by Tom Swyers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017
Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
For Cher. Thank you for chomping on your gum in the seat behind me during high-school math class.
I wouldn’t have told you to stop, and we wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
Acknowledgments
SAVING BABE RUTH
About the Author
ONE
The last thing on earth he wanted to do was to open that door. But he had no choice.
He believed that his brand-new key copy should work just as well, if not better, than the original. But he couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Helpless” and “mistaken”—two words that would come to define David Thompson’s life.
Why doesn’t this thing work?
The copy in his hand shimmered like a gold coin in the evening sun. He put it back in the hole, wiggling and jiggling it into the dead bolt of Apartment 1B, a ground-floor unit.
Come on already.
Nothing.
Some big-box worker must have made this copy.
With each wiggle and jiggle, he swayed his hips, hoping that his body language might help. On the fifth try, the door finally opened.
Facing David and standing upright with his back against the living-room wall some fifteen feet away was Dr. Harold Salar: his friend, client, and an oil-industry expert. He was slouching a bit and was staring at David with a silly grin on his face. A waist-high stack of papers and folders were piled in front of him; on either side, stacks of boxes and crates reached toward the ceiling and pressed against his shoulders. Harold, in his midfifties, was dressed in a plain navy-blue baseball jersey tucked into his pleated matching golf slacks. His jet-black hair matched the color of his belt; it was perfectly combed, parted to one side. His right-hand thumb was hooked between his jersey and his slacks so that his hand covered his belt buckle. His face was olive toned, almost tanned, chiseled, and neatly creased in all the right places. All in all, Dr. Harold Salar looked pretty darn good for a dead man.
“Harold . . . Harold!” David boomed as he moved his athletic frame down the narrow aisle toward him in disbelief. No response. As an attorney with an eldercare and estate practice, David had walked in on his share of stiffs. He had developed a keen sense of smell for a decomposing corpse. The stench screamed to David, “Dead man ahead!” But Harold was upright, almost standing.
Harold’s head leaned to one side, like he was nodding off with his eyes wide open. His knees pressed up against the waist-high stack to his front that helped to keep him upright. His Baltimore Orioles baseball cap was on the floor. Through the narrow opening that allowed entrance and exit to Harold’s space, David grasped the left hand hanging down by his side. It was cold to the touch, and David felt the stiffness of rigor mortis when he moved it. He didn’t need to check for a pulse, but he did anyway, just to make sure.
David’s eyes welled up when the certainty of his friend’s death hit. His hands plowed through his silvery-brown hair as he looked around for a place to sit and gather his thoughts. But there was no chair anywhere. Just mounds of stuff piled high. The only clear space was the narrow aisle that led him to Harold and another aisle that branched off to the left and right as he stood facing the corpse. David cleared some bottles and cans out of the way on the floor, and he sat down.
A breeze blew inside past the door he had left open, causing some papers to ruffle, or so he first thought. He looked over his shoulder to find the source of the sound, and he saw, for a split second, what he thought was the shadow of a bat or a bird—maybe even a large insect—against the door as it flew out of the apartment.
He rubbed his cobalt-blue eyes in an effort to process everything, but the shock of it all disoriented him. He was too shocked to cry. He simply didn’t believe what had happened. Every single conversation and shared experience with Harold raced through his mind at random, all at once. Nothing made sense. After a minute or two, David could generate only one solid thought: he needed to call Pete McNeal, his friend and the chief of the Indigo Valley Police Department. He took his cell out of his jeans front pocket and dialed.
“What’s going on, D?” Pete asked. D was short for David, a nickname left over from high school.
David sighed into the phone before speaking. “I’m calling on official business, Pete. You need to come over to the Hilltop Apartments, Unit 1B. I . . . just discovered . . . a dead body.”
“What happened?”
“I . . . walked into Harold Salar’s apartment and found him dead. That’s all I know at this point.”
“I’ll be right there,” he said before hanging up.
David tucked the phone back into his pocket and looked up. He felt like he was back in the canyons of New York City, except there were towers of junk above him instead of towering office buildings. It all threatened to bury him alive with one false move, but that’s the way he felt in New York, too. That fear, and the feeling that Harold was staring at him, was enough to get him on his feet again.
The picture-window drapes were drawn, hiding the colossal mess from view. From somewhere in the room, a lamp cast beams of light across the ceiling. There was no longer any breeze blowing through the doorway to refresh the air. If the smell of the rotting body wasn’t bad enough, it was soon joined by the smell of rotting food from somewhere over the mountains of stuff, probably in the kitchen. It smelled like a garbage disposal that hadn’t been flushed in a week. David looked at Harold again. His frozen smirk suggested he was quite comfortable living in the squalor. On the floor, a family of cockroaches merrily crossed the aisle, probably en route to the kitchen to visit friends and family for a night out in the big city.
