Las Vegas Gold (7 page)

“They're going to want to talk to Tabby first thing. I'll get him in a couple of hours earlier and brief him on what we've decided,” Molly said. “That gives me tonight to get my story straight for him.” She got up from the table and the men rose in courtesy. “Thank you for your help, George. I'll see you all in the morning.” She left the room, all five feet three inches of her showing in body language that she was feeling the pressure.

It took Molly a couple of hours to track Tabby down. She found him at home, on her second call there, about ten minutes after he had come in, gave him a brief outline of what had taken place in her father's office, and instructed him to be in her office at eight the next morning. Tabby was quite shaken and taken aback by her call. He wanted to know exactly how much she had told the meeting. “You promised you could keep a secret,” he accused her.

“Tabby, trust me on this. Just trust me. You're going to be all right. You're going to be safe, and you're going to come out of it smelling like a rose. Just trust me. Come in by eight o'clock and we'll get into what's happening. Okay?”

“Okay.” He sighed a big sigh. There seemed to be a lot of sighing going around, thought Molly. “I'll be there,” and he hung up without saying anything else.

“I hope,” Molly said out loud to the empty office, “I hope I can deliver on that promise.”

10

Tabby was not very happy when he walked into Molly's office next morning. He did knock first, though, and Molly hoped that was a good sign. After he was seated and had turned down a coffee, Molly began to go through the events of the evening before. Tabby sat quietly and listened until she came to the words “FBI.”

“No way! No damn way. I ain't talking to the FBI. I'll be in jail before the day's over. That's final. No FBI, Molly. You hear? No damn FBI.”

“I get your message, but I guess you didn't get
my
message. What the agent is going to want from you is the name of the guy who's been threatening you, and what went on when you were with the Dodgers. How he contacted you and how you handled it. You don't have to tell him about the thrown games. If the guy—Pat? whatever his name is—tells him you did, then Pat is in even bigger trouble, because persuading somebody else to commit a crime is a crime itself. Unless he's dumber than you seem to think, he won't give that away. He couldn't prove it anyhow.”

Tabby was silent. Thinking. Then, “Yeah. Maybe you're right. What I want is the guy off my back. If they can prove he's the guy who's been calling, that might work.” He stopped, and then continued. “Yeah. Okay. So what do I do?”

“You're not pitching tonight. Just go through your regular day off routine. When the guy comes, he'll look more like a reporter than a cop, and you can take him somewhere and make it look like an interview. Maybe he'll bring a camera man.”

“Maybe I'd better have that coffee. This is gonna be one scary day.”

They sat for a half-hour, rehearsing the program for the interview, and then Tabby got up to leave. “I don't mean to sound ungrateful, Molly. You have been helping me all along, and so far everything has worked out. I appreciate it. I just hope….” He couldn't finish. He turned and walked away.

A few minutes before ten, Molly went up to her father's office for the meeting with the FBI agent. He turned out to be a personable young man named Jeff Turnbull who happened to be a baseball fan. He had been in the stands for the game the night before, and was generous without being overpowering in his remarks about the way Molly had managed the new Gold so far this season.

“Molly,” began Mike, after all the introductions had been made, “You seem to be nominated to tell Mr. Turnbull the story.”

“Before you begin, Ms Malone…”

“Molly.” She interrupted.

”Okay. Jeff, then.” He smiled—a charming smile, she noted—and turned to George Halverson. “Just for the record, Mr. Halverson, what is your interest in this matter?”

“I've been retained by Mr. Malone to act on behalf of the Gold and their employees as a legal advisor.”

“Thank you.” He turned back to Molly. “Now, Molly, what's going on?”

Once more, Molly told the story, omitting the fact about the thrown games. When she finished, the room was quiet for a few moments.

“So Tabby O'Hara has begun to get threatening telephone calls from the same man who kept after him to throw games before he came to this team. Am I clear on that?”

“Yes.”

“And it is affecting his play, and could affect the rest of the team.”

Molly gave an affirmative nod. “Right.”

“Seems to me it might be a difficult task for a starting pitcher to give assurance enough his team would lose, or that somebody would want to bet large sums of money on that assurance.” The FBI agent paused, thinking. “Now, if a relief pitcher were the one involved, it would make more sense.”

Larry Henderson spoke for the first time. “I've never been involved, to my knowledge, with gamblers, but do they have to make sense? So far as I'm concerned, gambling itself doesn't make sense, even though it keeps Las Vegas running.”

