Susan knew that Brentnor was pleased with even a one-year exclusive on the items, but he went through the motions before finally agreeing and passing his pen across the table for Hans Roitler’s signature. “Let’s get this wrapped up today. It’s only six weeks till your opening game.”
“My attorney will have to vet it first.”
Susan could see the frustration on Mike’s face. “We need to order the merchandise and—”
“All right. I’ll have it faxed back East to him today. We should have his opinion by tomorrow. Can you both stay an extra day?”
“I think so,” Susan answered for them.
Larry Freedman was all smiles. “I can show you around the training camp if you’d like. You can watch some batting practice.”
Roitler snorted. “If the bats ever arrive.”
“They’re here, sir. They were delivered to the hotel where the team is staying by mistake and I’m having them sent out on the team bus.”
“You had no bats?” Susan asked. “Doesn’t everyone have his own?”
“The veteran players often do, but we need bats for practice and replacement when one breaks. We need them for the rookies and the pitchers too. A major league team can go through hundreds in one season. We ordered a gross of them in different sizes and weights.”
While the owner went off to fax the contract to his attorney, Freedman took them into the big dome. “Of course, it’s not as large as Toronto or Houston or our new stadium back home, but it holds forty-eight thousand people. It’s got a retractable roof, air conditioning, and natural turf. There are picnic areas, a children’s playground, and even a swimming pool behind the outfield fence. San Diego and Arizona are holding their spring training here, and, of course, our Comets. They have the training and exhibition schedules all worked out to accommodate three teams, and we expect big crowds.” He smiled ruefully. “If we don’t get ’em, we may be in the old minor-league ballpark for next spring’s practice. We might be back there anyway if the Diamondbacks decide we’re too disruptive to their own opening-day planning.”
Susan watched the workmen repairing the natural turf along the dugouts. Suddenly the loudspeaker squawked and a harsh voice asked, “Larry, have you seen Willa around?”
Freedman lifted his head toward the announcer’s booth. “She rode the bus into town to collect the bats, Chet. Anything I can do for you?’
“No, I was just looking for her.”
He showed them the team locker rooms and then took them on the elevator to the top of the dome. These are the sky boxes. There are around forty of them here and that’s where the real money is, with corporations willing to pay extra for luxury. We have them in the new Comets stadium too.” Susan had never been in a sky box before and she was intrigued that the bar and partying area seemed larger than the seating area for actually watching the game.
When they came back to ground level and went outside, Freedman glanced at his watch. “The bus should have been back by now. It’s only ten minutes each way, plus time to load the bats. I hope the hotel didn’t misplace them.”
“Are they in boxes?” Mike asked.
Freedman nodded. “Usually a dozen to a box, though some suppliers pack differently. Willa doesn’t have to lift them. She’s our front-office manager, Willa Bright. She just went along to supervise and make sure the hotel people loaded all the boxes on the bus.”
He pointed out the animated scoreboard that could show replays and crowd scenes as well as graphics, then took them back outside into the morning heat. “How long before Roitler hears back from his attorney?” Mike asked. “Probably tomorrow morning. If we get an answer today I’ll leave a message at your hotel. Meanwhile, take a look around Phoenix. There’s a lot to see.”
Mike and Susan headed back toward their hotels. Do you think the lawyer will find some reason to change the contract?” she asked.
“I hope not. We’ve got little enough time now if we want the items on sale for opening day. I’ll have to phone Saul.” Saul Marx was their boss back in New York.
Susan was more practical. “So long as we have them by the time the Comets come to New York in June, there’s no great harm done.”
“I suppose not,” he grudgingly agreed.
As they pulled out of the parking lot Susan noticed a large green bus at the entrance to another lot across the street. “What’s that, Mike?”
“Looks like a bus.”
They pulled up beside it and she saw the Comets logo on a large adhesive strip affixed to the side. “This must be the bus they’ve been waiting for. It may have broken down.”
“I don’t see any sign of an accident.”
Susan got out and went up to the bus door, with Mike reluctantly following. There was no driver visible and the doors were closed. Mike noticed the driver’s window was open slightly and stood on tiptoe to reach through it. “Sometimes this works,” he said, feeling around for the right lever to pull. There was a sudden whoosh of compressed air as the passenger door opened. Susan led the way onto the bus, seeing the empty driver’s seat with a pack of cigarettes and stack of hard-rock tapes next to the audio system. Long boxes of bats were piled in the aisle. One box had been opened, and she noticed that the bats were neatly packed, six in each direction.
Except that one was missing. “My God, Mike!”
“What is it?”
Near the back of the bus, drooped across the seats with her bloodied head dangling in the aisle, was the body of a young woman.
Mike used the missing driver’s cellular phone to call the police and then Susan notified Larry Freedman back at the training camp, using the number jotted down on the driver’s pad. It took Freedman a moment to realize what she was saying. “A dead woman? Is it Willa?”
“I don’t know. Woman in her twenties, short, with brown hair. Wearing a Comets T-shirt and jeans.”
“It sounds like her. What happened?”