David gagged, did an about-face, headed for the front door, and closed it behind him. The setting sun cast long tree shadows over the parking lot. A gentle breeze cleared the stench that had followed David out the door. Red-maple leaves fell by his feet. He looked up. It was mid-October and the trees were half-bare, except for the oaks. They’d hold on to their brown litter through November and beyond, and certainly after the town was done vacuuming the loose leaves raked to the curb. Then they’d dump them all purely out of spite and David would have
to bag them before the first snow or in the spring. David called it the Oak Conspiracy; he’d hated these evil trees ever since he was in charge of raking up after them as a kid.
Over the years, the oaks had come to remind David of his nursing-home clients: refusing to let go until the worst possible time, usually around the holidays, when flu season went into overdrive.
Down the road, David could see the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. The fall foliage had peaked, and the colors were starting to fade into the gray of November. In his line of sight, flashing red lights floated in his direction; a siren screamed.
Pete McNeal parked in front of David and swung open the door before coming to a full stop. A giant hand appeared on the roof of the car, helping to guide the former high-school football tackle out of the driver’s seat so that he didn’t hit his head on the ceiling. Out popped the chief, a man too tall and too wide for any midsize police cruiser. He was totally bald by choice. He decided to get rid of it all years ago when he first started losing his hair. He told David back then that he didn’t like to face the mirror every morning and wonder how much hair he’d lost the day before. “I just want to be done with it,” he’d said to David before shaving it all off. Afterward, he grew a mustache, combed straight down over his upper lip, to offset the loss.
McNeal put on his cap, walked over, and shook hands with David. “Good to see you, D,” he said, looking down at David. “What the heck happened?”
“The door’s open. Go check it out yourself, but you might want to hold your breath.”
Chief Pete McNeal strode inside Apartment 1B while David fought back tears. Shock was giving way to reality. But David wasn’t going to cry in front of Pete. Not if he could help it.
Pete shuffled out after about thirty seconds. He leaned against his car to steady himself. “He’s dead all right.” There was a pause as McNeal pushed up his hat’s visor and rubbed his forehead. “Never seen anything like that . . .”
“You mean a dead man standing, or a storage locker posing as an apartment?”
McNeal looked at David for a second. “Both.”
David nodded.
“Why don’t you tell me what you know, D.”
David wiped his nose. “Not sure where to begin. Yesterday morning, I stopped by the big baseball field and saw a bucket of baseballs near home plate.”
“Are you still running the baseball program for teens over there?”
“No, but I’m still on the board of directors.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I saw his name written on the bucket with a Sharpie. So I knew the stuff was his. It was an odd sight. There were a few baseballs spread over the field: one near home plate, one near the pitcher’s mound, one near shortstop, and one out in left field. So I picked them up. On the way back to home plate, I saw his equipment bags in one of the dugouts. He’s nowhere around. I didn’t see his car. So I figured he had held a practice and got distracted or something and left his stuff behind.”
“I thought the season was over.”
“There’s a fall baseball league still playing. The boys like to practice, and so he would organize a few to keep them fresh.”
“Okay, go on.”
“I asked Christy if he knew anything about a practice.” Christy was David’s sixteen-year-old son. “He said he and some friends were the last to leave practice three nights ago, and that Harold was cleaning up around the ball field when he left.”
“Did he have any kids himself?”
“No, he has no family that I know about. His wife died years ago. He didn’t remarry. He was an only child, and his parents are dead.”
“You guys must have been pretty good friends to know all that.”
“Yes. He was a little older than me, but we had a lot in common. He didn’t have any kids of his own; he just wanted to help out with the kids in town. He was my scorekeeper this past season, coached third base a lot, too. He asked me to draw up his will about four months ago. So I learned much about him from doing that work.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“He’s a retired petroleum-engineering professor. He worked as a consultant. He’s known all over the world for his research.”
“Did you know he was a hoarder?”
“No, he never invited me to his apartment. Now I know why.”
“How did you get in?”
“He gave me a copy of his key a month or so ago. He insisted on giving me one, just in case. I’ve been trying to reach him on the phone. When I didn’t hear back from him, I came here and rang the bell. He didn’t answer, and then I spotted his car in the lot. That’s when I decided to use the key.”
Pete thought for a second. “If you don’t mind my asking, who are the beneficiaries under his will?”
