The Final Detail: A Myron Bolitar Novel (23 page)

“So why did you beat them up?”

“Because it was simple.”

“What?”

Win hated repeating himself.

“You overreacted,” Myron said. “As usual.”

“No, Myron, I reacted perfectly.”

“Meaning?”

“I have a reputation, do I not?”

“As a violent psycho, yes.”

“Exactly—a reputation that I’ve culled and created through what you call overreacting. You trade off that reputation sometimes, do you not?”

“I guess I do.”

“It helps us?”

“I guess so.”

“Guess nothing,” Win said. “Friends and foes believe I snap too easily—overreact, as you put it. That I’m unstable, out of control. But that’s nonsense, of course. I’m never out of control. Just the opposite. Every attack has been well thought out. The pros and cons have been weighed.”

“And in this case, the pros won?”

“Yes.”

“So you knew you were going to beat up those two before we entered?”

“I considered it. Once I realized that they were unarmed and that taking them out would be easy, I made the final decision.”

“Just to enhance your reputation?”

“In a word, yes. My reputation keeps us safe. Why do you think FJ was ordered by his father not to kill you?”

“Because I’m a ray of sunshine? Because I make the world a better place for all?”

Win smiled. “Then you understand.”

“Does it bother you at all, Win?”

“Does what?”

“Attacking someone like that.”

“They’re goons, Myron, not nuns.”

“Still. You just walloped them without provocation.”

“Oh, I see. You don’t like the fact that I sucker-punched them. You would have preferred a fairer fight?”

“I guess not. But suppose you miscalculated?”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Suppose one of them was better than you thought and didn’t go down so easily. Suppose you had to maim or kill one.”

“They’re goons, Myron, not nuns.”

“So you would have done it?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“I guess I do.”

“Who would have mourned their passing?” Win asked. “Two scums in the night who freely chose a profession that bullies and maims.”

Myron did not answer. The train stopped. Passengers exited. Myron and Win stayed in their seats.

“But you enjoy it,” Myron said.

Win said nothing.

“You have other reasons, sure, but you enjoy violence.”

“And you don’t, Myron?”

“Not like you.”

“No, not like me. But you feel the rush.”

“And I usually feel sick after it’s all over.”

“Well, Myron, that’s probably because you’re such a fine humanitarian.”

They exited the subway at 161st Street and walked in silence to Yankee Stadium. Four hours to game time, but there were already several hundred fans lining up to watch the warm-ups. A giant Louisville Slugger bat cast a long shadow. Cops aplenty stood near clusters of unfazed ticket scalpers. Classic détente. There were hot dog carts, some with—gasp!—Yoo-Hoo umbrellas. Yum. At the press entrance Myron flashed his business card, the guard made a call, they were let in.

They traveled down the stairs on the right, reached the stadium tunnel, and emerged into bright sunshine and green grass. Myron and Win had just been discussing the nature of violence, and now Myron thought again about his dad’s phone call. Myron had seen his father, the most gentle man he had ever known, grow violent only once. And it was here at Yankee Stadium.

When Myron was ten years old, his father had taken
him and his younger brother, Brad, to a game. Brad was five at the time. Dad had secured four seats in the upper tier, but at the last minute a business associate had given him two more seats three rows behind the Red Sox bench. Brad was a huge fan of the Red Sox. So Dad suggested that Brad and Myron sit by the dugout for a few innings. Dad would stay in the upper tier. Myron held Brad’s hand, and they walked down to the box seats. The seats were, in a word, awesome.

Brad started cheering his five-year-old lungs out. Cheering like mad. He spotted Carl Yastrzemski in the batter’s box and started calling out, “Yaz! Yaz!” The guy sitting in front of them turned around. He was maybe twenty-five and bearded and looked a bit like a church image of Jesus. “That’s enough,” the bearded guy snapped at Brad. “Quiet down.”

Brad looked hurt.

“Don’t listen to him,” Myron said. “You’re allowed to yell.”

The bearded man’s hands moved fast. He grabbed the ten-year-old Myron by his shirt, bunching the Yankee emblem in his seemingly giant fist, and pulled Myron closer to him. There was beer on his breath. “He’s giving my girlfriend a headache. He shuts up now.”