“There's a whole raft of criminal behaviour that doesn't make sense. What was it you folks were hoping I would do?”

This time it was Mike Malone who answered. “Get this guy, whoever it is, off O'Hara's back, so he can get on with his job without being threatened with death.”

“Does he know you have contacted the FBI?”

“I've just had more than a half hour session with him. Tabby trusts me. He has made a tremendous change from the surly loner he was with the Dodgers. We've all worked hard to bring that about.”

“And have you gone over with him the story you want him to tell me?”

“Not the story
I
want him to tell you; the story
he
wants to tell you. He's very nervous about the entire thing.”

“That makes sense. How do you recommend I make the best approach to him?”

“Can you rent a TV camera man and make yourself appear as a sports reporter doing an interview?”

Turnbull laughed a short chuckle. “I can do better. I can get an FBI camera man.”

“Well,” Molly said, “good enough, but don't show up in a suit with black sun glasses. No tie, some kind of jacket and a spiral notebook.”

“Hey, I have watched reporters work. Give me a little credit.”

“He's expecting you today sometime. I told him when you arrive, just to walk casually with you to some reasonably quiet part of the practice area of the field and talk like it was a sports interview, and the rest of the players will think nothing of it. Happens all the time. Larry will give you a couple of passes to the field itself. If you find him in the clubhouse, just make a suggestion, maybe outside would make a better backdrop.”

“Okay. I'll see O'Hara today and get back to you.” He turned to the others. “Any questions?”

“Just one,” said Halverson. “If you're going to tape the interview, will you bring the tape with you so we can all see it?”

“Don't see why not. Tomorrow morning—same time?”

* * *

About two o'clock that afternoon, Jeff Turnbull, dressed in slacks and a windbreaker and accompanied by a bearded cameraman, showed his pass to a security man and walked into the dressing room. “I'm looking for Tabby O'Hara,” he said to the first person he saw, the clubhouse man who was obviously collecting towels to send out to be laundered.

“Out on the field somewheres,” the man indicated with his thumb toward the tunnel leading to the field, and turned back to his work. Turnbull found Tabby casually playing long toss with Lynn Meriweather along the left field sideline. He introduced himself, and his cameraman as “Olaf”, and waited for Tabby to reply.

“You the reporter Molly said would be along?”

“Yep. Where can we talk?”

“How 'bout in the stands there behind the tarp?”

“Okay by me.”

“Hey, Lynn, gotta' go. Catch you later,” called Tabby to the other pitcher, who waved and turned away.

When they were seated and the camera-man in place with the camera on, Jeff Turnbull led off. “Okay, Tabby. Let's hear your version of the story.” Tabby told him essentially the same thing he had heard earlier from Molly. “So what's this guy's full name—more than just Pat?”

“Calls himself Pat Trenowski. The other guy is just ‘Tom'. Pat called him ‘the money man.'”

“And he found you at the Home Run Bar in LA. He a regular at that bar, d'you think?”

“Dunno. He din't seem to be very well at home there with the barkeep.”

“Okay, Tabby. Here's what we'll do for now. We'll get a wiretap on your phone. If—when—the guy calls again, string him along for a few minutes so we can get a fix on where he's calling from, or if he's using a cell phone or whatever. Don't promise him anything. That may keep him calling back. Can you handle that okay?”

“I'll give it a try. He makes me pretty mad. It's hard to talk to the Son of a B.”

“Do your best. Here's my card. Call me anytime. I'll have the LA office go looking for this guy and his friend Tom, and see if we can come up with anything. By the way, did you get the impression Tom was the boss?”

“Oh yeah, Tom was the boss. No doubt.”

“One more question.”

“Shoot.”

“How did they expect you were going to throw a ball game? Pretty hard for a starter.”

“They wanted me to let the other team have a big inning, and I guess they hoped the rest of the guys couldn't catch up.”

Turnbull shook his head. “Pretty risky gamble.”

“I thought so too. Should have tried with a closer, but I guess there's no way you predict a game is going down to a closer, either. Beats me, friend. I was playing the ponies pretty hard last year, and I guess they knew I was losing a bundle. A rookie's salary is not big for the gambling I was doing. I give Molly credit for breaking me of that habit.”

Turnbull put out his hand and Tabby shook it. “We'll be in touch,” said the FBI man as he turned to go. Tabby sat by himself in the stands for half an hour or so before Willie Fontana called him to do some serious throwing on the sidelines.

