by Tom Swyers
“Ali Rahman Yasin?”
“Yes, him.”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
“No, just you.”
David had made a decision not to tell Ben about being a suspect in Harold’s death when he’d visited him two months ago. David hadn’t wanted to push Ben over the edge at a time when Ben was lashing out at anything and everything in his life. At that point, he’d viewed David as the only friend he had in the world—a man to whom Ben had entrusted his son should anything ever happen to him. Now David wondered whether Ben would have told him this story back then if David had been more forthcoming.
“Who did he say was claiming to be your father?” David asked.
“He didn’t say the name,” Ben said, looking at the floor. “He did say that the man claiming to be my father was up at the baseball field that night. He said if I wanted to know who he was, I should go up to the ballfield.”
“Did you go?”
“Yes. I went,” Ben said, struggling to make eye contact with David. “I couldn’t help it. I had to go after what my parents had told me all those years. I was angry, too. I left Mark behind to do his homework. It wasn’t easy to drive with my hands, but I managed. I used my wrists a lot on the steering wheel.” As Ben talked, beads of sweat formed on his forehead, and his head swayed back and forth.
“What did you see when you got there?” David asked.
Ben didn’t answer. Inside the black gloves, his hands shook slightly.
“What did you see, Ben?”
Ben took a deep breath and then exhaled in short bursts. “There was only one person there when I got to the field. It was night. The lights were on. Harold was raking the baseball mound—”
“Harold? You saw Harold Salar there? What night was this, anyway?”
“It was the night . . . he was killed.”
David’s head was spinning now. “Did you talk to him?”
“Yes . . . I did,” Ben said, placing his hands over his head as he stared at the floor.
“What did you say?”
Tears welled up in Ben’s eyes. “I asked him if he was going around town claiming to be my father.”
“What did Harold say?”
“He just stood there with his mouth open. He didn’t say anything. I asked him again. He didn’t say a word. He just dropped the rake and backpedaled toward home plate. So I asked him again as I moved closer. Nothing. He just held up his hand and waved his index finger. I got right in his face and waited. He didn’t have to say anything at that point. I knew it was him.”
Now, Ben began sobbing. Tears ran down his nose and beaded on the wood floor below. David had remembered to load up on tissues before coming to see Ben. He took one from his pocket. Ben couldn’t hold it with his stiff gloves. David stood up and wiped the tears from the other man’s face as Ben looked up at him. His eyes were red, and he was shaking. The arteries in his neck throbbed.
“I pushed him, and he tripped over a bucket of baseballs. Then I tried to pick him up by grabbing his collar. I tried to lift him up him off the ground, under his neck by the collar. But I couldn’t. My hands weren’t strong enough. I saw his face up close. His skin is a different color than mine, David. He’s darker. How could he claim to be my father? How? He’s not a Christian like me, either. He was something else.”
“A Muslim,” David said softly.
“Whatever. I just got angry that he would claim to be my father. I lost it. I shoved him onto the ground with my forearms. Then I straddled him and sat on his stomach. He started to cry and kept saying no over and over again. I yelled at him, ‘You’re not my father. I have only one father, and he’s dead.’ He tried to get up, and I pushed his head down into the ground.” The memory caused Ben to sob uncontrollably.
Right then, it all came back to David. He recalled what Ben had said to him a little more than a week after Harold’s death. Ben said he would get angry at anything. He had told David how he was afraid he’d hurt someone, how he couldn’t get Harold’s face out of his mind, how he felt responsible for his death, how he might have killed Harold. Ben hadn’t been merely suggesting back then that his bad luck had cast a shadow so wide that it had dragged others down around him. No, David realized this conversation had a different layer of meaning, a layer that had flown over his head that day.
Ben finally contained his sobbing enough to speak. “But David, please believe me. I didn’t kill Harold. I swear it. You have to believe me.”
