a location he knows is being watched? I reach back, ball up my right fist, and aim for his nose. My dad taught me to punch like boxer, with dexterity in both hands. Knowing how to hit with the right arm became a real asset later, as soon as it became clear that the left was going to be my meal ticket. When I connect with the kid’s face, there is the familiar crunch, and he doubles over. Blood trickles through his fingers.

  I know I should beat his ass on principle. The little shit made me run halfway across Manhattan Beach. He deserves worse that what I’ve given him. But I am unarmed, and I do not feel strongly enough about teaching him a lesson to risk further injury. Here’s another boxing lesson from Dad: just knock out your opponent, don’t kill him. You don’t get extra points for beating on a corpse.

  “What was that for?” the kid says. His voice is surprisingly low, a growl seasoned by nicotine. I notice grays mixed into his buzz and realize he is not a kid after all. He just acts like one.

  “Where’s Miguel?” I say.

  “What do you care, bro? This is business.”

  “Some business,” I say. “Planting microphones in people’s windows—what kind of business is that?”

  “They ain’t microphones. They’re like … firecrackers. I flip the remote, the glass breaks, that’s it. I wasn’t going to burn the house down or nothing.”

  He has managed to get his nose to stop bleeding, so I pop it again.

  “Hey! What do you want from me? I’ll take the pyros down, just leave me alone.”

  “First you leave my buddy alone.”

  “Fine, bro, but he ain’t who you think he is.”

  “You mean his girl? I know all about her.” I pull out the business card and wave it in front of the punk’s face.

  He spits a wad of blood and snot on the concrete. “Look, I’m just paid to send a message, that’s all.”

  “And what’s this message? That the price has gone up?”

  “Yeah, that’s what happens when you have new management.” He tips his head back, pinches the bridge of his damaged nose. “You’re not going to clock me no more, right?”

  “Leave my friend alone. He is happy with the girl he’s got, and he’s not interested in paying more.”

  “Fine. My boss won’t be happy, but fine.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  The pimpito shakes his head. “You don’t want to get mixed up in this.”

  I raise my fist. He winces.

  “Tell me his name,” I say.

  “You want to die? Because that’s what is going to happen. If my boss knew what I told you already, both of us would be dead, like tonight.”

  “Glad I’m not the only one in danger.”

  “Tell your friend he can keep his ho. Same price. But don’t ask no more questions—not you or him.”

  I keep watch as the little shit struts to the window, pops off the screen, and puts the little remote-controlled firecrackers back in the pocket of his Dickies.

  “Get the fuck out of here!” I yell after him.

  He walks away slowly in a kind of impotent defiance, his two hands in the air with middle fingers extended and crossed like six-guns. The irony is that he has big hands, bigger than mine. With a little discipline, he might have had a career.

  22

  Though I was hoping the unlocked bathroom door meant I would be invited for dinner, it turns out to be just another of Ginny’s half-wrought gestures, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. At six o’clock I am back in the house in Santa Monica, Simon’s pocket rocket returned to the garage.

  “Can I take Izzy out to dinner?” I ask.

  “Please, Mom,” our daughter begs. “I haven’t seen Dad since the All-Star break!”

  “You know it’s not easy to see your father during the season.”

  “But, Mom, he’s standing right here.”

  I am standing, to be precise, in my ex-wife’s haunted living room. The house actually has two living rooms—or parlors, I guess you’d call them—to the left and right of the entry hall. We are in the left parlor, which Ginny has decorated with a Day of the Dead theme. One wall is completely covered with painted papier-mâché skulls, or calaveras, that Ginny bought in bulk from a Mexican artist on the Venice boardwalk. Each skull is about the size of a baby’s head, and if that was not eerie enough, some of them are painted with commercial logos and other symbols of contemporary life. Not surprisingly (since the skulls were purchased in Los Angeles), there is one with the San José Bay Dogs logo, the interlocking yellow-and-black “SJ,” on its sparkling black dome. That one has blood running from its eyes.

  “Fine,” Ginny says, “but don’t go far. And no driving—the headlights don’t work in the Porsche.”

  “We’ll walk,” I say.

  There is a trattoria on Montana where I eat occasionally after visits with Izzy—other afternoons that might have led to dinner invitations but did not.