“Someone hit her with one of the bats. Possibly the driver, since he’s not here.”
“I’ll come right down. Exactly where are you?”
“Not far. A parking lot across the street, near the brew pub.”
A police car arrived as she finished talking, and another followed soon after. By the time Larry Freedman reached the scene, along with a man she didn’t know, the bus had been searched and a crowd was gathering. Larry introduced his companion as Chet Elton, and as soon as she heard his deep voice she recognized it as the one that had called to Freedman over the stadium’s loudspeaker. “Willa works for me in the front office,” Elton explained. “What happened here?”
“If that’s her on the bus, she’s dead,” Mike told him. “Killed with a baseball bat. No sign of the driver. Susan and I stopped when we saw the logo on the side of the bus. We knew you were waiting for your bats.”
The detective investigating the case was named Cena. He gazed at Susan with dark Latin eyes and asked, “Did you know, the victim?”
“No. Mike and I are here on business from New York. We never met her.”
“She was killed with one of the baseball bats. Someone had to open a box and take it out.”
Susan shrugged. “She might have done that herself, to make sure it was the correct shipment.”
Detective Cena turned back to the others. “Where’s the driver?”
Nobody knew. “This bus is used for intercity travel,” Chet Elton observed. “Did you check the lavatory in back?”
“Empty,” Cena said. “Can you give me the driver’s name and address?”
“John Nez. He lives in the mobile-home park out at the Salt River Indian
Community. I’d have to look up the actual address.”
“You do that. We’ll want to talk with him as soon as we can.”
“Do you think he killed her?” Freedman asked.
“He’s missing. That tells us something. And another thing bothers me too.”
“What’s that?”
“Like all intercity buses, this one
has a large baggage compartment. It’s empty.”
“It wasn’t needed. The bus had no passengers.” Freedman showed his exasperation.
Detective Cena remained calm. “Exactly my point. If the baggage compartment was empty, why did they go to the trouble of loading twelve boxes of baseball bats onto the bus itself, in the aisles? Could that have been John Nez’s idea, so he’d have a weapon available for the murder?”
Chet Elton was on his cell phone trying to reach Roitler, the team’s owner. Police technicians were still taking photographs and measurements. Mike was standing by helplessly, talking in a low voice to Freedman, probably wondering if this event might somehow delay the signing of the contract. Susan decided they didn’t need her anymore, and when Cena gave her permission to leave she asked Mike for the keys to the rental car.
“What for? Where you going?”
“I want to run back to the hotel for a bit. You should probably return to the stadium with these people anyway, to see if this will delay the contract. I’ll pick you up there later, or you can get a cab back to the hotel.”
He nodded absently, handing over the keys. “I’ll take a cab. See you back there.”
With a road map of Phoenix open on the seat beside her, Susan headed for the freeway that would carry her to the reservation just east of the city. The mobile-home park was shown on the map, and she had no trouble finding it. Hopefully she would arrive ahead of Cena’s men.
A couple of Native American men were seated by one of the mobile homes as she drove up. “I’m looking for John Nez.”
One of the men motioned down the street. “Last trailer on the left.”
“Thanks.”
She pulled up in front of the mobile home, already hearing the beat of rock music and remembering the tapes on the bus. There was a little black Toyota parked in the driveway but the music was coming from inside the home. A slender woman in her thirties came to the screen door when Susan rang the bell. “Is John Nez at home?” she asked.
The woman, whose features appeared more Mexican than Native American, eyed her suspiciously. “Are you from the Indian Agency? Is it about my Toyota?”
“No, I’m working over at the new ballpark.” Not exactly a lie, she decided. “Are you Mrs. Nez?”
“That’s me. Delores.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “John’s getting ready to leave, I don’t know if he has time to talk.”
“Where is he going?” Susan asked, but before the woman could answer a man appeared behind her.
“I’m John Nez. Who wants me?” There was no doubt that he was a Native American, with the weathered skin and chiseled features so familiar to Susan from the movies and television. He wore a workshirt and jeans that seemed about to burst.
“Susan Holt. There’s been an accident with the bus you were hired to drive. The police will be here soon to question you.”
“John, what’s she talking about?” his wife asked. “Be quiet, Delores. What do you want, Miss Holt?”
“Is there a place we can talk?”
“You can talk right here,” the woman insisted.
Nez ignored her. “The park across the street,” he suggested to Susan, motioning toward a little square of grass with a single bench and a few pieces of playground equipment. When they’d gone over there he asked, “What’s this all about?”
“I think you know, Mr. Nez. A woman was killed on the bus you were driving. Willa Bright, the Comets’ office manager. Don’t pretend you weren’t there. The police already think you killed her.”
“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
“No. I work for a department store back in New York. I just want to help get to the bottom of this so it doesn’t interfere with a business deal.”
“Why do they think it was me?”
“Probably because you ran away from the scene.”
“I didn’t kill that woman.”
“Then why did you run?”
He kicked at a loose stone by his feet. “Reservation folks don’t get a fair shake from the law. They’d listen to my story and lock me up for life.”
