Strike Three You're Dead (31 page)

“Chance favors a prepared mind, not to mention that there’s no time like the present. By the way, there’s a call for you on line three.”

“A call?” The third light on his phone was indeed pulsing.

“A call.”

“For me?”

“For you,” Greschak said. “It’s one of those things where somebody’s trying to get hold of you by telephone.” He closed Harvey’s door with a fatuous wink.

Harvey punched the third button and said, “Harvey Blissberg.”

“Please hold for Mr. Goody,” a woman replied.

Goody… Goody. That would have to be Goody of the Todd Goody variety. Fraternity brother at the University of Massachusetts a dozen years ago. Chiefly remembered for an ingenious apparatus he designed in his junior year which, when strapped to his back under his sports jacket, allowed him to dispense draft beer at frat parties through a hose that ran down his sleeve. After graduating, Goody had entered sports management, undergone a general sobering of character, and risen to the position of assistant general manager of the Boston Celtics. During Harvey’s five years as center fielder with the Boston Red Sox, their paths had crossed at sports banquets and charity dinners.

“Well, well,” Goody’s voice burst on the line. “How are you?”

Harvey pictured Todd’s fat, boisterous face. “Fine, Todd. You?”

“I could be better. As it happens, I’ve got a little problem, Harvey.”

“This isn’t a social call?”

“I’m steering you a little business. You know who Tyrone Terrell is, don’t you?”

“I’m not that out of it,” Harvey said. Tyrone Terrell was one of the five reasons, along with the rest of the Celtics’ starting lineup, that Boston was six games up on Philadelphia.

“He’s missing.”

“I thought he went home, had an illness in the family.”

“That’s what you read in the papers yesterday.”

“True,” Harvey said. The
Sunday Globe
had explained why Terrell had missed yesterday’s game against the Knicks in New York. His aunt was sick.

“False,” Goody said. “It’s what we fed the press. As far as we know, all of Tyrone’s relatives are in perfect health.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Look, Harvey, Terrell disappeared at Logan Airport on Saturday afternoon. The team was waiting to board the Eastern shuttle to New York for the game yesterday. Tyrone was there. Then he wasn’t there.”

“Yes?”

“One of the players was with him at a magazine rack at the newsstand. But he left Tyrone there, to return to the gate. Tyrone never showed for the flight. We had to leave without him, and we haven’t heard from him since.”

“Are the cops looking?”

“Now they are. They found a guy who works at the newsstand at the Eastern terminal, a basketball fan. He said he thought he saw Tyrone walk off with a bearded man. A bearded man in a short leather jacket. And that’s all he remembered. But we haven’t officially reported him missing yet, and we hope we won’t have to.”

Harvey doodled a basketball rim and net on his legal pad. “Has Terrell ever pulled anything like this before?”

“No. Late for practice once in a while, but we’re not dealing with a major discipline problem here. His first couple of years with us, he was prone to, shall we say, episodes of oversleeping, but he straightened out. Tyrone’s been in the league for six years now. He’s a grownup.”

“Have you checked with his family?” Harvey asked.

“He’s not married. We did call his mother in Connecticut and she hadn’t heard from him. Now we’ve got her worried too. But we don’t want to worry anybody else.”

“What do you need me for?”

“Spend a little quality time looking into this and see where it goes. And keep it away from the media. Weren’t you always pretty good at that, Harvey—avoiding the media?”

Yes, he was. For six years in the majors, he had repelled sportswriters’ efforts to cast him in the collective fantasy life of the American baseball public. For six years, he had uttered “No comment” on the average of twice a day. For six years, he had behaved toward the press as if he would rather have been doing exactly what he had been doing for the past month: sitting quietly in a rented office, nursing big, cheap emotions. Lately he had been obsessed with the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He had come across it in a philosophy course in college, and it had stuck. The question, he thought, had great merit. Maybe one of the graduate students down on Mount Auburn Street knew the answer. He didn’t.

“Let me think about this,” Harvey told Goody as he sketched in a backboard.

“Harvey, don’t tell me you’re booked up.”

Harvey consulted his desk calendar. The only obligation he had incurred for the week was to take his camera in for servicing. “No, Todd, you can be squeezed in.”