Fear engulfed Myron. Tears filled his eyes, but he wouldn’t let them escape. He remembered being shocked, scared, and mostly, for some unknown reason, ashamed. The bearded man glared at Myron another few seconds and then pushed him back. Myron grabbed Brad’s hand and rushed back to the upper tier. He tried to pretend everything was all right, but ten-year-olds are not great actors, and Dad could read his son as if he lived inside his skull.

“What’s wrong?” Dad asked.

Myron hesitated. Dad asked again. Myron finally told him what happened. And something happened to Myron’s father, something Myron had never seen before or since. There was an explosion in his eyes. His face turned red; his eyes went black.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

Myron watched the rest through binoculars. Dad moved down to the seat behind the Red Sox dugout. His father’s face was still red. Myron saw Dad cup his hands around his mouth, lean forward, and start screaming for all he was worth. The red in his face turned to crimson. Dad kept screaming. The bearded man tried to ignore him. Dad leaned into his ear à la Mike Tyson and screamed some more. When the bearded man finally turned around, Dad did something that shocked Myron to the core. He pushed the man. He pushed the man twice and then gestured toward the exit, the international sign inviting another man to step outside. The guy with the beard refused. Dad pushed him again.

Two security guards raced down the steps and broke it up. No one was tossed. Dad came back to the upper tier. “Go back down,” Dad said. “He won’t bother you again.”

But Myron and Brad shook their heads. They liked the seats up here better.

Win said, “Time traveling again, are we?”

Myron nodded.

“You realize, of course, that you are far too young for so many reflective spells.”

“Yeah, I know.”

A group of Yankee players were sitting on the outfield grass, legs sprawled, hands back, still kids under the collars waiting for their Little League game to start. A man in a too-nicely-fitted suit was talking to them. The man gestured
wildly, smiling and enthusiastic and as enraptured with life as the new born-again on the block. Myron recognized him. Sawyer Wells, the motivational speaker né con man of the moment. Two years ago Wells was an unknown charlatan, spouting the standard reworded dogma about finding yourself, unlocking your potential, doing something for yourself—as though people weren’t self-centered enough. His big break came when the Mayors hired him to do talks for their workforce. The speeches were, if not original, successful, and Sawyer Wells caught on. He got a book deal—cleverly monikered
The Wells Guide to Wellness
—along with an infomercial, audiotapes, video, a planner, the full self-help schematic. Fortune 500 companies started hiring him. When the Mayors took over the Yankees, they brought him on board as a consulting motivational psychologist or some such drivel.

When Sawyer Wells spotted Win, he almost started panting.

“He smells a new client,” Myron said.

“Or perhaps he’s never seen anyone quite this handsome before.”

“Oh, yeah,” Myron said. “That’s probably it.”

Wells turned back to the players, shouted out a bit more enthusiasm, spasmed with gestures, clapped once, and then bade them good-bye. He looked back over at Win. He waved. He waved hard. Then he started bounding over like a puppy chasing a new squeaky toy or a politician chasing a potential contributor.

Win frowned. “In a word, decaf.”

Myron nodded.

“You want me to befriend him?” Win asked.

“He was supposedly present for the drug tests. And he’s also the team psychologist. He probably hears a lot of rumors.”

“Fine,” Win said. “You take the roommate. I’ll take Sawyer.”

Enos Cabral was a good-looking wiry Cuban with a flame-throwing fastball and breaking pitches that still needed work. He was twenty-four, but he had the kind of looks that probably got him carded at any liquor store. He stood watching batting practice, his body slack except for his mouth. Like most relief pitchers, he chewed gum or tobacco with the ferocity of a lion gnawing on a recently downed gazelle.

Myron introduced himself.

Enos shook his hand and said, “I know who you are.”

“Oh?”

“Clu talked about you a lot. He thought I should sign with you.”

A pang. “Clu said that?”

“I wanted a change,” Enos continued. “My agent. He treats me well, no? And he made me a rich man.”

“I don’t mean to knock the importance of good representation, Enos, but you made you a rich man. An agent facilitates. He doesn’t create.”

