Authors: William G. Tapply
“I looked ’em up in the
Baseball Encyclopedia
at the library, and then I called a sportswriter I know at the
Globe.
Can’t say I really learned a hell of a lot. This one here, Pete Bello, is managing in the minor leagues in the Pittsburgh chain. Arnie Bloom is selling life insurance out in Sacramento. And Johnny Warrick has a hog farm in Alabama.”
Stern stared at the list of names, neatly printed on the single sheet of plain white paper. “What do you make of it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Obviously it makes you think of Eddie. But they couldn’t have been his teammates. These guys weren’t even each other’s contemporaries. Geralchick played in the late fifties, and Bello had a couple of years in the big leagues in the mid-seventies. Halley pitched for the Tigers a couple of seasons back in the sixties. Three of them played for the Red Sox. Bello had eleven games with them at the tail end of seventy-three, after Donagan had left, and Bloom was with them four seasons before they traded him to the Twins. Warrick, you may remember, played his entire undistinguished career with them.”
“Reserve outfielder, right? I remember, now.”
“Yes. Bloom and Geralchik were pretty decent players. The other three were journeymen.”
“So,” said Stern, tapping the paper with his eyeglasses. “They played for different teams at different times. Some were good, some not so good. Different positions. And some are alive and some aren’t. Not much, is it?”
“There has to be something. The names must mean something. Anyhow, the girl said she’d get back to me. I assume to give me more information. Maybe we’ll learn more then.”
“What do you figure her game is?” said Stern.
“It’s pretty obvious. I think she wants to help us find the guys who kidnapped E.J. Donagan. I think she wants to do that without them knowing she helped. She’s scared and she feels guilty, and as long as we don’t mess it up she’ll keep feeding us information. That’s the way it seems to me.”
He nodded. “Yeah. That’s possible. Or it could be nothing. A ruse, a smokescreen, a joke, for Christ’s sake.” He reached across the table, took a sip of my iced chocolate, and grimaced. “Anyway, what can you tell me about the girl?”
I stared at him. “I can tell you what she looks like. But I don’t think I will.”
He lay his forearms on the table and leaned toward me. His hands were clenched into fists. “Look,” he said, his voice tense. “I know about you.”
I leaned back and folded my arms. “Oh?”
“Yes. I know you like to interfere. You’ve got some sort of Wyatt Earp complex. You like to ride into town with your guns blazing.”
“You mean having Jan go on television, for example.”
“For example, yeah.”
“You checked me out, too, huh?”
“I did. Right. You don’t think much of the police, do you?”
I shrugged. “I’m a lawyer. I just do my job.”
Stern smiled sarcastically. “You’re not that kind of lawyer. You’re out of your element, now. Way out. You’ve been there before, and you’ve gotten yourself in trouble. I understand you tend to wind up in the hospital.”
“If I didn’t know better, I might think you disapproved of me.”
“Funny thing, Coyne. You might be surprised. Fact is, I don’t necessarily disapprove. You’ve got the right idea. Too goddam many citizens are afraid to get involved. They refuse to come forward, they refuse to cooperate. They never see anything. They say, ‘Not my problem.’ Right? Look, don’t get me wrong. I don’t care for your methods. You should be working with us. This shouldn’t be an adversary relationship, you know. Listen. We haven’t given up on this case, and just because we don’t give you a blow-by-blow of what we’re doing doesn’t mean we’re sitting around sucking our fingers. But we can use help. Any help.” He cocked his eyebrow at me. “Even your help.”
I stared at him for a moment. “You think we can work together?”
“Yes. I do.” He fiddled with his glasses but didn’t take them off. “Look,” he said, “I happen to think we can agree on how to handle this. I think you did the right thing to call me, and I’m willing to try not to do anything that doesn’t feel right to both of us. Okay? I know, you’re afraid I’ll try to catch up with that girl, and that we’ll lose out on what she’s going to give us. Well, I won’t do that. At least not for now. Not as long as there’s a chance of her helping us. So here’s what I think. I think I’ll agree not to go after her unless you and I discuss it. But I think you should help me get a line on her. See if we can’t figure out who she might be. Do the research. Be ready. The more we know, the better off we are. What do you think?”
I took a bite of my torte, and stared at the people passing along the sidewalk while I chewed it. Then I looked at Stern. “You wouldn’t interfere?”
“No. I’d just like to be ready to act when the time comes. It would be nice to know who she is.”