David didn’t know what to believe anymore. Suddenly, he recognized some features that Ben and Harold had in common—the hair color, the hairline, and the bags under his eyes. He recalled Russell Red Bear’s phone call about how Harold had had a child out of wedlock. Was Ben the child Harold had given up for adoption? David found himself confronting an idea that was mind-blowing.
“Ben, did you grow up around here?”
“No, originally my family is from New York City. Why do you ask?”
“I was wondering if you or your family might have crossed Yasin’s path before at some point in your life.” But David was telling only a half-truth. According to Red Bear, Harold’s baby had been adopted by a family in Brooklyn.
David thought back to the day when he’d first met Harold on the baseball field. Mark Prior was already a member of his team when Harold had asked if David could use some help. Now, it began to make sense. Harold was not an altruist trying to support his community. No, he was using the baseball team as a means of trying to connect with his son and grandson.
The realization made David look away from Ben. That’s when he saw them through the doorway to one of the bedrooms and lost it. The mere sight of them made him sweat buckets and made him feel like his heart was about to jump out of his chest. There they were, staring at David with their amber eyes again. On the cherry-colored walls hung posters of killdeers.
“Where did those come from?” David asked, pointing to the bedroom.
“What?” Ben asked, looking in the direction of David’s finger. “The posters of the birds?”
“Yes. Where did you get those?”
“Jim Fletcher gave them to me last week. He said that Harold asked him to give me a cardboard tube if he died. I opened it and found these posters. I wanted to toss them, but Mark wanted to keep them and hang them in his bedroom.”
David walked toward the bedroom as if he were in trance. Yes, they were killdeers, all right, but there was something different about them. The posters in Harold’s bedroom had showed the killdeer flying, nesting, swimming, standing, hopping, or running on the ground, proudly showing off downy-white breasts and underbellies. But these killdeers were doing nothing of the kind. All the killdeer posters in Mark’s bedroom were of the killdeer doing the broken-wing act. They were all feigning a wing injury to draw attention away from their ground nest and their eggs. They were protecting their offspring.
“The posters didn’t come with a note or anything,” Ben added. “When I showed these to Jim, he didn’t know what to make of them. But he said if anyone knew anything about them, it would be you.”
David’s knees weakened and almost buckled as he made his way back to sit down on the couch. It wasn’t the sight of the killdeers that had knocked him for a loop but what they were doing in the posters that had shocked him.
David hadn’t sought Harold out to be his expert witness. Instead, Harold had sought him out and volunteered for the job. What appeared to David as an act of generosity on Harold’s part was actually an act of self-interest. Harold wanted to serve as the expert witness for his own son in his legal action against Big Oil, against the same people who had done in Harold’s father, mother, and wife. Like the killdeer doing the broken-wing act in the posters, Harold had been trying to protect his son with an act of deception against Helmsley Oil. David had stumbled across another killdeer connection.
Now, David understood Harold’s letter to him. Harold had said it was in everyone’s best interests not to know too much about him. He understo
od that if Dick Pottenger ever found out that Harold was acting as an expert witness for his natural-born son, Big Oil’s attorney would have ripped him a new one should he ever take the stand. That is, if they didn’t first decide to make a pretrial motion to remove him because of a conflict of interest.
David believed that Harold had sought to conceal this fact from David as a protective device. Harold didn’t want David to find himself in an ethics firestorm by knowingly securing the services of an expert who potentially had a conflict of interest with Ben as his natural father.
If Kincaid and Yasin had not been arrested, Harold’s involvement would have spelled the end of Ben’s case against Helmsley. Kincaid and Pottenger must have known that they could overcome Harold’s expert opinion by the very fact that Harold had a conflict of interest. They could overcome it before the trial or when Harold took the stand. The case had been lost before it got to court, and David hadn’t even known it. It didn’t matter if Ben Prior had to get another attorney because David was behind bars. It didn’t matter that David had been in the courtroom doing his best to litigate the case. He had been going to lose and grant a win either way to Kincaid and Pottenger. The win would have served as a deterrent to future injury cases. Big Oil would have carried the day once again.