“We’ve never had to hire a, uh, private investigator before.” Goody said “private investigator” as if he were holding the phrase at arm’s length. “I figure we can pay you three bills a day.”

The mention of a figure roused Harvey slightly. It was not the money itself. He had the spending habits of an Amish; between his pension and what he had saved from his big-league salary, he could cruise for a few years. No, what stirred him was the prospect of a game, any game.

“I’m sorry, Todd—what’d you say?”

“I said three bills a day. Now I know it’s probably not much, compared to what you used to make.”

“Hey.” Harvey laughed. “No one told me I had a right to that kind of dough for the rest of my life.”

Goody laughed as well. “You can say that again.”

“Make it three-fifty,” Harvey said.

Goody breathed on the line. “All right, Harvey. Three-fifty.”

“Plus expenses.”

“All right. But check with me first before you fly off to the south of France on my money.”

“Is that where NBA players escape to when they don’t feel like facing the Knicks?”

“Harvey, why don’t you come by my office at the Garden at six-thirty? We’ll talk some more and watch the game.” Goody paused. “You know, this could be nothing.”

“That’s one thing it could be.”

“It’s just that Tyrone’s not the kind of kid to disappear like this.”

“Tell me what kind of kid does, Todd.”

“Harvey, that’s what I’m paying you to find out.”

When Harvey hung up, he walked over to the door and opened it. The sound of more videotape playing in fast forward drifted in from the adjacent room. He hadn’t had to go out and get it. If it didn’t amount to anything, he could always say he had never wanted it in the first place. It had come to him, like all those countless line drives to center field he had never had to move a step for. But a baseball he knew what to do with once it was in his glove.

On his way to the bathroom, he passed the office of an anorexic industrial film producer named Janice. She was on the phone, saying, “We’re going to need to spruce up those product shots with some DVE, but there’s no money for it in post.”

Harvey had no idea what she was talking about. Every profession had its precious little verbal universe, and Harvey was not part of hers. He thought of Campy Strulowitz, his old Providence batting coach. Hum babe, Harv, hum-a-now, you the one, babe, unloose that juice. Harvey would like to see Janice make sense of that. Be a stick, kid, have an idea, you the kid.

T
O BE ELIGIBLE FOR A
private investigator’s license in the state of Massachusetts, you needed to have three years of experience with a private investigative agency, with a reputable criminal attorney, or as a plainclothes police detective. By these standards, Harvey was as qualified as a German shepherd. But he knew Jerry Bellaggio.

In Harvey’s third year with the Boston Red Sox, Bellaggio had been retained by one of his teammates to determine what his wife was doing when he was playing ball on the road. Bellaggio’s several-month investigation—which eventually established that what the wife was doing was enjoying a liaison with a suburban contractor—occasionally brought the detective to the Fenway Park clubhouse to present his client with the fruits of his surveillance. On one of these visits, Harvey and Jerry struck up a conversation that became a friendship that survived the resolution of the Case of the Dallying Baseball Widow.

Harvey traded stories about the peccadilloes of American League players with Jerry’s tales of nocturnal voyeurism, adopted children’s tearful reunions with their natural parents, and the nuances of criminal defense investigations. Harvey had the distinct sensation of getting the better of the deal; his confidences regarding the sexual and pharmaceutical preferences of certain professional athletes did not seem like adequate compensation for stories that Bellaggio began by saying, “Stop me if I’ve told you about the time a nun hired me to find the man she’d had an affair with thirty years before on the California Zephyr.” But like countless men who had discovered by the age of thirteen that they would never be able to hit the curve, Bellaggio had a huge appetite for informed baseball trivia, and Harvey told him everything he kept from the reporters who were dying for it.

Back in the Boston area the November after his year with the Providence Jewels, Harvey had bumped into Bellaggio in the paperbacks section of the Harvard Coop.

“Well,” Bellaggio had said, “if you’re not doing anything with yourself, whyn’t you work under my license?”

“I’m not a detective, Jerry.”

