Parker Field (12 page)

On the way out, Kate asked me if I thought it was possible that Raymond Gatewood somehow got hold of a Winchester .30-30, slipped into the Prestwould, found Finlay Rand’s key, got into his unit and shot some guy in the park.

I told her that I thought just about anything was possible. I reminded her that Occam’s razor usually shaves pretty smooth and clean.

“Do you think he’s faking it?” she asked me. “Do you think he’s playing crazy?”

I told her, no, actually it seemed more like he was trying to play sane.

“Well, you might be right there. He’s lost it on a few occasions.”

She ticked off some of the highlights: three assaults, one malicious wounding, one indecent exposure when he decided to celebrate spring two years ago by running around naked in the park.

“But here’s the thing,” she said. “Not one of those involved anything more complicated than the shoe he used to beat some bum who tried to rob him.”

“Why isn’t he in jail now?” Our jail is full of people who didn’t do anything more violent than sell a narc a couple of ounces.

Kate laughed, but just with her mouth.

“They don’t want him in jail. Hell, nobody wants him anywhere. He tried living with his brother out in Chesterfield for a while, but he got out of control. The brother kicked him out, and you know what some deputy down there did?”

I think I know. I’ve heard this story before, just with different characters. But I let Kate continue.

“They put him in a squad car and dropped him off in the park. Told him to keep his ass out of the county.”

The suburbanites love to make jokes about Richmond’s homeless population. I know, from doing a story or two over the years, that a lot of them are residing in our parks because those same suburbs gave them a one-way ticket here.

I was noncommittal, but I had to admit that my mind was a little more open than it was before I met Raymond Gatewood. I’m not quite so ready to start erecting the scaffolding just yet. Gatewood seemed either too crazy to do everything necessary to put his ass in that ninth-floor window with a high-powered rifle or too smart to go around wearing that plaid jacket in plain view of the crime. Damn facts. They keep getting in the way of my righteous anger.

Kate asked me how my opus on the ’64 Vees was coming. I looked to see if she was being a smart-ass, calling it an opus. I couldn’t tell. I filled her in on the team’s diminishing numbers.

“Weird,” she said. “Well, athletes tend to live closer to the edge than most of us.”

Yeah, I said. Maybe that’s it.

I promised her I’d check in with her after I got back from my trip.

“What trip?”

I told her about my just-hatched plan to fly to Tallahassee, Florida, and see if I could find some Whitestones.

Getting reacquainted with Cindy Peroni was better than a winning lottery ticket. It turns out that Cindy’s brother flies for one of our more-maligned airlines. It further develops that Cindy “and a friend” can fly places for a very reasonable price—like, zero—if there’s a seat. So, when I mentioned that I needed to fly some places and see some people, she made me an offer. If the gods are kind, we’ll be flying down to Florida tomorrow, then driving over to south Alabama the next day.

“Can’t I pay you something?” I asked her when she made the offer.

“I’ll take it out in trade,” she said. I said it might take me a long time to pay her back “that way” for a last-minute airline ticket. At my age, I’m more into comfort than speed.

“Well,” she said, patting my arm, “just do the best you can.”

Kate listened to my plans for tomorrow with what looked suspiciously like a smirk.

“Well,” she said, “at least this one’s age appropriate.”

“I’ve never broken the law,” I remind her.

“Not quite.” Kate always has to have the last word.

I
HAD
time to look in on Les before the game. Peggy was still there. Awesome, never comfortable in one place for long, had disappeared someplace. I offered to take my mother home, but she said she was going to stay awhile longer.

“Want me to bring you anything?”

She looked up at me, giving me that wry smile she always was able to summon when we were being evicted or she’d lost another job.

“A joint would be nice.”

We both laughed. I kissed the top of her head and left before guilt made me miss the season opener.

J
UMPIN’ JIMMY’S
still on the payroll, like he has been for more than half a century, but he’s mostly taking care of the field, getting it ready for the next home stand, recruiting kids to help roll the tarp out if it rains. In actuality, Jimmy mostly just sits on a riding lawn mower and tells everybody else what to do. I guess age has its privileges.

So, unless we have a rain delay, Jimmy’s free to watch the game with us.

Cindy’s deeper into baseball than I ever was, which is saying something. She and Jimmy get into a long, philosophical discussion over why pitchers are such “wusses,” to use Cindy’s description.

“I mean, those guys in the seventies were pitching, like 300 innings a year. I don’t think I’d even heard of a middle reliever back then. How come these guys can’t start but every fifth game? What would Bob Gibson say?”

“I love it when you talk baseball,” I tell Cindy, then remind her that she was eight years old in 1975, and not many eight-year-old girls would have heard of middle relievers.

“Well,” she says, “I was precocious. And I had older brothers.”

Jimmy’s definitely old, old school. But he tries to defend modern strategy, pointing out how they’re throwing more exotic pitches now, and how much longer the games last.

“So,” Cindy says, “they get tired standing out there on the mound? Hell, the games last so long because they’ve got to make so many pitching changes.”

Jimmy sighs.

“They just go at it so much harder now, like every pitch is the World Series.”

He’s not buying into Cindy’s other theory, that there are so many injuries now because the players are too muscle-bound.

“They got to stay in shape,” Jimmy says. “Although I do think this yogi shit—pardon my French—is taking it a little too far.”