It was a vintage Pottenger setup for victory. David believed that Pottenger at least knew of Kincaid’s scheme, if he personally hadn’t been involved with it. David had no proof. Pottenger had made sure of that. But with Kincaid’s arrest for murder and terrorism, the tables had turned. If Kincaid went down, Pottenger had made sure he’d had an escape hatch and had retreated once again behind Amber. With the case going down the toilet, Amber was back in charge, and she’d take the fall for the failure. Baxter & Chadwick was going to lose this case, one way or another.
Even so, David now had negotiating leverage. He’d noticed that advantage when Amber offered up $1 million after offering only $50,000 a few months earlier. Helmsley couldn’t find a sympathetic jury anywhere in the country after the arrests and certainly not in Albany. All David needed to do was to find another expert witness who would attest to Harold’s findings and get the case to a jury for deliberation. The Albany jury would look at Ben’s hands and see themselves wounded by Big Oil’s greed. A group of his peers would find for him in light of the terrorist attacks orchestrated by Kincaid. Money would rain from heaven. Pottenger would have a stroke. David knew he was going to either reach a huge settlement or win at trial. Now it was a win either way for him.
Harold hadn’t known that either Kincaid or Pottenger had somehow found out that he was Ben’s natural father. In David’s mind, that’s why they had sent Ali Rahman Yasin to give Ben the news. They knew he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the accident. They had received Ben’s medical records in the course of the lawsuit. They knew he was a ticking time bomb on the inside, and they probably suspected that the secret of Ben’s adoption might serve as a trigger for Ben to confront Harold.
David pulled his hands away from his face and looked at Ben. He knew why Harold hadn’t responded to Ben’s accusations at the baseball field. Harold had been trying to protect his son, too. He’d probably known that Ben wouldn’t receive him as his natural-born father. He may have known about the warnings Ben had received from his parents. For all David knew, Harold had tried to make contact with Ben through his parents, and they’d told him to stay away. They were devout Baptists, and so was Ben. This may have been the reason they kept telling Ben that they were his birth parents. The idea that Ben was a Muslim by birth may have been one of the reasons they wanted Harold to stay out of their lives and out of Ben’s life, too.
“Ben, what happened after you pushed his head into the ground?” David asked, trying to figure out if Ben had killed his father.
“I got up off him. I felt really bad about what I’d done. I got up and walked away to my car and went home.”
“What did Harold do?”
“He just lay there, crying for a bit. He was on his feet looking in my direction when I drove away.”
“Where was his car?”
“It was parked near the concession stand.”
“Did you go back to his apartment afterward?”
“No.”
“Did you ever tell this story to Pete McNeal or any Indigo Valley officer?”
“They never interviewed me. Nobody knew I was there that night. It was just Harold and me. Nobody else was around.”
“Do you remember if all the baseballs were in the bucket when you left? Did you see any spread out on the field?”
“I don’t recall any baseballs being on the field. But to be honest, I was focused on Harold.”
David thought that Yasin had come to the ball field after Ben had left, and that’s when Harold had thrown some balls on it to try and send a message to David about the tank cars before it was too late.
“David, I hope you believe me. You’re the last friend I have now. Without you, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Before David could answer, they both heard the shuffle and stomping of feet in the snow outside and looked to the front door. In walked Mark with a grocery bag under one arm. It was snowing outside, and his sandy-blond hair was dotted with flakes. He was taller than his dad but just as skinny. He had a fair complexion, freckles, and an acne issue overshadowed by his striking blue eyes. He looked more like his mother than he did Ben. He smiled when he saw David sitting on the couch.
“Hi, Coach.”
“Hey, Mark, it’s good to see you,” David said, standing up.
Mark walked over and shook David’s hand and said, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Thompson.”
“Merry Christmas to you, Mark.”