* * *

Tabby's next start was to be against the LA Angels, the last of the current home stand before the first big road trip of the year, one taking them to Toronto, Boston, New York and Tampa Bay before they returned to Las Vegas. The night before the game, Tabby got the anticipated phone call.

“Hi ol' buddy. How're ya doin'?” The gravelly voice was familiar, but Tabby pretended not to recognize it.

“Who's this? My number's unlisted. How'd you get it?”

“You know who the hell I am. An' never mind how I got your number. You can run, Tabby, but ya can't hide.”

“I ain't tryin' to hide. I just don' wanna' talk to you no more.”

“What, you so rich now, you don't need to make an extra fifty grand for helpin' us win a few bucks?”

“I couldn' care if you never win no money. Why don't you just get off my back, Trenowski? You know what I'm saying? Get the hell outa' my life.”

“Too late for that, Tabby boy. You're in just for talkin' to us, and we don' aim ta let ya' get off the hook.”

Tabby wiped his brow, in a sweat. Pat hadn't said anything incriminating to this point. “Well, let me tell you I am already off the hook.”

“Not so fast, buddy. You listen up real good here. You lose tomorrow or you're gonna' wake up and find yourself dead. You hear me?”

“I hear you, and you can go to hell. I ain't scared of you and your buddies. You can threaten all you like, but I ain't scared, and for the record, if the Gold lose tomorrow night, it won't be my fault. You unnerstand that?”

“Okay. It's your funeral. Just make sure your will's up to date.” And the phone line went dead.

Five minutes later, Tabby's phone rang again. He let it right five times before he answered. “Yeah?”

“Jeff Turnbull, Tabby. You did a good job. We got all the information we need to charge this guy with half a dozen federal charges. And don't worry about tomorrow. You'll be better guarded than the President.”

“Thanks. I'm not scared, but I'm not real easy in my mind, either.”

“I understand. Okay. Thanks again for your help. G'night.”

11

Next morning, the regular daily meeting at Harrison, Bronson and Currie began with Pat Trenowski's report on his call to Tabby O'Hara. The report was delivered by Tom Currie. “So what do we do?” he asked as he finished delivering Pat's report.

Silence. “Kill the sonuvabitch,” growled Harrison, his ever-present cigar glowing like the coals of hellfire. “He's gonna blow the whistle. I can feel it in my bones.”

“I agree. What we made off him is peanuts compared to what we make off our other businesses.”

“Speaking of which, we have a shipment due tomorrow, and that's the priority. You got us into this O'Hara thing, Tom. Get us out. Arrange it. Take care of it.”

More silence. Then Tom Currie, somewhat reluctantly, agreed. “Yeah, you're right. Okay. I'll call Pat and we'll work out the details. I'll let you know what we decide.”

“Never mind that. Just do it. I got other matters on my mind. Now let's get started on a review of tomorrow's business.”

And the meeting went on, although Currie's mind was mostly tied up with how and when to murder Tabby O'Hara.

* * *

Tabby was superb that night against the Angels. He pitched a complete game and shut out the visitors 5-0, allowing just three hits, all singles, and two walks, not allowing more than one Angel on base in any inning. He grinned and laughed with his teammates all through the game, and accepted an invitation to a late dinner from Bobby Joe and Digger Hazen. Either he didn't know, or didn't care there were four FBI agents within close sight of him all evening, as well as the team's security man. First thing in the morning, Molly called to check on his welfare.

“Hell, Molly, I'm still asleep. It's too early to ask me how I'm feeling. I'll let you know when I get to the stadium.” And he hung up on her. She didn't care. He was alive.

Jeff Turnbull called Molly to say the LA police had found Pat Trenowski, but had not picked him up. They had found him in a restaurant having breakfast with another man, Tom Currie, a businessman well known to police, and they wanted to see who else and where the trail might lead. “Trenowski is too stupid to figure this all out for himself, as far as the gambling part of the racket goes, and he probably is only following orders. We'll keep a check on him.”

The eastern swing proceeded reasonably well for Las Vegas. The media were still interested in Molly as the only female manager in Major League history, but the Gold's amazing start to their season had taken away their reason for thinking she couldn't handle the job. Except for one Chicago columnist who continued to harp on his same old theme: anybody could manage a team like Mike Malone had put together. The players were so good they just went out and did their jobs. The fact that Molly used all her players, placing reserves in starting positions at least once every three or four games, seemed to be lost on the man. He also ignored her choices of hit and run plays, when to steal bases, and when to issue an intentional walk. She did not comment on his remarks, even when directly asked by other reporters. Molly simply said, “Everybody's entitled to his own opinion. The rest of us don't have to agree.”