“Yoga.”

“Whatever.”

There’s a good crowd. They changed the grease in the corn dogs, just like they do before almost every season. And there’ll be fireworks afterward.

The game itself is no prize. Through seven innings, nobody hits anything more impressive than a double into the right-center-field gap. There are too many walks and, yes, too many pitching changes. But it’s still baseball. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate a game where you can catch your breath and analyze the situation between plays. Watching football, it’s so intense your pants could be on fire and you wouldn’t notice.

As we stand for the seventh-inning stretch, orchestrated by the demented tree rat mascot, Jimmy nudges me.

“I almost forgot. I gotcha something.”

I put down my lukewarm beer and take the photograph Jimmy’s handing me.

I know right away who it is. Frances Flynn.

“I found it, going through some old files,” Jimmy says. Jimmy’s files are legendary and notorious. He supposedly has two bedrooms of a three-bedroom apartment crammed with material about every Richmond minor leaguer since 1960. When he dies, they’ll have to bring in a dump truck to haul it away.

“She was very pretty,” I say, truthfully. She’s squinting into the sun, with a big guy standing with his arm around her, low enough that he seems to be fondling her butt.

“That’s Whitestone,” Jimmy says, not pleasantly. “Must of been late in the 1964 season.

“I found this, too.”

It’s a letter.

“She wanted me to have it, so I could see how mean her mother was. I never gave it back. Hadn’t looked at it in thirty years I bet, but talking about her the other day made me think of it.”

The envelope was postmarked July 28, 1964. Jimmy says it wasn’t long after Frannie Fling’s parents found out where she was and what she was doing.

It’s a pretty grim note. They gave her a deadline: September 1. If you aren’t home by then, the note said, you do not have a home. There was enough chill in it to cool my beer.

“You have been a great disappointment to us,” is how it concluded. It was signed by her mother.

The return address gave me her parents’ names: William and Eleanor.

I already know she didn’t go back until late fall or early winter, and I guess they relented, at least until they realized she was pregnant and kicked her out.

Andi’s done some dumb things. I don’t believe, though, that there’s anything she could do that would make me toss her out the front door in the middle of a Vermont winter. I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Flynn felt in April, when they were headed down to Tennessee to retrieve their daughter’s body.

Cindy’s been keeping score. They don’t even want you to keep score at the ballpark any more, apparently. If they did, they wouldn’t give you this tiny-ass scorecard and the kind of pencil you get at Putt-Putt.

There’s something kind of endearing about the way she concentrates on the game and tries to make all the right marks in those too-small boxes. I take over for her when she goes to the bathroom.

The Squirrels pull it out when their fifth pitcher strikes out the Curve catcher with runners on first and third. The crowd has grown during the game, because of the fireworks. I note that this gives us a chance to get out quick, but Cindy says, “Oh, I love fireworks. Let’s stay.” So we do.

By the time I drop Jimmy off, it’s after eleven. Our flight leaves at nine thirty in the morning.

“Maybe,” Cindy says, “you ought to just come stay at my place. Might make it easier to get up and go in the morning.”

I ask her if she has an extra bedroom. She looks at me like I’m an idiot and says she could make up the extra bed for me, if that’s what I’d like.

I tell her that’s definitely not what I’d like.

“Good,” she says. “I don’t have any extra clean sheets anyhow.”

I stop by the Prestwould long enough to do some light packing while Cindy waits in the car.

Custalow looks up at me as I head out the door.

“Slut,” he says. I give him the finger.

Chapter Nine

F
RIDAY

W
e’re a little bedraggled this morning. My big brain, proponent of the benefits of a good night’s sleep, didn’t have much of a chance once we got in the front door of Cindy’s place and she laid about a five-minute kiss on me. About two, though, I did have to beg for mercy, since the alarm was set for six thirty. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” is a great song, but the older I get, the less it seems like an intelligent life plan.

We are able to get on the flight to Atlanta, and we’re able to get on the next one to Tallahassee. Apparently, when you have the kind of deal Cindy has through her brother, you spend a lot of time sitting in airport lounges holding your breath, hoping that you don’t get bumped by a paying customer.

T
HE AIRPORT
in Tallahassee is smaller even than Richmond’s, and it doesn’t take us long to rent a car and be on our way. Still, it’s pushing one o’clock.

I have arranged an interview with Lucky Whitestone’s son today at two, which gives us time to wolf down a couple of quarter-pounders. I promise Cindy that dinner will be an improvement.

“It’d almost have to be,” she says, trying to restrain a ladylike burp.

The plan is to learn all I can about the late Mr. Whitestone today, then drive to south Alabama tomorrow, former home of the equally late Phil Holt.

Randall Whitestone Jr., age forty-two, lives on the north side of town. His home backs out onto a lake. He apologizes for the mess. Even by the low bar Custalow and I have set for bachelor living, the place is a wreck. Maybe Randy Whitestone isn’t renting from his ex-wife, who, he informs us, took off last year. The Chinese take-out cartons on the dining-room table definitely need to be taken out.

He’s not quite sure what I’m there about. I fill him in, trying to make it sound like a sensible mission rather than a fool’s errand.

“Don’t know why you’d want to do that,” he says, shaking his head.