“It’s just a five-dollar word for someone who finds the truth when it’s been mislaid. Isn’t that what you did down there in Rhode Island last summer?” Bellaggio was referring to Harvey’s successful search for the murderer of his Jewels roommate, Rudy Furth. “Not too shabby for an amateur.” Bellaggio followed the progress of a statuesque Radcliffe student down their aisle. “Do it for a living now. You can work under my license as long as you don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“What can I do that you
would
do?”

“For God’s sake, Harvey—I’m a detective, not a fucking heart specialist. Are we talking about a science? No, we’re not talking about a science. You ask questions. Get on the horn. Get a hunch. Put two and two together. Sometimes two and three. Multiply by two, divide by three. Lie low. Impersonate a lawyer, a doctor, a priest. The rest of the stuff, if you want to trace a plate or something, I’ll help you out.”

“Forget it. I think the Talmud strictly prohibits Jews from impersonating a priest or wearing a shoulder holster.”

The ’Cliffie came back their way. Bellaggio performed some discreet surveillance on her legs. He said nothing to Harvey. Waiting was what he was good at.

“Okay, who’s going to hire me?” Harvey asked.

“I’ll throw you some work. Since I got my write-up in the
Globe
last month—”

“I saw it—‘Boston’s Super Sleuth.’”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a little more work than I can handle.”

“I don’t know, Jerry.”

“What the fuck you going to do with yourself? Make fucking potholders for the next forty years?”

Harvey didn’t let on that this held a certain appeal.

He had finally said yes to Bellaggio in early February, less than twenty-four hours after his encounter with the New York agent, but Bellaggio hadn’t thrown anything his way. The personal-misery market had taken a downturn after perennially bullish January. No matter now; Harvey had his own case. He called Jerry’s office to let him know and got his answering service.

“Hi, Marge, it’s Harvey Blissberg.”

“Hi, deah. How’s business?”

“I called to tell Jerry I’ve got a job.”

“Mazel tov.”

“Where is he?”

“Oh, the usual, deah. A local police chief with a wife who thinks he’s not really playing pokah on Monday and Thursday nights. And you know what, deah?”

“What’s that?”

“I think she’s right.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Lay you three to one he’s got some poozle on the side. You on?”

“I don’t bet, Marge. You know that.”

“What do you do for fun, deah?”

“Vicks VapoRub. And when I’m really depressed, I’ll pop a few Sudafed.”

Harvey called Al Mallory at the
Boston Herald.

“It’s Harvey Blissberg, Al.”

“The late great center fielder for the Providence Jewels?”

“Don’t rag me, Al.”

“Shut up, Harvey. In five years with the Red Sox, you maybe gave me three quotes, and only one of them was printable.”

“Now wait a second, Al. Who was it told you—not for attribution, I’ll admit—that it wasn’t tendonitis that kept Gene Fronduto out of the lineup for two weeks? Who told you the real reason when no one else was talking? And you went with it.”

“Gee, thanks. It was the hottest story of the year. I won the Pulitzer.” Mallory snorted into the phone. “It’s time you face it, Harvey, you turd. I’m probably the only sports-writer in town you ever had even a semblance of a relationship with. What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me about Tyrone Terrell.”

“Tell you about Tyrone Terrell? Oh, yeah, right, sure. I spend five years of my life trying to get you to answer a question, and I draw goose eggs. Then suddenly you’re out of baseball, where I can’t touch you and you can’t do me any good, and the phone rings and it’s Sphincter Mouth himself, and will you please tell me everything you know about Tyrone Terrell? Jesus. All right, what do you want to know about him?”

“Anything,” Harvey said.

“You got a blind date with him or something?”

“No, I just need to know what he’s like.”

“Why?”

“Can’t say.”

“Well, what’s in it for me if I tell you?”

“A trip for two to Coral Gables. Now tell me about Terrell.”

“His aunt’s sick.”

“Tell me more.”

“Look, Harvey, I wrote a profile of the guy last November. Why don’t you look it up?”

“I believe everything except what I read in the newspapers. Especially yours. Now what’s he like?”

“Okay,” Mallory sighed. “He’s the best basketball player to ever come out of the University of Connecticut. He’s got a jump hook I’ve seen blocked only once in his career. His hang time, when rebounding, is about an hour and a half. He still has trouble going to the left on the baseline. He drives a green Buick LeSabre and he likes white women.”