David looked at Pete, eyebrows raised, thinking it was an odd question. “I really can’t tell you that now. In my mind, attorney-client privilege rules until it’s filed for probate and becomes a public record.” David started to walk toward the apartment door. “Why do you ask?”
Pete sighed. “You can’t go in there.”
“Trust me, I don’t plan to. I’m just getting you the key from the lock.”
“Don’t touch it.”
David turned and looked at him. “What gives, Pete?”
“I’m treating this as a crime scene.”
“Really? What makes you think—”
“I guess you didn’t see the blood.”
“What—”
“Behind his head and behind him on the wall.”
“No, I didn’t see that. I figured he had a heart attack while he was standing, and all of his stuff was propping him up.” David went to lean against the car next to Pete. “What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know for sure, but it looks like someone pounded his head against the wallboard so hard that they busted through it and hit a wall stud. The impact may have fractured his skull.”
David shook his head. “Oh, my God.”
They looked at each other. It was like they were back on the offensive line during their football days in high school—David as guard and Pete as tackle. They would look at the defense, then at each other, exchanging their own signals to confirm their blocking assignments. The coach usually ran the ball in their direction because there was no place else to run. Their side of the line was the best the team could offer. They didn’t win a single game their senior year, and the highlight of the season was when the local newspaper called them the best winless team in the state. But there were no signals to exchange that evening; they were both clueless. Homicides didn’t happen but once a decade, maybe longer, in the town of Indigo Valley. There was no modern playbook readily available.
“What’s next?” David asked.
Pete put his hand on David’s shoulder. “You go home. I’ll take it from here. I’ll get back to you once I know more. I’ll probably have some more questions for you then.”
David looked at Pete. “I feel I should stay here for some reason. Harold didn’t have anyone else. I feel I should be here for him or something.”
Pete managed a smile. “You’re a good man, D. Trust me, you don’t want to be here when the news media gets here, not under these circumstances. Do you really want to talk to them?”
“No, I guess you’re right.”
“A tackle always knows best, right?”
David nodded. “You’ve been telling me that ever since we were kids.”
“Now, go home, and I’ll be in touch.”
“OK” David said patting Pete on the shoulder. “Thanks.”
Pete reached for his radio to call for a homicide team and the medical examiner.
David got into his 1974 pearl-white Mustang and started it up. The radio had been left on and was tuned to Bloomberg, the business-news station. The commentator was talking about the spot price of West Texas Intermediate Crude oil hitting a triple bottom at $79.70 per barrel from a peak of $107.68. David didn’t know if
it was the power of suggestion, but all of a sudden he smelled oil. He put his hands to his face and inhaled. It was oil. He reached for a bottle of hand cleaner he kept in the door pocket and tried to cleanse himself of Harold’s death and the oil, too. David kept scrubbing his hands while listening before drying them with some tissues he kept in the glove compartment. All the oil pundits interviewed in the report said the price of oil was heading higher. He turned the radio off, pulled out of the apartment complex, and began to drive home. His hands were trembling and still smelled like oil.
The radio report stirred up a memory of Harold. He used to talk to David about trading stocks or commodities, like oil. He’d say, “There’s no such thing as a triple bottom.” He used to call them killdeer bottoms because they aimed to deceive, the way a killdeer protects its ground nest and eggs. The bird feigns a broken wing, drawing any predator farther and farther away from the nest by keeping a few steps ahead of it. Harold said when pundits were screeching for a “triple bottom,” their intent, like the killdeer, was to distract predators—the market participants—from its looming breakdown. The triple bottom looked like it should hold just like David’s key looked like it should work. In Harold’s eyes, three strikes and you were out; the third time was the charm; a third trip to the bottom of a trading range meant prices were going to break and go lower, substantially lower.
Harold told David his nickname once, and they laughed about it. On Wall Street, they had called him King Crude Salar, or King Crude for short. He had been a frequent guest on CNBC, the business television channel. Harold was their go-to guy when it came to oil. His reputation was stellar, but years ago, he’d faded from the limelight by his own choice. Then it was “out of sight, out of mind” for him. Harold’s claim to fame was that he was never wrong when it came to oil, especially the price of oil. And that’s a noteworthy accomplishment, because most everyone is wrong when it comes to calling the market price.
Now King Crude was dead. While wiping away tears from his cheeks with a tissue, David couldn’t help but think Harold’s life had somehow caught up with him.
What David didn’t realize was that Harold’s life was about to catch up with him, too. Though David was in the driver’s seat that evening, Harold Salar’s hands were firmly on the wheel.