I swirled the dark remains of my iced chocolate in the bottom of my glass. Then I nodded. “Okay. Her name is Annie. She’s tall. Maybe five-ten or eleven. Mid-twenties. Black hair, black eyes. Slim. Oriental. Japanese, maybe. No scars or tattoos that I could see. Pretty well educated, I’d say, from her diction. New Englander, from the way she drops her R’s.”
Stern had taken out a little notebook and was making notes. When I finished he looked up. “That’s not much.”
“Did I say how beautiful she was? And how her voice sounds like rain falling in a pond? And that she smells like hyacinths?”
“Jesus!” said Stern, grinning. “Are you in love with her?”
“Wouldn’t be difficult, believe me.”
“What else?”
I thought for a minute, then shrugged. “That’s about it. I was only with her a couple of minutes.”
He shoved the notebook back in his pocket. “Guess I’ll go get some real food, then,” he said. “There’s a good cue over Kenmore Square.”
“Cue?”
“You know,” said Stern. “Bones. Ribs.”
“Oh. Barbecue. You fooled me. You don’t strike me as the barbecue type.”
“Well, you don’t strike me as the iced chocolate type, either,” he said. “I spent six years in an office in El Paso. Rib joints and whore houses is what they’ve mainly got in El Paso. You learn to adapt. Pros and bones. That’s about it in El Paso.” He pushed himself away from the table and stood up. “Why don’t you let me take that paper with me. We can run it through the lab, for whatever that might be worth. And we can do a rundown on these baseball players, too.”
I hesitated, then took my hand off the paper with the list of names on it. “We have an understanding?” I said.
He picked up the paper. “We do.” He extended his hand and we shook. His mitt was small and bony, but his grip was surprisingly hard. “Keep in touch,” he said.
I gave him a half salute. “Roger.”
He turned with a little nod and I watched him swagger away. He had surprised me. He didn’t seem to be such a bad guy.
T
HE PRUDENTIAL BUILDING WAS
Boston’s first legitimate skyscraper. For many years the Pru stuck up from the middle of the city all by itself, all fifty-two stories of it. Charlie McDevitt used to liken it to an upthrust middle digit, giving the finger to an otherwise distinctive skyline of church spires and low-slung office buildings. Then, not to be outdone, the John Hancock Insurance folks built their own tower practically next door, and the Pru lost whatever distinction it may have held.
The restaurant on the fifty-second floor of the Pru is called The Top of the Hub. It has pretty decent seafood, a panoramic view of the city, and prices geared to business luncheons on company credit cards. That’s where Farley Vaughn insisted on meeting me for lunch. “On the Red Sox,” he said over the phone, which was okay with me.
When I was deposited in the lobby of the restaurant after an ear-cracking ride on the express elevator, I whispered Vaughn’s name into the ear of the hostess who greeted me. “Oh, yes, sir,” she said, in a tone that suggested she and I shared an important secret. “Mr. Vaughn is expecting you.”
Vaughn was seated at a small table against the window that was wrapped all the way around the restaurant. He was gazing off toward the eastern horizon where every few seconds an airliner descended from its holding pattern toward the runway over at Logan. He was toying absentmindedly with a wineglass containing an unnaturally brilliant colored rose. He stood and extended his hand when I arrived at the table.
Farley Vaughn looked like a guy who worked hard at his conditioning, one of those compulsive joggers with stringy forearms and a leathery face and pale narrow eyes. About one-percent body fat. He was some kind of vice president for the Red Sox, responsible for the various operations that make professional baseball indistinguishable from any other big business.
The Red Sox, at the time, were playing lousy baseball again, much to the glee of the local sportswriters, and their perennial front-office feuds had superseded news of the games as lead stories on the sports pages. So I intended a touch of irony when I asked Farley how business was.
“Oh, good, good,” he said, his eyes twinkling to let me know he caught my sarcasm. “Turnstiles are well oiled. God bless the Boston fans. They’d just as soon come out to boo as to cheer.”
“Nothing a good reliever wouldn’t cure, anyway,” I said. “Sorry I’m late,” I added, taking my seat across from him. “Couple of appointments got backed up. Time. The enemy of us all.”
“Time is our ally, Brady,” said Vaughn earnestly. “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.”
“Well, time is what made me late,” I smiled. “What are you drinking?”
“Cranberry juice. Good for the kidneys. Hardly any calories. Have some?”