  We set off into the Santa Monica night. Izzy is pumped, adrenalized. For her it is a treat of epic proportions to be out for dinner with her peripatetic father. I hope this never changes,
but I cannot see how it won’t. Because I travel for a living, I have bought myself a little more of her adulation than other fathers enjoy. If I were living at home, or even divorced but readily accessible, she would be over me by now.

  Then there’s the investigation thing, the other side of my professional life. I used to feel dirty—doing what I do, solving the kinds of problems I solve, and then spending time with my daughter. How else could you feel after spending a four-game series flying back and forth between Miami and Santo Domingo, tailing the left fielder’s wife, only to discover that the left fielder is banging his thirteen-year-old cousin? How do you then spend a weekend with your own thirteen-year-old without feeling that some part of you has been tainted by association with these predators? How do you not feel contagious?

  Short of re-engineering the male endocrine system, there is little I can do. It should not surprise anyone that the hormonal imbalances that cause a thirty-year-old man to seduce and deflower his teenage cousin are the same ones that allow him to turn around on a baseball thrown ninety-five miles per hour and drive it 450 feet—and to do this once every four games, on average, for ten years straight. That’s a valuable endocrine abnormality, a multi-million-dollar freak show.

  And also a business opportunity. Just ask Alejandra Sol.

  “I thought we could go to Angelo Mio,” I tell Izzy. “You like the pasta there, right?”

  “When I was like ten.”

  “Is pasta just for kids?”

  “Dad, pasta is all carbs.”

  “I know that. I went to college.”

  “I’m carb-neutral.”

  “What does that mean, anyway?”

  “It means you have to offset every serving of carbs with something else. You can choose between protein, fat, and vegetables.”

  “And you don’t choose fat very often.”

  She looks to make sure I’m not joking. “No, I don’t.”

  “So why don’t you have a salad with your pasta?”

  “How about I order my own salad,” she counters, “but we split a pasta?”

  “Izzy, I weigh two hundred pounds. Have a heart.”

  “Fine, I’ll get the kids’ size.”

  “Why, because you’re a kid?”

  “Dad!”

  “I’m just saying, when was the last time you ordered off the kids’ menu?”

  “At Angelo?”

  “Anywhere.”

  She stops and thinks about this—God, could I love her any more?—and finally says, “I still get a Happy Meal sometimes at McDonald’s.”

  “Wait a minute—you won’t eat a full plate of pasta, but you will eat a burger from McDonald’s?”

  “I take off the bun. It’s called a Skinny Mac—my friend Jenna invented it.”

  I hold my tongue the rest of the way to the restaurant, while Izzy tells me about a boy named Kurt, the current heartthrob of her eighth-grade class.

  “I don’t even think he’s handsome. He’s too hairy. Jenna said he started shaving in sixth grade.”

  “Sixth grade, really? You should stay away from him.”

  Izzy bites her lip. This was not the answer she was hoping for. I can see her recalculating behind those wide brown eyes.

  “Are you sure?” she says.

  “Of course I’m sure. The sooner hair grows on the face, the sooner it falls off the head. And I wouldn’t want you to have a bald husband.”

  “I’m not going to marry him! We’re just—”

  She stops. Too late.

  “You’re just what?”

  “I haven’t even kissed him, Dad.” Suddenly it looks like she is going to cry.

  “Relax, honey. I was just joking.”

  “No, you’re right. He’s too mature.”

  I start to say that was not my point, but then I realize it was. Isabel is still a girl—and I say this objectively, not just as a protective father. She got her period last winter, when she visited me in San José, but I only know because of the way she pranced self-importantly to the bathroom every hour, clutching a bright-pink LeSportsac in one hand. Her body has barely begun to change. She grows taller all the time, but she looks like an eight-year-old on stilts.

  “Listen, Izzy, I’m sure Kurt’s a nice guy. I shouldn’t pass judgment until I meet him.”

  “You sound like Mom. She’s always saying things like ‘You shouldn’t pass judgment.’ But only after I start passing judgment. If I just talked about how nice he was, how gentlemanly and all that, she would tell me I wasn’t being careful enough. There’s not much in between, you know?”

  “Unfortunately, life is like that.”

  We take a table in the window, and I persuade Izzy to order a normal-sized plate of spaghetti marinara. The tomatoes in the sauce, I argue, cancel out the noodles. I order eggplant parmigiana, and I promise to supplement her tomatoes with some of my eggplant if she feels tempted to eat more pasta. We have to keep the equation in balance, I say. I sense that she appreciates the effort.