Sparky Hooper in Media Relations spent considerable time with the media explaining Molly's reasoning, but her reputation for playing games under protest continued. She had long since had reason not to protest every game, but there were enough of them to cause a real stir in baseball circles and in the media. Other managers in both leagues had begun to follow suit, and the Director of Umpiring in the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball had sent a memo to all umpires to follow the rulebook strictly. Some protests were allowed. Some were not. An umpire's judgment call is not open to protest. A couple of the younger umpires were sent down to the minors, and several of the older ones were reprimanded. Molly's reputation among umpires was as close to zero on a scale of five as it could get, but the quality of the calls both on the bases and behind the plate noticeably improved.

The Gold lost their first game of the season to the Blue Jays, but won the other two games at Rogers' Stadium. “GOLD ARE LOSERS” predictably trumpeted most of the sports pages around the league. They almost lost another to the Red Sox, but Mac Driscoll's relief pitching got them out of a jam and Corry Van Dyk blasted a tenth inning home run that won it for them. It was Van Dyk's second round-tripper of the young Major League season, and came at a good time when he hit a three and two pitch over the stands above the green monster at Fenway Park.

The Red Sox won the second and third games of the three-game series at Fenway Park. Those three losses on the season left the Gold' record at 19-3, and there was nobody even close at that point in the season.

* * *

Achille Ricci had had an idea. He called in one of his third-line mobsters named Curly Joe Agostini. Curly Joe achieved his nickname because, of course, he was as bald as an egg. When he walked into Ricci's office he was wary, because he wasn't called there very often, and a couple of the times he had been asked to go there the reason was he was in trouble. He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“Siddown, Joe,” the boss ordered, blowing smoke from his expensive cigar. “I got a job for you. This one even you shouldn't mess up.”

Joe Agostini decided not to make anything of the put down, but took a chair and waited.

“Who's the most important player on the team Mike Malone has put together?”

Without hesitation, Joe replied, “The lead pitcher, Tabby O'Hara.”

“That's what I thought, too. Get rid of him. Not you personally. Get somebody to do it. Who do you know in the New York connection?”

“Quite a few guys. How about Sylvester?”

“I know him a little bit. Could he organize something like that?”

“Done it lots of times I know of. Want me to call him?”

“Yeah, but not so the call can be traced.”

“Easy.”

“I'll read about it in the papers.”

Curly Joe took that as a dismissal and left the office. He went downstairs to the Casino and found the security man who had charge of confiscating cell phones and BlackBerrys from the customers and holding them until the gambler left the premises. He picked out a BlackBerry and told the security man to replace it with a new one. He turned it over and pulled off the sticker with the customer's name on it. The security man reached into the box of new BlackBerrys and stuck the sticker on the back. Agostini slipped him a fifty-dollar bill.

The text message to New York brought a reply in about five minutes. “The arrangement would be looked after” was basically what the return message said.

It might have been interesting had Agostini read the information the owner had stored on the BlackBerry before he made the call to New York. Instead, after finishing his reading of the return message, he took the BlackBerry to the parking lot, placed it in back of the left front wheel and drove his car over it backward and forward several times until he got out and looked to find the thing in pieces. He gathered them up and tossed them in four or five different garbage tins, then returned to the casino and had a drink at the bar.

Had he read the messages, he would have found the owner was a Drug Enforcement Agency officer who probably would not be working for the DEA after the next morning, because he would have missed an eight o'clock meeting. Had the DEA officer shown up, his boss would not have needed to know he had spent the night in a hotel room with the blonde he had been gambling with the night before. Neither would he have discovered she was not blonde all the way down—but that's another matter. The meeting was to take place in a nearby hotel to consider the DEA and IRA joint investigation of Achille Ricci. Ricci would certainly like to have had that information. Agostini might also have seen a message referring to a forthcoming raid on the offices of Harrison, Bronson and Currie in time to warn Emilio Graffitano not to travel to LA to pick up a shipment of Columbia crack cocaine that was due.

Of such small mistakes is history, great and small, composed.

* * *

The high-flying Gold rolled into New York. Tabby was slated to be the starter in the first game, and more than 60,000 Yankees fans made their way to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to watch the man few had seen pitch before perform against the perennial favorites to win it all each year. Tabby had had no more phone calls from Trenowski, which had puzzled both him and Jeff Turnbull, who was traveling with the team, still posing as a reporter. But Tabby's pitching had not suffered any, and he was not unduly alarmed by the cessation of harassment.