She stared into John Nez’s sad brown eyes. “Why don’t you try out the story on me? What happened on the bus?”
“I picked her up at the stadium this morning. We drove to the hotel and I waited while they loaded those bats. I guess the company got mixed up and sent them there instead of the stadium.”
“Louisville Sluggers?”
“Nah, they were cheap bats from across the border. They don’t use ’em in real games, just for practice.”
“I never heard of such a thing!”
“All I know is what they tell me.”
“The police think the loading of the bats onto the bus itself rather than in the baggage compartment might have been done to provide you with a handy weapon.”
“No, no!” he insisted. “That’s not what happened at all.”
“Then tell me.”
“She wanted the bats inside.”
“Willa did?”
He nodded. “She told me she wanted to check them over to make sure they were the ones she’d ordered.”
“The drive only takes about ten minutes. She couldn’t wait that long?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“I can’t. She’s dead.”
He thought about that for a moment and then started talking. “I couldn’t see her. She was behind me in the back of the bus, opening one of the boxes. I was playing a loud tape and couldn’t hear very well.” Susan nodded, remembering the tapes of rock music. “I did hear a noise of some sort, maybe a bat dropping, and I looked around. I saw her body hanging over the seat and all that blood, and I pulled off the road into one of the empty parking lots by the stadium. I went back to look at her and she was dead I don’t know how it happened. Maybe I hit a bump and the bat—”
“That was no bump,” Susan assured him. “She was deliberately hit with a bat, very hard. If you didn’t do it, who did? Who else was on the bus with you?”
He moistened his lips with a nervous tongue. “No one. There was just the two of us. I swear!”
“Could one of the people from the hotel have stayed on the bus after they got the bats loaded?”
Nez shook his head. “I sat there in the driver’s seat the whole time. Two of the bellmen loaded the boxes while Willa supervised. I saw them both get off.”
“All right. What did you do after she was killed?”
“I ran away,” he admitted. “I got off the bus and started running. I cut through the Civic Plaza and found a taxi to bring me home. I knew the city cops and the tribal police would be after me.”
“A taxi? Where was your car?”
“It’s not running. The company lets me drive the bus home at night till I get it fixed.”
“Do you have a police record, John?”
“Little things, way back. Drugs, mostly. But I didn’t want to be arrested again.”
His story was so unbelievable that she believed it. Any killer could make up a better story than that. “Take my advice and wait for the police to come, John. Anyone can understand panic. If you run away now they’ll come after you, convinced you’re the killer. When they find you, out there in the desert or wherever, they might shoot first.”
Perhaps he might have agreed to her suggestion. She never had an opportunity to find out. A tribal-police car came into view, traveling fast. A Phoenix police car was right behind it in a cloud of dust. John Nez’s options had run out.
Mike Brentnor was angry. Pacing back and forth across the hotel room, he directed his fury at Susan. “Damn it, you can’t keep doing this, meddling in police work all the time! Mayfield’ll have you out on the street, and I’ll be right behind you!
“They’ve never complained before,” she murmured.
“Well, they’re complaining now. Saul Marx is furious at both of us. The police think you were encouraging John Nez to run away, and Roitler has put the entire contract matter aside till this is resolved.
”
It was early evening and they were at the hotel, following hours of police questioning and phone calls back to New York. Nez was in jail, held on suspicion of murder, though he hadn’t yet been formally charged. “What motive did he have for killing her?’ Susan wanted to know. “The police say she wasn’t sexually assaulted.”
“But he admitted to you that he was alone on the bus with her. Who else could have done it?”
Susan didn’t answer. Instead she asked, “Just what did Roitler say about the merchandising contract?”
“That he was too upset to go into that now. Apparently, he was very close to Willa Bright and her death was quite a blow to him.”
“I have to get back there in the morning,” she said. “Right now, I don’t think they want to see either of us.”
But by morning, things had changed again. Susan was awakened at seven thirty by the buzzing of the telephone next to her bed. “Hello?” she answered sleepily, about to be angry with Mike for awakening her.
“Miss Holt, this is Larry Freedman at the ballpark. Sorry to bother you so early.” She was instantly awake. “That’s all right, Mr. Freedman. What’s up?”
“Mr. Roitler has heard from his attorney back East. He just called to give
his approval to the contract.”
“That’s good news. I was afraid things might be delayed.”
“Mr. Roitler would like to see you before he signs. Without Mike Brentnor, if that’s possible.”
“Certainly.”
“Could you come over now? You can have breakfast here if you haven’t eaten yet.”
“I’ll be there in a half-hour,” she promised and hung up. She knew it would mean more trouble with Mike, but she had little choice.
Freedman escorted her to the office Hans Roitler was using during spring training, then left them alone. The team owner waved his hand. “Isn’t this luxurious, Miss Holt? My office back home at the Comets’ new stadium won’t be nearly so plush.”
“It’s very nice,” she agreed. After a few words of regret about the previous day’s tragedy, she got right to business. “I understand your attorney has approved our contract calling for exclusive New York City rights to the merchandise we listed.”
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