David and Mark chatted about school and Christy while Ben looked on. The kids had nicknamed Mark “Steady” on the baseball field because at the end of the day, nothing seemed to get him down. In a meeting after one game, when the team had been lacking focus, David had told them they had to gain confidence before they could win a game. David had asked if the team knew what he meant. Mark had spoken up and said, “You’ve got to have faith. Like faith in God.” Religion and baseball were one and the same to Mark. But it didn’t stop there. Religion permeated everything in Mark’s life, including dealing with his father’s catastrophic injury. While Ben had called into question his belief in God after the accident, Mark had used his faith to get them both through it.
While Ben sat on the couch and listened to Mark and David talk, his smile returned. “Mark, can you put those things in the refrigerator?”
“Sure, Dad,” Mark said, going off into the kitchen.
Any inclination that David had to tell Ben that Harold was probably his father disappeared after his exchange with Mark. David was confident that Harold was Ben’s natural father. A simple blood test would prove it. But David wasn’t going to tell either of them what they didn’t want to hear. Not on Christmas Eve. Not next week. Maybe not ever. Certainly, not unless they asked, if even then. The two of them, father and son, were surviving on a foundation they’d built together, and the last thing David wanted to do was to tear it apart.
David thought about the family photographs he’d discovered of Harold’s family in the apartment. He was glad he hadn’t thrown them out. He decided right then and there to keep them. Times might change, and Ben and Mark might accept their heritage. If so, their family would be waiting for them in his safe.
“Dad,” Mark said from the kitchen, “I don’t think the refrigerator is working. The light is out, and it’s not really cold inside.”
“Oh, it’s probably not plugged in all the way. It has happened before. Can you pull the refrigerator out from the wall and make sure it’s plugged in?”
“Okay, Dad.”
As Mark tried to pull the large, old refrigerator from the wall, Ben spoke softly to David. “You do believe me, don’t you, David? You don’t think I had anything to do with Harold’s death, do you?”
A whirlwind of thoughts ran through David’s head. He was lost. He didn’t know what to believe.
David thought that Yasin probably had killed Harold when he saw that Ben couldn’t or wouldn’t do the job for him. Yasin probably had taken Harold’s expert report from the apartment and drilled Harold on the workings of the Killdeer Society before drilling his head against the wall. But David wasn’t confident in his assessment.
David knew he had been faked out before. At first, he’d thought Helmsley Oil was behind Harold’s death. But then he’d bought into the idea that some foreign terrorist was responsible, only to figure out it was Helmsley after all.
As David watched Mark struggle with moving the refrigerator far enough from the wall so he could reach the outlet, David was beginning to doubt Ben’s claim of innocence. Ben suggested that the refrigerator’s plug had come loose before and, in giving instructions to Mark, he indicated that he had moved it from the wall himself. If Ben had moved the refrigerator, he’d had to do it with his hands. And if he could move the refrigerator while Mark couldn’t, maybe Ben had had the hand strength to kill Harold after all.
But it would take two people to kill Harold. David recalled that he’d found Harold’s car in the apartment complex when he discovered his body. Someone would have had to restrain Harold at the baseball field and drive him back to his apartment while someone else would have had to drive Harold’s car back to the apartment parking lot where David had found it.
At that point, David wondered if maybe Mark was Ben’s accomplice. But when that thought crossed David’s mind, he got angry at himself for even thinking such a thing. Mark Prior was not that kind of boy. He was the moral compass on David’s baseball team. How could he kill when his religion denounced killing? But David had to consider that maybe Mark didn’t help with the killing. Maybe he was just involved in covering up for his father, who had lost his mind in a fit of rage and killed Harold. Maybe Yasin had broken into Harold’s apartment after Ben had done the deed to get Harold’s expert opinion report.
David’s mind was racing in all different directions until he considered the hairspray. Ben had no reason to torture Harold by shooting hairspray into his eyes. It must have been Yassin who finished Harold off to get the expert’s report.