Tabby struck out two of the three Yankees batters in the first inning, and continued pitching well into the seventh. As he came off the mound after that inning, he went to the dressing room to relieve his bladder. During the Las Vegas at bats, Tubby Littleton hit a two-run double which brought considerable noise from the crowd, and nobody heard the quiet noise in the Gold dressing room. When the inning ended, Tabby didn't come up from the dressing room to take the mound. After a couple of minutes, Willie Fontana went down the tunnel to check. What he found almost caused him to throw up.

The pitching coach ran up the steps and yelled at Molly and Kenny to come quick. He also motioned to the police guard standing in front of the bench as usual at every game. What they found was Tabby, shot through the head, and the clubhouse man, shot in the chest but still alive. The cop took charge, using his cell phone to call for help. Molly sent Kenny to fetch Jeff Turnbull. She went to the field to the plate umpire.

“What're you protesting this time? Get your pitcher out here and let's get on with the game,” the umpire grumped. When Molly, nearly in tears, told him what had happened, the shocked man called the crew chief and other umpires to gather in front of the plate. The crew chief summoned the Yankees manager to the conference. None of them had ever thought of a situation like the murder of a player during a game. For certain, the game would have to be suspended; whether it would be called was something they couldn't decide.

The crew chief asked the Yankees manager to give the crowd some kind of explanation and get them out of the stadium. The chief went to a phone and placed a call to the office of the Commissioner. Naturally, it was closed. Next, he tried the office of the President of the American League. Same result. He would have to wait until the next day, which left the question, would there be a game the next day? That would have to be up to a higher authority than he could decide.

Molly sent an usher into the stands to find Larry Henderson and ask him to come to the dugout. Then she called all her players to the dugout and told them briefly what had happened, and that the dressing room would be closed to them for an unknown time. She left them excitedly talking among themselves and disappeared down the steps to the dressing room where there was controlled chaos. Jeff Turnbull had pulled rank when a senior local policeman arrived, expecting to take charge. Jeff explained his reasons and asked for the help of the local police, which finally, after some argument and a couple of phone calls, was granted. The New York detectives and scene of crime men agreed to full cooperation and got on with the routine work.

The public address announcer told the crowd: “An emergency situation has arisen which necessitates the postponement of the game until further notice. Fans are asked to leave the stadium in an orderly manner. Keep your ticket stubs and you will be able to exchange them for a ticket to another game in the future.”

The announcement caused a great rush for the doors, many of the fans fearing an imminent bomb explosion or some other disaster. However, the ushers and stadium security people managed to keep the wholesale rush from the stands in some kind of order. Radio and TV commentators and the rest of the media tried their best to discover what was happening, but nobody on the field or in the Yankee dressing room would talk to them. The Las Vegas clubhouse was barred, the players still on the field, and all of them silent when reporters tried to talk to them. Finally the reporters just gave up, and the TV and radio broadcasters signed off in frustration at the unsolved mystery.

Tabby had been shot in the back of the head while he had been standing at the urinal, just after zipping up. It would appear he had no inkling of an assailant in the room. The bullet hole looked as though it had been fired by a small-bore handgun, likely a .22. Since the clubhouse man had suffered wounds from a similar gun, it would seem the gunman had used a silencer, preventing Tabby from hearing the first shots.

Clarence “Happy” Jefferson, the clubhouse man, was still alive but unconscious at a New York hospital, where a policeman was standing by to guard him and communicate any changes.

Again, Sparky Hooper was a busy man dealing with media questions and requests, when he had nothing he could tell them.

* * *

When things were sorted out a bit, the New York Police departments were cooperating with the FBI who assigned about a dozen agents to the job. Mike Malone, accompanied by George Halverson, both in shock, had flown east to New York in Mike's company jet late in the evening, and Molly and Larry Henderson joined them for breakfast in Mike's hotel suite. Jeff Turnbull also joined them. He looked exhausted, having been up all night.

“If there's fault to be found, it's mine,” Turnbull said contritely. “The killer got Tabby in the one area of the stadium I never would have thought to place a security man. The police are still trying to find out how somebody got in there and out again without being seen. There were about sixty thousand people in that stadium plus the hundreds of staff people, but nobody saw a thing.”

“Let's not talk about fault,” replied Mike. “Let's just get the guy and whoever else is involved. You said you had a man following this Trenowski or whatever his name is. How come he wasn't followed to the stadium, and how come he hasn't been picked up?”