  “Tell me about the new play,” I say. “Is Kurt in drama with you?”

  “No, he plays water polo.”

  I cringe. At my high school, the water-polo team worked out in the mornings before class, and then wandered around bleary-eyed all day. A sport that explains bloodshot eyes at 8 a.m. is attractive to a certain type of guy. We used to joke that they traveled to road games in the Mystery Machine.

  “Tell me, does he …” I pinch together my thumb and forefinger and raise them to my lips.

  “Does he get high? Probably, although he says he doesn’t. Jenna says his brother has a prescription.”

  What kind of world is this, I wonder, where kids score their pot from a sibling with a medical condition?

  “You have every right to be skeptical,” I say. “When I was in high school, people bought their pot from water-polo players.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sometimes. But I was stupid.”

  “In health they told us that pot rots your brain. The boys were all laughing and saying they didn’t care.”

  “You should care.”

  “But pot doesn’t rot your brain. Does it?”

  “No one knows. They haven’t studied it much.”

  “Come on, Dad.”

  “Is my brain rotten?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  I have to think about this. Did smoking pot in high school rot my brain? Hard to say. What difference would it make if I lost a few IQ points? I didn’t exactly choose a heady profession.

  “I got lucky, Izzy. Suppose I topped out at triple-A. Then where would I be? It would be a shame if a couple dozen bong hits in high school made the difference between selling sporting goods and curing cancer.”

  Who knows what young Isabel Adcock may decide to be? If she chooses law or physics or diplomacy, she may need those mental edges, the ones that weed sands off.

  “I stand by my first advice,” I say. “Be wary of Kurt.”

  Izzy sighs. “I know you’re right. But I still want him to ask me out.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t good-looking.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty much a god.”

  “They always are.”

  “Was Mom like that?”

  “Your mom is a beautiful woman, but she wasn’t dangerous like this Kurt kid, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Were you dangerous for her?”

  I realize this is the question she’s been meaning to ask all along. Screw Kurt. Maybe there is no Kurt.

  “Yes,” I say, “but neither of us knew it until much later.”

  “That’s not fair,” my daughter says, and I know she means to be generous, to say that it isn’t fair for me to accuse myself of a crime I could not have foreseen. But it is fair. One way or another, justice is always done. Just ask Frankie Herrera. I don’t expect Izzy to understand. I didn’t understand it myself for a long time.

  “Yeah, it’s too bad,” I say lamely. “But if your mom and I ha
dn’t done what we did, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.”

  “She says that, too.”

  “She does?”

  Izzy catches my eye. “Among other things.”

  23

  Another day, another one-run game. This time we were losing the whole way, which means that yours truly, the Bay Dogs’ new closer, did not pitch. I text Luck and tell him to meet me in the players’ parking lot at eleven-thirty. He texts back, Why? What happened? But I’m not going to give him the news over the phone. I don’t care how normal he thinks it is to be dating a prostitute. That kind of information should never be encoded into waves and sent around. Someone may be listening—the FBI, the NSA. Also, it’s just bad mojo, hanging your dirty laundry from a telephone wire.

  Luck is late—probably lingering in the clubhouse to bask in the warmth of a victory. It is a tough year to be a Dodger. Even with one of the highest payrolls in the majors, the Dodgers are ten games out of first place. The local media are furious, disgusted. But a chill still moves up my spine as I stand outside the stadium. As a kid, I used to come to this very spot, a chain-link enclosure beyond the left-field bleachers, and stand around after Sunday matinees with my friends, waiting to ask the players for autographs as they emerged from the clubhouse: Valenzuela, Guerrero, Scioscia, Sax. We used to say how great it would be when we got driver’s licenses and later curfews and could come here after night games. Of course, by the time we got our licenses, we were more interested in stalking high-school girls than professional baseball players. Now, twenty years later, I have finally made it back. The same orange “76” ball is rotating above the gas station at the edge of the economy lot. The stadium lights have been cut to half-power to save a few bucks while the janitors sweep beneath the seats. This is my favorite time at the ballpark—any ballpark—and it doesn’t matter if I have won or lost the game. Either way, the pressure is off. For a little while, you can pretend it is all still magic.

  My phone buzzes and I see a message from Bethany. Attached is a photo of the dead girl from the morgue in San Mateo. It’s not a pretty sight: her face is smashed on one side, cheekbone caved, skin lacerated. I can’t tell for sure if I’m looking at Alejandra Sol.