He crooked a finger and a waitress appeared. “Cocktail, sir?” she said to me.
“Bourbon old-fashioned,” I said. “No soda. Extra hunk of orange. My kidneys are in great shape.”
She frowned, then shrugged and went away to fetch my drink.
“So what’s up?” said Vaughn. “You said you wanted to pick my brain. Such as it is, pick away.”
“You have the reputation of knowing more about the players than just about anybody in the game. I’ve got some names I’d like to try out on you.”
He sipped his cranberry juice and nodded. “Okay. Shoot.”
“Pete Bello.”
Vaughn steepled his fingers. “He’s doing a nice job for Pittsburgh, I hear. Managing in A ball. We signed him out of Holy Cross in seventy, I think it was. He was a shortstop then. Nice, soft hands, good arm, contact type of hitter. Limited range, though, and no power and only average speed. We brought him up for a few games in September in seventy-three or four, then traded him to the Pirates. He hung on a few years with them. Smart. College kid. He saw the handwriting, and was happy to take a job in the bushes for them. Pete Bello is a pretty nice guy, and they’re high on him. Why’re you asking about Pete Bello?”
I spread my palms. “It’s a long story, Farley.”
“Something to do with Eddie? I heard about his boy. Is that…
?
”
“He’s still missing.”
Vaughn shook his head. “What a shame.”
I nodded.
“And you think Pete Bello is connected to that?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I really don’t want to go into it.”
“Because I seriously doubt it. Not Pete Bello.”
“Like I said, I can’t speculate.”
He shrugged. “Okay. That’s okay.”
The waitress slid my drink in front of me. I took a long sip and stared out the window at the grids of the city streets for a moment. From the fifty-second floor it looked like a big contour map laid out below us.
I looked back at Farley Vaughn. “Anything, ah, funny about him? Anything unusual?”
“Bello?” He frowned. “Well, he had this hitch in his swing. We never could do anything with it. Had the damnedest time pulling the ball. Dead opposite field hitter. That’s probably not what you’re after, huh?”
“No. I mean as a person, not ballplayer. Anything in his personal life?”
He stared at me out of those washed-out blue eyes. “He was divorced. But I guess that’s not unusual.”
“No, it’s not. When did it happen?”
“Before he got to the big league. I recall, they had a couple of little kids. He was married when he was in college. One of those baseball things, you know? Bouncing around the bushes, never home, playing winter ball in Puerto Rico. She just wasn’t a baseball wife.”
“Who is?” I said. “Like with Eddie.”
“Yeah. Like with Eddie. It happens. How is Eddie, anyway? How’s he doing?”
“I haven’t seen him in a while,” I said. “He wasn’t doing that great last time I saw him.”
“Understandable.” Vaughn shook his head. “Too bad. And he was one of the best prospects I ever saw, too.”
“How about Gus Geralchik?” I said. “What do you know about him?”
“Poor Gus. He died a couple of years ago, you know. Stomach cancer. He deserved better. One tough son of a bitch, Gus. Hung around the big leagues quite a while. Back—oh, in the mid-fifties, it was. Always a second-stringer, but the kind of guy you just wanted to have around.”
“He was with the Cubs.”
“Right. We signed him originally, though. Right out of high school. Chicopee, it was, out there by Springfield. We let him go after a couple of years in the low minors, and Chicago picked him up. I was glad to see him make it. Work his ass off, Gus would. I bet in all the years he hung on with them he didn’t get to bat five hundred times. Doubt if he minded. He liked being around the game.”
“I didn’t realize he was originally Red Sox property.”
“Yup. You stay close to your own guys, even when they move on. I was real sorry when he died.”
“What did he do after baseball?”
Vaughn stroked his chin. “Seems to me he bought into a filling station. Something like that. Maybe it was a car dealership. Outside of Chicago. And, no, I can’t think of anything unusual about him. Absolutely straight shooter. Married his high school sweetheart, stayed married to her. Just your average guy.”
“That’s not so average,” I said.
A waitress approached us, pencil and pad poised. “Are you gentlemen ready to order?”
Neither Vaughn nor I had glanced at the menus that had been laid before us earlier. I picked mine up. Vaughn didn’t refer to his. “Spinach salad,” he said. “No dressing. Just bring a wedge of lemon.” He looked up at me. “Have the lobster, if you want, Brady. The Red Sox are paying for this.”