Enos nodded. “You know my story?”

The thumbnail sketch. The boat trip had been rough. Very rough. For a week everyone had assumed they had been lost at sea. When they finally did pop up, only two of the eight Cubans were still alive. One of the dead was Enos’s brother Hector, considered the best player to come out of Cuba in the past decade. Enos, considered the lesser talent, was nearly dead of dehydration.

“Just what I’ve read in the papers,” Myron said.

“My agent. He was there when I arrived. I had family in Miami. When he heard about the Cabral brothers, he loaned them money. He paid for my hospital stay. He gave
me money and jewelry and a car. He promised me more money. And I have it.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“He has no soul.”

“You want an agent with a soul?”

Enos shrugged. “I’m Catholic,” he said. “We believe in miracles.”

They both laughed.

Enos seemed to be studying Myron. “Clu was always suspicious of people. Even me. He had something of a hard shell.”

“I know,” Myron said.

“But he believed in you. He said you were a good man. He said that he had trusted you with his life and would gladly do so again.”

Another pang. “Clu was also a lousy judge of character.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Enos, I wanted to talk to you about Clu’s last few weeks.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I thought you came here to recruit me.”

“No,” Myron said. Then: “But have you heard the expression
killing two birds with one stone
?”

Enos laughed. “What do you want to know?”

“Were you surprised when Clu failed the drug test?”

He picked up a bat. He gripped and regripped it in his hands. Finding the right groove. Funny. He was an American League pitcher. He would probably never have the opportunity to bat. “I have trouble understanding addictions,” he said. “Where I come from, yes, a man may try to drink away his world, if he can afford it. You live in such stink, why not leave, no? But here, when you have as much as Clu had …”

He didn’t finish the thought. No point in stating the obvious.

“One time Clu tried to explain it to me,” Enos continued. “‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to escape the world; sometimes you want to escape yourself.’ ” He cocked his head. “Do you believe that?”

“Not really,” Myron said. “Like a lot of cute phrases, it sounds good. But it also sounds like a load of self-rationalization.”

Enos smiled. “You’re mad at him.”

“I guess I am.”

“Don’t be. He was a very unhappy man, Myron. A man who needs so much excess … there is something broken inside him, no?”

Myron said nothing.

“Clu tried. He fought hard, you have no idea. He wouldn’t go out at night. If our room had a minibar, he’d make them take it out. He didn’t hang out with old friends because he was afraid of what he might do. He was scared all the time. He fought long and hard.”

“And he lost,” Myron added.

“I never saw him take drugs. I never saw him drink.”

“But you noticed changes.”

Enos nodded. “His life began to fall apart. So many bad things happened.”

“What bad things?”

The organ music revved immediately into high gear, the legendary Eddie Layton opening up with his rendition of that ballpark classic “The Girl from Ipanema.” Enos lifted the bat to his shoulder, then lowered it again. “I feel uncomfortable talking about this.”

“I’m not prying for the fun of it. I’m trying to find out who killed him.”

“The papers said your secretary did it.”

“They’re wrong.”

Enos stared at the bat as though there were a message hidden beneath the word
Louisville.
Myron tried to prompt him.

“Clu withdrew two hundred thousand dollars not long before he died,” Myron said. “Was he having financial problems?”

“If he did, I didn’t see it.”

“Did he gamble?”

“I didn’t see him him gamble, no.”

“Do you know that he changed agents?”

Enos looked surprised. “He fired you?”

“Apparently he was going to.”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I know he was looking for you. But no, I didn’t know that.”

“So what was it then, Enos? What made him cave?”

He lifted his eyes and blinked into the sun. The perfect weather for a night game. Soon fans would arrive, and memories would be made. Happened every night in stadiums around the world. It was always some kid’s first game.

“His marriage,” Enos said. “That was the big thing, I think. You know Bonnie?”

“Yes.”

“Clu loved her very much.”

“He had an odd way of showing it.”

Enos smiled. “Sleeping with all those women. I think he did it more to hurt himself than anyone else.”

“That sounds like another one of those big, fat rationalizations, Enos. Clu may have made self-destruction an art form. But that’s not an excuse for what he put her through.”